Motley Moose – Archive

Driving home today I heard Elliot Abrams on NPR in an interview.  He opened with this:

Mr. ELLIOTT ABRAMS (Senior Fellow, Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations): What the president began to say after 9/11 was that there was no special exception for the Arab world, that we had supported stability in the Middle East at the cost of liberty. And that we weren’t going to get stability either. And, of course, this is at a time when most of these regimes look completely stable. So the point I was making is he had it right in saying that these were not as stable as they appeared to be.

Elliot Abrams is right.

His comments are exactly correct. That was the one thread of Bush’s blunderfooted post-9/11 direction that I always agreed with while I rapidly became dissatisfied with his method. That one part of his legacy is quickly being proven as a real inflection in western policy. It isn’t OK to support tyranny ever, no matter what benefits it has for you.

It was true in Taiwan sixty three years ago this Monday. We should do what we can so that in  sixty three years there are only stone markers to the follies of the past.

This is the final part of three posts analyzing the congressional districts President Barack Obama underperformed in. It will focus on the movement in Appalachia and the South Central United States. The previous parts can be found starting here.



The 2010 Midterms

Let’s take one last look at those districts in which Mr. Obama did worse than Senator John Kerry:

One sees again, as clear as ever, the diagonal pattern of Republican movement in South Central America and the Appalachians.

These districts differ from the northeastern and Florida-based regions examined in the previous post. Unlike those congressional districts, the districts in South Central and Appalachia vote strongly Republican.

More below.

AP: Students beaten by police during protests

While much of our attention has been focused on Wisconsin, and the cabal of other right-wing Republican governors on the mainland, much of the dirty work of Republican Luis Guillermo Fortuño has not been on our radar.  Labor unions, teachers and students are under attack on the island under his administration.  Thousands of people have been protesting over the last year, but as usual, much of what happens on the island gets little coverage in the mainstream media.

I originally wrote this as a comment in my other diary, wanting to get off the issue of whether or not POTUS should be more or less involved in WI.

But then I decided it needs a diary, not just a comment.

So this is about educators, and even though I know ALL public employees are involved in WI, I have never been anything but a teacher (but I support ALL of them).  For forty years I have taught, mostly sixth grade, but at some point or another I did K through college, classroom to specialist in the media center, an MA in ed tech, an MA equivalent in Counseling and 100 credits above those degrees.  I am now retired but still sub.  Education is my expertise as well as my passion.

So I want to address the hot potato issue of tenure which seems to irritate many, even on the left.

As free Libyans rise up the world finally reacts to the unforeseen and widely misunderstood events of the last ten days.  

Libya’s prospects rely on their solidarity with each other and the principles of social justice which, as Obama recently mentioned, are as universal as they have been inaccessible to many Libyans for more than a generation.  Libya must rise to the occasion and there is every evidence that they will.

Perhaps we must create the space and opportunity for this and put aside for a moment our geopolitical and cultural fears, not to mention our apprehensions over the price of fuel, and watch the wondrous, rare process of nationhood with respect while withholding our considerable judgement.

This new nation is largely composed of youth whose notions of democracy are as intangible as their understanding of the afterlife and who have earned their hard-won freedom through determination and courage by confronting and vanquishing their own parents’ most terrible fears.

Some ask me why I am such a diehard, union supporter.  I may have mentioned some reasons in comments here. It started for me long before I became a teacher. Today I am feeling particularly saddened about some things happening in our country.  Or perhaps more about what is not happening up front as opposed to what is happening behind the scenes.  

While I believe the truth is on the side of workers, from teachers to firefighters et al who are fighting to keep hard fought for rights to private sector workers who have lost so many of those right, the media seems on the side of corporate profiteers.  

This was going to be a comment but the pictures were big.

I didn’t want to resize them and to avoid controversy I wrote my own diary!

Kind of an ego trip if you ask me.

LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!!

But the pictures look so awesome this big.

That’s just how I roll.

And Thursday Colonel Gaddafi likened himself to Queen Elizabeth, prompting this picture:

Unfortunately for him I think most Libyans will like this one:

The ‘Culture War’ has been going on since I returned to the ‘States in 1979. After being ruthlessly ejected from our home in Iran by a religious fanatic, I felt we had returned to a country that was being taken over by the religious right. Jerry Fallwell stood with Ronald Reagan and the Secretary of Interior believed in the Apocalypse. In late 1979 I met, for the first time, Mr Donahue who introduced me to a wide variety of people and ideas. I soon realized that I was a liberal. A leftist liberal who believed in the social contract as outlined by FDR and Kennedy. I was not old enough to vote in 1980, but I cried when Carter lost and Reagan went on for eight miserable years as the ‘Teflon President’ .

The result of this catastrophe for me was that I got very interested in politics and world affairs.  

Just over six weeks ago, a German mainstream publication Der Spiegel truthfully reported that the Wall Street banksters committed a monumental insider bank robbery. Since the date of publication, the US for-profit plutocrat owned media has ignored this story but more to the point perhaps is the fact that not only did they ignore the story, they failed to report it in the first place.

As an American expat who holds an MBA degree in marketing, currently living in European Union, I was struck once again by the reality that the job of the American media doesn’t seem to be about really informing us but rather to sell commercial advertising space as a marketing profit center. I’ve learned through truthful reporting to rely on the European mainstream media sources like Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s BBC networks. What I have also learned is that we have to reach out to our fellow Americans and citizens of the world in alterative media and ask each of our readers to help us get the word out through email and social networking sites like Facebook in order to get the truth out.

To that end, will you help us get the word out?

The reason we need your help is because the German Spiegel magazine also reported that the Wall Street banksters are at it again, behaving just as shamelessly as they did before the crash. To which I would ask how long before a second Wall Street crash and how long before a second tax payer bail out?