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The Rick Warren controversy and Barack's bad timing
Mary Shaw
One of the many big political stories of the past few days is Barack Obama's newest pastor problem.
Obama has chosen Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.
This is the same Rick Warren, of the ironically named Saddleback megachurch, who actively pushed for passage of Proposition 8, and has compared homosexuality to incest, polygamy, and child abuse.
Warren's respect for women equals his respect for gays. For instance, he recently compared reproductive choice to the Holocaust.
This guy is the king of zealous exaggeration and deceptive spin. But people follow him and absorb his every word. That makes him dangerous. And that danger led to disaster on November 4th, when his Prop 8 efforts succeeded in stripping gay couples in California of their right to marry.
This is the kind of religious political interference that we voted against when we elected Barack Obama as our next president. But now Warren will play a starring role at the inauguration of the president who promised change we can believe in. -So, naturally, Obama has come under fire in the past few days for this selection. And rightly so, in my opinion.
Fighting Within
Gilad Atzmon Interviews Sid Shniad (IJV Canada)
Recently I have been corresponding with Sid Shniad (1), a founding member of Canadian Independent Jewish Voice (Canadian IJV) (2). Those who are familiar with my writing are well aware of the fact that I am highly critical of any form of Jewish political activism, for I consider it to be a racially orientated discourse.
Yet, as much as I am interested in elaboration on the issue, a true dialogue with Jewish political activists is pretty much impossible. Jewish political ethnic campaigners and political activists have much to lose. They are fully aware of the categorical contradiction between the aim for universal values and tribal activism. They have much incoherence and inconsistency to hide.
Sid, however, was different, though we do not agree on many things, we have managed to keep an open and fruitful dialogue. He was very helpful and addressed each issue in a very positive manner.
Gore Vidal: The Prodigious Pessimist
Jonathan Raban
Gore Vidal with beloved cat Baby Brown.
In the grand sweep of Vidal's aquiline view, American history has been a succession of tragic follies, and his essays, in their still-uncollected totality, amount to a massive prose Dunciad of literary and political knaves, hacks, and blockheads.
In his essay about the top ten best-sellers on the New York Times fiction list of January 7, 1973, Gore Vidal gave a characteristically withering notice ("Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud") to Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. He finished with the remark, "I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is goré vidal (a Russian phrase meaning 'he has seen grief')." I'd always taken this as a joke-rather a below-par joke by Vidal's standards-until I checked it out with my Russian housecleaner.
"Gore Vidal!" she said. "Yes, but it is worse than grief. It is terrible. A woman, she have five sons, her only children, they all are killed at once in the war-goré vidal! It has many, many meanings. 'I was beaten so much nothing hurts me any more'-goré vidal. Sometimes it is sarcastic: we say 'goré vidal!' like Americans say 'Fuck you!' It is very common. I use it all the time." Later she sent me a list of synonyms for goré translated from her Russian dictionary. They included misfortune, disaster, mischief, distress, calamity, accident, adversity, ills, misery, affliction, bad luck, grief, sorrow, anguish, woe, poverty, melancholy, depression, and yearning.
Try that One on for Size: Al-Zaidi Puts Iraq Back on the Map
Remi Kanazi
I can't lie. I've watched Iraqi journalist Montather Al-Zaidi whip those two shoes past George Bush's head more times than I can count. I loved it; I even got into the corny jokes about the Red Sox drafting Al-Zaidi in the spring (cementing my belief that Iraqis have the second strongest arms in the Middle East—behind Palestinians of course). I also read endless blog coverage and joined the Facebook group, "Release Montather Al-Zaidi and Give Him New Shoes."
New Arctic Meltdown Rates Cut Little Ice With Governments
Andrew Glikson
It is a good question whether the Australian government, having effectively abandoned any meaningful attempt at the arrest of accelerating climate change, would have changed its White Paper in view of rising melt rates of Arctic Sea ice, which acts as the Earth's thermostat, and which has already decreased from 8 to 4 million km2 and is projected to vanish within the next 5 years or so news.bbc
Mean temperatures over the Arctic Sea, increased by about 3C and locally by 5C over the last 4 years, compared to the earlier long-term mean, heralds a new climate pattern in the northern hemisphere, including advanced melt of Greenland ice sheet over the next few decades, raising sea levels by several metres.
Bernard Madoff: Wall Street Swindler Strikes Powerful Blows for Social Justice
James Petras
[Cartoon: 'Amateur' ] Wall Street broker Bernard (‘Bernie’) Madoff, former president of NASDAQ, revered and respected investor confessed to pulling off the biggest fraud in history, a $50 billion dollar scam. Bernie was known for his generous philanthropy, especially to Zionist, Jewish and Israeli causes.
“We never thought he would do this to us, he was one of our people”, member of Palm Beach Country Club.
An Introduction to the Mega-Swindle
Wall Street broker Bernard (‘Bernie’) Madoff, former president of NASDAQ, revered and respected investor confessed to pulling off the biggest fraud in history, a $50 billion dollar scam. Bernie was known for his generous philanthropy, especially to Zionist, Jewish and Israeli causes. A one time life-guard on Long Island in the 1960’s, Bernie launched his financial career by raising money from colleagues, friends and relatives among wealthier Jews in the Long Island suburbs, Palm Beach, Florida and in Manhattan, promising a modest, steady and secure return of between 10 to 12%, covering any withdrawals in typical Ponzi fashion by drawing on funds from new investors who literally pleaded for Bernie to fleece them. Madoff personally managed at least $17 billion dollars.
Obama's New Appointments
Stephen Lendman
The beat goes on. As with his economic and security appointments, Obama again disappointed but didn't surprise. Without exception, his team assures business as usual, a near-seamless transition from George Bush, and not "change to believe in." His latest choices raise more cause for concern and with good reason.
Media Reaction to His Energy, Environmental and Education Team
The Nation magazine cheerled for Obama from the start, glorified his election, sees in him a "sea-change of course (for) progressive-driven reform....(the) end of the Reagan era....an end of the occupation of Iraq," and a socially liberal new beginning. The magazine often hyperventilates, and it's at it again about Obama's "Green Team."
From Global Crisis to "Global Government"
Andrew G. Marshall
Introduction
The United States’ National Intelligence Council has released a report, entitled "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World". This declassified document is the fourth report of the Global Trends 2025: The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project,
The report outlines the paths that current geopolitical and economic trends may reach by the year 2025, in order to guide strategic thinking over the next few decades. The National Intelligence Council describes itself as the US Intelligence Community’s “center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking,” with the tasks of supporting the Director of National Intelligence, reaching out to non-governmental experts in academia and the private sector and it leads in the effort of providing National Intelligence Estimates.
The report was written with the active participation of not only the US intelligence community, but also numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions and hundreds of other experts. Among the participating organizations were the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Wilson Center, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Texas A&M University, the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House in London, which is the British equivalent of the CFR.[1]
A Correction and an Apology
Chris Floyd
In a brief post yesterday, I wrote that African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to apologize for making such a controversial -- and flagrantly incorrect -- statement. Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild. For as a new article in The Nation forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class citizens in the United States; they are treated as wild animals to be hunted down and shot in cold blood.
The article is a very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups that formed, with police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in New Orleans in the days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had designated the area -- which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood -- as a vital evacuation point for those trapped in the city, a group of white residents seized the opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black skin. Many African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one knows the exact number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate any of the incidents, and coroner's records of the gun-blasted bodies that showed up in the area have unaccountably gone missing.
Cheney Throws Down Gauntlet, Defies Prosecution for War Crimes
Marjorie Cohn
Dick Cheney has publicly confessed to ordering war crimes. Asked about waterboarding in an ABC News interview, Cheney replied, “I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared.” He also said he still believes waterboarding was an appropriate method to use on terrorism suspects. CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the agency waterboarded three Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003.
U.S. courts have long held that waterboarding, where water is poured into someone’s nose and mouth until he nearly drowns, constitutes torture. Our federal War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.
Under the doctrine of command responsibility, enshrined in U.S. law, commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief can be held liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and they did nothing to stop or prevent it.
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