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Politics
Posts about Politics
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
“War is hell,†said Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration: he said it following the killing of 16 civilians, among them children, by a deranged sergeant in the Afghan province of Kandahar. This massacre unleashed on the world a series of images that one cannot look at without being reminded of similar massacres from the Vietnam War — for instance, My Lai.
The Utopian's blog publishes my translation of Vásquez' latest column for El Espectador: the original is "Los Avergonzados", from last Thursday.
On the subject of shameful killings: Founderstein's Michael Austin has exactly the right take on the killing of Treyvon Martin in Florida last month. (via Russell Arben Fox)
Zoe Leonard's political wishes (found at towleroad.com, and thanks for the link, ragebunny!):
I want a dyke for president. I want a person
with aids for president and I want a fag for
vice president and I want someone with no
health insurance and I want someone who grew
up in a place where the earth is so saturated
with toxic waste that they didn't have a
choice about getting leukemia. I want a
president that had an abortion at sixteen and
I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two
evils and I want a president who lost their
last lover to aids, who still sees that in
their eyes every time they lay down torest,
who held their lover in their arms and knew
they were dying. I want a president with no
airconditioning, a president who has stood on
line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare
office and has been unemployed and layed off and
sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
I want someone who has spent the night in the
tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and
survived rape. I want someone who has been in
love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has
made mistakes and learned from them. I want a
black woman for president. I want someone with
bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has
eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who
crossdresses and has done drugs and been in
therapy. I want someone who has committed
civil disobedience. And I want to know why this
isn't possible. I want to know why we started
learning somewhere down the line that a president
is always a clown: always a john and never
a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker,
always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
(Check out this group reading of the piece, in English and in Danish!)
posted afternoon of January 14th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
More news from your Republican party (and thanks for the link, Henry): At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory speaks with some analysts of sex and of politics about the stridently anti-sex rhetoric coming our way from such as Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, at a time when America's Puritan sexual ethic is perhaps less in the ascendant than in the past couple of decades. One can only hope this is the year the panderers to reactionary "Christianity" will be hoist for their own petard. (As one has been hoping every election year since 1988 or therabouts.)
Also: Perry's lunatic belligerence makes for a nice juxtaposition with the crazy anti-sex talk. ...And on a more coherent note, Robert Reich talks straight about where Republican values are taking our country.
Darcus Howe speaks to BBC News about the riots in London. The interviewer* does not hear a word he's saying.
Update: Mr. Howe appears on today's Democracy Now!
*(Indeed "interviewer" seems like the wrong word here.)
Timothy Burke's blog dropped off my radar a couple of years ago... Today I happened back onto it by way of Russell Arben Fox -- I'm making it a regular stop on my politics reading list from now on, based just on the two topmost posts at the moment -- one of the most scathing bits of criticism of President Obama I've read yet, one that really articulates the disappointment I feel at his term in office; and a bedtime story for the Republicans in congress who are hell-bent on destroying our nation in service of an incomplete, ill-considered analogy of the national economy to a family's budget.
Daniel Ellsberg is interviewed by CNN's Jay Kernis, producer of "In the Arena" -- he believes that Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, "would probably feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal." You can watch PBS's documentary on the Pentagon Papers, The Most Dangerous Man in America, online next week on Monday and Tuesday.
Elsewhere (and linked only by way of the disgust I feel for the malefactors), you can read about Cisco's outrageous abuse of the US and Canadian legal systems (and about the US Justice Department's cooperation) at Naked Capitalism.
