Norwood on Sonic Detour Today!
I will be hosting Sonic Detour from 4 - 6 PM this afternoon on WMNF 88.5FM
Today, I'll be featuring mp3s from protestrecords.com.
The Sonic Detour is a little bit of the best of everything, so everything will not be protest related this afternoon, but if you tune in tomorrow morning from 4a to 6a, I will be featuring all protest songs all the time on Morning Wood, my regular gig at 88.5.
Fixing the Legislature
Howard Troxler thinks he has a recipe for reforming the Florida Legislature. He seems to feel much the same way as me about the current situation in Tallahassee:
Honestly. It has never been this brazen. Lobbyists write bills openly, and stand up to present them in front of committees. Some legislators who supposedly "sponsor" the bills can't even explain what they say. It used to be that members at least were ashamed when it came out that their bill was lobbyist-written. Now they just file blank bills, waiting for lobbyists to fill in the content.
Howard sez all we need do is take away a little power, in the form of redistricting, and a little money, mainly the soft money from party headquarters, and we'll be well on our way to having a Legislature that is actually responsive to the voters. I don't know if those ideas will be enough, but they're not a bad start.
NY Times can’t come right out and say it… but I will: BUSH LIED!
Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie? That’s the headline on a NY Times “News Analysis” piece today.
Most thinking people with a memory would say “Yes” to the question of “Did he or didn’t he (lie),” but the Times sees black and white (our Prez’s favorite colors) as grey. In fact, the Times takes statements that are obvious untruths and glosses over them:
On the question of taxes, Mr. Bush made a claim in his State of the Union address that was not true, and he repeated it often afterward. "This tax relief," he declared, "is for everyone who pays income taxes."
In fact, as the Tax Policy Center, a research arm of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, discovered, 8.1 million people who owe taxes would have received no tax cut from the Bush proposal and will get no break from the legislation that was enacted last month.
So, he lied, right? Not according to the Times. After giving their readers this unfiltered information, they go on to spin it in such a way that Bush comes out looking downright truthful.
But there are more than 100 million income tax payers in the country. So well over 90 percent will get some tax cut. If he had said "almost all," it would have been accurate.
They do the same with the WMD question:
The October speech was devoted largely to the threat of banned weapons. Iraq, Mr. Bush said, had "a massive stockpile of biological weapons" and "thousands of tons of chemical agents" and was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The president asked, "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
In the speech in March, on the eve of war, Mr. Bush declared, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
There is no evidence the president did not believe what he was saying.
So, Bush manipulated intelligence to suggest that weapons were there, and seems to believe his own lies, so that makes it ok?
See Bush Lies for an excellent rundown on many many more lies uttered by our President and his minions.
In America, it’s now guilty until proven innocent
Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, comments on a report that the Justice Department released a few weeks ago detailing the abuses by the Justice Department under the auspices of the PATRIOT Act, a story that has been much under-covered in the mainstream press.
As for Inspector General Glenn Fine's report, the essence of his extensive evidence against the attorney general is that Ashcroft and some of the members of his senior staff deliberately established a policy that, as New York Times legal affairs reporter Adam Liptak noted—paraphrasing the report—replaced "ordinary rules" with "no rules or perverse ones."
Liptak continued, "The report says that the usual presumptions of the legal system were turned upside down in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001. As a result, people detained on immigration charges were considered guilty until proved innocent and were often held for months [without bail] after they were ordered [by judges] released [or deported]." (Emphasis added.)
They’re coming after the immigrants now. Some other group, maybe even one you belong to, will be next.
Whovian poetry from Elaine Cassel
Check out Elaine Cassel’s column today for the whole thing.
Dr. Seuss Sees AMERICA, 2003 - Author Unknown
The Whos down in Whoville liked people a lot,
But the Grinch in the White House most certainly did not.
He didn't arrive there by the will of the Whos,
But stole the election that he really did lose.
Vowed to "rule from the middle," then installed his regime.
(Did this really happen, or is it just a bad dream?)
He didn't listen to voters, just his friends he was pleasin'
Now, please don't ask why, who knows what's the reason.
It could be his heart wasn't working just right.
It could be, perhaps, that he wasn't too bright.
Florida House Speaker a money grubbing slimeball
Lucy Morgan, writing in the SP Times, clued me in on a practice I was unaware of:
House Speaker Johnnie Byrd passionately tried this week to defend fundraising in the middle of an important special session on medical malpractice.
He doesn't seem to understand how unseemly it looks for lawmakers to be debating the hottest issue of the year one minute and putting out their hands for contributions the next.
Government shouldn't tell candidates what they can do, Byrd insists. It's enough to ban fundraising during the regular session, he says.
The Leg. banned this practice several years ago when it became embarassingly clear that lobbyists were, in essence, trading money for votes:
...former Sen. Malcolm Beard, R-Seffner, who compared session fundraising with "shooting quail on the ground."
Beard noted how easy it was to raise money from a lobbyist who wanted his vote.
Clear channel bites
In this weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Walter Kirn opines on Clear Channel.
You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I'd reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication -- Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What's more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes.
I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ''morning zoo'' hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn't help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes.
FCC Senate vote a victory for the people
The News Dissector gives us the haps on the FCC Senate vote:
Bob McChesney for the new group Free Press says: "It is due almost entirely to the massive outpouring of public comments -- hundreds of thousand in just the past week -- opposing the idea of letting fewer media companies own more and more media."
And we need to keep those comments coming if we want this bill to be voted on by the full Senate.
Further down in today's column, The News Dissector give his own take on the Kristof column noted in BlogWood earlier today.
Kristof smells something fishy, but not quite rotten
In his regular NY Times column, Nicholas Kristof, a supporter of Bush’s war, wonders if he’s had the wool pulled over his eyes, but stops way short of actually attaining a firm grasp on reality:
My guess is that "Saving Private Lynch" was a complex tale vastly oversimplified by officials, partly because of genuine ambiguities and partly because they wanted a good story to build political support for the war
So, the mainstream paper of record is finally implying that the Pentagon may have embellished this story a little bit, but in an apparent abundance of caution, the Times wont come right out and say we were lied to. Nicholas starts this same column with a little joke about WMDs:
I've been roaming Iraq, turning over rocks in my unstinting effort to help the Bush administration find those weapons of mass destruction. No luck yet.
He then goes on to explore a different Iraq related falsehood, writes it off as mere oversimplification, and completely ignores the fact that without WMDs there was no legal justification for an unprovoked attack on another sovereign nation.
Bill Clinton lied about sex and was impeached. Bush has lied (and people have died)
about every justification for invading Iraq, and there is almost no talk whatsoever in the mainstream press about holding him responsible for his actions. Could this be because the press itself was a huge and willing player, accepting Bush’s increasingly incredible assertions without so much as a whimper of truth? Might the press have been blinded by the impending excitement and potential ratings of sleeping with the Pentagon - er - I mean being embedded?
Iraq: an occupation doomed to failure?
The Black Commentator has an interesting take on our imperialistic bumbling in Iraq:
This is an occupation unlike any other in modern history. Acting solely on greed and delusions, the Pirates dismissed the collective experience of humanity to attempt the occupation of a large and sophisticated society without a reasonable expectation of collaboration from any significant segment of the population. It cannot be done, as confirmed by the daily dispatches from Iraq and beyond.