NARAL is looking for a few good questions
NARAL Pro-Choice California is asking supporters to send in choice-related questions to the first Republican presidential debate in Los Angeles this Thursday, May 3rd. See What do You Want to Ask the GOP about Choice? on the national Impractical Proposals page.
What do you want to ask the GOP about choice?
NARAL Pro-Choice California is asking supporters to send in choice-related questions to the first Republican presidential debate in Los Angeles this Thursday, May 3rd.
Here’s the link: <http://www.politico.com/debate>.
NARAL wants to make choice a top issue in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding the Bush Federal Abortion Ban, which trumps California’s pro-choice laws. All of the Republican candidates applauded this ruling and now they are coming to California, the most pro-choice state in the union, where this federal ban threatens California’s protections for women’s health. This is a chance for the candidates to hear from the state’s pro-choice majority.
Here is a link to statements made by presidential candidates regarding the Federal Abortion Ban decision: <http://www.prochoiceamerica>
Here’s the link: <http://www.politico.com/debate>.
NARAL wants to make choice a top issue in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding the Bush Federal Abortion Ban, which trumps California’s pro-choice laws. All of the Republican candidates applauded this ruling and now they are coming to California, the most pro-choice state in the union, where this federal ban threatens California’s protections for women’s health. This is a chance for the candidates to hear from the state’s pro-choice majority.
Here is a link to statements made by presidential candidates regarding the Federal Abortion Ban decision: <http://www.prochoiceamerica>
Vonnegut, Halberstam, Imus, and the Good Germans
By Gary Gordon
Related article: The 'Good Germans' Among Us (Frank Rich, New York Times 2007-10-14)
When I was growing up I was taught, among other things, one of the worst things a person could be was “a good German.”
By that it was meant a citizen of a country engaged in war crimes who either knew about the crimes and ignored them, or was actively complicit.
Now, decades later, after actively opposing the Vietnam War and Reagan’s military exploits in Nicaragua and Grenada and Bush I’s aggressions in the Gulf War, I have become that worst thing.
I am a “good German.”
My country commits war crimes and I work to earn enough to afford health insurance, I read books, go to movies, hear music, watch too much TV, and write—but I do not, in the words of Mario Savio, reckon with the odiousness of the machine such that I put my body “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus… to make it stop.” I have not, other than with words spoken and written, and votes, indicated “to the people who run the machine, to the people who own it, that unless (we’re) free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
If I were an Iraqi and somehow emerged victorious such that I could convene or participate in a War Crimes trial, I would try the leadership of the United States, then I would try the American people, and I would say, “Didn’t you know? Why didn’t you do all you could to stop it?”
I met and interviewed Vine DeLoria in April 1973, as the American Indian Movement seizure of Wounded Knee continued, and he said “We used to think if we showed the White man what he had done, he would care and do something. Now we know he just doesn’t care.”
That was almost a year after I met Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at the Republican convention in 1972 in Miami Beach. It was on the last evening of the convention, demonstrators were trying to pull off very intricate mobile civil disobedience actions all around the convention hall, and I found myself inside the fence, outside the hall, with Yippie activist Jerry Rubin, who was asking me if he had the right credentials.
“Jerry, how’d you get these? I heard they weren’t going to let you and Abbie in.”
“Are these the right ones?”
I compared them with mine. “They look right to me.
Moments later we were joined by Vonnegut and Peter Schrag of Saturday Review. Vonnegut was taken with the size of the cops’ riot batons, longer than baseball bats.
“Look at the size of those,” he said as police and military choppers flew overhead and faint whiffs of tear gas began to infiltrate the yard.
Then we turned to watch a confrontation between a Miami Beach councilman and Rubin. The councilman had run up to us, furious, frustrated, demanding to know how things had gotten out of hand. “I voted to let you camp in the park,” he said. “Now they’re slashing tires. Why?”
Rubin shot him a cold look and answered, “In your heart you know they’re right.”
The councilman left, still furious and talk briefly turned to the demonstrations. Vonnegut asked what Rubin thought about the demonstrations; Rubin replied they had no power. Vonnegut was about to follow up when we were hit with pepper gas. The group broke up, fleeing into the convention hall.
In his November 1972 Harper’s Magazine piece on those political conventions in Miami Beach, Vonnegut imagined a visitor from another planet would observe: “The two real parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and Democrats, instead.” He notes the Winner’s axiom: Ignore agony. And later in the piece he notes: “The Winners are at war with the Losers, and the fix is in.”
In a graduation speech he gave a two years earlier, he advocated keeping ROTC on campus, with their guns and tanks, so student activists could see what they’re up against.
His wisdom had its moments of humor and pessimism, or his pessimism had its moments of wisdom and humor, or his humor had its moments of pessimism and wisdom. Take your pick.
On April 21, another wise man died, David Halberstam, author of one of the most profound books on the Vietnam War, The Best And The Brightest, a seasoned reporter and author who got his training in skepticism and thick skin covering Civil Rights in the South, then covering Vietnam. John Kennedy wanted him fired, his reporting of the truth versus the official line was that good.
There is a section, a wrenching, heartbreaking, frustrating, mind-bending, twisted moment near the end of Halberstam’s The Best And The Brightest when he tells of two chance meetings between Walt Rostow, a national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson and fervent supporter of the Vietnam War, and Daniel Ellsberg, who had doubts in 1965 and after returning in 1967 was sure the Vietnam misadventure was a failure, found on pages 773 and 774 of my dog-eared 1973 paperback edition:
In case you don’t get it, Iraq is Vietnam, as Vietnam is the Washita and Wounded Knee.
I looked up what Harper’s Magazine wrote about the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 and found this, the only mention, in their Monthly Record of Current Events, in the March 1891 issue:
Maybe it is too harsh to judge myself a Good German, and too harsh to judge others that way, too, especially the ones who fancy they are making a difference with their marches and emails. Maybe we are all doing our best to end this war, to reverse the course of Empire… but deep down, in the places we don’t like to go, we know it isn’t so. We are not threatened enough, motivated enough, enraged enough, desperate enough to do what we know needs to be done to stop the extermination machine. We’ve even got reasons to make distinctions between what the Germans did and what Americans do; I have made these arguments myself, vigorously, arguing Hitler’s killing machine was targeted, vicious, efficient, determined to kill everyone not acceptable to his sense of what is pure Aryan, as if the fact that it was all of that really differentiates it from the bombs we drop in what Lewis Lapham believes is not a war to end terror or create democracy but is actually an entrepreneurial venture designed to line the pockets of the rich investors regardless of the human cost.
Ignore agony.
I know we are not desperate, because we don’t strap bombs to ourselves and blow ourselves up in an effort to drive the occupiers out. I know we are not doing all we can because we don’t want to risk all we have. We do not have the courage of the American revolutionaries who put their lives on the line for what they believed. I often imagine that level of desperation—well, not often, not when I’m watching Law & Order reruns or ballgames. I think about this as I listen to friends argue Israel should give up the land it took and yet they don’t give their land back to the Indians and argue “it’s not the same thing” as if it isn’t the same thing.
I have often thought that what separates us from other animals is not an opposing thumb but the sophisticated ability to rationalize.
My friend Nancy sings a song, “I don’t see no Saints around here…”
We are not saints. And we are not always wise. And we are not always as courageous as our values and principles demand. Which is why we need visionary artists and dogged reporters to at least show us an elevated plane of thought and truth, and why we should reflect, at least for a moment, when we lose a visionary artist or a dogged reporter.
Instead, all too often, we are left with the likes of Don Imus. I know there is no God because Halberstam was killed in a car crash, not Imus.
Imus, of course, is one of the American Goebbels, rotting minds, preoccupying minds, distracting minds, massaging minds, stirring minds with stupid redneck racism, a punk pied piper of pusillanimous prevaricating pseudo-punditry, enticing adults with eight-year-old mentalities, an alcoholic and drug addict filled with self-hate who foists his hatred on others and cons people into believing it’s satire (like Twain?) or profound humor (like Lenny?), totally incapable of making anything but false comparisons to those and other geniuses who turned their talents, as did Vonnegut and Halberstam, to fighting power, speaking truth to power, not shilling for it.
I have no ending for this piece other than to suggest that each of us must be less of a Good German than we already are. I say that having no confidence that minimal step will lead to the justice we want, just as reducing gas consumption by increasing mpg will not end Global Warming. But let’s be honest. We will deceive ourselves until we are desperate enough to act courageously.
[Gary Gordon is a writer, musician and activist living in Los Angeles. His last piece on Impractical Proposals was Iraq, McGovern & Me: Now It's Your Turn.]
Related article: The 'Good Germans' Among Us (Frank Rich, New York Times 2007-10-14)
When I was growing up I was taught, among other things, one of the worst things a person could be was “a good German.”
By that it was meant a citizen of a country engaged in war crimes who either knew about the crimes and ignored them, or was actively complicit.
Now, decades later, after actively opposing the Vietnam War and Reagan’s military exploits in Nicaragua and Grenada and Bush I’s aggressions in the Gulf War, I have become that worst thing.
I am a “good German.”
My country commits war crimes and I work to earn enough to afford health insurance, I read books, go to movies, hear music, watch too much TV, and write—but I do not, in the words of Mario Savio, reckon with the odiousness of the machine such that I put my body “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus… to make it stop.” I have not, other than with words spoken and written, and votes, indicated “to the people who run the machine, to the people who own it, that unless (we’re) free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
If I were an Iraqi and somehow emerged victorious such that I could convene or participate in a War Crimes trial, I would try the leadership of the United States, then I would try the American people, and I would say, “Didn’t you know? Why didn’t you do all you could to stop it?”
I met and interviewed Vine DeLoria in April 1973, as the American Indian Movement seizure of Wounded Knee continued, and he said “We used to think if we showed the White man what he had done, he would care and do something. Now we know he just doesn’t care.”
That was almost a year after I met Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at the Republican convention in 1972 in Miami Beach. It was on the last evening of the convention, demonstrators were trying to pull off very intricate mobile civil disobedience actions all around the convention hall, and I found myself inside the fence, outside the hall, with Yippie activist Jerry Rubin, who was asking me if he had the right credentials.
“Jerry, how’d you get these? I heard they weren’t going to let you and Abbie in.”
“Are these the right ones?”
I compared them with mine. “They look right to me.
Moments later we were joined by Vonnegut and Peter Schrag of Saturday Review. Vonnegut was taken with the size of the cops’ riot batons, longer than baseball bats.
“Look at the size of those,” he said as police and military choppers flew overhead and faint whiffs of tear gas began to infiltrate the yard.
Then we turned to watch a confrontation between a Miami Beach councilman and Rubin. The councilman had run up to us, furious, frustrated, demanding to know how things had gotten out of hand. “I voted to let you camp in the park,” he said. “Now they’re slashing tires. Why?”
Rubin shot him a cold look and answered, “In your heart you know they’re right.”
The councilman left, still furious and talk briefly turned to the demonstrations. Vonnegut asked what Rubin thought about the demonstrations; Rubin replied they had no power. Vonnegut was about to follow up when we were hit with pepper gas. The group broke up, fleeing into the convention hall.
In his November 1972 Harper’s Magazine piece on those political conventions in Miami Beach, Vonnegut imagined a visitor from another planet would observe: “The two real parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and Democrats, instead.” He notes the Winner’s axiom: Ignore agony. And later in the piece he notes: “The Winners are at war with the Losers, and the fix is in.”
In a graduation speech he gave a two years earlier, he advocated keeping ROTC on campus, with their guns and tanks, so student activists could see what they’re up against.
His wisdom had its moments of humor and pessimism, or his pessimism had its moments of wisdom and humor, or his humor had its moments of pessimism and wisdom. Take your pick.
On April 21, another wise man died, David Halberstam, author of one of the most profound books on the Vietnam War, The Best And The Brightest, a seasoned reporter and author who got his training in skepticism and thick skin covering Civil Rights in the South, then covering Vietnam. John Kennedy wanted him fired, his reporting of the truth versus the official line was that good.
There is a section, a wrenching, heartbreaking, frustrating, mind-bending, twisted moment near the end of Halberstam’s The Best And The Brightest when he tells of two chance meetings between Walt Rostow, a national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson and fervent supporter of the Vietnam War, and Daniel Ellsberg, who had doubts in 1965 and after returning in 1967 was sure the Vietnam misadventure was a failure, found on pages 773 and 774 of my dog-eared 1973 paperback edition:
[Rostow] made his predictions and nothing bothered him. He could grab Daniel Ellsberg in 1965 and excitedly pass on the news about the bombing (which to most experts in the CIA had already proven itself to be a failure): “Dan, it looks very good. The Vietcong are going to collapse within weeks. Not months but weeks. What we hear is that they’re already coming apart under the bombing.” They did not come apart in a few weeks, but neither did Rostow, and Ellsberg went off to Vietnam, where for two years he became something of an authority on the failure of the Vietcong to collapse. Two years later, tired, depressed, and thoroughly pessimistic about the lost cause in Vietnam, he returned to Washington, where he found Rostow just as upbeat as ever.
“Dan,” said Rostow, “it looks very good. The other side is near collapse. In my opinion victory is very near.”
Ellsberg, sick at heart with this kind of high level optimism which contrasted with everything he had seen in the field, turned away from Rostow, saying he just did not want to talk about it.
“No,” said Rostow, “you don’t understand. Victory is very near. I’ll show you the charts. The charts are very good.”
“Walt,” said Ellsberg, “I don’t want to hear it. Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve just come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see any charts…”Now our president says the “surge is working” and charges the Democrats with wanting to override the wisdom of his generals and play politics, as if Bush hadn’t already fired all the generals who disagreed with him and actually stood up and said this war was a crazy, tragic mistake.
“But the charts are very good…”
In case you don’t get it, Iraq is Vietnam, as Vietnam is the Washita and Wounded Knee.
I looked up what Harper’s Magazine wrote about the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 and found this, the only mention, in their Monthly Record of Current Events, in the March 1891 issue:
Fears being felt of an uprising among the Sioux Indians in the northwest, large numbers of troops were sent to the frontier….Several conflicts occurred…between hostile Indians and United States troops -- one at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, December 29th, in which 30 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry…and nearly two hundred Indians were killed.Nothing to suggest the precursor of My Lai or the roughly 65,000 civilians killed in Iraq.
Maybe it is too harsh to judge myself a Good German, and too harsh to judge others that way, too, especially the ones who fancy they are making a difference with their marches and emails. Maybe we are all doing our best to end this war, to reverse the course of Empire… but deep down, in the places we don’t like to go, we know it isn’t so. We are not threatened enough, motivated enough, enraged enough, desperate enough to do what we know needs to be done to stop the extermination machine. We’ve even got reasons to make distinctions between what the Germans did and what Americans do; I have made these arguments myself, vigorously, arguing Hitler’s killing machine was targeted, vicious, efficient, determined to kill everyone not acceptable to his sense of what is pure Aryan, as if the fact that it was all of that really differentiates it from the bombs we drop in what Lewis Lapham believes is not a war to end terror or create democracy but is actually an entrepreneurial venture designed to line the pockets of the rich investors regardless of the human cost.
Ignore agony.
I know we are not desperate, because we don’t strap bombs to ourselves and blow ourselves up in an effort to drive the occupiers out. I know we are not doing all we can because we don’t want to risk all we have. We do not have the courage of the American revolutionaries who put their lives on the line for what they believed. I often imagine that level of desperation—well, not often, not when I’m watching Law & Order reruns or ballgames. I think about this as I listen to friends argue Israel should give up the land it took and yet they don’t give their land back to the Indians and argue “it’s not the same thing” as if it isn’t the same thing.
I have often thought that what separates us from other animals is not an opposing thumb but the sophisticated ability to rationalize.
My friend Nancy sings a song, “I don’t see no Saints around here…”
We are not saints. And we are not always wise. And we are not always as courageous as our values and principles demand. Which is why we need visionary artists and dogged reporters to at least show us an elevated plane of thought and truth, and why we should reflect, at least for a moment, when we lose a visionary artist or a dogged reporter.
Instead, all too often, we are left with the likes of Don Imus. I know there is no God because Halberstam was killed in a car crash, not Imus.
Imus, of course, is one of the American Goebbels, rotting minds, preoccupying minds, distracting minds, massaging minds, stirring minds with stupid redneck racism, a punk pied piper of pusillanimous prevaricating pseudo-punditry, enticing adults with eight-year-old mentalities, an alcoholic and drug addict filled with self-hate who foists his hatred on others and cons people into believing it’s satire (like Twain?) or profound humor (like Lenny?), totally incapable of making anything but false comparisons to those and other geniuses who turned their talents, as did Vonnegut and Halberstam, to fighting power, speaking truth to power, not shilling for it.
I have no ending for this piece other than to suggest that each of us must be less of a Good German than we already are. I say that having no confidence that minimal step will lead to the justice we want, just as reducing gas consumption by increasing mpg will not end Global Warming. But let’s be honest. We will deceive ourselves until we are desperate enough to act courageously.
[Gary Gordon is a writer, musician and activist living in Los Angeles. His last piece on Impractical Proposals was Iraq, McGovern & Me: Now It's Your Turn.]
Fish Wrap News: LATimes editor spikes story over alleged bias
Did the Los Angeles Times kill a front-page article about the dispute over acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide because its writer, Mark Arax, of Armenian descent, exhibited bias by co-signing a letter that asked the paper's editors to follow their own stylebook when referring to the slaughter by the Turks nearly a century ago? Or could it be that managing editor Douglas Frantz went native during his recent posting as the bureau chief in Ankara? Editor at the LAT Kills a Story on Armenian Genocide, Charges of Bias Fly (LA Weekly)
Ambience Chasers: The Lower East Side
Until you make it to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, at 108 Orchard St. (below Delancey), console yourself with the museum's new CD, Folk Songs for the Five Points, a collection of experimental music capturing the sounds, and the spirit, of one of New York's oldest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods. The album was created from audio fragments caught on location in the Lower East Side and remixed by cross-disciplinary artist David Gunn. Featuring new compositions by Angolan composer and instrument-builder, Victor Gama, the CD combines oral histories, local music, and Alan Lomax-style ambient field recordings -- from the street cries of market sellers in Chinatown to the screech of the subway, from church sermons to buskers on Spring Street -- to create a unique document of my old stomping grounds. Gunn has reinterpreted and transformed these sounds, creating surprising and evocative pieces like a queasy re-imagining of ice cream van music and a deconstructed performance by celebrated Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera.
The CD has its roots in a Digital Artist in Residence Project commissioned by the museum and part of an ongoing series of works by The Folk Songs Project. For The Tenement, as it likes to be called, Gunn and his collaborators in the Folk Songs Project, Alastair Dant and Tom Davis, created an interactive site where users could remix various noises and music to create their own "folk songs." Gunn recorded a wide variety of sounds, based on the suggestions of local residents and chance events as he walked the streets of the Lower East Side. Gama was invited to New York to create a series of compositions inspired by the neighborhood. The results, performed on the "toha" (an instrument conceived and built by the artist), were recorded in one take on a hot evening in an unrestored apartment in the museum's historic tenement building. The album was conceived as a collection of "folk songs" -- field recordings is more like it -- not finished compositions, but snapshots of moments in time. With this in mind, Gunn avoided the rigid aesthetics of modern electronic music, using simple editing and effects processes to retain a sense of immediacy and the unpredictable aspects of the source recordings -- tape glitches, wind noise, and radio interference. The result is a powerful, compelling portrait of a living, breathing community of sounds: not for everybody, but fascinating if you like this sort of thing, and time-capsule ready, should the need arise.
The CD has its roots in a Digital Artist in Residence Project commissioned by the museum and part of an ongoing series of works by The Folk Songs Project. For The Tenement, as it likes to be called, Gunn and his collaborators in the Folk Songs Project, Alastair Dant and Tom Davis, created an interactive site where users could remix various noises and music to create their own "folk songs." Gunn recorded a wide variety of sounds, based on the suggestions of local residents and chance events as he walked the streets of the Lower East Side. Gama was invited to New York to create a series of compositions inspired by the neighborhood. The results, performed on the "toha" (an instrument conceived and built by the artist), were recorded in one take on a hot evening in an unrestored apartment in the museum's historic tenement building. The album was conceived as a collection of "folk songs" -- field recordings is more like it -- not finished compositions, but snapshots of moments in time. With this in mind, Gunn avoided the rigid aesthetics of modern electronic music, using simple editing and effects processes to retain a sense of immediacy and the unpredictable aspects of the source recordings -- tape glitches, wind noise, and radio interference. The result is a powerful, compelling portrait of a living, breathing community of sounds: not for everybody, but fascinating if you like this sort of thing, and time-capsule ready, should the need arise.
Wi-Fi: Be the first on your block to have a free hotspot
Finally, a big communications outfit gets it.
Unexpectedly, given how out of it it's looked given the difficult time it's had since taking over Adelphia, Time Warner Cable "will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hotspots, a practice shunned by most U.S. internet service providers." The giant cable service provider has made a deal with the Iberian upstart Fon (see Impractical Proposals: Fon challenging Starbucks wi-fi), which has forged similar agreements with ISPs across Europe.
"For Fon,...the deal will boost its credibility with U.S. consumers," according to Business Week. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available.
"Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn wi-fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running.
"In the fall of 2006, Fon, which counts Google Inc. and eBay Inc.'s Skype among its investors, started selling and sometimes giving away its own branded wireless router, called La Fonera. Since then, it has distributed about 370,000 of them worldwide."
The rest of the story: Business Week.
Unexpectedly, given how out of it it's looked given the difficult time it's had since taking over Adelphia, Time Warner Cable "will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hotspots, a practice shunned by most U.S. internet service providers." The giant cable service provider has made a deal with the Iberian upstart Fon (see Impractical Proposals: Fon challenging Starbucks wi-fi), which has forged similar agreements with ISPs across Europe.
"For Fon,...the deal will boost its credibility with U.S. consumers," according to Business Week. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available.
"Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn wi-fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running.
"In the fall of 2006, Fon, which counts Google Inc. and eBay Inc.'s Skype among its investors, started selling and sometimes giving away its own branded wireless router, called La Fonera. Since then, it has distributed about 370,000 of them worldwide."
The rest of the story: Business Week.
American Civ: The Apology Widget
Victim America's favorite national pastime now has its own app: <http://www.imsosorry.cc/>
Good Medicine: Clowns Without Borders
"Clowns Without Borders offers laughter to 
relieve the suffering of all persons, especially children, who live in areas of crisis including refugee camps, conflict zones and territories in situations of emergency. We bring levity, contemporary clown/circus-oriented performances and workshops into communities so that they can celebrate together and forget for a moment the tensions that darken their daily lives." -- from the website.
<http://www.clownswithoutborders.org/>
relieve the suffering of all persons, especially children, who live in areas of crisis including refugee camps, conflict zones and territories in situations of emergency. We bring levity, contemporary clown/circus-oriented performances and workshops into communities so that they can celebrate together and forget for a moment the tensions that darken their daily lives." -- from the website.<http://www.clownswithoutborders.org/>
2008: Edwards Comes Closest To Facing Hard Issues (Mario Cuomo)
New York City's WNBC reports that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who famously wore down political reporters in the late 80s and early 90s with his seemingly endless internal dialogue over whether "to run or not to run" for president himself, has offered an assessment of the current field. According to Cuomo, all the Democratic presidential primary candidates, except John Edwards, are evading the difficult questions.
"Let's face it," he's quoted as saying, "the candidates are all ducking the really hard issues, how do you pay for this? How exactly do you get out of Iraq? What are you doing in Afghanistan?" New York's former chief executive suggests that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are trying to avoid the issues by focusing on the money race, and that Edwards comes closest to actually spelling out his positions.
In the New York City region, you can see the entire interview with Cuomo on Trend Breakers, a new show about polling data. Hosted by Marist College pollsters Lee Miringoff and Barbara Carvalho, the show will attempt not to be just for political junkies, though how they'll manage that is anybody's guess. Trend Breakers starts airing tonight at 8pm on WNBC 4 and will be rebroadcast throughout the week.
Click here to watch some of Cuomo's comments.
"Let's face it," he's quoted as saying, "the candidates are all ducking the really hard issues, how do you pay for this? How exactly do you get out of Iraq? What are you doing in Afghanistan?" New York's former chief executive suggests that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are trying to avoid the issues by focusing on the money race, and that Edwards comes closest to actually spelling out his positions.
In the New York City region, you can see the entire interview with Cuomo on Trend Breakers, a new show about polling data. Hosted by Marist College pollsters Lee Miringoff and Barbara Carvalho, the show will attempt not to be just for political junkies, though how they'll manage that is anybody's guess. Trend Breakers starts airing tonight at 8pm on WNBC 4 and will be rebroadcast throughout the week.
Click here to watch some of Cuomo's comments.
New Posting on "Take On The Media"
I've just put up "An Informed Electorate: from Walter Conkrite to Stephen Colbert" about the Pew Media Center for the People and the Press' new report, What Americans Know: 1989-2007.
Resource: Congressional Member Information Portal
A great collection of links from the University of Michigan Library Documents Center, intended for students but useful to any citizen, to sources of information on members of Congress: <http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/member.html>
The Democratic Community: Meet the Theocrats
I don't imagine any of us completely comprehends how dire a threat to our open society the Christian Right is: they are intent, they are disciplined, and most of all they are righteous. Below, for your convenience, are links to a series of posts called Blog Against Theocracy. At the last is a link to an essay that you must read about Christian "sleeper cells" discovered by a reporter for Harper's and reported in an article entitled, "Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats." If you missed it, and I don't doubt most people did, it is truly terrifying, and if you read nothing else linked from this post, read that. As anyone who knows me will testify (on a bible, if required), I am the farthest thing from a conspiracy theorist, having been immunized by growing up in the hermetic embrace of Christian paranoia (as a Roman Catholic, for whom American history is one long conspiracy against Rome), but this is real. In the short run, we are lucky that Bush and Cheney have made a botch of things and set back the cause, but we are dealing with true believers; as Ahnold might say, they'll be back.
Part I: Meet The Theocrats
Part II: A Taste Of Rushdoony
Part III: God's Law, Never Man's
Part IV: Takeover Of The Texas GOP
Part V: How A Christian Republic Punishes And Taxes
Part VI: The Continuing Influence Of Pat Robertson
Part VII: Culture Is Religion
And here is a link to the post about sleeper cells of christianists throughout the Bush administration.
Part I: Meet The Theocrats
Part II: A Taste Of Rushdoony
Part III: God's Law, Never Man's
Part IV: Takeover Of The Texas GOP
Part V: How A Christian Republic Punishes And Taxes
Part VI: The Continuing Influence Of Pat Robertson
Part VII: Culture Is Religion
And here is a link to the post about sleeper cells of christianists throughout the Bush administration.
Community: Cooperation Commons
: "Problems of health care, economic development, political and interpersonal conflict, environmental sustainability, resource allocation, disaster relief, urban planning, civil society, democratic governance, technological innovation, intellectual property, public education—the most critical problems of our time—involve social dilemmas and institutions for collective action that are not yet well-understood."Evidence from biology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, and psychology suggest the feasibility of building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation. Because of institutional specialization, a program of cooperation studies will not happen without purposeful action. In order to catalyze the growth of this enterprise, the Cooperation Project has created:
* An open, shared, knowledge base of insights and resources relevant to cooperation and collective action: the Knowledge Commons"The Cooperation Project has convened expert workshops, published a syllabus, launched online discussion communities, compiled reports, created and published video lectures, and built software prototypes—the beginnings of a Cooperation Toolset. Now we seek to:
* Several visual maps for customized navigation of the cooperation studies landscape
* A university course with publicly available lecture videos and readings
* A workshop and guidebook for re-perceiving the role of cooperation in business and the technologies that enable it
* The beginnings of a social network of cooperation researchers
* Test and refine these instruments through workshops and further research.-- from the website. <http://www.cooperationcommons.com/>
* Attract the best minds in cooperation-related disciplines to help.
* Learn how practitioners can use the knowledge and tools in their domains.
* Make these resources public and invite broad participation.
All of the video clips of the classes recorded during The Literacy of Cooperation Lecture Series are available for free: <http://www.cooperationcommons.com/resources>. About pdf.
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