Lump of Moss

In the Course of Events Exclusive!:

Congress Girds for Oversight Procedures

Well, it's about time.

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Congress girds up for return to oversight

Probes include alleged contracting abuses in Iraq and the alteration of scientific findings.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - Not since the Depression-era Congress of 1932 has Capitol Hill ramped up so quickly for oversight hearings and related legislation – most targeting the Bush administration.

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are hiring more lawyers, and watchdog groups say they are swamped with calls from committee staff asking for advice on pursuing the nearly lost art of congressional investigation.

In its first 100 days, the new Congress launched probes on allegations ranging from contracting abuses in Iraq and the alteration of scientific findings to the misuse of federal resources for partisan purposes. Some hearings, such as those on last year's firing of eight US attorneys, were snatched from the headlines; others are longer-term campaigns to try to uncover any government waste and to expand the public's access to how government conducts its business.

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Is the Surge Working?

Is the surge even working? It is costing a lot in lives, and in resources. Is it worth it?

By Paul Kiel - April 9, 2007, 9:14 AM

The New York Times delivers the first major report on the surge's progress this morning, a painstaking effort involving statistics and on the ground reports. The verdict?

American casualties are down in Iraq's provinces, but way up in Baghdad.
Sectarian killings are down, but increased use of car bombs has kept the civilian death toll high -- and anyway the beheadings seem to be surging again.
And as the U.S. moves to confront insurgents, the groups seem to be fracturing, making the fight increasingly confusing.

Or as an American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry puts it:

“The insurgents, they see what we’re doing and we see what they’re doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we’ve done and they get ahead.

“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse.”

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Happy Easter Photos

Big Trees from Northern California:


Golden Coast:


Portuguese Beach

E. O. Wilson - Celebration of Life

"We need to settle down before we wreck the planet."
- E. O. Wilson

MLK RIP

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors

Wednesday 04 April 2007

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years - his last years - are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling segregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or [the right] to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" - including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

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Nonviolence is the Way

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle ... your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dennis Kucinich for President

I am supporting Dennis Kucinich (OH), a Democrat, in his campaign for the Democratic Nomination to run for President of the USA.

He is the only candidate who I can justify supporting. He is the only candidate who takes seriously the corporate hegemony that is spreading such a vile toxicity and violence across the face of the globe.

No other major party candidate comes close to Representative Kucinich's down-to-earth common sense world view.

He supports Universal Health Care. He supports an immediate and unequivocal (safe) withdrawal of all military personnel from Iraq.

Dennis Kucinich 2008

I think the peace sign icon for his campaign needs some serious consideration. (or reconsideration - that is)

I couldn't support any other candidate. None of them seem to truly have the best interests of the people in heart or mind.

Cut The Funds - Stop the Killing - Stop the Occupation

The pin on my chest is of a crossed out dollar sign.

Rest assured, I have not completely disbarred capitalism from my world view. I do however believe that the current capitalism that is being practiced in the USA and exported to the rest of the world is destructive, harmful and violent.

The pin is to say no to further appropriations and war funding.

I heard today that since the Democrats got into office, more money is being spent on the war in Iraq.

There will be no peace - There will be no justice - until capitalism can somehow be made to conform to ethical and moral principles. Killing innocent civilians, as has occurred in Iraq, in order to perform economic expansion - as has (arguably) occurred in Iraq - is tantamount to murder, plain and simple.

I know that this is money (and economic resources otherwise) that could be much better spent and used in our communities here in the USA.

To waste it on an aggressive invasion and in the fighting of a pointless occupation of imperialism (which has only served to exacerbate and promote global terrorism by the way) is an atrocity. The invasion and this ongoing military action in Iraq ranks among the highest of crimes.

The World is a Dangerous Place

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
– Albert Einstein