President Abraham Lincoln, shortly before his death:
“Corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed.”
Subtitled version of “INJA KOJAST INJA IRAN AST SARZAMINE MANO TO” (link below) – a woman speaking about the state of her country while filming the rooftop shouting of “Allah-o Akbar” in Iran on Friday June 19th.
You can hear the narrator fighting through tears as she recites the poem over the sound of gunshots and hundreds of thousands of her fellow Iranians, struggling desperately to have their voices heard.
Today is the day that the authorities have promised a violent crackdown on what could be well over a million protesters, aware that something is very wrong with the results of an election in which a staggering 85% of the country turned out to vote. The hardline president Ahmadinejad defeated presidential candidate Mousavi in the country’s recent elections, which have been reportedly rife with corruption and false numbers. Now reports are flooding in the police are shooting freely into unarmed crowds, severely beating protesters and using tear gas & water cannons on anyone in the streets.
Iranian authorities have gone to great lengths to paint the demonstrators as more violent than they have been, justifying brutal crackdowns on “rioters,” having been caught numerous times in the past week sending out plainclothes police to incite violence and create destruction to tarnish the image and message of the protesters.
Security forces are swarming the area, and conflicts have already begun on a larger level than we’ve seen so far. Tear gas is being used, “Heavy clashes on Azadi Street, chants of death to Khameni! The street is full of rocks and fire.”
History is being made and lives are being lost as I type these words. A 10-part video chronology of the events involving the Iran elections can be found here. Our President summed up the role of journalists in these moments appropriately in a speech he gave a few nights ago:
“I am here tonight because I appreciate all of the work that you do and the role that you play. You report the news as it happens and you cover history as it is made, with a hand-held camera or a microphone. You bring the truth to people and allow people to bring truth to the world.We are seeing that now as history is unfolding in the sounds and images of broadcasts from Iran over the last week. We have seen professional and citizen journalists act as a voice for those who want to be heard, bearing witness to the universal aspirations of democracy and freedom, often at great risk and sometimes with great sacrifice. They do it because the rest of us need to hear the stories that they tell. We have seen the same courageous reporting and Iraq and Afghanistan, Congo, every dangerous corner of the world. everywhere, there is a story that needs to be told.”
A supporter of Ahmadinejad:
A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi:
An attacking protester gets tear-gassed:
Setting aside the fact that the Bible was written by mortal men & translated with rampant political liberties taken over the past two thousand years, the fact remains that the Bible’s definition of marriage is quite a far cry from what Miss California, Rick Warren and the delusional lunatics of the religious right are preaching from the mountaintops. With all the righteous indignance about “biblical marriage” these days, it’s long past time that somebody put these hyper-conservative, ill-informed, cherry-picking Bible-thumpers in their place.
The website Religious Tolerance has provided a very helpful article on the types of marriage found in the pages of the Bible. If you’ve spent your time believing everything your pastor/priest/parents tell you about what the Bible says, rather than doing your own homework, consider this your eye-opening backhand-to-the-face cheat sheet. Cliff’s Notes For Intolerance, if you will. Specific biblical chapters are quoted, so you can determine for yourself whether this is the work of some Christ-hating lunatic, or someone who’s spent his life seeing the word “God” used to justify disgusting hatred, idiocy and oppression, and has had enough.
Here’s a summary of the different kinds of marriage deemed acceptable in the Bible:
1. Polygymous Marriage
The most common form of marriage in the Bible. For the uninformed, this is an arrangement where a man has more than one wife.
2. Levirate Marriage
When a woman was widowed without a son, it became the responsibility of the brother-in-law or a close male relative to take her in, impregnate her and continue the lineage. If the resulting child was a son, he would be considered the heir of her late husband. See Ruth, and the story of Onan (Gen. 38:6-10).
3. A man, a woman and her property — a female slave
The famous “handmaiden” sketch, as preformed by Abraham (Gen. 16:1-6) and Jacob (Gen. 30:4-5).
4. A man, one or more wives, and some concubines
The definition of concubine varies from culture to culture, but across the board they tended to be live-in mistresses. Concubines were connected to their “husband,” but had a significantly lower status than a wife. Their children were rarely heirs, so they were safe outlets for sex without risking the line of succession. To see how badly a concubine could be treated, see the classic story of the Levite and his concubine (Judges 19:1-30). Imagine that taking place today. It does.
5. A male soldier and a female prisoner of war
Women who were taken as booty from a successful campaign were often forced to become wives or concubines. A detailed description of the process can be found here: (Deuteronomy 21:11-14)
6. A male rapist and his victim
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 describes how an unmarried woman who has been raped must marry her attacker. 8-12 more years of Bush and this could very well have been on the horizon.
7. A male and female slave
A female slave could be married to a male slave without consent, presumably to produce more slaves. See: American slave trade.
8. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage
The standard form of marriage, most closely resembling today’s Western societal marriage structure. Provided that you don’t count that marriages were arranged, and that inter-faith or cross-ethnic marriage were intensely forbidden throughout massive spans of biblical history.
A cloned Hitler/Superman hybrid couldn’t come anywhere close to the damage our Socialist/Communist anti-American President has apparently done in his first 100 days in office.
I’ll just let these…people… do the talking, because I don’t know how to keep the napalm death blasts in check after seeing it. This is why I can’t watch Fox News:
Sometimes Lewis Black just hits it right on the head.
God Bless America.
I’ve been mostly amused by Rush’s nonsense ill wishes and Glenn Beck’s hateful lunacy in trying to discount President Obama’s inauguration and oath office, but it’s been less than a week into the new Obama’s Presidency and the right has clearly lost it’s goddamned mind. But don’t take my word for it:
Entrenched Republicans and their dirty little corners of ultra-con media (Fox) are actively hoping for Barack Obama’s failure, forgetting the Orwellian “respect the office, respect the president” bullshit we’ve had crammed down our throats for eight years.
Now that people like these fuckers aren’t behind the wheel anymore, their barking, hypocritical absurdity has been reduced to a ranting, flailing novelty, an angry-bug-in-a-jar kind of spectacle that brings everybody together in a laugh-and-point kind of way.
It’s been less than a week. Let’s see where this shit goes before we throw him on the fire.
It’s hard to watch this video without feeling the slightest bit of sympathy for Dear Leader, as he’s shown walking across a line of world leaders without shaking or being asked to shake any of their hands. It’s no news that President Bush’s approval rating is at rock bottom here in the States, but with the end of his catastrophic looting marathon of America’s resources, military might and foreign policy fast approaching, world leaders are beginning to finally pull the veil on their disdain for the most arrogant, prickish, disastrous leader in this nation’s history.
Nixon and Hoover have absolutely nothing on George W. Bush. His presidency has been a kaleidoscopic eight-year gang-rape of everything decent this nation was founded upon.
The importance of establishing international coalitions and lobbying for the will of your nation in order to protect your economic and security interests is paramount, and as a result these world leaders have all had to tow the Bush line in obedient silence for many years. After all, confronting a bully face to face, fist to fist is one thing, but when that bully has a military budget of $650 billion it may be necessary to let pillaging dogs lie (cheat and steal) until an opportunity presents itself. But change is on the horizon, and the world is now reacting to the real signs of hope for a U.S. presidency that’s nothing at all like the humiliating, disgraceful treachery we’ve seen in the past decade.
I’m sure there are those out there who will rationalize this video, or even attempt to rhetorically demonize the world leaders for the snub. They’re likely the same hysterically deluded folks still insisting to anyone within earshot that Bill Clinton was responsible for both our economic downfall and 9/11. Hell, somebody had to vote for Michele Bachmann. But there’s an indisputable truth in play here that they simply don’t have the mechanisms to accept or the remaining political capital to efficiently spin (something they’ve had far too much of for far too long), and it will take nothing less than someone rewriting the playbook entirely to smack some sense into them.
That means scrapping the status quo of crude, fearmongering propaganda and shadow motives for major military engagements, beginning to pay attention to American public opinion and represent their common interests once again, reinstating core American values (and I’m not talking about dressing up fetuses – I’m referring to things like Habeus Corpus, torture standards and rights to privacy) and returning the bulk of our national resources to the places it belongs and is desperately needed: roads, schools, environmental progression and health care.
Bush has flagrantly discarded world opinion, broke pulverized a myriad of domestic and international laws, used vague warfare terminology as an excuse to strip away our individual liberties, shredded and shit on our constitution and, on top of it all, proudly lied to all of us in order to achieve and maintain a state of constant fear and herd submission in America that’s lasted nearly eight years.
As Ben Cohen wrote, “Every ex President (aside from Ronald Reagan who had alzheimers) has a role to play in public life after office. They give advice, do lecture tours, write books, sit on boards of huge companies and head non-profit organizations. How many people do you think will be itching to receive advice from W? How many companies would have him on their board? Who would buy his autobiography? Who would pay to hear him speak? No one. And that pretty much sums it up.”
It’s almost over.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
- James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
Say what you will about Clinton’s cigar collection or his association with a certain blue dress – the guy certainly had balls, but at least he kept the Oval Office door closed when he was doing Monica his business.
President Bush, on the other hand, has decided to let his guard down a bit in his last 100 days in office. Could be that he’s suddenly not taking the “Worst President Ever” title quite as well as he did when the ship was running full steam, and he’s fully aware that people all over the world are looking forward to Jan. 21 like it’s dey berfday.
So Bush is on something of a “cool” tour. Or a “don’t hate me” tour. That includes visiting colleges and freely rockin’ the shocker for all the world to see:
Yes, this is real.
