Song for Gaza, and Israeli Operation in Bethlehem

"We will not go down"


Rare video of Israeli operations in Bethlehem and a very brief discussion of how the video became available:


I had to take an ethics class for my MBA, and the short version of the class was "If you would do an action that everybody knew about, then it's an ethical action". I'm not sure I agree with the idea that being willing to be seen doing something makes that something ethical, but certainly by that standard, the IDF are doing unethical things because they hide them.

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A Salient Reminder; This Week We Celebrate Libraries, Books, and Access to Information

Put your opposition to Gov. Palin into action.

Volunteer for the American Library Association.

Support Banned Books Week and help spread the word.

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More on Sarah, Censorship, and The Librarian

-From ABC, Watch here. Not much else to say except I hope, somewhere some document comes to light about specific titles. But in the mean time... The Librarians don't trust her, and neither should anyone else. It's not just the censorship (though that is the worst for me.) It is the firing, intimidation, and now the lying.

Brian Ross reports that Sarah Palin asked about removing books from the library, then tried to fire the librarian

ROBIN ROBERTS: No doubt Sarah Palin has a huge following already. So many love her, but many want to know more about her resume. The details of her tenure as mayor and governor are still coming into focus. And this morning, we have new information on one battle she waged as mayor of Wasilla, a battle that brought her toe-to-toe with a local librarian over which books were appropriate and which were not; something her critics say crossed the line into censorship. Our chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross has the details. Good morning, Brian.

BRIAN ROSS: Good morning, Robin. As the mayor of the town Wasilla, Sarah Palin raised questions about removing books in the public library and then tried to fire the town librarian. She says the two were not connected. Sarah Palin was elected the mayor of Wasilla in 1996, with the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God.

REV. HOWARD BESS: It wasn't just simply a matter of her using the religious right to get elected. She was one of them.

ROSS: Palin has since changed churches. But Assembly of God ministers are well-known in Wasilla for taking strong positions on moral issues, including this recent sermon by the current pastor.

ED KALNIN: Everybody in the world has a guilty conscience. That's why homosexuals wants laws of the land to justify their sickness; they have a guilty conscience.

ROSS: Around the time Palin became mayor, the church and other conservative Christians began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called "Go Ask Alice," and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called "Pastor, I am Gay."

BESS: This whole thing of controlling, you know, information, censorship, yeah. That's a part of the scene.

ROSS: Not long after taking office, Palin raised the issue at a city council meeting of how books might be banned according to news accounts and a local resident, a Democrat, who was there.

ANNE KILKENNY: Mayor Palin asked the librarian, what is your response if I ask you to remove some books from the collection of the Wasilla Public Library?

ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, the then president of the Alaska Library Association, responded with only a short hesitation.

KILKENNY: The librarian took a deep breath and said, the books in the collection were purchased in accordance with national standards and professional guidelines, and I would absolutely not allow you to remove any books from the collection.

ROSS: A former town official and Palin ally says Palin's questions were only rhetorical.

JUDY PATRICK: There were no specific books that were ever banned from the city. Mayor Palin did enquire of the librarian about the policy of removing books from the library.

ROSS: A few weeks after the council meeting, the mayor fired the librarian, although she was reinstated after a community uproar.

JUNE PINNELL-STEPHENS: You'd like to hope that elected officials understand the role of the librarian in democracy; that is to provide access to information to everybody in the community.

ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, left two years later, and according to friends, because it was just too hard working for Sarah Palin. In a conversation with me yesterday, the librarian said she could not recall Palin ever asking for specific book titles to be removed from the shelves, but she acknowledge her treatment by Palin had been very rough – "I just don't care to revisit that time of my life," she told me.

ROBERTS: I'm sure. Brian, you know there's so much out there on the internet. And much of the information is wrong. In fact, in response to your story right there, the McCain campaign sent out this three pages to us. And they're trying to shoot down as much as they can. In fact, there was on the internet about a list -- a long list of books. That just wasn't true.

ROSS: That not true, that long list of books that some may have seen on the internet, that's simply made up. That was not part of this discussion. The mayor did raise the question of how to get books off the shelf. If people were picketing the library, would you take books off the shelf? The librarian was offended by that, as were members of the Alaska Library Association, who to this day remain very wary of Sarah Palin.

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Banned Books Week 2008

Banned Books week is coming up soon. I think that we should make a concerted effort to talk about book banning, Palin and Library-gate every where we can that week. If you have a blog, post about it. If you have a mailing list send out the word and point to references and posts about the story. If you know a librarian tell them the story and ask them to spread the word.

I know this whole election isn't about the lipstick-pitbull, but she is a huge problem and things like her extremist views on censorship are the reason why.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, this annual ALA event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. This year, 2008, marks BBW's 27th anniversary (September 27 through October 4).

BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met. from the ALA

Join the Banned Books Week group on facebook.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”- Justice William J. Brennan, Jr

UPDATE: One commentor suggests that we all contact Charlie Gibson and encourage him to ask Gov. Palin what books she wanted to ban in her local library when she was Mayor in 1996. I think that is an excellent idea. Please contact Charlie here.

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Sarah Palin Wanted to Ban Books in Alaska

Sarah Palin's Book Club

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter20and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
M y Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughte rhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John20Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth

The story was reported in Time Magazine and the list comes from the librarian.net website. (This list has not been confirmed. But I would not be surprised to find out it was either 100% true or was even longer.) What HAS been confirmed is this...

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor. from Time

Correction: Sep 7, 2008 6 pm.

The above list of books is a list of books commonly banned or attempted to be banned from libraries-- this particular list cannot be proven to be Palin's.

Point is though-- she wants to ban books and tried to abuse her power to get a Librarian fired for not agreeing to do it. The follow up on Mary Ellen Baker is that she later resigned. If there was any pressure brought for her to leave-- I pray that it can be exposed. Everyone loves the librarians.

Here is a list of books commonly attacked in the USA.

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Valerie Plame Wilson on The Daily Show

Jon Stewart Interviews Valerie Plame Wilson
About her book "Fair Game"

No kidding, the CIA redacted passages having to do with breast feeding.

Seriously.

Welcome to Alice in Wonderland.

Great interview. And nice to see she's doing well.

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Bound For Whoring

“Lame, Corporate Freeze-Out!”

Serendipity is indeed a strange bird.

Last night, I found myself up late watching perhaps my favorite TV channel—Turner Classic Movies, and their theme (which continues into today) is biopics of famed musicians. Last night they screened 1976's grossly unsung (at least nowadays) “Bound For Glory”—a phenomenally skillful depiction of the life of the late, great American songwriter/musician Woody Guthrie. Now, I was familiar with Guthrie's life —its up and downs, and the amazing art he created therein, but seeing the movie, one of the most beautifully shot films I've ever seen (thanks to the golden-eyed cinematographer Haskell Wexler), depicting dust-bowl America as a wonder of desolation, hopeful sunrises and bleary-eyed sunsets.

Guthrie's story itself was something that kept me thinking much of the night, too. David Carradine played Guthrie with a deft, naturalistic ease—conflicted and determined, but most of all, as a man of rich levels of empathy for his fellow man, and the state of world in general. His (and history's) Guthrie traveled with (via the rails along with the hoboes), and documented the travails of the millions of Americans left adrift in the economic hell that befell the Wsetern U.S. with the Dust Bowl and the latter stages of The Great Depression. He documented these American “voyages” through his songs—songs celebrating the American ideal that was not being put into practice by too many in power, and songs celebrating the spirit of the “little guy” worker at the mercy of his moneyed “betters” who ran everything that mattered in the U.S.

There's a key set of scenes in the movie where Guthrie, after receiving some fame for his musicianship and vocal styling nabs a job at a Los Angeles radio station. He sings a slew of the Okie standards of the time, but began to slip in more than a few of his decidely pro-“the little guy”, union and anti-corporate bully songs. He of course, runs into trouble with the station's boss who then asks Woody for a list of every song he'll perform before each week's broadcast because of fear of upsetting the sponsors—namely many of the farms and growers who took deep advantage of the poor migrants who came west seeking a way to survive. In one passage, Woody, who's ducked the angry station manager for days, finally shows up. The manager angrily demands the list of songs which Woody reluctantly produces. The manager goes over it, nodding his approval at the non-controversial tunes on the list until he stops at one and hesitates over the title. He's not familiar with it.

“This isn't one of them...union songs is it? I mean Woody, our sponsors...”

“Oh no.” Woody reassures him. “THis one's about a man who catches his wife cheatin' on him. He kills her.”

“Oh.”, says the suit. “That's okay, then.” And Woody looks at him with naked disgust.

Guthrie would battle constantly with that paradox of entertaining the masses, and remaining true to himself as a supporter of progressive causes, so much so that he is pretty much the avatar of that sort of putting one's self on the line that way. Not very many would follow him and be able to maintain a popular audience as he did. But a few have managed to do so.

One was the several posts aforementioned Curtis Mayfield. I wrote plenty on Curtis, but it's a comment by one the readers here that stuck out for me days ago, and even moreso today.

“Curtis always seemed to be relevant no matter what was going on.

To get the full flavor of that era, add Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Sly had his moments during the Psychedelic end of the Sixties, but never got as deep or as meaningful as the other guys. Perhaps he would have if he hadn't let his talent dissolve into the drugs.

Somehow, despite what must have been great commercial pressures to stay within the old "love and lost" formula of pop music, they were able to make music that spoke of the fight for freedom, to comment on the war, to say things that may have been a bit on the edge.”

Carol 10.28.07 - 3:45 am #

Carol hit that paradoxical “"ars gratius pecunirus” (art for money's sake—thank you, Amuseinc) note perfectly. Then, I saw “Bound For Glory” last night which dealt with this subject again.

And then in my blog trawling, this story today completed the serendiptous circle with a pen-jab right through the paper to the table top:

(Hat tip to Atrios for pointing the way to this at Down With Tyranny)

For all the kudos Springsteen's new Magic album is earning for the joyful rocking it delivers, it's rife with self-doubt, disillusionment, anger and acceptance of the disappointments and compromises life inevitably presents the thinking person.

A couple weeks ago the new album was #1 on the Billboard album chart. Kid Rock's new album knocked it down a peg and this week, Springsteen disposed on Kid Rock and is back at #1. The album is already gold and headed right towards platinum and he's got a great shot to win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year. Magic's reviews virtually everywhere are over the top and the intro to his latest interview in Rolling Stone refers to the album's subject matter as "weighty stuff like the direction of our democracy and party stuff that recalls the days when sparks first flew on E Street more than three decades ago."

Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn't interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no... not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year-- across all genres and demographics-- radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he's pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.

"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening-- if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is-- is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.

Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we're seeing that right now.

Of course, Clear Channel hasn't publicly said they are boycotting Springsteen's music. But they are. Fox News, hardly a hotbed of liberal alarmists, reports that "Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from Magic...

“Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.”—The Who

What's chuckle-worthy here is the silly-ass irony of it all. Here you have Clear Channel clumsily acting the role (again, as first noted in their Dixie Chicks ban) of the out-of-touch, corporate-whore, hayseed radio station owner from “Bound For Glory”—except, they're not answering to any aggrieved sponsors per se. Because the radio game is a lot different than it was in the 1930s. In fact, it's a lot different than it was a mere eight years ago, as the medium has lost 20% of its listeners since 1989. Ray-diddi-o is NOT about pushing records up the charts anymore. My kids—13 and 18 years old don't listen to the radio AT ALL. And neither do their friends. They get their music via the internet. They haven't turned on the radio tuner of my stereo in at least two years, which is kind of scary to a person who grew up on terrestrial pop radio like I did. In fact, what with the new music delivery systems in the computer age, like the iPod and internet and satellite radio, a recent study shows that terrestrial radio actually hurts record sales. And with the steady bleed-away of the listener base, the big ad rate money of the old days is just that—of the old days. What radio is now is little more than a massive corporate entity owned lock, stock, and barrel by a few large mega-companies. It's a corporate entity that leverages its monopoly powers and reach as a political weapon to be used by the most desperate bidder. But it is in fact, an increasingly toothless tiger, as broadband access finally reaches deep into once-isolated rural outposts and gives listeners a wider range of music and general programming and eats deeper into an already disappearing audience. Still, Clear Channel uses what power it has left in the service of furthering their goal of total domination of the medium, and wields its increasingly brittle cudgel for their wingnut masters on Capitol Hill who either pass laws that favor the company, or scuttle laws that could hurt them.

But they couldn't kill The Dixie Chicks...and in spite of their lame-assed “Boss Ban”, the album's gone gold in three weeks, (rapidly headed toward platinum status) and been the #1 record in two of its three weeks of release, slipping to #2 against the human Hep-C culture Kid Rock's release for the middle seven days.

What's the saying? “They're already dead...they just don't know it yet.”

And the secondary irony in their lead-eared mishandling of the Springsteen album lay in “The Boss's” tack of late as a performer. For the last decade, he has very much embraced the ethos of Woody Guthrie, in singing about the plight of “the little guy” on his own albums, and yes, singing several Woody Guthrie songs (“Riding In My Car”, “Deportee”, “I Ain't Got No Home”, and “This Land Is Your Land”) on various tribute albums and concerts. This note on Springsteen struck me:

Rather than continue as the wealthy rock-poet of the American grunt and risk being labeled inauthentic, Springsteen set out for new territory. As he put it in Better Days, a 1992 song, "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/ A rich man in a poor man's shirt.”
--------------------------------------------

Then in '95 he put out an album of folk songs, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it felt more like a Woody Guthrie tribute than a Springsteen record. The songs were stark and compelling, but the old optimism was gone. The characters of Tom Joad lived on the fringes of American life...

The funky parallels to the radio battles Guthrie found himself fighting as an artist, and that Springsteen now finds himself embroiled in are just plain...weird. Ghost Of Tom Joad? As in The Dust Bowl, The Grapes Of Wrath Okie Tom Joad? Who Woody Guthrie wrote a 1940 song entitled “Tom Joad” about?

Eerie.

But in the end, the “Boss Ban” is a failure, as Clear Channel continues to “Yee-haaaaah!” in between wheezes— every gimpy-ass step of the way to history's dustbin. They're in the same position as the “record” industry nowadays—spindly legged on a trembling sea of sand. And the same way that record companies fought so damned hard, and in the end futilely to retain their monopoly over content delivery, terrestrial radio with Clear Channel as their paragon wil lose its battle as well. They've got so much invested that they have to fight it. Take a hard look at who's backing the congressmembers against Net Neutrality and you won't be surprised to see the names of giant telecoms and “Old” media protecting their asses. Trying to smack down a Springsteen and his ilk is a chump-change favor in return for the legislative hook-up from their boys on Capitol Hill.

The ghost is already out of the machine, though. They've already lost. As I said, my kids and their friends ain't checking for radio at all. And when's the last time you saw a kid listening to a portable radio of any kind? Who's the last person you know who said “Hey! I bought a new radio!” How much has your own listening dropped in the last 10 years?

Yeah... I thought so.

So they have their moment, Clear Channel does. I'm not going to say don't fight them. But I am saying they're pretty much just a punch-line to a joke we'll soon forget the set-up to. Besides, it's so God-awfully easy to sidestep them in this age. Time was, you had to wait an hour or two until you heard the song you wanted to hear. Now, you go online.

You hear the song.

You see the video.

Just like that.

Ain't America a grand place?

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