Internet and mobile phone services have been blocked in Egypt since early on Friday morning. Many viewers also had trouble watching Al Jazeera Arabic’s Live Service. Ayman Gaballah, head of Al Jazeera’s Live service, spoke about the ongoing black-out being experienced.
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Tens of thousands of Egyptians ignored the nighttime curfew and took to the streets of Cairo for another day of protests, setting fire to police vehicles and the ruling party’s headquarters. A population generally viewed as being apathetic seems to have finally found its strong political voice. But with President Mubarak’s recent pronouncements unlikely to quench the thirst for change displayed on the streets, the outcome of Egypt’s protests remains to be seen. Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford reports.
Continue reading …If anyone doubts that our entertainment industry and our entertainment media are evangelists for a revolution of sexual immorality (or in their lingo, “progress”), he needs only to read the latest cover story in Entertainment Weekly magazine, a “special report” on gay teen characters on TV, and “How a bold new class of young gay characters on shows like 'Glee' is changing hearts, minds, and Hollywood.” Gay “Glee” actor Chris Colfer and his boyfriend on the show, Darren Criss, lovingly put their heads together on the cover. Colfer just won a Golden Globe for his part, which is another way the Hollywood press rewards propagandizing the youth of America. In his acceptance speech, he lamented anyone who would say a discouraging word about teen homosexuality, somehow putting all of those words in mouths of bullies: “Screw that, kids!” In this cover story, Colfer likens the gay couple he and Criss play to beloved and iconic teen-romance “Happy Days” characters from the 1970s: “They're kind of like the Joanie and Chachi of our generation,” he suggests. That line was played up in large promotional type over a full-page photograph of the couple. Their most controversial scene was the two private school boys singing “Baby, It's Cold Outside” to each other on the Fox show. “That was the gayest thing that has ever been on TV, period, “ Colfer boasted. The magazine touted this was the hottest-selling track on the “Glee” Christmas album, which gives you a flavor of Hollywood's reverence for that holy day. As you might suspect, Entertainment Weekly didn't plan to debate gay teen propaganda, but to encourage it, energetically. Not a single soul had anything critical to say. Not even a question. If this magazine weren't so earnestly in the tank, the story could come with a disclaimer: “This issue is an advertisement bought and paid for by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.” Writer Jennifer Armstrong summed it up like this: “The good news: Young gay characters are on a momentous roll after years of stops and starts.” EW championed under the inside headline how “networks are making up for years of on-air silence and providing inspiration for real-life youth (and parents) still searching for answers.” Armstrong says gay characters are “not just an accepted, but expected part of teen-centric television.” (Emphasis hers.) They are not celebrating diversity. They are intimidating dissidents. In their Gay Teen Timeline, we hear the gay actors proclaiming the lack of opposition. “We never received a negative word,” says the gay actor on ABC's 1994 bomb “My So-Called Life.” The gay teen on ABC's “Ugly Betty” insisted “99 percent of the public response was positive.” Translation: get in line. One of the leading cable channels in this revolution is ABC Family, which has come a very long distance from its origins as a Pat Robertson channel. Entertainment Weekly crowed that they top GLAAD's “Network Responsibility Index” – as in, you have a responsibility to engage in didactic pro-gay messaging. Most of ABC Family's teen shows seem to have a sympathetic gay character: “Greek,” “Huge,” Pretty Little Liars,” and “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” ABC Family vice president Kate Juergens underlined that the children are expecting this:
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enlarge Take nothing for granted Click here to view this media If you haven’t already heard about it repeatedly, today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Shuttle Challenger disaster. January 28, 1986 – routine by all accounts and then shocking. Shocking I suppose because like most everyone, I took the Shuttle program somewhat for granted. We had such a success rate over the years that the idea of one blowing up seemed remote. But that assumption is what gets us in trouble every time, taking things for granted. After the first several Shuttle launches, I admit to not paying a whole lot of attention when another one went up. It all settled into routine. So of course, it would never occur to me that one would actually blow up – and blow up the way it did. So on that day, that January 28th it was time for a reality check. Like everyone else I knew, I stood frozen over the TV as the footage of the explosion was played over and over again. Horrifying and spectacular by the surrealism of it all. Reminded of the Hindenburg disaster and the footage from that – the enormous dirigible exploding in the sky and the terror-stricken reporter screaming “Oh, the humanity!” Yes indeed. . . the humanity. So here is a clip from that day as a reminder.
Continue reading …Accuracy-Indifferent Maddow Invents Alleged GOP Push for US to Leave United Nations
January 29, 2011 No Comment
Rachel Maddow's self-proclaimed “obsessive” devotion to the truth again proves fickle. As an example of what she sees as the resurgence of wedge issues, Maddow said this on her MSNBC show last night — The culture war era conspiracy theories about black helicopters and a one-world government secretly pursued by America's elites, that stuff is back from the culture war eras too. The new Republican head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee convened the first hearing of that committee this week. What's the topic? Get the US out of the UN! To back up Maddow's hypercaffeinated claim (she tends to talk in italics), an article titled “House Republicans' next target: the United Nations” from Foreign Policy magazine was shown on the screen. Awkwardly absent from the actual article was any mention of what Maddow claimed . [Video clip below page break] Here's how the article reads — The new GOP leadership in the House is promising to aggressively confront the Obama administration on a full range of foreign policy issues. Now, it has reopened the debateover the performance and reform of the United Nations. “Policy on the United Nations should be based on three fundamental questions: Are we advancing the American interests? Are we upholding American values? Are we being responsible stewards for the American taxpayer dollars?” read the opening statement by House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) at Tuesday's committee briefing on the U.N. “Unfortunately, right now, the answer to all three questions is no.” Ros-Lehtinen, born in Havana, is the first Hispanic woman elected to Congress, according to her online bio . Do you think Maddow would have neglected to mention that were Ros-Lehtinen a Democrat? More from the Foreign Policy article — Ros-Lehtinen, who didn't attend the hearing because she was in Florida tending to her ill mother, criticized several instances of alleged poor corruption at the U.N. in her statement. She railed against the Human Rights Council (HRC), a U.N. organization the Obama administration joined, as “a rogue's gallery dominated
Continue reading …There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America – as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting – without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism. In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy – or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre – the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside. But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show). This is largely because the NRA’s duping its own members, which we’ll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we’ll discuss in Part II of this series. If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death. In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as “jack-booted thugs”. This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership. They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he “had blood on his hands” – all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows – which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked. Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to “strengthen existing gun laws” after each new tragedy). In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a “jihadist” in America who was… “a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open…” was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked. Emerson Begolly, the “jihadist” in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that “someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk”. Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands. More… Follow me On Twitter: @cliffschecter
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President Hosni Mubarak tells the Egyptian people that he has asked his cabinet to resign and that a new government will be formed
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US president says he told Hosni Mubarak to take ‘concrete steps’ – without violence – to advance the rights of the Egyptian public
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PA Auditor General Jack Wagner wants the state to get non-violent offenders out of state prisons. This is something reformers have been yelling about for years . Why put nonviolent offenders into an institution where not only does it cost more, you’re practically guaranteeing that they come out as hardened criminals? It’s more than just the politics of law and order. Across the country, politicians and their cronies have invested heavily in the for-profit prison systems. The more people go to jail, the more money they make: Pennsyvlania Auditor General Jack Wagner has found a way for the state to save as much as $350 million dollars over the next four years. Wagner’s formula is tied to inmates and correctional facilities. Wagner is now urging Governor Tom Corbett and the General Assembly to take on several reforms including better ways to use an existing alternative-sentencing program. The auditor general noted that over,19,000 inmates, 39 percent of the state’s prison population is made up of non-violent offenders at a cost that has tripled over the past 30 years. Find ways to give these folks more opportunity and there is no longer a need to house them on the state dime. And, Wagner observed that if Pennsylvania adopted this, it would, at least for now, mean not having to build more prisons, which adds up to saving hundreds of millions of dollars. “With Pennsylvania facing its greatest budget crisis since the Great Depression, we must look for sustainable savings in every nook and cranny of state government, and that includes the criminal-justice system, which is one of the three biggest drivers of increased spending over the past decade,” Wagner said. Pennsylvania had the fastest-growing prison population in 2009. Wagner said tougher sentencing guidelines for non-violent crimes is costing the state more than it can realistically afford .
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It begins sometime in early December, in a screening room near you, with a handful of middle-aged men and women impatiently awaiting the start of a new movie. Related Entries January 27, 2011 Critics Call ‘King’s Speech’ Historically Incorrect January 25, 2011 Sundance and the Art of Democracy
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