April 13, 2012

The investigaton I want to see...

While we are all relieved that - through public pressure - george zimmerman will get his day in court, I truly hope the feds are investigating the original "investigation" and what caused the locals to overule the detective and not charge him. what phone calls were made by his dad? why was said dad at the crime scene - the same crime scene where witnesses had their statements "corrected"?

April 8, 2012

Not since the New Deal

have two candidates embodied the parties' philosophical divide as much as Romney and Obama


A revived conservative movement dating back to the Fifties has succeeded in locking the Republicans into the philosophy of possessive individualism that was always a strand in the American story. In turn, they have portrayed the Democrats as the collectivist Other. This election the Democrats, or at least their presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has decided he can no longer duck the fight. In a fiery speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week Obama put it baldly: “This is not just another run of the mill political debate. I’ve said it’s the defining issue of our time and I believe it. What leaders in both parties have traditionally understood is that the [Democratic government programs] aren’t part of some scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another. They are expressions of the fact that we are one nation.”
.........

To the Republican ideology, American politics since the New Deal at least is a usurpation, not a genuine expression of American character. Not coincidentally, constitutional lawyers around the country are holding their collective breath waiting to see if an ideologically conservative majority of the Supreme Court will reverse the health care law and roll back the understanding of the constitution that made the New Deal possible as a first step in restoring the old order.

The election is the second.

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/obama_v_romney_the_philosopher_candidates/

April 8, 2012

The “NGOs” that spooked Egypt

History shows that the country is right to regard some U.S.-backed aid organizations warily

Back in the day, the CIA secretly funded, sometimes created, and often ran supposedly private, nongovernmental organizations to make propaganda and provide cover for covert operations all over the world. ........

...the Reagan administration and a bipartisan majority of Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. The new law stipulated that NED would work largely through three newly created “core grantees” – the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) – and the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which had a long history of working closely with the CIA.....

So what did these not exactly nongovernmental organizations do in Egypt?...

Will Egyptians – and Americans – believe that a U.S. government-funded “NGO” does not share information with U.S. officials or take its marching orders from them? For many, it’s a hard sell given the nearly 70 years in which the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have made covert use of real and purpose-built “civil society” groups.

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/the_ngos_that_spooked_egypt/

March 30, 2012

America’s bankrupt morality

It's not just Wall Street. Every profession from medicine to academia has been corrupted by our money obsession

First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness.....
........
Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington.....
.....

And then, Wall Street blew up the global economy...
.......

What I didn’t understand was that these weren’t cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them. Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today.
.......

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/29/americas_bankrupt_morality/

March 22, 2012

monstering

Mark Lewis is the lawyer for more than 80 alleged phone-hacking victims. Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant questioned Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, an executive and former newspaper editor at Murdoch's News International umbrella corporation, during parliamentary hearings. And Nick Davies is the reporter for The Guardian, the paper that originally broke the phone-hacking story. Some of them were put under surveillance by private investigators hired by News International. Others were intimidated, says Bergman, through a process called "monstering," in which Murdoch's papers singled out individuals and attacked their character on a daily basis.
"[Chris Bryant] tells the story that at some time [after questioning Brooks in Parliament in 2003] he runs into her at a party, and she starts to say unkind things to him, that she knows that he's gay," says Bergman. "Then soon after, he gets 'monstered' by the tabloids, where they single out an individual and go after him day after day.
"They began to show pictures of him in his underwear — any pictures they could find of him being somewhat compromising — talking about him being a member of Parliament, being gay, etc. And leaning on him, and, he thought for a while, endangering his political career."

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/148610399/as-murdochs-scandal-unravels-many-implicated

March 22, 2012

Racial Tension Runs Through Sanford's Roots

In Sanford, Fla., historic wrongs against the local black community go back a long way. The memory of those events is still fresh, and they are getting another airing in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, which protesters have called racially motivated......
.........
Willie Saunders grew up in the area in the 1940s and '50s. Saunders had a paper route back then and still remembers his boss at the Sanford Herald. The older white man refused to touch him.

"You know, I didn't think about it then. I was a kid," he says. "Every time I would come to give him the monies for the route, he would say, 'Put it on the counter, put it on the table.' And ... when he gave me my money, he put on the table."

.........

Valada Parker Flewellyn collected stories for the book Images of America: African Americans of Sanford. She says in 1946 baseball legend Jackie Robinson was run out of town during spring training. Local authorities did not want to see blacks and whites playing together

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/149164373/racial-tension-runs-through-sanfords-roots

March 22, 2012

Allen West On Trayvon Martin Case: 'This Is An Outrage'

Florida Rep. Allen West, a high-profile conservative and one of two African-American Republicans currently serving in Congress, lambasted the local authorities in the handling of the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

"I have sat back and allowed myself time to assess the current episode revealing itself in Sanford, Florida involving the shooting of 17-year-old Treyvon Martin. First of all, if all that has been reported is accurate, the Sanford Police Chief should be relieved of his duties due to what appears to be a mishandling of this shooting in its early stages. The US Navy SEALS identified Osama Bin Laden within hours, while this young man laid on a morgue slab for three days. The shooter, Mr Zimmerman, should have been held in custody and certainly should not be walking free, still having a concealed weapons carry permit. From my reading, it seems this young man was pursued and there was no probable cause to engage him, certainly not pursue and shoot him….against the direction of the 911 responder. Let’s all be appalled at this instance not because of race, but because a young American man has lost his life, seemingly, for no reason. I have signed a letter supporting a DOJ investigation. I am not heading to Sanford to shout and scream, because we need the responsible entities and agencies to handle this situation from this point without media bias or undue political influences. This is an outrage."

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/allen-west-on-trayvon-martin-case-this-is?ref=fpblg

March 21, 2012

serious question about trayvon, zimmerman and stand your ground

ok, i have raised this in other threads with very little response but:

if trayvon did in fact initiate the physical altercation, as zimmerman alleges AFTER zimmerman chased him down and illegally detained him, as zimmerman admits, doesn't the stand your ground law apply to trayvons actions and not zimmerman's?

wouldn't trayvon be the one who had the right to stand his ground under florida law against someone committing a felony against his person?

March 21, 2012

well now here is the "no-s***" story of the day

Trayvon Martin shooting: George Zimmerman dreamed of being a cop
Written by
Rene Lynch
Los Angeles Times - ?44 minutes ago?

By Rene Lynch When a rash of burglaries and other crimes broke out in and around a gated community in Sanford, Fla., residents wanted some form of protection.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-george-zimmerman-trayvon-martin-20120320,0,1508238.story

Didn't everyone know a guy like this in high school?

March 19, 2012

back to work tomorrow: or

how I stopped worrying and love high stakes standardized testing.

Tomorrow I will begin a whole week of prep for the starr test part one (writing). The ptbs want all attention on that. I will sneak in some social studies and science as writing cues but it will not make up for actually teaching the concepts.

This shit is out of control.