Supreme Battle

Tonight I watched a clip of ABC news coverage about the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court - just after reading MoveOn's talking points about the same nomination.

I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems like President Obama made a great choice. As I watched the ABC news report, I wondered about the news media in this country, which provides free air-time for conservative arguments, but gives much, much less coverage to the liberal point of view. The ABC piece was entirely composed of Republican complaints about the nomination - tired arguments that the judge might be "activist."

(There is this complete fiction that the corporate media push - that liberal judges are "activist," and conservative judges hew to the literal meaning of the Constitution. It's not that simple. Here's one discussion of the question.)

The ABC piece concluded with the news reader predicting that the Republicans would tread carefully in plotting their opposition to the pick because Sotomayor is a Latina, and the Republicans don't want to lose any more of this constituency. The way it was phrased emphasized the politics of the nomination, rather than Sotomayor's excellent qualifications.

Enjoying the scents & sights of spring in Appalachia

I realized the other day when I looked at this blog that I had a series of serious and even depressing items posted. Drugged soldiers. Torture rationales. Political repression.

All of these are serious issues and deserve serious attention. But - I don't want to give the wrong impression about my life - or life in general. It's spring in the hills of North Carolina. The rhododendrons are blooming. The magnolias are starting to bloom. The air is sweet with the scent of honeysuckle.

So - I thought to post some pictures of some of the flowers and local scenery I've photographed in the last week or so. Enjoy!

U.S. military: Heavily armed and medicated

In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and minds. A truly frightening scenario - and a mirror also of the drug-dependent society the USA has become.

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Senate Votes to Block Release of Torture Photos for 5 Years

In an amendment to the $91 billion spending bill to fund the war in Afghanistan, the Senate voted to block the release of all post 9/11 detainee abuse photos for five years. The language is aimed at preventing a court from ordering their release in response to a freedom of information lawsuit.

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The Republican propaganda has been effective. And the truth is - many people just don't want to know what was done by the CIA and the other torturers. Advocating for disclosure of this information is not a vote-winning strategy.

The Disease of Permanent War

"The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant." This is written by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, a seasoned war correspondent. He knows a little about war.

To reach his conclusions about the moral consequences of war, it is not necessary to travel to a war zone. You can observe the moral corrosion of war in Russia, Azerbaijan, the United States, or in any of a multitude of other nations. War requires that we view other humans as "less than human," and in so doing, our own humanity is itself diminished.

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Big Media Myopia: More Consolidation Won't Save Journalism

Some people have advances the sophistical argument that more consolidation will help the news business, because consolidation leads to richer owners, who can afford to make investments in the news outlets they have purchased. The only problem is - the more these owners are isolated from competitive pressures, the less likely they are to invest in improving the quality of the news media - whether it is broadcasting or newspaper.

This fact is glaringly demonstrated by the current crisis US newspaper business - the logical consequence of decades of breakneck consolidation with nary a thought given to the public good that the news media provide. So now - the industry is in crisis and Congress finally has woken up to the fact that the provision of even basic civic information is being threatened. The horse has left the barn.

What now? Your guess is as good as anyone's.

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Opium of the people

One of the biggest time-sinks on the Internet is Twitter. For me. It's an easy method of procrastination. I can open it up & follow strange links to useless and amusing sites. This morning I remarked on this characteristic of Twitter - after reading somebody's account of the survival of tomato seedlings.

(I'm glad they survived - but why would I care?)

Anyway - I told my friend that Twitter can be useful for searching for subjects, and just for kicks I searched "Azerbaijan," to see if there were any news flashes about continuing civil unrest there.

Nothing about that - but all sorts of tweets and twittering about the Eurovision song contest. I remember last year - how that was all people were talking about in Azerbaijan. I couldn't get away from that tune that the was the entry that year- the one with the histrionic demon & angel screaming at each other.

My thought - reading all these tweets - was how Marx needed to be updated. Religion is not the opium of the people. Pop is the opium of the people. In the USA, people are more concerned about American Idol entrants than they are about Supreme Court justices. In Europe, I guess the priorities aren't that much different.

Perhaps it's a question of agency and transparency. The public can see the singers perform. They can cast their votes by telephone. The public in Azerbaijan seems to have far greater input into the winner of a Eurovision song contest than it does in the formulation of government policies.