Tenney's Ticklers, Tunes and Tirades

Heebie Jeebies-Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five

2011-04-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

Why Is Israel So Blind?

2011-03-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

2011-03-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

The failure of capitalism to come up with a renewable safe energy system has put the earth on the brink of disaster in yet another way. All these politicians and scientists who still say we should still look into nuclear are bought and sold either literally or ideologically by big business interests . In every cae they put their short range money making goals and/or lack of imagination ahead of the the planet's well being. The list of guilty includes President Obama and Sen. Chuck Shumer, both whom should know better and are capable in their own ways of giving strength to the movement against the false promises of nuclear power.

Japan and Greed

2011-03-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

Those who own and control the means of production, in their brilliance and greed, put the nuclear reactors where any one with a grade school knowledge of geography would not have done. Its the workers at these plants who are clearly risking there lives to save Japan and us all from disaster.
It's the same everywhere, the fat cats make the money, the workers take the risks and we all suffer from it. Why aren't they evacuating at least the kids and pregnant women from what even the US NRC says it wants Americans to leave? Of course they talk safety there , but have plants here on earthquake faults and near large cities without evacuation plans.
NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES1 When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.

Where Peaceful Protest Begets Jail

2009-06-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

Where Peaceful Protest Begets Jail
By David Shulman
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1094150.html

Peacemaker

2009-06-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=1101&catID=3

Gerry Tenney and The Lost Tribe in Concert

2009-04-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=65502388349&wall_posts=#

A little late on the announcement.

Afghanistan

2009-04-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/afghan_women_protest/?r=3331&id=3531-513873-eMyjASx

Jackie Mason and The S Word

2009-03-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/68862.html

Although it sounds worse, because of how close it is to the N word,the proper word I always read and heard was neger.

A Must Read. Why Bipartnship Won't Work.

2009-02-13T15:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/an-open-letter-to-preside_b_165359.html

On The Stimulus Package By Noah Tenney

2009-02-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

I'd like to ask all of you to write to the White House and to Senators Boxer and Feinstein to support less tax cuts and more infrastructure spending in the stimulus package currently in Congress. Recent events have shown that tax cuts are what are getting us into the current economic mess. Meanwhile, the infrastructure has been stagnant for a long time, and spending in infrastructure projects would create jobs and help the economy. The White House and Boxer and Feinstein all need to know that now is not the time to be appeasing the Republicans. Right now, helping those in need is more important than bipartisanship. Watering down the stimulus bill with more tax cuts and less spending in order to ensure a filibuster-proof majority is nothing but counterproductive when the stakes are so high. The Republicans should be allowed to filibuster, so that everyone sees them for who they are and so that everyone gets pissed with them, as opposed to having a watered-down bill which does not do enough. I think Paul Krugman puts it best here:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/what-the-centrists-have-wrought/

Thanks.
-Noah T.

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Good Analysis OF Gaza Situation by Uri Averni

2009-01-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks again to BT for this

January 12, 2009

How Many Divisions?
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza
By URI AVNERY

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

* * *

IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.

The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that “our soldiers were shot at from inside the school”. Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that “they shot from inside the school”, and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a “symbol of Hamas rule”. Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the “most moral army in the world”.

* * *

THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity”, a sociopathic disorder.

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.

The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah’s peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population – not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past – but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.

From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not “hide behind the population”, the population views them as their only defenders.

Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners rose up against Churchill.

He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that “they will change their ways” and “it will sear their consciousness”, so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.

A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.

This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.

Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.

That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare – and that has been its Achilles heel.

A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: “Not a Nice Guy, but a Leader”) cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and crying out: “Mama! Mama!”

The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli journalists, to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic news, while they themselves remained miles away from the events. Foreign journalists were not allowed in either, until they protested and were taken for quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others – the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.

* * *

THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the war.

Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a dangerous ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of terrified refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in Washington, who until that time had blocked all calls for a cease-fire. These began to understand the menace to vital American interests in the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude – causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.

People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of normal people and must guess their reactions. “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin sneered. “How many divisions have people of conscience?” Ehud Barak may well be asking.

As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when the atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that can decide a war.

* * *

THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.

Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.

If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

How Hamas Got Power

2009-01-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,
I am forwarding to you a fascinating article by a middle east expert and professor at University of San Francisco. I knew a little about this subject, but here is a fascinasting piece of hidden history background to the Gaza crisis. Please spread it around . . .
thanks,
Dickie

Thanks, Dickie for this informative article

Subject: America's Hidden Role in Hamas's Rise to Power
From: John Roberts
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 11:43:00 -0500

Here is documented the role that the US and Israel had in creating and supporting Hamas early on. Just as the US supported Sadam Hussein when he carried water for the US, so Hamas was supported to undermine the secular PLO.

This is as important to read if you want to understand some of the internal politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

John

America's Hidden Role in Hamas's Rise to Power

By Stephen Zunes,
AlterNet
January 3, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/audits/116855/?page=3

No one in the mainstream media or government is willing
to acknowledge America's sordid role interfering in
Palestinian politics.

The United States bears much of the blame for the
ongoing bloodshed in the Gaza Strip and nearby parts of
Israel. Indeed, were it not for misguided Israeli and
American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the
territory in the first place.

Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian
Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine
Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed
of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist
movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous
funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in
Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge
through the establishment of schools, health care
clinics, social service organizations and other
entities that stressed an ultraconservative
interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not
been very common among the Palestinian population. The
hope was that if people spent more time praying in
mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-
wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli
occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their
own media or right to hold political gatherings, the
Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic
groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers
and even have their own radio station. For example, in
the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli
soldiers -- who had shown no hesitation in brutally
suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations -- stood by
when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned
a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering
family-planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya
(Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when
Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier.
Israel's priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent
during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel
forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a
Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-
style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-
Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate
anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the
destruction of Israel by force of arms.

American policy was not much different: Up until 1993,
U.S. officials in the consular office in Jerusalem met
periodically with Hamas leaders, while they were barred
from meeting with anyone from the PLO, including
leading moderates within the coalition. This policy
continued despite the fact that the PLO had renounced
terrorism and unilaterally recognized Israel as far
back as 1988.

One of the early major boosts for Hamas came when the
Israeli government expelled more than 400 Palestinian
Muslims in late 1992. While most of the exiles were
associated with Hamas-affiliated social service
agencies, very few had been accused of any violent
crimes. Since such expulsions are a direct
contravention to international law, the U.N. Security
Council unanimously condemned the action and called for
their immediate return. The incoming Clinton
administration, however, blocked the United Nations
from enforcing its resolution and falsely claimed that
an Israeli offer to eventually allow some of exiles
back constituted a fulfillment of the U.N. mandate. The
result of the Israeli and American actions was that the
exiles became heroes and martyrs, and the credibility
of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinians grew
enormously -- and so did its political strength.

Still, at the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel
and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the
support of only 15 percent of the Palestinian
community. Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises
of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued
to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank
without apparent U.S. objections, doubling the amount
of settlers over the next dozen years. The rule of
Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Yassir
Arafat and his cronies proved to be corrupt and inept,
while Hamas leaders were seen to be more honest and in
keeping with the needs of ordinary Palestinians. In
early 2001, Israel cut off all substantive negotiations
with the Palestinians, and a devastating U.S.-backed
Israeli offensive the following year destroyed much of
the Palestinian Authority's infrastructure, making
prospects for peace and statehood even more remote.
Israeli closures and blockades sank the Palestinian
economy into a serious depression, and Hamas-run social
services became all the more important for ordinary
Palestinians.

Seeing how Fatah's 1993 decision to end the armed
struggle and rely on a U.S.-led peace process had
resulted in increased suffering, Hamas' popularity grew
well beyond its hard-line fundamentalist base and its
use of terrorism against Israel -- despite being
immoral, illegal and counterproductive -- seemed to
express the sense of anger and impotence of wide
segments of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile -- in
a policy defended by the Bush administration and
Democratic leaders in Congress -- Israel's use of death
squads resulted in the deaths of Yassin and scores of
other Hamas leaders, turning them into martyrs in the
eyes of many Palestinians and increasing Hamas' support
still further.

Hamas Comes to Power

With the Bush administration insisting that the
Palestinians stage free and fair elections after the
death of Arafat in 2004, Fatah leaders hoped that
coaxing Hamas into the electoral process would help
weaken its more radical elements. Despite U.S.
objections, the Palestinian parliamentary elections
went ahead in January 2006 with Hamas' participation.
They were monitored closely by international observers
and were universally recognized as free and fair. With
reformist and leftist parties divided into a half-dozen
competing slates, Hamas was seen by many Palestinians
disgusted with the status quo as the only viable
alternative to the corrupt Fatah incumbents, and with
Israel refusing to engage in substantive peace
negotiations with Abbas' Fatah-led government, they
figured there was little to lose in electing Hamas. In
addition, factionalism within the ruling party led a
number of districts to have competing Fatah candidates.
As a result, even though Hamas only received 44 percent
of the vote, it captured a majority of parliament and
the right to select the prime minister and form a new
government.

Ironically, the position of prime minister did not
exist under the original constitution of the
Palestinian Authority, but was added in March 2003 at
the insistence of the United States, which desired a
counterweight to President Arafat. As a result, while
the elections allowed Abbas to remain as president, he
was forced to share power with Ismail Haniya, the Hamas
prime minister.

Despite claiming support for free elections, the United
States tried from the outset to undermine the Hamas
government. It was largely due to U.S. pressure that
Abbas refused Hamas' initial invitation to form a
national unity government that would include Fatah and
from which some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders
would have presumably been marginalized. The Bush
administration pressured the Canadians, Europeans and
others in the international community to impose stiff
sanctions on the Palestine Authority, although a
limited amount of aid continued to flow to government
offices controlled by Abbas.

Once one of the more-prosperous regions in the Arab
world, decades of Israeli occupation had resulted in
the destruction of much of the indigenous Palestinian
economy, making the Palestinian Authority dependent on
foreign aid to provide basic functions for its people.
The impact of these sanctions, therefore, was
devastating. The Iranian regime rushed in to partially
fulfill the void, providing millions of dollars to run
basic services and giving the Islamic republic -- which
until then had not been allied with Hamas and had not
been a major player in Palestinian politics --
unprecedented leverage.

Meanwhile, record unemployment led angry and hungry
young men to become easy recruits for Hamas militants.
One leading Fatah official noted how, "For many people,
this was the only way to make money." Some Palestinian
police, unpaid by their bankrupt government,
clandestinely joined the Hamas militia as a second job,
creating a dual loyalty.

The demands imposed at the insistence of the Bush
administration and Congress on the Palestinian
Authority in order to lift the sanctions appeared to
have been designed to be rejected and were widely
interpreted as a pretext for punishing the Palestinian
population for voting the wrong way. For example, the
United States demanded that the Hamas-led government
unilaterally recognize the right of the state of Israel
to exist, even though Israel has never recognized the
right of the Palestinians to have a viable state on the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, or anywhere else. Other
demands included an end of attacks on civilians in
Israel while not demanding that Israel likewise end its
attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip. They also
demanded that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority
accept all previously negotiated agreements, even as
Israel continued to violate key components of the Wye
River Agreement and other negotiated deals with the
Palestinians.

While Hamas honored a unilateral cease-fire regarding
suicide bombings in Israel, border clashes and rocket
attacks into Israel continued. Israel, meanwhile, with
the support of the Bush administration, engaged in
devastating air strikes against crowded urban
neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of civilian
casualties. Congress also went on record defending the
Israeli assaults -- which were widely condemned in the
international community as excessive and in violation
of international humanitarian law -- as legitimate acts
of self-defense.

A Siege, Not a Withdrawal

The myth perpetuated by both the Bush administration
and congressional leaders of both parties was that
Israel's 2005 dismantling of its illegal settlements in
the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of military units
that supported them constituted effective freedom for
the Palestinians of the territory. American political
leaders from President George W. Bush to House Speaker
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have repeatedly praised
Israel for its belated compliance with a series of U.N.
Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal
of these illegal settlements (despite Israel's ongoing
violations of these same resolutions by maintaining and
expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and
Golan Heights).

In reality, however, the Gaza Strip has remained
effectively under siege. Even prior to the Hamas
victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in
2006, the Israeli government not only severely
restricted -- as is its right -- entry from the Gaza
Strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through
the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt,
as well. Israel also refused to allow the Palestinians
to open their airport or seaport. This not only led to
periodic shortages of basic necessities imported
through Egypt, but resulted in the widespread wasting
of perishable exports -- such as fruits, vegetables and
cut flowers -- vital to the territory's economy.
Furthermore, Gaza residents were cut off from family
members and compatriots in the West Bank and elsewhere
in what many have referred to as the world's largest
open-air prison.

In retaliation, Hamas and allied militias began
launching rocket attacks into civilian areas of Israel.
Israel responded by bombing, shelling and periodic
incursions in civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, which,
by the time of the 2006 cease-fire, had killed over 200
civilians, including scores of children. Bush
administration officials, echoed by congressional
leaders of both parties, justifiably condemned the
rocket attacks by Hamas-allied units into civilian
areas of Israel (which at that time had resulted in
scores of injuries but only one death), but defended
Israel's far more devastating attacks against civilian
targets in the Gaza Strip. This created a reaction that
strengthened Hamas' support in the territory even more.

The Gaza Strip's population consists primarily of
refugees from Israel's ethnic cleansing of most of
Palestine almost 60 years ago and their descendents,
most of whom have had no gainful employment since
Israel sealed the border from most day laborers in the
late 1980s. Crowded into only 140 square miles and
subjected to extreme violence and poverty, it is not
surprising that many would become susceptible to
extremist politics, such as those of the Islamist Hamas
movement. Nor is it surprising that under such
conditions, people with guns would turn on each other.

Undermining the Unity Government

When factional fighting between armed Fatah and Hamas
groups broke out in early 2007, Saudi officials
negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the two
leading Palestinian political movements. U.S.
officials, however, unsuccessfully encouraged Abbas to
renounce the agreement and dismiss the entire
government. Indeed, ever since the election of a Hamas
parliamentary majority, the Bush administration began
pressuring Fatah to stage a coup and abolish
parliament.

The national unity government put key ministries in the
hands of Fatah members and independent technocrats and
removed some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders and,
while falling well short of Western demands, Hamas did
indicate an unprecedented willingness to engage with
Israel, accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip and negotiate a long-term cease-fire with
Israel. For the first time, this could have allowed
Israel and the United States the opportunity to bring
into peace talks a national unity government
representing virtually all the factions and parties
active in Palestinian politics on the basis of the Arab
League peace initiative for a two-state solution and
U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. However, both the
Israeli and American governments refused.

Instead, the Bush administration decided to escalate
the conflict by ordering Israel to ship large
quantities or weapons to armed Fatah groups to enable
them to fight Hamas and stage a coup. Israeli military
leaders initially resisted the idea, fearing that much
of these arms would end up in the hands of Hamas, but
-- as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put it -- "our
government obeyed American orders, as usual.' That
Fatah was being supplied with weapons from Israel while
Hamas was fighting the Israelis led many Palestinians
-- even those who don't share Hamas' extremist ideology
-- to see Fatah as collaborators and Hamas as
liberation fighters. This was a major factor leading
Hamas to launch what it saw as a preventive war or a
countercoup by overrunning the offices of the Fatah
militias in June 2007 and, just as the Israelis feared,
many of these newly supplied weapons have indeed ended
up in the hands of Hamas militants. Hamas has ruled the
Gaza Strip ever since.

The United States also threw its support to Mohammed
Dahlan, the notorious Fatah security chief in Gaza, who
-- despite being labeled by American officials as
"moderate" and "pragmatic" -- oversaw the detention,
torture and execution of Hamas activists and others,
leading to widespread popular outrage against Fatah and
its supporters.

Alvaro de Soto, former U.N. special coordinator for the
Middle East peace process, stated in his confidential
final report leaked to the press a few weeks before the
Hamas takeover that "the Americans clearly encouraged a
confrontation between Fatah and Hamas" and "worked to
isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with
recognition and weaponry." De Soto also recalled how in
the midst of Egyptian efforts to arrange a cease-fire
following a flare-up in factional fighting earlier this
year, a U.S. official told him that "I like this
violence . it means that other Palestinians are
resisting Hamas."

Weakening Palestinian Moderates

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the
moderates must be able to provide their population with
what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel's
siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and
colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories.
However, Israeli policies -- backed by the Bush
administration and Congress -- seem calculated to make
this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst
Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem
Post just prior to Hamas' electoral victory, how
"Israel 's unilateralism and determination not to
negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the
Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of
Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority, which was
already severely crippled by . Israeli actions that
demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority
governing bodies and institutions."

Bush and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in
Congress have also thrown their support to the Israeli
government's unilateral disengagement policy that,
while withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza
Strip, has expanded them in the occupied West Bank as
part of an effort to illegally annex large swaths of
Palestinian territory. In addition, neither Congress
nor the Bush administration has pushed the Israelis to
engage in serious peace negotiations with the
Palestinians, which have been suspended for over six
years, despite calls by Abbas and the international
community that they resume. Given that Fatah's emphasis
on negotiations has failed to stop Israel's occupation
and colonization of large parts of the West Bank, it's
not surprising that Hamas' claim that the U.S.-managed
peace process is working against Palestinian interests
has resonance, even among Palestinians who recognize
that terrorism by Hamas' armed wing is both morally
reprehensible and has hurt the nationalist cause.

Following Hamas' armed takeover of Gaza, the highly
respected Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, writing in
the June 15 issue of Yediot Ahronoth, noted that "The
U.S. and Israel had a decisive contribution to this
failure." Despite claims by Israel and the United
States that they wanted to strengthen Abbas, "in
practice, zero was done for this to happen. The
meetings with him turned into an Israeli political
tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abbas
into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the
Palestinian street."

De Soto's report to the U.N. Secretary-General, in
which he referred to Hamas' stance toward Israel as
"abominable," also noted that "Israeli policies seemed
perversely designed to encourage the continued action
by Palestinian militants." Regarding the U.S.-
instigated international sanctions against the
Palestinian Authority, the former Peruvian diplomat
also observed that "the steps taken by the
international community with the presumed purpose of
bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in
peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the
opposite effect."

Some Israeli commentators saw this strategy as
deliberate. Avnery noted, "Our government has worked
for year to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need
to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to
the withdrawal form the occupied territories and the
settlements there." Similarly, M.J. Rosenberg of the
Israel Policy Center observed, "the fact is that
Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for
the Palestinian extremists" since "supplanting ...
Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a
situation under which Israel would be forced to
negotiate with moderates.' The problem, Avnery wrote at
that time, is that "now, when it seems that this aim
has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about
the Hamas victory."

Since then, the Israeli strategy has been to increase
the blockade on the Gaza Strip, regardless of the
disastrous humanitarian consequences, and more recently
to launch devastating attacks that have killed hundreds
of people, as many as one-quarter of whom have been
civilians. The Bush administration and leaders of both
parties in Congress have defended Israeli policies on
the grounds that the extremist Hamas governs the
territory.

Yet no one seems willing to acknowledge the role the
United States had in making it possible for Hamas to
come to power in Gaza in the first place.
_____________________

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman
of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San
Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for
Foreign Policy in Focus.

Good Analysis OF Gaza Situation by Richard Falk

2009-01-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-falk/understanding-the-gaza-ca_b_154777.html

Articles Against the Israeli Bombing of Gaza

2008-12-29T18:09:00.000-08:00

JPN Posting - List of contents

1) Press release from UN Representative
2) ** Emergency appeal from Physicians for Human Rights - Israel
3) ** Action alert from the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and UK petition site
4) Article in Ha'aretz by Tom Segev
5) Emails received from Safa Joudeh, a university student in Gaza city
6) Press releases from Rabbis for Human Rights and Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, USA Inc

The pieces listed above provide more information and analysis about the situation in Gaza, as well as suggestions for actions you can take (items marked with ** above).

The pieces below make the following points:

-- Israel's actions in Gaza rise to the level of war crimes
-- In providing material aid for Israel throughout the siege and attacks, the US is directly complicit with these war crimes
-- In committing these crimes, Israel continues to create a situation that puts its own citizens at risk
-- Rocket attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinian groups are illegal and morally abhorrent

Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) is trying to raise funds to transfer medical supplies to Gaza. Information on how to contribute is in the second piece below. The third piece has information on how you can take action by contacting the White House, Congress and the media.

Judith Norman

Joel Beinin adds:

Professor Richard Falk, a widely respected authority on international law and the UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territiries, was recently detained by Israeli authorities at Ben-Gurion airport and prevented from entering the country. Professor Falk obviously poses no security threat to Israel whatsoever. He was prevented from entering Israel as a punishment for clearly stating his opinion that Israel has repeatedly violated international law, as in the press release below.

----------------------

PRESS RELEASE

STATEMENT BY PROF. RICHARD FALK,
UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.

Those violations include:

Collective punishment - the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

Targeting civilians - the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

Disproportionate military response - the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza's elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza's besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.

Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel's escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.

Israel has also ignored recent Hamas' diplomatic initiatives to reestablish the truce or ceasefire since its expiration on 26 December.

The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel's violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

I remind all member states of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law - regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel's serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.

-----------------------

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Gaza Emergency Appeal
December 29, 2008
GazaHospitals Already Filled to Capacity; Medical Supplies on the Verge of Depletion

Since the beginning of attacks in Gaza three days ago, over 300 people have been reported dead, more than 1000 wounded, and many hundreds more are in need of immediate medical attention. With a medical system already on the verge of collapse as a result of the ongoing closure, 1.4 million civilians are in desperate need of urgent medical help from outside the Gaza Strip.

PHR-Israel has the means to transfer this help within days and is seeking to raise 700,000 USD during the next week for purchase and direct transfer of supplies to Gaza hospitals.
Palestinian hospitals in the Gaza Strip have asked us for help in securing the following items:

Basic Sterilization equipment
Needles
Dressings
Anesthetics
Catheters
Medical gases
Endo-tracheal tubes
Laryngoscope
Oxygen
Portable monitors, ventilators, ultrasounds and x- ray machines
Clothing for medical teams
105 Essential Medications
225 Additional Medical Supplies
93 Laboratory items
Electric Shaving Machine
Trolleys
Hospital beds

As the situation stands, Palestinian doctors are performing surgeries without surgical gloves, local or general anesthetics, gauze, sterilized equipment or sufficient oxygen for patients. All together, there are only 1,500 hospital beds available in Gaza's 13 publicly run hospitals. A fleet of 60 ambulances is now reduced by half. The endless flow of new wounded and the need for beds has led to a suspension of care for dozens of other patients, including cancer, cardiac, and other chronically ill patients, who have all been sent to their homes for the duration of the crisis. Patients are not being permitted entry to Egypt and all referrals out of Gaza via Erez crossing have been suspended.

We are turning to organizations and individuals like you who have demonstrated your respect for the right to health by generously supporting PHR-Israel in recent years.

PHR-Israel accepts donations via check or bank transfer. To send a check by post, make check payable to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and send to:

PHR-Israel
Attn: Gila Norich, Director of Development
9 Dror St.
Jaffa Tel Aviv 68135 ISRAEL.

To make a bank transfer, our details are as follows. Please also send a note with your e-mail address informing us of your transfer:
Account Holder: Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Bank: Hapoalim #12
Branch: Hashalom #662
Address: 106 Levinski Street, Tel Aviv, Israel
Account Number: 25938
SWIFT: POALILIT
IBAN: IL-70-0126-6200-0000-0025-938

US residents may make a tax-exempt donation via the New Israel Fund (NIF). Checks should be made payable to "New Israel Fund". A note with the check should be marked "donor-advised to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, ID# 5762."

NIF Address in Washington:
New Israel Fund
P.O.Box 91588
WashingtonDC
20090-1588
U.S.A

NIF Bank details:
Citibank
1000 Vermont Ave NW
Washington, DC20005
ABA #254070116
Acc# 66796296

UK residents may make a tax-exempt donation online via the British Shalom/Salaam Trust. (http://www.bsst.org.uk/what_you_can_do.html) Checks should be sent, together with your name and address and a completed gift aid form to:
British Shalom Salaam Trust
PO Box 39378
London SE13 5WH

For additional information on the current health crisis gathered by Physicians for Human Rights, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Gaza) and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) on the current crisis please go to: http://www.phr.org.il/phr .

For more information on donations or to inform us of a transfer, please contact Gila Norich, Director of Development: gila@phr.org.il or by phone, +972.3.5133.102

To contact Ran Yaron, Director of PHR-Israel's OccupiedPalestinianTerritory (oPt) Department send mail to: ranyaron@phr.org.il, or call +972.547.577696.

----------------------------

US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1773
As of this writing, Israeli Air Force attacks today on the occupied Gaza Strip killed an estimated 200 or more people and injured hundreds more. These Israeli attacks come on top of a brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, which has created a humanitarian catastrophe of dire proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian residents by restricting the provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and other necessities of life.

While the scope of civilian casualties in today's attacks is not yet clear, it is unmistakable that Israel carried out these attacks with F16 fighter jets and missiles provided by the taxpayers of this country. From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of F16's. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of JP-8 aviation jet fuel. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and "bunker buster" missiles.

In short, Israel's lethal attack today on the Gaza Strip could not have happened without the active military and political support of the United States. Therefore, we need to take action to protest this attack and demand an immediate cease-fire.

TAKE ACTION

1. Contact the White House to protest the attack and demand an immediate cease-fire. Call 202-456-1111 or send an email to comments@whitehouse.gov.

2. Contact the State Department at 202-647-6575 or send an email at: http://contact-us.state.gov

3. Contact your Representative and Senators in Congress at 202-224-3121 or find contact info for your Members of Congress at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home

4. Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor. Find contact info for your local media at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/media

5. Organize a local protest or vigil and tell us about it at congress@endtheoccupation.org

6. Sign our open letter to President-Elect Obama calling for a new U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and find out other steps you can take to influence the incoming Administration at http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1771

--------------

For UK citizens there are some existing petitions about Gaza that you may like to sign. They can be found at

http://search.petitions.number10.gov.uk/kbroker/number10/petitions/search.lsim?ha=1157&sc=number10&qt=Gaza

For UK residents the site www.writetothem.com is a helpful resource for identifying your representatives at all levels of government and you may like to contact them about the Gaza war.

-------------------------

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050706.html

Trying to 'teach Hamas a lesson' is fundamentally wrong
By Tom Segev

Channel 1 television broadcast an interesting mix on Saturday morning: Its correspondents reported from Sderot and Ashkelon, but the pictures on the screen were from the Gaza Strip. Thus the broadcast, albeit unintentionally, sent the right message: A child in Sderot is the same as a child in Gaza, and anyone who harms either is evil.

But the assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation - it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another.

Israel is striking at the Palestinians to "teach them a lesson." That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom - via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.

The bombing of Gaza is also supposed to "liquidate the Hamas regime," in line with another assumption that has accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception: that it is possible to impose a "moderate" leadership on the Palestinians, one that will abandon their national aspirations.

As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over.

All of Israel's wars have been based on yet another assumption that has been with us from the start: that we are only defending ourselves. "Half a million Israelis are under fire," screamed the banner headline of Sunday's Yedioth Ahronoth - just as if the Gaza Strip had not been subjected to a lengthy siege that destroyed an entire generation's chances of living lives worth living.

It is admittedly impossible to live with daily missile fire, even if virtually no place in the world today enjoys a situation of zero terror. But Hamas is not a terrorist organization holding Gaza residents hostage: It is a religious nationalist movement, and a majority of Gaza residents believe in its path. One can certainly attack it, and with Knesset elections in the offing, this attack might even produce some kind of cease-fire. But there is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.

Most dangerous of all is the cliche that there is no one to talk to. That has never been true. There are even ways to talk with Hamas, and Israel has something to offer the organization. Ending the siege of Gaza and allowing freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank could rehabilitate life in the Strip.

At the same time, it is worth dusting off the old plans prepared after the Six-Day War, under which thousands of families were to be relocated from Gaza to the West Bank. Those plans were never implemented because the West Bank was slated to be used for Jewish settlement. And that was the most damaging working assumption of all

-----------------

From a university student in Gaza

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Safa Joudeh"
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:34:42 -0600
Subject: Fwd: Today in Gaza

Dear all. Here's an update on whats happening here from where I am, second night of Israeli air (and sea) raids on Gaza. (below is the first email I sent)

It's 1.30 am but it feels like the sun should be up already. For the past few hours there's been heavy aerial bombardment of Gaza city and the northern Gaza Strip simultaneously. It feels like the longest night of my life. In my area it started with the bombing of workshops (usually located in the ground floor of private/family residential buildings), garages and warehouses in one of the most highly condensed areas in Gaza city "Askoola". About an hour ago they bombed the Islamic university, destroying the laboratory building. As I mentioned in an earlier account, my home is close to the university. We heard the first explosion, the windows shook, the walls shook and my heart felt like it would literally jump out of my mouth. My parents, siblings and cousins who have been staying with us since their home was damaged the first day of the air raids, had been trying to get some sleep. We all rushed to the side of the house that was farthest. Hala, my 11 year old sister
stood motionless and had to be dragged to the other room. I still have marks on my shoulder from when Aya, my 13 year old cousin held on to me during the next 4 explosions, each one as violent and heart stopping as the next. Looking out of the window moments later the night sky had turned to a dirty navy-gray from the smoke .

Israeli warships rocketed the Gazas only port only moments ago, 15 missiles exploded, destroying boats and parts of the ports. These are just initial reports over the radio. We don't know what the extent of the damage is. We do know that the fishing industry that thousands of families depend on either directly or indirectly didn't pose a threat on Israeli security The radio reporter started counting the explosions, I think he lost count after 6. At his moment we heard 3 more blasts. "I'm mostly scared of the whoosh", I told my sister, referring to the sound a missile makes before it hits. Those moments of wondering where its going to fall are agonizing. Once the whooshes and hits were over the radio reporter announced that the fish market (vacant of course) had been bombed.

We just heard that 4 sisters from the family of "Ba'lousha" have been killed in an attack that targeted the mosque my their home in the northern Gaza Strip.

You know what bothers me more than the bangs and the blasts, the smoke, the ambulance sirens and the whooshs? The constant, ominous, maddening droning sound of the Apaches overhead that's been buzzing in my head day and night. It's like I'm hearing things, which I'm not, but I am.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Safa Joudeh
Date: Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 3:36 PM
Subject: Today in Gaza
To:

To all of you who received my email earlier this is a longer version of my account. To people who live in Gaza please send your own accounts to your friends and contacts.

It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window, barely did I get there and look out when I was pushed back by the force and air pressure of another explosion. For a few moments I didn't understand, then I realized that Israeli promises of a wide-scale offensive against the Gaza Strip had materialized. Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzpi Livni's statements following a meeting with Egyptian President Hussni Mubarak the day before yesterday had not been empty threats after all.

What followed seems pretty much surreal at this point. Never had we imagined anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I'm in the middle of it and a few hours have passed already passed.

6 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza city. The images are probably not broadcasted in US news channels. There were piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you looked at them you could see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they're all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the 2 largest universities in Gaza) a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students, they'd been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbors kids, young men who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I'm writing this I can hear a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window a moment ago
and it was the 3 Rayes boys, They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn't spoken a word since.

What did Olmert mean when he stated that WE the people of Gaza weren't the enemy, that it was Hamas and the Islamic Jihad who were being targeted? Was that statement made to infuriate us out of out state of shock, to pacify any feelings of rage and revenge? To mock us?? Were the scores of children on their way home from school and who are now among the dead and the injured Hamas militants? A little further down my street about half an hour after the first strike 3 schoolgirls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a missile struck the Preventative Security Headquarters building. The girls bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.

In all the locations people are going through the dead terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The streets are strewn with their bodies, their arms, legs, feet, some with shoes and some without. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren't working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them. Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the floor weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanished after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings.

And even after the dead are identified, doctors are having a hard time gathering the right body parts in order to hand them over to their families. The hospital hallways look like a slaughterhouse. It's truly worse than any horror movie you could ever imagine. The floor is filled with blood, the injured are propped up against the walls or laid down on the floor side by side with the dead. Doctors are working frantically and people with injuries that aren't life threatening are sent home. A relative of mine was injured by a flying piece of glass from her living room window, she had deep cut right down the middle of her face. She was sent home, too many people needed medical attention more urgently. Her husband, a dentist, took her to his clinic and sewed up her face using local anesthesia

200 people dead in today's air raid. That means 200 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -actually all of us- would gladly have Hamas sign off every last basic right we've been calling for the last few months forever if it could have stopped this from ever having happened.

The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is ok, but 2 of my uncles' homes were damaged,

We can rest easy, Gazans can mourn tonight. Israel is said to have promised not to wage any more air raids for now. People suspect that the next step will be targeted killings, which will inevitably means scores more of innocent bystanders whose fate has already been sealed.

This doesn't even begin to tell the story on any level. Just flashes of thing that happened today that are going through my head

peace
S

------------------

STOP HARMING CIVILIANS NOW

RHR Rabbis-"Can we say the full Hallel on the 8th day of Hanukah in Light of the Events in Gaza?"

The firing on Israeli communities adjacent to Gaza gives the State of Israel the right to defend her citizens, but both the Jewish tradition and international law do not allow the harming of innocent civilians.

Many Israelis will quote from the Talmudic Tractate Sanhedrin, "When somebody is coming to kill you, get up earlier and kill him first." However, few are aware of how the Talmud continues, teaching us only to use the minimum necessary force and drawing a sharp contrast between defending ourselves against those attacking us, and harming an innocent third party. These are also principles in International Humanitarian Law (IHL)

"Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit says the Lord of Hosts." Our Talmudic sages determined that these words from the prophet Zechariah would be read as part of the Haftarah (Scriptural reading from the prophets after the reading of the Torah) for the Sabbath of Hanukah, and edited the story of the war of the Macabees out of the Talmud. They understood that, in the long run, sustainable peace and security are not achieved through acts of war.

RHR calls on the leadership of Israel and Hamas to act according to these standards. RHR calls upon Israel not to harm civilians either through firing on them or through the collective punishment of the ongoing closure severely limiting the amount of food, fuel and other basic goods entering Gaza. RHR calls upon Hamas to cease the intentional harming of civilians through firing on the residents of the Western Negev.

Israel has actualized its right of retaliation and the defense of her citizens in the last 36 hours. Both the State of Israel and Hamas must now take a "time out" to determine whether the cease-fire can be reinstated. Otherwise, they will soon be plunged even deeper into a cycle of bloodletting, with neither side knowing how they will get out of it. We hope that, as we reach the end of Hanukah, the "Festival of Lights," that we will see the fulfillment of the prayer, "May a new light shine upon Zion, and may we all speedily merit its light." (Prayerbook)

There are those who say that the Talmudic sages ruled that we do not recite the full Hallel (Festive psalms recited on holidays.) on the 7th day of Passover because that is the day that the Egyptians drowned in the Reed Sea. RHR asks whether this year it is appropriate to recite the complete Hallel on the 8th day of Hanukah (Monday) when the work of God's hands are dying on both sides.

-----------------------------------

Subject: Statement on Gaza:Dr. Eyad El-Sarrj President of FFIPP-I

Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, USA Inc
Building a stronger peace and social justice movement here at home
and in Palestine/Israel
*****************************************************************
Gaza, December 28, 2008
Best way to secure Israel is Justice to Palestine

Israel's air force launched a major bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip today, killing over two hundred people and injuring many more. Typically, Israel justifies this horrific scale of killing as retaliation against the rocket launching from Gaza. The spate of Israeli bombing continued throughout the day and into the night. I was interrupted several times while trying to finish this note, by the devastating sound of bombing.

In the core of the vicious cycle of violence that has engulfed the region for decades and lead to the many wars of the Middle East and beyond, lies the tragedy of the Palestinian uprooting in 1948, the justice denied to their plight and the living under the oppressive Israeli occupation for over forty years.

Instead of acknowledging the real issues of justice, mutual security and peace, the region was drowned into mutual hatred, revenge killing and insecurity.

Israeli policies and strategies rested always on the supremacy of its brutal force. Palestinians, in defiance of the Israeli scheme, were drawn into the resistance and some used homemade missiles and suicide missions.

Brute force and carnage in Gaza on the scale of today is a dangerous omen. Israel must restrain its military might and face up to the consequences of dragging the region into such a serious and intensified path of violence.

Palestinians must stop all forms of violence and unite in the pursuit of peace and justice. We, in the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-International, FFIPP-I, call for an immediate halt of the Israeli military attack on Gaza and ending the siege on the deprived strip. The United States of America is the only power that could play a positive role in ending the unending tragedy in the Holy Land. We hope that the new administration of President Obama will make the necessary change; a fresh approach as an honest broker of peace.

Eyad El-Sarraj

Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj is the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) and the president of FFIPP-International

................................................................
--------
Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
------------
Jewish Peace News archive and blog: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com
------------
Jewish Peace News sends its news clippings only to subscribers. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription, go to http://www.jewishpeacenews.net

YouTube Favorites December 2008

2008-12-22T02:27:00.000-08:00

1	Johnson Mountain Boys - Duncan and Brady
2	"I'm So Happy" Kenny Vance & The Original Teenagers Doo Wop vocal group hall of fame
3	Ike & Tina Turner "Fool In Love" & "Work Out Fine" medley
4	Jim Garland - I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister
5	Frank Sinatra Night and Day 1943
6	Music using ONLY sounds from Windows XP and Vista
7	Argument to Beethoven's 5th
8	Bob Dylan - Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
9	Charlie Chaplin from The Great Dictator
10	Bella ciao Italian traditional Partisan song
11	The Band - King Harvest 1970 - Long Black Veil 1970
12	Jerusalem Ridge
13	chava alberstein & the klezmatics IV

Acorn On Acorn

2008-10-18T15:51:00.001-07:00

http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=12439&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=22384&tx_ttnews[backPid]=12386&cHash=8
48fccca14

Thanks to Nora A. for this,

Playing The Banjo During Surgery!

2008-10-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5946602

Racism And The Working Class

2008-10-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

Thnaks again to Bob T.

http://www.truthout.org/100608L

Paulson's Plunder

2008-09-22T10:12:00.001-07:00

http://www.democrats.com/stop-paulsons-plunder

Palin For President

2008-09-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my high school classmate Shelia G, for this one.
http://www.michaelpalinforpresident.com/

Trojan Moose

2008-09-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sarah-palin-a-trojan-moos_b_124867.html

Ralph Stanley Supports Barack Obama

2008-09-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

This is great news. As a bluegrass player and fan this brings me great joy and hope that Obama is able to reach folks who I imagined, might have been reluctant to vote for an African American.
http://brendancalling.com/2008/09/09/holy-sht-ralph-stanley-endorses-barack-obama/

Most Heard Mandolin Solo?

2008-09-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

See if you can guess before opening link. Great story also.

http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_00938.shtml

Good Insight Into Sarah Palin

2008-09-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

This is by a women from her home town.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/kilkenny.asp

A Deeper Look At McCain's War Record

2008-09-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy34.html

Freedom Of The Press?

2008-09-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

What you might not see on mainstream news.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/dont_arrest_journalists/?r=1376&id=796-513873-cD1aaXx

Giving Constitutional Rights To Nature

2008-09-03T12:07:00.001-07:00

From Ecuador.
http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=3185

Colonoscopy Fun!

2008-08-30T15:50:00.022-07:00

Similar to my own recent experience. Thanks to Jim R.
DO NOT LET THIS STOP YOU FROM GETTNG ONE. IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!
Dave Barry's colonoscopy journal: I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis . Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!' I left Andy's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I willdiscuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies. I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because > MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon. The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground. MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you> have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet. After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, 'What if > I spurt on Andy?' How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough. At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked. Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house. When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the> room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs> that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' has to be the least appropriate. 'You want me to turn it up?' said Andy, from> somewhere behind me. 'Ha ha,' I said. And then it> was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like. I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, Feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that 'It' was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ. ABOUT THE WRITER: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.

How Hurricanes Gain In Stregnth

2008-08-30T15:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/katrina_seaheight.html

Sit Down Bass

2008-08-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest favorite shot from a couple of weeks ago at music camp. Photo is as taken, no fixing. I was my self surprised by the fiddles, and because one of the fiddles was left handed , it framed the bass fiddle wonderfully

60's Terrorists

2008-08-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bob T. for this

counterpunch.com Weekend EditionAugust 2 / 3, 2008
Westmoreland, Johnson and Nixon
Meet the Real Terrorists of the 1960s
By HARVERY WASSERMAN Hate-mongering against alleged “leftist 1960s terrorists” now fills the days of anti-Obama rage for the Rovian bloviator battalion. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Baby Boom professors, social workers , etc, are front and center for the hateful blatherings of the usual GOP flunkies all cowering at the prospect of an African-American president. But there were, indeed, three 1960s terrorists whose murderous, planet-killing rampage continues to poison this nation. They tower above all others. Their names: William Westmoreland, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.This unholy trinity killed outright more than 55,000 Americans and several million southeast Asians---most of them innocent civilians---while bombing, strafing and spewing horrific toxic chemicals onto countless of square miles of previously pristine jungle. Their Agent Orange caused tens of thousands of deaths and deformities that still carry through the generations.No single terror act in the history of the United States even remotely compares to the lethal psychosis that created and was then furthered by the Vietnam War.As Commander In Chief of US forces in Southeast Asia, Westmoreland dragged the US into the Vietnam quagmire. He repeatedly assured Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam’s north-south civil war was “winnable”.In the 1980s I debated Westmoreland on two campuses (the University of Florida and Juneata College) and heard him tell me directly that “we never lost the war in Vietnam.” According to the man who lit the fuse, the US spent all those lives and dollars “successfully protecting” Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines from Communist dictatorships. Never mind that Suharto (Indonesia), Lee Kwan Yew (Singapore), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines) were among history’s most violent and authoritarian kleptocrats. In Westmoreland’s world, all that death, destruction and expenditure were worth it to keep these torturers in office while they stacked billions of public dollars in their private bank accounts.Lyndon Johnson bought Westmoreland’s lies. With Defense Secretary Robert McNamara explaining the war in terms of “kill ratios,” Johnson used a fake non-attack by alleged North Vietnamese gunboats to get a blank check from Congress and impose wholesale slaughter on both the US and Vietnam.’Johnson’s March, 1965, decision to escalate the war is arguably the turning point from which America’s moral standing and quality of life took their definitive downward plunge.While he crumbled from the psychological and spiritual strain, LBJ sent 550,000 Americans to Vietnam to perpetrate a human and ecological slaughter on a scale unique in the modern annals of gratuitous terror.Richard Nixon followed with still more. After winning the presidency based on a “Secret Plan” to end the war, he escalated air attacks on an innocent nation that exceeded all the explosive tonnage dropped during World War 2. Nixon illegally expanded the war into Cambodia, where three million civilians eventually died in wholesale slaughter.At home, Nixon’s close friend, Governor James A. Rhodes, furnished the Ohio National Guard with the live ammunition they used to kill four unarmed students. Two more died soon thereafter in an official attack on a college dormitory at Mississippi’s Jackson State.A clearly deranged psychotic, Nixon’s resignation journey should have taken him straight to prison, rather than to a presidential retreat alongside the Pacific.None of these horrific terrorists was ever prosecuted or imprisoned. But their ungodly assault drove America’s economy, currency, health care and educational systems, moral and military standing, and much, much more, into a deep decline from which we have yet to recover. None of those bilious corporate bloviators ever mention these highest-ranking terrorists in their rants against all things sixties. But when it comes to an American axis of evil perpetrating useless, gratuitous and totally unredeemed mass destruction of people and the planet, this is the 1960s trio that overshadows all others.
Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com

Great Article On Levon Helm

2008-07-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.ulsterpublishing.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=454286

His new CD is great. His story is a great triumph over adversity.

Where To Send Aid To Burma By Alan Senauke

2008-05-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

An Imperfect Storm

Once again, our hearts go out to the people of Burma.

Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma (Myanmar) on Friday, May 2 with winds that reached 135 miles per hour, and a 12-foot storm surge that has left vast areas of the delta completely submerged. As of today, the official death toll has reached 25,000, but with dozens of towns and villages underwater, and countless coastal Burmese unaccounted for, the numbers will certainly go much higher. The storm moved up the delta, devastating Rangoon itself, with thousands of buildings destroyed. Shari Villarosa, the charge d'affaires of the US embassy in Myanmar, said: "The information that we're receiving indicates that there may well be over 100,000 deaths in the delta area.” Five regions — Yangon, Ayeyarwady, Bago Divisions and Mon and Kayin States have been officially designated as disaster areas.

The scope of this disaster cannot yet be measured, and it comes just a week before Burma’s military junta, SPDC, plans to hold a referendum on a new constitution that would consolidate the generals’ illegitimate hold on power for the foreseeable future. The amount of energy and expense the junta has spent over these last months suppressing opposition to a forced referendum, hunting down and imprisoning dissidents, stands in sharp contrast to their failure to give timely warning to the delta’s population — when the likely path of the storm was evident to meteorologists all across South Asia. It stands in contrast to the government’s slow and deadly response to the storm itself, and to the obstacles it places to the receipt and distribution of disaster relief funds and materiel.

And yet the vote goes on, with a minor concession postponing the referendum in the flood zone until May 24. So we see the terrible possibility of disaster settled upon disaster — an imperfect storm of suffering.

Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the new Clear View Project encourage the wider Buddhist community to respond in the following ways.

1. Offer humanitarian aid now to those directly affected by Cyclone Nargis. Emergency relief efforts can be directed towards BPF’s affiliate, the Foundation for the People of Burma (FPB), which already has some funds in Burma, and has the resources and connections in country that assure proper distribution and use of your generous gifts.

Foundation for the People of Burma
225 Bush Street, Suite 590
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 217-7015
Fax: (415) 477-2787
www.foundationburma.org
Email: info@foundationburma.org

2. Write or email the Myanmar Embassy, expressing your compassionate concern for the Burmese people in this natural disaster, in hopes that the government of Myanmar will wholeheartedly devote all its considerable military and civilian resources to rescue those trapped in the path of the cyclone; will allow the free flow of international relief aid; and will indefinitely postpone the constitutional referendum until such a time as there can be a full and open vote — internationally monitored by respected parties acceptable to all sides.

The Honorable Ambassador U Linn Myaing
Embassy of the Union of Myanmar
2300 S Street NW, Washington D.C. – 20008
info@mewashingtondc.com

— Hozan Alan Senauke
for Clear View Project
& Buddhist Peace Fellowship
5.9.08

Bill Moyers On Rev. Wright

2008-05-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

Thoughtful article from Bill Moyers as usual.
Thanks again to Bob T. for sending it too me.

Rev. Wright
By BILL MOYERS
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.
In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. More than 2000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.
Many black preachers I’ve known—scholarly, smart, and gentle in person—uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. But where I grew up in the south, before the Civil Rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.
I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.
Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle – forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.
Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.
Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media – the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help – people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?
Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this – this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.
Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.”
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

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Grand Theft PentagonHow They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism

The Occupationby Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian ImperialismBy Jean Bricmont

CITY BEAUTIFULBy Tennessee Reed

Addiction To Music

2008-05-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_00846.shtml

This sure hits home to me.

May Day Strike Led By Longshoremen's Union

2008-04-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

http://maydayilwu.googlepages.com/

Great news for those who see blue collar workers as an important component of a progressive coaltion.

Joshua Bell In The Train Station

2008-04-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

If you don't know the Bach piece that he's playing, please do so as soon as you can.

Cheney On Iraq in 1994

2008-04-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY&feature=user

Must be heard to believe!

Robert Reich On Obama And "Bitterness"

2008-04-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/04/obama-bitterness-meet-press-and-old.html

Progressives For Obama

2008-04-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/hayden_et_al

Poppies Late Afternoon Mt. Diablo Ca.

2008-03-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

Cheney On Democracy

2008-03-20T12:52:00.001-07:00

RICHARD CHENEY ON DEMOCRACY MARTHA RADDATZ: ABC NEWS - Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives. RICHARD CHENEY (with smirk): So? RADDATZ: So. . . You don't care what the American people think? CHENEY: No, I think you can't be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

This is how Cheney spells : deMOCKracy.

This is what he is really saying about public opinion: "Fluc You Nation."

Gerry Tenney and The Lost Tribe in Concert

2008-03-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

Where: McGraths Irish Pub , 1539 Lincoln Ave. in Alameda Ca.
Date and Time: Friday March 28 8:00 P. M.
Cost: $5.00 ( Such A Deal)
Link to Mcgrath's . http://www.mcgrathspub.com/
Gerry Tenney and the Lost Tribe have been playing in the Bay Area off and on for over 20 years. Based mostly around Gerry’s song writting , the band offers a fresh selection of songs and tunes played and sang only the way that a group of friends and talented musicians can do. The mix of folk, bluegrass, acoustic country, a little rock and roll and klezmer, create a refreshing look at Gerry’s vision and version of that style of music Americana Among the current members are ,Gerry on guitar and mandolin, David Laub on bass, Leslie Tenney on vocals, Suzy Thompson on fiddle and vocals, and Harry Yaglijian on mandolin, guitar and vocals.Emery Barter will join us on the dobro and Neil Linden, my old bandmate from Woodstock N.Y. is on banjo. With plenty of guest musicians, this will be a special night of music.

Feta Cheese

2008-03-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

If you like feta cheese, and have access to various kinds of feta cheese, try the French. It's a little more expensive, but its the smoothest and the taste is just wonderful. Let me know what you think.

Some YouTube Music Favorites

2008-03-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=26BECFC9EABEC859

Artie Traum

2008-02-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to see and play a few songs with Artie on his west coast visit. Below are some of his thoughts on the current state of the music business.
Check out his website and his music.
http://www.artietraum.com/

If you're in the music business, you're aware that the old business model (record, press CDs and sell product) is essentially over. The big labels are in big trouble, but they're coming back with new ways to squeeze cash out of the system. The latest they've come up with is an experiment with free downloads paid for by advertising. Media sites like Salon.com have a similar model: watch an ad and get free content. I have mixed feelings about this. First, advertisers may use their clout to decide who gets included in the mix. Second, I believe this new system may squeeze "indies" as the major labels try to control the market. Those of us who are struggling to maintain small record companies are facing rising costs and diminished opportunities. Still, musicians and artists have always been resourceful. Hard times sometimes make us all work a little more creatively to find a path to success.It's no secret that the corporate world has started devouring itself in a mad frenzy of layoffs, buyouts and an unseemly squeezing of the middle (and poorer) classes. Greed and corruption have hit a tipping point. Is there a limit to how many fees, interest rate increases and price hikes can be levied? Rather than address the fundamental issues of why and how our society is falling apart, the media is fixated on distractions. Even some of the in-depth sites, like Huffington Post, are now simply grabbing the same feeds that everyone else gets. CNN and MSNBC and Fox spend hours analyzing election polls. This numbing parade of numbers tells us nothing.In the 1976 Sidney Lumet film "Network," Peter Finch (playing a network news anchor) reaches a personal tipping point. He goes on air and shouts, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." This mantra is picked up around the country and people start shouting "I'm mad as hell... " Clearly, a lot of people are feeling this way as we enter the campaign of 2008. Still, I remain optimistic. Perhaps it's that I grew up listening to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie singing about the Great Depression and bitter struggles of miners, lumberjacks and factory workers. They never gave up a certain pioneering spirit and abiding belief that justice would, in the end, prevail. Studs Terkel wrote, "I've always felt that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."See you down the road,Artie. NEW VIDEO! Here's a link to my song Halifax, which I performed at the Fairfield Theatre. Halifax. It tells how Acadians were driven from Canada in 1755, an early example of ethnic cleansing in colonial-era North America. Beausoleil was an Acadian resistance fighter who waged a guerrilla war against the British near Halifax. He did not prevent thousands of Acadians from being loaded on boats and sent to Virginia, French Guiana and Louisiana. I learned much of this story from Michael Doucet, the irrepressible fiddler and Cajun scholar behind the band Beausoleil. I've been drawn to Cajun culture and history since I worked with Michael Doucet on the CD "Chez Les Cajuns" several years ago. Perhaps the Acadian exile reminds me of Jewish history and how our ancestors were driven from lands they cherished -over and over- in the past. I believe a good song shouldn't need a long introduction but sometimes a little history expands what songwriters must compress into a handful of short verses. I tried to convey the emotion, despair and excitement of those sad years in the mid-18th Century.

Article About Yours Truly In The Forward Yiddish Rock & Roll

2008-02-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.forward.com/articles/12722/ Photo By Leslie Tenney

Great Obama Video

2008-02-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

http://pol.moveon.org/endorse-o-thon/video.html?id=12030-1699880-5soASt&t=967

He's not my ideal candidate, but clearly the best of the narrowed down field.
There's a certain intangible charisma there, and an ability to stir people for change in the right direction. We on the left should not let our criticisms of him stop us for voting and working for him. The defeat of facist Republicanism is much more important than anything else. It goes without saying that we should not do this blindly and furthermore take this opportunity to promote and encourage more progressive, anti-war, anti-corporate etc. positions.

Israeli Conductor Barenboim Takes Palestinian Citizenship

2008-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

Click: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/944235.html

Worth reading the reader responses too.

A brave and bold step towards peace and understanding.

Schmaltz

2007-12-22T03:02:00.000-08:00

Schmaltz, Chicken Fat, Used To Make High Yield Biodiesel Fuel By U Of Arkansas Engineers.Cooks everywhere have long used schmaltz, the Yiddish word for chicken fat, as the basis for chicken soup, a tasty power dish reputed to cure the common cold, but soon drivers might find themselves cooking, so to speak with schmaltz as fuel in their gas tank. Researchers say they have found a way of converting schmaltz to turn it into high-yield biodiesel fuel for vehicles.To read the full article, see:http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009509960

Yiddish Beatles

2007-12-06T09:03:00.000-08:00

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=6vAMgbGEDTY

This is me with California Klezmer /The Lost Tribe, doing A Hard Day's Night,A Schvereh Togedikeh Nahkt, synched up to the Beatles on YouTube.

Translation by Gerry Tenney and Khane Yakhness

Alley In San Francisco 2

2007-12-06T02:09:00.000-08:00

Mural In San Francisco Alley

2007-12-05T17:58:00.000-08:00

Cheney O' Lantern

2007-11-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

Jack O' Lantern By Leslie Tenney.

Photo By Gerry Tenney

Atlanta Aquariuum

2007-11-25T21:21:00.000-08:00

Photo By Gerry Tenney

Armenian Holocaust And Jewish Response

2007-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Jews Face the Armenian Genocide * By Dr. Stephen Scheinberg .Dr. Scheinberg is emeritus professor of history,Concordia University, and co-chair of Canadian Friendsof Peace Now. His editorials can be heard on Montreal'sRadio Shalom 1650AM on Monday at 7:15A.M. and Wednesday at 6:14P.M..There is a controversy raging among American Jews which may get even hotter in the coming days. The issue arises because the U.S. Congress will once again beasked to vote for a bill recognizing the Armenian genocide of 1915. One might think that this would notbe a difficult issue for the Jewish community butunfortunately several of the major Jewish organizationsin the United States have seen fit to intervene against the bill.First, let me explain to those of you who are not well acquainted with the events of 1915 that an overwhelming number of historians recognize that the Turkishgovernment of the day engaged in the pre-meditated murder of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians. Jewish holocaust scholars including Raul Hilberg, Elie Wiesel, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Goldhagen and Deborah Lipstadt have all signed ads urging the Congress to pass there solution. The scholarship is overwhelming; including even some Turkish writers, but the Turkish government persists in its refusal to acknowledge responsibility.Armenian genocide denial is close kin to holocaust denial and as morally reprehensible.The current bill in the Congress was introduced inJanuary 2007 by Representative Adam Schiff ofCalifornia and has wide Jewish support in both theHouse and Senate, from Democrats and Republicans.However, it is not clear if or when the bill will cometo a vote. The Turkish government has been active in supporting opposition to the bill, hiring prominent lobbyists and meeting with Jewish leaders. This leadership was obviously reminded, at a meeting with the Turkish Foreign Minister Abdula Gul, of Turkey's good relations with Israel as well as with the UnitedStates, her support for her own Jewish community numbering approximately 40,000, and her record as asanctuary for Jewish refugees over the centuries. It is difficult to say whether it was Turkish lobbying, theirown sentiments, or possibly direct intervention fromIsrael which led the Anti-Defamation League, B'naiBrith International, the American Jewish Committee andthe Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs topass along to members of Congress a letter from TurkishJews opposing the resolution, thus implicitly takingthe side of Turkey.It was the ADL's Abraham Foxman who was the mostoutspoken of the Jewish leaders, declaring that "this is an issue that needs to be resolved by the parties,not by us. We are neither historians nor arbiters." One has never heard Foxman, a child survivor of the holocaust, make such a cavalier reference to the deathof six million Jews. He has given further fuel to his critics by firing the ADL's New England regional director who had urged that the organization recognize the genocide. A former ADL regional board member condemned the firing as "a vindictive, intolerant, and destructive act" by an organization and leader whose"fundamental mission - is to promote tolerance." Foxman has subsequently, following much criticism and a conversation with Elie Wiesel, recognized that the events of 1915 constituted genocide but continues to oppose the bill as counterproductive.For her part, Israel has not made any public reference to the Armenian genocide and has carefully deleted such references from text books and even withdrawn support from international conferences at which the genocide would have been a subject for discussion. Before a trip to Turkey then-foreign minister Shimon Peres said of the genocide, that it was "a matter for historians todecide." There are many prominent Israelis who deploret heir government's failure to act on a significant moral issue. However, in the case of a nation state,realpolitik often triumphs over morality. Israel obviously considers that her relations with Turkey are too important to be possibly undermined by taking the moral road, though Israelis from across the political spectrum have disagreed on the consequences of such actions.Nevertheless, the American Jewish leadership is not and should not be tied to Israeli realpolitik. Individual morality cannot be waived in the interest of Israel,the United States or Canada. Perhaps if the Armenian genocide resolution is again defeated these same community leaders will be at pains to deny the influence of the Jewish lobby. Neither Israel nor theAmerican Jewish community will be well served by a community leadership that abandons elementary standards of behavior for a misguided assessment of the needs of Israel or Turkish Jewry. Perhaps they should recall the infamous words attributed to Adolph Hitler, calling on his troops to pursue their destructive work, he stated:"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" As Jews, we are obliged to speak, and our voices must be heard on the side of justice and morality.* Credit : Wikipedia - The Armenian Genocide Memorialin the Marcelin-Wilson Park in Montreal.(c) 2007 Tolerance.ca(R) Inc. Tous droits de reproductionreserves.Toutes les informations reproduites sur le site dewww.tolerance.ca (articles, images, photos, logos) sontprotegees par des droits de propriete intellectuelledetenus par Tolerance.ca(R) Inc. ou, dans certains cas,par leurs auteurs. Aucune de ces informations ne peutetre reproduite pour un usage autre que personnel.Toute modification, reproduction a large diffusion,traduction, vente, exploitation commerciale oureutilisation du
2. Turkey and the Armenians / Today's Denial Is Tomorrow's Holocaust By Yossi Sarid http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/912094.html Congressman Adam Schiff, who proposed the resolution to name the Armenian massacre a genocide, is Jewish.The Jewish nation should be grateful for Schiff'sinitiative, for he has saved Jewish honor in America,Israel and everywhere. He restored our humane image,in contrast to the cynics and genocide deniers who are forever demanding payment for being perpetual victims.Congressman Schiff is following in the footsteps ofanother Jew, Henry Morgenthau, who served as U.S.ambassador in Turkey in those days. He called the massacre "the greatest crime in modern history."AdvertisementSchiff is also the student of another Jew, FranzWerfel, who on his way to the Land of Israel stopped in Damascus and was appalled to see "the starving,mutilated and sick Armenian refugee children." Hepublished the novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh"(1933), which shocked the world.In 1918 Shmuel Talkovsky, then secretary of HaimWeizmann, wrote with Weizmann's approval: "Is there any nation whose fate is more similar to ours than the Armenians?"But in Israel today there are Jews who are less than Jewish and Zionists who are less than Zionist -including heads of state and heads of government.Denying another nation's Holocaust is no less uglythan denying ours. It is also dangerous. Today'sdenial is tomorrow's Holocaust. The Armenian genocidewasn't the first in this era. The German imperial armyslaughtered 100,000 Namibians in 1904. In 1915, theArmenian genocide began; the Ottomans killed 1.5million of them in various ways. If the world hadrisen up in protest against the genocide of theNamibians and Armenians, the Holocaust of the Jewsmight also have been averted. This is not a mereassumption; it's probably a fact. A week before invading Poland, Hitler addressed his officers (August24, 1939): "It's a matter of indifference to me what aweak western European civilization will say about me... I have ordered my Death-Head Formation to killmercilessly and without compassion men, women andchildren of Polish derivation and language. Who, afterall, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"Such was Hitler's calming message to his troops.The next time some Israel hater - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,for example - denies the Jewish Holocaust, and we raise a hue and cry about it, there will be someself-righteous Gentiles ready to say, "You're right,but we have our own Turkeys."As natural and historic victims, we should be the ones to spread the message from one end of the world to another: what happened to us can happen again, to us and to the people of Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Sudan, Burma.There is no need to compare between holocausts to recognize other nations' suffering.

Hillary Clinton And The Democratic Party

2007-10-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

A pessimistic view from the Progressive Review follows, which I mostly share.
Sam Smith: If the latest Washington Post poll proves accurate, the Democratic Party as a serious alternative to the GOP is finished. It is not just that a perennially dissembling and once almost prosecuted candidate came in miles ahead of Barrack Obama and John Edwards. The real tragedy is to be found in the reasons respondents gave for their support.For example, Democrats favored Hillary Clinton to deal with health care by a two to one margin over Obama and Edwards combined - an absurd judgment given her previous health care legislation that was laughably incompetent and confusing as she attempted to conceal its gifts to the insurance industry. There are only two possible explanations for such a masochistic choice: deep denial or deep ignorance and they probably both play a role.57% of Democrats said HR Clinton has the best chance of being elected even though current polling has all three front runners coming out about the same. For example, the heavily pro-Clinton Washington Post headlined her 8 point lead over Giuliani without mentioning that Edwards had scored a 9 point lead in another recent poll.Further, Clinton's supposed electability is based on the assumption that the GOP will not mention all the dirty laundry in HRC's past - including matters now hidden in Justice Department files. The Republican strategy - which the media has given great aid and comfort - is to keep quiet until the Democrats are irretrievably in the Clinton trap. In fact, some on the right are already having a hard time hiding their enthusiasm: Matt Drudge featured Clinton's wipe out lead in the Post poll with big type and red ink and George Bush is even sending her advice on how to handle Iraq.By 52% to 39% Clinton beats both Obama and Edwards as the one best able to deal with Iraq, even though she is clearly the one with the worst record of doing so this far.By the same margin, she is the one who Democrats think best represent the core values of the party. This may be tragically true in contemporary terms, but before her husband took office the party had dramatically different - and better - values.The only First Lady ever to face possible criminal indictment even farcically leads the others as the one best able to deal with corruption in Washington.And worst of all, not only is she considered more inspiring than Obama and Edwards but she is considered more trustworthy.This is a party that doesn't need a candidate; it desperately needs a therapist.If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination it will be the end of the modern Democratic Party - the period of both its greatness and its popularity. Her husband began the serious dismantling of the party - particularly its commitment to social democracy - and produced for it the greatest loss of elected offices under an incumbent president since Grover Cleveland.Hilary Clinton will complete the job. If she wins the nomination there will no longer be a real Democratic Party; it will be reduced a subculture of de facto Republicans who support abortion and affirmative action.Just look at those round her: there isn't one major figure directly involved in her campaign who represents the spirit or the substance of a decent and progressive Democratic Party. It is a cadre of cynical manipulators and fund raisers with dubious pals.This incredible destruction of the party took place in less than two decades, in part thanks to a number of factors beyond the Clintons:- The rise of the delusional myths of neo-robber baron capitalism that, among other things, taught voters to choose between competing political CEOs rather than among real issues.- The trivialization of politics by television and other media in which the future of our nation and our planet was reduced to just another game show or daytime serial.- A sycophantic Washington press corps that brazenly boosted those politicians with whom it felt socially and culturally most compatible. The media has repeatedly covered up for the Clinton, most recently by failing to inform its audience of HRC's sordid past.- The stunningly incompetent handling of Congress by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.- The underlying force driving many Democrats in office: fear. Fear of the Christian right, fear of seeming weak, fear of Karl Rove and so forth. By their words they try desperately to seem not afraid, but by these same actions they confirm the critics' view that they are cowards.But the Clintons played a major part as well, primarily because they have been the preeminent political con artists of modern times.The Clintons belong to a long American tradition of snake oil salesmen, road gamblers and fake evangelical prophets. The thing these all had in common: those they purported to help or deal fairly with invariably came out the short end. With card sharks or door to door hustlers, the culture suffered but did not shake. But the Clinton as the first of the disreputable breed to actually run the country.Bill Clinton at least came by his skill naturally. When Bill Clinton is 7, his family moved from Hope, Arkansas, to the long-time mob resort of Hot Springs, AR. Here Al Capone was said to have had permanent rights to suite 443 of the Arlington Hotel. Clinton's stepfather was a gun-brandishing alcoholic who lost his Buick franchise through mismanagement and his own pilfering. His mother was a heavy gambler with mob ties. According to FBI and local police officials, his Uncle Raymond -- to whom young Bill turned for wisdom and support -- was a colorful car dealer, slot machine owner and gambling operator, who thrived (except when his house was firebombed) on the fault line of criminality.The media forgot to tell you this, but knowing it helps one understand why Bill Clinton is such a better con artist than his wife and why Hillary Clinton constantly gets caught in petty dishonesties, cheap machinations and artificial cackles. It wasn't natural; she had to learn the trade from Bill.Now, one could go on for 500 more pages on this topic but here's the problem: hardly any of those Democrats who think HR Clinton is the most honest of the major candidates would absorb the information and alter their opinion because the Democratic Party has transformed itself from a political organization into a sort of EST for political junkies.So it looks like it may be over. Yes, an unanticipated scandal could still emerge. The good people of Iowa and New Hampshire could take the Democratic Party back. HR Clinton might move from embarrassing cackles to indefensible contortions.But if nothing major happens, you can say good bye to the modern Democratic Party the day that HR Clinton is nominated. You will then be faced not with a choice, but a threat - not unlike one from the capo who tells you: stick with us and your friends and family will be safer and we won't take as much from you as the other mob. This isn't politics; it's thuggery. And that's what our politics have become.

Going South

2007-09-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

It's The Oil Stupid

2007-09-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

From Energy and Capital:

Are You Sure You Can Handle the Truth?
Petraeus Report Cooks the Books with Deft Kabuki Spin. Benefactor: Big Oil.
September 11, 2007. Reading the General Petraeus report on the Iraq debacle reminded me of nothing so much as Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men yelling, "You can't handle the truth!"
The Petraeus report goes to great lengths to paint a picture of progress in Iraq, but the truth is a far different story. As the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, the declining number of deaths in Iraq that General Petraeus cites depends on a few accounting tricks: like not counting a death as an assassination if you're shot in the front of the head, and not counting deaths by car bombs.
So, what are we really doing in Iraq?
We're building and maintaining permanent military bases from which our military will ensure a near-monopoly of the world's second-largest oil reserve. All this... for a small cadre of corporate fatheads, including the top members of Bush, Inc. The American taxpayer will be burdened with footing the bill for security in Iraq ($2 billion PER DAY!) to provide stable working conditions for Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Halliburton, not to mention the dozens of corporations feeding off the military spend bosom.
But this White House clearly believes you can't handle the truth.
Well, those of us in the energy world can handle it, and here it is: because the U.S. could not tolerate the possibility that the second-largest oil bonanza on Earth might be held beyond our reach by a dictator who hated us.
The fact is, the U.S. uses fully one-quarter of the world's oil, but we possess only about two percent of its reserves, and we rely on imports for about 60% of our consumption.
Meanwhile, Peak Oil is either just behind us, or nearly upon us...
Without guaranteed access to Iraq's oil, we absolutely could not maintain our military and economic dominance of the world. Vice President Cheney has known this, even spoken publicly about it, for many years. And why else would he have convened a meeting of Big Oil representatives within his first month in the White House to pore over maps of Iraq's oil fields, as if that were the top priority of the administration?
We at EnergyAndCapital.com have prepared a full report, called "The Truth about Oil," and we're happy to share these truths with you.
To get our new report, simply sign up for the free Energy and Capital e-Letter, a daily advisory on the fast-moving realities in the energy and oil sector, written and edited by energy and natural resources investing expert Chris Nelder.
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Pavoratti and James Brown RIP

2007-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCIyzNISw1Q James Brown and Pavoratti

Fighting Terorism Since 1492

2007-08-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

San Pablo Ave. Oakland California.

Photo by Gerry Tenney

Wall Hanging: My Ties

2007-08-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Photo By Gerry Tenney

Bo Diddley Live

2007-08-17T17:23:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrYhRFOcgg4

A Proper Send Off

2007-08-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Balence and The Middle East

2007-08-15T01:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/893537.html

American Capitalism and Vacation

2007-07-06T00:47:00.001-07:00

REPORT: AMERICA IS THE 'NO VACATION NATION' REUTERS - As Europe's workers take a few weeks of holiday this summer, their American colleagues will be lucky to get a few days off work, says a report published by the European Trade Union Institute. Finland, followed by France, offers working people the most statutory vacation, at more than six weeks per year, the report, an international snapshot of how much paid leave people get by law and in practice in 21 countries, says. The United States is the only country where employees have no statutory leave, and they get about half as much time off in reality as Europeans get, according to the report, compiled by the Washington-based Centre for Economic Policy Research. "The United States is in a class of its own," the report says. "It is the no-vacation nation."http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSL0522341220070705

Capitalism And War

2007-07-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

PRIVATE CONTRACTORS OUTNUMBER U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQT. CHRISTIAN MILLER, LA TIMES - The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns. More than 180,000 civilians -- including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis -- are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-private4jul04,1,6564316.story?ctrack=4&cset=true

See Sicko

2007-06-29T20:13:00.001-07:00

Sicko will perhaps be the catalyst to change our criminally negligent health care system.
http://www.reelzchannel.com/moviedetail.aspx?movieid=226829&gclid=CMWPh-S1g40CFRuNYAodHjYAiQ

Einstein Speaks

2007-06-20T21:13:00.000-07:00

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. Albert Einstein

Iraq Labor Movement

2007-06-11T10:26:00.001-07:00

Iraq's Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil By David Bacon t r u t h o u t Columnist, Saturday 09 June 2007http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060907A.shtml The Bush administration has no love for unions anywhere, but in Iraq it has a special reason for hating them. They are the main opposition to the occupation's economic agenda, and the biggest obstacle to that agenda's centerpiece - the privatization of Iraq's oil. At the same time, unions have become the only force in Iraq trying to maintain at least a survival living standard for the millions of Iraqis who still have to go to work every day, in the middle of the war. This week, Iraqi anger over starvation incomes and oil ripoffs boiled over. On Monday, June 4, the biggest and strongest of the Iraqi unions, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, launched a limited strike to underline its call for keeping oil in public hands, and to force the government to live up to its economic promises. Workers on the pipelines carrying oil from the rigs in the south to Baghdad's big refinery stopped work. It was a very limited job action, which still allowed the Iraqi economy to function. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out the army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. Then he issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders. On Wednesday, June 6, the union postponed the strike until June 11. Labor unrest could not only resume at that point, but could easily escalate into shutdowns on the rigs themselves, or even the cutoff of oil exports. That would shut down the income stream that keeps the Maliki regime in power in Baghdad. Some of the oil workers' demands reflect the desperate situation of workers under the occupation. They want their employer - the government's oil ministry - to pay for wage increases and promised vacations, and give permanent status to thousands of temporary employees. In a country where housing has been destroyed on a massive scale, and workers often live in dilapidated and primitive conditions, the union wants the government to turn over land for building homes. Every year, the oil institute has miraculously continued holding classes and training technicians, yet the ministry won't give work to graduates, despite the war-torn industry's desperate need for skilled labor. The union demands jobs and a future for these young people. But one demand overshadows even these basic needs - renegotiation of the oil law that would turn the industry itself over to foreign corporations. And it is this demand that has brought out even the US fighter jets, which have circled and buzzed over the strikers' demonstrations. In Iraq, the hostile maneuvering of military aircraft is not an idle threat to the people below. This standoff reflects a long history of actions in Iraq, by both the Iraqi government and the US occupation administration, to suppress union activity. Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and its puppet monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after 1958. Saddam Hussein later drove its leaders underground, killing and jailing the ones he could catch.
When Saddam fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild its labor movement. Miraculously, in the midst of war and bombings, they did. The oil workers union in the south is now one of the largest organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein. Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they've gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living reality. Yet the Bush administration, and the Baghdad government it controls, has outlawed collective bargaining, impounded union funds and turned its back (or worse) on a wave of assassinations of Iraqi union leaders. President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.
The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process. Iraq's oil was nationalized in the 1960s, like that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and still is, the industry's most zealous guardian.Holding a no-bid, sweetheart contract with occupation authorities, Halliburton Corporation came into Iraq in the wake of the troops in 2003. The company tried to seize control of the wells and rigs, withholding reconstruction aid to force workers to submit. The oil union struck for three days that August, stopping exports and cutting off government revenue. Halliburton left. The oil and port unions then forced foreign corporations to give up similar sweetheart agreements in Iraq's deepwater shipping facilities. Muhsin's electrical union is still battling to stop subcontracting in the power stations - a prelude to corporate control. The occupation has always had an economic agenda. Occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it." The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because that economic agenda is still insecure. Under Washington's guidance, the Iraqi government wrote a new oil law in secret. The Iraq study commission, headed by oilman James Baker, called it the key to ending the occupation.That law is touted in the US press as ensuring an equitable division of oil wealth. Iraqi unions say it will ensure that foreign corporations control future exploration and development, in one of the world's largest reserves. Hassan Juma'a Awad, president of the IFOU, wrote a letter to the US Congress on May 13. "Everyone knows the oil law doesn't serve the Iraqi people," he warned. The union was banned from the secret negotiations. According to Juma'a, the result "serves Bush, his supporters and foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people." The union has threatened to strike if the law is implemented. Like all Iraqi unionists, Juma'a says the occupation should end without demanding Iraq's oil as a price. "The USA claimed that it came here as a liberator, not to control our resources," he reminded Congress. Congressional opponents of the war can only win Iraqis' respect if they disavow the oil law.
Whatever government holds power in Baghdad at the occupation's end will need control of the oil wealth to rebuild the devastated country. That gives Iraq's working people a big reason to fight to ensure that happens.
Two Iraqi union leaders, Faleh Abood Umara and Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, are speaking in the United States about their situation in Iraq. For details about times and places, contact US Labor Against the War:
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=12200
For more articles and images on Iraq's unions, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Iraq/iraq.htm
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html--
__________________________________David Bacon, Photographs and Storieshttp://dbacon.igc.org__________________________________

Bush Democrats Shame on You

2007-05-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.democrats.com/events_cat/Democratic+Primary+2008

Above is a link to the list and an effort to create a more progressive Democratic Party. Good Luck

Four Years Later

2007-05-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

George Tenet Maureen Dowd

2007-05-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------May 2, 2007, NYT Op-Ed Columnist Better Never Than Late By MAUREEN DOWD Instead of George Tenet teaching at Georgetown University, George Tenet should be taught at Georgetown University.There should be a course on government called "The Ultimate Staff Guy." A morality saga about how much harm you can do as a go-along, get-along guy, spending so much time trying not to alienate the big cheese so he doesn't can you that you miss the moment where you have to can him or lose your soul.If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naïve president into invading Iraq with junk facts.General Powell counted on Slam Dunk - a slender reed - to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage Mr. Cheney's office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public. Slam Dunk's book tour is mesmerizing, in a horrifying way. "The irony of the whole situation is, is he was bluffing," Slam said of Saddam on "Larry King Live" on Monday night, adding, "And he didn't know we weren't." Mr. He-Man Tenet didn't understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn't take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?If he was really running around with his hair on fire, knowing the Osama danger, shouldn't he have set off alarms when W. and Vice went after Saddam instead of the real threat? Many people in Washington snorted at his dramatic cloak-and-dagger description of himself to Larry King: "I worked in the shadows my whole life."He was not Jason Bourne, lurking in dangerous locales. He risked life and limb on Capitol Hill among the backstabbers and cutthroat bureaucrats - from whom he obviously learned a lot. He spent nine years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, four as staff director. When Bill Clinton appointed him to run the C.I.A. in 1997, the profile of him in The Times was headlined "A Time to Reap the Rewards of Being Loyal." It observed that old colleagues had said "he had an ability to make many different superiors feel at ease with him."Six former C.I.A. officials sent Mr. Tenet a letter via his publisher - no wonder we're in trouble if spooks can't figure out the old Head Spook's home address - berating him for pretending he wrote his self-serving book partly to defend the honor of the agency and demanding that "at least half" of the profits be given to wounded soldiers and the families of dead soldiers (there needs to be a Son of Slam law). One of the signers, Larry Johnson, told CNN that Slam "is profiting from the blood of American soldiers.""By your silence you helped build the case for war," the former C.I.A. officials wrote. "You betrayed the C.I.A. officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld." They also said, "Although C.I.A. officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. ..."In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence." They concluded that "your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. ... It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated." Thus endeth the lesson in our class on "The Ultimate Staff Guy." If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off.

Another thanks to BT for sending me this.
GT

New Island

2007-04-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

GREENLAND'S NEW ISLAND IS ALARMING SIGN OF CLIMATE CHANGE MICHAEL MCCARTHY, INDEPENDENT, UK - The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming. Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland's remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea. . .The second-largest ice sheet in the world (after Antarctica), if its entire 2.5 million cubic kilometers of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 meters, or more than 23 feet. That would inundate most of the world's coastal cities, including London, swamp vast areas of heavily-populated low-lying land in countries such as Bangladesh, and remove several island countries such as the Maldives from the face of the Earth. However, even a rise one tenth as great would have devastating consequences.http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2480994.ece

Compromise And The War by Howard Zinn

2007-03-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

By Howard Zinn May 2007 Issue of The Progressive: As I write this, Congress is debating timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. In response to the Bush Administration's "surge" of troops, and the Republicans' refusal to limit our occupation, the Democrats are behaving with their customary timidity, proposing withdrawal, but only after a year, or eighteen months. And it seems they expect the anti-war movement to support them.That was suggested in a recent message from MoveOn, which polled its members on the Democrat proposal, saying that progressives in Congress, "like many of us, don't think the bill goes far enough, but see it as the first concrete step to ending the war."Ironically, and shockingly, the same bill appropriates $124 billion in more funds to carry the war. It's as if, before the Civil War, abolitionists agreed to postpone the emancipation of the slaves for a year, or two years, or five years, and coupled this with an appropriation of funds to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite-provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence-they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home.It is four years since the United States invaded Iraq with a ferocious bombardment, with "shock and awe." That is enough time to decide if the presence of our troops is making the lives of the Iraqis better or worse. The evidence is overwhelming. Since the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, and, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, about two million Iraqis have left the country, and an almost equal number are internal refugees, forced out of their homes, seeking shelter elsewhere in the country.Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. But his capture and death have not made the lives of Iraqis better, as the U.S. occupation has created chaos: no clean water, rising rates of hunger, 50 percent unemployment, shortages of food, electricity, and fuel, a rise in child malnutrition and infant deaths. Has the U.S. presence diminished violence? On the contrary, by January 2007 the number of insurgent attacks has increased dramatically to 180 a day.The response of the Bush Administration to four years of failure is to send more troops. To add more troops matches the definition of fanaticism: If you find you're going in the wrong direction, redouble your speed. It reminds me of the physician in Europe in the early nineteenth century who decided that bloodletting would cure pneumonia. When that didn't work, he concluded that not enough blood had been let.The Congressional Democrats' proposal is to give more funds to the war, and to set a timetable that will let the bloodletting go on for another year or more. It is necessary, they say, to compromise, and some anti-war people have been willing to go along. However, it is one thing to compromise when you are immediately given part of what you are demanding, if that can then be a springboard for getting more in the future. That is the situation described in the recent movie The Wind That Shakes The Barley, in which the Irish rebels against British rule are given a compromise solution-to have part of Ireland free, as the Irish Free State. In the movie, Irish brother fights against brother over whether to accept this compromise. But at least the acceptance of that compromise, however short of justice, created the Irish Free State. The withdrawal timetable proposed by the Democrats gets nothing tangible, only a promise, and leaves the fulfillment of that promise in the hands of the Bush Administration.There have been similar dilemmas for the labor movement. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that unions, fighting for a new contract, must decide if they will accept an offer that gives them only part of what they have demanded. It's always a difficult decision, but in almost all cases, whether the compromise can be considered a victory or a defeat, the workers have been given some thing palpable, improving their condition to some degree. If they were offered only a promise of something in the future, while continuing an unbearable situation in the present, it would not be considered a compromise, but a sellout. A union leader who said, "Take this, it's the best we can get" (which is what the MoveOn people are saying about the Democrats' resolution) would be hooted off the platform.I am reminded of the situation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, when the black delegation from Mississippi asked to be seated, to represent the 40 percent black population of that state. They were offered a "compromise"-two nonvoting seats. "This is the best we can get," some black leaders said. The Mississippians, led by Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses, turned it down, and thus held on to their fighting spirit, which later brought them what they had asked for. That mantra-"the best we can get"-is a recipe for corruption.It is not easy, in the corrupting atmosphere of Washington, D.C., to hold on firmly to the truth, to resist the temptation of capitulation that presents itself as compromise. A few manage to do so. I think of Barbara Lee, the one person in the House of Representatives who, in the hysterical atmosphere of the days following 9/11, voted against the resolution authorizing Bush to invade Afghanistan. Today, she is one of the few who refuse to fund the Iraq War, insist on a prompt end to the war, reject the dishonesty of a false compromise.Except for the rare few, like Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, and John Lewis, our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be "realistic."We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.Howard Zinn is the author, most recently, of "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."

Thanks again to Bob T. for this.

SDS Documentary.

2007-03-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

sds documentary "Rebels with a cause", available on google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3748224138549545719

I did some of the incidental music for this film.

The Pragmatism of Prolonged War Norman Solomon

2007-03-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Pragmatism of Prolonged War
by Norman Solomon

The days are getting longer, but the media shadows are no shorter as they cover the war in Iraq through American eyes, squinting in Washington's pallid sun.
Debated as an issue of politics, the actual war keeps being drained of life. Abstractions thrive inside the Beltway, while the war effort continues: funded by the U.S. Treasury every day, as the original crime of invasion is replicated with occupation.
More than ever, in the aftermath of the Scooter Libby verdict, the country's major news outlets are willing to acknowledge that the political road to war in Iraq was paved with deceptions. But the same media outlets were integral to laying the flagstones along the path to war -- and they're now integral to prolonging the war.
With the same logic of one, two, and three years ago, the conformist media wisdom is that a cutoff of funds for the war is not practical. Likewise, on Capitol Hill, there's a lot of huffing and puffing about how the war must wind down -- but the money for it, we're told, must keep moving. Like two rails along the same track, the dispensers of conventional media and political wisdom carry us along to more and more and more war.
The antiwar movement is now coming to terms with measures being promoted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi and Reid have a job to do. The antiwar movement has a job to do. The jobs are not the same.
This should be obvious -- but, judging from public and private debates now fiercely underway among progressive activists and organizations, there's a lot of confusion in the air.
No amount of savvy Capitol-speak can change the fact that "benchmarks" are euphemisms for more war. And when activists pretend otherwise, they play into the hands of those who want the war to go on... and on... and on.
Deferring to the Democratic leadership means endorsing loopholes that leave the door wide open for continued U.S. military actions inside Iraq -- whether justified as attacks on fighters designated as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or with reclassification of U.S. forces as "trainers" rather than "combat troops." And an escalating U.S. air war could continue to bomb Iraqi neighborhoods for years.
The position being articulated by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey and others in Congress is the one that the antiwar movement should unite behind -- to fully fund bringing the troops home in a safe and orderly way, while ending the entire U.S. occupation and war effort, by the end of 2007.
We're urged to take solace from the fact that Washington's debate has shifted to "when" -- rather than "whether" -- the war should end. But the end of the U.S. war effort could be deferred for many more years while debates over "when" flourish and fester. This happened during the Vietnam War, year after year, while death came to tens of thousands more American soldiers and perhaps a million more Vietnamese people.
Pelosi is speaker of the House, and Reid is majority leader of the Senate. But neither speaks for, much less leads, the antiwar movement that we need.
When you look at the practicalities of the situation, Pelosi and Reid could be more accurately described as speaker and leader for the war-management movement.
A historic tragedy is that the most hefty progressive organization, MoveOn, seems to have wrapped itself around the political sensibilities of Reid, Pelosi and others at the top of Capitol Hill leadership. Deference to that leadership is a big mistake. We already have a Democratic Party. Over time, a vibrant progressive group loses vibrance by forfeiting independence and becoming a virtual appendage of party leaders.
Last week, while MoveOn was sending out a mass e-mail to its 3.2 million members offering free bumper stickers urging "End This War," the MoveOn leadership was continuing its failure to back the efforts of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for "a fully funded, and systematic, withdrawal of U.S. soldiers and military contractors from Iraq."
There are rationales for uniting behind practical measures, and sometimes they make sense. But the MoveOn pattern has been unsettling and recurring. Power brokerage is not antiwar leadership.
The U.S. Constitution and the federal courts are clear: Only through the "power of the purse" can Congress end a war. It's good to see MoveOn churning out bumper stickers that advocate an end to the Iraq war -- but sad to see its handful of decision-makers failing to support a measure to fund an orderly and prompt withdrawal from the war.
On Capitol Hill, most Democrats seem to have settled on a tactical approach of simultaneously ratifying and deploring the continuation of the war. The approach may or may not be savvy politics in a narrow sense of gaining temporary partisan political advantage. But it is ultimately destructive to refuse to do the one thing that the Constitution empowers Congress to do to halt a U.S. war -- stop appropriating taxpayer money for it.
In retrospect, such congressional behavior during the Vietnam War -- while attracting sober approval from much of the era's punditocracy -- ended up prolonging a horrific war that could have ended years sooner. Now, as then, pandering to the news media and other powerful pressures, most politicians are busy trying to pick "low-hanging fruit" that turns out to be poisonous.
"Somehow this madness must cease," Martin Luther King Jr. said 40 years ago about the Vietnam War. "We must stop now."
Was the situation then essentially different from today? No.
"We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy," King said. And: "We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late."
When King denounced "the madness of militarism," he wasn't trying to cozy up to the majority leader of the Senate or impress the House speaker with how he could deliver support. He was speaking truthfully, and he was opposing a war forthrightly. That was imperative in 1967. It is imperative in 2007.
Norman Solomon's latest book is "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com
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Article About Ben Goldberg A Great Clarinetist

2007-03-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

I've done a bunch of casuals with him over the years. He's great to play with.

http://www.themonthly.com/up-front-03-07.html

Jim Harrington on Don Nelson and Ralph Stanley.

2007-03-01T18:43:00.000-08:00

What does Golden State Warriors Coach Don Nelson do to relieve a little stress after his team losses a big one? Well, on Sunday (Feb. 25), mere hours after the W’s dropped a game to Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers at Oracle Arena, Nellie took in Ralph Stanley’s concert at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Coach Nelson was one of many music lovers that turned out to celebrate Stanley’s 80th birthday (see show review in today’s Bay Area Living). Nellie said he enjoyed Stanley’s concert _ but he really seemed to be having a blast during the opening set by Berkeley’s Laurie Lewis. It was charming to see the coach dance in the back of the church while Lewis performed her upbeat brand of bluegrass. Charming, yes _ but let’s just say that Nelson won’t be a cast member on “Dancing With the Stars'’ anytime soon. No word yet on whether Nelson will adopt Stanley’s classic “O Death'’ as the official theme song for the Warriors’ push for the playoffs.

A Good Review Of Why The Left Was Right ( Correct)

2007-02-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

A dose of nostalgia, truth and a call to action. B. Thanks to Bob T once again .http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/16/135644/137From: "Mike Kramer"

Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home!

2007-02-09T16:13:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ewY_mYqt0

Don' Mourn Organize

2007-02-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

Great Driscoll Cartoon

2007-02-06T18:20:00.000-08:00

Molly Ivins

2007-02-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Bob T.If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation atspecial discounted rates. You can order online athttps://ssl.thenation.com/sumo/EMAILARTLINK or call our toll-free numberat 1-800-333-8536.Thought you would be interested in this article from The Nation. Remembering Molly Ivins by John Nichols Washington Correspondent, The Nation Molly Ivins always said she wanted to write a book about the lonely experience of East Texas civil rights campaigners to be titled No One Famous Ever Came. While the television screens and newspapers told the stories of the marches, the legal battles and the victories of campaigns against segregation in Alabama and Mississippi, Ivins recalled, the foes of Jim Crow laws in the region where she came of age in the 1950s and '60s often labored in obscurity without any hope that they would be joined on the picket lines by Nobel Peace Prize winners, folk singers, Hollywood stars or senators.And Ivins loved those righteous strugglers all the more for their willingness to carry on.The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came only when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out. The nation's mostly widely syndicated progressive columnist, who died January 31 at age 62 after a long battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer," adored the activists she celebrated from the time in the late 1960s when she created her own "Movements for Social Change" beat at the old Minneapolis Tribune and started making heroes of "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.""Troublemaker" might be a term of derision in the lexicon of some journalists--particularly the on-bended-knee White House press pack that Ivins studiously refused to run with--but to Molly it was a term of endearment. If anyone anywhere was picking a fight with the powerful, she was writing them up with the same passionate language she employed when her friend the great Texas liberal Billie Carr passed on in 2002. Ivins recalled Carr "was there for the workers and the unions, she was there for the African-Americans, she was there for the Hispanics, she was there for the women, she was there for the gays. And this wasn't all high-minded, oh, we-should-all-be-kinder-to-one-another. This was tough, down, gritty, political trench warfare; money against people. She bullied her way to the table of power, and then she used that place to get everybody else there, too. If you ain't ready to sweat, and you ain't smart enough to deal, you can't play in her league."Molly Ivins could have played in the league of the big boys. They invited her in, giving her a bureau chief job with the New York Times--which she wrote her way out of when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck." Leaving the Times in 1982 was the best thing that ever happened to Molly. She settled back in her home state of Texas, where her friend Jim Hightower was about to get elected as agricultural commissioner and another friend named Ann Richards was striding toward the governorship. As a newspaper columnist for the old Dallas Times Herald--and, after that paper's demise, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram--Molly began writing a political column drenched in the good humor and fighting spirit of that populist moment. It appealed beyond Texas, and within a decade she was writing for 400 papers nationwide.As it happened, the populist fires faded in Texas, and the state started spewing out the byproducts of an uglier political tradition--the oil-money plutocracy--in the form of George Bush and Dick Cheney.It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins's columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.When Washington pundits started counseling bipartisanship after voters routed the Republicans in the 2006 elections, Molly wrote, "The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife--accused of everything from selling drugs to murder--all orchestrated by that paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.... So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners."Given Bush's record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a bad idea on its face," Ivins continued, in a column that warned any Democrat who might think to make nice with President and his team that "These people are not only dishonest--they're not even smart."Her readers cheered that November 9, 2006, column, as they did everything Molly wrote. And the cheers came loudest from those distant corners of Kansas and Mississippi where, often, her words were the only dissents that appeared in the local papers during the long period of diminished discourse following 9/11. For the liberal faithful in Boise and Biloxi and Beaumont, she was a lifeline--telling them that, yes, Henry Kissinger was "an old war criminal," that Bush had created a "an honest to goodness constitutional crisis" when it embarked on a program of warrantless wiretapping and that Bill Moyers should seek the presidency because "I want to vote for somebody who's good and brave and who should win." (The Moyers boomlet was our last co-conspiracy, and in Molly's honor, I'm thinking of writing in his name on my Democratic primary ballot next year.)For the people in the places where no one famous ever came, Molly Ivins arrived a couple of times a week in the form of columns that told the local rabble-rousers that they were the true patriots, that they damn well better keep pitching fits about the war and the Patriot Act and economic inequality, and that they should never apologize for defending "those highest and best American ideas" contained in the Bill of Rights.Often, Molly actually did come--in all of her wisecracking, pot-stirring populist glory.Keeping a promise she'd made when her old friend and fellow Texan John Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could have commanded five figures, she took no speaker's fee. She just came and told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. "I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years," she told them. "The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's."She also told them, even when she was battling cancer and Karl Rove, that they should relish the lucky break of their consciences and their conflicts. Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."This article can be found on the web at:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070219/molly_ivinsVisit The Nationhttp://www.thenation.com/Subscribe to The Nation:https://ssl.thenation.com/

Tradition

2007-01-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

During a service at an old synagogue in Eastern Europe, when the Shema (this is perhaps the key prayer of the service) prayer was said, half the congregants stood up and half remained sitting. The half that was seated started yelling at those standing to sit down, and the ones standing yelled at the ones sitting to stand up. The rabbi, learned as he was in the Law and commentaries, didn't know what to do. His congregation suggested that he consult a housebound 98 year old man who was one of the original founders of their temple. The rabbi hoped The elderly man would be able to tell him what the actual temple tradition was, so he went to the nursing home with a representative of each faction of the congregation.The one whose followers stood during Shema said to the old man, "Is the tradition to stand during this prayer?"The old man answered, "No, that is not the tradition."The one whose followers sat said, "Then the tradition is to sit during Shema!"The old man answered, "No, that is not the tradition."Then the rabbi said to the old man, "But the congregants fight all the time, yelling at each other about whether they should sit or stand."The old man interrupted, exclaiming, "THAT is the tradition!"

Pete Seeger 1947 Film

2007-01-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1585962456964293309&q=to+hear+your+banjo

Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home!

2007-01-12T01:26:00.000-08:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2286920372780429587&q=pete+seeger&hl=en

Itche Goldberg, Yiddish Advocate, 102, Dies

2007-01-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

By ARI L. GOLDMAN New York Times
Published: January 3, 2007
Itche Goldberg, a champion of Yiddish who wrote and edited and taught his beloved language in the face of all those who said keeping Yiddish alive was a lost cause, died last Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102.

He died of complications of cancer, his son, David, said.
Passing on the Yiddish tradition to future generations was the passion of Itche Goldberg’s life. He promoted the language in every conceivable form: writing poetry, librettos, children’s books and essays and running Yiddish schools and summer camps. His book “Yiddish Stories for Young People” is still used in the shrinking network of secular Yiddish schools.
Mr. Goldberg’s final collection of essays in Yiddish, “Essayen Tsvey” (“Essays Two”), was published in 2004 on his 100th birthday.
In secular Yiddish circles, Mr. Goldberg is best known as the editor of one of the longest-running journals of Yiddish literature, Yidishe Kultur. He served as editor from 1964 to 2004, when he published the journal’s final issue.
Mr. Goldberg was a veteran of the heated ideological wars of the 20th century over Judaism, Yiddish, socialism and communism. He quit a job at a Yiddish summer camp in Canada in the 1920s after a fight with the anarchist Emma Goldman over the Sacco and Vanzetti case. And he was no fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1978. He published an essay criticizing Singer as failing to reflect the humanist and social ideals that Mr. Goldberg felt were the central themes of Yiddish culture.
He never stopped championing Yiddish, in whatever form, even in the face of evidence that fewer and fewer people were interested in it.
“We’re dealing with a language that is about 1,000 years old and a literature that is 600 or 700 years old,” he once said. “What developed was an extraordinary and profound modern literature which would become the equivalent of French or German literature.”
Yiddish is a Germanic language that developed as the lingua franca of the Ashkenazic Jewry by incorporating Hebrew and borrowing liberally from the different European lands where Jews lived. The use of Yiddish has greatly diminished, with the notable exception of its use among Hasidic Jews who continue to speak the language of the European Jewish communities from which they sprang.
Mr. Goldberg was decidedly secular. But as he told an interviewer not long ago, “Just because I’m secular doesn’t mean I’m antireligious.” What was important about Judaism, he said, was its progressive values and not its religious rituals. He pushed for more Jewish content in the Yiddish schools of his day, including more study of the Bible and of Jewish holidays, to the dismay of some of his anti-religious colleagues.
Isaac Goldberg was born in Apt, Poland, on March 22, 1904. From early childhood everyone called him Itche, a diminutive form of Isaac. In 1920 he moved to Toronto, where he taught Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring School, which promoted a socialist ideology. Later, when he moved to New York, he broke with Workmen’s Circle and embraced communism, seeing the Soviet Union as the salvation for Jewish national and social problems. He became the cultural and national school director of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, a branch of the pro-Communist International Workers Order.
Mr. Goldberg repudiated Communist ideology in the 1950s when the Stalinist regime’s horrors became apparent, particularly the execution of Jewish writers in 1952.
Although he was threatened with deportation because of his Communist activities, Mr. Goldberg was able to remain in the United States, and eventually became an American citizen. From 1970 to 1985, he was a professor of Yiddish language and literature at Queens College.
Two years ago, in honor of his 100th birthday, a group of Jewish musicians performed an adaptation of I. L. Peretz’s “Oyb Nit Nokh Hekher” (“If Not Even Higher”), with a libretto by Mr. Goldberg. It was one of more than 20 works that he wrote with the composer Moyshe Rauch.
In addition to his son, who lives in Manhattan, Mr. Goldberg is survived by his wife of 67 years, the former Jennie Wilensky, who is 101; a daughter, Susan, of Manhattan; two granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Goldberg fought to keep his magazine Yidishe Kultur alive right to the end of his life.
In an interview in 2004 he said: “I only have two dreams. One dream is that someone will knock on the door and I will open it and they give me a check for $150,000 for the magazine. Second dream is that someone knocks at the door and I open it up and he gives me a corned beef sandwich. Those are my only two dreams. I’m not asking for much. Really, I’m not. And I think they’re both reachable.”
.

Jimmy Carter's Book

2006-12-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2006-12-28-08-49-03-news.php
Jimmy Carter's Sin Against Israel
By Charles Lenchner clenchner01@yahoo.com, PDA Israel/Palestine Working Group CoordinatorDecember 28, 2006.We all knew Jimmy Carter was in for it. Before anyone had read a single paragraph of his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” well known heavy hitters in the media were taking pot shots at the ex-president. Jennifer Siegel of the Forward got it right in saying that “critics of the former president probably will be most offended by his use of the word ‘apartheid.’”(1) In so doing, Carter departed from a particular script that leaders of the pro-Israel community were willing to tolerate from U.S. critics of Israel. The Israel lobby – Jews and non-Jews -- has devoted enormous resources and political capital to supporting Israel. They’ve done a great job, strategically speaking, by funding think tanks, newsletters, endowed chairs, academic centers and media activism shops. These resources are deployed in part to secure short-term victories around policy issues. The larger and ultimately more important role is setting the limits of allowable debate. The terms of debate in the U.S. are: Israeli actions and policy may be criticized, as long as everyone affirms Israel’s motives of only wanting peace and security. However, in Israel proper, other motives are debated constantly. These include a racist desire to subjugate Arabs to Western and Jewish control, greed for land, profit from a captive market, the wish to serve U.S. interests in the Middle East, and of course, classic stupidity, of the kind detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly.” In choosing to use the word “apartheid,” Carter violates the terms of U.S. debate. True, he does not actually accuse Israel proper of being an apartheid state. Also, he does not consider Israel’s motives to be racist. The term does however, connote moral obtuseness, a suggestion that some part of Israeli policy is wrong in the sense of ”evil,” not just wrong in the sense of “misguided.” We should remember that to its dying days, the white South African regime that gave us the word “apartheid” claimed that it was only acting in its role as a bulwark against communism and anarchy, and not on behalf of the white race. Gandhi famously said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote an academic paper about the Israeli Lobby, they were ridiculed for appearing to support the myth of Jewish control of Congress and the media. But they did succeed in getting widespread notice. Carter follows the path they cleared, with the powerful footsteps of an ex-president known for ensuring fair elections and housing the homeless. Where Mearsheimer and Walt evoked learned essays, Carter has provoked hysterical gnashing of teeth. (Just look at poor Alan Dershowitz jumping up and down in Cambridge, virtually screaming, “Listen to me, not Carter!”) Carter has succeeded, because he gave an emotional narrative of particular appeal to this country’s Christians – still a large majority . He not only explains the facts, he includes the story of how he learned them, as a former president and elder statesmen with extensive Middle East experience. Carter’s view – that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, along with its apartheid policies, violation of UN resolutions, and well documented human rights violations, constitute the driving force of the conflict -- support my own conclusions, and those of most Europeans and our own State Department, although they clash with the self image of Jewish supporters of Israel who wish to preserve their own status as peace- and freedom-loving victims, angry at the Arabs because they “force us to kill their sons.”(2) End the Occuption with the creation of a viable Palestinian state and the conflict will end. This is Carter’s position and one PDA enthusiastically supports. I grew up in Israel and served in her army(3). I live and work in the Jewish community in New York. And of course, I recognize that Israel faces real dilemmas about how to achieve peace and security. Nonetheless, the occupation (in the West Bank) and imprisonment (in Gaza) of Palestinians cannot be described as primarily “misguided.” Occupation is an ongoing and brutalizing evil, carried out by people with limited moral vision and overwhelming military might. It is not in the long-term interests of peace in the region for supporters of Israel gloss over this fact. Nothing can justify what is being done by Israel to the Palestinian people, not even Palestinian terror, extremism and incompetence. The refusal to end the occupation over the last 39 years is most of all a failure of will, not some unfortunate result of Palestinian intransigence. Carter's book will persuade more Americans to point a finger at Israel, and even consider applying serious, option-closing consequences (sanctions) to Israeli actions. If we care about Israel’s survival, we must care enough to apply U.S. political power and will to end the occupation. 1 Carter Book Slaps Israel With ‘Apartheid’ Tag, Provides Ammo to GOP 10/17/06 2 “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Golda Meir to Anwar Sadat. 3 I was a refusenik in 1987-1988, preferring to go to prison rather than enter the West Bank as a soldier.

A Nation Founded On Illegals

2006-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks again to Bob T. for this one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------December 27, 2006 Op-Ed Contributor, NYT Our Founding Illegals By WILLIAM HOGELAND.EVERY nation is a nation of immigrants. Go back far enough and you'll find us all, millions of potential lives, tucked in the DNA of our African mother, Lucy. But the immigrant experience in the United States is justly celebrated, and perhaps no aspect of that experience is more quintessentially American than our long heritage of illegal immigration. You wouldn't know it from the immigration debate going on all year (the bipartisan immigration bill-in-progress, announced this week, is unlikely to mention it), but America's pioneer values developed in a distinctly illegal context. In 1763, George III drew a line on a map stretching from modern-day Maine to modern-day Georgia, along the crest of the Appalachians. He declared it illegal to claim or settle land west of the line, all of which he reserved for Native Americans.George Washington, a young colonel in the Virginia militia, instructed his land-buying agents in the many ways of getting around the law. Although Washington was not alone in acquiring forbidden tracts, few were as energetic in the illegal acquisition of western land. And Washington was a model of decorum compared to Ethan Allen, a rowdy from Connecticut who settled with his brothers in a part of the Green Mountains known as the Hampshire Grants (later known as "Vermont"). The province of New York held title to the land, but Allen asserted his own kind of claim: He threw New Yorkers out, Tony Soprano style, then offered to sell their lots to what he hoped would be a flood of fellow illegals from Connecticut.Meanwhile, illegal pioneers began moving across the Alleghenies and into the upper Ohio Valley, violating the king's 1763 proclamation and a few more besides. (George would today be accused of softness on immigration; he kept shifting the line westward.) Immigrants from such déclassé spots as Germany and Ireland violated the laws and settled where they pleased. The upper Ohio was rife with illegal immigrants, ancestors of people who, in country clubs today, are implying a Mayflower ancestry.Parallels to today's illegal immigration are striking. Then as now, it was potentially deadly to bring a family across the line. But once across, illegals had a good chance of avoiding arrest and settling in. Border patrols, in the forms of the British Army and provincial militias, were stretched thin. The 18th-century forest primeval, like a modern city, offered ample opportunities for getting lost. Complex economies thrived in the virgin backwoods, unfettered by legitimate property titles. When conflicts developed between the first and second waves of illegals, some salient social ironies arose, too. By the early 1770's, George Washington had amassed vast tracts to which his titles were flatly invalid. The Revolution rectified that. With British law void, Washington emerged from the war with his titles legal by default. But he acquired another problem: low-class illegals were squatting on his newly authenticated, highly valuable property.Washington harbored no fond feeling for breakers of laws that he too had recently flouted. "It is hard upon me," he lamented without irony, "to have property which has been fairly obtained disputed and withheld." He went to court to have the squatters evicted, complaining that they had "not taken those necessary steps pointed out by the law." He was appealing to righteousness from atop a high but wobbly horse. Descendants of the great immigration experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum to learn of the tribulations of ancestors who risked much to become Americans. Those of us whose ancestors risked everything as illegal immigrants, and in the process helped found a nation, owe our forebears a debt of gratitude, too. Without their daring disregard of immigration laws, we might not be here today.William Hogeland is the author of "The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty."

Music Videos From YouTube

2006-12-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

I’m sending out this group of songs that I found on YouTube. If you haven’t checked it out , be prepared to spend a lot of time there. There’s great old clips and more that gets added all the time. Happy everything and anything you celebrate. If you find something you like, send it to me.
Peace and justice,
Gerry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLresN6yZEY Spoon Guitar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMMluFiMiQ Uncle Pen Bill Monroe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-C9BqADIWE Peggy Lee Why Don’t You Do Right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Qtqw9Eec0 Milton Nascimento – Uakti – Lagrima do Sul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9qqTI3YrHk Grapevine Antonio Forcione

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxYV1jGuj5U Caravan Van Morrison and The Band
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXEWzq0UANA Jamaican Jewish Wedding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pXgVzFHcSs Just Over In The Glory Land Stanley Brothers and Reno and Smiley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U-_gMpdXBI Caravan Duke Ellington
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GG2v8LBcBU Koko Little Walter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbM7oAz3bS8 John Coltrane Naima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8jAafAkrM Chava Alberstein Klezmatics Mayn Schvester Chaya

The Fairness of Capitalism

2006-12-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

INCOME SCORECARD 1979-2004 BOTTOM 60% OF AMERICANS: DOWN 5%60TH-80TH PERCENTILE: UP 2% TOP 5% OF AMERICANS: UP 53% TOP 1% OF AMERICANS: UP 248% DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, NY TIMES - Despite significant gains in 2004, the total income Americans reported to the tax collector that year,adjusted for inflation, was still below its peak in 2000, new government data shows. Reported income totaled $7.044 trillion in2004, the latest year for which data is available, down from more than$7.143 trillion in 2000, new Internal Revenue Service data shows. . .The overall income declines . . . came despite a series of tax cutsthat President Bush and Congressional Republicans promoted as the bestway to stimulate both short and long-term growth after the Internetbubble burst on Wall Street in 2000 and the economy fell into a briefrecession in 2001. . .Very top households, which include about 300,000 Americans, reported significantly more pretax income combined than the poorest 120 million Americans earned in 2004, the data show. This was a sharp change from 1979, the oldest year examined by the I.R.S., when the thin slice at the top received about one-third of the total income of the big group at the bottom.Over all, average incomes rose 27 percent in real terms over thequarter-century from 1979 through 2004. But the gains were narrowlyconcentrated at the top and offset by losses for the bottom 60 percentof Americans, those making less than $38,761 in 2004.The bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than 95cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979, analysis of the I.R.S. data shows.The next best-off group, the fifth of Americans on the 60th to 80 thrungs of the income ladder, averaged 2 cents more income in 2004 foreach dollar they earned in 1979.Only those in the top 5 percent had significant gains. The average income of those on the 95th to 99th rungs of the income ladder rose by 53 percent, almost twice the average rate.A third of the entire national increase in reported income went to thetop 1 percent and more than half of that went to the top tenth of 1 percent, whose average incomes soared so much that for each dollar,adjusted for inflation, that they had in 1979 they had $3.48 in 2004.http://tinyurl.com/yaxw9g

One Minute OF Music Played In A Way You Have Never Heard

2006-12-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/05/teaspoon2.mpg I don't know who this is. I got the link from an interview with Cindy Cashdollar.

Andy Statmen Live

2006-12-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

I saw him and his trio play at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center last night. The man is simply amazing. He started out on clarinet , ended the first set playing mandolin and played mandolin for the whole second set.His band is really outstanding as well.He and they are tuned into some relationship with sound that one rarely hears. Toping the night off was an appearence by David Grisman, and the evening ended with great duets. Don't miss this show if it comes to your neck of the woods. Most of what happens is spur of the moment so although the recordings are great , what happens on stage is always fresh and wonderful. Andy pulled some great sounds from his well worn snakehead, which he struggled with to get in tune( it happens to the best of us) and won. David played his Giacomel, which I got to play backstage. It's a fantastic instrument in every way, great sound and easy to play.
An added bonus for me was that when I practiced this morning , I felt I was playing better just because of being at the concert and absorbing some of the musicality , fluidity and most of all soulfulness .
Andy's website http://www.andystatman.org/index.htmlCheck out Andy's concerts.

Mazel Tov

2006-11-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

Mazel tov to all those not getting married in a castle today.
Mazel tov to all whether you are straight or you are gay.
I'll drink a l'khayim with my best bottle of booze,
And dance with my wife without any shoes.

Good Light Bulb Joke

2006-11-14T17:22:00.000-08:00

How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?The answer is 10.1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed.3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for darkness.5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Haliburton for the new light bulb.6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a stepladder under the banner, "Mission Accomplished."7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally in the dark.8. One to viciously smear #7.9. One to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light bulb-changing policy all along.10. And finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb, and screwing the country.

Emma Lazurus Statue Of Lberty, Immigration and Judaism

2006-10-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

America's voice of liberty, the writer of the Statue of Liberty sonnet is honored around the same time as the election that may decide the fate of immigration.By Esther Schor, ESTHER SCHOR is professor of English at Princeton University and author of a new biography, "Emma Lazarus."October 28, 2006 THIS WEEKEND, Emma Lazarus, whose eloquent words are engraved in the Statue of Liberty, will be honored with a stone in the Poet's Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. The timing is auspicious because 10 days later, when Americans go to the polls, we will decide anew the fate of her vision for our country as a refuge for immigrants.
These days, famous phrases from Lazarus' resonant 1883 sonnet - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" - are hurled like salvoes from all sides of the immigration controversy. Those who view immigrants as a threat to our security, our economy and our democracy contrast the accomplishments of the heralded immigrants of the past with the woes they feel are imported by the current wave of arrivals. They would prefer the statue to proclaim, "Keep your huddled masses." Bloggers on the left ask the statue to admonish and accuse: "Huddled masses; muddled laws." And on and on; a Google search for "your tired, your poor" yields about 200,000 results, while "huddled masses" nets almost twice that number.
Voters and politicians alike understand that the lawmakers chosen Nov. 7 will again face the question of whether to slam the door on new immigrants and, if so, how hard. Nevertheless, most candidates have learned something from the debacle of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill that split even the president's party: Immigration is simply too divisive an issue to depend on for votes.Lazarus wrote her famous words in a climate just as divisive. In December 1883, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's statue, "Liberty Enlightening the World," languished in pieces in Paris because fundraising in the United States to build a pedestal had been abysmally slow. As Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, wrote: "We have more than a hundred millionaires in this city, any one of whom might have written a check for the whole sum. But do they care for a Statue of Liberty, which only reminds them of the equality of all citizens of the Republic?"
Born in 1849 to a wealthy Jewish family of Sephardic descent, Lazarus had been an enfant terrible. Her doting father, a sugar merchant, used his fortune to turn her into a publishing superstar at 17. Her precocious fame, along with her magnetism and wit, won her the friendship of such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James. She called herself an "outlaw" Jew, was secular and fiercely identified with the Jewish people rather than with Jewish observance. Writing in the mainstream, middlebrow Century magazine, she introduced a national American audience to Jewish culture, history and nationhood and wrote vignettes about the history of anti-Semitism.
With the bloody Russian pogroms of 1881-82, boatloads of Jewish refugees arrived in New York, sometimes at the rate of 2,000 a month. Aid groups raised the specter of "an army of Jewish paupers," and even Jews who could trace their American ancestry back two centuries began to fear anti-Semitic reprisals. If those who raised the alarm had had the genius to invent the term "homeland security," they would surely have done so. Lazarus, in a weekly column in the American Hebrew newspaper, hectored and browbeat complacent American Jews into opening their hearts and pockets to the refugees. She refused to soothe ruffled feathers and calm fears. "It will be a lasting blot upon American Judaism if we do not come forward now with encouragement for the disheartened and help for the helpless," she wrote.
Traditional Jews reviled her disparaging of Jewish law; Reform Jews disparaged her for speaking candidly about anti-Semitism. A lesser figure might have retreated, but she was made of stern stuff. Instead, she advanced. In "The New Colossus," what she had once said to Jews - "Until we are all free, none of us is free" - she said to the nation. Just as Jews were morally obliged to repair the world, she argued, America was morally obliged to succor the nations, to open its doors to the poor and oppressed. That obligation was incurred along with a legacy of rebellion against tyranny.
As unambiguous as she was on the immigration question, Lazarus herself was a woman of contradictions. She was a champion of the oppressed; she was also a snob with an exquisite sense of entitlement. She flaunted her dual identity as an American and as a Jew, believing, unlike her contemporaries, that to be more openly Jewish was to be more deeply American. She pleaded the cause not of a chosen people but of a people who deserved the freedom to choose: what to think, whom to love and befriend, how to earn their bread.A spinster who lived out her life under her father's roof, she inscribed in her poetic legacy an explicit sonnet of erotic desire for a woman that, after her death at 38 from Hodgkin's disease, her grieving sisters squelched. Despite how prolific Lazarus was in her time, her oeuvre of poems, plays, essays, translations and a novel has been whittled down to a single sonnet, "The New Colossus," mounted only after her death in 1887 inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.Enriched by her contradictions, Emma Lazarus spoke with a clear, prophetic fervor, telling the nation that its complexion would change, along with its soul. Within the hard, cold, haughty visage of Gilded Age America, she discerned a mother's face and gave that face a voice.

Thanks To HH for sending me this.

New Old Play About The Yiddish Theatre

2006-10-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30723/format/html/displaystory.html

Beloved Celebrity Succumbs To E.Coli Pathogen

2006-10-02T22:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to HY for this one.