Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Peter Bergen, National Security Analyst, CNN, March 26, 2013
[....] another member of the secretive SEAL Team 6, which executed the bin Laden raid, tells CNN the story of the Shooter as presented in Esquire is false. According to this serving SEAL Team 6 operator, the story is "complete B-S."
SEAL Team 6 operators are now in "serious lockdown" when it comes to "talking to anybody" about the bin Laden raid and say they have been frustrated to see what they consider to be the inaccurate story in Esquire receive considerable play without a response. Phil Bronstein, who wrote the 15,000-word piece about the Shooter for Esquire, was booked on CNN, Fox and many other TV networks after his story came out [....]
Editorial Board, New York Times, March 26/27, 2013
Gen. Pervez Musharraf has returned to Pakistan, proclaiming an intention to “save” his country. If there is anyone capable of saving Pakistan, he is not it. [....]
Also see:
Dictator turns democrat: Musharraf’s return
Editorial, Dawn, March 26, 2013
GEN Musharraf may be trying to take a different route into power politics this time around. But it isn’t easy to forget the way he entered it in the first place. His remarks to the media before he returned to Pakistan were revealing; the former dictator implied he thinks the military should have a formal role in governance. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant or whether he would limit that role to security matters, but [....]
By David D. Kirkpatrick & Mayy E Sheikh, New York Times, March 25/26, 2013
CAIRO — The public prosecutor on Monday ordered the arrest of five anti-Islamist political activists on charges of using social media to incite violence against the Muslim Brotherhood. The order stirred accusations of a vendetta by the group’s close ally, President Mohamed Morsi.
Egyptians are already on guard against the possibility that their first freely elected president may seek to become a new autocrat, and some said they feared that the arrest warrants might be the first clear example that Mr. Morsi’s government was using law enforcement as a political tool to punish his critics.
A search of the online comments by several defendants found no messages urging others to violence. Some, in fact, argued strongly against it.
But the arrests arose out of an attack by anti-Islamist activists on the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo on Friday night [....]
Also see:
Rise in Sexual Assaults in Egypt Sets Off Clash Over Blame
By Mayy El Sheik & David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, March 25/26, 2013
Women have begun turning to the news media to tell their stories as conservative lawmakers use their political platforms to criticize victims of rape.
By Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR.org, March 22-26, 2013
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.
For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found....
Passnotes @ guardian.co.uk, March 26, 2013
Singer, fashion icon, married to President Xi Jinping … she's like Carla Bruni, but popular
PPP numbers are surprisingly good for Elizabeth Corbet Busch (D) in NC-2. She leads Stanford (R) and ties with Bostic (R). Are we headed to picking up a Democratic seat? If Stanford wins the toss up then his unpopularity in the general will give Busch the edge.
On Monday, Breitbart.com's Matthew Boyle published the location and the name of the resort where the Obama daughters are staying for spring break, ignoring the long-standing journalistic tradition that media outlets should not report on a president's minor children when they are not attending "official and semi-official events."
Can you imagine this?
Attacking and then putting in danger the President's daughters?
Enuff said. Goddamn I hate these people!
One of the striking elements of the demonization of Cyprus was how it was depicted as a willing tool of Russian money launderers and oligarchs.
The Associated Press
The figures come from Beverage Digest, an industry newsletter that publishes a similar report every March.
The trade journal also found that the pace of decline for carbonated beverages has sped up. Sales volume fell 1.2 percent last year, compared with a 1 percent drop in 2011 and a 0.5 percent drop in 2010. Without energy drinks, volume would have fallen 1.7 percent.
A 3 percent soda price hike helped revenue rise 1.8 percent to $77.1 billion
Click on the image to view the “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” interactive graphic on the drone war in which an estimated 3,105 people have been killed in Pakistan of whom only 47 were so-called “high value” suspected terrorists.
Check out ESPN golf or PGA.COM or whatever.
Tiger won today following a rain drenched Sunday with 62 MPH winds and fish swimming on the fairways.
I am so hero oriented and that just smacks of sheep herding; but how I could be drawn into a sport where man conquers nature because he was appointed by God Almighty to do so is beyond me.
But this Black Thai (how often might we describe someone in this manner?) had been breaking every record in the book until 2010 when he was relegated to the plus fifty level of greatness, just regained Number One status on the PGA Tour and in the world rankings.
It was a marvel to watch this Monday finish of the repub game (next to NASCAR) of course.
Tiger begins Sunday with a two stroke lead.
Just before the deluge he is three strokes ahead with sixteen holes to play.
Poor Mark Fowler is teamed with him at 10:00 tee time on Monday and matches the master stroke for stroke until the 16th when the poor kid ends up in the water twice!
Justin Rose, in the group just a hole ahead of Tiger was once the leader by five strokes in this tournament that went from Thursday to Monday.
Poor Justin had fallen apart on Saturday but never could quite regain his momentum on Monday; even though he ended up Number Two by day's end.
All the sites will tell you this:
Tiger has tied Slammin Sam Snead as far as winning the same tournament 8 times.
Tiger has an edge since he duplicated this feat at another golf course but was not given credit because one of those wins was only an American Major. hahahaha
Tiger is now rated number One by every conceivable rating agency.
Tiger is Numero Uno in the Fed Cup Standings.
But I tell ya, just watching this guy putt this week was incredible.
And when pundits say that Tiger is bad at coming from behind; BULLSHITE.
He was behind every day until Saturday.
He sunk so many 20' shots that I went nuts just watching him.
It is fun, I guess emotionally, to see a minority (and that certainly categorizes him in the PGA Tour) just kill his 100% white competition.
You cannot make this stuff up.
17 years (well 18 because I began watching him as an amateur by a mistake in channel surfing in 1995) I have been watching this guy.
I just viewed him talking about his first golf experience at 9 months.
I had fun this week end watching Tiger and it makes me happy.
the end
Five years ago, U.S. trains transported just 9,500 carloads of oil, the association said. The number grew to 65,751 carloads in 2011 before jumping 256 percent last year, to 233,811 carloads.
The mile-long trains bound for the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, travel two routes through Maine, typically pulling 80 to 85 tank cars.
By: Allison Linn CNBC
The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. That's more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.
"I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting," said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research. "We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban."
That is the problem with this depression most of the poverty is hidden. Unlike during the 1930's with long soup and bread lines. The food banks struggle to keep up with it in suburban areas. The fact that so much of it is hidden in the suburbs, that is makes it easy for the politicians to ignore.
Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system (which, for many of us, is truly indispensible), its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo- hosting services, and on and on and on. It hasn't done this because we're its customers, it's worth remembering. We aren't; we're the products Google sells to its customers, the advertisers...
...What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world...
...That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us....
...But in the long run that's a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector....
...I find myself thinking again of the brave new world of the industrial city, when new patterns of interaction led to enormous changes in economic activity, in culture and personal behaviour, and in the way we think. We upgraded ourselves, in terms of education, hygiene, and social norms, to maximise the return to urban life. And the history of modern urbanisation is littered with examples of privately provided goods and services that became the domain of the government once everyone realised that this new life and new us couldn't work without them. I think we, meaning users of the web and the companies that provide its blood and bones, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of a world awash in information.
By Tim Adams, The Observer @ guardian.co.uk, 23 March, 2013
Twenty years ago Shane Smith set up a hip little Montreal magazine called Vice. Then along came the internet and Vice reinvented itself as the edgiest, wildest online media brand in the world. It's staffed by twentysomethings and aimed at a global youth who have no interest in mainstream media. Which is why he is courted by everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Google. Here he explains what drives his brand of gonzo journalism [....]
If you hadn't heard of Vice media back then, it is likely that now you have. In America, in particular, two archly millennial Vice stories have made the "established media", Murdoch included, look distinctly 20th-century by comparison.
The first involved the on-the-run internet millionaire, John McAfee, whose paranoid tale of drugs, murder and subterfuge in the jungly paradise of Belize dominated the daily news channels and blog sites for a few weeks before Christmas. [....]
The second Vice scoop was perhaps even more incendiary. Last month a documentary film crew from Vice blagged its way into North Korea in the company of the NBA legend, and celebrity rehab casualty, Dennis Rodman, and the Harlem Globetrotters. The Vice crew once again could hardly believe its fortune when Rodman ended up befriending Kim Jong-Un [....]
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some one million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all – the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.....
This is a editorial by Charles Lane in the Washington Post about the paper's story on Woonsocket, RI. I guess they felt they had to give their readers some criticism of the SNAP program to interest the readers that lean conservative.
First off the WIC program is a rationing system with ration coupons that is based on the mother's pregnancy, the age of the child and how many small children. It has a limited amount of products that are offered and has been cut back several times by the government. There are less items now offered then there was when it started. The grocery stores usually have the items marked on the shelf as WIC to make it easy to find them so you don't pick up the wrong brand. It is run like the ration system we had during WWII. This is something my mother pointed out to me when the program first started. The way the customer had to sign the coupon reminded her of the war rationing. I have been in grocery store check out lines where other customers get cranky about the hold up because each coupon has to be rung up with separate receipt so the store can turn them in with the coupon for credit. There are many working poor that receive WIC but don't receive any other assistance. Every few months the mother has to see a councilor and sometimes they check and weigh the baby to make sure he is thriving. The amount of items are adjusted as the child grows and basic nutrition changes. Comparing WIC to SNAP is stupid because they are not close to being the same thing.
Second, poor people are not stupid. Yes they do buy treats for the family. Mostly they work very hard to stretch their food stamps as far as they can with cheaper food. There is need for more education and advice on getting the most from their food dollar. They live under some major challenges and I find many of my neighbors are real heroes at getting through the day.
Most elementary schools request you send a healthy snack to school everyday for your child for snack time. There are rules about what the child can bring. So things like string cheese, apples and granola bars can really take a bite out the food budget. This is why I bake so many muffins. I send two when the kids ask for extra for someone else. There are kids that have to go without snacks. Now should we restrict the Little Debbies they can take to school as junk?
The idea that soda and chips should be restricted sounds good but impractical. What do you do when you have a sick child that needs fluids and the doc says give them Sprite to drink? It is easier to talk a stubborn 5 year old into eating a sandwich they have decided they don't like with a bribe of a handful of chips or cheese puffs on their plate. When you know what it is like to live on skid row, editorials like this one is misinformed and a little mean. Besides how would you police the restrictions?
By Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem and Ewen MacAskill in Washington
The Guardian, 22 March 2013
Barack Obama has persuaded Israel to apologise to Turkey for the loss of nine lives on board the Mavi Marmara – the lead ship in an aid flotilla trying to breach the blockade of Gaza – in a deal that paves the way for diplomatic relations to be restored between the two countries.
News of the US-brokered deal came on Friday as Obama was leaving Israel at the end of his first official visit during which he was praised for an emotional speech tailored to mainstream Jewish opinion but criticised for doing nothing practical to advance stalled peace negotiations and downplaying Palestinian suffering.
The apology to Turkey for the May 2010 incident had been resisted by Israel until now, despite pressure from the international community. Both are close US allies – Turkey is a member of Nato – so the president was well placed to broker the deal.
According to White House officials aboard Air Force One, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu placed a call to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan while closeted with Obama in a trailer on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport in the last minutes before the president's departure for Jordan. Obama joined the call at one point [.....]
Pictures of Syrian children with heavy weaponry are popping up on Facebook and it’s becoming clear that many of the kids are now active combatants. Story by Versha Sharma.
Today beginning at 12:00 noon Eastern, we will begin the second installment of our new feature at the Guardian: a live question-and-answer session between myself and readers regarding columns I've written over the last month. Starting now, please leave your questions in the comment section. From 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm ET, I'll be here (in the comments) live to answer selected questions.
Israeli journalists and commentators give their verdict on US president's trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah
By Ronald Dworkin, New York Review of Books, April 4, 2013 issue
Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors
By Shaun Walker, The Independent, March 21, 2013
It was in the Maksimir Stadium that the tremors that presaged the Yugoslav wars first erupted, as a mass riot broke out between fans of Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb in May 1990. With fists flying and knives drawn, dozens were injured in a brawl between the two sets of fans, many of whom would soon be facing each other on real battlefields.
It is in the same stadium tomorrow night that Serbia and Croatia will face each other for the first time on the football pitch as independent nations in a World Cup qualifier that is overlaid with memories of riots, battles and war crimes. [....]
“When we played Macedonia recently there were only a few thousand people in the stadium,” he says. “Now it’s Serbia and people are sleeping in the street overnight trying to get a ticket. The majority of people don’t care about football, it’s about hatred.” [....]
Chants during tonight’s game are likely to include “Kill, kill, kill the Serbs” and “For my motherland, I am ready,” a controversial song linked to the Ustasa, the Second World War Croatian fascist movement. Goran Gunjevic, a basketball coach from Osijek, says: “Instead of a celebration it’s always about hatred. We’re in the middle of an economic crisis and for a few hours it will allow people to forget that they can’t pay their bills, that they aren’t eating well. Instead they can focus all their attention on hating the Serbs.” [....]
By Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2013
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will soon face a court-martial. Should the case have been labeled an act of terrorism rather than 'workplace violence?'