Genre: Alternative Title: This is Why We Fight Artist: The Decemberists I’ve been a fan of The Decemberists for a long time, but I have to admit that even though I’ve developed pretty high expectations, their new album, The King is Dead (buy it here ) is astonishingly good by anyone’s measure. Although this probably is my favorite song — “This is Why We Fight” could be an anthem for everyone in Wisconsin — it’s not by a lot: the album is superbly written and performed from start to finish. Congrats to Colin and the gang. There’s a reason this album entered the charts at No. 1. Please note: This video autoloops with an advertisement in the middle. You’ll have to click stop to stop it.
Continue reading …Chris Matthews Will Emcee Dinner for Liberal Lobby for Gays in the Military
March 18, 2011 No Comment
On Saturday night, MSNBC host Chris Matthews steps away from any sense of neutrality by serving as Master of Ceremonies at the 19th Annual Dinner of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network , which has long agitated for a repeal of any limitations on open homosexuality in the U.S. military. The motto of the dinner is “Making History, Moving Forward” — not very far from the “Lean Forward” motto of MSNBC.
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Young man pulled from rubble in Kesennuma, one of the hardest-hit cities, reports say A survivor of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami has been pulled from the rubble eight days after the disaster, Japanese broadcaster NHK has reported, citing the military. The young man was found in Kesennuma city in Miyagi prefecture, which was one of the hardest-hit regions. Japan’s police agency has said nearly 7,200 are dead and more than 10,900 missing. A week after the disaster on the north-east coast, the National Police Agency said Saturday that 7,197 people died and 10,905 were missing. Some of the missing may have been out of the region at the time of the disaster. The tsunami is likely to have sucked many people out to sea – after the the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami many of those bodies were never found. More details soon Japan disaster Japan Natural disasters and extreme weather guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Several House Democrats spoke at a rally this week in front of the Alabama legislature in opposition to HB 56, an immigration-enforcement bill patterned after Arizona’s “papers please” law. They linked their own historical struggle for civil rights in Alabama to the battle being waged over immigration. As I watched, it occurred to me that Alabama might be the first state where local history provides a focus for opposition to the tea-fueled wave of pandering state immigration bills. This took place just blocks from the Civil Rights Museum and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: Like much of America, Alabama is seeing an intense campaign by a new Republican majority to destroy teachers’ unions and public pensions. In the second week of the session, Alabama’s Republican House majority pushed hard to eliminate the state’s Delayed Retirement Option Plan (DROP), calling it a “Cadillac pension.” Democrats defended the program as vital to keeping qualified and experienced teachers and public servants. Here is House Minority Leader Craig Ford delivering his opening remarks to the debate: Republicans rebuffed all attempts to modify the DROP program and put it on a fiscally-sound footing, repeatedly claiming the program would have to end or else the state would be forced to lay off 780 teachers. (Sound familiar?) Here’s Lynn Greer describing the Republican version of reality: While the DROP program does include such highly-remunerated figures as our famous college football coaches, thousands of teachers and state employees have enrolled in DROP since its inception. The Republican attack on DROP is widely seen as political payback against the Retirement Systems of Alabama and the Alabama Education Association, whose leadership have opposed the GOP’s agenda. For more on DROP, here is a pretty good diary at Left in Alabama . You can follow the Goat Hill Project through my website , where I’ll (hopefully) be streaming House and/or Senate debate next week via Ustream. You can also click here to help me take this project to Netroots Nation as a model for progressive, state-level netroots.
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After Ahmed Masoud was born in Gaza, the hospital was bombed. His father rushed to the special care unit – but did he take home the right baby? I had a very happy childhood in a very large family, with five sisters and six brothers. I’m right in the middle, which is a good place to be. But we lived in one of the worst places on Earth – the Gaza Strip in Palestine – and when I was six, in 1987, the first intifada started. There were continual searches and raids on Palestinian homes and hospitals. Some years we hardly went to school at all. The whole school would be out throwing stones at military Jeeps. It was a game for us, but a very dangerous game. In this situation, my mum was the one who held the family together. My father was an Arabic teacher in an elementary school, but he was often not at home; he would be taken away and questioned and then a few days later be brought back. But every evening my mum would play cards with us and she became a child again, like us. Her sense of humour was brilliant. We could hear gunfire outside but my mum would stay calm, or get more competitive with the cards, and you’d forget about the gunfire and focus on the game instead. Looking back, I see how she provided us with a bubble to stay away from all the troubles outside. So despite everything going on outside I had a happy childhood. But all this changed when I was 17. One day I came home from school and turned on the TV. There was a programme about Palestinian refugees and how their families were fragmented because of the troubles, and it talked about how children and babies were mixed up in hospitals. I looked at my mother and she was electrified – her mouth was open, her eyes were staring and she looked like a ghost. I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me. My dad, too, was staring at the screen. I could see that behind his glasses there was a tear coming down. I hadn’t seen my dad cry before, and to see his tears falling down his cheek was terrifying to me. Then he wiped his eyes and held my hand, and my mum’s hand, and he started telling the story about what happened when I was born. At the time, the hospital was being raided and I was evacuated to a special care unit before my mum had even seen me. My dad heard news that the hospital was being bombed and went straight there. When he arrived he was told the room and cot number where he could find me. He ran as fast as he could, but when he got there, he found not one but two babies in the cot. He didn’t know which one was his – the one on the left
Continue reading …Former prime minister closest allies conspired against legislative programme as part of war with cabinet ‘ets’ One of Margaret Thatcher’s closest allies actively conspired, with her permission, against a key part of her government’s legislative programme as part of a war with the cabinet “wets”, papers released for the first time show. Demonstrating just how divided her first cabinet was, the 1980 papers reveal how Thatcher’s private secretary, the backbench MP Ian Gow, was active in fomenting rightwing MPs’ opposition to a bill devised by the employment secretary, Jim Prior, to limit but not ban secondary strike action by trade unions. The right wanted much tougher legislation. Acting in collaboration with the solicitor general, Sir Ian Percival, Gow actively encouraged rebellion, keeping the prime minister briefed on what he was doing against a key part of her legislative programme. Prior threatened in cabinet to resign; had Gow’s role become public, it would have rocked the Conservative government. Gow, a firm supporter of the Ulster Unionists, was also involved in consulting their leader, Jim Molyneux, and the former Tory Enoch Powell on how to oppose the government’s constitutional initiative for Northern Ireland. Gow was murdered by the IRA in 1990. The 30,000 pages of internal letters, notes, memoranda and other documents – some ephemeral but many casting new insights into the first Thatcher government – are being placed online by the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University. They complement official government files from the same period already released by the Public Record Office. The newly released documents show a prime minister feeling her way in power, unexpectedly deterred by public demonstrations against her and already privately trying out phrases, such as “the enemy within” and “there is no such thing as society”, that she would proclaim publicly years later. Chris Collins, the Thatcher Foundation’s archivist, said: “I was surprised by the amount of stuff that was committed to paper, seen by the prime minister. There was a high degree of risk involved. You get a sound read-out of her mood from the documents. With some prime ministers, you cannot tell what they are thinking but there is no doubt with her. A squiggly line means I don’t like this, two squiggles I HATE this.” There is further evidence that Thatcher encouraged rightwingers’ references to her first year in office as being wasted, because there were not enough hardline policy initiatives. Among those publicly criticising the government’s performance was the industry secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, with a note from Bernard Ingham, the Downing Street press secretary, saying Thatcher was “quite relaxed about it … I believe she agrees with Sir Keith but for the sake of the government and confidence in it does not say so.” Notes about Thatcher’s 1980 party conference speech, in which she famously announced “the lady’s not for turning”, indicate how fraught the writing was – as was the previous year’s effort, described by one of the drafters, Sir John Hoskyns, head of the Downing Street policy unit, as “an unbelievable shambles”. Handwritten notes show her trying out the phrases about society and the enemy within – concerning all trade unions, not just the miners, against whom the phrase was eventually deployed four years later. The accounts of the speech’s development bear out Hoskyns’s recollection of Denis Thatcher telling his wife: “Honestly, love, we’re not trying to write the Old Testament.” The 1980 speech soft-pedalled on attacking Labour, then embarking on internecine strife, but the papers show how closely Downing Street monitored who might emerge as leader after James Callaghan, who resigned on 15 October. Denis Healey was regarded as particularly formidable, being described as “the most powerful, the most dangerous and the most uncertain of the candidates” by Tory chairman Lord Thorneycroft. Thatcher regarded the eventual winner, Michael Foot, with disdain. Gow had lunch in August 1980 with Neville Sandelson, a rightwing Labour MP, who was privately planning to defect to what became the SDP six months later. Gow reported back to Thatcher: “[He] says that his remaining political purpose is to ensure the re-election of the Conservative party at the next election because only by [that] will there come about the split in the Labour party which he considers to be the essential precondition for a real purge.” Thatcher could be discomforted by demonstrators. After being heckled in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in February 1980, she wanted to call off a visit to nearby Calne when told 450 locals had just lost their jobs. “We can’t go there! Not another occasion like that!” she wrote with heavy underlining. Nevertheless, the trip went ahead. The files are online at www.margaretthatcher.org . Margaret Thatcher Politics past Trade unions Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk
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BBC show features appearances from Andy Murray, Kim Cattrall and Simon Callow – plus Ronnie Corbett hiding in the bushes Who knows how many favours the Comic Relief powers-that-be had to call in, but they managed to open with a clip of The King’s Speech – intercut with scenes of Lenny Henry pointing agonisedly to his watch as Colin Firth stutters in the sports ground and telling him they’ve only got seven hours to get everything in. And then – boom! – we’re into the studio and everything that is Comic Relief’s 2011 outing. The hosts are always some of the safest hands in the business, but the early shift naturally goes to the safest of them all – this year, Claudia Winkleman and Michael McIntyre. In a moment typical of the background thoughtfulness and intelligence that marks out Comic Relief from the herd, Winkleman lifts us gently over the hurdle of how we can turn our minds to supporting the traditional mixture of African and domestic projects in which the charity specialises while the tragedy in Japan continues to unfold, and the audience is free to relax. And then it’s on with the show. There’s a perfectly functional if not side-splittingly funny mini-episode of Outnumbered involving Andy Murray who is all but crippled – physically by the boys, mentally by Karen – by the end of his meeting with the family, and a Doctor Who adventure concerning the appearance of a Tardis within a Tardis by Stephen Moffat that manages brilliantly to nod to just about every Whovian in-joke, demographic and fetish within the span of two tiny instalments. The first proper laughs of the night are served up by the pathologically incompetent Winkleman, Ruby Wax and Miranda Hart – “the three worst cooks in the country” – in Celebrity Masterchef. They have two hours to cook dinner for the prime minister. Despite their worst efforts, we are alas denied the inestimable comic pleasure of watching David Cameron choke to death on Ruby’s shell-strewn crab salad or mad-eyed Claudia’s massively overspiced chilli con carne. He survives unscathed and everyone agrees Miranda’s trifle should win. “It was EDIBLE!” she says, beaming with pride. “They ATE it!” After that hosting responsibilities are taken over by Davina McCall and Graham Norton until Norton swaps out for Dermot O’Leary. A spoof of Autumn Watch (with Ronnie Corbett hiding in the bushes – always funny. Don’t know why. But always), and of the latest rash of costume dramas in Uptown Downstairs Abbey follows. The latter centres round the mysterious appearance of a scratch on a spoon and includes sterling work from Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall and Simon Callow having the time of his life as “His Majesty Lord Julian Fellowes”. Musical numbers are provided by The Wanted, Take That (providing the always comic sight of Robbie Williams straining to keep his performance ego down to manageable proportions for the occasion) and Peter Kay duetting with Susan Boyle in an increasingly mountainous Barbara Dickson wig on I Know Him (who turns out to be Sir Trevor MacDonald) So Well. Later, Gareth Malone will be trying to knock some singing sense into a collection of telly chefs, which should knot a few emerging themes of the night together nicely. And of course, amid all the merriment, there are the tightly pulsing little documentaries which illustrate the great gouts of human misery that flow here and abroad. We watch doctors choosing from four sick children the three to hook up to the remaining lifesaving machines. Toddlers dying from malnutrition or convulsing with malaria. Nine-year-old Esther orphaned by Aids who wanted to climb into the grave with her mother. And Comic Relief doing its matchless job of warning us of the sights to come, urging us not to look away and then averting despair with another dose of comedy. Not every sketch hits its mark, not every spoof is as funny as it could be, but it doesn’t matter. When you unpack it, the real secret of Comic Relief’s success is the sense of goodwill and hard work that has gone into every little bit of it and it is this, more than the laughter, if not more than the profound gratitude that our children will never know a life like Esther’s, that marches them onwards to a total hopefully even grander than last year’s £82m. Comic Relief BBC Television Comedy Entertainment Lucy Mangan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Sean Hannity Mangles Facts and Science About Radiation While Reporting False Alarms
March 18, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Sean Hannity’s lead tonight left viewers thinking Southern California is about to be a fallout zone, passengers returning from Japan to Chicago glow in the dark, and we should all have our potassium iodide pills at the ready. It’s classic Fox fearmongering, meant to scare little old ladies and stoke up the heroes in the shadows. He leads with this: The deadly radiation leaking into the atmosphere from Japan’s nuclear crisis isn’t just heading for the United States, it’s already here. Oh really? I checked the radiation monitors online and I couldn’t find any. But listen to Hannity’s grave drone as he reports the dire news: But first, DHS officials have confirmed that two flights departing Tokyo — one bound for Chicago, the other for Dallas — set off radiation alarms when they arrived in the US yesterday. Now in Dallas, tests indicated the presence of low radiation levels in travelers’ luggage, and in the aircraft’s cabin filtration system. No passengers were quarantined and the cabin was ultimately cleared. Of course, I’m sure no one heard that last sentence because they’re all thinking OMG the radiation is already HERE and we’re all dead men walking now. But he doesn’t stop there. After describing the Chicago flight and suggesting that passengers were triggering radiation detectors, he gives us this: Now this as the Golden State braces for a potentially dangerous radioactive plume coming from Japan . Now the United Nations projects that the plume will drift across the Pacific, hitting the Aleutian Islands first and then Southern California. That’ll be late tomorrow. Ok, assuming there is anyone out there who actually wants facts and who actually watched this nonsense from Hannity, here we go. First, as to the DHS reports, here’s the Chicago Tribune story , as posted at 12:55pm today, well ahead of Hannity’s breathless report: The Department of Homeland Security is screening passengers and cargo entering the United States from Japan for “even a blip of radiation,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday. Customs and Border Protection said there have been reports of radiation being detected from some cargo arriving from Japan at several airports. Those airports include Chicago, Dallas and Seattle. Radiation has not been detected in passengers or luggage. And none of the reported incidents involved dangerous or harmful amounts of radiation. The agency handles more than half a million radiation alarms a year, though many are related to medical procedures. Hardly the same as his report, which says they “detected radiation”. Now let’s talk about that “radioactive plume” heading right for my front yard. And let’s talk about Hannity’s report that makes it sound like it’s an absolutely-for-sure-it’s-gonna-happen-any-minute kind of thing. From the New York Times, who originated the report yesterday: A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday. What odds do you give a weather report? A United Nations forecast of possible movement is not the same thing as it’s definitely going to happen, brace yourselves, go indoors, lock the doors and windows and put wet towels over your face moment. It’s just not. My problem with reporting like this is that it’s “War of the Worlds” hysterical reporting. If a radioactive plume is heading to California, there’s not a darn thing I can do about it. It’s not like the Japanese intentionally unleashed this after they caused a 9.0 earthquake and a 30-foot tsunami, for heavens’ sake. There’s also no way to “brace” for such a thing. So how about some real facts around what MIGHT come our way and what to do? Here’s an excellent, science-based FAQ from UC Berkeley that might help allay fears: Q: There are reports of a plume of radiation headed for the United States that is expected to hit California on Friday. What is the danger to people on the West Coast? The short answer is, essentially none. There is no such thing as zero risk, but the risk from the radiation from Japan is orders of magnitude from being dangerous, by any definition. To put it into perspective, I live in the hills above the stadium, which is at a higher elevation than the campus and gets more radiation from cosmic rays. The difference between the radiation I receive in my office down on campus and what I receive at my house is many times more than you’d get from this plume. Most of the human-caused radiation we receive these days actually comes from medical procedures, but there are also radiation risks from living at higher elevations, or taking a plane flight. We will be able measure whatever radiation gets here, no question. The nuclear engineering department has monitors on its roof to measure the radiation. But just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. Even after the Chernobyl accident, which released a million times more radiation than has been released in Japan and produced a plume that went all over the planet, there was absolutely no risk to people in the United States. The pictures on the Web showing a very dangerous-looking plume coming across the Pacific Ocean is a wonderful testament to our ability to measure things, but the radiation we measure is not a risk of any consequence. The only thing I’m bracing for tomorrow is the rain coming in over the weekend which will screw up my plans to go mountain bike riding. But for Hannity, maybe the world could end. Just for him?
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