Late Night Drift

Posted: January 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Festivities, just because, open thread | Tags: , , , , | 29 Comments

Doctor Daughter introduced me to Ricky Gervais for the joint celebration of youngest daughter’s birthday and another one of mine that I really tried to ignore back in November.  Both daughters were exhausted and spent the evening after sushi at Wasabi determining what was watchable On Demand.  The movie that won the  twenty something vote was called “The Invention of Lying”. Doctor Daughter told me that that the religious right was ticked off about it which immediately got me interested.  I actually sat, then watched for a change.  It was watchable.  That’s a big compliment coming from me.

Whenever some one is accused of crashing some big Hollywood self love celebration or  having a  prime time meltdown, my interest is completely piqued. It’s the same sorta thing that gets me up and about when some one pisses off the supremely ultra-religiously sanctimonious. Some of the snooty set were into Ricky’s muse and some took themselves completely TOO seriously.  It’s always fun to see the nerds and outkasts take revenge on the kool kids.  If it wasn’t for the big pay checks, the plastic surgery and the multiple retakes, they wouldn’t be so cool.  I know. I’ve sat in mix stations before and heard raw results.

The Daily Mail called him “saucy“.  Hugh Hefner faced his own mortality by tweeting “age is just a number”. (That isn’t what most of us thought when Ronald Reagan could push the detonator button on the ‘football’.)  I will say that the word self-destructive came to my mind as I read and watched the many snippy folks accessing his performance.  As long as he has a nice paid for cottage some where near Scotland, he should never worry.  The UK has national health, after all.

You can chant along with me … “you’ll never work in this town again …”

It’s an open thread.   Other blogs behave badly.  Here, we just embrace the snark.  Have fun!!

Oh, and in the word’s of The Bard:   “Well, God give them wisdom that have it, and those that are fools, let them use their talents.”

Live Blog: Tucson Memorial

Posted: January 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because, Live | Tags: , | 138 Comments

CNN is live streaming here.

NPR’S News Line will host live coverage of the Memorial here.

Several memorials are planned Wednesday for the victims of the shooting rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

On Wednesday evening, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will attend a public memorial service in Tucson entitled “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America.” The president will address the gathering and the nation in the live televised event at the University of Arizona. Preliminary details on the event are available here.

The White House said President Obama would meet privately with the victims’ families before the service

The NewsHour will have live streaming online coverage of the service in a special report starting at 8 p.m ET.

Youngest victim: Christina Greene

Pictured on the left is Christina Taylor Green. She is the youngest victim of the shooter.  We encourage donations to the memorial fund established in her name by her family.

Here are the ways to make a donation in memory of Christina:

  • Online at www.cfsoaz.org – click on the link to the Christina Taylor Green Memorial Fund.
  • E-mail christinataylorgreenmemorial@cfsoaz.org
  • Call (520) 545-0313.
  • Send a check to: The Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, In Memory of Christina Taylor Green, 2250 E. Broadway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85719

In a moment of sanity, members of the hate group Westboro Baptist church agreed not to picket her funeral. They will be showing up at the funerals of the adult victims including Judge Roll.   Here are some interesting details.

The Steve Sanchez Radio Show on KXXT AM in Phoenix offered the group 30 minutes on his show on Saturday in exchange for not protesting at Green’s funeral. The deal was established through an e-mail exchange, which was forwarded to CNN.

Other members of congress attending include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.  The First Lady will be accompanying the president.  There are representatives from the Judiciary.  Senator John McCain is there.  Former SCOTUS judge Sandra Day O’Connor is to the right of the President.

We will post updates and links here as they become available.

A War on Public Servants

Posted: January 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , | 31 Comments

I’ve noticed a developing villager meme about the people who put out our fires, teach our children, complete the paper work to give us driver’s and hunting licenses, and paint the picnic tables at parks.  Are they the new enemy or just the collateral in the War for Austerity?   Are we experiencing the first shot heard round the world in the Battle against Public Servants?

If you believed the senile President Reagan, government was the problem.  If you believe the current set of villagers, government workers are the problem.   This actually appears to be part and parcel of a plan to tear down any sort of union where ever it possibly could sprout up.   Silly government workers still want and get pensions, health care plans, and are not subject to firing on management whimsy.   Their examples must be held up as source of public disgust and disgruntlement.  The Power class certainly wouldn’t want their serfs getting any ideas.   Therefore, we’ll just shuffle public workers into the bigger theme of they’re wasting your tax dollars and all because their unions can get them a decent work arrangement. I continue to be amazed how they get us dogs under the table to fight for scraps and bones while they continue the feast up top.

Truth-Out riffs on this them in an article called   We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords.  It describes the new ‘ruling’ class as mostly comprised of Wall Street Bankers and Silicon Valley Geeks.  Chrystia Freeland explains this concept in the cover story of Atlantic Monthly.   Because these folks don’t necessarily come from wealth, they assume they are wealthy because they’re gifted and deserving.  They ignore a lot to maintain that frame.  The new old buzz word is Plutocracy. Freeland argues the super-rich are a nation to themselves.  She explores this in a section called Winner-Take-Most.  The deal, she says, is that the same thing that’s caused the rest of us to be poorer is the very same thing that’s mega-enriched the new plutocrats.

Many corporations have profited from this economic upheaval. Expanded global access to labor (skilled and unskilled alike), customers, and capital has lowered traditional barriers to entry and increased the value of an ahead-of-the-curve insight or innovation. Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of college just six years ago, is already challenging Google, itself hardly an old-school corporation. But the biggest winners have been individuals, not institutions. The hedge-fund manager John Paulson, for instance, single-handedly profited almost as much from the crisis of 2008 as Goldman Sachs did.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers, however devoted and skilled at their jobs, have missed out on the windfalls of this winner-take-most economy—or worse, found their savings, employers, or professions ravaged by the same forces that have enriched the plutocratic elite. The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population. The financial crisis interrupted this trend temporarily, as incomes for the top 1 percent fell more than those of the rest of the population in 2008. But recent evidence suggests that, in the wake of the crisis, incomes at the summit are rebounding more quickly than those below. One example: after a down year in 2008, the top 25 hedge-fund managers were paid, on average, more than $1 billion each in 2009, quickly eclipsing the record they had set in pre-recession 2007.

So, their new frame is that they did it ‘on their own’ and the rest of us are just plain lazy and insufficient.  Unions are our  ‘affirmative action plans’ that cripple the American Dream.  Their frame also translates into the refusal to recognize obligations to the public and public goods as being part of a society.  This makes public workers easy targets. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Feel-Good News From Boston

Posted: January 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: GLBT Rights, just because | Tags: , , , | 32 Comments

Steve Buckley is on the left in this photo

This afternoon I was out in the car, listening–as I often do–to the local sports radio station, WEEI. It was the beginning of the afternoon drive time program “The Big Show.” Instead of talking about the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics (almost never the Bruins), the guys on the show were participating in a “coming out party” for frequent co-host Steve Buckley, a sportswriter for the Boston Herald.

After years of hesitation and months of talks with friends and co-workers, Buckley had decided to announce publicly that he is gay. He wrote about his journey in his column in the Boston Herald today.

Years ago, Buckley had come out to his mother; and while she assured him she totally accepted and loved him just as he was, she advised him not to go public as he wanted to, because she feared his sports writing career in might be damaged by “prejudice.”

Here’s a bit of Buckley’s column:

Just over seven years ago, before Thanksgiving, we were getting into the car outside of a CVS when my mother said, “I think you should go ahead and do that story you’ve been talking about.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just go ahead and do it. And then we’ll have a party.”

She was talking about the story in which I would say that I am gay.

[….]

“Do it,” she said. I thanked her. She smiled. And then I made the biggest mistake of my life: With a vacation lined up for the first week of December, I told her I’d get to it when I returned to Boston — just before Christmas.

The vacation came and went. The day after I returned to Boston, I received a call from the Lifeline people telling me my mother was being rushed to Mount Auburn Hospital, where she had undergone radiation therapy during the summer. The family gathered at her side. The next morning, she suffered a heart attack. She died a few days later.

There was a funeral at Doherty’s, and then a very soulful, reflective Christmas. And then a Super Bowl, and then spring training. The story didn’t get done. Whenever I revisited the idea of coming out, I’d foolishly dwell on how it was to have been a big family event, my mother pulling everyone together. When that was lost, I guess I lost my way.

On the radio show today, Buckley explained that many of his friends knew he was gay, and that he would have told anyone who asked him. But he still felt he wasn’t really being true to himself. He needed to go public.

After he wrote the column last night, Buckley received thousands of calls and e-mails from friends, readers of his column, listeners to WEEI, and several professional athletes. He answered questions from co-hosts and took calls from listeners throughout the three-hour show today, and toward the end of the program he said that he could honestly say this was the happiest day of his life.

As someone who has listened to Buckley on the radio for years, I couldn’t help smiling as he talked and as the other guys on the show supported him–and these are very macho-type guys.

While I’m not gay, I am a recovering alcoholic, so I know what it’s like to have a deep dark secret that you’re not sure you want to reveal. After a number of years of sobriety, I decided to just be open about it; because my sobriety is a huge part of who I am. I’m a completely different person today because I stopped drinking. I’m not saying it’s the same thing as coming out of the closet, but I can identify with that feeling that you want your friends and family to know you as you really are.

Anyway, this story made me feel really good, and so I wanted to share it with you all. I hope it makes you feel as happy as it made me.

Wikileaks and Israel

Posted: January 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Anti-War, Barack Obama, Drone Warfare, Foreign Affairs, Hamas, Human Rights, Iraq, Israel, just because, Middle East, Wikileaks | Tags: , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

We may not be able to get the news from our press,but the foreign press and alternative media sources continue to let us know the substantive things released in the Wikileaks State Department Cables.  I can’t read Norwegian, but the Norwegian Aftenposten is the source of the following story outlined by Professor Juan Cole on his website Informed Consent.

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that

‘ The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of time, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.

Note: This war preparation is serious and specific, according to the paper, and clearly is not just a matter of vague contingency planning.

The paper says that US cables quote Ashkenazi telling the US congressmen, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite

I have to also tell you that my print copy of  The Economist showed up in the mail box today with this huge headline:  Please, Not Again:  The Threat of War in the Middle East.  Also, there’s this subtitle in the online version: ‘Without boldness from Barack Obama there is a real risk of war in the Middle East’.  I am assuming that the editorial staff there got the low down on some of these items way before we finally are reading about them here.  Predictably, there’s a lot on Hizbullah rocket stockpiles.  No information on such robust Israeli war planning.  Coverage of war drum beating is always predictably filtered and lop-sided.

Democracy Now also has major coverage of Israeli preparations for war via the Wikileaks information.

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten is claiming it has come into possession of all of the classified U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks. In a report on one newly released cable, the paper reveals that Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told a U.S. congressional delegation a little over a year ago that the Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East. The cables quote Ashkenazi saying, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”

Evidently the driving force behind this is Hamas and Hizbullah stockpile of rockets and their capabilities according to Juan Cole as cited above.  Israel–like any other state–has the right to defend itself.  This should go without saying.  However, the more I read, the more I’m convinced this goes way beyond that.  There are stockpiles in the hands of nefarious groups.  So far, that’s been it.

The general’s plans are driven by fear of growing stockpiles of rockets in Hamas-controlled Gaza and in Hizbullah-controlled Southern Lebanon, the likely theaters of the planned major new war. Ashkenazi does not seem capable of considering that, given a number of Israeli invasions and occupations of those regions, the rockets may be primarily defensive.

Ashkenazi told the visiting delegation that Israeli unmanned drones had had great success in identifying rocket emplacements in southern Lebanon, and that it had been aided in this endeavor by the US National Security Agency,which spies on communications.

Israeli unmanned drones? I’d forgotten that development was announced last than a year ago. The Heron TP is evidently the size of a 737 and can fly nonstop for 20 hours giving it more than enough steam to get well into Iran. Now, we’re beginning to see why they were so excited about it.  I figured it might be used to take out Irani nuclear weapon facilities or something possibly noble like that.  Of course, I should know better given how much WMD were used to beat the drum beat against Iraq. We know how well that turned out.

Instead, we read this.  Again, it’s from Juan Cole translating the source.

The new, major war will be a total war on civilians, Ashkenazi boasted: “In the next war Israel cannot accept any restrictions on warfare in urban areas.” (I den neste krigen kan Israel ikke godta noen restriksjoner på krigføring i byområder in Norwegian, or let us just translate it into the original German: “Im nächsten Krieg kann Israel keine Beschränkungen der Kriegsführung in städtischen Gebieten akzeptieren.”.) Mind you, the civilian deaths deriving from this massive and unrestricted bombing campaign on targets in the midst of civilian urban populations will be “unintentional.” Planning to bomb civilian areas with foreknowledge that you will thereby kill large numbers of civilians is a war crime.

I certainly hope the Secretary of State is answering the 3 a.m. phone calls these days.  If the remaining naysaying  idiots on the planet haven’t figured out the value of the Wikileaks yet, they never will.  We could always send them off to be used as human shields in a possible war zone hidden from our view for over a year.  Frankly, I agree with Mr. Rogers.  I like to be told.  Do you think we’d have invaded Iraq if we’d have been told a lot of the lies behind that invasion by a Wikileaks type whistle blower source?

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