(‘Journalism’ by Anthony Freda)
It’s rare that I post about an issue based on one article or op-ed, but the information and links contained in this May 15 piece of Glenn Greenwald’s deserves as much attention as it can receive right now: ‘The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties’
We’ll need to file the primary story under: blatant hypocrisy (yet better late than never?)
Oy; such a bad week for Obomba given the breaking news about the IRS and the DOJ/AP phone records snatch.
Glenn quotes the Washington Post’s newfound realizations about the President and his administration’s worse-than-Nixon’s (Jonathan Turley) Unconstitutional and Imperial presidency’s proclivities:
“President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.
“The Justice Department’s collection of journalists’ phone records and the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama’s credibility as a champion of civil liberties – and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor.”
Jay Carney’s quotes at the WaPo piece are a goddam hoot, considering what his boss has done to subvert the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and shredding of our civil liberties via his massive and secret security state apparatus.
Glenn lists a number of news outlets that have just gotten some sizzling religion, hoo-boy, on Obomba’s perfidies and prosecutions of whistleblowers are rapidly becoming de rigueur to report; now, isn’t that special?
Greenwald (my bolds):
As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined “DC turns on Obama”, writing that “the town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House” and “reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” The Washington Post’s political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies “reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days“. About the AP story, Balz wrote that “no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.”
HaHaHa! Day late, and about four years too late, folks. Where were you when we needed you as an oppositional press, investigating stories and shining a light on them in the hope that the electorate might wake up to at least some of the truth? Yes, if this sea change of reporting continues, it will help in the future, but will the media owners let it get too far?
Holy smokey Joe, we now have mainstream news outlets objecting to this administration’s opacity and war on whistleblowers and vast curtailment of our civil liberties, now that one of their own has been victimized (no matter that AP has been a long-time purveyor of corporate news and Empire…
Greenwald’s just loving the hell out of the putative Lefty media, too (though why he refers to them as ‘progressive’ is beyond me), and the fact that Obomba loyalists like Maddow, Alter and others are covering both stories, and are at least angry. But he’s so right about it being morally reprehensible that they hadn’t been railing against his targeting and annihilating the civil rights of his other victims: Muslims, Bradley Manning, OWS participants, Wikileakers per se, those still imprisoned at Gitmo…and the list could go on.
It shouldn’t take an attack on the mainstream press to fuel this indignation; the time to have done it was when others were receiving the same, and indeed far worse treatment. And yes, there have been exceptions. Glenn notes that almost no one is defending the DOJ’s actions, save…a few. And this is where it gets even more grotesque.
As I noted yesterday, TPM’s Josh Marshall – who fancies himself an edgy insurgent against mainstream media complacency as he spends day after day defending the US government’s most powerful officials – printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a “smear of Justice”. Worse, Media Matters this morning posted “talking points” designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that “if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated” and that “it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either.” [snip]
Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ’s conduct toward AP that I’ve seen comes from a Media Matters employee and “liberal” blogger.
In his recollection, most of the most scathing criticisms of Manning, Assange, and Wikileaks came from ‘progressives’. He links to a piece by Charles Davis who was guest-blogging while Greenwald was away. Do read it again if you can make the time, and I’d suggest that you may also find Davis’s stunning piece Drone Court Advantage’ some of the best satire in recent history (hint: read it all the way to the end).
And a tip of the hat to the good fatster who discovered that Obomba’s ‘accepting the resignation’ of IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller was just because a scapegoat had to found to tamp down the scandal; turns out he wasn’t even at the IRS when all that was going down. Ah, well; Washington at work… You can read Kevin Gosztola’s ‘Attorney General Eric Holder’s Contemptible Defense of the DoJ’s Seizure of AP Phone Records’ here. He gives a brief explanation of the DOJ’s claims as to why the AP story on the 2012 Underwear bomber sting was deemed ‘a security issue’, as well.
[Updated]: Jason Hirthler is up with ‘Under Normal Circumstances: The Justice Department v. the Fourth Estate’.
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.
~ Martin Niemöller
Speak out!
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Glad you picked up on this, Wendy, and assume it’s cross-posted at the Other Place. I read the Greenwald piece yesterday, and he certainly has earned the right to crow a bit, given how he’s carried the civil liberties banner almost all by himself for all these years. But really, what can one do when one sees a society where all those with the power, and the OBLIGATION, to do anything remain unconcerned until their own little piece of turf gets shat upon? Righties who discover a gay family member, or one with an unwanted pregnancy, or a natural disaster in their own backyard; lefties who won’t question drones or other empire grossnesses as long as “their man” is doing them; and now, a “watchdog” press that just watches, until it turns out that theyy are ALSO being watched. That selfishness, that lack of concern for the other, is the hallmark of modern Americanism. And I say, to all the above and all the rest who could not summon up a solitary shred of support or concern for the Occupy Movement that held the promise of addressing all the concerns of the non-elites, SUFFER, BITCHEZ!!! I just saw Obama justify the AP matter on the grounds of military security. Oh, yes, the ultimate brow-beating tool. Come on in, the schadenfreude is fine lol.
i know it’s typically American, but it sincerely sickened me, *and* pissed me off when i read the self-serving diatribes he spotlighted. i’d been working hard for two days on something different, but once again had to drop that for some burning schadenfreude. and yeppers; glenzilla has earned the right in spades. oh, how the ‘left’ genuflected before him when he brought his Constitutional Light to bear on Bush, but now: he’s the enemy to the same fucking folks.
this pollack piece was up yesterday, says a lot, and in great and worthy graphic terms.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/15/the-posterior-of-fascism/
you can also click the boxes below the comment boxes for notifications. yep, i just cross-posted it, although hardly anyone seems to be at fdl save for the over easy folks.
and i did desist to speak about some of the front page coverage of these events and benghazi, save for…kevin gosztola. tboww!’s were sickening.
I read that article. The most interesting part for me, was the comment about the leaked CIA memo, that stated something like, how it would be easier to take military action under a President Obama. And Glenn saidm and easier to do other the rest of it.
This was before he was elected for the first time.
You know I always wondered about the timing of the financial crisis announcement, during that election, it was right in the middle of the campaign.
Obama was not doing all that well. It was not clear that he would win.
Suddenly out comes Paulson with his announcement. That did it. Why then? Why not after the election. No question that announcement won it for Obama. And it was made by a Republican, a hard core money man.
Have never heard this question asked, or answered.
But is Yahoo (AP) SERIOUS? After all, they started such surveillance on Chinese dissidents. And APIRSBenghazimpeachment’s apropos for Buck-stop Obomba in Any CASE! NixOn him!
yeppers, it’s a bit of a stretch having to defend AP given that they’re stenographers for Empire. But then, as the man said, ‘but when they came for me, no one was left to speak out. what’s ‘APIRSBenghazimpeachment’s’ signify, not to be thick…
mafr: hold that question, okay? i may not be able to remember all of it, but dammit, i did a post on the frontline piece that did tell a lot about obomba’s peeps at the Big Bailout Table advising him all during the deals. i’ll ssee if i can remember the title when i wake up and slow down…or in 2017 or something.
gotta change the place’s name again, lol
oh, and welcome, bruce. have we met before in another guise?
here’s the post; i may bring it over just for the info and links.
http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2012/05/04/highlights-from-frontlines-money-power-and-wall-street/
the key paragraphs, but not the exact timing are:
“The story of Obama’s connection to Robert Wolf, Chairman and CEO of UBS’s Group Americas division was new; I assume it’s true, but he makes himself into a bit of a hero of the Obama-to-President story, so…it would be nice to know if it’s so as a matter of history. He claims that they met at a Soros do, became friends and confidantes in 2007, and that he fed Obama information from the crisis talks Paulson held with the Big Bankers, claiming that his help primed Obama for his Cooper Union speech to bankers concerning the need for regulatory policy to be enacted. He thought Obama was a real tiger; I thought he paid plenty of homage to the financial industry, but Frontline only aired the ‘get tough on Wall Street’ part. Wolf would become a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Segue now to September of ’08 when John McCain ‘suspended his campaign’ in order to rush back to DeeCee to solve the banking crisis; he even invited Obama along to the meeting. In Wolf’s and Frontline’s narrative, Obama walked into the room with incredible élan, and ruled the meeting with his knowledge, calm, and resolve, and made an utter fool out of McCain, which was communicated widely to Wall Street; bet the contributions started flowin’ into his coffers right afterward. Bye-bye John and Sarah.
“The next story of interested as far as personal relationships influencing Obama was the one they showed with O and Geithner; according to Frontline, they felt almost like twins separated at birth, sharing much twin bios and natures; love at first sight. This bond heavily influenced the next mind-boggling story, the one in Episode, Chapter 3: Showdown at the White House in which immediately following Timmeh’s first disastrous speech to the nation (read: bankers) outlining his ‘cure’ of stress-testing the banks, and the DOW falling 400 points…up stepped Larry Summers, another of the MOTUs we love to hate.”
But as far as being contrived with the timing, a lot of us were watching Jim Cramer claiming at the top of his lungs: ‘Bear won’t fail!!!’ And, then came the tumble. Paulson letting Lehman Bros. fail was a most interesting and personal story; he and Fuld were arch enemies.
Dunno how much of it to believe, but Cathy (mathbabe) O’Neil was interviewed, and actually did head to OWS NY and is still involved today with Occupy your money or the SEC or something. She and her friends still believe you can reign in capitalism at this point; I have my doubts.
Heh, what was it Scooter Libby said about the damned aspens? Tell me again how we reverse all of this without some baddies losing their lives and fortunes? ;-(
BTW, every time you change the name of this site, I’m gonna change the name of my dog. Let’s see where the confusion subsides first lol. (How come you haven’t tried, “FuckFascism” yet? I doubt they’d send a heli all the way to your neighborhood lol.)
Dunno, rc; what did he say about the damned aspens?
lol; thd just linked to this mark fiore cartoon. damn, i might have to learn html link codes, arrrrgghh.
http://billmoyers.com/2013/05/16/snuggly-the-security-bear/
oh, bugger all; when i stuck in the update with jason hirthler (try to thay that three timethes…all sorts of extra code came in. fdl’s wordpress is doing the same lately; odd bodkins…
he nails it, except for the homeland security bullet stuff, i think. a commenter at washington’s blog (i think) had mentioned that while we’re absorbed with these ‘scandals’, yethderday a law was passed in which the military could police american citizens. i asked for a link, and i’ll try to remember to go back, but that site does use some questionable sources, imo.
Here is the famous quote, Wendy: [Libby] closed the letter [to Judy Miller] on this personal note (although he wasn’t quite right on when autumn begins): “You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover–Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.” Folks put forth hundreds of different speculations as to exactly what Libby was trying to communicate with the phrase, but to me, the most basic sense of it was that there is a club to which all the bad guys belong, and that that connection overrides all other considerations. I still think that is a basic truth that confronts us, and that prompted my reference above. [ ]Holy-moly, girl, you actually took my reckless name suggestion for the site. “Now you’ve done it, now you’ve done it” (Sharon Stone, Total Recall) ;-) [ ] Re military policing citizens, if true, a catastrophic turn of events. :-(
oh, cripes; i remember now. he wrote it to her in jail, hoping she’d give up her sources. gads, russert, novack (ewww); yes, a whole lot of connected roots. too bad he hadn’t known the term ‘adventitious’, it’s almost more descriptive of the growth of the real power dynamos, isn’t it? jeez, thanks for triggering the memories (well, i guess…couldda lived without seeing novak’s face…brrrr)
i understand your reference to ridding the world of em, but…prison’s a good enough option for me.
i just checked, and the woman never offered a link about the military policing the population, and given that she’d said: it’s the REAL news, i even checked at…trnn. nothin’.
ah, i’ll change it again; hoped it’d make you laugh. lol, it was the site name most of the folks on the thread at my.fdl saw! one of my faves would be ‘the lone gunmen’ from the x-files, but that’s more dangerous than ‘fuck fascism’.
do you get notifications when i change the name?
Wendy- I will not bother you here. Since the other blog you created kinda went poof very quickly- I lost contact with some good folks. Others who had been disappeared at the other place. So all I ask is- can you help me regain conntact with some of them? Like reality checker ? My e mail is openprogressivemichael@gmail.com As an aside- I will be on the radio today doing an interview on this very subject of the AP spying issue. A local community radio station.
welcome, michael cavlan; it’s certainly no bother having you here, especially given that they let riff-raff like me in…
but…er…um…realitychecker is two comments up from yours, ya great idjit, lol!
cool on the radio program. shall i just keep your email address right here for folks to see? dunno who all you want to be in contact with.
Well, Wendy, I would submit that the connections are less serendipitous than “adventitious” would suggest, more like based on common interests (and therefore goals) shared by the club members, all of whom know very well who is in and who is out of the club. IOW, the predators all know that the livestock is for eating. [ ] I get comment notifications regardless of site name changes, apparently. FWIW, I think it’s good that we don’t rent pigs, for multitudinous reasons lol. (I still can’t accept that Gus is dead. :-( ) [ ] Well, now, let’s just consider how the prison thingy is working out to control the bad guys. Oh, right, Scooter Libby got sent to jail. Oh, wait . . . Sorry, dear one, but my highest value is what actually works. My studies in psychology implanted this truth irrevocably in my belief system: Nothing is a better learning motivator than quick and clear application of negative reinforcement. Deterrence actually does work, when it is the credible threat of negative reinforcement. Expecting this system, which is demonstrably corrupted on every level, to ever be credible about such threat to those who are in control of it, well, it’s kinda like waiting for a reality checker to shit diamonds lol. OTOH, a few dead baddies, even a few confiscated fortunes, would convey the requisite threat with undeniable force and simplicity. This is not advocacy, just pragmatic analysis. The question arises, does it matter if any of the desired changes happen in the foreseeable future, or are we all happy to wait forever with our beautiful but unsupported hopes, whilst the boot bears down ever-more-heavily on our collective throats? [ ] Greetings, Michael, miscreants, troublemakers, and questioners are welcome here, as demonstrated by my presence lol. Best of all, moderators may be shot on sight, if not on-site. ;-)
BTW, Michael, did you and PhoenixWoman ever get a room lolololol?
‘adventitious’ is a root system in which they travel horizontally, new trees pop up from the parent, and are all interconnected. like this: _!_!_!_ (the !’s being the quakee trees) seems right to me. i did google, and found speculation that it was in reference to the Aspen Group (forgot already), an FP secret think tank.
as far as terminating them with extreme prejudice, iirc, the death penalty didn’t reduce the murder rate, so there’s that. but, i’ll nominate you to run the guillotine (sorry you can’t hear it; try downloading Chrome, maybe…
LOL, I’m not enough of a botanist to have known you were not using adventitious in the “accidental” sense. [ ] Re your other point, negative reinforcement is effective in direct proportion to the immediacy of the application; IOW, if the penalty is only imposed many years later, IF AT ALL, you should expect the lousy results you reference. Junk science, garbage in, garbage out. Like most social science “science.” Immediacy and certainty of the negative reinforcement are the key factors, and our system delivers neither. I won’t even go into all the other mushy variables that never get properly accounted for, because they really can’t be, or because the entities conducting the studies don’t really want to hurt their desired outcome. (E.g. We recently saw a gun use study presented at FDL that EXCLUDED from it’s data the ages most likely to be gun-violent (mid-to-lateteens) AND the high-crime neighborhoods most likely to be gun-violent lol. Surprise! Guns are useless for self-defense by law-abiding middle-agers living in affluent suburbs. Ta dah!!!)
glad the punctuation picture served its purpose, then. okay, i’ll yield to the studies being front-loaded. but: by your skinner sorta model (and unless you’re speaking of vigilante justice), then in order to secure the death penalty for the sorts of de facto crimes against humanity above, it would have to be proven that certain individuals’ behaviors caused death or deaths, no? now we know it’s so just by the examples people show, say with: no access to health care (even though i think AMA care is akin to torture in most cases), starvation, etc. and how can one person be held accountable when the whole purpose of modern corporate charters is exactly to create layers of people to share any blame, not to mention the power of the legal purses they hold?
now with the crimes of genocide, if one believed that the state should be able to execute people, those might fall more clearly under the death penalty as just. but look at how many people were actually complicit in what Montt carried out in guatemala? and dammit, no one at fdl has written that story, or even created an open thread. more important to write about fooking niall ferguson’s dissing gays, i reckon.
and hell’s bells, reality checker: i gave you barbequed bankster on the menu. what else do you want from me? fried fraudster? (rats; almost said ‘grilled greasy guts’, but you wouldn’t be able to enjoy buffy’s song.)
As to my wondering what other Big News we were missing, here’s some of it (as if we didn’t know already): Permanent War Codified.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/endless-war-on-terror-obama?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-4%20Pixies:Pixies:Position4
“Punctuation picture”? I need some help to get that one, please; if it’s a ref to the Coup vid, I’ve seen and heard it before, but the group denies, IIRC, that it means a literal guillotine. [ ] Seems to me that the proper starting point is to decide if it is either moral or necessary to take the lives of key oppressors in order to move back toward a just (or even a sane) society; if you can’t get to that conclusion, then discussions about the details of the process are irrelevant, aren’t they? I know you have not gotten to that conclusion yet, so why wade into the dangerous thicket of even discussing how to effectuate such a goal? I know it can be effectuated, but also not with the transcendant purity you are holding out for. (Seems to me that the status quo is very non-ambiguous about the fact that millions of innocent lives are being, and will continue to be, deliberately and knowingly taken and ruined by those whose proper comeuppance we are quibbling over in our long-running philosophical conversation; that at least is a factor whose reliability and purity we need have no doubts about. Perhaps phrasing the issue as one of saving those lives rather than just punishing the perpetrators would be helpful?) [ ] A propos of that, the Greenwald article is excellent, as usual, and amplifies my last parenthetical point, doesn’t ti? Aside form that, please show me the idiot who did not understand from the get-go that the War on the TACTIC of terrorism would never end, just as the war on the VICE of drugs will never end, because both are wars on natural aspects of human behavior. And both wars have created and perpetuated their own profit-and-power-driven infrastructure which insures that they are virtual perpetual motion machines, delivering huge profits to the implementers of both wars. All with the highly desirable side effect of conditioning the populace to forget all about that foolish and quaint civil liberty concept forever. Can a pure David really expect to defeat such a corrupt Goliath?
punctuation picture: _!_!_!_ (adventitious roots, botany lesson)
you say purist as though it’s a bad thing. but srsly, you may be right that given my thoughts on the sincerely questionable karma of killing for justice, we might be better avoiding the discussion. i just see stalin, robespierre, and others with my limited knowledge of armed revolutions.
yes, we knew…we saw…and almost no one still does understand the underlying mechanisms of Empire or the absurdity of the vaunted American Exceptionalism.
I ‘ve discovered (not just recently) that i really don’t have a clue about the dampening effects of the constitution post-revolutionary war. kurt sperry brought this piece of the ever-cranky arthur silber (anarcho-syndicalist, i’ve heard him characterized) and he and arrow agreed with his take (including greenwald’s mistakes, i guess. i’ll go fetch it…
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2013/05/for-all-deluded-andor-stupid-people.html
but, lol, and all that jazz: his new one’s titlemust be one that will ballast your contentions; i’ll read it later:
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2013/05/you-say-you-want-peaceful-revolution.html
i wonder if i’d missed his post ‘how to suck fascist dick’, though… ;~)
ask me later about your Enter key, okay?
And all of this on the day that our daughter-in-law sent video of my (sorry: our) baby boy graduating from national guard boot camp, with the next’ camps’ to come. And can you think this stuff doesn’t affect me where i live and challenge every value i hold dear, no matter how frivolous or impractical you see it?
No; sorry. it all challenges my beliefs, but for now, i believe in the unseen, and our collective power to move mountains with our directed and conscious minds and spirits. and other actions that at least start out as nonviolent.
Oh, how fun, this and what followed, at TBagg’s post on the Gay Pride Parade (where he also threatened a ban from all of FDL for using “TBagg” lol)
Teddy Partridge May 17th, 2013 at 11:39 pm
150
In response to TBogg @ 64
This comment, as well as your entire post, proves you don’t have the facts.
Not only is the post fact-free, you’re full of shit generally.
Manning didn’t ENDANGER American servicemembers. As Daniel Ellsberg has said repeatedly, Manning SAVED American lives. Because of the release of the Collateral Murder video and other atrocities being revealed in the documents he allegedly released, the Iraqi government wouldn’t agree to a Status of Forces Agreement without being able to prosecute US servicemembers in Iraq for future atrocities. Saint Obama (blessed be in name in these precincts) said, “No way” and brought all the troops home. Thus saving at least some of their lives, unless you believe the 10,000 or 30,000 planned residual forces would have some Magic Obama Mojo that would protect them from death while serving in Iraq.
But, generally, you don’t get an opinion on this matter. You’re not gay, you don’t live in SF, and you’re hopelessly uninformed about the topic of the election, and decertification, of Manning as Grand Marshal.
But — look at how many comments! I bet Jane gives you a bonus!
[ ] Short response to your last comment (trying to go hike before the rain hits)- Nothing wrong with pure, darling-purity of ideals, purity of aspirations, purity of intention, these are all beautiful and essential things. But some compromises with the nasty realities are necessary in order to implement any of those beautiful motivations. You know this is true. If we only moved when we could do so with absolute purity, we would always be immobile.
EF Beall dropped in a link to that post on my thread over yonder; i did read it, and was duly appalled. it became quite the clash of the titans, but a bit ironic in that as i’d remembered it, on my ‘we are’ post, the dynamic duo had called my posts an embarrassment to fdl, and had lauded mister bogg profusely. things change with more ‘who is the victim/target ‘…and then they came for me’ speaking out, i reckon. ;-)
but as i was saying to mafr, this site is for all eyes, and anyone can comment, so we’ll no doubt receive visitors of all leanings and convictions, no matter how vile we might consider some of them. we’ll see how that goes when the time comes. who knows but that there may come a time for at least considering banishments, though i do hope not. the software is set up for it, of course.
as to ‘purity’, i was jesting a bit since i don’t see myself as such, especially given the caveats i have offered in the past concerning myself and violence.
your enter key: what if it’s just not working well because something’s dirty or jammed underneath the cap? sometimes i disconnect any devices and tip my laptop upside down and shake it a little, then periodically use that pressurized air to clean the keyboard. both the board and the can have to be vertical, so it’s a bit awkward, but something may blow out of there.
or you could find a repair shop that might take you as a walk-in since what you need is so small a thing. you can always take a key cap off, but it’s a bit fraught, fearing you might break it, and then getting it on again. i’ve done it many times, and have even replaced keyboards on these stupid dell laptops (that chore is almost easier than replacing keys for me. more time, but less fraught.
Just FYI, I have not caught up on reading the links you provided here a couple comments up, or on your version of this post at FDL, will prob have more to say when I catch up. [ ] Enter key so I don’t have to do this instead of make a new para, I’m assuming lol? Prob right, I never cleaned this in the 4.5 years I’ve had it. I’ll make an effort. [ ] Just so many ironies and cross-ironies at large in the TBagg/Teddy tempest, like the whipped cream atop the sundae lol. [ ] Re visitors/banning–you know how I feel about censorship-I’d rather have the debate than the decorum. Unless someone was just commenting to be excessively ugly and hateful, with no larger point at all to make, I would say, let ‘er fly. Just my HO-marketplace of ideas is an area where I am a purist lol. [ ] And, to revisit the purity discussion, since we are still to depart for our hike (now despite the rain), I think we should cling to the purity of our ideals like a North Star is used by navigators, but when a detour is necessary to continue in the right direction, we should not be stymied by that necessity, but rather do it with a keen awareness of the larger goal and a resignation to the reality that we must make continual and careful course corrections (reality checks?) as we go, to make sure we do not get so far from the path that we cannot find our way back. (And always remembering that when we undertake to change a whole society, we will inevitably have to deal with a huge mass of folks who are going to be stubbornly ignorant, dishonest, hateful, vindictive, selfish, destructive, etc., etc., no matter how carefully we conduct ourselves. Purity, R.I.P. lol.)
Forgive me, Wendy, for adding this in a way that looks like an afterthought (really just about my aging brain lol), just want to say I do appreciate the anguish that the boot camp graduation must engender in your heart and soul, dear one, and you have my deepest and most loving sympathies, Let’s just hope he quickly comes to hate the job, darling.
one person said he/she didn’t want transparency in government, and how he trusted that he’d be told what he needed to know (arrrrggh!) bmaz? oy. didn’t think that unveiling the state department memos had anything to do with anti-war. holy sufferin’ sailfish!
links: i’d be interested on your take of the first arthur silber one i stuck up yonder; both kurt sperry and shootthatarrow agreed with him, and one of the things he said was that greenwald was actually doing harm by subscribing to the propaganda that the constitution was…meaningful to democracy, or something close. i’ve read different takes on the purposes and limitations of the document, of course, but it’s admittedly hard for me to unlearn what i did in high school; that stuff can get cemented in pretty firmly.
purity, norrth stars, course detours…okay, i heat ya. but quit throwin’ around two-dollar words like ‘effectuate’, would ya, lol? i’z not a college gradjiate, nuh-unh.
and yep; i’m exactly where you are on censorship, i just meant that there may be a time for some commenters…well, that they do far more harm and fail to advance a discussion too often. but by then, this site will have likely proven too small to accommodate that many visitors. we’ll cross those chickens when the bridge flows under the road…or something…
thank you for that, toby (should i use your name here or not?). the video made it so devastatingly real in a way i couldn’t have imagined. nearly bald, ramrod straight, dress uniform, turning corners in that precise, military way. sober faced, one more cog in the machine. can’t help weeping; i just didn’t even know the man in the video, really and truly.
but i’d meant to say, as well, that all our love and life by examples could not stem the tide of his innate proclivity to ‘soldierness’. i’ve even wondered if in his mind he sees his biological father’s invented visage in approval. who knows, but we both know we can’t let us kill us, or remain apart from him. he did call steve once the ceremony was over, but not his mama, which killed steve. but i fully understood why it was so.
actually, i was so forlorn and speechless that i never wrote back to sandy; i will go and do so now…
Wendy- Since I am unable to contact Metamars (who stood up for me when I was banned from the other place) as I am now banned again- could you contact him and give him my e mail openprogressivemichael@gmail.com
As an aside- I am working hard on my book Censorship- A Liberal Value- Tales Of A Progressive Activist. Aiding me is a local progressive journalist who is considered to be the Minnesota version of Amy Goodman. Project Censored have agreed to help us promote the book when ready. Chris Hedges works on the Death Of The Liberal Class has helped to sharpen and direct the shape of the book.
I want to personally thank Metamars for sticking up for me when I was banned the first time. If he had not- I would have been disappeared without any ral notice- like what happened at the other “progressive” blogs that will also be mentioned in the book.
Thanks
since i don’t have his email address, all i could do is give him yours on his next post. i dunno if he’d know how to delete it, others i’ve tried to instruct in that haven’t quite twigged. but if given that, you’d like me to, i’d be glad to.
re the title of your book: i’d say that there must be too much material for it by now. i haven’t entered enough in the Dem/ status quo gatekeeper category on the right sidebar, but a couple good opinion pieces are there, anyway.
i’d imagine he’d like being thanked. something rc said the other day made me wonder why i didn’t write sch a post when he was banned, but of course by then we’d been told we’d be gone as well. tough choices, no good answers. but i still feel guilty that i’m still there, and so many others aren’t, even though some by their own designs. there are just so few folks there now; sad.
Wendy- smile- No problem. Do not feel guilty. You are our spy on the inside.As well as a conduit to contact those few good people left at FDL. Keep on truckin’ Sistah- keep on truckin’
being ‘a spy there’ isn/t any of the reasons i write there, michael cavlan. hell’s fire, anyone can read there, not just those of who still write or comment there. among the reasons, though, is that there still are so many good folks there (specifically at the ghetto diaries) who have strong moral compasses, deep awareness of how far out of control this empire and its *current* unitary executive are, and have some hopes that if we call out the dark, we might get closer to bringing the light in America Rebooted.
Naive, yes, but there you are. ;-) i assume that you mean that i can just go ahead plunk your email address down for metamars. (not much each fans of one another, but i’ll certainly do it.) he doesn’t ever visit my threads, or maybe once, so i wouldn’t be able to do the deleting. doubt you’d have a flood of unwanted mail; i never have, even after the many times i’ve posted mine.
OK, Wendy, just now catching up on all the reading, to include all your assignments. And I thank you for making clear that no “intelligent” response will be required of me lol. The Silber readings are interesting, enough to get him onto my endless Favorites list lol. Not cuz I agree with all he says, just that he’s interesting. On the Constitution stuff, i do agree generally with his take on the intent of the victorious elite in writing it But before we rush to fault Greenwald’s understanding, a moment to think. The idealistic underpinnings for that wonderful “democracy” are in the Declaration of Independence. That document represents an attempt to find a higher moral justification (i.e., the “Creator”) for rejecting and replacing what was at the time the accepted order and law of the land. It could not rely on law, because it was a rejection of law. So, instead, it relied on all these beautiful deity-endorsed ideas about equality, etc. When the Founders won and got around to writing a governing document, the Constitution, the new law of the land to be supervised by the victors, the last thing they wanted was to leave the door open to having themselves forcibly replaced by others who actually believed all those ideals. (Perfectly understandable, and just one more example of governing from the selfish, rather than the ideal.) But here’s the thing-Greenwald apparently feels, and I agree, that having so clearly relied on that idealistic document, the Declaration, to get themselves into the catbird seat, and having gotten all us serfs to serve their agenda often to our detrimental reliance on those implied promises, they are now not in a position to complain if others expect them to live up to those stated ideals, nor if others decide that forcible replacement is still acceptable because those higher moral values are still in place to supercede the elite-interest-driven governing document. Just like when they did the same to old King George lol. Hoist, meet petard. [ ]The sucking fascist dick article would have been great to link onto TBagg’s latest monstrousity (442 comments, good God). Says it all in much less space lol. [ ] I don’t think much of his “peaceful revolution” piece, strikes me as so unrealistic I won’t waste any energy on it. What the hell, two out of three ain’t bad lol. [ ] Finally, Enter key still not working to create a new para break, despite upside down shaking, patting, and blowing. Will get compressed air after hospital stuff is over.
well, bingo and bloody hell; he did surpass my expectations! (you, rc, that is.) and i’d asked for so little, too. ;-)
yeah , the ‘peaceful revolution piece disappointed, think i’d mentioned i’d onl seen the title, and had hoped it mightta been more up your alley than mine.
but just to tide you over, well done on seeing from greenwald’s perch. i may have called it ‘Common Understanding of the Constitution’, but yes. and the bill of rights and amendments, as well.
but as it happens, my cup runneth dry for tonight due to …life stuff, i guess i’d say. so please allow me to say more tomorrow.
A sweet good night to you, then, beloved. I really hope we can speak for even a moment before I go into the hospital (just in case I don’t come out lol).
it will likely be the blind leadin’ the blind, dear, but i’ll save a moment, maybe tomorrow if that works. just hit duck panic when i twigged to the date, and i really want to get up my OpMonsanto post; er…may 25 is fast approaching…
herself has been on lazy wench lately.