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Wanted: Creative Extremists

By Mickey Z.
Created Jan 16 2007 - 9:49am

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of
extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative
extremists."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When reporting on the infamous New York School of abstract expressionist
painters in 1947, art critic Clement Greenberg pondered, "What can fifty do
against one hundred and forty million?" It wasn't so much an entire
population stacked against a band of radical painters that Greenberg was
contemplating. Rather, it was 140 million Americans essentially ignoring a
movement that would eventually change the face of art.

The U.S. population has more than doubled in the fifty-plus years since
Jackson Pollock dripped his way onto the cover of Life magazine and there
are still plenty of movements being ignored by the majority. In fact,
lurking beneath the homogenized, one-size-fits-all surface of today's
consumer culture, there's a broad range of indefatigable rabble-rousers
doing their thing.

The Bush Who Cried Wolf

By Bob Burnett
Created Jan 16 2007 - 9:31am

In his speech announcing an escalation in Iraq [1] President Bush relied
upon a familiar refrain: "Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United
States... Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch
attacks on the American people." Bush suggested Al Qaeda leads the Iraqi
resistance to the occupation and, therefore, if America leaves without
achieving "victory," Al Qaeda will establish a caliphate in Iraq. Once
again, Bush cried Wolf.

The Aesop fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, tells of a shepherd who amused
himself by periodically crying, "wolf," which caused nearby villagers to run
to his pasture to help him. One day, a real wolf threatened his flock;
however, this time when the shepherd cried "wolf," no one in the village
believed him and all his sheep died. President Bush continues to cry wolf.
The danger is that one day he will tell the truth, but no one will believe
him.

In his escalation speech, Bush tried to paint the conflict in Iraq as the
most important component in his "war" on terror. He argued we must fight
terrorists there or we will have to fight them here. The...

Vice-President Capone Meets the Reich Ministry of Justice

By P.M. Carpenter
Created Jan 16 2007 - 9:26am

A "perfectly legitimate activity" is how the vice president described the
government's most recently revealed intrusion into civil liberties -- that
of the Pentagon and CIA's snooping into financial records of "suspect"
Americans -- an intrusion that the New York Times bluntly reports [1] is
"barred ... by law."

In the accommodating atmosphere of "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Cheney declared,
"There's nothing wrong with it or illegal. It doesn't violate people's civil
rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security
letters [i.e., a written Pentagon/CIA demand for private financial records]
disagrees with it, they're free to go to court to try to stop its
execution."

Such institutional pushback would be an odd reaction indeed to a "perfectly
legitimate activity" by the government, however. First of all, financial
institutions are being instructed officially as to the letters' legitimacy,
so many are apt to automatically comply without question or resistance.

Our Delusional President Preferring Yes-Men, Yes-Women, Yes-Generals

By Bill Gallagher
Created Jan 16 2007 - 9:16am

- from the Niagara Falls Reporter (posted with permission) [1]

"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
-- Will Rogers, American humorist, 1879-1935.

DETROIT -- President George W. Bush is digging like a starving junkyard dog
desperate to find a lost bone. He's also a one-trick dog, incapable of being
taught anything new. In his twisted mind, he believes he already knows
everything, especially about war and how the world works. His behavior is
clearly delusional and his enablers know it.

Sending more troops to Iraq is far from a new strategy, as the slaves in the
corporate media dutifully reported. It's simply some tactical tweaking aimed
at buying time and stretching the agony in Iraq so someone else will have to
deal with the mess and admit failure.

Bush has no strategy for "victory," nor can he explain what "winning" in
Iraq means. The memorized bromides he uses are meaningless. He's flying by
the seat of his pants, hoping somehow he'll get lucky.

Happy Doomsday To Us!

By Ed Naha
Created Jan 16 2007 - 9:09am

Does anyone besides me find it telling that the keepers of the "Doomsday
Clock" plan to move its minute hand forward this Wednesday for the second
time during the Bush administration? (Note to Dubya: That would be Mickey's
"big hand.")

For anyone unfamiliar with the clock, scientists who were spooked after
working on The Manhattan Project created it back in 1947. Maintained by the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the clock is currently set at seven minutes
to midnight, with midnight marking global catastrophe. The group said it was
making the move based on worsening nuclear and climate threats.

I'm not saying that the Bushistas' worldview is directly responsible for the
move but when you have Veep Cheney declaring on Fox re: Iraq: "This is an
existential conflict," you've got to wonder about how much brain matter is
involved in this government. ("Sergeant Sartre, Corporal Camus, incoming
dangerous philosophies! Get the bunker brain busters!")

An open letter to the citizens of Wingnuttia ...
By Joshua Holland
Created Jan 16 2007 - 8:53am
Dearest Wingnuts,

During the course of American history, tens of thousands of mostly male
politicians have given speeches, accepted nominations and taken part in
countless other public events surrounded by their families. Cute, usually
white families are as ubiquitous to the political photo-op as are the
American flags hanging in the background.

All of them wore clothes, and most of those clothes were, presumably,
expensive (and sometimes even fashionable). And among the tens of thousands
of fully-clothed politicians who have preceded the new Speaker of the House,
the vast majority of them had: A) genitalia, and B) kids and/or grandkids.

In fact, the only difference between Nancy Pelosi's press opportunities and
those of her predecessors is her failure to possess one teeny little Y
chromosome while holding them.

Media reform should include critique of sexual-exploitation media

By Robert Jensen
Created Jan 16 2007 - 8:44am

At a progressive media reform conference dedicated to resisting corporate
control of mass media, where many of the participants focus on gender and
racial justice, it shouldn't be difficult to interest people in the feminist
critique of mass-marketed pornography.

After all, the pornography industry creates a steady stream of relentlessly
sexist and racist films and web sites that undermine attempts to build a
healthy sexual culture, while filling the pornographers' pockets with
substantial profits. A general critique of the effects of misogyny, white
supremacy, and predatory corporate capitalism on mass media dovetails
perfectly with the feminist critique of sexual-exploitation media.

Yet as I circulated at last week's National Conference on Media Reform [1]
and distributed fliers for an upcoming feminist conference on pornography
[2], the responses I got were often skeptical and sometimes hostile. The
questions that were commonly asked of me that weekend revealed the need for
the left/progressive political community to deepen its understanding of the
issue.

What Next For Media Reform?

By Danny Schechter
Created Jan 16 2007 - 8:35am

MEMPHIS, TN: I felt the presence of Dr. King this past weekend in Memphis.
Of course, this is the city in which he gave his life, and as America marks
his birth, it was hard not to be reminded of his death when you visit the
scene of the crime, the fully restored Lorraine Motel.

It was there that he was shot down by a cowardly sniper. Was it James Earl
Ray? There are more conspiracy theories on that than eyewitnesses but it
almost doesn't matter because most of the people who studied the matter
remain puzzled by so many contradictions and unanswered questions.

That hotel is now part of the national Civil Rights museum which honors the
legacy of the Movement he was part of. I visited this mecca to his memory
and mission in the company of its founder D'Army Bailey, a local Judge and a
former civil rights worker who I remember and worked with 35 years ago. He
couldn't be warmer and told everyone with him, including FCC Commissioners
Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps that I was "the real deal," a comrade
in a struggle from back in the day; a struggle that is far from over.