The Dance Parade, Oops: Police Kill LI Student They Were Saving, Prominent Pakistan Politician Assassinated, Supreme Court Just Rejects Bush v Gore,

May 19th, 2013 - by: Danny

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•May 19: Malcolm X’s Birthday

***Sunday Morning: I will be joining Reverend Jesse Jackson and his guests on his weekly internet radio show, GiveHopeAliveRadio.com. I will be on from 8 AM to 10 Am. You can call in.

•Press Release: Jackson Appeals for Non-Violence in Nigeria

The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. was granted an honorary Nigerian Citizenship while on his recent trip to Nigeria. While there, he spoke of a need for a peaceful non-violent resolution to the current violence in this African nation’s northern region. He expressed the need for closing the gap between the Rich and Poor and holding that country’s oil companies accountable.

(AJE: Nigeria sets curfew in Boko Haram stronghold

Residents of Maiduguri ordered to stay indoors as military launches strikes against armed group in the north.)

He also expressed the urgency of spreading the country’s wealth to the entire Nigerian society and not just to a privileged few. Africa is now the economic engine for the entire world and in the next two (2) years is on target to surpass China economically.)

Saturday: The Day of Rest That Wasn’t

It was an overcast and rainy Saturday but i was cheered by the Dance Parade that swarmed down Broadway into University, past Union Square and Washington Square Park. There must have been l00 or more groups, some with drummers, others with sound systems, boogieing down the street, showing over their moves and the pure joy of performing for the people. There were kids and seniors, groups, it seemed from every corner of Mexico and Bolivia, all in colorful national dress doing folk dances and ballroom dances, and some rap moves. It was very diverse–and lots of fun. Hooray for the dancers of New York.Viva.

At union Square fast food workers who are organizing unions nationwide were our performing guerrilla theater.mocking the BiG Mac, Burger King and Wendy’s and explaining why they deserve a living wage.

And then later in the evening I was at a party and dinner at a software company that honored the memory of internet activist Aaron Schwartz and Hugo Chavez and heard a talk by Chris Hedges on the suspension of constitutional rights. He just visited with Julian Assange in London. There were also presentations from South African activists, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, retired from Chicago and immigrant rights advocates from the South West.

I checked out around ll, but it could have gone on all night and the issues deserve more airtime. I don’t have time now to go into more detail

On This Theme: Tom Carter, The Threat to Political Dissent (WSWS.org)

In a series of prosecutions, precedents are being established for the criminalization of political dissent in America.
Last week, Massachusetts high school student Cameron D’Ambrosio was arrested and charged under “terrorism” laws merely for posting lyrics on Facebook that make reference to the Boston Marathon bombings. He faces 20 years in prison. A string of similar “terror” prosecutions around the country take aim at the First Amendment protection of free speech and political expression.

The authorities have already branded select participants in Occupy Wall Street and anti-NATO protests as “terrorists.” Last year, heavily-armed “domestic terrorism” commandos raided Occupy Wall Street protesters’ homes in Washington and Oregon, using battering rams and stun grenades. The commandos were authorized to seize all “anti-government or anarchist literature or material.”

As with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, also guaranteed under the First Amendment, has not been officially repealed. The reality, however, is that political assembly is already a semi-criminal activity in America. Political protests are routinely met with vastly disproportionate police mobilizations, confinement to oxymoronic “free speech zones,” “kettling” (in which protesters are surrounded and forcibly moved in one direction or prevented from leaving an area), beatings, tear gas, pepper spray, stun grenades or rubber bullets. The standard government response to a political protest is a massive show of force, complete with police snipers on rooftops.

The drive towards the establishment of an American police state, initiated under the Bush administration, has shifted into high gear under Obama. For nearly twelve years, the phony “war on terror” has been used as the overarching pretext for illegal imperialist war abroad and a methodical assault on democratic rights at home. The basic structure of authoritarian rule is now emerging into plain view.

Over the recent period, the government has vastly expanded its warrantless surveillance of the population. The Obama administration has constructed a massive data center in Utah big enough to store the contents of every personal computer in the country. Already at a government agent’s fingertips–without a warrant–are all of a person’s Internet browsing activity, telephone conversations, text messages, credit card transactions, mobile phone GPS location data, travel itineraries, Skype and Facebook data, medical records, criminal records, financial records and surveillance camera footage.

•News, News, News

•AJE: Senior Pakistani politician killed in Karachi

Zahra Shahid Hussain, central leader of Imran Khan’s party, shot dead hours before re-polling begins in port city.

•Op-Ed News: Pandering To The Bankers Obama And The Housing Boondoggle

•Fluent: ‘Sheila Bair: The interview’

•AP: IRS probe ignored most influential groups

WASHINGTON (AP) – There’s an irony in the Internal Revenue Service’s crackdown on conservative groups. The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was underway.

•The NY Times reported Sunday: “Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.

•Stevens: Rationale for Bush v. Gore was “unacceptable”

•NYT: Police Say Officer Mistakenly Killed Hofstra Student in Hostage Standoff

A 21-year-old Hofstra University student who was killed in a home invasion on Friday was mistakenly shot in the head by an officer who fired eight times at a man who was holding a gun to the student’s head and then pointed it at him, the police said on Saturday. Seven of the bullets hit the man, who was also killed.

The student, Andrea Rebello, and her twin sister, Jessica, who also lived at the home, just blocks from the university, were among several people taken hostage on Friday morning in an apparent robbery attempt.

The Nassau County police identified the gunman as Dalton Smith, 30, a Hempstead, N.Y., resident with an extensive criminal record who was wanted for violating parole on a robbery conviction.

About 15 or 20 minutes elapsed from the time Mr. Smith burst into the home about 2:20 a.m. Friday until the last shot was fired, the police said.

•NYT: Gay Man Killed in Hate Crime Near Stonewall Bar In New York City

Mark Carson did not hide that he was gay, and when he went out on the town he would often head to Greenwich Village, where years before he was born, much of the struggle for gay liberation unfolded. Yet late Friday night, just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, among the most important landmarks of that struggle, he was confronted with a man screaming antigay slurs, who then stalked him before pulling out a silver revolver and fatally shooting him, the police said.

Sayeth The Pope: Sanders Welcomes Pope Francis Statement on Poverty

WASHINGTON, May 16 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today applauded Pope Francis for condemning a “cult of money” in the world that he said was oppressing the poor.

In a major speech at the Vatican on Thursday, Francis said the global financial system has worsened poverty while benefiting the wealthy few. “While the income of the minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority of the majority is crumbling,” Francis said.

Sanders commended the pope. “At a time when the gap between rich and everyone else is growing wider, at a time when Wall Street and large financial institutions are exerting extraordinary power over the American and world economy, I applaud the pope for speaking out on these enormously important issues,” Sanders said.

The pope’s comments on the financial crisis were made in remarks to ambassadors presenting their credentials at the Vatican.

“The majority of the men and women of our time continue to live daily in situations of insecurity, with dire consequences… People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way,” the pope said.

•Portside: Deborah Burger of National Nurses United, Hospitals Should be Care Providers not Loan Sharks

Hospital lobbyists have tried for years to convince us all that predatory pricing policies don’t matter. But the grotesque reality tells a different story.

If there is one problem that symbolizes the ongoing national healthcare emergency, it is the rampant price gouging in the healthcare industry that continues to price too many Americans out of access to care and into financial ruin. Not only is the problem not solved by the Affordable Care Act, but it is a likely reason many will continue to demand more effective reform, as in expanding and extending Medicare to cover everyone.

U.S. hospitals are among the biggest abusers, as illuminated in recent data released by Medicare on hospital charges for a variety of common procedures as well as brand new findings by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, the research arm of the National Nurses United, based on Medicare cost reports.

The nurses’ data augments the Medicare findings, and goes the next step, illustrating a trend of rising high hospital charges while providing context to a very ugly picture and the deplorable impact on anyone who needs healthcare.

Here’s the sobering numbers:

· U.S. hospitals charge on average $331 dollars for every $100 of their total costs, in statistical terms a 331 percent charge to cost ratio.

· While hospital charges over costs have been climbing steadily over the past 15 years – the charges took their biggest leap ever in 2011– a 22 point vault.

· From 2009 to 2011 (the most recent year for which the data is available), hospital charges lunged upward by 16 percent, while hospital costs only increased by 2 percent.

· U.S. hospital profits, pushed upward by the high charges, hit a record $53.2 billion, while nurses see more and more hospitals cutting patient services and limiting access to care.

· One case study is California where hospitals soared past the national average with a charge to cost ratio of 451 percent, or $451 for every $100 of costs.

That similar pricing practices occur elsewhere in the healthcare industry is hardly an excuse for the private hospitals to act more like Wall Street corporations than responsible, community based institutions. It should be no shock that the lowest charges are by government-run hospitals that operate in public, not in secret, and have far more accountability and transparency.

•Ray McGovern, ICH: Boston Suspect’s Writing on the Wall

Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”

•AFP: Can AlJazeera Win Hearts and Minds In America?

It will likely face an uphill battle for viewers but could solidify its journalistic brand, analysts say.

“Al-Jazeera is going into extremely unfamiliar terrain,” said Adel Iskandar, a professor of communication at Georgetown University and co-author of a 2002 book on the Qatar-based news organisation.

Iskandar noted, however, that al-Jazeera’s English-language operation around the world “has done a spectacular job” in areas of the world “where international broadcasters can’t afford to go”.

He said that al-Jazeera, with its “extremely deep pockets” thanks to funding by Qatar’s royal family, has the money to hire a solid team of journalists so that it can carve a niche in the difficult US market.

Al-Jazeera has not released details on the launch and declined a request for an interview. But it has announced plans to open offices in a dozen US cities, including Detroit and Chicago, and hired some respected journalists.

•Guardian: Mandela family fall out as lawyers argue over former president’s legacy

•Media: If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn?

If Yahoo! succeeds in its attempt to acquire Tumblr, it will end up with one of the hottest Internet properties in today’s Web, with access to the coveted youth market and a foothold in mobile.

•Digg: What 11 Pairs Of Eyeballs Watching A Movie Looks Like

This is not only really cool, but it has striking implications for makers of film and TV.

•Digg: YouTube’s Biggest Stars Celebrate Being YouTube’s Biggest Stars

Do you have any idea who the people in this video are?

•BBC: Thousands rally to oppose Italy cuts

Tens of thousands of protesters, led by trade unionists, rally in the Italian capital Rome against the policies of the new coalition government.

•News Republic: Bunga Bunga Parties At Berlusconi’s Villa Had Nun Strippers, Woman In Obama Outfit: Karima El-Mahroug

•Atlantic: Artificial Afghanistan

And….

•Winning numbers drawn in Powerball jackpot

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Lottery officials say the winning numbers in a near-historic Powerball jackpot have been drawn. They are: 10, 13, 14, 22, 52 and Powerball 11. Officials say the latest Powerball jackpot figure results are still pending. They had estimated it at $600 million. With four of every five possible combinations of Powerball numbers in play, someone is almost sure to win.

•Thank you for visit NewsDissector.net. Please also check out Mediachannel.org. Comments to dissector@mediachannel. Follow Danny Schechter on Facebook and Twitter

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Questions: Is There Really A Sandal Trifecta? Was IRS Really on a Political Crusade? Is FBI Involved In Hacking? Who Is Behind Attack on SEC? Trains Collide

May 18th, 2013 - by: Danny

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What’s In The News, What Isn’t?

***Powerball jackpot at record $600 million

It may hit $1 billion if no one draws the winning numbers this weekend. The Higher It goes, the more people play. The higher the odds of winning.

•In case you missed my dissection of the current scandals and their coverage

•NYT: Two Metro-North Railroad trains collided after a derailment near Fairfield, Conn., at the height of the evening rush on Friday, injuring 60 people, 5 of them critically, and snarling transit corridors in the Northeast, the authorities said.

•FAIR: Is Barack Obama: facing a “scandal trifecta”?

The White House is evidently in a tough spot thanks to what’s being called a “scandal trifecta”: Benghazi, the Justice Department seizing AP phone records, and the IRS targeting Tea Party groups. Much of the Beltway press corps–which has pushed the Benghazi story for months–is seeing the Obama presidency in a state of near free-fall.

“A President Tries to Regain His Footing,” reads a headline in the New York Times today– over a story that makes much of the fact that it rained at Obama’s press conference. “If ever a White House news conference fit the metaphorical moment,” explained Mark Landler, “it was Thursday’s rainy-day affair in the Rose Garden.”

But what’s actually happening?

The release of the Benghazi-related emails makes that story seem like even less of a scandal than it did before–and has exposed the fact that some journalists appear to have been taken in by Republican sources. The Justice Department’s investigation of AP, on the other hand, is serious and reflects a disturbing pattern of Obama administration attacks on investigative journalism–but it might be a hard issue to for Republicans to exploit, given party members’ enthusiasm for prosecuting reporters under the Espionage Act.

The IRS story, then, could very well be the main fuel for the White House’s opposition, so it’s worth a look. The optics of the story, as they say, are pretty clear–and damning. As a giant USA Today headline (5/15/13) put it, “IRS Gave a Pass to Liberals.” A Democratic administration targeting conservative groups while favoring political allies–that certainly sounds Nixonian.

Interestingly, the Web version of one of the USA Today pieces discussed the IRS hurdles that the progressive group Roots Action faced. (Disclosure: That group was founded by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen.) That story would certainly seem to undermines the front-page headline–which might explain why it doesn’t appear in the print version of the paper.

Not a lot is known what was happening at the IRS. But there are some questions and context worth considering. Brad Friedman (BradBlog, 5/16/13) notes that, according to the IRS’s own investigation, the conservative groups that were flagged for additional scrutiny made up about a third of the groups so flagged overall. What were the other groups? We don’t know”.

•Friday was the 59th anniversary of the Brown Vs Board of Education decision desegregating schools. The Rainbow Coalition commented:

“Almost 60 years ago today, the United States Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. With that decision, Thurgood Marshall and his team of lawyers had fought and won a significant battle in the war for equal access to high quality public education. Decades later, we have won many more battles but we continue to fight that same war.

At the time of the Brown decision, African American students were locked out of schools. Today, students of color are pushed out of schools by “zero tolerance” policies and high-stakes tests that create a school to prison pipeline. A report recently released by the ALCU and NAACP found that children have been suspended, expelled and arrested for violating dress codes, arriving late, or talking back. At the same time, testing programs punish schools and educators for low scores, providing an incentive to push out students who struggle to perform. School closings in predominately black and brown communities, allegedly to improve educational outcomes, have instead pushed our nation’s most vulnerable students to drop out into poverty and incarceration.”

•House Passes Bill Which Effectively Weakens the SEC

WASHINGTON – The U.S. House of Representatives today passed the “SEC Regulatory Accountability Act” (H.R. 1062), a Republican bill which despite its common-sense title would greatly restrict the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to protect millions of American investors.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, led debate for the Democrats. She told colleagues that the bill would make it easier for special interests to sue the SEC to block rules protecting investors. “The bill weights the scales heavily in favor of industry over investors,” Waters said. “In fact, the words ‘investor protection’ do not appear anywhere in the bill.”

The bill not only would apply to future regulations, but would require the SEC to subject long-established regulations to scrutiny. Congresswoman Waters pointed out that the “bill would require the Commission to review every rulemaking ever issued – even those that have protected our securities markets since the Great Depression.”

•Politico: Immigration reform no sure bet

•News Republic: Obama seeks to cut Afghan war spending by 10 percent

Guns/Violence

•Pro-Publica: An estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, according to the latest government report. That’s up from 19,000 in 2010, despite recent claims that the military has been focusing more on prevention efforts.

•Guardian: Cannes 2013: panic as shots fired during TV broadcast

•USA Today: Long Island college student, armed intruder killed

•AlJazeera: North Korea launches short-range missiles

Two missiles fired in the morning, followed by another in the afternoon, according to South Korea’s defence ministry.

•NBC: Facebook shutters page that taunted lawmaker’s push to curb military rape

•News Republic: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction, America’s 300 Million Guns

International

•Fluent: ‘Russia slammed by US for sending anti-ship missiles to Syria’

•AlJazeera: Deadly Iraq violence spills into fourth day

At least seven people killed in apparent sectarian attacks following the country’s deadliest day in months.

•AP: Idaho man charged in Uzbekistan terrorism plot

•Tyler Durden, ICH: Mystery Sponsor Of Weapons And Money To Syrian Mercenary “Rebels” Revealed

The tiny gas-rich state of Qatar has spent as much as $3bn over the past two years supporting the rebellion in Syria, far exceeding any other government.

•Phil Greaves: The CIA, Qatar, and the Creation of Jabhat al Nusra.

An armed group belonging to the Free Syrian Army umbrella, for example, can engage in a war crime, and then the next day issue a condemnation. It is an unlimited license for war crimes

*Finian Cunningham, ICH: Cannibalizing Syria: The West to Blame

The grotesque video depicting the cannibalism by one man is really a vignette of the bigger picture of cannibalism that the Western regimes have unleashed on the entire Syrian people.

•Egypt, M&G: Demonstrators calling for Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi to resign and demanding early elections clashed with riot police in Cairo.

•Al Jazeera: Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest Israel army draft

Thousands of men rally in Jerusalem against plans to enrol them into military, saying it would harm their way of life.

•FBI Hackers? Denial-of-Service attacker tells Brian Krebs he’s working for the FBI

LAST WEEK, I BLOGGED BRIAN KREBS’S AMAZING PIECE ON ASYLUMBOOTER, A CHEESY DENIAL-OF-SERVICE-FOR-HIRE SITE APPARENTLY RUN BY A 17-YEAR-OLD CHICAGO-AREA HONOR-ROLL STUDENT NAMED CHANDLER DOWNS, WHOSE PAYPAL ACCOUNT WAS FLUSH WITH MORE THAN $30,000 PAID BY PEOPLE WHO’D LAUNCHED MORE THAN 10,000 ONLINE ATTACKS.

Now, Krebs has uncovered an even weirder booter story: Ragebooter is another DoS company, but this one is run by a guy who claims to be working part time for the FBI, and who says that the FBI has its own login to his site, and review all the IP addresses and other traffic data it logs.

Ragebooter.net’s registration records are hidden behind WHOIS privacy protection services. But according to a historic WHOIS lookup at domaintools.com, that veil of secrecy briefly fell away when the site was moved behind Cloudflare.com, a content distribution network that also protects sites against DDoS attacks like the ones Ragebooter and its ilk help to create (as I noted in Monday’s story, some of the biggest targets of booter services are in fact other booter services). For a brief period in Oct. 2012, the WHOIS records showed that ragebooter.net was registered by a Justin Poland in Memphis…

… “I also work for the FBI on Tuesdays at 1pm in memphis, tn,” Poland wrote. “They allow me to continue this business and have full access. The FBI also use the site so that they can moniter [sic] the activitys [sic] of online users.. They even added a nice IP logger that logs the users IP when they login.”

•Al Giordano, From The Last American Newspaper–The Death of the Boston Phoenix

My success at manipulating daily newspapers had stripped from me any sense of myth or magic that dailies had so carefully cultivated among the reading public. I liked reporters but felt badly for them: Their mothers thought they were powerful, but they were really slaves to the daily deadline, which more often than not denied them the time to ponder or think about a story before having to put their name on it. Spared from the popular illusion that anyone could be Woodward and Bernstein if he could just get to a big-enough daily, I pointed my ambition elsewhere: The Phoenix job, for me, was the pinnacle, top of the heap. It was all I had aspired to be, and I was about to get my greatest wish.

Be careful what you wish for: My plan, that summer of 1993, was to enter the Boston Phoenix at full swashbuckling gale force and take the state capital by storm. After all, my complaints about management aside, I’d been able to do whatever I wanted at the Advocate. I had one of those rare and valued editors who considered it her job to let me be me. (That editor, Kitty Axelson, protected me from her superiors as best as she could and never took it personally when I fought for a controversial story.)

Having published just a few freelance pieces for larger publications – the Washington Post, the American Journalism Review, and the Phoenix in 1988 and ’89 – I started at the Phoenix not knowing that there was a difference between “copy editing” and “story editing.” I had been story edited at the Advocate but not copy edited. (I’m still a bit amazed the Phoenix took me on: I didn’t know what a copy editor was, but there I was, in the job interview, barking arrogantly to owner Stephen Mindich, “I smoke marijuana medicinally! If that’s a problem don’t hire me!”)

Copy editors were the heart and soul of the Phoenix experience, and I’ve long since thought that separating the two kinds of editing was at the core of the paper’s genius. Let me explain: A story editor checks your facts and challenges you on them, and you debate with him or her and fuss over the content and substance of your story. A copy editor is another species altogether. The copy editor pounds your typing into literature. The typical copy editor could give a crap about your political or cultural opinions or whom (“whom” is a word I learned from copy editors) they may offend. Copy editors just want to make your words beautiful, and have them be proper English……

•To read the rest, go to this link.

•Canadian Oil Polluting Detroit

•NYT: WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

And Now It Can Be Told

•Paul McCartney: Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles

•Thank you or reading Newsdissector.net. Please visit Mediachannel.org as well. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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Radio Podcast; Dissection: In An Age Of Missing Information, Why We Can’t Trust The News We Are Receiving

May 17th, 2013 - by: Danny

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•••Listen To The Podcast: Thursday’s News Dissector Radio Hour on PRN.fm with Al Giordano and Laura Garcia of the Narco News Bulletin and School of Authentic Journalism.

•The Hill: House immigration group announces ‘agreement in principle’

A bipartisan group of House negotiators said Thursday they have reached an “agreement in principle” on comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

“We have an agreement in principle,” Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) said as he and five other members of the group emerged from a two-hour meeting late Thursday afternoon.

•RT: Gitmo Hunger Strike Now In l00th Day

Dissection: The News That Isn’t: How We Are Fed False Stories Driven By Missing Information

By Danny Schechter

The news is coming to us hot and heavy these days. There is scandal after scandal, outrage after outrage. The media playbook treats it all as a way to build audience, and raise ratings (and revenue) by polarizing opinion.

Conflict sells.

Here’s what the Republicans say; here’s how the Democrats respond. Obama is good; Obama is bad. So and so says this; so and so fires back. Its mostly heat, not light.

There are rarely any other views, or independent ways of understanding events presented.

News programs are the new wrestling shows, a noisy battleground, in the morning, on the Sunday shows, and all day long on cable networks. The goal is not to explain, probe, or ask questions.

No, its to squeeze a repetitive and narrow narratives into a morality play that provokes as much emotion as possible.

Its been said we live in an era of “missing information” and the news is the best arena that defines it—not by what’s being reported, but how its being reported, and mostly by what’s not being reported.

Lets look at current major “stories”—stories is an appropriate word—to show how this process works.

1. The IRS

At issue is the decision of one office of the IRS to target small Tea Party Groups. They are now apoplectic, using the incident to picture them as martyrs while launching campaigns to raise money for them as victims.

The President is apologizing, “accepting resignations” from temporary officials. Yada Yada Yada.

Unmentioned; This is not the real taxß scandal focused on the way big money has taken over the electoral system using non-profits and anonymous sources with the Federal Election Commission and the IRS looking the other way.

The IRS of course has been a favorite tool of punishment since the days of Al Capone. Remember the Nixon enemies list?

•How many peace and justice groups experienced the same treatment? For howmany years did the IRS go after leftists? Did anyone in our fearless media ask?

•Did the right-wingers now crying bloody murder ever speak up when the IRS harassed its enemies?

Do I even have to ask?

Why isn’t Karl Rove’s “dark money” manipulations tied to this? William Boardman writes: “Karl Rove is the real poster boy for the so-called IRS (Internal Revenue Service) ‘scandal’ of taking a closer look at applications by political organizations seeking a 501(c)(4) tax status that not only makes them tax exempt but protects their donors with anonymity.”

Sheila Krumholz, of the Center for Responsive Politics, the group that tracks all money in politics, wrote (with her board chairman) in the New York Times:

“With the surge of dark money into politics, we need to ensure that the I.R.S. is capable of rigorously enforcing the law in a nonpartisan, but also more effective, way. While we focus on the rickety raft of minor Tea Party groups targeted by the I.R.S., there is an entire fleet of big spenders that are operating with apparent impunity.”

Unfortunately, this real problem it is not yet news.

And, for that matter, do all the corporations who get away without paying any taxes rate this type of media treatment too? Why isn’t that a mega scandal? Just asking.

2.The Boston Bombers

It was left to Russ Baker of the small WhoWhatWHy website to catalogue the many unasked and unanswered question about what really happened in one of the most “covered” recent news spectacles.

He writes, before sinking his teeth into the substance:

“Most of the national and international media have left Boston—and essentially moved on from the Marathon bombing story. Most of the national and international media have left Boston—and essentially moved on from the Marathon bombing story. But at WhoWhatWhy, we’re just getting started.

Why? Because we see a lot of problems with what we’ve been told so far. We’ve been disappointed that the media have failed to demonstrate healthy skepticism while passing along, unchallenged, the (self-serving) assertions of “the authorities.”
It is the job of journalism not only to report what authorities say, but also to confirm their claims, and address anomalies, errors, inconsistencies, outright lies, and cover-ups, large and small.”

3: Spying on the Associated Press

It turns out there is much more to the story about the government investigating leaks to the AP. It turns out the news and the government had been negotiating, about when to release the story, and the AP had held its story for five days and was wrangling with the White House over who would break it suggesting that there may be questionable practices on both sides.

Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute that covers media practices reported:

“The Associated Press held its story about a foiled underwear bombing for five days, Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate report in The Washington Post. But on Monday, May 7, “CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were ‘no longer an issue,’” they write. Then the government began jostling with AP over who would get to break the story.

When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?

Then an administration official called, saying, ‘AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer.’”

The AP may be our leading news agency, and a cooperative no less, but it has a long history of collusion with power, belittling opposition movements worldwide, echoing US government claims and skewing the news.

This goes way back—here’s a story I found from 1914 from the Radical magazine “The Masses.”

“Last summer, after a number of publications, including Collier’s Weekly and The Independent, had delicately intimated that the Associated Press gave the country no fair amount of the struggle between labor and capital in West Virginia, THE MASSES decided to look into the case. It decided that if this thing were true, it ought to be stated without delicacy.

The result was a paragraph explicitly and warmly charging the Associated Press with having suppressed and colored the news of that strike in favor of the employers. Accompanying the paragraph was a cartoon presenting the same charge in a graphic form.
Upon the basis of this cartoon and paragraph, William Rand, an attorney for the Associated Press, brought John Doe proceedings against THE MASSES in the Municipal Court of New York. Justice Breen dismissed the case.

Rand then went to the District Attorney. And the District Attorney considered the case serious enough to receive the attention of the Grand Jury. He secured an indictment of two editors of THE MASSES for criminal libel. Max Eastman and Arthur Young were arraigned on December 13, pleaded not guilty, and were each released on $1,000 bail. The date for the trial is not set. The penalty for criminal libel may be one year in prison, $5,000 fine, or both.”

So much for Freedom of the Press! In this case, critics were demanding freedom from the press.

4. Benghazi Blunders

The government has released emails on Benghazi, The Republicans want more. The issue is defined as one of bad security by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Once again, there’s been no independent investigation. It has become a partisan football while skirting deeper issues.

Former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman has come forward to question whether this office in Benghazi was really a consulate as we have been but an “intelligence platform” for use in a covert war that the sacking of the embassy became part of.

He writes:

“When U.S. personnel were airlifted from Benghazi the night of the attack, there were seven Foreign Service and State Department officers and 23 CIA officers onboard. This fact alone indicates that the consulate was primarily diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation that was known to Libyan militia groups.”

So again, what’s offered up as news may be a way of masking the real news—and/or truth—information that the government and other interests want to conceal, with most of the media looking the other way playing games.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and blogs daily at NewsDissector.net. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

AP: Badgered: Obama acts, but Republicans unsatisfied

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama, seeking to regain his footing amid controversies hammering the White House, named a temporary chief for the scandal-marred Internal Revenue Service Thursday and pressed Congress to approve new security money to prevent another Benghazi-style terrorist attack. The efforts did little to satisfy Republicans,

•Digg: The Man Who Spied On The AP

Meet a hard-charging federal prosecutor at the center of the Justice Department’s controversial leak investigation.

*DB/AP: The Justice Department just cannot catch a break this week. The U.S. Marshals Service has essentially lost track of two known or suspected terrorists, and it’s all the DOJ’s fault. The persons in question formerly participated in the federal Witness Security Program and should have been on the government’s “no-fly” list, but the Justice Department failed to provide the agency responsible for the list with the names of several suspected terrorists, and as a result some of them were able to make it onto commercial airplanes without being apprehended. A report from the inspector general notes that confusion within the DOJ over the identities of Witness Security Program participants was just one of several “significant issues concerning national security.”

•EJC: Yahoo in talks to acquire Tumblr

Yahoo is in serious talks with Tumblr to acquire the social blogging site, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks. The deal is not done, but could reach as high as $1 billion, Adweek has learned. Such an acquisition could be just what CEO Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale. (AdWeek)

International

•BBC: BP asks Cameron to curb US leak cost

BP appeals to Prime Minister David Cameron to intervene over the escalating compensation costs of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

•Sky: Anti-Apartheid Leader Charges South African Police With Torture

•Via EJC: CCTV blames Dalai Lama, foreign media for instigating self-immolations

Chinese national television aired a lengthy prime time news feature blaming the Tibetan government-in-exile and foreign media for self-immolations in the country’s Tibetan-populated areas. The half-hour news feature is part of recent efforts by Chinese state media to change the narrative of Chinese control over Tibet. It is the fifth such video aired over the last year, writes Beijing-based Tibetan activist Tsering Woeser in a tweet. At least 116 Tibetans have killed themselves in such acts of defiance against Chinese rule since 2009, according to overseas media reports.(The South China Morning Post)

•AP: Brothers arrested in Mother’s Day parade shooting

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Two brothers with a history of drug arrests and suspected ties to a neighborhood gang each face 20 counts of attempted second-degree murder in a shooting spree that brought a sudden bloody end to a Mother’s Day parade in a New Orleans neighborhood. The arrests by city police and U.S. marshals came less than four days after gunfire scattered the crowd and wounded 20 people

•BBC: Nigeria begins raids on Boko Haram

Nigeria’s army begins operations against militant Islamists after states of emergency were declared in three north-eastern states.

•NYTimes Examiner: Petition To NY Times Public Editor To Investigate Coverage of Honduras

The following petition, signed by over a dozen experts on Latin America and Media including Noam Chomsky and Greg Grandin, was sent today to Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor for The New York Times. Join the campaign below.

Dear Margaret Sullivan,

In a recent column (4/12/13), you observed:

Although individual words and phrases may not amount to very much in the great flow produced each day, language matters. When news organizations accept the government’s way of speaking, they seem to accept the government’s way of thinking. In The Times, these decisions carry even more weight.

In light of this comment we encourage you to compare The New York Times’s characterization of the leadership of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and that of Roberto Micheletti and Porfirio Lobo in Honduras.

In the past four years, the Times has referred to Chávez as an “autocrat,” “despot,” “authoritarian ruler” and a “caudillo” in its news coverage. When opinion pieces are included, the Times has published at least fifteen separate articles employing such language, depicting Chávez as a “dictator” or “strongman.” Over the same period-since the June 28, 2009 military overthrow of elected president Manuel Zelaya of Honduras-Times contributors have never used such terms to describe Micheletti, who presided over the coup regime after Zelaya’s removal, or Porfirio Lobo, who succeeded him. Instead, the paper has variously described them in its news coverage as “interim,” “de facto,” and “new.”

Porfirio Lobo assumed the presidency after winning an election held under Micheletti’s coup government. The elections were marked by repression and censorship, and international monitors, like the Carter Center, boycotted them. Since the coup, Honduras’s military and police have routinely killed civilians.

Over the past 14 years Venezuela has had 16 elections or referenda deemed free and fair by leading international authorities. Jimmy Carter praised Venezuela’s elections, among the 92 the Carter Center has monitored, as having “a very wonderful voting system.” He concluded that “the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” While some human rights groups have criticized the Chávez government, Venezuela has had no pattern of state security forces murdering civilians, as is the case in Honduras.

Whatever one thinks of the democratic credentials of Chávez’s presidency-and we recognize that reasonable people can disagree about it-there is nothing in the record, when compared with that of his Honduran counterparts, to warrant the discrepancies in the Times’s coverage of the two governments.

We urge you to examine this disparity in coverage and language use, particularly as it may appear to your readers to track all too closely the U.S. government’s positions regarding the Honduran government (which it supports) and the Venezuelan government (which it opposes)-precisely the syndrome you describe and warn against in your column.

Sincerely,

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus, MIT
Edward Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University
Sujatha Fernandes, Professor of Sociology, Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center
Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center
Adrienne Pine, Professor of Anthropology, American University
Mark Weisbrot, Ph.D, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of History and Latin American Studies, Pomona College
Katherine Hite, Professor of Political Science, Vassar College
Steve Ellner, Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, Universidad de Oriente
George Ciccariello-Maher, Professor of Political Science, Drexel University
Daniel Kovalik, Professor of International Human Rights, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Gregory Wilpert, Ph.D, author of “Changing Venezuela by Taking Power”
Joseph Nevins, Professor of Geography, Vassar College
Nazih Richani, Director of Latin American Studies, Kean University
Steven Volk, Professor of History, Oberlin College
Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History, Salem State University
Keane Bhatt, North American Congress on Latin America
Chris Spannos, New York Times eXaminer
Michael Albert, ZNet
Oliver Stone, Film Director, “South of the Border”
Michael Moore, Film Maker and Activist

•AP: Freeing Afghanistan–Afghans tell of US soldier’s killing rampage

Shahara, now 3, sits tucked inside the shawl of her mother, Masooma, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 20, 2013 as Masooma recalls the night she says a U.S. soldier killed her husband and attacked her children in a southern Afghanistan village. Masooma says the soldier grabbed Shahara’s pony tails and shook her head violently after killing her father.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) – Sitting on a dirty straw mat on the parched ground of southern Afghanistan, Masooma sank deeper inside a giant black shawl. Hidden from view, her words burst forth as she told her side of what happened to her family sometime before dawn on March 11, 2012.

According to Masooma, an American soldier wearing a helmet equipped with a flashlight burst into her two-room mud home while everyone slept. He killed her husband, Dawood, punched her 7-year-old son and shoved a pistol into the mouth of his baby brother.

“We were asleep. He came in and he was shouting, saying something about Taliban, Taliban, and then he pulled my husband up. I screamed and screamed and said, ‘We are not Taliban, we are not government. We are no one. Please don’t hurt us,’” she said.

The soldier wasn’t listening. He pointed his pistol at Masooma to quiet her and pushed her husband into the living room.

“My husband just looked back at me and said, ‘I will be back.’” Seconds later she heard gunshots, she recalled, her voice cracking as she was momentarily unable to speak. Her husband was dead…

•CNN: You Can Read All The Benghazi Emails Here

The White House released more than 100 pages of e-mails on Wednesday in a bid to quell critics who say President Barack Obama and his aides played politics with national security following the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

•Thanks For Visiting NewsDissector.net. Please visit the just updated Mediachannelk.org. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org

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Obama Scrambles To Put Out Fires, Manage Scandals; The Real Benghazi Story Goes Untold, Banks Win Again On Derivatives, Hail Cornel West

May 16th, 2013 - by: Danny

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•••Today: New Dissector Radio Hour at 5 PM on the Progressive Radio Network (PRN.fm) hosted by your news dissector with musician Polar Levine. Today: a look at press freedom through the eyes of Al Giordano, Editor Narco News Bulletin (Narconews.com), global correspondent, worked with Abbie Hoffman, covers drug war and Laura Garcia a Mexican journalist and graduate of the School of Authentic Journalism.

•Today: Please visit the newly updated Mediachannel.org website

Da Nooze

•AP: Obama tries to regain control amid controversies

WASHINGTON (AP) – Under mounting pressure, President Barack Obama on Wednesday released a trove of documents related to the Benghazi attack and forced out the top official at the Internal Revenue Service following revelations that the agency targeted conservative political groups

•Video: President Obama Makes A Statement

FIRED

Acting Chief of I.R.S. Forced Out Over Tea Party Targeting

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced Wednesday night that the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service had been fired, and he pledged that his administration would cooperate with Congressional investigations into the targeting of conservative groups.

Speaking in the White House’s formal East Room, the president said Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew had asked for and accepted the resignation of Steven Miller, who was aware of the agency’s efforts to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny as a deputy I.R.S. commissioner.

Mr. Miller is scheduled to testify on Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee in the first of a series of hearings on the I.R.S. targeting scandal.”

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” the president said. “It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is the I.R.S. has to operate with absolute integrity.”

•Question Unasked: Why did they go after the small fry again, and not look at the electoral manipulations by Karl Rove et.al/

•CNN: GOP going after Democrats in new ads over IRS scandal

•Pulse: IRS Incompetence, Yes. Tea Party Innocence? No.

The IRS certainly deserves some of the criticism it’s getting, but it’s also worth looking at the groups they were examining a little closer.

•Remember: When a Plane Was Flown Into an IRS Office?

•Digg: Before The IRS Harassed The Tea Party, It Harassed Gay Rights Groups

Before there was the Tea Party, there was Big Mama Rag, Inc.

Economy

•NYT: Banks’ Lobbyists Win Softer Rule on Derivatives Trades

• Naked Capitalism: Josh Rosner on How Dodd Frank Institutionalizes Too Big to Fail

Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher testifies before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services committee today on why Dodd Frank has not ended too big to fail, but also has managed to entrench the megafirms’ advantaged position.

Rosner provided Congressional testimony on this same topic in 2011, and deemed Dodd Frank’s plans for winding down systemically important firms to be unworkable. Rosner has good company here; the BIS and the international bank lobbying group the IIF reached the same conclusion.

Rosner stresses that he’s not advocating the repeal of Dodd Frank but describing what is flawed so it can be remedied or replaced, and that he sees the sort of fixes embodied in the bills approved in the House to weaken derivatives regulations as a step in the wrong direction.

•BBC: Rich-poor divide ‘picking up speed’

The gap between rich and poor widened more in the three years to 2010 than in the previous 12 years, according to the OECD.

•Business Insider: Natural Disasters Have Cost The Global Economy $2.5 Trillion Since 2000

*Pulse: Actually, countries do make painful economic reforms without austerity

•Reuters: Obama Student Loan Policy Reaping $51 Billion Profit

• Digg: America’s New Oligarchs

Americans love their tech gurus, but the feeling isn’t mutual. The new ruling class is gaming the system and jerking the rest of us around.

•CNN: How I ‘Stole’ $14 Million From A Bank

In early 2010, Nish Bhalla sat down at his computer with one objective: steal a huge amount of money from a bank.

Benghazi

News Alert: White House releases Benghazi emails

The White House has released 100 pages of internal e-mails that document the development of talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and others following the attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. The emails show that the White House, State Department, FBI and the CIA all participated in shaping the talking points, which have become a flashpoint for critics of the administration’s response to the attack.

•As Expected: GOP not satisfied by Benghazi email release

Congressional Republicans are demanding more information on the Benghazi attack.

• We keep accepting the notion that the so-called Consulate was attacked by terrorists. There is another view suggesting that Benghazi “Consulate” was a CIA Front. What was going on there–and how was it linked to the covert and then overt war to overthrow the Libyan government and steal the country’s “sweet oil? The Institute for Public Accuracy draws attention to this totally under covered angle, one that I find very plausible.

“CNN’s Gloria Borger noted on Tuesday: “White House spokesman Jay Carney says the White House changed the wording from ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ to be more accurate. So what does that mean? Thanks to the digging of Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, it looks very much like the Benghazi consulate ‘was not a consulate at all but basically a secret CIA operation.’”

In fact, Goodman wrote in November for ConsortiumNews that: “the consulate was the diplomatic cover for an intelligence platform and whatever diplomatic functions took place in Benghazi also served as cover for an important CIA base.”

Meet Melvin Goodman. director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He was an analyst at the CIA for 24 years. His most recent book is the just-released National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. Goodman just wrote the piece “The Real Benghazi Scandal” for CounterPunch, which states:

“When congressional Republicans complete manipulating the Benghazi tragedy, it will be time for the virtually silent Senate intelligence committee to take up three major issues that have been largely ignored. The committee must investigate the fact that the U.S. presence in Benghazi was an intelligence platform and only nominally a consulate; the politicization by the White House and State Department of CIA analysis of the events in Benghazi; and the Obama administration’s politicization of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, which has virtually destroyed the office and deprived congressional intelligence committees of their most important oversight tool.

“When U.S. personnel were airlifted from Benghazi the night of the attack, there were seven Foreign Service and State Department officers and 23 CIA officers onboard. This fact alone indicates that the consulate was primarily diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation that was known to Libyan militia groups. The CIA failed to provide adequate security for Benghazi, and its clumsy tradecraft contributed to the tragic failure. On the night of the attack, the small CIA security team in Benghazi was slow to respond, relying on an untested Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for U.S. personnel. After the attack, the long delay in debriefing evacuated personnel contributed to the confusing assessments.”

Goodman lists a series of major failures by the CIA where no one was held accountable. The most recent: “The politicization of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 was the worst intelligence scandal in the CIA’s history, but there were no penalties for those who supported CIA director George Tenet’s efforts to make phony intelligence a ‘slam dunk’ as well as Deputy Director John McLaughlin’s ‘slam dunk’ briefing to President George Bush. The CIA’s production of an unclassified white paper for the Congress on the eve of the vote to authorize force in October 2002 marked the misuse of classified information to influence congressional opinion, but there were no consequences.

“The destruction of the torture tapes, a clear case of obstruction of justice in view of White House orders to protect the tapes, led to no recriminations at the CIA. The controversy over the use of drone aircraft; the intelligence failure that accompanied the Arab Spring in 2011; and the inadequate security presence in Libya in the wake of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi have not received the necessary scrutiny. Any CIA component in the Middle East and North Africa is a likely target of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role in the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ and the Obama administration’s increasingly widespread use of drone aircraft.

“The ability of the Nigerian underwear bomber to board a commercial airline in December 2009 marked an intelligence failure for the entire intelligence community, but there was no serious attempt to examine the breakdown in coordination between five or six intelligence agencies, let alone pursue accountability. Instead, President Obama halted all efforts to return home Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo.”

•Petraeus email objected to Benghazi talking points

WASHINGTON (AP) – Then CIA-Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points the Obama administration used after the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, because he wanted to see more details revealed to the public, according to emails released Wednesday by the White House.

•••Need To Know! Russ Baker on Why Need a real investigation into the mysteries of the events in Boston

•Fluent: ‘Pa. abortion doctor gets 3rd life sentence in baby death, more prison time for patient death’

•CLG: KBR Tells U.S. Army It Will Cost $500 Million and Take 13 Years to Close Its Iraq Contract

The recipient of the largest government services contract in U.S. history has told military officials it will take another 13 years and half a billion dollars to finish off its ‘work’ stemming from the Iraq war. This assessment from KBR Inc., which won the *38 billion deal from the U.S. Army in 2001, is at the heart of a legal battle between the two sides. KBR was responsible for aiding virtually all American military support operations as part of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III in Iraq.

•New Orleans Police Arrest Suspect in Parade Shooting

•Yahoo: NEW YORK (AP) — The ACLU is lobbying for the gay couple on “Modern Family” to get married.
ACLU Action started a campaign to urge the show’s producers to write a wedding episode for Mitchell and Cameron, fathers of an adopted child and one of three couples at the heart of the show.

The ACLU says it is appealing to the fictional family to draw more attention to the real issue as it awaits Supreme Court decisions on two important marriage equality cases.

“Mitch and Cam are a couple that America has come to know and love, and seeing them get married, and seeing the characters in the story grapple with their desire to get married, makes it real for a bigger part of America,” said James Esseks, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project at the ACLU.

Supporters are invited to “RSVP” to the wedding online. The ACLU plans to deliver the online “guest list” to the show’s producers but said it had not yet contacted the show.

Environment

•Guardian: Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds

The Atlantic Wire: Hundreds of New Yorkers Are Still Living in Hotels After Sandy

International

•Fluent: ‘Lawmakers push White House to tighten pressure on Iran’

•NYT: Israel Threatens To Attack Syria And Warns Against Retaliation

•Reuters: Nigerian Military Escalates Campaign Against Islamacists

•Beijing Bluster: Chinese Official Says Tibetans No Longer Interested In Dalai Lama’s Politics

•New York Times: Mandela Fades As Dispute Erupts Over His Legacy

•Guardian: Britain Discovers Cornel West ‘They Say I’m Un-American’ By Hugh Muir

Cornel West, the firebrand of American academia for almost 30 years, is causing his hosts some problems. They are on a schedule but such things barely move him, for as he saunters down the high street there are people to talk to, and no one can leave shortchanged. Everyone, “brother” or “sister”, is indeed treated like a long lost family member. And then there is the hug; a bear-like pincer movement. There’s no escape. It happens in New York, where the professor/philosopher usually holds court. And now it’s the same in Cambridge.

The best students accord their visitors a healthy respect, but West’s week laying bare the conflicts and fissures of race and culture and activism and literature in the US and Britain yielded more than that during his short residency at King’s College. There are academics who draw a crowd, but the West phenomenon at King’s had rock star quality: the buzz, the poster beaming his image from doors and noticeboards; the back story – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, his seminal work Race Matters, his falling-in and falling-out with Barack Obama.

Others can teach, and at Cambridge the teaching is some of the best in the world, but standing-room-only crowds came to see West perform. He performed. Approaching 60 now, he is slow of gait. But he always performs.

“Britain is in trouble,” he tells me. “Britain is in deep trouble. The privatising is out of the control, the militarising is out of control and the financialising is out of control. And what I mean from that is you have a cold-hearted, mean-spirited budget that the Queen just read; you have working and poor people under panic, you have this obsession with immigration that tends to scapegoat the most vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful. And it is not just black immigrants, but also our brothers and sisters from Poland and Bulgaria, Romania; right across the board.” He isn’t ranting. He doesn’t rant. He smiles, he growls gently, he leans in and whispers conspiratorily. There is an upside, he says. “Britain has a rich history of bouncing back too.”

And

• NPR: Publisher Threatens Librarian With $1 Billion Lawsuit

•EJC: New Yorker launches “open-source anonymous inbox” built by Aaron Swartz

The New Yorker on Wednesday launched Strongbox, an open-source system that allows readers to anonymously submit confidential documents. Strongbox was built by Aaron Swartz and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. Strongbox lets users “share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.” To submit documents, users must download the Tor Project software. They can then access Strongbox and submit information under a randomly generated code name. (paidContent)
Bahrain sentences Twitter users to prison

EJC: A Bahraini court has sentenced six Twitter users to one year in prison for allegedly insulting King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, according to the public prosecutor’s office.

The six were charged by the lower criminal court with “misusing the right of free expression,” the government statement, which was posted online, said on Wednesday. The six Twitter users were accused of writing remarks “undermining the values and traditions of Bahrain’s society towards the king on Twitter”, according to the statement, which did not identify the people who were accused. (Al Jazeera)

Blasts From The Past

•OJ Simpson testifies in bid for new Vegas trial

LAS VEGAS (AP) – His leg shackles rattling as he shuffled to and from the witness stand, O.J. Simpson made his own case Wednesday for a new trial on armed robbery charges with testimony that he relied on the advice of his trusted attorney when he tried to reclaim mementos from his football glory days. “It was my stuff. I followed what I thought was the law,

•It’s Lonely At the Bottom for Sarah Palin

•••Thats The News Dissector.net blog for today. A newly updated Mediachannel.org is now online. Please support our work. Input to dissector@mediachannel.org Follow me on Facebook and Twitter,

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Hurricanes A Coming, Obama Facing Trio of Troubles, The IRS Debate, Why Doesn’t The Fed Make Big Banks Smaller?

May 15th, 2013 - by: Danny

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•Today, http://Medichannel.org has been updated with the latest media news and analysis. Please visit.

•••Breaking: War Spreading–Rockets Hit Golan as Palestinians Rally to Mark Nakba