The Battle of Portland. Coming to a town near you!

An impressive overview from a journalist reporting at the protests in Portland.

Update:

Locusts

Locusts are grasshopper were-beasts.

Two reddit posts of interest:  what one fact pisses you off and what scam do you think more people should know about.

NRA President’s Son Convicted For Road Rage Shooting, Nears End Of 10-Year Jail Sentence

How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war

Wow!  A journalist actually practicing journalism.  This Is What Happens When A Journalist Forces A Banker To Actually Answer A Question

Jaw-dropping quote of the day:

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was. 

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

So good to hear in this era of bad news..

Richard Engle is safe.  Thank goodness.

News you never read about

Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action.

Did you know?

1. More US Soldiers Committed Suicide Than Died in Combat

2. US Military Manipulates the Social Media

3. Obama Authorizes International Assassination Campaign

4. Global Food Crisis Expands

Read all 25 of the top censored news you never read or heard about.

News of the World

via Bryan of Why Now?

You can interrupt a Democratic president because....

It shows you're a REAL journalist guy and anyway Republican preznits don't need the aggravation? They can't threaten you with Cheney's secret assassination squad? Republican preznits are special?

Even with the interruptions or non, I can sure tell who actually is presidential, has a grasp of all the facts and nuances, can complete complex sentences, and use big words. And not get testy being interviewed by an asshole. (Or interviewing an asshole.)

God... just listening to Georgie's excuses is nauseating... all of them WRONG. His condescending style of speech, his simplistic view of the world, his platitudes, his sound bites.... I am so glad this man is off the world stage.

Just keep him off.

*edited for stupid grammar.

But our elected officials tell us the truth all the time!

Zachary Roth of TPM explains why some mainstream media fell for the Sanford Spin:

None of these are the biggest crimes in the world, but still: It feels absurd to have to point this out, but politicians and their staffers frequently have reason to dissemble, about issues far more important than an extra-marital affair. Too often, though, the press treats public statements from elected officials' offices -- especially those purporting simply to provide information, like the Appalachian Trail line -- as self-evidently accurate. It's as if, despite everything, some in the press can't quite bring themselves to believe that politicians might try to mislead people.

Part of this is structural. There's almost no acceptable way for a mainstream reporter to explicitly tell readers that the information being put out by a powerful office-holder may be false or misleading. But the only way that this structural flaw will change is if individual reporters are willing to stick out their necks to change it.

Until then, people will read blogs for stories like these.

Exactly. I was driven in great frustration from newspapers and the TV to the internet during the Bush era just because the truth was so obviously NOT what the news was reporting. The mainstream media just hasn't discovered this fact yet, as stunning as that sounds. We want the truth. We can handle it, it's the lies we can't stand.

A president we can laugh with

Not at. What a pleasure and what a relief!

President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Blog sprinkles

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blog.

Prepare to be trampled in every Wal-Mart except New York?

The 401k pirates

Newspaper Narcissism

Pakistan's meltdown:

In the last few days, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Pakistanis have fled to North West Frontier Province, just south of the military operation, according to U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond, citing provincial government data.

Another 300,000 Pakistanis are on the move or expected to flee the fighting, he said Friday.

The massive displacement is a result of "more widespread" fighting between Pakistani forces and Taliban militants as well as people taking "advantage of the partial lifting of curfews to move into safer areas," according to a UNHCR news release.

Those fleeing the recent fighting are in addition to 555,000 previously displaced civilians who have fled their homes in Pakistan's tribal region and North West Frontier Province since August, according to the U.N. agency.

Oh look, Kyrgyzstan is having problems with terrorism too...

The threat posed by Islamic militant groups in Central Asia, especially in the Kyrgyz and Tajik portions of the Ferghana Valley, appears to be growing, according to the US State Department’s recently released annual report on terrorism.

The State Department’s 2008 Country Reports on Terrorism, released April 30, suggest that the membership in Kyrgyzstan of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that the State Department says advocates "the establishment of a borderless, theocratic Islamic state throughout the entire Muslim world," grew from 5,000 in 2006 to 15,000 in 2008.

Words used to describe President Barack Obama.

Maybe we should reconsider the death penalty?:

A cyber hacker who claimed to have stolen the medical records of more than 8.3 million residents of the state of Virginia is demanding 10 million dollars for their return, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The FBI and state officials have confirmed that they are investigating the incident.

The report came a week after someone managed to take over a Virginia Department of Health website that monitors prescriptions to track the sales of controlled substances. The hacker shut down the site and posted a ransom note online, claiming to have stolen and encrypted the data and threatening to sell the data to the highest bidder if authorities did not pay him by Thursday.

"Attention Virgina," the demand read, "In my possession right now are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too."

Abba returns!

Roland Burris doesn't leave!

Bill Moyers with his gentle journalistic style

Pulls no punches. William Black and then Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald.

From the transcript with William Black:

BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.

BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, ‘contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.

BILL MOYERS: The cover up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.

BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

And (same link) the interview with Goodman and Greenwald:

BILL MOYERS: Glenn, what stories are you covering that you think are being ignored by mainstream press?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, let's start with the fact that there is a very widespread perception, one that's growing with more and more revelations, by the day. That what the United States did over the last eight years, in terms of how we detained people, how we interrogated people, how we tortured people and kidnapped them, and shipped them off to black sites, where they were completely disappeared is something that is not only disgraceful, and a fundamental violation of what we claim our political values to be but are crimes. Very serious war crimes. If you look at political discussions that take place on most major television no shows, about that. What you'll find is this implied consensus that Americans don't want their political leaders spending time on investigations and looking to the past. And that's absolutely false. It's a case where public opinion is distorted. Polls show that large numbers of Americans, even 50 percent believe that there should be investigations into whether or not crimes were committed. Because if we don't investigate when our political leaders break the law, it means that there's no rule of law. Look at our policy toward Israel, and this continuous blind support for whatever the Israeli government does. Something that's about to get even more harmful to our interests now that there's a very right wing extremist party with racist factions within the government in Israel. Polls show that if you ask Americans do you think the U.S. Government should be on the side of Israel, on the side of the Palestinians, or should be even-handed? Seventy percent, seven out of ten, will say that the government should be even-handed in that conflict. And yet, that is an opinion that is virtually never heard. Debates about our policy toward Israel is something that is essentially frozen out. You can go across those issues, and find the same dynamic.

BILL MOYERS: I sometimes sense some frustration in both of your voices. And I know that I.F. Stone was often frustrated. I mean, no one dug deeper into government documents than he did. And he saw the difference between the official view of reality, and the reality on the ground. And yet, for all of his exposure of these lies and deceptions and horrors, the Vietnam War raged on another ten years. Do you ever feel futile over the results of what you do?

GLENN GREENWALD: Personally, I actually don't. And, you know, I do think there is a difference. I think that the advent of technology the internet, in particular. And also the collapse of trust that so many Americans have now placed in the political and media institutions, as Amy was saying earlier. Largely, though not exclusively, as a result of how transparent the lies were over Iraq. Have really caused so many more citizens than ever before to question the kind of establishment instruments that have been used for so long to propagandize the citizenry. And to seek out alternative sources of truth. You know, change of this type is always extremely incremental. And it can be kind of imperceptible and very frustratingly slow. But I think it clearly is happening. And the more profound and transparent are the failures of the institutions. The more the citizenry will be open to alternative ways of thinking. The greater the crises are, I think, the more people will seek out opinions that may even five, ten years ago have been entirely excluded. And so, I think when you combine those events with the potency of technology, the advent of bloggers, and alternative media, like what Amy is doing, and the growth of it. I actually feel rather optimistic that the work that we do is paying off.

Thank god for Bill Moyers and real journalism. (Just for fun and the enjoyment of delicious memories, look at how he dealt with 0'Reilly's attack dog):

Where the hell were you guys for the last eight years?

Do you think we're that fucking stupid?

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters explains:

When contrasting the early Clinton and Bush coverage, I noted it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up the emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration. But wouldn't you know it, the press corps' alarm went off right on time for Obama's arrival last week, with the Beltway media taking down off the shelf the dusty set of contentious, in-your-face rules of engagement they practiced during the Clinton years and putting into safe storage the docile, somnambulant guidelines from the Bush era. In other words, one set of rules for Clinton and Obama, another for Bush. One standard for the Democrats; a separate, safer one, for the Republican.

"I don't think there is a honeymoon" for Obama, Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC's World News, announced last week. "The accountability starts immediately." See, accountability suddenly reigns supreme. Just like right after Clinton was sworn in. But Bush in 2001? Not so much.

And there they go again. Haven't they learned ANYTHING?:

The early Clinton and Obama scripts are at times interchangeable (i.e. baseless, negative stories like the cost of Obama's inauguration and the cost of Bill Clinton's haircut). The only part that doesn't fit in with the rest of the mosaic is how the press lovingly treated the Republican in 2001 during his arrival in town.

The media's abrupt transformation last week in terms of greeting the new president -- a transformation that unfolded with great pride and even apparent glee among reporters -- was showcased during the new administration's first White House press briefing, where many reporters, previously comatose during the news-free Bush-era briefings, rose up in anger and demanded answers during a contentious session.

Oh boy oh boy! Gotcha reporting is back!

And the mainstream media wonders why we're leaving them in droves.

We're not stupid. They are.

For those who mock journalism

Reporting the truth is dangerous work and there are many who will kill to keep people from learning what they are doing.

Copied this post completely from Boing Boing:

A documentary filmmaker whose work we've been following for Boing Boing's video projects sent us this note today:

A man I knew was gunned down last week in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. He was an editor and journalist, and he was murdered because he told the truth in a place where the truth runs you afoul of murderers. For those of us who knew him, and know Sri Lanka, his death was not a matter of how but when. He knew it too, and before he died he wrote the piece that I have attached here. I am asking you all to take just a few minutes to read it. As a favor. Thank you.

Here are the first few grafs of the piece, which were the last words written for publication by Lasantha Wickrematunge of The Sunday Leader:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

And Then They Came For Me (Sunday Leader)

See also this page where news about his death, and remembrances by colleagues at the paper, have been posted: "A deadly drive to work."

And here, news about protests following his killing.

So for those who will try to demean actual journalism (rather than the stenography we have put up with from our press these last eight years), remember that many journalists have died violently these last few years trying to bring us the truth.

War destroys you from the inside

And not only soldiers.

Michael Ware:

“I am not the same fucking person,” he tells me. “I am not the same person. I don’t know how to come home.”

[snip]

To begin to understand where he’s coming from, Ware wants you to see a movie. He filmed it. It’s just after midnight during the second battle of Fallujah, November 2004. The marine unit he’s hooked up with has cornered six insurgents inside a house, and with no air support available, the only way to take them out is person-to-person. Staff Sergeant David Bellavia doesn’t like the sound of that — odds are one of his men, or he, will die in the pitch-black of an unfamiliar house — but he knows he can’t just let these guys go. So he asks for volunteers to go with him: Three men raise their hands, followed by Ware, who as a reporter (then for Time, now for CNN) is the only one without a gun or night goggles, and still can’t explain why he went along. He just couldn’t not.

Ware flips on his video camera and creeps into the house six feet behind Bellavia. His device is picking up nothing but darkness and the slow, creaking sound of footsteps. Then, light, blinding light. Bullets ping around the living room, and before he knows what’s going on, two bodies drop. Bellavia has knocked off the first of them. For the next hour — until all six insurgents are carried out dead from the house — Ware captures that same pattern of blackness and near silence (in the background you can hear the insurgents chanting, “Allahu Akbar,  Allahu Akbar”) pierced by gunfire and screaming.

Ware believes he recorded the perfect war experience that night, a snapshot you can get only from terrifying proximity. He dreams of renting out a theater and subjecting an audience to it in full surround sound; that way people would know what it’s really like over there. “It’s my firm belief that we need to constantly jar the sensitivities of the people back home,” he says. “War is a jarring experience. Your kids are living it out, and you’ve inflicted it upon 20-odd million Iraqis. And when your brothers and sons and mates from the football team come home, and they ain’t quite the same, you have an obligation to sit for three and a half minutes and share something of what it’s like to be there.”

There is no dog in this race

In fact there are no dogs, no race. There is nothing there:

AP reporter Liz Sidoti, fresh off a stint delivering donuts to John McCain, pens an "analysis" of the Blagojevich indictment that begins: "President-elect Barack Obama hasn't even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him."

Then, in the very next sentence, Sidoti admits "Obama isn't accused of anything." And that pretty much sets the tone for the "analysis" -- ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, followed by concessions that he, you know ... isn't.

Sidoti writes: "But the fact that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a fellow Democrat, has been charged with trying to sell Obama's now-vacant Senate post gives political opponents an opening to try to link him to the scandal."

Well, sure. Republicans can try to link him to the scandal. Have they succeeded? Are there actual substantive connections between Obama and the wrongdoing? Because if there aren't, that's the story: Republicans smearing Obama by falsely suggesting he is tied to the wrongdoing. Indeed, Sidoti later acknowledges "U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said prosecutors were making no allegations that Obama was aware of any scheming. And Blagojevich himself, in taped conversations cited by prosecutors, suggested that Obama wouldn't be helpful to him."

So there's a great big ball of nothing here, yet Sidoti continues to pretend that Obama is caught up in the scandal, writing "There were signs the continuing investigation could still involve Obama."

Well... once you've been trained by the Bush administration how to actually report 'news', it's hard to stop. How fast will they start calling it the Obama Depression and Obama's Iraq War? In 3... 2... 1...

The special super extra double secret club of power

Makes one forget that the government works FOR the people.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon:

Part of what motivates this Beltway fixation on secrecy is an ignoble attribute of human nature, or at least an attribute of a certain common psyche. The more exclusive a club is, the more privileged someone feels to belong to it. The fewer people with access to certain information, the more special those who have been granted access to it -- Beltway insiders and source-pleasing journalists -- believe themselves to be.

Francis Bacon's now-clichéd-though-still-true observation that "knowledge is power" means that the more ignorant the rabble are kept about what Beltway rulers are doing, the more powerful Beltway rulers and their underlings become. Hence, Beltway insiders cherish their secrecy (and though it's amazing in one sense, it should thus come as no surprise that Miller is actually a career journalist -- someone who therefore, in theory, ought to cheer when government officials disclose what they see, not think of ways to empower political officials to legally suppress it).

As much as we need anything else, we need a massive reduction in government secrecy and a massive increase in transparency. Obama himself (as well as, ironically, CAP's President and Obama tranistion chief John Podesta) has repeatedly said as much:

"People from every State in this great Nation sent us to Congress to defend their rights and stand up for their interests," Sen. Obama said in a prepared floor statement. "To do that we have to tear down the barriers that separate citizens from the democratic process and to shine a brighter light on the inner workings of Washington."

The police state we live in

Obviously asking questions is a crime.

ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).

Kevin Hayden of American Street has a warning of what comes next if we don't protest.

Update: Chet Scoville of The Vanity Press has the video of Goodman being released. Check out the experiences of several others and the warning by Glenn Greenwald on what has happened to our 'freedoms'.

Exactly.

The media at its finest.

Lying must be a reflexive action

With these people...

Oregon Republican candidate Mike Erickson:

Congressional candidate Mike Erickson took a six-day visit to Cuba in 2004 that he called a "humanitarian trip" to aid disabled Cubans oppressed by Fidel Castro, but the trip was instead a vacation that included bars, Havana cigars and the Tropicana nightclub.

Erickson said he visited a medical center, met with doctors and attended a presentation on the plight of the disabled. But travel documents obtained by The Oregonian, others who accompanied Erickson and representatives of U.S. and Cuban charities tell a different story.

For example, the medical center Erickson said he visited does not exist.

Mary Matalin tries to step away from the shit splatter of Corsi's idiotic fictional book:

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, head of Threshold Editions, which published Jerome Corsi's falsehood-laden book The Obama Nation, reportedly wrote in an email to Slate.com's Timothy Noah that her role at Threshold is "more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers." But according to her own website, Matalin "runs Threshold, a new conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster".

Yet then there are those who cannot help but search out and tell the truth.

Thank you, Helen Thomas.

The truth about the war in Iraq the Marines don't want you to see

Siun of Crooks and Liars:

This week US Marines censored an award winning photojournalist – continuing the efforts to make certain we do not see the real results of our actions in Iraq. Zoriah was embedded with a Marine unit documenting the reasons so many soldiers are suffering from PTSD. He was only a block away when another Marine unit was caught up in a suicide bombing in Anbar province:

My hands still shake and my heart pounds despite my fatigue. A combination of depression, fear, and adrenaline makes my thoughts race with the realization that a simple decision was the only thing that seperated me from a body count that grows daily. I look at the images I took on the 26th of June, and realize they do nothing to capture the emotion of being an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda suicide attack in Karmah/Garma… the smell… the sound of screams and crying.

Link to Zoriah's post and pictures.

Fox News exposes its true essence

By distorting reporters' faces and calling them names:

Summary: During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head.

Now if someone with photoshopping skills would take on ... oh, look:


and



There. I know it's childish, but I like to win the 'I know you are but what am I?' debate.

Also I'm not trying to pass off the wonderful photoshopping at pssht.com as reality as Fox News was attempting to do.

Update 7/10: Vanity Fair exacts delicious revenge!