October 11, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

PSST, THE WAR IS WRONG

There are some disturbing similarities between the war in Iraq and Vietnam, but there are also some stark differences. In the Vietnam era the streets were filled with protesters. This war has drawn some protests, but nothing on the scale of the Vietnam war. Maybe it's because there's a "volunteer" army now instead of the draft that existed back in the 1960's. Another difference is the lack of protest in music. Lots of anti-war music was recorded during the Vietnam era. Even now, after four years of this atrocity there is still little protest in music. On the country charts Tim McGraw has an anti-war song and Merle Haggard recorded an anti-Iraq war song. Film makers are beginning to address Iraq. And now Bruce Springsteen has a new album that takes on this issue. This article by Brian Morton is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Fast forward to today, and if you listen to the radio, it's hard to tell that America is in year four of a gigantic losing quagmire our leaders sank us into on the basis of lies. Turn on the television, and you'll only see a debate between those who were in favor of war and are in favor of staying, and those who were in favor of war and now are thinking we might want to be withdrawing. All those who were never in favor of the war in the first place are still sitting on the sidelines, wondering how those who were right all along still never get a chance to say their piece into the microphone.

Even some of the most powerful artistic statements in pop music about the war still tiptoed around the subject--Green Day's American Idiot and its elegy to the war's futility, "Wake Me Up When September Ends," didn't take on the issue of the war or our leadership directly but hinted at it in the lyrics or in the somber accompanying video depicting a young man leaving his girlfriend to go to war.

PROTECT FREE SPEECH IN THE DIGITAL WORLD

As technology advances, we should also advance civil liberties, not restrict them. Verizon Wireless tried to do that recently when they considered messages from NARAL, a pro-choice organization on abortion, to be improper. Verizon was trying old-fashioned censorship about an issue someone at Verizon didn't like. Fortunately, pressure forced Verizon to rethink its position. This editorial is from the New York Times and linked at www.truthout.org:

If Verizon had attempted it on normal phone lines, it would have been violating common carrier laws that bar interference with voice transmissions. Unfortunately, those laws do not apply to text messaging.

Given this chilling experience, the Federal Communications Commission should quickly issue regulations that also bar interference with text messaging. Unfortunately, the F.C.C. is in the thrall of the carriers, and the Bush administration has an unblemished record of siding with corporations over the rights and safety of American citizens. That means Congress will have to take the lead, as it must on other issues affecting the mushrooming world of digital communications.

Verizon admitted its mistake and pledged not to repeat it, but that's not enough. As admirable as Verizon's retreat was, the company reserved the right to change the rules at any time. Verizon still says "some well-intentioned employee" got too zealous. If its top executives were not engaged on this issue, they should have been.

Our democracy is built on basic freedoms not being left to individuals, or individual companies. And there is special cause for worry in our business. American newspapers can resist government intimidation because the Constitution is on our side, but also because we control the presses. That is the real meaning behind "freedom of the press," and authoritarian societies know it. In the 1980s in the Soviet Union, you had to have a license from the Communist Party to own a Xerox machine; the Soviets understood that it was a printing press.