Sad liberals can only get behind jokers. Other side is "war is insane."
Hey, Jon Stewart, Here's Some Insanity
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."
- Allen Ginsberg, HOWLThings that are insane:* War* Wall Street bailouts* Working class white people following Beck on Murdoch * That corporations can run our elections* That water is being privatized
* That advertisers can target children* That people in D.C., where you're having your rally, don't get a real vote in Congress
* That the establishment solution for D.C. not having a vote in Congress is to unconstitutionally give it and Utah a vote, while denying the people of D.C. representation in the Senate * That our government invaded Iraq for totally bogus reasons* That virtually no one has been held to account for that * That you've had pleasant chats on your show with people who should have been held to account for that, like recently, Condi Rice* That your show just chugged along during the build up for war and never blew the whistle
* That you actually spent much of 2002 and 2003 making fun of the weapons inspectors in Iraq
* That Colbert went to Iraq for two weeks and did an interview with only one Iraqi -- a Kurdish separatist
* That Obama can't acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons
* That virtually no one comments on Obama refusing to acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons
* Military occupations
* Alliances with dictators and absolute monarchies
* That broadcasters claim they are serving the "public interest" as part of the condition of them getting broadcast spectrum
* That there are no significant mass movements in the U.S.
* That you mock or ignore those who might be trying to change that
One problem with what is being reported on the WikiLeaks Iraq war logs is the civilian death numbers are being reported as estimates. They are not. There are documented. They are a minimum, not a reasonable estimate. The two can be very different, especially in a situation of massive violence.
In 2006, The Lancet published a study that gave the best estimate of the Iraq invasion and war as causing 655,000 excess deaths. This was much higher than the estimate by Iraq Body Count. A footnote in The Lancet piece provided an explanation and I tracked down the analyst: PATRICK BALLBall is a co-author of the book "State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996," and wrote the chapter "On the Quantification of Horror: Field Notes on Statistical Analysis of Human Rights Violations" in the book "Repression and Mobilization." Questioned about the disparity between the Lancet study and figures from media reports and efforts like IraqBodyCount.net, Ball said: "I've found a similar disparity between reported deaths and likely deaths in other conflicts that I've studied in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Timor-Leste. Methods such as media reports typically capture violence well when it is moderate, but when it really increases, they miss a great deal. There are a series of biases regarding what gets reported -- we get very good reports about journalists killed, but not rural peasants; we know about big landowners, but not grassroots union organizers." Ball is director of the human rights program at Benetech, a firm that uses technology for social good, and works extensively on human rights data analysis. See: http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1370&type=exactmatch&se... Earlier today I contacted Ball by email; but he's in the Congo and not terribly available.
Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, where Windy is studying.
Currently shown in the Fleming Museum at U of Vermont, Christo and Jeanne-Claude did this in Paris in 1962, without government permission. I saw a similar oil barrel wall in Nablus in the 1990s; remember how beautiful and horrific it was -- Israeli military chucking off Palestinian city life. Or perhaps the Israeli government is, infact, a large conceptual art ensemble.
UFPJ had rallies in DC shortly before the 04, 06 and 08 elections (dwindling as the years went on) and now this. Is this a movement or a get out the vote effort for the Democratic Party?
Can this be a serious mass movement when protests habitually happen on weekends and then it's back to business as usual in DC on Monday?
Is a nationalist framework -- "One Nation" -- right or wise? Were not progressive movements in the US strongest when they linked up globally, like the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle or the Feb. 15, 2003 protests against the Iraq war? Why doesn't that get built on?
Do you have an actual strategy for pressuring the Obama administration, or isn't Rahm Emanuel right in saying you have nowhere else to go, (the Green Party doesn't seem to be a major force here)?
There seems to be a lot of demonization of the Tea Party people. Is that smart? For example, don't alot of people here have alot in common with Ron Paul and his supporters? (War, military budget, Wall Street bailouts, civil liberties, corporate giveaways and trade deals). Wouldn't it be better find common ground with some of them on crucial issues?
Lots of people are calling for a new New Deal, but isn't there something ahistoric about that? The New Deal happened because FDR and much of the establishment were afraid of communists gaining power. Won't real progress come if some sort of radical movement starts gaining momentum?
Seceding from the One Nation and bound for the Independent Republic of Vermont.
