Happy Polish Constitution Day!
Also, of course, the feast of Our Lady, Queen of Poland.
Today seems the perfect day to bring back one of my greatest hits (at least on YouTube)--my nieces , Julia and Fatima, singing the Polish National Anthem.
In honor of May Day
I'm a few months late for the 60th anniversary of the plane crash, but I thought this fitting for May Day, especially in light of the continuing uproar regarding migration from Mexico.
Download mp3 | Bruce Springsteen's cover of "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)"
Indybay | 60th anniversary of "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)"
The fire began over Los Gatos Canyon. It started in the left engine-driven fuel pump. The plane crashed 20 miles west of Coalinga, California, on January 29, 1948. It came down into hills which, as one commentator noted, at that time of year are "a beautiful green, splendid with wildflowers … a place of breathtaking beauty."
There were 32 people on board that day, but the names of only four are recorded for history. The newspaper articles about the crash describe an accident involving a Douglas DC-3 carrying immigrant workers from Oakland, California to the El Centro, California Deportation Center. Those accounts give the name of the plane's pilot (Frank Atkinson), and co-pilot (Marion Ewing). They mention the name of the stewardess (Bobbi Atkinson) and the guard (Frank E. Chapin). However, the newspaper stories do not include the names of any of the 27 men or of the one woman who were passengers on that flight, victims who were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California. The newspaper reports simply dismiss them as "deportees."
One visitor to the crash site described the scene this way:
"I was born and raised in Coalinga and can remember going to the crash site the day after the incident. My father, older sister, and I viewed the crash and even though I was about six years old at the time, I can remember it as if it happened yesterday. It was a cold and damp day and even though the reports were that the site had been cleaned up, this was not the case. The sadness of seeing the meager possessions of the passengers and the total lack of respect by those who had the task of removing the bodies will be something I will never forget or forgive."
It's snowing right now
That is all.
Military "analysts": We have always been at war with Oceania
(...please ignore that our companies are profiting from it)
NYT | Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves... The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror ...
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks...
...The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”
Of note
These both piqued my interest:
One the advantages (really!) of majoring in philosophy:
NYT | In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined
On the dark side of Schengen and EUnity:
Strib | 'Borderless Europe' divided into rich and poor
The DOJ is not the law
Glenn Greenwald has done a great job chronicling the fallout from John Yoo's memo authorizing torture, and in addition to pointing out the obvious (torture is wrong, Yoo should be disbarred and charged with war crimes), he makes an additional argument that I think has gotten too little play:
The DOJ is not the law. They are not above the law and they do not make the law. They are merely charged with enforcing it. The fact that they assert that blatantly illegal conduct is legal does not make it so. DOJ officials, like anyone else, can violate the law and have done so not infrequently. High DOJ officials -- including Attorneys General -- have been convicted of crimes in the past and have gone to prison.
Embracing this twisted notion that the DOJ has the authority to immunize any conduct by high government officials or private actors from the reach of the law is a recipe for inevitable lawlessness. It enables the President to break the law, or authorize lawbreaking, simply by having his political appointees at DOJ -- including ideologues like John Yoo -- declare that he can do it. As these incidents ought to demonstrate rather vividly, the mere fact that Bush officials at the DOJ declare something to be legal cannot provide license to break the law with impunity.
Letting sleeping cats lie
Spike is actually asleep in this picture.
After 5 years
- 4,000 Americans dead
- 29, 395 Americans wounded
- Approximately 1.5 million Iraqis internally displaced
- More than 2 millions Iraqis externally displaced
- Between 100,000 and 1 million Iraqis dead
Vice President Cheney is not particularly impressed to hear that the American people no longer support this war:
