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Copyright 2011 http://www.internetweekly.org/.org. Seen at Bartcop.com.
Copyright 2011 The Daily Show and Comedy Central.
Sure, Conservative Party PM Stephen Harper nabbed another four-year term in the May elections up in Canada, but the real news is that the progressive New Democratic Party has replaced the wheezy and corrupt Liberal Party as the Official Opposition, unseating the LP’s leadership. This is largely due to the efforts of firebrand NDP leader Jack Layton, who died of cancer last week at the age of 61. Harper’s a Bush-style Conservative, although he’s tempered some of his most repellent views to appeal to the generally liberal Canadian public, and he’s never been wildly popular, winning by bare margins in Canada’s Parliament. Here’s a video of the NDP’s Stephen Lewis delivering a eulogy at Layton’s funeral last weekend. (Full text here.) He stirred the audience to standing ovations with his impressive eulogy and didn’t shy away from making Harper and the other CP members in the audience uncomfortable. (Are you paying attention, President Obama?) His definining of the differences between the small and selfish Conservative view of government and the populous propositions of the progressive NDP couldn’t be clearer, and Lewis is an obvious choice for NDP leader and a shoe-in for PM in four years. (The majority of Canadians are sick of Harper, just as the Brits became tired of Margaret Thatcher, but the anti-Harper vote has been splintered among four different parties. With the hapless LP and the Parti Quebecois vanquished, the NDP will, I think, unite the left into a concerted front against Harper.) Why is this important to America? It shows the shift is on to the progressive left, with Canada leading the way. (BTW, Lewis is father-in-law of Naomi Klein who, literally, wrote the book on Disaster Capitalism in “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” (2007). )
…he was the last of the old Delta bluesmen with a connection to Robert Johnson — he had played with Johnson back in the ’30s. R.I.P. Honeyboy. Here are two videos and the obit from Howard Reich at the Chicago Tribune:
Honeyboy with John Hammond on slide guitar playing “Walkin’ Blues”
At the Briggs Farm Blues Festival in NY, July, 2010.
Edwards, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, performed with the founders of the art form, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Tommy McLennan, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Joe Williams. He was the last of the bluesmen from his generation.By Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune, August 30, 2011David “Honeyboy” Edwards, the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a slave and — for an extraordinary 80-plus years — the voice of the Delta blues, died Monday at his home in Chicago, said his longtime manager, Michael Frank. He was 96 and had been in declining health with heart problems.Edwards picked cotton and pulled corn on Mississippi Delta plantations from age 9, living the hard life that the blues were created to address. As a young man, he hoboed across the South with a guitar on his shoulder, rode the rails, got thrown in prison for vagrancy and on various trumped-up charges and, along the way, made music with the founders of the art form: Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Tommy McLennan, Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams.
“[O]ne of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture: the media constantly talks about truth as if it … were always equidistant from two points. In other words, sometimes the truth is one-sided.” […]
“[I]t’s exactly like saying … ‘so-and-so says, two plus two equals five. But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four.’ The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.”
— Susan Jacoby, from Bill Moyers’ Journal, PBS, Feb. 15, 2008.“The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72”“The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.”
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg“Anti-intellectualism is nurtured by the false notion that democracy means ‘my ignorance is as good as your knowledge’.”
– Isaac Asimov“After all, everybody only hears what they understand.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bush Junior clone Gov. Rick Perry handed out a single license to one Texas billionaire to build a nuclear waste dump above the Ogallala Aquifer that provides fresh water for nearly 2 million people in the southwestern US. Naturally, that billionaire, Harold Simmons, has contributed over a million dollars to Perry’s campaigns. Sure the stuff is radioactive for 10,000 years, long after Rick and his rich buddy will be sucking on hot coals in the Inner Circle of Hell, but what if there is an earthquake in the near future, or shoddy construction work leads to a crack that leaks radioactive poison into the ground water? Under a deregulated President Perry government, those water drinkers would just have to kiss their asses goodbye. What a unique way to get rid of the peasants, atheists, Democrats and immigrants Perry hates. If some Republicans die along with them, it’s their own fault for not buying bottled water from a safe source. Read the disgusting story below:
Most Americans have never heard of Harold Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low.by Joe Conason
AlterNet, Aug. 29, 2011Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency—a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled “Fed Up!” Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a “dirty energy” state where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.
But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.
The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance—and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials—Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.
“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that,” Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. “Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”
Read the rest here.
Copyright 2011 Joe Conason & Creators.com.
Bill Withers, a native of the pastoral West Virginia hellhole of ‘Slab Fork,’ was working on an aircraft company assembly line in L.A. in 1970 and submitting demos of his music to record companies. A small company named Sussex Records signed him and released the single of “Ain’t No Sunshine” in 1971 and Bill was on his way, racking up five chart-toppers in as many years. The tune featured here, the 1972 release “Use Me,” is credited by some as having a major influence not only on the funk music of the mid ’70s, but also on the rap and hip hop genres. Sparse arrangement, funky lines and an almost talking vocal part bespeak the roots of all three styles. The now 73-year-old Withers all but retired from music in 1985, but it seems even the young ‘uns know his most popular songs — easy to see why: the groove and lyrics still sound fresh nearly forty years later.
H/t to Ricky L. for the idea.