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View Article  The News Network Bush Will Hate!
The News Network Bush Will Hate!


You gotta love this... Progressives everywhere should check out this video and participate in the survey. They’re looking for input so let your voices be heard Iowa!

From Iowa Rapid Response:

In 2006, the IWT founders say they will begin to fundraise through private citizens, no commercial advertising. They will request $50 from $500,000 people worldwide to get going. Check out their website below, spread the word.
 

http://www.iwtnews.com/ watch the video (2-3 mins.) and take their survey (3-4 mins.); they're requesting input.
 

The IWT team: http://www.iwtnews.com/people (Laura Flanders, Jeff Cohen, Medea Benjamin, Janeane Garofalo, Naomi Klein, Robert McChesney, Nicco Mele--Howard Dean's campaign webmaster, Greg Palast, Howard Zinn...many others).

Excerpt via Daily Kos:


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/25/104646/250

in the Recommended Diary section: "The News Network Bush will hate!"


The News Network Bush Will Hate!

by m16eib

Sat Jun 25th, 2005 at 07:46:46 PDT


This needs to be blasted into the Blogosphere!


IWT news

I don't really care if you want to miss out on the chance for truely independent news.


NO corporate backing, NO government funding, and NO commercials.

Just independent WORLD news, supported ONLY by the people.

http://www.iwtnews.com/

Watch the VIDEO, do the SURVEY, then you decide if they merit your support!

Now Click on the link and freep this survey! They desperately want Kossacks input (and yes, they wouldn't mind your donation...)
http://www.iwtnews.com/survey

Independent World Television is building the world's first global independent news network. Online and on TV, IWTnews will deliver independent news and real debate from professional and citizen journalists -- without funding from governments, corporations or commercial advertising. Using the web to organize and raise funds across borders, IWTnews is building an international movement for democracy.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/25/104646/250


View Article  Better Stay Out Of Federal Court
  Bush Appointments Extremist of the Extreme

MinutemanMedia

by Donald Kaul

Last week the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, perhaps the most influential appellate court after the Supreme. She is, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. 

She is African-American and as her supporters never tire of pointing out, a sharecropper’s daughter who overcame early widowhood and single motherhood to work her way through college and UCLA law school. She maneuvered her way through the political thickets of California to become, eventually, an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. 

She is said to write poetry, read widely and her speeches are peppered with quotations by such as Cicero, Ayn Rand, Samuel Beckett and Chris Rock - that crowd. She is, in short, a practically perfect candidate for an important judicial appointment. She has but a single flaw; hardly worth mentioning, but I’ll mention it anyway. 

She’s nuts.

She is a raving conservative lunatic who not only grasps the most extreme right-wing views available to her, she dips them in blood and waves them around like flags. She has said in speeches, for example, that the New Deal, with its emphasis on regulation of business and help for the disadvantaged, has brought upon us a new slavery. 

“In the heyday of liberal democracy all roads lead to slavery,” she has said. “We no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.”

She found a 1937 Supreme Court ruling allowing federal regulation of the workplace particularly egregious, calling it a “triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

 “Where government moves in, community retreats and civil society disintegrates. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.” She apparently wants a return to the pre-New Deal era - bread lines, child labor, unfettered stock market manipulation. Those were the days.

Still, that wasn’t what bothered me most about Judge Brown. People say extreme things in speeches all of the time; I’ve done it myself. Nor was it the fact that in cases involving discrimination against minorities or women that have come before her, she seems most often to favor the discriminators rather than their victims. There are two sides to every issue; she’s entitled to her opinion.

No, it’s statements like this:

“These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Or this:

“Atheistic humanism handed human destiny over to the great god autonomy and this is quite a different idea of freedom. Freedom then becomes willfulness.”

As a matter of fact, these are the least perilous times for people of faith - particularly the evangelical Protestant faith to which Judge Brown belongs - in my lifetime. Name the last “atheistic humanist” hired by the Bush administration to do anything. “People of faith” are in the saddle and riding the rest of us hard. And I - an agnostic humanist, if you have to know - have not handed over destiny, human and otherwise, to any god, let alone the great god autonomy. As a group we secularists are at least as moral and ethical as our religious brethren and are more fun at parties.

Believing in the progressive income tax and Social Security is not a mortal sin. Someone should tell Judge Brown that.

The scary thing about Judge Brown’s appointment was that she wasn’t even the worst nominee to be confirmed to the bench that week. There’s Judge William Pryor, Jr., who thinks Roe v. Wade (the abortion decision) “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and compares homosexual relations to bestiality and necrophilia.

God, if any, help us all.

_________


Donald Kaul recently retired as
Washington columnist for the “Des Moines Register.” He has covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way. Email: donald.kaul2@verizon.net.  You can read Donald Kaul weekly at MinutemanMedia


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