1. “The Awards!
The good, the bad, and the downright ugly
The Sullivan Award goes to the person who brazenly condemns others for shortcomings he (or she) epitomizes, and who blames others for the consequences of policies that he (or she) once loudly advocated, and now is desperately trying to run away from. That Sullivan has truly earned the award that’s named after his sorry self seems beyond dispute. After all, here is someone who now disdains the “excesses” of the Bush years – the warmongering, the bloodthirstiness, the hair-trigger belligerence – and yet called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Iraq because he had talked himself into believing (on the strength of zero evidence) that the anthrax attacks were masterminded by Saddam Hussein. ”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/12/22/the-awards/
2. What a surprise:
“Guantánamo Closure Delayed Another Year”
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/23/guantanamo-closure-delayed-another-year/
3. “Sartre Meets Afghanistan: Obama’s ‘No Exit’ Strategy”
http://original.antiwar.com/arianna-huffington/2009/12/22/sartre-meets-afghanistan/
4. “The Troops Protect Our Freedom, and Other Lies I Learned in School”
5. “Hillary Clinton: We’ll Still Be In Afghanistan in 50 or 60 Years
Remember also that – while the U.S. government has promised to withdraw by December 31, 2011 from Iraq – the U.S. is building numerous permanent military bases in that country. (see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this). So talk is cheap.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/hillary-clinton-well-still-be-in.html
Conventional wisdom is that the Internet is responsible for destroying the profits of traditional print media like newspapers.
But Michael Moore and Sean Paul Kelley are blaming the demise of newspapers on simple greed.
…
There has been talk of bailing out newspapers for months.
But the newspapers have largely driven themselves into the ground with their never-ending drive for higher profits, which led to a reduction in news bureaus, investigation and real reporting, and an increase in reliance on government and corporate press releases.
…
But as Dan Rather pointed out in July, the quality of journalism in the mainstream media has eroded considerably, and news has been corporatized, politicized, and trivialized…
No wonder trust in the news media is crumbling.
Indeed, people want change – that’s why we voted for Obama – but as Newseek’s Evan Thomas admitted :
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring….
“If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am). . . .”
So traditional newspapers are also losing readers to the extent they are writing puff pieces instead of writing the kinds of things people want to read: hard-hitting stories about what is going on in the country and the world.
…
If there are bailouts of the newspaper industry, will the government take ownership of the media corporations, as it has in AIG and some of the giant banks?
Will that – in turn – lead to a situation in which the government representatives subtly and innocently censors anti-government stories? After all, the object of criticism might be the employer or friend of the government representatives on the newspaper board.
Indeed, the most cynical view is that this could eventually open the door to Pravda-style government control of media.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/why-newspapers-are-losing-money-reason.html
7. “Curacao Is U.S. Spy Base Against Venezuela”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16649
8. And another reason to hope for the destruction of mainstream media – WAY too much consolidation:
“At present, the global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:
William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group
Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel
John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing
Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton
Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.
Given an interlocked media network of connections with defense and other economic sectors, big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. Media critic and historian Norman Solomon described the close financial and social links between the boards of large media-related corporations and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment: “One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media.”[vii] The Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) provides an example of the interlocked military-industrial-media complex. This Act specifically asks the directorate to “develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States including information technology and telecommunications systems (including satellites) emergency preparedness communications systems.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16647
9. “The NYT’s view of “journalistic objectivity”
The New York Times will frequently label what other governments do as “torture” but steadfastly refuses to use that term for what the American government did. It promiscuously accuses foreign countries of “human rights atrocities” but self-righteously objects when that term is applied to our own government even after it abducts, disappears, lawlessly imprisons, and tortures people even to the point of death. It accords extreme deference and respect to the claims of government officials even when those claims are patently false. In other words, The New York Times‘ journalistic practices create — either by design or effect — the false impression that torture and human rights abuses are things that other governments do, but not our own. Who is it exactly, then, who is departing from “journalistic objectivity”?”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
10. ”
Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises–the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.
In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.
All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.
Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.
The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two US senators, a US representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.
Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”
…
Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people. The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.
Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his
affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of US civil liberty. Americans don’t seem to mind that “their” government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago–simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.
According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both US and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court. Apparently, the brave citizens of the “sole remaining superpower” are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.
With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed. ”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24245.htm
11. ““The white civilized man (is) the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” – (Herman Melville, 1840s)
In 1841, Melville sailed aboard the Acushnet, a whaling vessel, on a three year trip to the South Seas. By July of 1842, Melville and a shipmate, Toby Greene, jumped ship revolting against the tyrannical powers that brutalized the crew by oppressing these men of many races. Having witnessed American warships firing their guns at naked islanders in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii and watched “rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals” seizing the “depopulated land” from the natives, reducing them to starving “interlopers” in their own country, he realized that the superior white Christian civilization epitomized absolute savagery and that cannibals treated others with more humanity than these self-identified enlightened men. That understanding of the civilized white man struck me with its absoluteness, its certainty, its expressive force the moment I opened my file of little four year old Kaukab Al Dayah, whose tender face rests on top of the rubble of her home, an unsuspecting victim of white Zionist brutality that delivered her family a missile as a Christmas gift just over a year ago. (See Salaman, “The true Jew is the European Ashkenazi … of whitish appearance,” in Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People). (To see the picture of Kaukab Al Dayah, google her name. Two sites have photos: Getty Images and Laweranceofcyberia).”
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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