Category Archives: opinion

Freepers Creepers / Deja War

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Incredibly, it’s happening again. As if Iraq never happened, as if the innumerable lessons from that national shame and continuing horror never happened. As if the ‘06 election slapdown and clear annunciation of the people’s will never happened.

Incredibly, the same cast of chickenhawk fools and lazy legislators who brought us Iraq are now dragging the country into an even bigger pile of bushit. Incredibly, the media awaits their next sage utterances on the “progress” in Iraq and the need to bomb the hell out of Iran as if they had a shred of credibility remaining.

Read the Rest @ Thinking Peace or read about Bush and the Freepers

Real Time With Bill Maher: Cornel West, Mos Def & Ralph Nader

Topics including Iraq, terrorism (Islamic, American and otherwise), Obama/Clinton, the Jena Six, OJ Simpson, the Boogie Man…
[youtube]http://youtåube.com/watch?v=rO1w1H3iZUU[/youtube]

Bill: [On Islamic terrorists] You have to admit there are certain people who do want to kill Americans.
Mos: Yeah, uh, some of them are called The Police…

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=3zyEIGchffs[/youtube]

Mos: This is not about the Muslim or the Christian…the division of the Democrat/Republican, Muslim/Christian, uhhh, Autobot/Decepticon, Crypt/Blood, black/white: it’s all bullshit, because the bottom line is that Islam is not the threat; it’s not a problem.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=zvT4adazeOE[/youtube]

Bill: [to Nader, on being a consumer advocate] Ralph, you’re bringing sexy back.
Ralph: [On his new book] There are at least three reasons why if my mother raised George W. Bush, we wouldn’t be in Iraq. One: she would have taught him history. Two: critical thinking. And three: how to listen.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=aMwIOq06iAk[/youtube]

Cornel: Truth lies prostrate on rugged heels with nameless cavalries. And what I mean is, it’s hard to find a space for truth, and it’s hard for truth to be a species of the good to have impact, in the face of corruption, mendacity, mediocrity and shortsightedness. So truth has to lie prostrate, which means we have to reveal it in its nekidness, even if that nekidness seems to be connected to a lack of power…
Bill: Let’s get the truth nekid right here on this table.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=4vDmURpie_E[/youtube]

Bill: [New Rule] Sorry Mr. President, but slinking into somewhere unannounced and under cover of night isn’t an ass whooping; it’s a booty call.

Thanks to Kelena for the tip on this one!

RWU: Rich White Underachievers to Racist White Underachievers?

jabba and the first lady
::This post as written by Dubs – who you would normally find on architecture.MNP – quite a while ago now, but we dropped the ball and the post slipped through the cracks in those tubes that make up these crazy internets…sorry, my ninjas::

oh my ninjas please…such a shame

From the school that brought you the Whites Only Scholarship! and the repeat offensive statement ‘nappy-headed hoes!! (copywrite Don Imus) comes the epic third part of the Roger Williams University racism trilogy…The Dropping of the N-Bomb, or how i learned everything is not as it seems!!!

Okay, almost all humor aside, ninjas. I clearly haven’t posted in a minute and i definitely didn’t want this to be the first. I really struggled to even write up a draft (this is number 2.5) for this topic. Having gone to RWU for five years and being around for the whites only thing, knowing and living with Dana Peloso (the Imus comments) and on top of all else, being black puts me at a sort of crossroads for what i can and/or should say.

I was gonna write this in my typical fashion (for those who know me) but I’m gonna take a step back and cool it a little, again for personal reasons, and due to the fact that the school really ISN’T that bad. They just have s*** for luck when it comes to press coverage. Let’s look at the world in the past 6 years now…dudes flying planes into buildings for the name of religion, people attacking each other in Iraq in the name of hatred, and students killing other students in the name of crazy. We are definitely living in a time where the wrong words said to or about another can have a startling aftermath. So let’s start off with what is known:

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Papitto has been a board member for 40 years (18 of them being the chairman), recently retired (sort of) from the Fortune 500 company he founded Nortek, has subsequently donated millions to the university and though not a lawyer, has his name affixed to the ONLY law school building in Rhode Island. To this resume, you could add racist? (i’m Ron Burgundy?) Roger Williams University Chairman of the board Papitto (Papi) said in the board room:

They want us to add more poor kids and they want us to add more, well, I can’t call them n——, I learned that from Imus…

WHAT???!?!?!!???!?!!!

A few days later Papi went on WPRO-630 AM to publicly apologize and while he was getting around to it, told host John DePetro that

It just slipped out…I never even knew I said it.I apologized for that…What else can I do? Kill myself?http://www.projo.com/news/audio/20070716_papitto.mp3

Listen to the clip from the show above and form your own opinions on his regretfulness or lack there of (I’m trying my hardest to stay unbaised here, people). How can a man actually be considered NOT a racist when he also comes out and says some s*** like

The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something

Mother F***er…mother f***er, mother f***er, mother f***er.

Did he not learn anything from the whole Columbine incident (that music (of any form) is not the problem in the world). Music is self expression. It is a person commitment to communicating himself or herself through an art. And this mother f***er just put rap music on blast? He put ART on blast!!! REALLY??!??!!!? That is some s*** a kid tries to pull before their mother whoops their ass; not expected from someone who is 80.

Papi tries to state in the interview that he is a well-known man in Rhode Island and those who truly know him will vouch for his not being a racist in any manner. Except:

None of it came [as a] surprise. He has lambasted blacks, Muslims and Jews before in front of staff.

That is a direct quote from President Roy J. Nirschel, printed this past week from an email he sent in response to what Papi said in the board room. So what can you make of that? I NEVER heard a rumor of Nirsch being racist at all. Matter of fact, he could be considered one of the more humane persons I ever had a chance to talk to in my life. President Nirschel goes a little further on record stating that

No one should be associated with [Roger Williams University] who espouses racist thoughts, words or deeds.

So I leave it up to you – when a person wrongs, the person’s peers basically throw them under the bus he or she themself is driving, (partially) owns up to their actions (though he or she is obviously an ass-clown), and multiple actions of change are taken against them, how or when does it truly get resolved? And, does anyone really give two damns???

Okay, okay. Now I said i wasn’t gonna do it, but it happened. And that is more the reason why i should not have done this post in the first place. My race will ultimately be brought into question in the validity of my arguement. But i’m supposed to be mad. I’m completely allowed to tee off on this topic. It only confirms that in a world where people are killing each other everyday, i should stop looking across the ocean to see who may hate me for being American and merely turn my head left and right when i step off my property to see who hates me for being black. Can you imagine? I live in a region of a country where i’ll get judged before they know a f***ing ounce of my life story. And to be completely honest y’all, that frightens me.

Again, DO NOT take action against the school. DO NOT associate the actions of one person for the whole, because I’m a part of the university and no matter how i like it i’m also condemned for life with a diploma with that mother f***ers signature on it. All the hate towards the university is only negatively effecting the goal of Nirschel, which was to bring diversity to a campus not that diverse.

If you are a minority and have had interest in going to RWU, don’t let this incident decide for you. I know a lot of great people who went there and still go there (look up a Mr. John Barker for proof). Okay that’s all i can muster. I’m going to have a drink now.

Quotes and information from the source links provided [Providence Journal, ABC and CNN]. Thanks to Tim Bestor for the post title.

Alberto Gonzales and Thought Crime

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Well, as you all know, for a short while politricks.mnp died of pure apathy, but luckily for you out there in the general population, we’re back. At issue today, the totally Minority Report-ish articles that have been going around the net about the Attorney General’s new plan to neutralize internet piracy. Some of the points under his proposal include:

* Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department’s summary of the legislation says: “It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.”)

* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are “attempting” to infringe copyrights.

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC “intended to be used in any manner” to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and it is problematic and controversial.

* Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention regulations. Criminal violations are currently punished by jail times of up to 10 years and fines of up to $1 million. The IPPA would add forfeiture penalties.

* Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes. Certain copyright crimes currently require someone to commit the “distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period of at least 10 copies” valued at more than $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were “intended to consist of” distribution.

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with “unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance” are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder, such as photographers, playwrights or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment.

From CNET (News.Com) [Check out their podcast on the issue]

bush_alberto_gonzales_attorney_general.jpg

The referenced article also highlights that, in terms of Hollywood, the Democrats seem to be more closely allied to Hollywood than the Republicans. It would be interesting to see how such a bill would be handled in congress.

I, for one, am not comfortable with all that “attempted” language. Furthermore it seems like this may be just some type of diversion on the part of Gonzales to take attention away from his recent lawyer firing scandals. Since the mainstream media drops any scandal that doesn’t payout in 2 weeks like a horse at a glue factory it seems like only the bloggers are all over it. The administration seems to be pointing its big hairy finger right back at the internet.

While it’s common sense that a democracy (er.. of capitalistic nature) needs intellectual property protections, I’m still not sure how far our government should go to be protecting and industry with antiquated business models. For a bunch of old fogeys who still can’t make money off the internet for some unbeknownst reason (Apple seems to be doing well despite the stock scare) the RIAA cats still seem to be doing well for themselves. By “how far” I mean why should homeland security be involved in fighting piracy? I thought they were supposed to be securing the homeland against a perceived threat.

Go Read and Form Your Own Opinion

Can Gore Let It Rip?

Next time he runs for president, things will be different. That was Al Gore’s pledge to Democrats after the 2000 election: “If I had to do it all over again, I’d just let it rip. To hell with the polls, the tactics and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America’s future.”

Will Gore run in 2008? The question will echo throughout his appearances Wednesday before the House and Senate committees dealing with climate change. It likely will echo through all of American politics for months to come. There are two ways to ponder the question.

The logic of politics suggests Gore has already given his answer. He is not raising money. He is not urging friends and associates to stay on the sidelines until he makes a decision. He has said repeatedly that he has no plans to run. Shouldn’t we take him at his word?  Not yet, we shouldn’t. The logic of psychology and even history suggests that Gore should run. And if he should run, it is hard to believe that a man who has organized most of his adult life around public service and the pursuit of the presidency won’t in the end actually do it.

For the moment, Gore’s legacy in American politics rests on two opposing facts:

– From the perspective of Democrats, no politician has been more right, more often, on more important questions. On global warming, words that had a radical edge in 1992 — and still do, to many conservative ears — Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance,” anticipating mainstream liberal rhetoric by a decade. Many Washington Democrats cringed at what they regarded as his shrill people-vs.-powerful 2000 convention speech, when he warned that a Bush presidency would favor special interests and the wealthy. They cringed even more in 2002 at what they regarded as Gore’s naive warnings that the coming Iraq war was a disaster in waiting and a distraction from other fronts in the campaign against terrorism. But within a year or so of both speeches, most Democrats inside Washington and beyond essentially embraced Gore’s argument and tone.

– From the perspective of people who believe, as nearly all Democrats do, that the Bush presidency has been a historic debacle, no Democratic politician is more culpable for these consequences than Gore himself. A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.

[Politico]

The Lessons of Iraq

Former Senator and Presidential Candidate Gary Hart has published a great piece on the Huffington Post:

Very soon a new industry called “The Lessons of Iraq” will be born, even as the search for the end-game continues against the back-drop of the theme “who lost Iraq.” Partisan strategists will be allocating blame while more thoughtful citizens will try to draw lessons for future generations.

Some lessons are apparent. Do not manufacture justification for invasions. Plan for all eventualities, including the most unpleasant. Do not pay exiles to tell you what you want to hear. Deal honestly with Congress and the American people. Be candid about possible costs in lives and money. And an endless list of common sense, and Constitutional, dos and don’ts.

The second kind of lessons are less obvious and have to do with the new realities of the 21st century:

First, treat jihadist terrorism more like organized crime than traditional warfare. By declaring “war on terrorism” we made the fatal mistake that it could be crushed using conventional warfare and massed armies…

Second, liberate the U.S. from dependence on Persian Gulf oil. We can then sharply reduce the U.S. military presence in the region and remove the single most important incentive for jihadism…

Third, restore principle to American foreign policy. Neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration have used the Wilsonian rhetoric of “democratic idealism” even as they pursue the most cynical and dishonest policies…

Fourth, engage the nations of the world in achieving security for the global commons. Security in the 21st century now means much more than it did in the Cold War 20th century.

Read the full article at the link below:

[HuffingtonPost]

Before Jon Stewart

The truth about fake news. Believe it.

Fake news arrives on doorsteps around the world every day, paid for by You, Time magazine Person of the Year, a.k.a. Joe and Jane Citizen, in one way or another. Take for instance, the U.S. government’s 2005 initiative to plant “positive news” in Iraqi newspapers, part of a $300 million U.S. effort to sway public opinion about the war. And remember Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who was hired on the down low to act as a $240,000 sock puppet for the president’s No Child Left Behind program? Williams’s readers had no idea he was a paid propagandist until the Justice Department started looking into allegations of fraud in his billing practices.

Fake news has had its lush innings. The Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with big business to make sure of it. Together, they’ve credentialed fringe scientists and fake experts and sent them in to muddy scientific debates on global warming, stem cell research, evolution, and other matters. And as if that weren’t enough, the Department of Health and Human Services got caught producing a series of deceptive video news releases— VNRs in p.r.-industry parlance—touting the administration’s Medicare plan. The segments, paid political announcements really, ended with a fake journalist signing off like a real one—“In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” and they ran on local news shows all over the country without disclosure. All of this fakery taken together, it may be fair to say that the nation’s capital has been giving Comedy Central a run for its money as the real home of fake news.

[CJR::via::RawStory]

Talking About Israel

Another great piece from Nicholas Kristof:

There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Three years ago, Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?

…You can argue that Arabs pursue a double standard, focusing on repression by Israelis while ignoring greater human rights violations by fellow Arabs. But the suffering in Palestinian territories, while not remotely at the scale of brutality in Sudan or Iraq, is still tragically real…

…Hard-line Israeli policies have profoundly harmed that country’s long-term security by adding vulnerable settlements, radicalizing young Palestinians, empowering Hamas and Hezbollah, isolating Israel in the world and nurturing another generation of terrorists in Lebanon. The Israeli right’s aggressive approach has only hurt Israeli security, just as President Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up harming U.S. interests…

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

Bush’s Shadow Army

The Bush Administration is increasingly dependent on private security forces to do its dirty work, Jeremy Scahill reveals in his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq — an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a “road map for change” at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the “Department’s Total Force” as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors — constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.” This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors — conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. “We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability,” says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.

[AlterNet]

The Ides of March 2003

Our ninja Frank Rich does it again:

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now …” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

Two Perspectives on the Iraqi Draft Oil Law

“Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?” [NYTimes]:

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force), which included executives of America’s largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq’s economy, democracy and sovereignty.

“Three cheers for Iraq’s new hydrocarbon law” [Slate.com]:

The recent hydrocarbon law, approved after much wrangling by Iraq’s council of ministers, deserves a great deal more praise than it has been receiving. For one thing, it abolishes the economic rationale for dictatorship in Iraq. For another, it was arrived at by a process of parley and bargain that, while still in its infancy, demonstrates the possibility of a cooperative future. For still another, it shames the oil policy of Iraq’s neighbors and reinforces the idea that a democracy in Baghdad could still teach a few regional lessons.

To illustrate my point by contrast: Can you easily imagine the Saudi government allocating oil revenues so as to give a fair share to the ground-down and despised Shiite workers who toil, for the most part, in the oil fields of the eastern region of the country?

The Coulterization of the American right

Gary Kamiya puts it perfectly:

American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn’t a winning political strategy anymore — but they’re stuck with it. They’re trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove’s dream of long-term GOP domination.

It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.)…Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn’t raise an eyebrow. We’re so inured to the complete convergence of “respectable” conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don’t even deem it worthy of comment.

[Salon.com]
(free, after advertisement – just wait the few seconds, it’s worth it)

NYT: The Failed Attorney General

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution.

Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference. He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

[NYTimes]

Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk

Frank Rich sounds off:

EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)Â