by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
10 June, 2011
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
The monopolization and digitization of the media has industrialized the production process. This has resulted in virtually identical output regardless of its source. Not only the nature of the ‘news’ but also what is considered to be worthy of our attention comes at us in lockstep regardless of where we are or the medium, blanketing out any alternate views on the subject.
by William John Cox
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.thevoters.org
January 12, 2011
The shooter of Congresswoman Giffords acted as a domestic suicide terrorist on the political “battleground” of American politics. His YouTube postings and “goodbye” phone messages are ominously reminiscent of the traditional farewell videos of Islamist martyrs.
The deadly combination of suicide terrorists’ mental instability, their political and religious indoctrination, and readily available bomb materials and firearms explode in violence almost every day somewhere in the Middle-East.
by Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
December 3, 2010
God’s mysterious sense of humor strikes again, afflicting the lunatic fringe with this especially ludicrous zinger: the delusion of infallibility. Beyond the ‘50’s jingoism of “America, right or wrong,” the right now stays this course, “America, never wrong.” We must be special, the chosen elect, morally superior to every other country. Why else would an omnipotent God put us in charge? End of discussion.
Frankly, the Roman Empire was more culturally tolerant.
by Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
November 27, 2010
How quickly the meteoric prince has fallen to earth, with a thud. The splashy campaigner has morphed into a cross between Neville Chamberlain, England’s Nazi appeaser, and George Armstrong Custer, rushing to get ambushed at the Little Big Horn. Few recall Chamberlain, whose compromises to belligerent Hitler spurred, rather than deflected war – not that I am offering any absurd Nazi parallels. And yet, appeasing bullies from the get-go is curious strategy for a newcomer once rich with political capital.
by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
crossposted at Truthout/Buzzflash
20 October, 2010
NBC TV airs vote “caging” exposé on Tim Griffin
“What he [Griffin] did was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail.”
That’s hardly the kind of endorsement a candidate for Congress expects. But that is the conclusion of voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after digging into the evidence of Congressional candidate Tim Griffin’s role in directing the Republican National Committee’s racially biased attack on voters known as “caging.” Continue reading
by Joel S. Hirschhorn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.foavc.org
Oct. 9, 2010
Image via Wikipedia
In trying to understand how so many Americans adore people like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh I have come to this critical understanding: Poorly educated, terribly informed, intellectually deficient and downright stupid people need idols. They feel angry, frustrated, ignored, cheated and disillusioned by so much going on in American society. They find the emotional, political and philosophical rants by talk show, loud mouth celebrities matching and justifying their feelings. Of course, those celebrities work hard to fan the flames of all that unhappiness and discontent, and also perpetuate ignorance and hate. They sell stupidity to gullible dummies, teaching them who to blame for their misery.
By Jerry Mazza
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at Online Journal
www.jerrymazza.com
Sept. 29, 2010
As the Beatles once sang, “oh I’ll get by with a little help with my friends/yes I’ll get high with a little help from my friends.” In this case I received some illuminating help from my friend, journalist, researcher and activist, Barbara Honegger on my last article The making of 9/11 activists.
As I wrote in it, Manny Badillo had related to me that he was a conservative in 2009, even attending a Tea Party in Boston for 9/11 Truth. I assumed and wrote: “Ironically, it was the conservative 9/11 Tea Party given in Boston in 2007 that put him on the path to 9/11 Truth.” The use of conservative was his, but the assumption that the Tea Party was a conservative property was mine.
by Ed Ciaccio
Dandelion Salad
Featured Writer
– August 31, 2010
September 5, 2010
Image via Wikipedia
TV personality/self-assumed “messiah”/and seller of gold Glenn Beck held his D.C. rally to “Take Back America” last Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where, in 1963 on that same date, August 28, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech about the dire need for racial integration and tolerance.
The Beck crowd, in the tens of thousands, drew families from all over the U.S. They were “preached” to by Beck and Sarah Palin, among others. Palin said she spoke “not as a politician. No, as something more — something much more. I’ve been asked to speak as the mother of a soldier…Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me.”
by Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
September 3, 2010
Before we unprofessional leftists get too high on our horse, blithely scoffing at Beck or Palin’s staged chicanery, let us acknowledge our own home-grown “conspiracy theories.” Agreed, ours are more realistic, indeed evidence-based, but they’re still self-serving, wide-ranging projections, often presuming more than they prove. Was Iraq only about oil? Is Obama merely the pawn of Wall Street, the Pentagon, or big business? Have safety-first, corporatist advisers rotted his once politically agile brain? Okay, some conspiracies have the ring of truth.
Whatever, I distinguish a good, rousing conspiracy theory from its dark, hissing cousin, the Big Lie, the readily disprovable trickery fueling misdirection, war games or fear-mongering. What a growing list: death panelists, WMDs, Saddam’s 9/11 linkage, phantom al Qaeda behind Afghan surges, or a Kenyan-born, Muslim, racist president who hates America.
by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
August 22, 2010
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
(SOAPBOX #69) – Cindy sez: “Greetings! This Sunday, (August 22nd) at 2 pm PST, I hope you tune into Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox to hear my fascinating and informative interview with legendary whistle blower and activist, Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel and I will be chatting about; the Wikileaks controversy, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan–an info packed show, for sure. With millions of bits of disinformation and propaganda flying around our airwaves this past week, Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox continues to be a light shining through the lies. Please use the link above to listen to today’s discussions.
by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
17 August, 2010
Since everyone seems to have an opinion about the mosque near Ground Zero (and President Obama has two), I like to ask you all a couple of questions:
Given that white Christian supremacist Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, shouldn’t we ban white churches from the sacred ground of Oklahoma?
As New York City’s indigenous Lanape Natives died at Ground Zero by the thousands when overrun by Christian colonists, shouldn’t we ban Christian churches from their sacred ground?
If a mosque near Ground Zero is bad, then why not ban all Muslims from downtown? For this to work, should we require all Muslims in the city to wear yellow crescents?
by Michael Carmichael
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
PlanetaryMovement.org
July 21, 2010
The United States of America rightly prides herself on her constitutional tradition for the Constitution clearly and starkly defines individual freedom in the Bill of Rights.
The core of the Bill of Rights is, of course, the First Amendment that states:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Recently, Sarah Palin joined with Mark Williams another prominent leader of the Tea Party Movement when she spoke out in opposition to the creation of a Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan that aims to establish mutual respect between people of all faiths. In doing so, Palin and the Tea Party leadership boldly and explicitly proclaimed their opposition to religious freedom.
by Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
July 13, 2010
“We shall all hang together,” quipped the savviest of our founders, Benjamin Franklin, “or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Unlike us, Franklin found unity against a single, outside, mortal danger to Founders – British retaliation. We aren’t so fortunate, as a myriad of ill-defined threats loom. That merits a new, updated Pledge of Allegiance that redefines a national commitment for a 21st Century super-power. Continue reading
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http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=1094015
by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
10 May, 2010
Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.
Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well, that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.
“That was a mistake,” he said, referring to US Statehood. “We should have been our own nation,” which, I pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.
Passed on by Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
May 3, 2010
Note: Who knew “d-mail” existed (“d” for demonic?), let alone actual demons wreaking havoc upon our species (like we need help). Surfacing by chance in my e-mail, one Uncle Screwtape, with nothing less than gleeful abandon, discloses how Devilish chicanery favoring chaos and against authority is coming to fruition. Apparently, there’s no point just blaming liberal elitists or Tea Party sputtering, not Goldman Sachs, manipulation by rightwing billionaires, not even residual Bush-Cheney machinations. There are foreigners among us without birth certificates.
Dandelion Salad 