'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
Short Takes 2007 II
By Baron Dave Romm
Shockwave Radio Theater podcasts
To everyone who has
defended this country, via arms or support: Thank you.
This is
not enough, but until we have adults running the country it will have
to do.
The Pat Tillman Cover Up
White House Invokes Executive Priv. In Tillman Investigation Liepar Destin's DailyKos Diary from July 13, 2007, largely links and quotes from Congressional testimony, and how Bush is dishonoring a man who died for his country.
Unlike our brave soldiers, Bush and the conservatives around him are cowards. Glenn Greenwald on Still more White House secrecy -- this time in the Tillman investigation salon.com July 14, 2007:
The fraud perpetrated in the Pat Tillman case -- just like the similar fraud perpetrated in the Jessica Lynch case -- was not unusual. But its high-profile victim ensured that a critically important lesson was illustrated: namely, just how deceitful the propaganda is when the military issues politically self-serving claims which a complicit media then dutifully and uncritically recites ("Pat Tillman heroically killed by enemy fire" -- "Jessica Lynch battles the Enemy to the end and is rescued from her Iraqi torture chamber" -- "the U.S. military is vanquishing al Qaeda and making Iraq safe for freedom").
Bush Lying About His Support Of Our Troops
President Bush on Pay Raises for Our Troops The Gavel, July 20, 2007.
Bush was against a pay raise for the troops before he was for it salon.com's War Room commentary on this and Sen. Reid's comment on hypocrisy:
After refusing to support the Webb amendment giving the troops a decent interval between deployments, the blocking the defense authorization bill, President Bush and the Republicans are now wailing that the Democrats are refusing to give the military a pay raise.
This is the same pay raise that was part of the defense authorization bill they just blocked and the same pay raise the president himself threatened to veto just two months ago. It was reported at the time that the Bush administration "'strongly opposes' both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases 'unnecessary.'"
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., responded to Bush's hypocritical taunts today with this:
Democrats and a majority of Americans believe that supporting the troops means rebuilding our overburdened military and redeploying our troops from an Iraqi civil war. It is the height of hypocrisy for a President whose Administration has sent our brave men and women into combat without the proper equipment, recuperation time, training or strategy for success to lecture Congress about supporting the troops.
If our military's wellbeing were truly a priority for this President, as he indicated this morning, why has his Administration for the past several months opposed military pay raises as too costly and blocked everything we have done to support the troops? I hope, but highly doubt, that President Bush will one day realize that supporting our troops is more than a slogan or a photo op.
Bush Lying About War Casualties, Refuses To Honor All Those Who Died In Wars He Started
Casualties of Bush's Contract Army by Jim Hightower, June 20, 2007:
Here comes another dirty little secret about the Bushites' disastrous Iraq war: Many more American troops have died there than they have admitted. These troops aren't part of the Army or other official military units. They are part of the hidden "contract army" that Bush has quietly sent to war. While there are about 150,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq, there are more than 120,000 other men and women serving alongside the military, but drawing their paychecks through such Pentagon contractors as Halliburton, Blackwater, DynCorp, and Custer Battles.
Bush's corporate army not only provides support services -- including doing laundry, serving meals and delivering water - but it also is engaged in such direct military functions as interrogating prisoners, training the Iraq army, guarding the Green Zone, protecting military convoys, analyzing intelligence, and providing paramilitary security.
These are hired hands, not soldiers, and mostly they lack the training, discipline, and equipment of the regular forces -- yet they're thrown into the same deadly environment, getting shot, bombed, maimed, and killed. Yet, the Bushites don't even keep count of them. A spokesman coldly says: "There is no requirement for the U.S. government to track these numbers."
Excuse me, but they're not numbers. They are people. And the Labor Department, which receives workers compensation claims, has quietly recorded that at least 917 of these people have died in Bush's war. Another 12,000 have been wounded in battle or injured on the job. That's about one-third more causalities than the Bushites have told us about -- a hidden toll of this awful war, and another measure of its deceit and immorality.
Outsourced US wars, contractor deaths top 1000, Reuters, July 3, 2007:
The death toll for private contractors in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped 1,000, a stark reminder of the risks run by civilians working with the military in roles previously held by soldiers.
A further 13,000 contractors have been wounded in the two separate wars led by the United States against enemies who share fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and the hit-and-run tactics that drain conventional armies.
The casualty toll is based on figures the U.S. Department of Labor provided to Reuters in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act and on locally gathered data.
The department said it had recorded 990 deaths - 917 in Iraq and 73 in Afghanistan - by the end of March. Since then, according to incident logs tallied by Reuters in Baghdad and Kabul, at least 16 contractors have died in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
Sphincter Conservatives sneeringly smear anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq, saying that we want to "cut and run". In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Those of us who want an intelligent war that uses our military to its maximum capabilities should point to these right wing cowards as "Sitting Duck" fools. They'd rather have a soldier die than have the guts to admit they were wrong. As it is, they send our troops into battle with insufficient protection and their incompetence has created enemies where none existed before. The Enemy's New Tools in Iraq, Time, June 14, 2007:
Saif Abdallah says his inventions have helped kill or maim scores, possibly hundreds, of Americans. For more than four years, he has been developing remote-control devices that Sunni insurgents use to detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the roadside bombs that are the No. 1 killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The only time he ever felt a pang of regret was in the spring of 2006, when he heard that the Pentagon, in a bid to fight the growing IED menace, had roped in a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Abdallah, an electronics engineer by training, once dreamed of studying for a Ph.D. there. "I thought to myself, If my life had gone differently, who knows? I might have been on that team," he says, his eyes widening as he imagines that now impossible scenario. Then he shrugs. "God decided I should be on the other side."
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E. Podcasts of Shockwave Radio Theater. Permanent archive. More radio programs, interviews and science fiction humor plays can be accessed on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
--////
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Poor Elijah (Peter Berger): Some Will Be Left Behind (irascibleprofessor.com)
Today schools are laboring under a twenty-first century punch line slogan of their own, No Child Left Behind.
Marshall Herskovitz: Are the corporate suits ruining TV? (latimes.com)
Network control and media consolidation are wringing the creativity out of entertainment.
JOEL STEIN: Finally, a chance to picket (in a virtual way) (latimes.com)
Showing solidarity with fellow striking writers -- by e-mail from Europe.
Dan Cairns: Joan Jett still loves rock'n'roll (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)
The former Runaways star might love music but it's not a cause she is ever going to give up her life - or her dignity - for.
Roger Ebert: ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES (Rated R; 4 stars)
How did one of the most magical films of the 2005 festival season become one of the hardest films to see of 2007? John Turturro's "Romance & Cigarettes" is the real thing, a film that breaks out of Hollywood jail with audacious originality, startling sexuality, heartfelt emotions, and an anarchic liberty. The actors toss their heads and run their mouths like prisoners let loose to race free.
Kate Williams: My So-Called Life (popmatters.com)
Unrequited love, the all consuming crush, the exasperated horror of hormonal changes, the tedium of school, trouble with parents, the emergence of individual identity . . . the adolescent struggle and all of its attendant rites, rituals, and humiliations are ever present in the storytelling of My So-Called Life.
Mike Steinberger: In Blindness Veritas? (slate.com)
TASTING WINE BLIND ISN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE.
Bill Zehme: Cameron Diaz Loves You (esquire.com; from 3/1/2002)
As for me, when I get to thinking about her, like I'm doing right now, I think about the first thing she ever said to me, which was: "I've gotta pee soooooooo bad!" She said that, by the way, in a loud whisper, and her crystalline eyes bulged, and then she ran to the john with her little blue flip-flops clip-clopping like thunder hooves, but only after shaking my hand and telling me her name, even though I knew her name, but she isn't presumptuous about that sort of thing.
Reader Contribution
Veterans Day
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Gray and overcast, with a little rain this morning.
Mom Helped Pick Stage Name
Alicia Keys
If it weren't for her mother, Alicia Keys might have a radically different image. Keys, who has a new album titled "As I Am," says that when she was trying to choose a professional name she went through a dictionary and stopped on the word "wild."
She tells Newsweek in the magazine's Nov. 19 issue that she asked her mother how Alicia Wild sounded to her.
"She said "It sounds like you're a stripper,'" Keys said.
After that, she decided to use Keys.
Alicia Keys
Australian Scientists Decode Sounds
Whales
Australian scientists studying humpback whales sounds say they have begun to decode the whale's mysterious communication system, identifying male pick-up lines and motherly warnings.
Wops, thwops, grumbles and squeaks are part of the extensive whale repertoire recorded by scientists from the University of Queensland working on the Humpback Whale Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC) project.
Recording whale sounds over a three-year period, scientists discovered at least 34 different types of whale calls, with data published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
The researchers studied migrating east humpback whales, as they traveled up and down Australia's east coast, and recorded 660 sounds from 61 different groups.
Whales
Photo Proofs On View
Ansel Adams
They are photos Ansel Adams never intended anyone to see - tiny proofs taken with a handheld camera of a landscape that lacks the grandeur captured in his portraits of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Park.
But thanks to some connections and a quirk of inheritance law, and over the objections of the trust that controls use of Adams' work, the few dozen 5-inch-square proofs are now on display at a small museum not far from the inland waterway where Adams shot the pictures in 1940.
The proofs - taken with a Zeiss Super Ikonta BX handheld camera, instead of a larger view camera mounted on a tripod that Adams typically used - were shot as Adams and a friend, David McAlpin Hunter, traveled the Intracoastal Waterway in November 1940 from Virginia to Georgia.
The exhibit of 50 photos, about 30 of which are credited to Adams, runs through Dec. 2 at the Museum of the Albemarle. "Ansel Adams in the East: Cruising the Inland Waterway in 1940" was also exhibited earlier this year at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts. This is its final stop.
Ansel Adams
French Musings Become New Memoir
Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson, addicted to attention and craving a colourful legacy, loved to chronicle his rise from a restless Texas teen to the world's first black heavyweight boxing champion.
Now, nearly a century after his most famous bout - the 1910 defeat of "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries - and decades after his death, Johnson has more tales to tell.
His largely unknown 1911 musings to a French sports magazine, including candid observations on racism likely never intended for American readers, have been translated to English in their entirety for the first time. The result, "My Life & Battles," is a 127-page book by and about the man considered by many to be one of history's most important athletes.
Jack Johnson
Quitting Cabinet
Gilberto Gil
Gilberto Gil, who revolutionized Brazilian music in the 1960s as a founder of the Tropicalism movement, will resign his post as culture minister next year after tests revealed a potentially career-threatening polyp on his vocal cords, local media said Saturday.
The Grammy-winning artist plans to abandon his cabinet position and routine speeches to treat the polyp, which is growing where a callus was removed years ago, the daily Folha de S. Paulo reported.
Gil and his longtime friend Caetano Veloso are credited with inventing the Tropicalism movement, a blend of rock and bossa nova music.
Tropicalism eventually influenced such musicians as David Byrne, Paul Simon and Beck, but the political content of its lyrics offended the nation's 1964-1985 military dictatorship. Both Gil and Veloso were jailed in 1968 and lived in exile in London from 1969 to 1972.
Gilberto Gil
Flee Monasteries
Burmese Monks
The monasteries of Myanmar used to teem with saffron-robed Buddhist monks, revered as spiritual guides and moral authorities in a country in the grip of a repressive military regime.
Then the junta turned its troops on the monks, beating them in the streets for leading pro-democracy protests. They also raided their monasteries, leaving bloodstains on the floors, chasing anyone who had participated in the rallies.
The junta has not disclosed how many monks were put behind bars since the upheaval of Sept. 26-27. In its last tally, on Nov. 6, the regime said nearly 3,000 people had been released, leaving 91 still in custody. But diplomats and dissidents say the figures are a fraction of reality and an unknown number of monks have been detained since then.
The picture that emerges, after scores of interviews with monks, abbots and other people in Myanmar, is that monasteries around the country have been depleted - particularly in the biggest cities, Yangon and Mandalay, where protests were staged.
Burmese Monks
Pork Store No More
'The Sopranos'
Eight months ago, James Gandolfini drove his white SUV out of the parking lot of Satriale's for the last time, as HBO wrapped up the final season of "The Sopranos."
Now, the building has followed the same fate as the popular show. It's gone.
Last month, owner Manny Costeira demolished the structure, home to a fictional pork store where TV mobster Tony Soprano and his Jersey crew hung out on the acclaimed mob drama. On TV, a life-sized pig sat atop the building.
Nine condo units will replace former storefront. The project is called "The Soprano," and prices range from $325,000 to $385,000. Construction is expected to start in the spring and would be finished in about a year.
'The Sopranos'
'Mr. Toilet' Builds Commode-Shaped House
Sim Jae-duck
Sim Jae-duck has made his political career as South Korea's Mr. Toilet by beautifying public restrooms. Now he's got a home befitting his title: a toilet-shaped domicile complete with the latest in lavatory luxury.
Sim is building the two-story house set to be finished Sunday to commemorate the inaugural meeting later this month of the World Toilet Association. The group, supported by the South Korean government, aims no less than to launch a "toilet revolution," by getting people to open their bathroom doors for the sake of improving worldwide hygiene.
Representatives from 60 countries will gather in Seoul to spur the creation of national toilet associations of their own and spread the word about hygiene. Organizers argue the issue deserves greater attention and cite U.N. figures that some 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation or water supplies.
Sim Jae-duck
School Didn't Pay For Concert
Peabo Bryson
Peabo Bryson's manager and the owner of a South Carolina sound company say South Carolina State University failed to pay them for performances during the school's homecoming last month.
The Grammy-winning singer and R&B group Silk performed on Oct. 27. Bryson's manager, Jeff Alston of Bronx, N.Y.-based Rebel Soul Records, said the singer is owed $16,000. Madison Meadows of Greenville-based Audio Mass said the school still owes him $3,900.
But Edwin Givens, the university's special assistant for legal and government affairs, said the school paid a promoter and his company for the concert.
The school will work with the singer's management to ensure he is compensated, but is "in no way liable for payment due to Mr. Bryson," Givens wrote.
Peabo Bryson
Stalker Priest Hospitalized
Rev. David Ajemian
The Roman Catholic priest accused of stalking talk show host Conan O'Brien was admitted to a hospital for evaluation Saturday after briefly going missing.
The Rev. David Ajemian was reported missing by his father at about 3:15 p.m. after he had not been seen for nearly three hours, police said in a statement. Police were told that Ajemian's "mental health may be of concern."
He returned to his parents' home in Boston at about 7 p.m. and voluntarily went to a hospital, police said.
Rev. David Ajemian
Expect Less
Privacy
As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that defends online free speech, privacy and intellectual property rights, said Kerr's argument ignores both privacy laws and American history.
"Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms," Opsahl said. "The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together."
Privacy
Weekend Box Office
'Bee Movie'
Jerry Seinfeld turned more honey into money as his animated comedy "Bee Movie" buzzed to the top of the box office in its second weekend.
The DreamWorks-Paramount flick, which had debuted at No. 2 behind Universal's "American Gangster" the previous weekend, packed in family crowds to pull in $26 million, raising its total to $72.2 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Bee Movie," $26 million.
2. "American Gangster," $24.3 million.
3. "Fred Claus," $19.2 million.
4. "Lions for Lambs," $6.7 million.
5. "Dan in Real Life," $5.9 million.
6. "Saw IV," $5 million.
7. "The Game Plan," $2.4 million.
8. "P2," $2.2 million.
9. "30 Days of Night," $2.1 million.
10. "Martian Child," $1.75 million.
'Bee Movie'
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