Are you like, a 1st ammendment girl? the Onion imbroglio

CNN: Did 'The Onion' take satire too far?

John King USA|Added on September 29, 2011
CNN's Candy Crowley and panel members discuss a fake tweet about a hostage incident released by "The Onion." I think if you take satire too far you lose your Satire License.


L.A. Times, "Onion story on Capitol Hill hostages sparks probe"

And finally, the link in question:

Congress Takes Group Of Schoolchildren Hostage: 'We Need $12 Trillion Or All These Kids Die'


Jonathan Turley, via John Caruso:

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

Slate, Does Southwest Airlines Overpolice Its Passengers?

Jonathan Cook, Counterpunch, "The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian"

Two from Salon:

Thomas Rogers, "The theft of the American pension"

and Glenn Greenwald, The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot:
Are there so few actual Terrorists that the FBI has to recruit them into manufactured attacks?

The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade -- much of it valid -- but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots. Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out -- only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.

William Cavanaugh, Only Christianity can save economics

The financial crisis was not driven by materialism so much as by a desire to transcend material constraints.

To put it another way, far deeper than the desire for more "stuff" is the desire to overcome the limitations of the material world, of the human body and of death, and thus to be free from the scarcity and risk and dependence of a life that is materially based.

Maybe I'm missing something here. I don't understand what the difference is between materialism and trying to "transcend material constraints." I may write a bit more about this essay later.

21 July 2011

The video is by way of Glenn Greenwald's column from earlier today,
"Cenk Uygur and the ethos of corporate-owned media"

Also from Salon(via Mahablog):

“Corporate America’s Sunshine Patriots.” “… as of last week, as per the website Zero Hedge and data analysts Capital IQ, 29 public companies — including Bank of America, JP Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, GE and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway — each have more cash on hand than the U.S. Treasury.”

from Rolling Stone, "Corporate Tax Holiday in Debt Ceiling Deal: Where's the Uproar?"

Two from Dissident Voice,

Alton C. Thompson, The New Society: Part III: Toward a New Moral Equivalent of War

(Part 1, and part 2 are here.)

Phil Rockstroh, "The Arts of Life They Changed into the Arts of Death: Bachmann, Palin, Robertson and the limits of logic"

Bust a move

When I heard about Dallas pastor Robert Jefress's recent comments on local TV denouncing Islam as an evil religion, I felt compelled to do some googling. I was disappointed to find out that Dallas's mayor attends Jefress's First Dallas Baptist Church, although I'll admit I was never a big fan of Tom Leppert anyway.


Monika Diaz, WFAA: "Controversial comments about Islam from Baptist leader"


see also, Emily Pothast, "God, Gays, and the Gilded Age: First Baptist Church of Dallas and the New Satanism"

(via Fort Worth Weekly.)



"Virginia's Stalin Problem,"

Matt Welch, Reason, June 9, 2010:

The city of Gori in the formerly Soviet Republic of Georgia is not the only place in the world with controversial commemorations to mustachioed mass murderer Josef Stalin. Take, for example, um, Bedford, Virginia?

The small town of Bedford, Va., is home to 21 men who sacrificed their lives on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It is now also the home of one of the world's few public memorial busts of communist dictator Josef Stalin.
Local citizens and organizations have expressed their outrage over the installation of the bust at the National D-Day Memorial, which honored the 66th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy over the weekend.

Spencer Ackerman, Wired: "Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant
"

Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its over-reliance on Microsoft’s slide-show program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy. Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack.

Dean Baker, Counterpunch, "A Pointless Waste of Money: Pierce the Housing Bubble"

Fadlallah

Reuters/US State dept

Rob Payne:
"The idea that Americans, much less people like Obama and Clinton, care about Afghan women is absolutely priceless. And if things aren’t hunky dory in Afghanistan for women it isn’t for anyone else either."

Rob's discussion[here; also here] of a recent NYT item about women in Afghanistan reminded me of some thoughts I had about the death last month of Lebanon's Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah. I heard about the death of Ayatollah Fadlallah's death very indirectly, via an ATR item about CNN firing Octavia Nasr for praising him on Twitter, where she called him one of "Hizbollah's giants." (Just as with McChrystal mouthing off to Rolling Stone earlier this year, I wondered if this was a case of a smart person who wanted to be fired and decided to produce the circumstances that would make it so...). Then I came across Robert Fisk's discussion of Nasr's firing--

Well, he wasn't Hizbollah's man, but no matter. He was definitely a giant. A man of immense learning and jurisprudence, a believer in women's rights, a hater of "honour crimes", a critic of the theocratic system of government in Iran, a ... Well, I'd better be careful because I might get a phone call from Parisa Khosravi, who goes by the title of CNN's "senior vice president" – what these boss types do or what they get paid for their gutless decisions I have no idea – who said this week that she had "had a conversation" with Nasr (who'd been with the company for 20 years) and "we have decided that she will be leaving the company".

Oh deary, deary. Poor old CNN goes on getting more cowardly by the hour. That's why no one cares about it any more. That can't be said about Fadlallah. The Americans put it about that he had blessed the suicide bomber who struck the US marine base in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 service personnel. Fadlallah always denied this to me and I believe him. Suicide bombers, however insane we regard them, don't need to be blessed; they think they are doing God's duty without any help from a marja like Fadlallah. But anyway, Washington used Saudi money to arrange a car bombing to assassinate Fadlallah in 1985. It missed Fadlallah. But it killed more than 80 innocent people. I do wonder what Ms Khosravi would have thought of that. No comment, I guess.
[...]
In those days, we journos called Fadlallah Hizbollah's "spiritual mentor", though that wasn't true. He did support the Lebanese resistance during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and he was a fierce opponent of US policy in the region – like almost everyone else in the world, including the US, it seems – and he demanded an end of Shia blood-shedding ceremonies at Ashura (when Shias mourn the killing of the Prophet's grandson).

As an Arab-American and more specifically an Iraqi-American, the Ashura rites have always troubled me. During the Ba'athist era the Ashura ceremonies were forbidden by Saddam, but after the US invasion some Shi'ite men (and adolescent boys) have started it up again, whipping themselves till their backs bleed in honor of the Shi'a martyr Ali. Of course Saddam banned the Ashura ceremony for political reasons, seeing it as a rallying point for Shi'a malcontents who opposed Ba'athist rule. But Fadlallah was Shi'a, and wanted to end a savage and unnecessary practice. He also issued fatwas condemning honor killings and female circumcision, and condemned the 9-11 attacks.

American TV journalists and op-ed types frequently lament the lack of a so-called Muslim Gandhi, a rhetorical game that's designed to glide past the need to discuss any actual moderating influences within Islam. The rub of course is that Fadlallah was not consistently against violence. At one point he praised suicide bombings, which I wish he hadn't, although by 2006 he had backed away from such rhetoric when he condemned the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.

All the same, Fadlallah doesn't have to be a Gandhi for the point about Fadlallah's positive aspects to be worth communicating to regular American TV viewers and readers. To be fair the Yahoo/AP article linked below does touch upon these; even the Fox News online obit does. But I imagine that the next time a TV talking head wants to bemoan the lack of moderate figures in Islam they wont remember him. You'd think they could at least call him a "problematic figure" while acknowledging the existence of those kinds of views. I guess I'm tilting at a straw man, at least at this point, since I haven't seen such an op-ed since he died in early July. We'll see.

Incidentally, an international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs went into effect today, August 1st, 2010. Most of the European countries, including the UK, signed on, as did Japan, Australia, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq- but not the US.

Fadlallah obits: Yahoo/AP, Fox News, Reuters, BBC

the crazies

"I heard people saying things today I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus"

-James Clyburn, D, South Carolina


AP/Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Democrats deal with broken windows, obscene threats over support for US health care overhaul“

Windows were shattered at four Democratic offices in New York, Arizona and Kansas and at least 10 members of Congress have reported some sort of threats…

The brick flung through the window of a county Democratic Party office in Rochester, New York, over the weekend had a note attached: "Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice," roughly quoting 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.
[…]
Gun imagery was used in a posting on the Facebook page of Sarah Palin urging people to organize against 20 House Democrats who voted for the health care bill and whose districts went for the John McCain-Palin ticket two years ago. Palin's post featured a U.S. map with circles and cross hairs over the 20 districts.

LA Times, “Threats, Violence Against Democrats Who Voted For Healthcare Bill”

As anger has built in some quarters over the Democrats' passage of healthcare legislation last week, Internet posts urging opponents to take action may have sparked a viral spate of vandalism and other threats against members of Congress and their families.
On Tuesday, the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello discovered that the gas line connecting a propane tank to an outdoor grill at his home near Charlottesville, Va. had been severed. Days earlier, members of conservative tea party groups in the area had posted his address online, urging people to "drop by" what they mistakenly believed was the congressman's home.
The brother, Bo Perriello, has four children at home under the age of 8, according to the Congressman's office.

My comment over at Jonathan Schwarz’s Tiny Revolution,
24 March, “A suggestion”

Jon S.,

people's memories are short in part because of the deliberate awfulness of the popular/corporate media. Remember how Time ran Ann Coulter on the cover in April 2005, on the 10 year anniversary of the OKC bombing? You want a succinct and powerful symbol of the supposedly liberal media's complacency and enabling, look no further.

***

Jon Schwarz suggests discussing the OKC bombing in personal terms to illustrate what's wrong with the present situation.[see the link directly above.]Many others have been calling on the GOP to denounce these actions. I wonder if that’s sufficient, or even the best approach-- although I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that. It’s just that when you call on the GOP(i.e. right-wing elites) to denounce right-wing thuggery and leave it at that and avoid more direct appeals, the message you’re sending is, "these are your children.” In other words, yep, we’re the stereotypical secular left and we don’t understand people like that; they’re foreign to us, none of us even have friends or relatives who identify with those values. You are wondering where I’m going with this, no doubt.

Here: you have to avoid suggesting(or even believing) that all conservatives and “values voters” are just savages, and pretending there is no continuum of values that we all belong to, the best and the worst of us. If you do suggest this, you elicit defensiveness from practically all of “them,” when you could be persuading the sane and peace-loving among “them” to feel revulsion towards the crazies in their midst, which is ultimately the only way to extinguish this fire.

A couple of practical illustrations: The message is, if you’re a conservative and you’re not a racist, but you have some racist friends, well, we’re not surprised. But we liberals aren’t like that. Sniff, sniff. Second, the association between racism and religious identity: yes, it’s there, at least at the margins. But if you just offer anodyne platitudes about religious people(because you‘re a little scared and puzzled by them), you prohibit yourself from making this link, and explicitly discussing the difference between sane and crazy believers.


I discussed this at my old blog in January 2005 on the occasion of George W. Bush’s second inauguration, “Inauguration notes, or the other.” I look back at the words I wrote, and I regret that I didn’t more explicitly state that most Christians are sane, well-meaning people who don‘t go around bombing abortion clinics or threatening people‘s lives, etc. (But the crazy minority, though small, clearly aren’t small enough, and they've been growing in number.) And I note that I no longer necessarily care about the democratic party being a majority party quite like I did in 2005. If they can get back to being pre-1984 democrats (as far as domestic policy goes), that's one thing; but at this point my hopes for that are greatly diminished.


On the other hand, at least in the short term, if the House does in fact vote again on the healthcare bill per recent republican maneuvering, I have a hard time saying that wavering democrats should back away from their yes vote from Sunday. Not if it also means enabling and emboldening domestic fascism and thuggery, even if, therefore, it also means not stepping back from a really horrible piece of legislation-- which of course is horrible for mostly very different reasons than the tea-baggers suppose. It’s quite a conundrum.

Haitian abduction story, Pt 2

from CNN:

"I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking," Carlos Castillo said he told the group's leader, Laura Silsby, during a meeting Friday.

Four hours later, Silsby and nine other Americans were turned back from the border. They were arrested and taken to a jail in Port-au-Prince.

"This woman knew what she was trying to do was not legal," Castillo said.

A CNN reporter attempted to get reaction to Castillo's comment from the jailed Americans, but they would not discuss the matter, responding to questions by singing "Amazing Grace" and praying.

The Man Who Changed The World, parts 1 & 2

Part one (of six): The Man Who Changed The World: Iran & The West

via www.alisanaei.com

and, part two:

"Hunt people for Jesus"

Mimi writes:

It seems the evangelicals enjoy fertile proselytizing ground in the U.S. Army, according to an article by Jeremy Scahill in Common Dreams. Org:
"New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military's top chaplain in the country to "hunt people for Jesus" as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan."
I remember when "separation of church and state" was a basic American tenet. Now it's "torture and kill for Jesus."

I couldn't find the Common Dreams link, but I found this at the Huffy Post, also via Scahill:

Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. The fact that the video footage is being broadcast on Al Jazeera guarantees that it will be seen throughout the Muslim world. It is likely to add more credence to the perception that the US is engaging in a war on Islam with neo-crusader forces invading Muslim lands.

[...]

The video footage was shot about a year ago by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes, who is also a former US soldier. "[US soldiers] weren't talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons," Hughes told Al Jazeera. "The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it ... documenting it would be important."
The broadcast of this video comes just days after a new poll of White Americans found that, in the US, church going Christians are more likely to support the use of torture than other segments of the population. The Pew Research Center poll found: "White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

I'm reminded of this video I came across recently, regarding proselytizing efforts in India. I know nothing about the context of this video, nor how representative it may or may not be of what's going on at a larger scale(the still image, though intriguing, is not representative either):



cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.