Thursday Reads

Posted: February 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Bahrain, Civil Rights, Egypt, Foreign Affairs, Israel, Lebanon, morning reads, Team Obama, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics | 34 Comments

Good Morning!!

A couple of days ago President Obama actually did something I could cheer about. He awarded the Medal of Freedom to former Boston Celtics great Bill Russell. Of course he also awarded them to George H.W. Bush and Warren Buffett, but I’ll try to overlook that for now.

Obama suggested that Boston should have a statue of Russell, and according to the Boston Herald:

The unveiling of a Bill Russell statue in Boston appears to be just a matter of time.

According to Celtics [team stats] co-owner Steve Pagliuca, the organization has already begun the process of getting the statue created and placed. And it didn’t hurt Tuesday when President Barack Obama, while awarding Russell the Medal of Freedom, mentioned that such a monument should be erected for future generations.

That would be okay, but I agree with what I heard NPR sports commentator Bill Littlefield recommend yesterday: every school library should have copies of Russell’s books and biographies of him written by others.

Russell played for the Celtics in the days when racism was rampant in Boston.

NBA greats Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain

As a highly visible public figure in the years when the country was emerging from a century of legally sanctioned discrimination, Russell threw his prestige behind the emergent Civil Rights Movement, participating with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the historic 1963 March on Washington. Russell’s years of living in Boston were not easy ones. At the height of the Celtics’ success there were many empty seats in the Boston Garden, while less successful teams in other cities played to full arenas. When Russell bought a fine home for his family in a historically white neighborhood, he received threats and insults. On one occasion, vandals broke into his home and splattered the walls with filth and graffiti. Unbowed, Russell focused his energies on his game, and enjoyed excellent relations with his teammates and other NBA players.

Once when a hotel in the South denied accommodations to black players, Russell protested by refusing to play in the game that night, drawing media attention to the injustice. He never let the disrespect he often received prevent him from giving his heart and soul to Celtics basketball, leading the team to 11 NBA championships. If only President Obama would take leadership lessons from Bill Russell!

For a long time Russell remained bitter about Boston, but in the past 20 years or so he has become a presence here again, a greatly admired and beloved part of Boston sports and social history. Never mind that the Medal of Freedom has been given to so many who don’t deserve it. This time it went to someone truly worthy.

In other news…

The White House is still leaking information to The New York Times in an effort to make it look like President Obama has been in full control during the ongoing crises in the Middle East.

President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.

Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.

Administration officials did not say how the report related to intelligence analysis of the Middle East, which the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, acknowledged in testimony before Congress, needed to better identify “triggers” for uprisings in countries like Egypt.

Hmmm…I wonder why Obama looked so flatfooted and off-balance when the Egyptian protests began then? Why did he fail to make any definite stands? Why did he make so many vague and conflicting statements? Why is he now trying to blame all of this on the State Department? Do you suppose maybe he didn’t read the report?

Whatever. It’s too late. The rest of the world knows he’s incompetent even if a lot of Americans don’t.

The Obama administration offered to support a UN rebuke of Israel:

The U.S. informed Arab governments Tuesday that it will support a U.N. Security Council statement reaffirming that the 15-nation body “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” a move aimed at avoiding the prospect of having to veto a stronger Palestinian resolution calling the settlements illegal.

But the Palestinians rejected the American offer following a meeting late Wednesday of Arab representatives and said it is planning to press for a vote on its resolution on Friday, according to officials familar with the issue. The decision to reject the American offer raised the prospect that the Obama adminstration will cast its first ever veto in the U.N. Security Council.

Still, the U.S. offer signaled a renewed willingness to seek a way out of the current impasse, even if it requires breaking with Israel and joining others in the council in sending a strong message to its key ally to stop its construction of new settlements. The Palestinian delegation, along with Lebanon, the Security Council’s only Arab member state, have asked the council’s president this evening to schedule a meeting for Friday. But it remained unclear whether the Palestinian move today to reject the U.S. offer is simply a negotiating tactic aimed at extracting a better deal from Washington.

Gordonskene at C&L has a great post up about one of my favorite journalists of all time: Eric Severeid:

Before the days of spin, agendas and punditry, there was that somewhat extinct class of journalists known as “commentators” – and even though they were journalists first, their commentaries were secondary; separate and classified as such. They were usually imbued with a sense of professional objectivity we would find somewhat strange by todays standards with Entertainers masquerading as Journalists and Journalists masquerading as Entertainers.

One such commentator was Eric Sevareid. In the mold of Edward R. Murrow (in fact, often referred to as one of “Murrow’s Boys” during World War 2), Sevareid along with radio journalists Charles Collingwood, Robert Trout and many others from CBS and the other networks routinely offered commentaries on the days news, separate from their regular reporting.

Yes, those were the days…there may have been plenty of propaganda, but there was some actual journalism going on too.

You may have heard (despite the U.S. media blackout) that a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Pervez Musharraf, former President of Pakistan for the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Ron Brynaert at Bradblog has an analysis of the U.S. media reaction. A sample:

“A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for ousted military leader Pervez Musharraf on Saturday over allegations he played a role in the 2007 assassination of an ex-prime minister and rival,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend, although no major US newspaper seems to have followed up. “It was a major setback for the onetime U.S. ally, who was plotting a political comeback from outside the country.”

[….]

After the opening paragraph, the next four paragraphs of AP’s report are devoted to defenses of Musharraf, accusations against the present Pakistan government, and doubts that the warrant will amount to much. An independent United Nations report which blasted the Musharraf government’s security arrangements as “fatally insufficient” isn’t mentioned until near the end, and reports that the Musharraf government lied and manipulated evidence about the ultimate cause of Bhutto’s death are completely ignored.

“Musharraf, who has not been charged, described accusations that he had a hand in the attack on ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a smear campaign by a government led by her aggrieved husband,” the second paragraph states, even though the former coup leader is never directly quoted once in the article.

Al Jazeera has the latest on events in the Middle East:

Clashes rock Bahraini capital

The Bahrain capital of Manama was rocked by sporadic clashes, hours after riot police attacked a makeshift encampment of pro-reform protesters in the centre of the city, killing at least three and injuring dozens of others.

An Al Jazeera correspondent, who cannot be named for security reasons, said on Thursday morning that “clashes were no longer limited to one place…they are now spread out in different parts of the city”.

Another Al Jazeera online producer said that booms could be heard from different parts of the city, suggesting that “tear-gas is being used to disperse the protesters in several neighbourhoods”.

Latest reports, however, indicated that a tense calm had descended on the capital with troops patroling the streets.

There were also reports of dozens of armoured vehicles moving towards the Pearl Roundabout, the protest site that was raided by the riot police.

‘Day of rage’ kicks off in Libya: Protesters have reportedly taken to the streets in four cities despite a crackdown, heeding to calls for mass protests.

Protesters in Libya have defied a security crackdown and taken to the streets in four cities for a “day of rage,” inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, reports say.

Several hundred supporters of Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s longtime leader, have also reportedly gathered in the capital on Thursday to counter online calls for anti-government protests.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said that Libyan authorities had detained 14 activists, writers and protesters who had been preparing the anti-government protests.

Libya has been tightly controlled for over 40 years by Gaddafi, who is now Africa’s longest-serving leader.

According to reports on Twitter, the microblogging site, Libya’s regime had been sending text messages to people warning them that live bullets will be fired if they join today’s protests.

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Musing about My Reaction to News of the Attack on Lara Logan

Posted: February 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Egypt, Foreign Affairs, just because, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , | 77 Comments

Woman protesting in Cairo

Yesterday in the early evening, as I was surfing the ‘net, I came across the announcement by CBS that their foreign correspondent Lara Logan had been brutally sexually assaulted and beaten in Cairo on the day Mubarak resigned.

Normally, I would have posted this at Sky Dancing right away, but at first I hesitated because the description of what happened, although vague, sounded so awful and I thought it would be insensitive to rush to the keyboard to spread the news.

Within a short period of time, it became clear to me that both mainstream news sources and blogs were all posting the story and discussing it. Still, I hesitated. I checked with the other frontpagers to see what they thought, perhaps subconsciously hoping one of them would write the post that I didn’t want to write. Meanwhile, I continued reading reactions to the story at other sites.

Finally I realized that I was really blocked about this story for some reason. I simply couldn’t find the words to write anything coherent about it. I felt a very deep sadness and a sense of foreboding that I didn’t quite understand.

I usually react strongly to stories about violence against women, but normally I don’t have a problem writing about them. Why was I having writer’s block over this one? Thankfully, Minkoff Minx wrote a very sensitive and compassionate post last night, and I stopped obsessing about my “problem” and went to sleep.

This morning as I was driving to work, I again started thinking about the feelings I had had last night; and I was able to begin to better understand my strong reaction. I had been so thrilled by what took place in Egypt–that the protesters had been able to force the ousting of Mubarak and that they had done in relatively peacefully. I had also been excited to see women taking an active role in the demonstrations. I now realized that learning about what had happened to Logan, had tainted my enthusiastic feelings about the Egyptian protests. I also began to wonder if anything would really change for Egyptian women even if there were real changes in their government.

In my reading last night I had learned that Katie Couric had also felt in danger among the crowds in Tahrir Square. She had been pushed hard by an Egyptian man whom she described as being extremely angry, his eyes full of rage.

Even more disturbing, I read that Egyptian women are regularly accosted and groped by men when they go out in public. In fact, 86% of women in Egypt say they have been sexually harrassed. From Sarah Topol, at Slate:

Egypt has a sexual harassment problem. In a 2008 study, 86 percent of women said they had been harassed on Egypt’s streets—any woman walking through a crowd of men in Egypt braces to get groped. But in the square, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, men apologized if they so much as bumped into you. After wandering around the protests for days, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t been groped, a constant annoyance when I’m faced with large crowds in Cairo. When I pointed this out to other women in the square, we all took a moment to reflect. “I hadn’t even thought of that,” one woman in Tahrir told me. “But it’s because we’re all so focused on one goal, we’re a family here.”

Here is another piece about sexual harrassment of women in Egypt (h/t Dakinikat). In the article, Mary Rogers, a CNN producer and camerawoman who has lived in Egypt since 1994, wrote about her own personal experiences of being sexually harrassed. Be warned, it’s pretty disturbing.

Again at Slate, Rachel Larrimore asked whether the attack on Lara Logan was a “bad omen” for Egyptian women. She wondered if in the end women would really be empowered by the “revolution.” Or would they be sent back home with a “thank you” and a pat on the head?

As I continued thinking about all this, I recalled how as a young girl I had tried reading science fiction novels. I liked them a lot, but I was disappointed that male science fiction writers wrote about women in the future performing pretty much the same roles and working in the same jobs that women in the 1960s. I wondered why these supposedly imaginative writers were unable to imagine that future women might actually do exciting, stimulating jobs instead of continuing to be teachers, nurses and clerical workers eons into the future.

And yes, I know there are female science fiction writers now who imagine women of the future in adventurous situations–and perhaps there are even male writers now who can imagine such things. It doesn’t matter. For me the damage was done. I had learned something very depressing about the culture I lived in. Women were bit players–there only to provide foils for men, or to support or comfort men.

That is how I feel now about the Egyptian protests. Women were included for a time, perhaps because they were needed, perhaps because everyone was feeling excited, happy, and inclusive. For a time, even the groping of women stopped. But then, on that day when Mubarak resigned it began again. And a very famous American woman was horribly attacked by men who screamed “Jew! Jew!” as they violated and beat her.

And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of “being Israeli spies.” Logan is not Jewish.

After the attack, Logan returned to the U.S. where she spent the past several days in the hospital. It has been reported that according to network sources she was at first unable to speak and that her injuries were “serious.”

I want to be very clear. This isn’t just about the Middle East or Muslims. This could easily have happened here. Women are brutally raped every day in the U.S. Many more women are sexually harrassed at work or on the street.

Most women have experienced this–I know I have. I’ve been groped by strangers in public places. It is a terribly traumatic, degrading, and humiliating experience that can stay with you forever. I still occasionally flash back to times when this happened to me, and feel the remnants of helpless rage followed by sadness and even depression that follow such experiences. The trauma of actually being raped is, of course, far worse, and can change a woman’s life forever.

I’ll wrap this up for now. I just thought I’d share my thoughts on this, in hopes that others might relate to them.

Finally, I want to note some positive reactions following this heartbreaking event.

Nir Rosen, the “journalist” who sent out horribly offensive tweets attacking both Logan and Anderson Cooper was forced to resign from his fellowship at NYU today. He gave an interview to Fishbowl DC in which he tried to explain the unexplainable.

Egyptian activists have condemned the attack on Logan.

“It’s incredibly sad that this has happened, and it’s something that the spirit of Tahrir and the spirit of revolution was resolutely against,” Ahdaf Soueif, an author who spent a great deal of time in Tahrir Square, told the Guardian. “Women in the square were rejoicing that they felt freedom on the streets of Cairo for the first time, and [this is] definitely something that we want to stamp out alongside corruption and all the other social ills that have befallen Egypt during Mubarak’s regime.”

Mahmoud Salem, a well known Egyptian blogger, was one of many of the January 25 activists to express outrage. “Lara Logan, what happened to you was reprehensible, & I hope u don’t judge the egyptian people or Tahrir because of it,” he tweeted under his moniker Sandmonkey.

Finally, Logan is now home with her family and talking to friends about what happened to her–a healthy sign. And she is determined to go back to her job after a few weeks. Clearly she is a very strong woman with a good support system. I hope that her husband will stand by her and that she will be able to heal from this and go back to doing the work she loves.

Iraq Invasion Whoppers

Posted: February 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Central Intelligence Agency, Diplomacy Nightmares, Federal Budget, Foreign Affairs, Gitmo, Human Rights, Iran, Iraq, Media, Psychopaths in charge, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, Surreality, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Oops, there goes another rationale for the Iraq Invasion

Any number of us that closely followed the trumped-up case for the Iraq invasion figured that most of the evidence was shoddy if not based on out-and-out lies. I seriously wanted to throw up every time I heard some Bush official equivocate smoking guns and smoking mushroom clouds.  The most disheartening thing was the number of people that believed them.  The entire Iraq Invasion run-up  just showed how vulnerable the American public is to propaganda and jingoism.  You could hardly hold a civil conversation with so much hysteria-based flag waving going on.

So, it’s another one of those moments where you learn exactly how duped the entire country was by a set of people just itching to scratch that NeoCon rash.  The UK Guardian reports that the “man codenamed Curveball ‘invented’ tales of bioweapons”.  Colin Powell’s judgment looked bad then, it looks nonexistent now.   Remember, he was considered the moderate voice of reason.  You can watch the video and hear the words of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi: ‘I had the chance to fabricate something …’  I’m sure they begged him to do it.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi’s claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell’s landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi’s admission as “fascinating”, and said the emergence of the truth “makes me feel better”. “I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” said Drumheller.

It was no secret that most of the advisers surrounding Dubya Bush were the same ones disappointed in Poppy’s decision to stop the first Gulf War with Saddam still in power.  There were many good reasons to leave Saddam in power including the geopolitical stalemate created by tensions between the Sunni Saddam and the Shia Clerics in Iran that frequently burst into horrible wars.  We shifted the balance of power in the area to Iran and have undoubtedly created a long term mess in Iraq itself. It’s cost us lives and money.  It’s cost the Iraqis untold horrors.  We continue to learn it was based on nothing but a pack of lies.  This mea culpa is just the latest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday Reads: Tim Geithner in Control of Obama’s Economic Policy, and Other News

Posted: February 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Bailout Blues, Barack Obama, Economic Develpment, Egypt, financial institutions, Foreign Affairs, Global Financial Crisis, Gulf Oil Spill, Iran, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, Yemen | Tags: , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Good Morning!! The snow is slowly melting outside my house, and I’ve come down with Spring fever! No more snowstorms please, Mother Nature. Anyway, at least for this week, we are getting temperatures in the 40s and 50s. It is going to be chilly again tomorrow, but after that–springlike! After the frigid winter we’ve lived through, these temperatures feel amazing. Maybe this will make the bad news from DC a little more bearable. I hope so.

This morning I want to focus on an important article that comes via David Dayen at FDL. It’s a piece at The New Republic about Timothy Geithner, written by Noam Scheiber. First a little aside.

Back in November, I wrote a post about the axing of Obama’s economic team and noted that Geither was the last man standing.

In that post, I quoted Andrew Cockburn of Counterpunch:

If Barack Obama needed any help in guiding the Democratic Party over the cliff he certainly got it from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Voters have told pollsters that the state of the economy, their own in particular, was their principle concern. Though impelled by the specter of unemployment and homelessness, the image of Geithner, toady to the bankers, can only have encouraged them in their fury. A sensible president would therefore already be running out the plank prior to giving this disastrous financial overseer an encouraging shove between the shoulders. But in this case, we may not be that lucky. CounterPunch can reveal the crucial role played in these matters by a group close to the President but unknown to the outside world.

A knowledgeable insider told Cockburn that despite Larry Summers’ reputation as a corporate tool,

“Larry has some idea that there is more to the economy than just the welfare of large banks,” this official suggests. “He did push for a larger stimulus and more jobs programs, for example. Tim just cares about banks.”

I then went on to indulge in a little conspiracy theorizing based on Cockburn’s information. But that’s beside the point right now. The point is that after writing that post, I came to the conclusion that Geithner was running economic policy in the Obama administration.

Getting back to the article at TNR, Scheiber purports to explain how Geithner survived the massacre of the economists. One interesting tidbit in the lengthy article is about Geithner’s relationship with Larry Summers, who acted as Geithner’s mentor and patron early on.

In 1993, Geithner caught the attention of [a] prominent patron—Larry Summers—whom Bill Clinton had appointed as his treasury undersecretary. Summers took a personal interest in Geithner’s career and promoted him each time he rose through the Treasury ranks.

And then during the Obama administration, Geithner apparently stabbed his patron in the back, becoming President Obama’s primary economic adviser–even though Geithner isn’t an economist. (Neither is anyone else on Obama current “economic team,” as Dakinikat frequently points out.)

Geithner actually sounds a lot like Obama–he’s really good at sucking up and convincing people he’s on their side–until he slides in the knife. Regarding Geithner’s time at the IMF, Scheiber writes:

According to former co-workers, Geithner was deft at bringing skeptical colleagues on board. One technique involved homing in on possible dissidents and absorbing their suggestions into his proposals.

Sound familiar? A bit more:

Perhaps most important, Geithner was scrupulously attuned to the temperament of the boss. Like Obama, he evinced a strong aversion to blather. During meetings with the president, he would say little, and usually not until the end, when his opinion was solicited. “I thought [Geithner] got the president really well,” says a former administration official who interacted with him on nonfinancial matters. “When he was in trouble, I said to someone, ‘He just needs to hold on. He’ll be fine with Obama. Once they get to know each other, they’re like the same person.’”

Scheiber describes an epic struggle between Geithner and Summers over how to deal with the banks that had crashed the U.S. economy. Summers argued for some form of nationalization, while Geithner claimed the banks just needed more capital and they could recover.

If Geithner was right, the capital shortfall was much more manageable than Summers feared. The banks might be able to fill it with minimal government help, simply by selling shares to investors. But, if he was wrong, the banks would stumble along in a kind of vampire state, sucking credit from the economy and exacerbating the recession. In the worst case, fears of insolvency could trigger a modern-day version of Depression-era bank runs.

Hey, wait a minute. That sounds like what is happening to our economy right now. But, never mind, Geithner won the battle that counted–the battle for Obama’s favor.

Part of what Geithner convinced Obama of was “that it was ultimately better politics to risk a backlash with unemployment at 10 percent than to feed the backlash and watch the economy shrink further.” So it’s Geithner we have to thank for the new normal of high unemployment, poverty, and suffering among the middle, working, and lower classes.

Finally, what horrified David Dayen was Geithner’s out-front claim that–in Dayen’s words, “what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.” Geithner:

“I don’t have any enthusiasm for … trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world,” he said. “It’s the same thing for Microsoft or anything else. We want U.S. firms to benefit from that.” He continued: “Now financial firms are different because of the risk, but you can contain that through regulation.” This was the purpose of the recent financial reform, he said. In effect, Geithner was arguing that we should be as comfortable linking the fate of our economy to Wall Street as to automakers or Silicon Valley.

In response, Dayen writes:

I don’t even know what to say about this. We’re just a few years removed from the financial oligarchs destroying the global economy through their own greed and negligence. And the man put in charge of regulating them, who had a front-row seat to all this destruction and who has been given expanded powers under Dodd-Frank to see to it that never happens again, thinks that there’s a great “financial deepening” about to take place where the demand for sophisticated financial innovations will jump. Therefore, the financial sector will need to grow and become the most reliable spur of the US economy. That’s his feeling. And regulation can reduce the risk, even though the new regulations barely put a dent into Wall Street’s core business, and are being systematically defunded besides.

Financialization of the economy has led to practically nothing but pain for the average worker and risk for the taxpayer. It has turned the allocation of capital into the placing of bets at a casino, and the stock market into a particularly sophisticated video poker game. This territory was all covered before in the run-up to the Great Depression as well, and we know the precise causes and remedies involved. Geithner prefers not to address the plutocracy he’s really advancing here – where elites provide “financial deepening” services abroad and amass ridiculous profits that they wall off.

This incredibly amoral conman is partnering with our conman chief executive to sell out our country, our lives, and those of our children and grandchildren. There’s lots more of interest in the article, particularly the information about Geithner’s upbringing.

I’ll wrap this up with a few other stories, and then throw the floor open to your links and opinions. Did you hear that Stephen Baldwin is suing Kevin Costner over Costner’s oil-eating invention?

It seems Baldwin sold his shares in Costner’s company right before BP shelled out $50 million for the machines.

Jane Hamsher offers a flow-chart of the principle players in the scandal over US Chamber of Commerce’s attempts to discredit Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald, Brad Friedman, David House, and others who have supported wikileaks and Bradley Manning. Joseph Cannon has also been covering this story.

Brad Friedman’s post especially is a must read. Get this, the Chamber paid 2 million dollars a month for dirt on Friedman, and got completely inaccurate information. And that inaccurate information came from corporations who are paid billions by our government “to target terrorists.” But Obama wants to cancel heating assistance for poor people to save money.

Mitt Romney is ahead in the latest NH poll, at 40%, for whatever that’s worth. Romney was always going to win NH. They always vote for New Englanders up there. The real test for Romney will be Iowa.

The Patriot Act extension has been passed by the House on the second try. I think the Egyptians will probably get rid of their emergency law before we get rid of ours.

There are “massive” protests in Iran, inspired by the dramatic events in Egypt. There have also been more protests in Yemen and in Bahrain. When will it happen here?

What are you reading and blogging about today?

Saturday Night Specials

Posted: February 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Algeria, Foreign Affairs, just because, open thread | Tags: , , , | 12 Comments

The Martini dakini

There’s a lot going on to think about during this weekend that’s generally reserved to celebrate the sale of mattresses, bad candy, and greenhouse flowers.

First, Is Algeria the next democracy domino in the MENA region? Also, why can’t I get any newspaper or TV news channel in this country to tell me about it?  Let’s start helping these folks out too!!

Internet providers were shut down and Facebook accounts deleted across Algeria on Saturday as thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were arrested in violent street demonstrations.

Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

There were also reports of journalists being targeted by state-sponsored thugs to stop reports of the disturbances being broadcast to the outside world.

But it was the government attack on the internet which was of particular significance to those calling for an end to President Abdelaziz Boutifleka’s repressive regime.

Protesters mobilising through the internet were largely credited with bringing about revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

“The government doesn’t want us forming crowds through the internet,” said Rachid Salem, of Co-ordination for Democratic Change in Algeria.

It’s interesting that so many countries are aiming for what we’re losing every day. Meanwhile, the US Presidential assertion of the day is: FBI can get phone records without oversight.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.

The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.

So, this is an open thread, but I thought I’d share something with you. This is the famous Emma Lazarus poem that is etched into the pedestal of the statue of Liberty.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Do you think it still applies?

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