June, 2004 Week 3
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June, 2004 Week 3
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Monday June 14 , 2004 It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair, novelist and reformer (1878-1968) I am putting this here because it seems like I need to make note of it There have been 949 coalition deaths, 833 Americans, 59 Britons, 6 Bulgarians, 1 Dane, 1 Dutch, 1 Estonian, 18 Italians, 1 Latvian, 6 Poles, 1 Salvadoran, 3 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 2 Thai and 6 Ukrainians, in the war in Iraq as of June 14, 2004 (Graphical breakdown of casualties). The list below reflects the names of the soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors and Coast Guardsmen whose families have been notified of their deaths by each country's government. There have been at least 5,013 U.S. troops wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. I took the riding pants back and exchanged them for ones that match my jacket. "Riders Choice told me Friday that my tires would be ready on Monday, I asked if he didn't mean Tuesday but he said No' they would be ready Monday... I called, the guy I talked to said, there was no one in the Service Department and they wouldn't be ready till Tuesday... It just bother's me that they don't follow through. Tuesday June 15 , 2004 We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another. Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745) ..We had a meeting with the Principal at "B"'s school... Everyone agrees that "B" needs to be in a 'more restrictive environment' Autumn had another seizure, it seems to be focused in her throat and lower jaw... Wednesday June 16 , 2004 Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. Demosthenes We went to visit what will most likely become "B"'s new school, Sierra School. We met the Director, Kimberley. She was very young and earnest. She seemed to have no illusions about kids like "B". A little bit Pollyanna about 'Positive reinforcement' to my way of thinking but the no tolerance for bad behavior is in the right direction. I bought some stuff for my trip, Picked up the new riding pants at Cycle Gear, Took Calie and Monica to their friends house at 1300 for a swim party... they had fun,,, I had to pick up their friend Brian in Lancaster... and take him home, Christian went to Shaun's house last night... Autumn had another little flurry of seizures. Thursday June 17 , 2004 It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. ARISTOTLE (384 B.C.-322 B.C., Philosopher "B" is officially enrolled at Sierra School, he start's Monday. Autumn had another seizure during the IEP... they are coming daily now... I am getting concerned I took the girls to lunch at Don Cuco's even eating off the kids menu isn't cheap... I am listening to Bela Fleck and the Flektones and another CD called "Bluegrass Sessions" by Bela he is simply the best banjo picker in the world... from improvised progressive Jazz to Chopin and Mozart to Bluegrass.... Where ever I an on the 25th of June, I will find out where Farenheit 9/11 is showing and stop what I am doing and watch the show. Friday June 18 , 2004 Laughing stock - cattle with a sense of humor.
Autumn has had several seizures today, some were true Petit-mal events, she just zones out and stares blankly. Below is another insightful article that got my attention, mainly because it echo's what I have been saying for years. The main problem being that we are being governed by MBA types. The philosophy behind what they are trained to do may or may not be sound but what I see is that the people making the decisions only care about Today's bottom-line, as long as the books look good and the charts reflect a profit they are doing a good job. What is actually happening is that they are cutting corners, selling off assets, gutting the employment rosters. They aren't upgrading their plant, training their people or seeking new business. Pac Bell looked good right up till it went broke. That's what's going to happen to this country. With the Government deeming fast food employees to be in 'Manufacturing' all of a sudden we have gained hundreds of thousands of new jobs on the books. It's all footwork... When we get rid of the MBA types and get some people who can project into the future then maybe we can get ahead. We need to educate, we need to innovate... Too late to rebuild IT? June 18, 2004 Now that Nicholas Carr--he of "IT Doesn't Matter" fame--has enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame, Intel CEO Craig Barrett says the industry ought to get itself worked up over an issue that's really going to affect the future. Just one problem: Few people seem to care. "The U.S. has a whole series of complacencies about it," according to Barrett, who recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with a team of CNET News.com editors and reporters. Barrett may be famously cranky, but I think he is on to something. The building blocks of national competitiveness--from education to infrastructure to research and development--continue to receive short shrift from the nation's elites, who still seem more interested in debating the relative merits of offshore outsourcing. I'm not downplaying the human costs. No one can help but be moved by the plight of a 55-year-old single mother whose textile factory job winds up overseas. But few serious thinkers believe offshoring poses a widespread threat to American jobs. The bigger worry is that the United States is falling behind from an infrastructure standpoint while the education system is (charitably speaking) in worsening shape. Yet how many elected officials are particularly vocal about the implications of a nation in decline? Instead of acknowledging the existence of competitive threats and challenges, we get grandstanding politicians looking to bash Benedict Arnold CEOs who dare hire foreign employees. Consider countries like Japan or Korea, where you can get 20 or 30 megabit DSL (digital subscriber line) capability nearly anywhere and compare that with the limited rollout of broadband in the United States (not to mention the relatively slowpoke transmission rates that prevail on these shores). Fixing the problem will take time and effort--two commodities in short supply in Washington. "The mentality today is, 'What can you do for me yesterday?'" according to Barrett. "It's not, 'What can you do for me 5 years from today?'" Even in an election year, the good news is that the situation is not hopeless. But how do you get the ball rolling? I thought you'd never ask. For starters, how about implementing the recommendations of the Glenn Commission on the state of science and math education? (That was September 2000!) The report set out clear goals and an accompanying road map on how to improve the quality of instruction students receive in math and science. Double the National Science Foundation budget. This isn't a freebie for companies. The NSF is the country's basic research lab and winds up supporting universities throughout the country. As the business jargon du jour would have it, it's a win-win for everyone. Enact permanent R&D tax credits. If you want to promote spending on infrastructure, this is the easiest way to prime the pump. Of course, it would be even better if we could get an honest sense from the candidates whether they're really interested in doing more than pay lip service. Talking in gross generalities may be fine for the campaign trail but sooner or later something needs to get done. If not, you should expect today's trickle of overseas outsourcing to become a veritable deluge.
Saturday June 19 , 2004 To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets. Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE) Autumn is still having seizures, Christy took her into Kaiser and the Advise Nurse wrote an order for a Lamictal Level blood test. it will be a few days till we hear though, we have a call into the Neurologist, Dr. Gawanathan (Dr Nathan) Sunday June 20 , 2004 Father's Day Father's day got off to a bad start but ended well...
'While Reagan napped: Ronnie, Osama and the Chin defense'
By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com Vinnie the Chin had a great alibi. The New York mob capo shuffled down the street in his bathrobe, unshaved, drooling out the side of his mouth. When he got busted, he pleaded he was too gone-in-the-head to know about the Cosa Nostra running rackets from his candy shop. Ronald Reagan out-Chinned the Chin. When caught paying ransom to Khomeini and his Hizbollah terrorists, Reagan did his aw-shucks I'm just a ga-ga grandpa routine, "I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart tells me that's true, but the facts tell me it is not." Oh, OK then. If it were Jimmy Carter who'd been caught in such an act of treason -- arming our enemy -- Republicans would still be chewing on his flesh today. You know it and I know it. The Reagan Right has used the late President's funeral for a shameless political victory dance, carefully wiping the blood off the historical files. Before the truth is interred, let us have a moment of remembrance for the dubious doings in the White House while Reagan napped: * South Africa's government went on a murder spree to insure that Black folk would never vote. Reagan blessed that police state with a smile, refusing, despite the pleas of Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, to take even the small measure of limited trade sanctions against the evil white empire. * Reagan's Secretary of Interior, James Watt, launched a biological pogrom against trees. Before he was indicted, he turned the Environmental Protection agency into a country club for polluters' lobbyists. Reagan's heart told him it wasn't true, but the screeching chain saws said otherwise. * AIDS was identified in 1981. Reagan's official policy was to hit the research snooze button. Our president did not mention nor act on the epidemic until 1987 -- 30,000 funerals too late. The gay death toll brought glee to Reagan's apocalyptic allies, the mewling mullahs of the Christian Right. (But As the Good Book warns, doing unto others has a price: the same fruitcake fanatics that slowed AIDS research also blocked the stem cell studies that might have saved the dying president from the horrors of Alzheimer's.) * Reagan politically fathered those rascally Rosemary's Babies of the Bush junta: Dick Cheney, Ronnie's appropriately titled Whip in Congress; Paul Wolfowitz, the kind of Dr. Strangelove that scares even Henry Kissinger; John Poindexter, convicted of abetting Contra terrorists while in the Reagan White House, later Bush's first Total Information Awareness chieftain; and Reagan Treasury Secretary James Baker, who tried his damnedest to bankrupt America for Ron, and now, from his Bush White House office, is doing the same for Iraq as "special advisor" to the conquered nation. But there can be no more dangerous creature to have burbled out of the Reagan Frankenstein factory than his Cold War comrade, Osama bin Laden. In November 2001, with my BBC television and Guardian newspaper colleagues, I reported that, during the Reagan presidency, a US embassy official in Saudi Arabia was, in his own words, "repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants." Sounds icky but not too notable until you learn the identities of these "applicants." They claimed to be engineering students who, when queried as to what school they attended, answered they "could not remember." They didn't have to. The unlikely "engineers" had little helpers in the Reagan Administration. After investigation, the career diplomat, attorney Michael Springmann, learned they were, "recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to [bring to] the United States for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets." Uh, oh. They returned to Afghanistan all right. But terrorists are like homing pigeons -- they have a bad habit of coming home to roost. In spook-world, it's known as "blow back." The Reagan-bin Laden killer brigade, skilled in such crafts as skinning Russian prisoners alive, blew back with a sickening vengeance. That story ran world wide at the top of the BBC nightly news -- except in the USA where it bounced off the electronic Berlin Wall. Our media was careful not to wake America from its nap, to hide the deeply disturbing truths behind Grandpa Gipper's grin. Ronald Reagan's loss of memory was, undeniably, a great personal tragedy. But lost in this week's circus of fakery and fawning for a failed president, is the greater national tragedy: America's amnesia, an unforgivable forgetting, a great sleep of reason from which we have yet to awaken, even after September 11. Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, just released in a new Expanded Election Edition. to view Palast's report on bin Laden for the BBC and the Guardian report (winner of a 2002 California State University Journalism School Project Censored Award), go to www.GregPalast.com. Reprinted from GregPalast.com: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=340&row=0 ''Fahrenheit 9/11' on the hot seat' Posted on Thursday, June 17 @ 10:19:03 EDT Right-wing groups are launching a campaign to stop Michael Moore's film from being seen. Though information yearns to be free, will the right manage to yoke Moore's message? By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 won't rake in as much money as Shrek 2, the Spiderman sequel, or the latest installment in the Harry Potter saga, but it could make its mark on the November presidential election. And that's what Team Bush and their right-wing surrogates are concerned about. Worried that Moore's new film, Fahrenheit Even before its release, Moore's film had stirred up a fair amount of controversy. The back-story, while nothing like the hullabaloo surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, has nevertheless engendered its own drama, including a major freak-out by the Disney Corporation which under the bold leadership of Michael Eisner, refused to distribute the film. Now, with distributors Lions Gate Films, IFC and Bob and Harvey Weinstein's newly formed Fellowship Adventure Group in place and committed to spending up to $10 million on marketing, a California-based group called Move America Forward, which claims its goal is "supporting America's war on terrorism," has launched a campaign to prevent Moore's film from being shown. At its website, Move America Forward is urging its supporters to "Stop Michael Moore" by taking "action against the release of his anti-American movie Fahrenheit 9/11." Claiming that the film is "an attack on the U.S. Military, the heroic men and women of the Armed Forces and our Commander-In-Chief," Move America Forward points out that Moore "and his anti-American film distributors are hoping to cash in to the tune of millions of dollars and also change U.S. politics." Former GOP California Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, and Melanie Morgan, a right wing talk show host on San Francisco's KSFO 560 AM are heading up the anti-Fahrenheit campaign. "Michael Moore has the right to free speech," MAF chairman Howard Kaloogian told Daily Variety. "But so do millions of Americans who find his anti-military propaganda and attacks on our troops offensive." Another major participant in the campaign, according to the Political Strategy website, is Sal Russo, a longtime veteran of Republican Party politics. According to the Washington Post, Russo's Sacramento, CA-based political consulting firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, helped create the Move America Forward website. Russo, who ran Bill Simon's unsuccessful campaign for Governor against Gray Davis, was an adviser to the Recall Gray Davis Committee. Kaloogian, the Chairman of Move America Forward, claims that "we are winning the war on terrorism," and that the group's Web site is aimed at "report[ing] on the 'good news' you don't hear about." (Snuffing the film from America's movie theatres is not the only controversy surrounding the film's release. Last week it was saddled with an "R" rating by the MPAA, meaning that children under 18 cannot see the film without being accompanied by an adult. According to a USA Today report, Moore has brought former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo on board "to help fight the movie's R-rating." At a press conference, Lions Gate Films chief Tom Ortenberg said that the distributors "want teens today, who will be required to fight in the next war, to be able to see" the movie. IFC president Jonathan Sehring pointed out that a PG-13 rating could add as much as 20% to the film's receipts.) More often than not, censorious campaigns like the one carried out by Move America Forward are destined for the dust heap of history and often succeed in drawing more attention to a project than it otherwise might have garnered. "Any time any organization protests against a movie, they ensure that the movie will do better at the box office than it would have done otherwise. If they have any doubt about this, just ask Mel Gibson," said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners. (Since its opening in February, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ has grossed $370 million domestically.) "The movie theater is a place of public discourse, and all views and philosophies are welcome," Fithian added. "It's the right place for the public to debate public issues." However, in the era of the permanent "war against terrorism," where, as then-White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer once warned "all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do," combined with the skill of right-wing organizations in managing the media by mobilizing the full range of their resources, the campaign launched by Move America Forward should not be taken lightly. Last year's brouhaha over CBS' four-hour miniseries on Ronald Reagan -- revealing only a modicum of the late president's warts -- became a lightening rod for conservatives. By the time the dust cleared, a multi-pronged conservative mobilization had forced CBS to capitulate and move the miniseries from prime time to the pay cable channel Showtime, a sister network at Viacom. Revelations by the New York Times that the film was less than flattering to the 40th president brought a blitzkrieg of right-wing organizing against CBS. Critics jumped on the so-called inaccuracy of the script (as revealed by the Times), and heaped scorn upon the lead actors -- James Brolin, the husband of one of the Right's favorite targets, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Davis -- criticizing them for being anti-Reagan. The Drudge Report, the extraordinarily popular Web site also took on the issue; Reagan's son, right-wing radio talk show host Michael Reagan got involved; the cable news networks, especially the Fox News Channel and MSNBC featured stories and interviews with mostly Reagan supporters; right-wing groups sent out e-mail alerts urging constituents to contact CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves. By late October, the Media Research Center, a longtime conservative media watchdog group run by L. Brent Bozell III, wrote a letter to a list of 100 top television sponsors urging them to "refuse to associate your products with this movie." The Republican National Committee entered the fray, when GOP Chairman Ed Gillespie urged CBS to appoint a group of historians and associates of Reagan to review the film for accuracy. In the end, CBS caved and another battle -- albeit a small one -- in the "culture wars" had been won. "We used technology that was not available 10 years ago to do in nine days what used to take months," said Michael Paranzino, a former Republican congressional staff member active in the drive to boycott CBS, to the New York Times. "We created a genuine, national, grass-roots movement that forced a broadcasting titan to cancel one of its key sweeps weeks series." The all-out assault against Fahrenheit 9/11 is just getting started. However, given the mood of the country and Michael Moore's celebrity, it is doubtful the attack dogs will prevail. Nevertheless, Move America Forward is urging people to put pressure on theaters that have decided to run the film; their website lists e-mail addresses for dozens of executives from groups such as Loews Cineplex Entertainment, Landmark Theaters, Cinema Arts Theaters, Drexel Theatres Group, as well as contacts for Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Theaters, Century Theatres, and others that have not yet decided whether they will run Moore's film. For years right-wing organizations have kept their constituents mobilized by trumpeting the liberal threat to traditional family values and their lack of patriotism. These campaigns -- whether against same-sex marriage, a silly miniseries about the Reagans, or now, against Michael Moore's pointed critique of President Bush's war against terrorism and War on Iraq -- are aimed at keeping its constituents on a permanent war footing. Move America Forward will not succeed in taking down Fahrenheit 9/11. It will, however, keep Team Bush's right wing base vigilant, agitated and mobilized. Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements. What the hell took so long? So enjoy the new cartoon, and let's hope Reagan remains dead. For the sake of art, of course! - Rob The terrible legacy of the Reagan years Show Us the Proof |
