Updated: added another video with some of the same footage but with different commentary at the end (propaganda alert). How anyone can justify what Israel did is beyond me. ~ DS
Warning
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This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Excellent report by Jonathan Millar reporting from Gaza and the UN School in Beit Lahiya where Phosphorus bombs and artillery struck, killing two children and injuring many more people.
I’ve added a few photographs to this report at 4mins 08secs.
They also make a distinction about neo-conservatives and neoliberals:
U.S. neo-conservatives, with their commitment to high military spending and the global assertion of national values, tend to be more authoritarian than hard right. By contrast, neo-liberals, opposed to such moral leadership and, more especially, the ensuing demands on the tax payer, belong to a further right but less authoritarian region. Paradoxically, the “free market”, in neo-con parlance, also allows for the large-scale subsidy of the military-industrial complex, a considerable degree of corporate welfare, and protectionism when deemed in the national interest. These are viewed by neo-libs as impediments to the unfettered market forces that they champion.
Giles Ji Ungpakorn, an author and associate professor at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, will report to a Pathumwan police station today in a case that could land him in prison for nothing more than political dissent.
Ungpakorn is facing the charge of “lese majesty”–insulting the monarchy–for his book A Coup for the Rich (the book can be read online at Ungpakorn’s Web site), which analyses and criticizes the 2006 military coup in Thailand and discusses the question of the role of the monarchy in Thai politics.
The 2006 coup banned the popular and democratically elected Thai Rak Thai Party, led by businessman Thaksin Shinawatra, after right-wing protests by the inappropriately named People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) calling for Thaksin’s ouster.
The lese majesty charge against Ungpakorn is also being used against a host of other people after another coup late last year, this time carried out in the courts, against a democratically elected government led by the successor party to Thai Rak Thai, which was banned after the 2006 coup. The latest coup was again pushed by the PAD and strongly supported by the military.
Ungpakorn talked to Paul D’Amato about his case and about political developments in Thailand.
“IDF Pulls Out of Gaza,” IBA TV, Israel
“Gazans Inspect Damage,” Dubai TV, UAE
“Billions in Losses in Gaza and in Israel,” Al Jazeera TV, Qatar
“Saudi King Pledges 1 Billion in Aid for Gaza,” Al Arabiya TV, UAE
“Israel is an Obstacle for Relations Between Tehran and Washington,” Abu Dhabi TV, UAE
“Families Refuse Their Damaged Homes in Gaza,” Nile TV, Egypt
“Scenes of Devastation in Tel el-Hawa,” New TV, Lebanon
“Protestors Storm Israeli Embassy in Jordan,” Al-Alam TV, Iran
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani.
by Rand Clifford
featured writer Dandelion Salad
January 20, 2009
Truth in our time has become so muddied, the first thing we need in any search for fundamental, unambiguous truth is a good working definition. Something to clutch as a certain cruciform against vampires…a touchstone to help us better navigate lies.
truth \’trüth\ n. : That which is true
Hhmmm…so precisely what is “true”?
Truth. Truth is true.
That Möbius strip leads nowhere. Could a better understanding of truth as an aide to our search for it be found by examining the opposite of truth—by examining untruth?
American life floods us with one particular very tried and true untruth: Everything our federal government tells us, either officially, or through mainstream corporate media. So, a reliable working definition of truth here could be: “Exactly what government does not tell“. Certainly they tell occasional superficial truths, but those always have tendrils merging into the massive and nearby body of deceit.
The New York Times ran a headline immediately after the inauguration today that read “President Obama Vows Era of Responsibility.” They quoted Obama as saying that with our current economic crisis we must deal with “our collective failure to make hard choices.”
Those are code words that really mean the “entitlement programs” need to be scaled back. Particularly Social Security and Medicare. There was no language in the speech about cutting the military budget or closing down bases of the empire. In fact in one flourish, where he talked about the “sacrifices” made to destroy Nazism and Communism, Obama sent out a call to the “terrorists” I presume, declaring “you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”
Nothing was uttered about making the rich and the bankers pay back the $700 billion bailout they weaseled out of the tax payers by scaring the nation into thinking they would stabilize the economy if we just handed the national treasury over to them.
It’s Inauguration Day and all of us are focused on the historic proceedings in Washington. But I wanted to share a fantastic piece of environmental news because I know it will lift your spirits even more.
On Saturday night, a federal judge ruled in our favor and blocked the Bush Administration from proceeding with the lease sale of 110,000 acres of Utah’s Redrock wilderness to oil and gas companies.
This is a huge victory for our nation’s legacy of public lands — and a final rebuke to the Bush Administration as it slinks out of town.
“Gaza fought back, withstood, resisted …. Arabs are now speaking of victory, hailing the resistance, singing the praise of the Palestinians in Gaza…” — Ramzy Baroud
Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of a European war, the Palestinians were made the sacrificial lamb, slaughtered in the abattoir of Capital by their executioners, the Zionists and their imperial paymasters.
Unfortunately for Israel, those damn Palestinians persisted in ‘hanging around’, jammed into refugee camps across the Middle East, ghettoized and relegated to third class people in the land of their birth, Palestine.
The ‘traditional’ view is that expunging an entire nation from the face of the Earth was somehow an atonement for European ‘guilt’ over the Nazi death camps. Looking back, I’m amazed that this idea ever gained any kind of credibility, but it became the rationale for sixty years of misery and death for the Palestinian people as well as a source of destabilization for the entire Middle East.
What it does reveal however, is the deeply rooted racism in Western society, the product of centuries of colonial domination.
My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you’ve bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.
The perfect tribute for a president who was far from perfect… this music video features an award-winning song parody by Spanx T. Urquhart with editorial cartoons by Daryl Cagle, RJ Matson, Jeff Parker, John Cole, Pat Bagley, Mike Lane, Bob Englehart and many others courtesy of PoliticalCartoons.com ~
Barack Obama and Co. are planning to launch their own version of economic “shock and awe” in the opening weeks of the new administration. Aside from the $825 billion stimulus package, which will be used to create 3 million new jobs and make up for flagging consumer demand; Obama is planning a financial rescue operation for banks that are buried under hundreds of billions of dollars of troubled assets. Spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economics chief Lawrence Summers, the new program will create a government-backed “aggregator” bank that will purchase mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other problem assets for which there is currently no active market. The proposed “bad bank” will do what the TARP program was supposed to do; wipe clean the banks balance sheets so they resume lending to consumers and businesses. Until the credit mechanism is fixed, the economy will continue slip deeper and deeper into recession.
Dandelion Salad 