Filed under: Community, Economy, Media, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, wake up | Tags: Alabama, Alabama PACT, PACT, Torches and Pitchforks
Countrycat has an eyewitness account and her first video from yesterday’s hearing on the Alabama college saving program. Pure dynamite. She does a beautiful job capturing the fear and loathing that the citizens who are on the receiving end of this fiasco have for their government. And the unmitigated contempt that the few board members who bothered to show up have for the unwashed masses.
The citizens of Alabama really showed their quality yesterday.
They are connecting the dots:
More than once, I heard the meeting referred to as “just for show” or, more entertainingly, “just like a meeting in North Korea.”
They are anxious to attend the board meeting, and they see right through the pseudo-democracy:
So, as we were getting hustled out of the place, parents were shouting questions to the moderator about where the March 24th board meeting would be, what time it would start, etc. etc. He said that hadn’t been decided yet, but it would be posted on the Web site.
Some of the older people protested that they didn’t have Internet access, so how would they find out? Watch TV or read the papers. NOTE: the Huntsville Times announced the event yesterday morning and it was buried in the middle of a page in the Local section.
They agree with my irresponsibly speculative analysis, too:
They don’t trust the board, the Legislature, or the Governor to do anything to fix this mess and many people said openly that they thought this was just a show trial to shut people up long enough for the board to shut down the program.
I cannot do this justice. You must read the whole thing.
We are not done with this.
Cross-posted at The Mighty Corrente Building.
Filed under: Iran, Iraq, Mississippi, Politics, war | Tags: Foreign Policy, international relations, Lebanon, Middle East
And ominous signs in other parts of the world as well.
International Herald Tribune — Hezbollah has apparently taken control of West Beirut. More in the SF Chronicle. It’s difficult to tell what’s really going on. Looks to me like a dispute over disarming Hezbollah between pro-government forces (backed by the Sunni states, the U.S., and Israel) and Hezbollah (backed by Iran, Syria, and the Lebanese parliamentary opposition), with the Lebanese army officially neutral.
The Lebanese government is calling the violence “an armed coup.” Syria is blaming U.S. and Israeli “adventurist interferances” for the violence. Condoleeza Rice is discussing how to support the Syrian government “in the face of illegal acts, by the armed gangs” with the secretary general and her French and Saudi counterparts. Hezbollah is handing over pro-government offices to the Lebanese military and says it will maintain roadblocks and control the route to the airport until the crisis is resolved. The White House is talking about “measures which must be taken to hold those responsible for the violence in Beirut accountable.” An unnamed source who supposedly speaks for the opposition says “all issues are linked. Beirut will remain shut until there is a political solution.”
This is oversimplifying just a bit, but this seems like spillover from the ongoing power struggle between the U.S. and Iran. I don’t think U.S. or Israeli bombs dropped from several thousand feet are going to resolve this, and I’d like to know more about where the population stands and how they’re faring.
Bush is headed to the Middle East next week. WaPo is quoting an “unnamed State Department Source” accusing Iran of giving a green light to Hezbollah. That official is probably right, but who can believe what the State Department says at this point? In fact, who can give the Post the benefit of the doubt and believe they’re actually quoting someone, instead of just making stuff up? I’m wondering whether or not the “green light” quote will make the Sunday talk shows. I’m guessing it will.
Elsewhere in the world . . .
Tanks and missile launchers made a return to Red Square for the inauguration of the new Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, who gave a speech:
Medvedev said the history of World War II demonstrated that military conflicts are rooted in “irresponsible ambitions which prevail over interests of nations and entire continents.”
“We must not allow contempt for the norms of international law,” he said, in what sounded like veiled criticism of the United States and its Western allies.
I wouldn’t call that criticism “veiled.”
You’ll want to read this article in the Asia Times from earlier this week about Douglas Feith’s new book (emphasis added):
WASHINGTON – Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions . . .
. . . Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the Feith’s book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing “new regimes” in a series of states by “aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism”. . .
. . . General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.
So, instead of focusing our efforts on apprehending the person identified as responsible for the attacks on our country, and dismantling the network that carried them out, Rumsfeld and his generals decided to make a list of countries and overturn their governments under the guise of “helping” them. That’s the real war on terror. So I guess at this point we can conclude that Iran and Syria are next, and we can probably expect the administration to take action against one or both before the election. We’ve been warned.
Sorry posting has been so light this week. It probably will be light this weekend, as well. I have lots of irons in the fire right now, and won’t have much time to write on Saturday or Sunday.
Got tied up at work today and couldn’t get away at noon, so I missed the protest.
Did anyone go, and if so, got pics?
Thinking I might just start scheduling this as a day off.
Tomorrow in Hattiesburg. 49 and Hardy Street, Noon. Bring yer signs! I’m hoping to make it there with my camera.
Sorry, not much time for blogging at the moment. Hopefully, things will ease up for me later in the week.
Filed under: Elections, Mississippi, Politics | Tags: advertising, Travis Childers
h/t WriteChic
That’s a lot of money for the NRCC to be putting into the First District of Mississippi — especially for ads of such poor production quality. It’s always difficult to tell how ads will be received, but in the one above, I think people are going to find the narrator condescending . The animation looks like it was done with PowerPoint.
“Groovy” is just silly. It’s a sign that whoever produced the ad believes Mississippians are still living in the 1980s. Using the hippie stereotype as a smear just doesn’t have the same effect it did 25 years ago, and there are going to be a lot of voters participating in this election who simply don’t have the emotional baggage from the Vietnam Era that’s required to make it work. “That dog won’t hunt” makes it even more obvious that the genius behind this ad thinks we’re all smoking corncob pipes and have cotton growing up to the edge of our porches.
Having donated money to John Kerry may be a good thing for Childers at this point. Kerry ran against Bush in 2004. To a lot of people, that’s all that matters, and it’s a plus. If this ad has any positive effect for Republicans at all, it’s going to come from stirring up some homophobic bigots who might otherwise stay home. I think that’s what the mention of S.F. and having Pelosi’s name in pink are really about.
This one, from the Davis campaign, is a bit more dangerous and a lot more dishonest.
It’s been thoroughly deconstructed elsewhere by now. Rev. Wright’ statement is being distorted here, and Obama wasn’t ridiculing rural people with his statement about guns and religion. This one could do some damage, though. It’s no secret that we still have lots of racism in Mississippi. However, it seems to me that the ad is preaching to the choir and could backfire. I think more people than you would expect are going to say the same thing about Rev. Wright’s speech that Buelahman said the other day in this post, which includes several minutes of video that helps to put Rev. Wright’s speech into its proper context.
The ad from the Davis campaign is, I think, designed to incite the base and get some people who would otherwise stay home to turn out. The problem I see with it is that it’s probably going to turn some people off, too. It’s fairly well-accepted that negative advertising reduces turnout in general more often than not. Since it tends to hurt the target’s turnout more than the sponsor’s, and since high turnout so often favors Democrats, I think the GOP strategy here is to depress turnout as much for possible and hope for the best.
It’s significant that the word “Republican” isn’t mentioned anywhere in the ad. That’s because the Republican brand is pretty much dead, at least for this election cycle. If someone in the Childers campaign asked for my advice, I’d tell them to brand Davis as a big-money, pro-war Republican. One who doesn’t want us to have jobs or our children to have health insurance. Just like Bush and McCain. They should also do everything possible to question his credibility as a conservative.
To me, these ads make Davis seem desperate. As nervous as that second ad makes me, I’m glad the NRCC is spending this kind of money here, and I hope it turns out to be a waste of resources for them.
Jeff Walters has a roundup on the MS-01 race over at the excellent Cotton Mouth, including a link to a post that discusses the FEC filing that the dollar figure comes from.
Will Bardwell has invented a fun new game called “Childers said Nothing.”
Filed under: Elections, Katrina, Mississippi, Politics, Religion | Tags: Alabama, bigots, homophobia, John McCain, Travis Childers
My comment from Mooncat’s recent Left in Alabama post on McCain’s visit is too good not to share.
Democrats fell less than two percent short of flipping the Mississippi-01 with six candidates on the ballot. The two Dem candidates combined got 50.6 precent of the vote. The NRCC outspent the DCCC two-to-one on this race. This is a Republican +10 Congressional District.
And McCain draws 100 people here[Selma].
DNC is attacking McCain (finally!). The video of the ad is worth a look, but even if you can’t handle video you should check out the link just to read the headline.
One more positive sign, and I might just move into the “McCain has nowhere to go but down” camp.
I am hoping that the GOP race-baiting is finally going to backfire. And that none of their strategists will realize McCain is coming off as a cranky old man who’s out of touch with everyone except Joe Leiberman.
How Insane is John McCain? So insane he’s happy to be endorsed by a bigoted pastor who says, more or less, that God damned New Orleans because some homosexual people like to hang out there. Now that’s insane.
Filed under: Fun and Games, Mississippi, music, Personal, Politics | Tags: Louisiana, Randy Newman
This is a little more mellow than the stuff I’ve been posting, but I need a little mellow right now, so I’m guessing someone else might need it, too. I don’t know when it was filmed.
Filed under: Environment, Mississippi, Politics | Tags: Alabama, Earthquakes, Natural Disasters, New Madrid
As if hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes weren’t enough, the AP is reporting that the recent earthquake centered on Illinois may have been caused by seismic activity on the New Madrid fault. I’ve heard that this quake was felt in North Mississippi and Alabama. I haven’t found any specific government or media reports to support that, but I have seen a report that says it was felt as far away as Georgia, so it makes sense that it would have also been felt in Mississippi and Alabama.
The quake is believed to have involved an extension of the New Madrid fault, a network of deep cracks in the earth’s surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The fault is at the center of the nation’s most active seismic zone east of the Rockies, something that’s known to Midwest residents, even if they forget it now and then — the last severe earthquake in the region was a 5.0 magnitude quake in 2002.
Back in the early 90s, there was a lot of talk in Mississippi about the New Madrid becoming more unstable. For a few years, people were actually selling earthquake insurance, and the community college I went to developed an earthquake response plan.
USGS says earthquakes east of the Mississippi are felt more widely than earthquakes out west, and they are issuing updated earthquake hazards for the entire U.S. on Monday.
Here’s a map that illustrates the difference in the range of earthquakes of similar magnitude on the west coast and in the Mississippi Valley. The large one is the range of the New Madrid earthquake in 1895.
Map by Whyfiles.org
Wiki has an entry on the New Madrid fault. There were significant earthquakes along this fault in 1811-12, in 1895, and in 1968. There’s some debate as to whether the quake should be classified as a New Madrid quake or as an Illinois Basin quake, because fault lines in the center of the continent are difficult to detect and difficult to monitor. From the USGS
At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, scientists can often determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. The Illinois basin – Ozark dome region is far from the nearest plate boundaries, which are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Caribbean Sea, and in the Gulf of California. The region is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few earthquakes in the region can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. As in most other areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards in the Illinois basin – Ozark dome region is the earthquakes themselves.
The Kansas City Star has a report with details from the quake. USGS has a page on the history of Mississippi earthquakes. Wouldn’t FEMA and the insurance companies just love it if we had a major earthquake in the Lower Mississippi Valley?
Filed under: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Mississippi, Politics | Tags: Alabama, Don Siegelman, Justice, Law, Political Prosecutions
The Judiciary Committee has released a report that raises questions about whether Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz and Democratic Donor Paul Minor were subject to selective prosecution. (“Selective” = “Politically motivated” in my book.)
The report raises similar questions about Cyril Wecht, a county coroner in Pennsylvania; Carl Malinga a county prosecutor in Michigan, and Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state procurement official.
Links to .pdf documents of the committee’s majority report and letters to Rove and AG Mukasey are available at the committee’s website. The Siegelman case is front-and-center in the 40-page report. I haven’t had time to review it and see if other cases, such as the Wes Teel case, are mentioned.
You may recall that Scott Horton, Legal Schnauzer, and the Gulf Coast Realist were all over the Diaz, Minor, Teel, and Seigelman cases months ago. You can find links to a couple of Horton’s articles on the issue in this post I wrote back in February.
Filed under: Blogs, Economy, Iraq, Mississippi, Politics, war | Tags: Alabama
Glynn Wilson plants a revolutionary garden.
Mooncat has several excellentlinks in the morning roundup at Left in Alabama, including a short film by an Iraq veteran at the Haze Filter.
The Clarion Ledger reports five tornadoes hit central Mississippi on Friday.
Here’s a quick roundup of blog posts I’ve been able to locate on the event.
Kathy Rhodes writes about the experience of her son, who lives near Jackson.
The Acropolis has more detailed information from the Jackson area and some helpful phone numbers.
Folo says Arkansas and the Vicksburg area also took a lot of damage.
Shadowscope has video.
That’s about all I can find at the moment.
Bloggers: Is it just me, or is Google’s blog search becoming more useless by the day?
Filed under: Community, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive | Tags: activism, events, weather
Protest the War in Hattiesburg – First Wednesday of every month, Noon – 1 p.m. at the corner of Hardy Street and Highway 49. More information is listed on the United for Peace calendar. Even if you aren’t liberal or progressive, but you want the war to end or you think it should be a bigger issue in the Presidential campaign, here’s your chance to encourage a little unity on this issue. The next protest is Wednesday, May 7.
Drinking Liberally in Hattiesburg – Second Thursday of each month, 5:30-7:30 at Keg and Barrel, 1315 Hardy Street. I don’t know how many people attend this event, but I will be at the next meeting. More information is listed on the Drinking Liberally calendar. We also have Drinking Liberally chapters in Jackson and Natchez. The next meeting is Thursday, April 10.
Posting here will be light this weekend. I have to catch up on all the comments threads I’m trying to keep up with here and there. I’ll try and track down some info on the latest round of tornadoes as quickly as possible.
