Photographers expelled, and worse, from NOLA...signs?

[Drum]

This is to me the most chilling aspect of things today...the ability for our government's thugs to forbid the press to cover news, this time when our battlefield is in America. DailyKos (www.dailykos.com) has several diaries up now about photogs being roughed up and having equipment confiscated or destroyed when trying to cover the awful situation in New Orleans. They---BushCo---have gotten away with so much oppression and suppression on other fronts (no coffin photos of war dead, Gitmo, AbuG, rendition) and the now-familiar mechanism comes home to our shores and the song sounds the same: Dither, blame, deny, lie, threaten.

I'm most scared about this, as anymore in this Repub-controlled government the only protection or salvation Americans have against corrupt and wicked governance---short of uprisings and revolts---is the press. Even the bought-and-paid-for right-wing pressies had a hard time towing the line last week, as the terrible truth was there for all to see. The truth getting out can awaken our humanity, but the current climate of information management (and worse) is totally opposed to this, and it frightens me, makes me think of early fascist steps in other countries through history. We must be able to see, and to hear from, the affected people in crisis spots. Once our lifeline to the truth is cut, we are adrift and vulnerable to the loudest voice, or one that plays on our fears...

Couple this domestic blackout of important news with the DU posts on the 9/11 Pentagon Party...are you, like me, flashing back to the big military pageants of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Mussilini's Italy?

I'm seriously grieving...lets pursue this clamping down on reportage, even if such record-keeping only aquits us in the eyes of our children when they look up and ask us how America became this way.

[Dora]

1. This is what cell phone cameras were invented for. n/t