Does anyone have this song?

Clint Mansell Requiem for a dream.

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America

Via: Challenging Media

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (1 of 6)

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (2 of 6)

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (3 of 6)

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (4 of 6)

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (5 of 6)

Jonathan Kozol: Education in America (6 of 6)

The eyes of the beholder...

Via:slit

slit is in Egypt and among other things, she noticed that:America's image in the rest of the world is one of a cold, cruel and uncaring superpower

I never thought I'd miss the underbelly of American media, but after being here for almost two months, watching only CNN and BBC and Al-Jazeera English, I've started seeing the U.S. in a different light. On television, our government looks scary-competent. It looks cold. And the American people -- when they are featured at all, which is rare -- look like cold and calculating minions of it. We look much more intentional than we really are. "Yes," we are saying to the world (unsmiling), "George Bush is our president. We like him, because he is powerful. We are more powerful than you."

...

Yet this cold version also misses the level and intensity of American opposition. I've gotten frustrated with German friends in the past who are critical of the U.S. government, particularly this administration, but obstinately refuse to acknowledge that I am too, probably way more than they are. But now I can kind of see it, because people who speak for me are not in power, and in this kind of news format, where it's Australia (60 seconds) --> France (30 seconds) --> South Africa (60 seconds) --> U.S. (30 seconds) --> Russia (60 seconds)..... there's no room at all for people like me. So why WOULD they think I exist? They watch the news, right, they're informed? And they don't see me. So my opposition looks like a defensive posture I'm adopting only because I'm under fire, in the moment, rather than the thing that drives me every day of my life.More

slit then makes a surprising and thought-provoking linkFacebook is being used as an organizing tool against oppression in Eygpt

AHA! Lets pat ourselves on the back for encouraging the spread of democracy, right?


Not so fast.

We in the U.S. hear "America supports democracy abroad!!ELEVENTY!" so much that it's become a cliche, so much that we assume the government must be just killing themselves doling out of democracy instruction booklets around the world. We complain that their reality doesn't match their rhetoric, but that criticism concedes half the argument -- it assumes the rhetoric, at least, is there.

It's not. In Egypt all the American rhetoric about democracy comes with so many caveats and explanations of what's meant by the word "democracy" -- explanations Egyptians hear and Americans don't -- that no one sees it as 'America failing to live up to its promise' or anything so forgiving. The issue here isn't rhetoric without teeth: it's that no one has been promised democracy in the first place. They've specifically been told that the U.S. will not be promoting democracy if it threatens to come at the expense of stability.

Think about that while you watch this:

Egypt's Facebook Face Off - Egypt

So I HATE country music. And Kareem Salama is making me reconsider. A little bit:)

Via:shewhohashope
A Land called Paradise Kareem Salama

Film Description
In December 2007, over 2,000 American Muslims were asked what they would wish to say to the rest of the world. This is what they said. A music video for Kareem Salama's "A Land Called Paradise."

Produced and directed by Lena Khan. A MAS Media Foundation Production.

Kareem is American born with Egyptian parents whose music style is a result of his unique upbringing in Oklahoma with exposure to US western and Native American cultures.

Generous Peace-Kareem Salama

This was a poem written in arabic, which has been translated into english and song by Kareem Salama.


Picnics and Sunshine-Kareem Salama

NY Gov. David Patterson Speech at the DNC Convention

Never trust an oilman pretending to sell windpower

Via: Daily Kos

You've seen the ads right? T. Boone Pickens, former oilman, now reformed character going to sell windpower cause he has seen the light?

Sounds great? Right?

T. Boone Pickens wants your water

By Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist | 8/21/08 7:10 PM Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn’t own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. After he pulls it off, the media will deride it as craven capitalism. In truth, it is one the most audacious examples of politics for profit, showing how big government helps the biggest business steal from the rest of us. The plotline behind Pickens’ water-and-wind scheme is almost too rich to believe. If it were a movie script, reviewers would dismiss it as over-the-top.

The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly “sustainable” practice, he has piggybacked this water project onto a windmill project pitched as an alternative to oil.

Pickens’ scheme is a perfect demonstration of why it’s worth asking cui bono — who benefits — from regulatory and environmental initiatives. Last week, this column pointed out that Pickens, before his current lobbying blitz for increased federal support of wind power, built the largest wind farm in the world.

I received dozens of responses from environmentalists and Pickens fans objecting to my implication that Pickens’ profit from expanding wind subsidies ought to cast suspicion on his call for more wind subsidies. “Why should I care if someone’s getting rich?” was the general gist, “windmills are good, and we need more of them.”

This objection is grounded in a good instinct: The profit motive, far from being evil, is the driving force behind most of our society’s advances. But, especially when it comes to government plans involving your tax dollars, asking cui bono helps us unearth less desirable aspects of the scheme. MORE

There is, of course, more...

There Will be Water

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it's all a matter of supply and demand. "There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing," he says.

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling "blue gold"—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world's population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

Into this environment comes Pickens, who made a good living for a long time extracting oil and gas and now, at 80, believes the era of fossil fuel is over. So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there's a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year. "The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many," says James M. Olson, one of America's preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. "But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities."


...

In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened in the grand statehouse in Austin. The 80th session turned out to be very productive, and one person who kept busy during that time was J.E. Buster Brown, a former state senator and one of the most powerful lobbyists in town. Among Brown's clients is Mesa Water. "My job is primarily defensive," Brown says of his work for Pickens. "I'm watching to make sure there is no legislation passed that creates obstacles to Pickens doing what he wants to do. I'm supposed to make sure nothing bad happens."

Brown did more than that: He helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way. "We helped move that along," says Stillwell. "We thought it would be handy and helpful to everyone."

After the bill passed, Tom "Smitty" Smith, Texas director of Public Citizens, an advocacy group, says several legislators were drinking coffee and reading through it. "Uh-oh," one said. They'd just realized the amendment would help Pickens build his pipeline. "Many legislators were watching for this play," Smith says, "and it still snuck by." State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican who represents Lubbock, says: "It probably should have raised our suspicions, but we were moving a lot of bills. And it would have been hard to hold up this one even if we'd discovered the amendment."

Pickens still needed the power of eminent domain if he was going to build his pipeline and wind-power lines across private land. And by happy coincidence, the legislators passed a smaller bill that made that all the easier. The new legislation loosened the requirements for creating a water district. Previously, a district's five elected supervisors needed to be registered voters living within the boundaries of the district. Now, they only had to own land in the district; they could live and vote wherever. The bill, as it happens, was put forth by two legislators from Houston; Brown says he and Mesa had nothing to do with it. "That wasn't our bill," says Brown. "I wish I could take credit for it."

Pickens moved quickly to take advantage of the new rules. Over the summer of 2007, he sold eight acres on the back side of his ranch to five people in his employ: Stillwell, who resides in Houston, two of his executives in Dallas, and the couple who manage his ranch, Alton and Lu Boone. A few days later, Mesa Water filed a petition to create an eight-acre water-supply district with those five as the directors and sole members. On Nov. 6, Roberts County held an election to decide whether to form the new district. Only two people were qualified to take part: Alton and Lu Boone. The vote was unanimous. With that, Pickens won the right to issue tax-free bonds for his pipeline and electrical lines as well as the extraordinary power to claim land across swaths of the state. MORE

And of course, we could ask the esteemed oilman some even more POINTED questions

(no subject)

Via: Hullabaloo



A Liberal Shock Doctrine

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation's status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity -- which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office's most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy's martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points -- our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests -- to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state -- banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights -- had happened fast, they wouldn't have happened at all?

...

The 1930s Washington culture in which LBJ thrived was not merely a function of the New Dealers' scramble to redeem a national emergency. It was a function of the fact that they understood the reality of America as "the frozen republic," as Daniel Lazare has called it. By the time Johnson got his accidental opportunity to occupy his hero FDR's chair, progressives understood implicitly that the unique constitutional system, conceived to protect the minority interests of slaveholders, gives the upper hand to obstructers. This, and not the supposed necessity of trimming ideological sails to placate some notional conservative majority, guided their strategizing. James MacGregor Burns' book on the subject, The Deadlock of Democracy, was not merely what every progressive in Washington was reading during the Kennedy years, it was what every progressive was living. The House Rules Committee, dominated by reactionary Southerners, kept Kennedy from passing even an increase in the minimum wage, let alone his campaign promise -- the cornerstone of his legislative agenda -- to extend Social Security to cover medical care for the elderly. It was, as historians G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot write in their fine recent study, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, "a lesson fully understood by the Southerners in Congress. They didn't need to have majorities on their side, they didn't need to have public opinion on their side, they didn't need the president on their side. They only needed to have the rules on their side."

Three accidents of history followed in quick succession to break the deadlock. First, in the most important turning point in history you've never heard of, Kennedy narrowly won a vote to dynamite the House Rules Committee's role as a tar pit for liberal legislation by expanding its membership. Second, the Supreme Court's first "one man, one vote" decision, Baker v. Carr (1962), outlawed Southern electoral systems, which, for instance, gave the three smallest counties in Georgia, with a total population of 69,800, as much voting strength as the largest county in the state, with a population of 556,326. And finally, Kennedy was shot. The national trauma was a blunt political opportunity from whose import Johnson did not flinch. "Let us continue," he intoned in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Then, before this tragic but miraculous once-in-a-lifetime store of political capital drained away, he started passing the liberal legislative agenda that had been little more than a shadow during Kennedy's lifetime.

Less than a month into his presidency, Johnson wrangled from a recalcitrant Congress a loan guarantee to help our mortal enemies, the Soviets, buy grain before he had been in office a month, convincing 38 legislators to return to Washington during their Christmas vacations to approve the loan. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- the "war on poverty" -- passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. Johnson advocated for a tax cut that conservatives called a budget-buster, bringing Dwight D. Eisenhower out of retirement to campaign against it. But Johnson passed that, too. Then came Medicare. Then the Civil Rights Act. "I'm not going to cavil, and I'm not going to compromise," Johnson told Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia as the landmark bill Kennedy introduced to no avail in the summer of 1963 was steamrolling its way to completion.

In 1965 Johnson passed new legislation for preschool for poor children, college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, redevelopment funds for lagging economic regions, landmark immigration reform, a new Department of Housing and Urban Development, and national endowments for the humanities and art. He even added a whole new category to the liberal agenda with the passage of the Highway Beautification Act, the Water Quality Act, and the Clean Air Act. He insisted to his congressional leadership that the House's bill for federal aid to education pass the Senate "literally without a comma changed," aide Eric Goldman recalled. It did indeed, two weeks later, with only 18 votes in opposition.

His insistence on ramming through bills "without a comma changed" wasn't a function of Johnson's natural aggressiveness or ego (or at least not only that). It was, in the American legislative context, a necessary sort of pragmatism. The 36th president saw that his opportunity to move the country forward could end any day and that he must act before America lurched back into a state of fearful reaction. He was right. During the span of just a few weeks in the summer of 1965, Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to sign Medicare -- the reform JFK had run on in 1960 -- and to Washington to sign the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, on Aug. 11, the Watts Riots brought down the curtain on the liberal hour. After that, he couldn't even get Congress to approve $60 million for rodent control in the slums.

The right and Democratic centrists have taught us to think of the Great Society in terms of its failures, like the War on Poverty's Community Action Program, which drove a wedge between Washington and local Democratic municipal administrations and supposedly empowered all manner of swindlers and "poverty pimps." We should focus instead on Johnson's remarkable number of broad-based accomplishments in those first 22 months. We now take for granted the notion that the elderly have a right to medical care, that the government should provide aid for education, that immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government should concern itself with clean air. It would be unimaginable to see them reversed -- in part because of the constitutional inertia that made them so difficult to achieve in the first place. They are the kind of things Republicans now pretend they were in favor of all along. This is the way social change works. It is the responsibility of the next progressive president to crash through a similar set of reforms for the next generation to take for grantedMORE

(no subject)

Media Hype and election Polls (or the sky is falling

While one should be skeptical about the predictive capacity of head to head polls at this stage of the campaign, especially national ones, in terms of the latter Obama is doing just fine, thank you. The recent NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll (July 18th-21st) has Obama 6% ahead of McCain, 47%-41%. RealClear Politics (July 25th) has him 4.8% ahead in its average of recent polls. Gallop daily tracking on July 25th has Obama with a 6% lead, and Rasmussen’s daily poll has him by 5%. Perhaps most significantly, when third party candidates are factored in, as they were in the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, Obama turns out to be 13% ahead of McCain, 48% to 35% (with Nader at 5%, Barr at 2%, and a 4.4% margin of error). In a four way match up Obama’s share of the vote hardly changes (he moves up from 47% to 48%), while McCain drops (from 41% to 35%). Although the margin of error in the four way race is greater than in the two way race, the difference between Obama and McCain is significant, and outside of the margin of error. Notice that Obama retains support while McCain loses support.

It’s worth mentioning that half of the last ten elections have been won by less than 6%. Also, when third party candidates are a significant factor (1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, 2000), the margin of victory has been below 13% in every case. If Obama won by 13%, it would be a landslide, and the third highest popular vote total in the last ten elections. See Dave Leip’s Atlas U.S. Presidential ElectionsMORE

(no subject)

Bill Clinton pulled off a BADASS speech!