We (heart) Hinchley

"Media reform is the most important issue confronting our democratic republic and the people of our country," Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said at the Free Press National Media Reform Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee last weekend. "This is a critical moment in history that may determine the future of our country...maybe forever."

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Indeed. The major 'news' networks Fox especially, and the radio dial, have become a propaganda arm of the Republican Right. Hinchley is a strong supporter of the Fairness Doctrine:

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Hinchey faults the mainstream media for failing to tell Americans the truth about "an administration in Washington that has falsified information to people about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an illegal and unjustified attack perpetrated on Iraq. How was it that Congress voted to give the President that authority? And how was it that so many people just bought into it when Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and whatever weapons they had were given to them by the Reagan administration?"

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Hinchey believes the takeover of the U.S. media has been carefully calculated by the "political right wing," starting with the abolition in 1987 of the Fairness Doctrine, which was originally adopted in 1949 in reaction to the rise of global fascism prior to World War II.

"Fascist government dominated discussions in Europe. They could now broadcast all over and control all information going out. That's how they took over governments in Spain and Italy," Hinchey recalled. "The U.S. said the airways should be owned by everyone."

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It's refreshing to see one of our reps take such a strong stand but then many Dems have grown testicles since Nov. 7. Read the whole report at Raw Story.

Big tip o' the Brain to Avedon Carol for the link.

Good news

I've been relating how crazy my off-line life is, namely with friends' and relatives' health problems. Well last night, as I got in from work, Mrs. F read me an email that took a big load off. Though she and her husband asked me not to blog about their ordeal (they are regular readers of the Brain), my dear friend, who's been undergoing chemo and radiation treatments for close to a year for throat and lung cancer, got word yesterday that her latest PET and CAT scans showed the cancer in remission. 3 months ago we were preparing for the worst and hope was a fleeting thing. She's suffered so much through the treatments and their side effects and now the door to the future has been reopened. An extraordinary thing. She is 46 years old and now she can do some living again.

State-of-the-Union 2007

Thanks to K.T. for the original image.

R.

Just cool ...

Touch-driven interface.

Sad ...

Via Jeff in comments. 5 years ago, everybody would have been running around with their hair on fire. Now, does anyobdy believe this? They've lied to us so much, people don't give a shit anymore.

Update:

Larisa has more probable propaganda.

Bush's Push

It's kind of a slow news day so far, so here's some history.

Not too long ago I made a brief comment somewhere that the current Middle East mess can easily be traced directly to a pistol shot in Sarajevo 92 years ago. This piece at TomDispatch likens Bush's Iraq escalation to "the Big Push" by the English at The Battle of the Somme in 1916, and goes on to flesh out my comment a little.

Shorter "Big Push": it didn't work then, it ain't gonna work now. Go read it anyway. History is important. Take a lunch.

Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it's like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.

There are huge differences, of course, between the First World War and the current fighting in Iraq. But, even beyond the optimistic talk of the Big Push, there is another eerie resemblance between the two conflicts. In both cases, a great power was itching to launch an invasion, and seized on a handy excuse to do so. For the Bush administration, of course, the excuse was September 11th. From a long string of insider revelations, we know that its top officials were hungry to invade Iraq, looked eagerly for the most far-fetched connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and - even then not finding them - invaded anyway, while continuing to vaguely imply the connections were there.

Something remarkably similar happened in 1914. Austria-Hungary was a shaky empire of restless ethnic minorities ruled by a German-speaking elite in Vienna. Nearly half the population was Slavic, including many Serbs. As a result, the imperial rulers in Vienna felt threatened by the very existence on their border of the independent nation of Serbia, small though it was. They were determined to invade it, possibly partition it, and so stamp out pan-Slavic and Serb nationalism once and for all.

Part of that remaking, ironically, was the post-war cobbling together of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into what was first a British protectorate and then, after 1932, independent Iraq.

There is a final resemblance between the present bloodshed there and the First World War. Both conflicts were fought for a curiously shifting set of noble-sounding goals. With Iraq, the Bush administration has tried on for size finding weapons of mass destruction, liberating the Iraqis, combating Islamist terrorism, and installing democracy in the Arab world. In the First World War, the Allies initially talked of coming to the defense of innocent, invaded little Belgium, then of defeating German militarism and defending the British and French way of life. Once Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the conflict, he spoke of "the war to end all wars."

It didn't. The humiliation of the losers and the catastrophic loss of life on both sides did nothing to end all wars and much to light the fuses of later ones - especially the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. The longer the war in Iraq goes on, and the more American troops are planted by Big Pushes in a highly combustible part of the world, the more we will continue to stoke a widespread humiliation and anger whose consequences are already guaranteed to haunt us for decades to come.

Those are just a couple of the history lessons that this idiot administration failed to learn. There's a lot more. I'll leave Saddam Hussein's and the Ba'athist Party's fascination with and ties to Nazism for some other time. Suffice it to say that they saw it as a way to get out from under British occupation and get rid of the Jews at the same time.

The Middle East was all about oil then, too.

The Height of Hypocrisy

National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2007
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

declared by the man who lied to and deceived the country to get support for an illegal war that has cost the lives of almost 3,200 American soldiers, as many as 650,000 Iraqi civilians. Has maimed at least 22,000 more military personnel and who knows how many Iraqis. His actions have unleashed sectarian violence in Iraq that is currently taking 3,000 lives a month. All this and he can, with a straight face (probably with a slight smirk, though), sign a declaration of "National Sanctity of Human Life Day". Truly the height of hypocrisy. He may not care much about human beings, but at least he is working to make the world safer for stem cells.

R.

The grunts know ...

A good article over at Huffpo:

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"Hack's" [the late Col. David Hackworth] pessimistic assessment was influenced by his own experiences fighting North Vietnamese guerillas but this "soldier's soldier" was also debriefing his beloved Iraq War "grunts." For the past couple of years, I've interviewed scores of American soldiers, asking them about their experiences in Iraq. I too heard accounts from these GIs that indicated that early on, the hearts and minds campaign to win over the Iraqi people was pretty much lost and with it, the war.

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For posterity's sake, I said this 2 1/2 years ago:

Personally, I think the time for winning the hearts and minds has long passed, the opportunity squandered.

Any Australian Readers Here?

Support this guy any way you can.

Qantas bans passenger over anti-Bush t-shirt

"January 22, 2007: Qantas turns away passenger over terror T-shirt - Qantas is refusing to let an Australian man board a plane from Melbourne to the United Kingdom because he insists on wearing a T-shirt depicting US President George Bush as a terrorist. Alan Jasson said he was defending freedom of speech through his insistence on wearing the T-shirt. Qantas says the t-shirt was offensive to other passengers, but Mr Jasson has told the ABC he's considering court action..."

R.

The dog ate my homework ...

Didn't know excuses like this worked when you got older:

... This committee expected to be briefed on the long-awaited NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] by an official from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates NIEs by gathering input from all of the nation's various intelligence agencies. But the NIC official turned up empty-handed and told the committee that the intelligence community hadn't been able to complete the NIE because of the many demands placed upon it by the Bush Administration to help prepare the new military strategy on Iraq...

I got a feeling that if we knew what was in the NIE, no one would me making the case for escalation, not even Holy Joe and St. John*. You can safely assume, once it comes out, things in Iraq and Afghanistan are even worse than we've been led to believe.

*Link via Atrios.

Get this ...

Shakes says Preznit Save the Zygotes has declared this day National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

I wonder if anybody told these guys:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four U.S. soldiers and a Marine were killed during combat in Anbar province, the Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, the military reported Sunday. The five newly reported deaths on Saturday raised that day's toll among American forces to at least 24, the third deadliest single day for U.S. troops since the war began in March 2003.

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A State of the Union Speech That Would Guarantee Bi-Partisan Support

Bushie and Flashie

Rozius Unbound

MoDo suggests a few more books that the Crawford Clown needs to read.

George Bush may have lost his swagger, but Harry Flashman hasn't.

Maybe the president presiding over a quicksand empire got a vicarious thrill out of the fictional Victorian brigadier general who roamed from Chillianwalla to Isandlwana to Abyssinia at the height of the British Empire, always making conquests in love andwar despite his cowardly, caddish behavior.

In our continuing odyssey of discovery through the president's reading list, we learned that he perused two of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, "Flashman at the Charge" and 'Flash for Freedom."

"Flashman" is based on a devastating British defeat during one of their wars in Afghanistan. After invading Kabul in 1839 and setting up an unpopular puppet shah, the British trekked through the snowy mountains to Jalalabad. Of more than 16,000 troops and camp followers, only one doctor survived; the rest were picked off in ambushes by Afghan warriors.

The lesson is that Afghanistan is a no man's land that can't be tamed by gringos. The British Empire, on which the sun never set, never succeeded in occupying Afghanistan even as it engaged in the Great Game with the Russians for influence there. It was terra incognita and terra fuggedaboutit.

"Eventually, I suppose, we'll get out of Iraq and pretend it's been a success when it's just a mess. ... "Afghanistan is slightly different. You cannot ever win. When you consider the Russians put in more than 100,000 troops and couldn't do it. There's only one way to deal with the Afghans, and that's to buy them."

Mr. Fraser recites the end of Kiplings "The Ballad of the King's Mercy":

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told,
He has opened his mouth to the North and the South,
They have stuffed his mouth with gold...
and sweet his favours are...
from Balkh to Kandahar.

"It wouldn't do Bush any harm to read Kipling," he concluded before signing off.

It wouldn't have hurt Bush to read Kipling's work about the British mess in the Middle East either. Just one example, from "Mesopotamia" (1917):

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us; the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide--
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Go see A Complete Collection Of Poems By Rudyard Kipling. I know you'll find many you like, and many that are as totally applicable today as they were 90 and more years ago.

Quote of the Day

Two, very related.

1. Preznit Smirky McStupid via Carpetbagger:

You don't want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls.

2. Former FEMA head Michael Brown via Scout Prime:

Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it.

Just sayin'.

A Reminder

This image from Life Books 100 Photographs That Changed the World depicts Hiroshima 3 weeks after the bomb. It also serves as a reminder of where we may be heading if Bush and company continue unfettered.

R.

Fairness ...

What the Fairness Doctrine will do:

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But the Fairness Doctrine isn't going to kill Rush or Hannity. With tens of millions of listeners and a dozen years head start, are they really in jeopardy? This is about something much bigger. The Fairness Doctrine would bring new competition to the radio airwaves at all levels all across this country. It wouldn't keep a show on that wasn't any good either. But even wingnuts like Rush and Sean would actually have to offer facts amidst their snide, condescending decent into propaganda, while having guests on to offer the opposite side. That's just too much work, especially for Rush, who hasn't broken a sweat, except when he was in trouble for allegedly doctor shopping pills, or when he got caught with somebody else's penis pills after his single man's holiday to an underage capital of the world. [my ems]

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The airwaves belong to us, ladies and gentlemen, not the corporate monopolies who are run by big conservative campaign donors.

Update:

And this is why the Fairness Doctrine has to be reinstated:

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Democrats do not call for an end to the war because they're certain Republicans will try to blame them for the debacle and they're certain the "journalism" corps will happily go along. The mighty Wurlitzer of right-wing radio, conservative press and filthy television will breathlessly enable Republicans and endlessly repeat the Democrats stabbed our troops and the country in the back, losing us the war.

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They're simply being rational political actors, to call for end to the war could very well mean the end to their careers. CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, thanks so much. This insane war continues this very day because our "journalism" enables Bush and Republicans to get away with it.

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A Progressive Call To Action

Hey folks! We are addressing the wrong issues and arguing the wrong arguments.

There is only one overriding issue that the Congress of the United States should be addressing today and that is how to get George W. Bush and Dick Cheney out of the White House before they set the world in flames. I would like to see a full impeachment process that would carefully lay all of their crimes on the table, but we may not have time for that. A declaration of incompetence, and I think a good case could be made under the provisions of the 22nd? amendment, might be a reasonable first step but that would leave Cheney with his hands on the nuclear levers for at least a short period. Also not a desireable scenario. I'll leave it to the folks who know the minituae of the Constitution to figure out the steps necessary. What we "ordinary" folks can do is this, contact your Representative(http://www.house.gov, use the form at the top of the page), contact both your Senators (http://senate.gov,use the link at the upper right), put pressure on your state legislature (action can be initiated from the state level), contact newspapers, contact TV and radio stations. In other words, make noise, raise your voices to a level where they can't be ignored. Blog, if not in your own blog, comment in other blogs. The overriding goal is to get Bush and Cheney out of the equation as fast as possible and it will be done if we let those with the power to do it know, in clear, loud voices, that we want it done. In every poll published lately, the overwhelming majority of Americans are unhappy with the way things are going. Raise your voices, folks and raise them loud and often. The goal is Bush and Cheney out (and hopefully in shackles) before this year is out. From that, all else flows. Let's work for that like we've never worked for anything, then we can turn our attention to the 2008 elections.

R.

They might not like our 'democracy' ...

But they sure learned about TV programming from us:

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This is al-Zawraa TV, a 24-hour satellite station that lionises Iraq's insurgency to the drumbeat of Saddam-era martial music. It is a crude and dizzying mix of images and videos harvested from jihadi websites - and a cult hit. There are grainy loops of car bombs and mortar attacks interspersed with images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and bloodied children. "Mujahideen" are seen training. Clips of Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 are thrown in for good measure.

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Killing Americans is a cult hit. Time to leave, though we should send the judges from American Idol there before we do.

Link via BuzzFlash.

I'm Here

A big thank you to Fixer and Gordon for the invite. I will try to inform, incite and entertain (in no particular order). I have a lot to say about current events and hope to be pissed-off enough to actually post some of it here.

Here's a capsule bio:

"I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and now live in a small farming village in Lower Austria. Professionally, I am an independent software developer. I have been involved in one aspect or another of software development since 1966.

After a stint as a civil servant with the U.S. Navy and the U.S. General Servicees Administration, I moved to private industry and started developing software in 1966. I’ve never looked back, I love the industry. I currently develop in Java, but my background encompasses C, Delphi (Object Pascal) and assembler development. I’m now moving into web development, mainly using PHP and Ruby on Rails.

When not in front of the monitor I can be found with my wife (also a software developer and amateur photographer), with camera slung over shoulder and tripod in hand looking for something at which to point the camera. We both also enjoy cycling (and, when in shape, running) and reading just about anything that someone has seen fit to print."

So that's me. I like to feel that, having lived outside the U.S. for 20 years, I bring a unique perspective to U.S. politics. I hope what I have to say will keep you interested enough to come back.

R.

Welcome

Please give a warm welcome to Jersey Guy who'll be taking up blogging duties here soon. Considering his background (I'll let him fill you in if he wants), I think he'll bring a good perspective and worldview to this blog. He's also a regular reader so he knows what we're about. From corresponding with him, I've seen evidence he's as pissed off as the rest of us are about the current situation and that's a good thing. I think he'll do fine.

Welcome to the team and good luck.