"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."
Some pundits say it is over. The Democrats are ready to come together as one. The primary results came in late on Tuesday May 6, 2008. Before the tally was final, Barack Obama took the stage. He congratulated Senator Clinton; Presidential hopeful Obama was conciliatory. Hillary Clinton offered an overture. "This has been an extraordinary experience." Political experts muse, thank goodness. The Party needs to heal. The North Carolina and Indiana primaries were decisive. The campaign has been too divisive, disruptive. Distractions aplenty were destructive. If the Democratic Presidential contenders continue to battle, most believe these diversion will be no less damaging. Countless, citizens and columnist say, Hillary Clinton cannot survive.
Read on below the fold for quotes from the article.
As far as I am concerned the fix has been in from the get-go.
Obama B.-Yo. Hil!!! First we get rid of that geek Edwards and then we run it down. Down and dirty; no punches pulled; may the best pro win. Whoever wins chooses the other as VP. Together we'll save the world. Whaddaya say???
Hillary C.-I'm in, baby. I am in Let's get it ON!!!
He's a pro, she's a pro.
Like the bullshit hype before a big boxing match or mixed martial arts bout...it's all business in the end.
Watch 'em kiss and make up.
Money talks; nobody walks.
When money and power talk...then nobody REALLY walks.
The NYTimes, on April 20, past, broke a long story which focussed on revelations that the Pentagon and the Bushevik regime had embedded military propagandists, mainly former Generals, in important consultative and commentariat positions with the major US Corporate Media organizations. The NPR Ombud addressed the issue at some (ultimately unsatisfying) length and delicately danced around the problem. She quoted NPR Defense correspondent Tom Gjelten:
Gjelten: "...A General wants to be a military analyst on NPR or some other news organization in order to curry favor with the Department of Defense which in turn will benefit him in his defense contracting. That's a hypothetical scenario we have to be concerned about."
In reply to which, I sent the following message to the NPR Ombudsone:
Onward to West Virginia! After duping fewer of the "white niggers" in the Hoosier state into believing that she is some sort of brawling, beer drinking, elbow wrestling, blue collar 'one of them' the bitter and recalcitrant monster that is Hillary Rodham-Clinton moves the goalposts one more time. The non-elitist who just happens to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $ 109 million dug around in the sofa cushions in order to lend her never ending crusade another $ 6 million and change in order to remain solvent while the operatives work their chicanery and try to strong arm, sweet talk, cajole and bribe those superdelegates into getting with the fucking program and throwing in the Clinton restoration - when will those fuckers get it that Tracy Flick 2008 is entitled to the presidency goddammit?
Something momentous occurred and the news media said nothing. The press spoke of North Carolinian voters, and those in the Hoosier State. Citizens in these regions would cast their ballots today. The results, undoubtedly, would be significant. While no one, and nothing can lessen the impact of what is expected to ensue, before the polls closed, another event quietly occupied the attention of many. The occurrence is meaningful, noteworthy and will effect the election. A prominent person, one who had long remained neutral in regards to the Democratic primary race finally expressed his opinion.
From the Clinton media mouthpiece-in-place, George Stephanopoulous via the shamefully over the top pro-Clinton so-called "debate"-producing ABC News.
CHARLES GIBSON: Is there any discussion of what kind of an exit strategy there would be?
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: There are various exit strategies right now. Number one would be, go out on a win. So, stay in until West Virginia, where Sen. Clinton is likely the winner, and Kentucky on May 20, and after that, bow out. Two, negotiate for the imposition of Michigan and Florida, to get those delegations seated, declare victory on that, and get out. But the big one, Charlie and this is what some people close to the Clintons are talking about: Is there a way to negotiate a settlement with Barack Obama to have Sen. Clinton on the ticket?
CHARLES GIBSON: And what do they think?
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It's hard to know. I mean, first of all, would Sen. Obama go for it? Can he get over the bitterness of this campaign? Can he be convinced that it's the strongest ticket? Third, of course, would Sen. Clinton take it? I think if it was offered in the right way, yes.
CHARLES GIBSON: All right, George Stephanopoulos. Very interesting. Thank you.
Awakening to news of the virtual certainty of Barack Obama's becoming the Democratic Presidential nominee on the same morning as to news of the death of Mildred Loving (1939 - 2008), I felt... conflicted.
For marrying the only man she ever loved, Mildred Loving paid a price: She was arrested, convicted and banished from her home state.
In the 1950s, the Commonwealth of Virginia handed down such punishments to couples whose love the state did not sanction: She was black. Her husband, Richard, was white. Their union was prohibited by law.
May is the season of graduations here in the South. In many states school doesn't start until after Labor Day, but here, we start early, and finish before Memorial Day. So my mailbox has been filled with a steady stream of high school and college graduation announcements, otherwise known as begging letters.
I don't mind throwing a little cash in the general direction of my friends' kids, but when you need to get out the phone book to figure out the latest announcement must be from your plumber's daughter, things are getting a little out of hand.
In addition to ritualized begging, graduation season also heralds upheaval in many families' living situations. High school graduates begin packing up their worldly possessions; only to arrive a few months later in a dorm room smaller than the walk-in closet they left in their bedroom at mom and dad's. This leads to some serious soul-searching and growing-up, wherein many young people discover it's possible to live without immediate access to one's complete stuffed animal collection.
At least one high profile war critic sounds alarmed by a recent revelation that Mr. Bush signed a "secret finding" against "the Iranian regime" six weeks ago. I'm frankly less than agog about it.
In a May 2 CounterPunch article, Andrew Cockburn wrote that Bush has launched a "covert offensive" on Iran that is "unprecedented in its scope." The "directive covers actions across a huge geographic area - from Lebanon to Afghanistan." The directive, according to Cockburn, also permits an expanded range of actions, "up to and including the assassination of targeted officials."
Wow, I thought as I read it. That's some scary sounding stuff. Then, out of habit, I rescanned the piece to note who Cockburn's sources on the secret finding were, and here's what I found: "those familiar with its contents."
Great. Caesar's. Ghost. Credibility wise, that kind of thing puts Cockburn and CounterPunch on an even footing with Michael R. Gordon and the New York Times.
Consider this your mid-week oasis - if only for a few minutes - from shouting-heads on TV, know-it-all pundits and the like. Come, stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US and ....well, just plain whimsy....
"What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined."
And there is NO WAY, despite the fact that 68% of the people say they want the troops home, NO WAY it's gonna happen. Cuz the folks in the Pentagon and in Foggy Bottom, not the politicos but the careerists, know that the realities of geo-politics militate overwhelmingly against the appearance of weakness, which a withdrawal signifies (McCancer's right: "Withdrawal" = "Surrender", in the eyes of our global antagonists at least), which our position as #1 and ONLY superpower cannot withstand much of...super-powers do not long endure which consistently lose face in matters such as this, especially when they have brought on the crises themselves...
And the media's deliberate use of the isolation mike changed the context. Their failure to explain why you don't hear any crowd noise in the clip [of the "Dean Scream"] is deceptive.
tampered with. It's that Dean was speaking into an isolation microphone so that his audio could be picked up without the background noise. In actuality, he had to scream to be heard because the ambient noise was so great.
But to know that, you had to either be in the room or listening to a different audio track that took in more of the room.
There was an interesting discussion yesterday here about the evil corporate media and their exploitation of the "Dean Scream." Which was fortunate, because I made a comment about Dean a few weeks ago. Fortunate? Yes fortunate, because I was completely stumped this morning for a QOTD, and this gave me at least someting to ask.
Follow me below the ambient noise level for more...
You can add D.C. Madame Deborah Jeane Palfrey to that long list of marvelously convenient mysterious deaths, 'accidents' and 'suicides' that have for so long been a fixture of the hijacked by fascist American political system. The dead giveaway on the importance of Palfrey and the threat that she represents is that ordinarily such an incident would be flogged to death 24/7 on the corporate media machine given the sexual sleaze factor and the celebrity allure. Well that insipid blathering sow Nancy Grace spent about ten or fifteen minutes on it on Thursday and was then on to something ridiculous involving actor Rob Lowe, as much as I hate cable 'news' programs I tuned again the night after and she was talking about some kidnapped or murdered pregnant teenager, you know, the same local news that is trumped up and manufactured into a national crisis.
I thought they could sink no lower than their sound and fury over the manufactured controversies, during the six week Pennsylvania primary overload, whose fires they helped stoke. Once again, find me guilty of consistently underestimating the depths of shameless, absurd and -- given the stakes -- utterly, unforgivably immoral behaviour to which they could sink.
And by "they," I mean Senator Clinton, the corporate media, and each individual who responded to the Reverend Wright brouhaha as anything but a bathetic, pointless, insulting distraction from the actual serious business of conducting a primary campaign for the chance to run for President of the United States of America.
And I include in that latter category the usually sensible Senator Obama, who responded to this latest tempest in a teapot with all the naivete of a playground schoolboy taking the "Your mother wears Army boots" bait.
His acknowledging -- let alone accepting -- the Wright issue as even mildly legitimate may be a minor misstep. But better we start wagging our fingers and raising our complaints now, lest Senator Obama stumble already bloodied into the national election only to repeat this foolish offer of credibility to absurd criticism in the campaign against the predictable artillery of the right wing attack machine.
It looks like we're still using U.S. Navy warships to assassinate suspected terrorists in Somalia. The New York Times said, "at least four Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a Navy ship or submarine off the Somali coast had slammed into a small compound of single-story buildings in Dusa Marreb."
The NYT's source for that information was an "American military official in Washington, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation." Notice how operations these days are "sensitive" as opposed to "classified" or "secret." One has to wonder how they arrived at a world like "sensitive" to describe things like cruise missile attacks that kill people. Then again, so many of these missile strikes kill people other than the people they were intended to kill that yeah, I guess American military officials in Washington might get sensitive about that aspect. The NYT reported that 10 to 30 people other than the intended target were killed this time, and we can be pretty sure that part of the story is mostly true because the NYT didn't get it from an anonymous American military official.
