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10 November 2008

 

Keith Olberman Speaks Out Against Bigots

posted by Lorenzo 8:21 PM

08 November 2008

 

The Civil Rights Struggle Still has a Long Way to Go
I just heard Andrew Young state that with the election of Barack Obama "the civil rights struggle has been won." Oh? Really? Then how is it that this newly elected hero of the civil rights movement is anti-gay? Why was he against Proposition 8 in California? Why did 70% of the blacks in California vote AGAINST BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender communities?

Don't tell me the civil rights struggle is over. It may be over for black politicians, but the rest of the citizens of this Empire still have a long way to go to reach any kind of equality.

posted by Lorenzo 11:22 AM

02 November 2008

 

A Web Site Well Worth Your Time
This is a truly fascinating site, particularly if you have read David Rothkopf's brilliant book, Superclass. This site (available through the link above) is very interactive. Here is a little of what they say in their About section:
Overview
They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

Context
A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy. They are proud to rule. And yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.

. . . until now, that is!

posted by Lorenzo 8:59 AM

02 October 2008

 

Senators, the Bailout, and the Election
In case you are wondering how the Senators running for reelection voted on the Wall Street Bailout, here is an interesting picture. While 25% of all senators voted against transferring tax payer dollars to the Wall Street fat cats, only 17% of the Democratic Senators running for reelection voted against it. Yet, 44% of the Republican Senators running for reelection voted against the bailout.

Democratic incumbent races
Mark Pryor of Arkansas YES
Joe Biden of Delaware YES
Dick Durbin of Illinois YES
Tom Harkin of Iowa YES
Mary Landrieu of Louisiana NO
John Kerry of Massachusetts YES
Carl Levin of Michigan YES
Max Baucus of Montana YES
Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey YES
Jack Reed of Rhode Island YES
Tim Johnson of South Dakota NO
Rockefeller of West Virginia YES

Republican incumbent races
Jeff Sessions of Alabama NO
Ted Stevens of Alaska YES
Saxby Chambliss of Georgia YES
Pat Roberts of Kansas NO
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky YES
Susan Collins of Maine YES
Norm Coleman of Minnesota YES
Thad Cochran of Mississippi NO
Roger Wicker of Mississippi NO
Sununu of New Hampshire YES
Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina NO
Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma NO
Gordon Smith of Oregon YES
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina YES
Lamar Alexander of Tennessee YES
John Cornyn of Texas YES
Michael Enzi of Wyoming NO
John Barrasso of Wyoming NO

posted by Lorenzo 10:28 AM

29 September 2008

 

Happy birthday to GNU! ... Open Source Rules!
Software should be free, and the using community should be responsible for its development.



For more information, please see: www.gnu.org

posted by Lorenzo 7:44 PM

28 September 2008

 

Sarah Palin is a Pathetic Idiot, Judge for Yourself!

posted by Lorenzo 9:37 PM

08 September 2008

 

Life Lived Free!!!
Here is a short clip from a 2008 Burning Man party.

posted by Lorenzo 10:15 PM

24 August 2008

 

I Wish I Was At Burning Man
Unfortunately, I'm not able to make it this year. So I spent the afternoon watching Burning Man Videos on YouTube. Here is one of my favorite fire-art performances from last year.

posted by Lorenzo 2:49 PM

25 July 2008

 

A line from Obama's Berlin speech:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
-- Aldous Huxley

posted by Lorenzo 9:10 PM

23 July 2008

 

People like Richie Jackson amaze me ... BRAVO!!!

posted by Lorenzo 12:00 PM

16 July 2008

 

Get Ready for the Next BIG SHOCK

Between now and the elections this coming November, I think we can expect some sort of crisis to engulf us on a national level. So just get used to the idea. That way you won't be knocked off your pins when the goons in Washington provoke their next big shock. IMHO, no one has a better handle on this than does Naomi Klein.

posted by Lorenzo 10:44 AM

07 July 2008

 

Doug Stanhope - This Generation Sucks
Now that I've become disenchanted with Obama because I think he's too conservative (i.e., old fashioned), I've been avoiding politics and looking for laughs instead. So I did a Google search for "comedian drug marijuana" and found Doug Stanhope, who has now added years back to my life by making me laugh. In this bit he echos my sentiments about young yuppies even though he must be half my age. So imagine how painfully true this bit is for a dusty old fart like me. (Full Disclosure: I retired from Verizon ... just listen the end :-) .)

posted by Lorenzo 8:12 PM

03 July 2008

 

Deception in Obama's new statement on FISA
(Glenn Greenwald, July 3, 2008)
Barack Obama has issued a new statement on FISA in response to the growing number of his supporters objecting to his position. . . . the statement contains many dubious claims and, in a couple cases, outright misleading statements. Worse, Obama's statement only addressed the objections to the telecom immunity provisions of the bill, while ignoring the objections to the (at least) equally pernicious new warrantless eavesdropping powers the bill authorizes. . . . Obama says he will vote to remove immunity from the bill but knows full well that this effort will fail, and that the final bill will have telecom immunity in it. The bottom line is that he will nonetheless end up voting for this bill with immunity in it even though he previously vowed to support a filibuster of "any bill" that contains retroactive immunity. Put another way, Obama claims he opposes telecom immunity but will vote for a bill that grants it. . . . Whether it's better than the Protect America Act (PAA) is irrelevant. The PAA already expired last February. If the new FISA bill is rejected, we don't revert back to the Protect America Act. We just continue to live under the same FISA law that we've lived under for 30 years (with numerous post-9/11 modernizing amendments). So whether this bill is a mild improvement over the atrocious, expired PAA is not even a coherent reason to support it, let alone a persuasive one. . . . The government already has "the authority to collect the intelligence it needs to protect the American people." That authority is called FISA, which already allows the Government extremely broad authority to spy on any suspected terrorists. The current law results in virtually no denials of any spying requests. So how can Obama -- echoing the Bush administration -- claim a new law is needed to provide "the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people" when the current FISA law already provides that? . . . The new FISA bill that Obama supports vests new categories of warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President, and allows the Government, for the first time, to tap physically into U.S. telecommunications networks inside our country with no individual warrant requirement. To claim that this new bill creates "an independent monitor [to] watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people" is truly misleading, since the new FISA bill actually does the opposite -- it frees the Government from exactly that monitoring in all sorts of broad categories. . . . Why else would Bush and Cheney be so eager to have this bill if it didn't substantially expand the Government's ability to eavesdrop without warrants?

posted by Lorenzo 9:07 PM

28 June 2008

 

Obama: Just another politician
(Michael Crowley, The Observer, June 29, 2008)

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: OK. You were right. It turns out that Obama IS just another politician. I guess that old age really does bring on the senility of hope. How could I have been so stupid as to actually believe that someone could get to where he is in our political system without being "just another politician" who will do anything, say anything, promise anything, and imply anything just to get more power.]

Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics. . . . But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual. . . . First, let us count the repositionings. This past week, Obama expressed surprising disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the death penalty for child rapists (he had previously questioned the rationale of capital punishment). He resisted criticising another high court ruling that affirmed gun owners' rights, even though he had previously seemed to support the gun-control measure at issue. . . . Obama also dropped his once-stern opposition to a Congressional measure, despised on the left, that would legally shield telecommunications companies [ AND the Bush Administration AND Congressional Leaders] that co-operated with extra-legal US government eavesdropping. To some, even the contents of Obama's iPod, recently revealed to Rolling Stone, smacked of political calculation, combining as it did Baby Boomer classics (Stones, Springsteen, Dylan) with highbrow jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis) mindless top 40 pop (Sheryl Crow) and edgy-but-not-too-edgy hip hop (Jay-Z, Ludacris). Perhaps this playlist should be titled 'Majority Coalition'. . . . It's an unfortunate reality of politics that voters don't want to hear what they need to hear. We want to hear what we want to hear. Obama's recognition of that is a testament that he is, for better or worse, a shrewd, if far from pure, politician. Somewhere Hillary Clinton must be chuckling ruefully.

posted by Lorenzo 7:32 PM

02 April 2008

 

Matt Pallamary as seen on YouTube!
Here is a brief interview with my friend Matt Pallamary whose recent memoir, "Spirit Matters", has just been published.

posted by Lorenzo 9:24 PM

19 March 2008

 

Barack Obama Speech on Race
I've heard some good speeches in my life, Kennedy's innagural, MLK's "I Have a Dream" among them, and I'm adding to that list Barack Obama's direct and honest speech about the racism that still persists in this country. IMHO, if this speech doesn't move you then you still don't quite get what his campaign is all about.

posted by Lorenzo 4:44 PM

14 February 2008

 

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video

posted by Lorenzo 4:03 PM

28 January 2008

 

Kennedy Family Endorsements of Barack Obama
I have to admit, this Obama rally took me back to my college days when I watched John Kennedy's run for the presidency on a little black and white television in my college dorm's basement. While I don't agree with Obama on all the issues, there is no question but what he brings with him a sense of hope that is long overdue. It has been so long since we have seen a true LEADER in this country that we have almost forgotten what they look like, and to me, Barack Obama is the kind of leader this country so desperately needs at this critical moment in history.

posted by Lorenzo 6:20 PM

19 January 2008

 

Video: Angry About Environmental Destrucion
Everyone over 30 should who sees this video should give some serious thought to what this young man has to say about the current state of our Earthly environment and our responsibility to do something about the mess we humans have made of this planet.

posted by Lorenzo 11:25 AM

10 December 2007

 

What is Myspace, really?
[CLICK the above link to read this entire essay.]

This is the scariest question of all. Myspace is the largest private opt-in database on the planet. We willingly register ourselves, our thoughts, ideas and interests. We upload photos of ourselves, our children and families. We link ourselves to our friends, family, organizations, telling where we live, our relationship status, religion, age, sexual preference, employment, which schools we attended, etc. We feed all of this into the biggest computer networked propaganda machine ever developed all in the name of social networking. A machine owned and operated by friend and supporter of G.W. Bush and his "war on terror" All ready there are numerous reports extreme as people going to jail, because of the contents of their Myspace page? What will be next?

A few good sites dedicated to the Myspace censorship problem.
freemyspace.com

www.civic.moveon.org/pdf/myspace/

Myspace censors Presidential candidate Ron Paul - see informeddissent.com

posted by Lorenzo 4:08 PM