NBC, the Military Industry Network owned by General Electric, at least unless or until it is sold to Comcast, was, along with most of the rest of the US corporate media, outraged when, last year, the Associated Press circulated, and some newspapers ran, a photo of an American marine, Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, dying after being shot in battle in Afghanistan. There was all kinds of high-minded talk about the protecting the dignity of the dead, and about how it was not appropriate to show such images without the permission of the deceased’s close relatives.
February 15, 2010 | Filed under
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I guess I may as well get out front of things here. I’m about to fly to Switzerland to lead a panel on how to change pro-capital punishment attitudes in a country at the Fourth Congress Against the Death Penalty, being sponsored by the United Nations in Geneva. And judging from the stories I’ve been reading about the Transportation Security Administration, or at least its Philadelphia International Airport operation, and the Philadelphia Police who backstop the TSA here, I’m afraid I’m liable to be hauled away as a suspected terrorist before I can get on my flight.
February 12, 2010 | Filed under
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President Barack Obama is a relative newbie to Washington. He didn’t even complete one term in the senate, and now he’s just finished his first year in the White House, so it’s stunning to see how quickly this one-time “community organizer” has lost his moorings in the marbled halls of power in Washington.
February 11, 2010 | Filed under
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There were two points in President Obama’s State of the Union address that provoked resounding and universal applause in the chamber from the assembled senators and representatives of both parties. One point was when the president said he wanted to start his job-creation program “in small businesses, companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she became her own boss.”
February 5, 2010 | Filed under
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¿Plata o plomo? Colombian and Mexican drug gangs ask government officials, judges and police officers which they prefer, “silver or lead,” when offering bribes and threatening violence. The U.S. Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same free speech rights as natural persons allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections and public affairs. Corporations, foreign and domestic, can now force politicians to choose silver or lead when supporting or opposing corporate and foreign power interests.
February 1, 2010 | Filed under
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You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side. “Relax–No deal with Taliban is Imminent,” the headline read. “I suggest everyone take a deep breath,” Rubin wrote. “The US position toward talks with the Taliban has shifted somewhat, but no deal with top Taliban leaders is imminent, or even likely.”
January 31, 2010 | Filed under
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Flash! The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision overturning the over 60-year-old ban on corporations giving money to political campaigns is not the end of democracy as we know it, or the onset of fascism in America, as some of hyperventilating progressives have been claiming. Sure it’s an outrage to say, as the court majority did, that corporations have the same rights as people. But let’s face it: Corporations have long dominated the American political scene. They didn’t need to be free to donate in their own corporate names.
January 27, 2010 | Filed under
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The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face reelection.
January 26, 2010 | Filed under
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It is time for serious soul-searching regarding the role of the CIA and the intelligence community. Last month’s operational and intelligence failures led to the deaths of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan and might have resulted in nearly 300 deaths on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit. It is particularly shocking that President Barack Obama’s chief of counterterrorism, John Brennan, conceded that the latter failure was caused by the fact that there was “no one intelligence entity or team or task force assigned responsibility for doing a follow-up investigation” of the considerable intelligence that was collected
January 24, 2010 | Filed under
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Air America, the liberal radio network, went down in flames, Jan. 21, when it filed for bankruptcy. It wasn’t because of air-to-air combat with conservative talk shows and bloggers. It wasn’t because of the Recession, although reduced advertising revenue, a reality of all media, also affected Air America. It wasn’t even demographics, even though older, marginalized conservatives tend to listen to radio more than do younger liberal professionals. And media history was only part of the problem.
January 24, 2010 | Filed under
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