Saturday, March 05, 2005

Bush's Classic Rendition of Elvis Presley's: "Don't"

Yahoo! News - Mar 05, 2005

Bush wielding secrecy privilege to end suits

Thu Mar 3, 9:40 AM ET
Top Stories - Chicago Tribune
By Andrew Zajac Washington Bureau

The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign.

How the White House is using this privilege, not a law but a series of legal precedents built on national security, disturbs some civil libertarians and open-government advocates because of its sweeping power. Judges almost never challenge the government's assertion of the privilege, and it can be fatal to a plaintiff's case.

The government is invoking the privilege in an attempt to wipe out the heart of a lawsuit that seeks to examine rendition, the secretive and controversial practice of sending terror suspects to foreign countries where they might be tortured.

Use of the secrets privilege also could eliminate a suit by a former FBI (news - web sites) contract linguist who charges that the bureau bungled translations of terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Bush administration is also using the secrets privilege to seek dismissal of a third case not related directly to terrorism. And the administration has invoked the privilege in less sweeping ways on several other occasions.

The use of the state secrets privilege, critics say, is part of President Bush (news - web sites)'s forceful expansion of presidential secrecy, including a more restrictive approach to releasing documents under the Freedom of Information Act; limitations on the dissemination of presidential papers and curtailment of information on individuals rounded up in the war on terrorism.

...

SOURCE - http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2027&ncid=2027&e=1&u=/chitribts/20050303/ts_chicagotrib/bushwieldingsecrecyprivilegetoendsuits

...

Elvis Presley - "Don't"

(Words & Music by Jerry Leiber - Mike Stoller)

Don’t, don’t,
That’s what you say
Each time, that I hold, you, this way,
When I feel like this,
And, I want to hold you,
Baby, don’t say don’t.

Don’t, don’t,
Leave, my embrace,
For here, in my arms, is your place,
When, the night grows cold,
And, I want to hold you,
Baby, don’t say don’t.

If you think,
That this is just a game,
I’m playing,
If you think,
That I don’t mean,
Ev’ry word, I’m saying
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,
Don’t feel that way,
I’m your love,
And yours, I will stay...

This, you can believe,
I will never, leave you,
Heaven knows, I won’t,
Baby, don’t say don’t...

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Hy-g-g-g-giene Unit!!!

Smelly divorce hits Iranian court

Could a bar of soap make all the difference?

An Iranian woman says she wants to divorce her husband because he has not washed for more than a year, according to a press report.

The 36-year-old woman, identified as Mina, reportedly told a court in Tehran that her husband smells so bad even their children will not go near him.

She said that when she met her husband eight years ago, he was obsessive about staying clean.

Women in Iran have fewer rights than men when it comes to getting divorced.

A woman normally has to prove that her husband has neglected her financially or sexually, is a drug addict or is physically abusive.

Mina reportedly told the divorce court the smell of her husband was so bad that it was making her family a laughing stock.

"We cannot go to any parties. I feel so ashamed," she was quoted by Iran's state-run newspaper.

Divorce criteria

She said he "does not like water and does not want to take a shower. He doesn't even wash when he wakes up in the morning."

She said that when they first married, he had an obsessive compulsion to stay clean.

"He spent hours taking showers three times a day and washed his hands every few minutes," she reportedly said.

"But he suddenly changed... Now nobody, including me, my children and his colleagues, can stand him."

A legal expert told the AFP news agency that being smelly was not a valid reason for divorce in Iran.

But Mina could argue it had caused her to hate her husband so much that she could no longer live with him, which would meet the criteria.

SOURCE - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4312873.stm

Monday, February 28, 2005

Blog Trailer - Michael Moore: One Of The Greatest Men In History Rants Among Us

(coming soon to http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/...)

"Can you honestly believe that ANY of this years Academy Award Winning movies - or ANY movie in history for that matter, could elicit A 15-MINUTE STANDING OVATION from ANYONE? Let alone film critics seeing it for the first time???"

This has to mean something more than "people liked it."


(...)

Feb 28, 2005 - Yahoo! News
Moviegoers, Academy Show Different Tastes
By JAKE COYLE, Associated Press Writer

"Likewise, the academy stayed away from the equally controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Moore did not enter in the best documentary race, hoping for a best picture nomination. The movie has grossed $119 million and memorably received a standing ovation of more than 15 minutes at the Cannes Film Festival (news - web sites), where it also won the festival's top prize."

SOURCE - http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050228/ap_en_mo/film_minute_forgotten_films_1

"Africa Unite, 'cause we're moving right out of Babylon..."



"Africa Unite, 'cause we're moving right out of Babylon..."
- Bob Marley

---

(email...)

Hey,

This is the picture of the starving Sudanese girl I was talking about. It's extremely disturbing and sad.

v

---

(response...)

vygmalion...

this is very sad, and is the type of thing that both motivates and disturbs me, as i wonder: who's letting this happen and why (and how dangerous and dispassionate are they?; what God would allow this to happen (and where is He or She?);and how can we make sense of it (and how bad is it that we can?)

i think we can "Make the revolution a blast!" (BK Song: Tupac Resurrected), and gain positive energy from doing something about this - like your adopted indian foster-child costing you a shiny-nickel-a-day and giving you at least a shiny-nickel's worth of happiness, as opposed to shutting it out as most want to do...

... and thus, making things infinitely worse.

of course i know that ignorance is bliss (and i really believe it), and the core logic really makes sense - the mainstream info we get is so spotty and malnourishing that it sets of crazy alarms without giving us closure: they scare us into silence by yelling "fire!" and then not telling us much else...

but, we have to play through the pain and figure out the truth, because unfortunately, we can't escape it anyway.

we can't possibly stay completely ignorant when inundated with media everywhere we go... little bits of freaky-stuff will hit us and mess us up... we'll start discrediting honest people just because we've trained our brains to defensively do so, discouraging others from speaking truth to power... and frankly, we are all feeling worse - just think back a few years, and see that history will not look kindly upon today...

(...)

if you wonder how it all works, here's one tiny but significant angle:

- the U.S. is the world leader (whether we like it or not)

- the U.S. govt is the worst in history right now when it comes to caring about this stuff when it's most needed and capable

(you can see for yourself if you've seen what i've seen - no more "their side/our side" artificial equivocation bullshit. if you "look" at it - and i mean really "look" as opposed to simply assuming both sides are equally morally compelling, you would see that the side not hell-bent on destroying the world makes a hell of a lot more sense - trust me...)

- the U.S. govt needs to lead the world in the fight to save Africa from disaster

- BUT, if they treat African Americans so poorly...

(in Texas "there was a 360% increase in the number of African Americans sent to jail for drug offenses, while there was a 9% decrease in the number of whites sent to jail for drug offenses" - Jason Ziedenberg, Executive Director, Justice Policy Institute; referenced in BK Blog: T.R.U.E. - B.L.O.G.)

- then how can they possibly care about Africans?

(...)

since current solutions aren't working, we have to frame everything differently, accomodating from our narcissistic selves-outward to fix it, and avoiding the mainstream default argument i've been telling you was objectively completely wrong for a while: leave everyone alone because "That's the way It is, He is, She is, I am." (BK Blog: T.R.U.E. - B.L.O.G.)

the only way to give people enough pride to believe they can change the world, is to give them that pride in incremental steps: changing their "own" world first (their sphere of influence) for the better, and then using those changes as a stable jump-off for bigger challenges...

in fact, i've been saying this for over a year now...

"(Tupac) was talking to his people, and advocating change and success in the ghetto, often a lost land in American culture discussed in terms of perpetual karma: ghettos are bad places with bad people, that's just the way it is." (BK: original Tupacumentary article, re: T.H.U.G. - L.I.F.E.)

and so, m'lady...

if you're happily sunning yourself by the pool in the greek islands, and you see a 3-yr old kid drowning in the pool beside you, just scoop him up and plop him down safely, and let's hope the rest of the world does the same for Africa...

peace,
BK

---

Kevin Carter captured this striking image of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding centre while a vulture waited nearby. It's not known what happend to the girl after the picture was taken. The photograph became an icon for mass starvation in Africa. The war in Sudan was between an Arab Muslim-dominated government in the north, and black Christian insurgents from the south.

In the 1990s, the cold war gave way to dozens of ethnic, religious, and sectional conflicts. Millions of people were tortured, starved, and slaughtered. Many were innocent children. This photo of a vulture standing near a starving Sudanese child won Kevin Carter the 1994 Pultzer Prize for photography. A few months after receiving this award, Carter, who was only thirty-three years old, committed suicide.

Photographer: Kevin Carter (1961-1994)

---

Epilogue:

I got,
No stress,
When I test,
The blessed,
Getting stuff off my chest,
Allows me to rest,

I'll take care of the rest,
Whenever I confess,
Win over the stressed,
'Til they see,
We're all blessed...

"And yet, they just hate it when ol' Sy uses anonymous sources..."

Feb 28, 2005

Bin Laden Asks Zarqawi to Make U.S. a Target

Yahoo! News - 55 minutes ago Top Stories - Reuters
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) recently asked his chief ally in Iraq (news - web sites), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to consider the territory of the United States as a target for terrorist attacks, a U.S. counterterrorism official said on Monday.

"There has been communication between bin Laden and Zarqawi, with bin Laden suggesting to Zarqawi the U.S. homeland as a target," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official called the bin Laden communication "a fairly recent development" but declined to provide details for fear of compromising U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.

The Department of Homeland Security said it issued a classified intelligence bulletin over the weekend warning state officials that the federal government had received nonspecific information about al Qaeda plans to attack the United States.

SOURCE - http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=1&u=/nm/20050228/ts_nm/security_binladen_dc

(...)

July 15, 2004

Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech Transcribed

"I think you’re going to see a lot of efforts to try to paint the insurgency in the next month as increasingly being outsiders..."

I think you’re going to see a lot of efforts to try to paint the insurgency in the next month as increasingly being outsiders. I’ve seen already the first “showdown” between al Qaeda and the United States. “Al Qaeda’s taken over the insurgency” — I don’t think that’s true at all. And I can tell you right now — this I'm telling you I know — a year ago, a year and a half ago, there was total panic inside, because the opposition, the insurgency, was operating in 1, 2, and 3 man cells and we knew nothing about them. I can tell you right now, they're operating in 10 and 15 man cells right now and we still know nothing about them. The interrogations haven’t worked, no matter how much pressure they put on people. We have no tactical information of any use whatsoever.

And if you go to Europe and talk to some of the intelligence people there and some of the people in the Middle East who are our friends — we have many friends, who are very sad about what’s happened to America, are praying for the next election — they will tell you even the stuff you’re hearing about Zarqawi — Zarqawi, excuse me, Zarqawi is mister everybody, he’s never liked bin Laden, and it’s not clear that the person that we claim responsible for all those acts is he. Some of the people who know the Arab world very well and very carefully and listen to his statements. He’s a Jordanian, and many of the comments that have been alleged to have been in his name are not made by him. In other words, the suggestion is that he’s a composite figure. He’s very convenient.

SOURCE - http://www.pastpeak.com/archives/2004/07/post_1.htm

(...)

Instead of doing this every day, after watching Jon Stewart and Fahrenheit 9/11, I'm just going to ask you one question:

Who do you trust?

(...)

Epilogue:

I just saw this crap as two mini-stories and links on the right side of my Gmail account. Ugh. Is there no escape from misinformation? If I never knew or cared to know the news, and if that's all of it I ever saw when I opened my personal email account, is that what I'd believe? Is the message so neccessarily ubiquitous that journalistic etiquette demands it get two listings out of two spaces for listings in my personal email account? Wait - was there any discussion about this? The value of the "new" story of chocolate-and-peanut-butter naturally getting together and scaring the shit out of us? Or the value of giving the U.S. government the only two advertising spots the fastest growing email service in the world? How does this potent cocktail of corporate government co-propagandizing affect our sense of reality?

I guess we'll see...


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