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Page 77 of 791 pages « First < 75 76 77 78 79 > Last »
May 2007
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There IS a Possible Solution
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Fri 18 May 2007 9:38
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Out West]
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Despite tragically high rates of crime against American Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs receives only about 30 percent of the funding it needs for law enforcement, federal officials testified at a congressional hearing Thursday.
In Wyoming, just seven officers patrol the 2.3 million acres of the Wind River Indian Reservation. They are forced to answer dangerous calls with no backup, testified Wyoming U.S. Attorney Matthew Mead.
“The magnitude of crime against Native Americans is a tragedy, not just for the victims and the victims’ families but for all of us collectively,“ Mead said.
In Montana, the situation in Indian Country has become “a catastrophe,“ said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.
Witnesses at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing on law enforcement in Indian Country also cited problems with jurisdictional conflict among federal, state, tribal and local agencies and recent reports on violence against Indian women.
Committee Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said BIA law enforcement is staffed at just 31 percent of need and corrections at 39 percent of need. He wondered how a more urgent effort has not been made to boost those levels.
BIA Director Patrick Ragsdale confirmed the numbers and called crime rates on most reservations “unacceptably high.“ He said a Bush administration effort called the Safe Indian Communities Initiative, which would increase BIA law enforcement funding by $16 million to a total of $233.8 million, would be a good start. But even with that boost, he said, the funding would be at about 50 percent of need.
“On many reservations there is no 24-hour police coverage,“ Ragsdale said. “Police officers often patrol alone and respond alone to both misdemeanor and felony calls. Our police officers are placed in great danger because backup is sometimes miles and hours away, if available at all.“ » Casper Star-Tribune:
‘Tragedy’ in Indian Country: Wyo’s U.S. attorney urges Congress to help fight crime
The problem here is with the reservation system. Instead of being dependent on their own law enforcement agencies and the federal government, Indian reservations’ relationships to the states need to be clarified and normalized, so that non-tribal law-enforcement resources can be allocated to help tribal police in their work. To the extent that state and local non-tribal authorities already have access to reservation lands to cooperate, that cooperation needs to be enhanced. The feds need to learn to work better with state and local agencies in any case, and the troubles on Indian reservations are simply the most emphatic examples of the suffering that results from that situation.
Ideally, I would favor a plan that phases reservations out of existence over the course of the next couple of generations. To the extent that indigenous culture still lives among Indians’ descendants today, the good needs to be separated from other aspects that are blocking them from full membership in American society. Some degree of assimilation is essential for the people to survive, and only if the people survive will any part of their cultural heritage survive.
Until our policy on this front catches up to reality, Indian reservations will continue to be little more than remotely located (and thus invisible) non-urban ghettos, with all that word implies.
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Thank You, Stay-at-Home Republicans
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Fri 18 May 2007 9:21
by Kevin McGehee
52° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Here's Your Sign]
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By using last year’s congressional elections to express your pique at President Bush, you’ve given him exactly what he’s wanted all along.
Senators and the Bush administration yesterday reached an immigration deal that offers a multistep path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens in exchange for better border security and a new way of choosing how future immigrants are selected.
The agreement, reached behind closed doors after months of talks among a small group of Republicans, Democrats and Bush Cabinet secretaries, created little enthusiasm for the negotiators, but those involved said it is the only chance for immigration reform to pass this year.
“This is the best I think that can be done with an enormous effort on a bipartisan basis,“ said Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican and one of the top negotiators.
Whether it is enough to win on the Senate floor next week is in doubt. Support seemed to crumble even as the deal was announced.» Washington Times: Senate immigration deal forged
Oh, we can only hope.
One of the issues the stay-at-homes offered as justification for not helping the Republican Party retain control of Congress was Bush’s squishiness on illegal immigration, forgetting that it was Republicans in Congress who had been blocking Bush’s preferred legislation and driving him to the right on the issue.
Even before the election I was warning what would happen.
Usually I’d say, “So right, it’s embarrassing”—but right now it isn’t me that’s embarrassed, or at least should be. Nice job of shooting yourselves in the foot; will you remember it the next time the opportunity arises?
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So Tell Me
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Thu 17 May 2007 14:57
by Kevin McGehee
74° and sunny
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Our Times]
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You know, the makeup they use to turn an actor into Ronald McDonald does a damn good job of disguising his features—but they can only get it but so close to his eyes. So there have been actors in the big floppy red shoes that one could tell—if one cared to look closely enough—were African-American.
So tell me: where do I go to cry racism because black actors are performing in whiteface?
Update: Never mind—I should have filed my complaint years ago.
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[whew]
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Wed 16 May 2007 15:25
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
1 comment
[Asides]
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Well, that disc-dredging project is finished. And now you can actually go back into the archives right here and find stuff I was saying about, for example, election campaigns going all the way back to 1994, and about Hanging-Chad-gate in 2000.
And I just know you’ve been waiting with bated breath to be able to do that.
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Evolution in Action
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Wed 16 May 2007 8:59
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
1 comment
[Nature]
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Dissatisfied with their place on the evolutionary ladder, Pacific humpback whales (remember Humphrey?) are yet again trying to evolve into land-dwelling creatures.
Two imperiled humpbacks surfaced Tuesday evening in muddy waters near the Port of Sacramento, so far upriver that federal wildlife officials launched frantic efforts to save the whales.
“We need to start turning those animals around,“ said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.» Bee: Survival at stake for wayward humpbacks
Turning them around!? What are you, one of those anti-evolution wackos?
What’s a Creationist doing working as a wildlife biologist anyway?
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Awwwww, Poor Baby!
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Wed 16 May 2007 8:41
by Kevin McGehee
64° and sunny
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[War]
[Wackadoodle]
[Media Ochre]
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A Pakistani man being held in Guantanamo Bay is claiming he was tortured and his family hounded by U.S. authorities. According to the Associated Press—the father of Majid Khan claims his son was tied to a chair, beaten and deprived of sleep.
But a transcript of a hearing last month reveals what Khan defines as “mental torture” he says he endured at Guantanamo. Khan says was forced to use unscented deodorant and shampoo, had to play sports with a ball that did not bounce, had his baby pictures taken away, was not given a DVD player, and the people who cleaned his cell left marks on the walls.
This information was not in the AP story. Last month’s hearing was to determine whether Khan was rightly classified as an enemy combatant.» Fox News: Torture Chamber?
Through the magic of TiVo, Chris and I recently watched an episode of “Boston Legal” in which one of the clients was a man of Middle Eastern ancestry—pursuing U.S. citizenship—who had been detained at Guantanamo under suspicion of ties to al Qaeda. The things he described as being done to him were things that people would remember hearing of Americans doing to detainees, but at Abu Ghraib, not at Gitmo.
We like the show because it generally doesn’t take itself or its politics very seriously—but in this episode I was left disgruntled because it obviously wasn’t taking seriously the issue on which it was pontificating. Not seriously enough, anyway, to have bothered with actual research.
Or maybe it was assuming it could put it over on the audience because the writers knew the average viewer, dependent on the Establishment Media for its knowledge of what’s going on in the world, wouldn’t know the difference.
It’s hard to give those drive-by guys the benefit of the doubt when they first create, and then deliberately exploit, that kind of wholesale ignorance.
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And Even More Old Stuff
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Tue 15 May 2007 21:46
by Kevin McGehee
69° and mostly cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Asides]
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As of right now, I have yet only the preserved archives from the year 2000 itself to rummage through and choose postable material from. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s also been kind of fun. I could really pitch the ol’ brimstone when I got wound up.
All I can say about the stuff from 2001 and later is, I’m glad I posted what I did of that stuff before my last hard disk crash. Everything else from that batch is gone forever, as far as I know.
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Called Home
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Tue 15 May 2007 20:17
by Kevin McGehee
79° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Media Ochre]
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Yes, I know—that was Jimmy Swaggart, not Jerry Falwell.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell was stricken at his campus office and died Tuesday after a career in which the evangelist used the power of television to transform the religious right into a mighty force in American politics. He was 73.
The founder of the Moral Majority was discovered without a pulse at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.
Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group’s greatest triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan’s victory and giving Republicans control of the Senate.
“I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved,“ he said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.» AP: TV Evangelist Jerry Falwell Dies at 73
I never paid much attention to Falwell, myself—I would never have heard of him had not Big Media anointed him as The Grand Imperial Poobah of the Religious Right (without bothering, I might add, to poll the constituency).
Now, of course, the opinion-givers of the Fourth Estate must already have gone into conclave to nominate Falwell’s successor. Given the Establishment Media’s regard for Christians and conservatives, and the logarithmic escalation of that opinion when the two identities intersect, I would expect them to anoint Fred Phelps to the throne—except that Wrong-Said Fred happens to agree with the media types about Iraq.
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Most People Just Don’t Care
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Mon 14 May 2007 7:44
by Kevin McGehee
66° and cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
6 comments
[Media Ochre]
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Do you care who CBS puts out front during its nightly newscasts?
The numbers are stark. Eight months into Katie Couric’s job as the first woman to anchor a network newscast on her own, her “CBS Evening News” has not only settled back into its long-held position of last among the evening news broadcasts, but also regularly falls short of the newscast that Ms. Couric replaced.
In the latest week’s ratings, “CBS Evening News” had its worst performance since the Nielsen company installed its “people meter” ratings system 20 years ago.
Ms. Couric professed to be unfazed. “Honestly, I think we’re going to see ebbs and flows,“ she said in a telephone interview the day after receiving the ratings news. “I don’t think it’s a doom-and-gloom scenario.“
But it certainly is not a buoyant scenario either, as Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, acknowledged. “We are a distant third,“ he said. “There is no way to sugarcoat that fact.“
CBS executives say their research had predicted that the newscast would continue to struggle in the ratings, even after the network’s enormous investment in Ms. Couric—an estimated $15 million in annual salary—as well as millions more to build a new set and promote her and her newscast.
But the network seemed not fully prepared for a host of other developments that followed its expensive decision.» New York Times: Is It the Woman Thing, or Is It Katie Couric?
I’m sorry, but being a distant third among the Cobweb-Festooned Three TV networks’ news broadcasts is kind of like being a distant third among Packard, Edsel and Stutz.
[CBS chairman Leslie Moonves] and Mr. McManus took pains to deny vigorously that there has been any plan to unseat Ms. Couric. “It’s a flat-out lie that there has been any consideration, any meeting or any discussion about replacing Katie,“ Mr. McManus said.
“This is a long-term commitment,“ Mr. Moonves said.
They were solidly behind Rather too—right before they showed him the door.
Let’s get something straight here; this isn’t about Katie Couric or about whether a network news anchor should stand or sit to pee. This is about CBS and the obsolete establishment media. It’s about trying to recover from the vast foul-up of the 2004 phony National Guard memos scandal by repackaging the news business instead of reforming it. CBS thought they’d rekindle interest in their disgraced news division by bringing in a face and an on-air persona made for bleary-eyed, caffeine-intoxicated mornings, and presenting it to people at the end of a grueling day, just before dinnertime—when what they should have done is dedicate their news operation to strictly observing standards of gathering and reporting news.
It’s actually kind of reassuring that CBS’s erstwhile news viewership is rejecting the Oprah-ized newscast Couric presents; it suggests that even an audience that reveres “Uncle Walter” and maintained loyalty to “Crazy Uncle Dan” still expects a news broadcast to be about news. Who’da thought it?
The network’s executives, including Leslie Moonves, the CBS chairman, say they knew that they were acquiring probably the most avidly followed personality in television news, and so they did expect a media spotlight. But some of the other reactions caught them off guard.
“Am I surprised by the attention?“ said Mr. Moonves. “No. Am I surprised by the vitriol? Yes.“
I think there’s some scapegoating going on here against Couric; she is the face on the network’s present decline, but the brains behind it are Moonves’ and McManus’, and it goes back a long way before Katie’s arrival. The vitriol they’re hearing may be directed against Couric, or it may not. I don’t have enough faith in the people infesting broadcast TV news to think anyone in it has figured out what’s wrong and what needs to be done.
CBS News is an old tree stump on the Back Forty that America’s news consumers have finally gotten tired of mowing around. It’s time to dig the thing up and get rid of it.
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Page 77 of 791 pages « First < 75 76 77 78 79 > Last »
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