FEATURED ARTICLES
- Bush Opts for Costly Bash in Wartime, SF Chronicle
- Inaugural Fear in a Year of War, Daytona Beach News-Journal
- Will the Anti-Inaugural Protests Be Covered? by Danny Schechter, CommonDreams.org
- A
Televisual
Fairyland; US Media is Disciplined by Corporate America, Guardian/UK
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"This is the Super Bowl for us. Everyone on every team is dressed up and
playing in the game. And the bench is very, very deep. The agents and officers
at the swearing-in and along the parade route will have access to the latest
tools. Every piece of technology that exists will be a part of this.”
- - FBI Special Agent James
W. Rice II, (Supervisor of the National
Capital Response Squad)
KNOW YOUR HISTORY
January 19th 1946 -- The first complaint heard by the United
Nations Security Council was made by Iran and directed against the Soviet Union.
Iran alleged Soviet interference in its internal affairs and the refusal to
remove Soviet troops from Iranian territory. The very first session of the
UN had begun just days earlier, on January 10, 1946, in London. The issue was
resolved without UN intervention.
RHINO SEZ:
Tomorrow, the most expensive Presidential Inaugural in
US history will take place in Washington
DC. Below are links to 2 pieces critiquing
the fanfare,
each from an opposite end of the country. Meanwhile, the largest Inaugural protest in
US history will also occur, and what a field day for the
heat.
Media Critic Danny Schechter asks, "Will the Anti-Inaugural Protests
Be Covered?" And last but not least, Rhino's
Bottom Line hails from
the UK Guardian & uses just 2 of the countless shrub gang outrages to
make the point that the US media has become the pom-pom girls for Corporate
America.
Rhino sez, "Hail to
the thief!"
(o/)(o/)(o/)
Bush Opts for Costly Bash in Wartime
FDR Scaled Back Event, but There's No Clear Precedent
by Edward Epstein, San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 2005
Jubilant Republicans are descending on a nippy Washington for President Bush's
second inaugural on Thursday, an affair of celebrations and protest, pomp and
a predicted high temperature of 35 degrees. Beneath the festivities surrounding
the 55th presidential inauguration, there is a current of unease. Washington
is capital of a nation at war, with 150,000 Americans serving in Iraq and 18,000
in Afghanistan. So far, more than 1,500 military personnel have been killed
in the two countries, with more than 10,000 wounded. Some critics have suggested
scaling back Thursday's inaugural, which will cost $40 million in privately
raised funds for the parties, parade, dinners and entertainment events. It
will cost tens of millions of dollars more in public money for an unprecedented
security effort that will involve about 6, 000 people who will cordon off a
large chunk of downtown.
MORE: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/18/MNG49AS6N51.DTL
(o/)(o/)(o/)
Inaugural Fear in a Year of War
by Pierre Tristam, Daytona Beach News-Journal, January 18, 2005
In Europe the Russians had just raped and pillaged their way to Warsaw, "liberating" the
first European capital occupied by Nazis five years earlier. The western front
had bogged down in a six-month stalemate thanks to Eisenhower's strategic mistakes
and his field generals' tactical ones. In the Pacific, the battle for the Philippines
was inching past Douglas MacArthur's ego. In Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt
was personally urging Congress to pass a work-or-fight bill for all men between
18 and 45. The allied offensive could not slacken, the president wrote to Congress, "because
of any less than total utilization of our manpower on the home front." So
went the week preceding FDR's fourth inauguration.
That slushy, Hamburg-gray Saturday in Washington, the country really was at
war in every sense of the word. The picture was just as gray militarily. Roosevelt
invited a few people to his inaugural ceremony, held it at the White House
instead of at the Capitol, kept his address to the length of a brief advice
column in the newspaper and served his guests cold chicken salad. There was
no parade, no celebration. President Bush, our neo-New Dealer, is reaping too
much unfair criticism for the way he's going about his second inaugural...
The criticism is unfair because what most liberal detractors refuse to acknowledge
is that Bush never intended to be a war president. He was only playing one
on TV.
MORE: http://www.news-journalonline.com/03ColEssays.htm
(o/)(o/)(o/)
Will the Anti-Inaugural Protests Be Covered?
by Danny Schechter, CommonDreams.org, January 17, 2005
Some of us are old enough to remember that bright day in January 1977 when
Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter got out of their limo and strolled down Pennsylvania
Avenue to the White House. We remember it now with nostalgia because that more
hopeful American moment is long gone. Now we have elections deemed "brief
accountability moments" and a garrison state to insure the trains of social
order run on time.
Homeland security? Homeland insecurity is more like it, as new state of the
art police state tactics are introduced to protect the president from protesters
who plan to try to give his Administration as hard a time as they can. This
year's re-inauguration promises to be more fun and games and who knows what
repressive tactics will be introduced if somehow the event turns into a street
fight or worse. Will there be another Chicago or Tiananmen Square or just mass
arrests like at the RNC in New York? The FBI uses a sports metaphor to describe
its overkill approach even as it waves a stick bigger than any Teddy Roosevelt
carried. They can't wait to test out their souped up contain and control strategies.
The testosterone is pumping among the G-Men. They want to engage...
MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0117-20.htm
8:05:09 AM 
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