Not guilty! In court today, Medea Benjamin entered this video into evidence and the trumped up trespassing charges against her were dismissed…

Background: In August, Erik Prince, owner of the Blackwater group of mercenary companies claimed he was leaving the USA to establish residence in the UAE. His flight allowed him to avoid giving depositions in some civil suits that were pending against him. Medea Benjamin and a couple of Code Pink (or “Pinkwater” as they now call themselves) members visited the Prince home in McLean, Virginia and was surprised to learn that the former Navy Seal’s family was still in residence. Mrs. Prince had Benjamin busted for trespassing. The final court date was today.

Here’s the deets…

Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview

Plutocrats and the Internet

Cheap Debt for Corporations Fails to Spur the Economy

Ron Johnson: Liar, Cheat, Scammer, Asshole, Oil Spill Profiteer, etc.

September 20, 2001

Guns for a penny!

Hat tip to Terry Canaan for turning me on to this little bit of cultural dreck. Canaan hopes that Dr. Laura becomes the first of a parade of talk show hosts who deprive us of the right to listen to their onerous mutterings by going on strike. Buh-bye Laura. Buh-bye Rush. Buh-bye Glenn. We can only hope that Laura, Rush and Glenn go all John Galt on our unappreciative asses and recapture their first amendment rights together in a bunker out west somewhere while we’re forced to watch re-runs of Barney and Friends to somehow fill the void. (We should be so lucky as to have the Schlessinger doing Eva Braun to Glenn Beck’s Adolph videos put up on YouTube while we wait for the propagandists’ strike to end).

According to Source Watch, “Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a US talk show host.” That’s it. None of her seventeen year history as a relationship adviser and right wing watchdog of American morals is reflected in that brief one-liner.

Wikipedia is more expansive. The Schlessinger entry there today includes:

At its peak, The Dr. Laura Program was the second-highest-rated radio show after The Rush Limbaugh Show, and was heard on more than 450 radio stations. In May 2002, the show still had an audience of more than 10 million, but had lost several million listeners in the previous two years as it was dropped by WABC and other affiliates, and was moved from day to night in cities such as Seattle and Boston. These losses were attributed in part to Schlessinger’s shift from giving relationship advice to lecturing on morality and conservative politics. Pressure from gay-rights groups caused dozens of sponsors to drop the radio show as well. In 2006 Schlessinger’s show was being aired on approximately 200 stations. As of 2009, it was tied for third place along with The Glenn Beck Program and The Savage Nation.

On August 10, 2010, on a call with an African-American woman who was seeking advice concerning her own interracial marriage, Schlessinger used the word “nigger” eleven times, saying that mention of the term did not constitute racism. She told the caller that she had the right to say the word because black comedians and actors on HBO say it, and cited a previous race-related comment made by her that was “funny” (and was made to her bodyguard, a black man). She also claimed that black people voted for Barack Obama for President on the basis of skin color, as an example of blacks as well as whites making judgments based solely on skin color. She apologized for doing the “wrong thing” a day later.

On August 17, 2010 Schlessinger announced the end of her radio show during an appearance on Larry King Live, saying that her motivation was to “regain her first amendment rights.”

Media Matters has a good report with an interesting comment thread that follows.

Or. you could check out the Atlantic article on Netanyahu’s threat to poison the planet with a radioactive cloud of fallout from his planned raid on Iran. Let’s see, on the one hand we could waste time yakking about the bandwidth sucking antics of a totally botoxed blonde bimbo, or on the other hand we could seek to inform ourselves and influence international diplomacy enough to avoid a lingering death by radiation poisoning.

Here’s a brief update regarding 24:

Yes, I watched all 192 episodes plus the two hour feature film. Yes, I’m still thinking about writing about the women of 24, and I may after I’ve finished watching the BBC’s MI-5, an espionage series with good stories and reasonable scope, and Ultraviolet, a vampire series that seems to have died after only six episodes.

I’m enjoying these video equivalents of trash novels, although the 24 marathon was simply excessive. I wonder if Mike Hammer would kick Jack Bauer’s ass?

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
–Mickey Spillane

The cliff-hanger ending keeps the kids coming back, but 192 cliff-hanger endings pretty much deflate the currency. More about some of this later, I’m sure…

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On a more meaningful note, I recommend Juan Cole’s essay in Salon, Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and, for balance, Carolyn Glick’s rebuttal in the Jerusalem Post, followed by Cole’s long blog post, The Closing of the Zionist Mind, wherein he takes another kick at the cat.
* * *
Listening now to Allen Ruff’s interview of Henry Giroux regarding Giroux’s new book, Youth in a Suspect Society.
* * *
In this season of information overload, of Wikileaks and Shirley Sherrod, doomsday scenarios and dirty laundry, it’s easy to let important newspaper feature writing slip through the cracks. The Washington Post Top Secret America investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin is one of these. Bookmark it! Read it, look at the great graphics, talk it up.

“You could spend hours trolling the site, and that’s precisely the point. The Post has a rich tradition of crack investigative journalism, but it’s been slow to deepen its storytelling through digital tools. This is by far the most detailed, comprehensive online data visualization we’ve seen from a newspaper. Hat’s off to the Post for finally figuring out how to exploit, instead of feel exploited by, the Internet.”
– Suzanne Labarre, Co.Design

…if you sit in front the fucking boob tube five days or more per week and let this garbage – and I don’t care if it’s “right” or “left” garbage – pour all over your soul, what the hell are you doing to your brain? What are you conditioning yourself to?
– Yule Heibel, “No wonder we’re hosed…“

“Jack Bauer is a true patriot.” That’s a statement overheard from a conversation between two politically-naive guys a few years ago, a sentiment that blurs the boundaries between a real person and a fictional character. For eight years Fox Television, a tentacle of the “entertainment” branch of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, administered a steady dose of adrenaline via the pulse-pounding weekly drama of Jack Bauer and his fight against evil-doers. In a self-congratulatory press release distributed March 26, News Corporation said, “While the series gained global recognition, Sutherland’s portrayal of the legendary character [Jack Bauer] penetrated the American psyche like no other dramatic television character to become part of the English lexicon.”

Whatever. Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer sure punished a whole bunch of bad guys. One premise of 24 was that there are among us some people, like Jack Bauer, whose integrity and moral compass are so true that they may be permitted frequent ethical lapses in order to combat evil. The show served up this message on a fist-to-the-face blood and guts pizza with a side of soft core S&M. Every episode contains bondage scenes, men and women with their hands bound behind their back, gagged, tied to a chair, cuffed to a railing, immobilized face on the floor with a boot between the shoulder blades. Every episode contains brutality and physical torture, some inflicted by government employees with medical kits and electric shock devices, some by agents using fists, blades, bullets and makeshift tools like 120 volt AC. The bad guys, of course, duplicate the entire panoply of pain, terrorizing the country and avenging themselves on their enemies.

Another important premise of 24 was that in American diplomacy “the end justifies the means,” and the means are administered by extra-legal methods through the agency of a security apparatus, the Counter Terrorist Unit. Justice Brandeis would have been appalled:

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent, teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. — Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead vs. the United States, 1928

24 seeks to advance the argument that indeed government MAY commit crimes to achieve a greater good. Whether the terrorists intend to kill millions through release of a virus, or by melting down nuclear reactors, delivering nuclear warheads to an urban center by launching a missile or carrying in a suitcase, every righteously fearful person must agree that justice can be compromised if it will save American lives to do so. Characters in the 24 narrative who oppose torture and a suspension of human rights are painted as cowards, or–at best–hypersensitive women who can be expected to shudder at the sight of all those compound fractures.

Next: Fox Torture Porn, the Women of 24

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. — Chris Hedges

With the whole world watching, the USA compromised itself further by tacit support of its ally Israel, a country lately committed to brutality as a substitute for diplomacy. Americans can only sigh in shame at our government’s inability to say or do anything that isn’t compromising.

Is there any act of brutality that Israel could do short of nuking Gaza that would surprise us? Did Bibi warn Obama that the shit was going to hit the fan on Memorial Day? Was Obama’s measured response a tacit admission that piracy and murder are the norm, that we expect a vicious barbarity from our allies in their single-minded opposition to the existence of a free Palestine?

Are the excesses of Hamas sufficient reason for the Israelis to murder foreign nationals on a mission of mercy? Hamas and Israel are committed to the destruction of each other. When the Israelis commit acts of piracy and terrorism, what distinguishes them from Hamas? Does Bibi Netanyahu have a free rein to “manage” the situation or is there some possibility that we, the US, could use our influence to open up relations between Palestine and Israel?

Paradoxically, Bibi is an elected jack-booted thug. If the Israeli people didn’t affirm his policies and approve of his practices he could be overthrown in a free election. Or could he? Does he have any opposition today? The whole “strong man” thing is troubling. The world can see Bibi behaving like Stalin when he ran rough-shod over the kulaks. Is there an effective response to this emerging totalitarianism?

Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer

Here is a link to a Flash presentation I made in January, 2004 in remembrance of this principled young woman.

Has anything changed over there since Rachel Corrie was murdered?

The twentieth century saw the erosion of egalitarian American revolutionary values. Any claim America had to a special place in the family of nations was long gone by the time John Kennedy took office.

If you are some kind of fancy aristocrat with a foreign title of nobility, you can forget about US citizenship unless you renounce the title. Article One of the Constitution is pretty specific about that. But, in 1963 law and tradition were set aside to honor Sir Winston Churchill with honorary citizenship. He was the first of seven honorary citizens of the United States of America, and besides Mother Teresa the only one to receive the award while still breathing.

Citizen Churchill… how did that dissipated old war monger with his English honorifics and titles find his way so deep into our hearts that we granted him citizenship? Well, he received the award in Camelot, in the last year of the Kennedy presidency. Kennedy’s father was aristocracy himself, a beer baron during prohibition then Ambassador to the Court of Saint James. The Churchill award was symbolic of the marriage and merger of the ruling class of two great powers.

The old codger totally pulled the wool over the eyes of President Truman during and after World War Two. When his own people booted him out of office following the war he was welcomed in the US, so welcome that he gave his Iron Curtain speech in Truman’s back yard, plunging the world into the decades long cold war and encouraging our own home grown jingoistic red-baiters to divide the country along ideological lines.