Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Democracy Now!: addresses Lawrence Summers' self-created firestorm; Gove Vidal and The Progressive's Matthew Rothschild on the Bully Boy's speech

Democracy Now! is always worth watching (as Marica notes) but what a great show today.
Gore Vidal and Matthew Rothschild are both on.

Headlines for January 25, 2005
- Army To Keep 120,000 Troops In Iraq Thru 2006
- Bush to Seek $80 Million for Iraq & Afghan Wars
- Rumsfeld Develops Secret New Spy Unit
- Report: Iraqi Security Forces Carrying Out Torture
- Tsunami Death Toll Soars to 288,000
- Study: Vioxx Caused As Many as 56,000 Deaths
- Monsanto Buys Major Fruit & Vegetable Seed Producer
- Bush to Anti-Abortion Protesters: "This Movement Will Not Fail"
The Hidden Passages in Bush's Inaugural Address
We speak with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive Magazine who analyzes President Bush's second inaugural address. Rothschild finds that in addition to the many explicit references to God, Bush's speech contained even more hidden allusions to the Bible.
Gore Vidal on Bush's Inaugural Address: "The Most Un-American Speech I've Ever Heard"
We take a look at President Bush's inaugural address with Gore, Vidal, one of America's most respected writers and thinkers and the author of more than 20 novels and 5 plays. Vidal says, "If the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty and so on, she could become dictatress of the world, but in the process she would lose her soul."
Women and Science: A Look at Harvard Pres. Larry Summers
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers created a firestorm earlier this month for claiming that women have less innate scientific ability than men. We speak with the Nancy Hopkins, the MIT professor who walked out of Summers' speech as well as Dave Targan, the Dean of Science Programs at Brown University.

Lastly, Luke wrote Sunday about Andrew Sullivan's book review in the Sunday's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/books/review/books-sullivan.html). If people would like to weigh in on this, we'll probably do some sort of entry on it shortly.
(E-mail address is common_ills@yahoo.com) (Shortly is tonight, if this is goes up via e-mail. If not, and it's posted tonight, we'll try to pull some stuff together Wednesday.)
[Note, the e-mail attempt at this post never made it. Or may make it still. But we'll try together some opinions on Sullivan's review for an entry tomorrow so please weigh in if you'd like to be quoted.]