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7/4/04 [2] <link>
Happy July 4th!
The flag below is apparently from Senator Pat Leahy's
website and I got it through DailyKos.
Why am I displaying it on my website? Well, while
Michael Moore has a mixed record, he has the answer in
this LA Times op-ed (via Buzzflash):
As a young boy, I loved the
American flag. I'd lead my younger sisters in patriotic parades up
and down the sidewalk, waving the flag, blowing a whistle and
reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over and over until my sisters
begged me to let them go back to their Easy-Bake Oven.
I loved singing the national anthem. I won an essay contest on
"What the Flag Means to Me." I decorated my bicycle with
little American flags for a Fourth of July parade and won a prize
for that too. I became an Eagle Scout and proudly promised to do my
duty to God and country. And every year I asked to be the one who
planted the flag on the grave of my uncle, a paratrooper who was
killed in World War II. I was taught to admire his sacrifice, and I
hoped to grow up and do my part, as he had, to keep us free.
But, in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came
back home from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the
American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice. But their
sacrifice wasn't for their country: They were sent to die by men who
lied to them. Those men presidents, senators, government
officials wrapped themselves in the flag too, hoping that their
lies would never be questioned, never be discovered. They wrapped
themselves in the very flag that was placed on the coffins of my
friends and neighbors. I stopped singing the national anthem at
football games, and I stopped putting out the flag.
I realize now I never should have stopped.
For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a
symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home.
Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car
dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper
bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to
send a message: "You're either with us or you're against
us," "Bring it on!" or "Watch what you say,
watch what you do."
Those who absconded with our flag now use it as a weapon against
those who question America's course. They remind me of that famous
1976 photo of an anti-busing demonstrator in Boston thrusting a
large American flag on a pole into the stomach of the first black
man he encountered. These so-called patriots hold the flag tightly
in their grip and, in a threatening pose, demand that no one ask
questions. Those who speak out find themselves shunned at work,
harassed at school, booed off Oscar stages. The flag has become a
muzzle, a piece of cloth stuffed into the mouths of those who dare
to ask questions.
I think it's time for those of us who love this country and
everything it should stand for to reclaim our flag from those
who would use it to crush rights and freedoms, both here at home and
overseas. We need to redefine what it means to be a proud American.
If you are one of those who love what President Bush has done for
this country and believe you must blindly follow the president to
deserve to fly the flag, you should ask yourself some difficult
questions about just how proud you are of the America we now
inhabit:
Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?
Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional
illiterates?
Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are
low- and minimum-wage jobs?
Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an
hour?
Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society
survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map
(and 11% cannot find the United States!)?
Are you proud that the rest of the world, which poured out its heart
to us after Sept. 11, now looks at us with disdain and disgust?
Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not
have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and
technology to remedy this immediately?
Are you proud of the fact that our president sent our soldiers off
to a war that had nothing to do with the self-defense of this
country?
If these things represent what it means to be an American these days
and I am an American should I hang my head in shame? No.
Instead, I intend to perform what I believe is my patriotic duty. I
can't think of a more American thing to do than raise questions
and demand truthful answers when our leader wants to send our
sons and daughters off to die in a war.
If we don't do that the bare minimum for those who offer to
defend our country, then we have failed them and ourselves. They
offer to die for us, if necessary, so that we can be free. All they
ask in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it
is absolutely necessary. And with this war, we have broken faith
with our troops by sending them off to be killed and maimed for
wrong and immoral reasons.
This is the true state of disgrace we are living in. I hope we can
make it up someday to these brave kids (and older men and women in
our reserves and National Guard). They deserve an apology, they
deserve our thanks and a raise and they deserve a big parade
with lots of flags.
I would like to lead that parade, carrying the largest flag. And I
would like the country to proclaim that never again will a war be
fought unless it is our last resort.
Let's create a world in which, when people see the Stars and
Stripes, they will think of us as the people who brought peace to
the world, who brought good-paying jobs to all citizens and clean
water for the world to drink.
In anticipation of that day, I am putting my flag out today, with
hope and with pride.
7/4/04 [1] <link>
Fahrenheit 9/11 - reviews
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and found it to be a
powerful, must-see movie. One of the best articles about it was
written by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Here it is:
Since it opened, "Fahrenheit
9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at
theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
took his Nascar crew to see it. The film's appeal to working-class
Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush's policies,
should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals
rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore.
There has been much tut-tutting by
pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught
in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create
false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form
to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of
association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a
self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the
president of the United States?
And for all its flaws,
"Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would
be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy
theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of
people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These
people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard
elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable,
but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been
doing their job.
For example, audiences are shocked
by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation
was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with
a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr.
Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.
Or consider the Bush family's ties
to the Saudis. The film suggests that Mr. Bush and his good friend
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador known to the family as
Bandar Bush, have tried to cover up the extent of Saudi involvement
in terrorism. This may or may not be true. But what shocks people, I
think, is the fact that nobody told them about this side of Mr.
Bush's life.
Mr. Bush's carefully constructed
persona is that of an all-American regular guy not like his
suspiciously cosmopolitan opponent, with his patrician air. The news
media have cheerfully gone along with the pretense. How many stories
have you seen contrasting John Kerry's upper-crusty vacation on
Nantucket with Mr. Bush's down-home time at the ranch?
But the reality, revealed by Mr.
Moore, is that Mr. Bush has always lived in a bubble of privilege.
And his family, far from consisting of regular folks with deep roots
in the heartland, is deeply enmeshed, financially and personally,
with foreign elites with the Saudis in particular.
Mr. Moore's greatest strength is a
real empathy with working-class Americans that most journalists
lack. Having stripped away Mr. Bush's common-man mask, he uses his
film to make the case, in a way statistics never could, that Mr.
Bush's policies favor a narrow elite at the expense of less
fortunate Americans sometimes, indeed, at the cost of their
lives.
In a nation where the affluent
rarely serve in the military, Mr. Moore follows Marine recruiters as
they trawl the malls of depressed communities, where enlistment is
the only way for young men and women to escape poverty. He shows
corporate executives at a lavish conference on Iraq, nibbling on
canapιs and exulting over the profit opportunities, then shows the
terrible price paid by the soldiers creating those opportunities.
The movie's moral core is a
harrowing portrait of a grieving mother who encouraged her children
to join the military because it was the only way they could pay for
their education, and who lost her son in a war whose justification
she no longer understands.
Viewers may come away from Mr.
Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true. For
example, the film talks a lot about Unocal's plans for a pipeline
across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of
the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is
over, I'll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported
Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views.
But not now. "Fahrenheit
9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential
truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political
gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.
Other reviews/notes on Fahrenheit 9/11:
Fox
News' Roger Friedman:
But once "F9/11" gets to
audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities
for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of
work, and a film that members of all political parties should see
without fail.
As much as some might try to
marginalize this film as a screed against President George
Bush, "F9/11" as we saw last night is a
tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty
and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.
Readers of this column may recall
that I had a lot of problems with Moore's "Bowling for
Columbine," particularly where I thought he took gratuitous
shots at helpless targets such as Charlton Heston.
"Columbine" too easily succeeded by shooting fish in a
barrel, as they used to say.
Not so with "F9/11,"
which instead relies on lots of film footage and actual interviews
to make its case against the war in Iraq and tell the story of the
intertwining histories of the Bush and bin Laden
families.
Editor
and Publisher:
They like Mike. While the country
as a whole appears split, along political lines, over the
controversial Michael Moore documentary, "Fahrenheit
9/11," movie reviewers at U.S. daily newspapers are not.
An E&P survey of 63 daily papers that ran reviews, in
"red" and "blue" states alike, finds that 56
gave the film a positive nod, with only seven abstaining, an almost
90% favorable rating.
6/24/03
<link>
Lying
by youth on the increase
Susan Tifft's op-ed in the L.A. Times is sobering and highly
disturbing. We reproduce it here in its entirety.
"When I began teaching at Duke, I was
pleased to find that the university had an honor code exhorting
students to promise they wouldn't "lie, cheat or steal" in
their academic endeavors. But now I regard the pledge as a quaint
artifact.
How can young people take seriously such a vow when everywhere they
look they see successful grown-ups getting ahead by playing fast and
loose with the truth?
Every day brings fresh accusations that President Bush and his
advisors stretched intelligence to get the United States into a war in
Iraq, while the one feel-good story of the conflict the rescue of
Pfc. Jessica Lynch is looking increasingly phony. At least three
independent media investigations (the British Broadcasting Corp., the
Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post) have cast doubt on the
initial heroic narrative and questioned whether the military
manipulated the episode for propaganda purposes.
In the private sector, Martha Stewart is just the latest business icon
to morph into a mug shot. And at the New York Times, up-and-comer
Jayson Blair got his comeuppance for fabricating and plagiarizing
stories, followed by fellow Timesman Rick Bragg, who admitted passing
off a stringer's work as his own. What's a kid to think?
Lying in the service of power, money and advancement or simply to
avoid embarrassment is nothing new. Bill Clinton lied about having
sex "with that woman"; Richard Nixon lied about his abuse of
power during the Watergate scandal. Lyndon Johnson lied about American
destroyers being attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of
Tonkin. What is different today thanks in part to around-the-clock
media coverage and the peculiar American habit of making celebrities
of the fallen is that kids see lies, half-truths and hype not as
aberrations but as the norm.
"What do you expect?" one student asked with a shrug last
spring as my class discussed yet another government assertion that had
turned out to be false. "It's business as usual."
A survey released last fall by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in
Los Angeles found that high school students today were more likely to
lie, cheat and steal than their counterparts 10 years ago. Nearly
three-quarters said they had cheated on an exam in the last year (up
from 61% in 1992), and 37% said they would stretch the truth to get a
job.
This Pinocchio culture has made kids alarmingly cynical: 43% agree
that a person has to lie and cheat sometimes to get ahead, up nine
points since 2000. The irony is that on many issues school prayer
and abortion, to name just two young people today are more
conservative than their elders. Yet they are surprisingly blasι about
shading the truth.
They weren't born that way. They learned it from us.
One day soon they will be our politicians, lawyers, teachers, CEOs,
auto mechanics and pilots, and they'll bring to those jobs the values
they're absorbing now. Honor codes? Who knows whether they make a
difference on college campuses? But the moment has come for our
country's leading adults to sign one."
2/1/03
<link> (UPDATED
2/3/03)
Space
Shuttle Columbia explodes killing all 7 on board
Tragic news. NASA thinks
it may have been foam debris that hit the left wing of the shuttle at
liftoff that resulted ultimately in the explosion at re-entry.
Interestingly, a similar problem had
occurred in Columbia's first mission without any ultimate
problems.
The seven astronauts killed were commander Rick
Husband; pilot William McCool; payload commander Michael Anderson;
mission specialists David Brown, Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla; and
Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Complete coverage on their
history and the accident may be found at MSNBC.
Given our Indian ancestry we link here to an article on her in the San
Jose Mercury News, but more details on the other astronauts are
available in
In the meantime, many news articles have appeared
focusing on NASA budget cuts relating to safety and on warnings
ignored.
CNN:
Proposed 2003 budget was to cut shuttle program funds and up nuclear
program funds
MSNBC:
NASA veteran Don Nelson warned NASA and Bush of possible disaster.
Here is a website
that documents Don Nelson's attempts to convince NASA and the Bush
administration of the problems that he has been pointing out for a few
years.
San
Jose Mercury News: Other safety experts had warned Congress
too.
USA
Today: The latest.
11/24/02
<link>
Teenage
boys pumping themselves up with steroids
Disturbing growth in this undesirable trend, seen in "middle
America". Boys want to make themselves "look better" to
attract girls.
11/8/02
<link>
Poor
ethics and cheating amongst American youth on the increase
Research report from the Josephson Institute very disturbing.
Participation in sports, being in religious schools, or having
religious convictions have no real impact on unethical or illegal
actions. Girls seem to be slightly better off, and so do students who
have continued higher education as key goal.
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