Monday, July 19, 2004

Fight of Our Lives FEATURED ARTICLES - Bush Quietly Meets With Amish; They Offer Their Prayers, Lancaster New Era - Fight Continues Over 'Outfoxed', Editor & Publisher Magazine - How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary, By Robert S. Boynton, NY Times - Seymour Hersh - Pentagon has videos of boys sodomized at Abu Ghraib, EdCone.com - This is the Fight of Our Lives; Bill Moyers' Keynote speech at Inequality Matters Forum QUOTE OF THE DAY "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.'' - - George W. Bush (July 9, 2004, meeting with Old Order Amish, Lancaster, Pennsylvania) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - JULY 19th 1881 -- US: Surrender of Sitting Bull & 186 followers, crossing the Canadian border into US; Army breaks its amnesty promise & jails him at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory. 1968 -- US: In the wake of the King & Kennedy assassinations, the House votes down a bill that would have made mandatory the federal registration of guns. RHINO HERE: Rhino's learned that a week ago Friday, the shrub held a secret meeting (no media allowed) with senior representatives of the Old Order Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Word has it the meeting took awhile to get under way as the Secret Service had to take several knives off the black clad farmers as they were processed through the metal detectors. Then when shrub asked for their vote, they gently let him know they don't vote, but they'd prey for him.  Story goes dubya had tears in his eyes & told the group as quoted in today's Quote, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.'' Bush Quietly Meets With Amish; They Offer Their Prayers By Jack Brubaker, Lancaster New Era, Jul 16, 2004 President Bush met privately with a group of Old Order Amish during his visit to Lancaster County last Friday. He discussed their farms and their hats and his religion. He asked them to vote for him in November. The Amish told the president that not all members of the church vote but they would pray for him... This story has not been reported before. You might think an observant press follows the president everywhere, especially during a re-election campaign, but no reporter attended this meeting.... MORE: http://lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/4/7564 Today (Monday), representatives from Common Cause, MoveOn.org & other progressive groups are delivering "legal papers" to Fox News' studio in NYC, challenging use of their tag line"Fair and Balanced." This, an outgrowth of the controversial documentary on the network's questionable journalistic ethics. Fight Continues Over 'Outfoxed' Editor & Publisher Magazine, July 16, 2004 Aided by controversy fanned by a New York Times magazine story, and dozens of newspaper stories since then, the new documentary "Outfoxed" hit No. 1 on amazon.com's list of bestselling DVDs today. The film takes on alleged bias at Fox News Channel, and has been denounced by Fox while warmly embraced by liberal groups. Fox has also attacked The New York Times for quoting from internal Fox memos.  In the latest development, MoveOn.org and other groups announced this afternoon that on Monday they will deliver "legal papers" to Fox News' studio in New York City, challenging the network's use of the tag line"Fair and Balanced." Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, will lead a news conference disclosing two legal actions in this matter... http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000579998 Here's a link to the NY Time Magazine story on "Outfoxed." How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary By Robert S. Boynton, NY Times, July 11, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11FOX.html Ed Cone's political blog is called, "Word Up." Here's an excerpt of a recent entry in which he reports on last week's ACLU Conference in San Francisco. Seems one of the most powerful speakers was veteran investigative reporter Sy Hersh who let loose a volley of revelation on Pentagon goings on. Word Up by EdCone.com, July 14, 2004 Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." (I transcribed some of his speech from this streaming site. Hersh starts at about 1:07:50.) He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes." The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society." Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is "in incredible chaos," he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq. "The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremely acute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn't want to hear." The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information." He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government. The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity." Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as "neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is." He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the damning info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Posted on Word Up at: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/2004/07/14.html#a1922 Audio of his speech is available at: http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/731004.htm For video, go to the ACLU Conference Web Page and click on "July 7th" http://www.aclu.org/2004memberconf Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is Bill Moyers  Keynote speech at the Inequality Matters Forum AT NYU. Entitled, "This is the Fight of Our Lives,"  it outlines several key reasons that any American considering themselves a person of compassion had better get off their butt and get active to throw the shrub gang out of Washington.  An important read. 8:23:18 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - This is the Fight of Our Lives "SEND THIS ARTICLE TO A REPUBLICAN!" This is the Fight of Our Lives Bill Moyers  Keynote speech at the Inequality Matters Forum, NYU, June 3, 2004 Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by Inequality.org It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.   Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year -- for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer. Something to get mad about.  Here's something else:... READ IT ALL AT: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-09.htm "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 7:52:48 AM    comment

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