Okay, Rebecca's entry is up. It's entitled "ed lorenzen feels the need to supposedly write me but really just complain about me to c.i. of the common ills." (Language warning if you visit the link.)
Here's an excerpt:
i'm the woman who won't eat your shame.
i'm the woman who won't back down.
i'm the woman who belives her place isn't in the back room or 2 steps behind a man.
i'm the woman who's front and center and in your face calling you on your s**t.
i don't play nicely in the sandbox with those who want to destroy social security or dismantle a woman's right to privacy.
i don't tolerate the right's attacks on america and i won't tolerate the actions of people who want to aid them.
Now we're going to excerpt from The Third Estate Sunday Review's "Essay dedicated to the mainstream press: 'Don't it leave you on the empty side?'" (Language warning if you visit this link.)
Quagmire. There we said it. Did you grimace? Did you toss out some nonsense about how long it took to rebuild a country after WWII? Are you still so scared of making the comparison to the Vietnam conflict?
The nation's turning against this illegal war. Every day, another new detail emerges. The mainstream press, if it addresses it, does so fleetingly. But the people are making the connections the press refuses to make.
You've got a press collectively pulling a hard for the glory days of the Watergate coverage all week. And then they go back to . . . talking about Tom Cruise. Hey, we understand Christian Slater may have been charged with something. Surely you can continue to do your j-schools proud by easing out of the Michael Jackson coverage and into that.
As Ruth pointed out a few editions back, it's easy to look back and think that the press was once just doing one hard hitting story after another. That they were actively and unanimously exposing the lies of Vietnam. But that's not the case. Then, as now, the public had to turn against the war. Only then did the press start to do its job.
That's an excerpt and Susan e-mailed to request that it be highlighted.
Keesha e-mails to note Margaret Kimberly's latest at The Black Commentator. From "Farrakhan and Foxman:"
In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Million Man March, Minister Louis Farrakhan has announced the creation of the Millions More Movement. The Millions More Movement includes Russell Simmons, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Dorothy Height and Julianne Malveaux among its supporters.
Farrakhan is still a lightning rod for controversy. As soon as the Millions More Movement was announced Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, chimed in and asked black leaders to disassociate themselves from any involvement with Farrakhan: "When will someone in the African-American community stand up and say that the Million Man March had a positive message, but the pied piper is a racist and anti-Semite?"
Perhaps that will happen as soon as someone points out that Foxman is a hypocritical, ethically challenged, influence peddler.
The responses to Foxman's criticism were entirely predictable. Al Sharpton called the remarks a "distraction" and added "... we should not allow other people to define and denounce what we're about." Russell Simmons wrote to Foxman and called him "misguided, arrogant and very disrespectful of African Americans." Aside from the snide but amusing remark that Foxman had "single handedly caused millions of persons to flock to see the Passion of the Christ," Simmons letter did little to tell Mr. Foxman why he should butt out.
Sharpton and Simmons should be able to think of more biting criticisms, if they bother to respond at all. It doesn't really matter if Foxman doesn't like the Million Man, Millions More or Million Dollar march. He is irrelevant and so is anyone else who doesn't understand the appeal of a nationalist message in the black community. Few will admit it now, but there was more nay saying than support among black leaders in the days proceeding the Million Man March in 1995.
Todd e-mails to note BuzzFlash's "What Ever Happened to What Is Wrong Is Wrong?" by Jack Rice:
I am blown away. The news that Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI was in fact Deep Throat was amazing. But what was more amazing to me was President Bush's response to hearing the story. What response, you ask? Well, the President saying its hard for him to judge if Felt was right to leak Watergate details to the Washington Post.
Let me get this right. President Nixon was a criminal. That is certain. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the break in at the Watergate Hotel and should have gone to prison like many others involved in the break in and subsequent cover up. And it is hard for President Bush to judge if Felt was right to leak it?
What the hell is wrong with this picture when we have such moral relativism that we can explain away the moral and legal rot that took place in the White House some 30 plus years ago.
What ever happened to wrong is wrong, is wrong, is wrong?
Zach e-mails wondering if there's anything "on deck" on C-Span tomorrow:
Tuesday, June 5
Senate Hearing on Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)
On C-SPAN3 at 9:30am ET
Tuesday, June 5
NCTA Pres. Kyle McSlarrow on Telecommunications Marketplace
On C-SPAN at 1:10pm ET
Tuesday, June 5
House Hearing on Pentagon Management of Excess Inventory
On C-SPAN3 at 2pm ET
On CAFTA, we'll note, from In These Times, David Moberg's "Three-Dimensional Economics:
CAFTA won’t help U.S. workers, and blocking it may help the rest of the world:"
There are good reasons to doubt the administration claims. Even if they're wide open to American exports, the signatories are small, poor countries--including Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. The largest, the Dominican Republic, is a market about the size of Bakersfield, California. Even optimistically exaggerated trade with them isn't going to make a dent in the record U.S. trade deficit, which reached $617 billion, or 5.3 percent of the U.S. economy, last year.
CAFTA isn't likely to expand markets by reducing Central American poverty much either. Flooding their markets with subsidized U.S. corn will hurt many of the rural poor. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the model for CAFTA, offers scant inspiration. Over NAFTA's first eight years, Mexico lost 1.3 million jobs and suffered declining real wages, according to the Carnegie Endowment for Internal Peace, and the United States lost 880,000 jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Hemispheric cooperation is not likely to save either Central American garment workers or the remaining U.S. apparel and textile workforce. The global quotas on export of apparel and textile products to Europe and the United States established under the longstanding Multifiber Agreement had dispersed the industry to dozens of poor countries. But when it ended on December 31, Chinese garment exports to the United States shot up in January by 75 percent, with 20 times more cotton knit shirts coming in than a year earlier. Apparel factories in both Central America and the United States have been shutting down. Not even China's upwards reevaluation of its currency, which is needed to reflect economic reality and to redress a rapidly growing trade imbalance with the United States, is likely to stop the Chinese from capturing a projected 70 percent of the U.S. market in a few years, much of it at the expense of small, poor, garment-exporting countries.
On labor rights, CAFTA is no improvement over NAFTA's deeply flawed labor side agreement, and it retreats from the labor rights standard that unions praised in the free trade agreement with Jordan signed in 2000. It simply requires the countries to enforce their own laws and "strive" to protect labor rights, with no meaningful penalties if they fail. Under current preferential trade agreements, unions and human rights groups have been able to petition the U.S. government for trade sanctions--and win some improvements--when Central American governments have violated international labor standards.
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