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On Syria: the most cogent explanation I've seen of what that mess is all about (four or five civil wars at once) is from Patrick Coburn, a Brit who is over there and was in Iraq for the better part of a decade. I would describe our administration as incompetent to understand, much less intervene in it -- and am glad Obama is going to Congress. More and more, he seems adrift: good instincts, lousy execution. Let's just hope the health insurance law gets implemented competently; then he'll have been worth something for all the sweat we put into getting him elected.
The U.S.A. Is Our Name, Overseas Kaboom Is Our Game
Forget Syria on its own dubious merits for a moment. The really disturbing part of our what is soon to be our latest military adventure is that we just never stop doing this. We seem to look at the world with the attitude that we can militarily intervene anywhere and anywhen we damned well fee...
Sick. Twisted. Stupid.
Forgetting about the Unemployed
Mentions of the deficit versus mentions of unemployment in major newspapers: [Source]
I just want to say, I love your blog. This is such an important insight -- that kids without a million flashing distractions are sponges, sucking up anything new and amazing. We don't get to see that much, though, like you, I've been a few places where it was visible.
Yet, ending extremely poverty breaks that innocent receptiveness down. And yet, we must!
Daydreaming is fun
In a media- and entertainment-starved rural Congo, village kids are easier fascinated. They will sit around in the hot sun for hours watching and listening to a speech by village and health officials. It is just amazing to watch them observe something new. They are little sponges. But I ...
That's one of the more chilling photos I've ever seen.
I have to wonder why the "day room" is set up so prisoners are essentially chained so they must face each other, interact with each other. What does that do for the security state?
Stupidité d’état at Guantanamo Bay
by BagNewsNotes Contributor, Robert Hariman Among the sophisticated, raison d’état (”reason of state”) is the first principle of foreign policy. Decisions are to be made on behalf of the national interest without regard to confounding values. So it is that democracies can support dictators,...
Apparently propriety in the tradition she comes from requires that a woman nailed to the cross be clothed. Why?
Your Turn: Philippine Woman Nailed to the Cross
I was interested in your read on this photo circulating in several Easter slideshows this weekend. (Caption below.) (photo: Jay Directo/Getty Images. caption: Filipina Roman Catholic Mary-Jane Mamangun is nailed to a cross as a re-enactment of the Crucifixion of Christ during Good Friday celeb...
Is it possible that our governing institutions have lost their ability to adapt and so have become simply frustrating expressions of our various forms of stasis? It looks that way. If so, economic and culture creativity will find easier environments for their expression.
Standing Still is Not the Answer - The West vs the BRICs
By Patricia H. Kushlis For decades, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was seen as the result of an economic decline that took place over more than a century. More recently, however, historians have taken another look. Some now suggest that the problem was not Ottoman economic decline bu...
I'd like to hear the President explain his health care reform to some people who actually understand the issue. The Republicans are easy pickings on this -- they don't have a policy on this or much else that goes beyond preserve provider profits and die quickly. But how would the Prez do with some of these people who actually know something? (second part of post.)
Shining a Light On the Whole Lot of Them
As Obama continues to train his focus on the pettiness in Congress and right-wing obstructionism, it's just too bad the traditional media -- because it thrives on the conflict -- is so hesitant to train its eye on the GOP hostility and presumptuousness Obama is exposing. Because the newswire p...
Despite current smiles, McChrystal=Westmoreland. Ignominious. Without the draft, Obama may not equal Johnson. How about Obama=futility?
Sad.
Scoring the Surge: McChrystal 30,000, Obama '12
Well, what a relief to finally see Stanley smile. (photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images. caption: General Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, visits with soldiers from Blackfoot Company of the Army's 1st Battalion 501st Pa...
I think we can probably date the popularity of ignoring Constitutional formalities back to when we stopped thinking Congress was necessary for declaring wars.
An Issue I Have Never Understood...
Spencer Ackerman asks a question: >Oh, So That’s the Fifth Category of Detentions: As Marc [Ambinder] writes, that sounds a lot like the administration will just simply hold them in legal limbo, as per the so-called “Fifth Category” of detentions outlined by President Obama in his May speech at t...
How old is this guy? Photo looks like a 50s kid's dream.
Douglas L. Hoffman's America
(Click for ginormous size) Doug Hoffman, the congressional candidate in upstate NY, and this week's now fuel-injected darling of the radical right, has three personal photos on his campaign media page. The one above is virtually identical to one of the others except the other version is in c...
I had no idea Brooke was still alive. I encountered him in about 1963 when he sat on a panel with the Rev. James Bevel who would now be considered a civil rights agitator of ill-repute -- sort of an Al Sharpton. It was a different time.
Can't Brooke the Stonewalling
Here's a demonstration of a brilliant photo op and political tactic today as Obama honored former GOP Senator Edward Brooke in the Capitol rotunda. Brooke was the first African-American ever elected to the Senate in the modern era. Here's how it sets up politically: 1. Obama centered on Americ...
That is one sad, sick looking woman. I feel kind of sorry for whoever is family with her.
NY23: Repubs Trying Each Other's Souls
Not that I was trying to make Lisa Miller, the DC Tea Party organizer, look bad with the eyes closed. I wanted to show you this specific screen shot, however, given the exact moment she not only holds up Newt's novel, but a flier branding Gingrich a RINO (Repub In Name Only). Rounding out the...
I don't know if it is "realistic" but if we are serious about our agendas, we need to keep demanding that the President push on with the matters he campaigned on. That seems realistic to me.
Otherwise we are acquiescing in the view that democracy is just theater. This may be true, but we can't afford to submit quietly to being necessary extras in the games of elites.
Latin Songs, page A16
I was interested in the juxtaposition between these two photos at opposite ends of page 16 in this morning's NYT print edition. The top photo accompanied the article "Immigration Rally Draws Thousands" and marks a rally in DC yesterday advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. The...
Great pic. I think you understand the significance rightly. Too bad Hillary happened to be looking down, pouty at that instant. Don't know if that catches anything real. She seems a worthy team player.
Back At The Center of the World
I don't get the sense the media or the American people really grasped the magnitude of what took place yesterday at the U.N. Less than a year after America and the world were finally extricated from the tyranny of George "Coalition of One" Bush, his distain for diplomacy, and his abuse of the ...
This bit of what you wrote is brave: I have always believed that the private sector is more efficient and better at getting things done than the government but I now believe that in the case of health care other countries are right and we are wrong. All of us are wrong sometimes (even me!) and it is hard to say so.
Shannon: mostly when I read what Canadians say about their health system, they like it and think whatever waiting they have to do is reasonable. See, for example, this Canadian oped article: http://bit.ly/1bH3tG.
I'm in Favor of Health Care Reform!
I'm going to do something today that I haven't done in the almost five years that I have been blogging. I am going to take a political stand. Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By asked that elder bloggers stand up and be counted about where they stand on health care. I am for health care reform for th...
Congratulations on selling in this market. I hope you enjoy Portland. My partner was living there when we got together 30 years ago and we both liked it.
And I trust you'll figure out where to go with a new approach to blogging!
Little Red Hen Flies Big Apple Coop...
They said it could not be done. Selling one's own apartment in Manhattan in 2009--sans real estate broker. But as other unexpected things might happen (chickens fly late at night when no one's looking), we now have a happy buyer, a contract, and a closing date. In the interest of transpare...
As a liberal at the time, it wasn't so much Clinton's Sista Soulja moment as when he executed the retarded guy that got to me.
Be that as it may, Ignatius is a dick.
Scared, impotent white guys. Part One.
Raised on a New York Times op-ed page that featured Anthony Lewis, Scotty Reston, and Russell Baker (and some other guy who used to write columns about words and grammar and such for the Sunday magazine section as well), I used to think that to rise in the ranks of the elite thinkers and pundits...
Exactly -- the ball and chain of Afghanistan will likely sink this hopeful Presidency. Also probably Pakistan. There is no military solution. And covering for the lawbreaking (joining in it?) goes right along with the military adventure.
Very appropriate to see the holdover Secretary of War upstaging the blithe young President.
The Effect Of Withholding Terror Photos: The Front Man
One problem for Obama -- in refusing to release pictorial documentation of torture from the Bush "terror war" era (after having committed to doing so) -- is that, visually, it is not a zero-sum game. What it does in its place is evoke and encourage other visual narratives that inevitably shap...
Exactly my response!
Your Turn: Tuesday Would Have Been His 21st Birthday
Are these Dover images just getting more creative now that many bodies have returned, or is there more being said here? How do you read Chip Somodevilla's photo? (image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. caption: Soldiers carried a flag-draped transfer case containing the remains of United Stat...
With Jody, I imagine Obama has read Galeano. He seems too broadly thoughtful a guy not to have. Open Veins of Latin America is the classic, beautifully written, statement of the wrongs done to Latin America by US supported rapacious market capitalism, originally published in 1971. Galeano is one of the premier writers of the southern hemisphere, expressive of that continent's rage, pain -- and beauty.
If Obama was paying any attention to current affairs the 80s, he has read Galeano.
Your Turn: Reading Matter
As the weekend's Obama-Chavez show continues, I invite your thoughts on the dynamics in the very interesting body-language here. (Obama won't be played?) Also curious how Clinton, and the "chain" of her necklace, visually factors in.) I like this one also (reacting to the pitc...
Guess the idea of reducing/doing away with nukes makes The Economist anxious -- and they insist on sharing.
The Economist: A World Without Nuclear Weapons
RT: Economist cover less impressive for mushroom cloud than Obama anti-nuke pledge. Maybe denial, but I can also see a tree. Full text of Obama's speech in Prague.
Nasty looking bunch of old white guys. Thanks to the Bag for finding this.
Bankers On Parade
The CEOs arrived today at the White House alone or escorted by other company executives; some were quickly ushered in through the security gate by Bartlett, while others were forced to go through the usual routine for visitors. Dimon was among the first to arrive and was asked by the guard ...
Has anyone seen the picture the NYT has in its slide show of the backs of 3 apparent Lubovitchers looking comfortably (happily?) at the smoke rising from Gaza? Here's a link.
I find that one even more upsetting than the Sderot students, perhaps because it taps into very European images of "the Jew."
And yes, I do think of Bull Run. And I am appalled.
On The Hilltop
Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more." ... Sderot residents — some of...
Just want to note that if I were there, I'd probably be taking the same sorts of pics, rubble and victims framed by the holes blown in buildings, but they've become cliched.
Unfortunately, over the years all images of the destruction wrought by modern militarys in overcrowded cities have come to look pretty much alike. It is very hard to capture visually the unremitting, daily violence that lies behind these events. But it is that undramatic grinding away at Palestinian humanity that hardens support for Hamas. And while the fears of Israelis seem close to insane given the balance of power, those fears must explain the willingness to inflict so much humiliation and pain upon the weak. But all this is so hard to capture visually...
Gaza With The Sound Off
Clearly, the media-scape represents a vital, if not decisive front in contemporary warfare. To the extent this image of a Palestinian looking out the window in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp evokes a television screen, the intimation is that Israel has perceptually lost this war as a result of ...
Again, as in other war coverage, we Americans are shielded from the human carnage, the shredded bodies, the guts spewed out. Other peoples get to see those images -- why shouldn't we?
I haven't known quite what to say about Gaza; it all seems such a mindless re-enactment of past atrocities, Lebanon 2006, Jenin, etc. But I have put an ugly picture of dead, dismembered humans at the head of my not very original Gaza post, because that is what all this means.
War Should Be So Beautiful
One thing I'm seeing in the NYT visual Gaza coverage, especially in the print edition, is an attempt to apply "fair balance." These two images, for example, mirrored each other in yesterday's print edition, both spanning five columns on facing pages (A10 and 11). The photos themselves couldn'...
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