Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Other Items

The passing of Coretta Scott King has to compete in the paper this morning with both the State of the Union and Alito's First Day On The Job! Want to guess who comes in third? If you guessed King, give yourself a prize. Suddenly, the Times (in an Adam Liptak article) is concerned with how Alito might rule from the bench. We also get an article on Alito's swearing in because the Times stands on ceremony. And Alito just bubbles throughout other articles. (Or does he seep into them, like raw sewage?)

From Peter Applebome's "Coretta Scott King, a Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 78:"

Andrew Young, a former United Nations ambassador and longtime family friend, said at a news conference yesterday morning that Mrs. King died in her sleep.
"She was a woman born to struggle," Mr. Young said, "and she has struggled and she has overcome." Mrs. King rose from rural poverty in Heiberger, Ala., and became an international symbol of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. She was an advocate for women's rights, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and other social and political issues.
In 1952, she was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who, on their first date, told her: "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all." A year later she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with Dr. King's assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
Mrs. King did not hesitate to pick up his mantle, marching before her husband was even buried at the head of the striking garbage workers he had gone to Memphis to champion. She went on to lead the effort for a national holiday in his honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, dedicated both to scholarship and to activism.


Many a crooked politican gets days of coverage when they pass, beginning with multiple articles the first day the paper covers their passing. King is reduced to one. Says a great about the priorities of the New York Times.

Rhonda notes David Lindorff's "The Democrats' Alito Debacle" (CounterPunch):

This means it won't be enough to simply pick up 16 new Democratic seats in the House and six in the Senate in November. Those new seats will have to be filled by people who do stand for something. And the fake Democrats like Max Baucus (D-Montana), Kent Conrad (D-N. Dakota), Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) -- there were 19 Democrats who voted for cloture, ending the chance of a filibuster, and one, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who abstained -- need to be challenged in primaries by real progressives, and punished for their betrayal of the Constitution and the hopes of those who sent them to Washington.
Impeachment of the criminal and power-mad President Bush will not even be possible as long as these frauds continue to dominate the Democratic Party. Only a grass-roots revolt among progressives during the primaries in support of candidates like Cindy Sheehan, who has announced plans to challenge Feinstein, will produce the kind of political shift that could turn around the country's slide into authoritarianism.

Brad notes Greg Szymanski's "Pentagon Has Videos Of Sexual Perversion At Iraq Detention Centers" (The Artic Beacon via MediaChannel.org):

Although the U.S. government is in possession of video tapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, the evidence and public clamor to end the torture and killing has done little to change the mindset of the Bush administration.
Lawyers for President Bush, including U.S. Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales, have tried to neatly package and justify skirting international law regarding the illegal detention of prisoners.
But when it comes to torture, sexual perversion and murder while holding prisoners captive, it would seem obvious there is no legal justification.
But not according to a team of Bush's crooked lawyers who concluded in a legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.
Besides this bogus legal finding, the administration has also taken the untenable position, according to legal observers, the reported acts of torture and sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers are only isolated incidents of abuse, not officially military policy handed down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
However, critics contend the mounting number of abuse cases and evidence compiled is more than just coincidence or isolated acts of aggression, but indicate an official policy handed down from top to bottom.

Remember today on Democracy Now!:

Amy Goodman in a special broadcast from Doha, Qatar

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