Circuit Writer

Here’s an excerpt from Chris Hedge’s latest column at TruthDig.  It’s well worth the read.

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

Read the rest of the article.

I’m highlighting this article because of it’s authors: three high school seniors from Michigan.  They eloquently expressed their concerns about the costs for host nations and cities of the Olympic games, providing both concise comment that they backed up with factual information.  This is just a quick look – I hope you’ll check out the entire article here.

Grace Hirzel is a senior at Otsego High School and is a member of the 2008-09 Gazette Young Editorial Staff:

In both former host countries [Australia & Greece], citizens are not only still paying for the games but also the upkeep of huge Olympic venues in their taxes. At least in Sydney these facilities are being put to good use. In other places, Olympic venues are closed up, falling apart and vandalized.

Trenton Bulat is a senior at Hartford High School and is a member of the 2008-09 Gazette Young Editorial Staff:

So, what is such an imperial monument [Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium] being used for today, hardly a year later? Nothing! The stadium has fallen on hard luck when it comes to attracting anything other than vendors around the Olympic Green, and seats have been shaved off in an effort to simplify the stadium’s design. In fact, Beijing’s own soccer club was ready to call the Bird’s Nest home, but backed out because of the still-intimidating capacity.

Ben Wells is a senior at Galesburg-Augusta High School and is a member of the 2008-09 Gazette Young Editorial Staff:

The honor the Olympics provides is not given to the city or country that has enough money to win a bidding war, but to the elite men and women who have what it takes to bring home a medal.

Here is the introduction to an interview featuring David Dow, an attorney who defends death row inmates and works to reduce their sentences to life in prison.  He currently works for the Texas Defender Service and teaches law at the University of Houston Law Center.  Here’s a brief quote from the original article at NPR.org that includes an excerpt from his book, The Autobiography Of An Execution, and a link to listen to the interview conducted by Terry Gross.

Attorney David Dow has made a career out of defending death row inmates in Texas — a state that boasts the highest number of death row executions nation-wide since 1976.

In the last twenty years, Dow has defended over 100 inmates sentenced to death. Many of his clients have died — most of them were guilty — but Dow says they should have been sentenced to life in prison instead of death at the hands of the state.

“The person that we’re executing is simply not the same person who committed the crime that landed that person on death row in the first place,” Dow tells Terry Gross.

Read the rest of the article and hear the audio of the interview here.

Here’s the contents of an email update from Repower America featuring the ridiculous claims made by climate change skeptics:

Extreme weather brings out some strange behavior.

In the middle of this week’s storm, Senator James Inhofe constructed an “igloo” in Washington, DC and posted a sign reading “Honk if you heart global warming.” Senator Jim DeMint tweeted “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries uncle.” Rush Limbaugh and Fox News chimed in with story after story distorting the facts to fit their dishonest narrative.

Climate deniers like Inhofe and DeMint are willfully missing the point: Extreme weather is climate change! Not only does “Snowpocalypse” not disprove global warming, it actually matches scientific predictions that climate change will increase extreme weather events of many kinds, including heavy snowfalls in regions like the Northeast.

Together, we can and must stop this disinformation campaign. Jon Stewart just did a great job taking on the deniers. Check out a short clip from The Daily Show and help spread the truth about extreme weather.

Click on over to see the video and read the facts about severe weather and global warming.

Here’s a summary of President Obama’s discussion of energy legislation and climate change in the State of the Union address.

Watch the video here and then click over to Repower America to learn more.

A friend of mine put me on to this blog post through Facebook and I’ve deemed it important enough to share – and it’s unbelievable well written to boot!  It engages the question of white privilege and spells out what it means in accessible terms.  I’m posting a teaser here and a link to the rest of the blog.

One of the frustrating things about living in Iowa City – a cozy, liberal-for-the-Midwest sort of town – is that I’ll make friends with intelligent people, considerate people, well-spoken, literate people, who nevertheless will pull out phrases like “I don’t believe in white privilege” when I have discussions with them.

To them, I dedicate this. (Originally posted on my own blog, http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org/.)

Click here to read the rest.

Howard Zinn, the controversial author of A People’s History of the United States, passed away at the age of 87.  A historian who admitted that he never intended to write a complete or objective history of our nation, he challenged the idea that there is one story that defines the United States.  Growing from an initial publishing run of 5,000, A People’s History went on to sell over 1 million copies, become a textbook in high school and college history courses, and launch a series of publications that would remind us all to listen for the voices that are often never heard.

The remainder of this post includes excerpts from his obituary at the New York Times.  Godspeed, Professor Zinn. continue reading…

It is with a profound sense of sadness that I repost this article from DisciplesWorld.com, the website for the independent magazine of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).  Normally, I would post a stub and link to the remainder of the article, but due to the fact that the dissolution of DisciplesWorld will ultimately lead to the closing of this website, I’m risking the copyright laws and reprinting the entire article.  You can read it in its original publication here.

Chris Hedges, longtime journalist and writer of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction finalist, presents a critical look at the United States under the Obama administration.  His harsh and uncompromising commentary may be difficult to read, but it is certainly worth considering in light of the ongoing U.S. military actions abroad.

Did they play  Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world’s largest ghetto?

What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture—yes, we still torture—only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel’s brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?

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While flipping through some news updates I came across this interesting little tidbit related to evangelical author Warren Cole Smith and his latest book A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church.  Here’s an excerpt from this post:

“For the sake of money and power and status and celebrity … we’ve made ‘church’ easy,” complains Smith, editor of The Charlotte World and the Evangelical Press News Service. “We’ve made being a card-carrying member of the evangelical movement easy. But being a disciple of Jesus in the early 21st century is hard and, for the most part, the evangelical church doesn’t teach us how to do that.”

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