The Other Campaign in Spanish Harlem

This article was written by the man who publishes the blog "Zapagringo." Could that name be any cooler? The Fire Witch gives her wholehearted support to the Other Campaign on the Other Side. I so wanna be a Zapagringa!

“Walking, We Ask Questions”
The Other Campaign in Spanish Harlem

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La Consulta del Barrio

On July 23rd, residents of El Barrio trickled in to the sparse basement of St. Cecilia’s for the first public meeting of the Consulta. They received bottled water, a photocopied El Diario NY article about MJB, and copies of the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration to read while waiting for the forum to begin. Young children were invited to draw and play. With half of the room’s 60 folding chairs filled, the organizers decided it was time to get things started.

Rotating between male and female members, MJB introduced its organization and the reasons for the Consulta. One member summed up the importance of the Consulta with humility, “We are but one organization. How can we make decisions for El Barrio? We’ve learned that we can fight together and that the people themselves can fight without having to be under one leader.” They capped off the introduction by explaining a bit about who the Zapatistas are and why they, MJB, are adherents to the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration. Before moving into a larger conversation about problems in El Barrio, they showed their video, “Message for the Zapatistas.”

Featuring snippets from interviews with over a dozen of MJB’s members, “Message…” is a powerful expression of their perspective, politics, and direction as Mexican immigrants fighting for justice “on the other side.” Moving through different themes and capturing equally men’s and women’s voices, the video captures their views on why they left Mexico, what they think of Mexico’s political parties, their struggles in NYC with housing, work, immigration, and the Mexican consulate, their commitment to the equal rights of women and queer folks, and their reasons for joining the Other Campaign. The video is a scathing indictment of the Mexican political system, neoliberal globalization, and oppression in the US. Describing the Other Campaign as “the magic touch to find another way,” an MJB member explained that it inspired them “to fight in NYC and to claim justice now” while building towards a greater goal: “to free Mexico and return.”
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Hizbullah Defeats Israel

Hizbullah's victory has transformed the Middle East

The defeat of the regional superpower could yet open the way to a wider settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict

By George Galloway in Beirut

08/31/06 "The Guardian" -- -- As the smoke clears from the battlefield of the 34-day war in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to count the cost only in fallen masonry and fresh graves. All is changed, changed utterly, by the defeat that the whole of Israel is now debating, from the cabinet through the lively press to the embittered reservists at the falafel stall. Practically the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush - and we all know his definition of the words "mission accomplished".

Reports that the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel's reponse to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.
If the fierce thicket of the Iraqi resistance stopped the Bush war spreading to Syria then the extraordinary Hizbullah victory has surely made the world think again about an attack on Iran. But the main - and maybe the most welcome - shift in the 40-year-old paradigm of the Israeli-Arab conflict is the puncturing of the belief in a permanent and unchallengeable Israeli military superiority over its neighbours and the hubris this has induced in Israeli leaders - from the sleek Shimon Peres through the roughhouse of Binyamin Netanyahu to the stumbling Mr Magoo premiership of Ehud Olmert.

The myth of invincibility is a souffle that cannot rise twice. Over the past week I have picked my way through the rubble of Dahia in downtown Beirut, now resembling London's East End at the height of the blitz, and across the south of Lebanon in towns such as Bint Jbeil whose centres look as if they have been hit by an earthquake. Here the litter of banned weapons lies like a legal time bomb - evidence of war crimes alleged by the UN and Amnesty International that in a genuine system of international justice would put Israel in the dock at The Hague. This, together with the beating Israel has received in international public opinion, is the collateral damage suffered alongside military humiliation.

Israel announced the capture of Bint Jbeil several times, but in truth it never held the town - or anywhere else for that matter - throughout the war. Despite raining down thousands of tons of high explosive on homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, ambulances, UN posts, oil storage depots, electricity plants and virtually every petrol station south of Beirut (the bombers seemed to have a crazed thirst for petrol stations, while telling the world that they were kindly inviting the residents of south Lebanon to get into their cars and leave their homes for a little while), the Israelis were given a severe mauling by Hizbullah fighters when it came to boots on the ground.
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Again and Again Empires Fall

Return of People Power

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In Lebanon, the pattern continues. An armed resistance a few thousand strong has humbled the fifth-most powerful army in the world, which is supplied and backed by the superpower. That much we know. What is not known is the extraordinary and decisive part played by the unarmed people of southern Lebanon. Reported as a trail of victims, the spectacle of people heading back to their homes was an epic act of defiance and resistance. On 13 August, as the Israeli army advanced in southern Lebanon, they warned people not to return to their homes. This was defied almost to a man, woman and child, who abandoned the refugee centres and headed south, jamming the roads and flashing victory signs.

An eyewitness, Simon Assaf, described "gangs of local men along the route clear[ing] paths by dragging away the piles of electrical cable, rubble and twisted metal that littered the highway. A new stream of cars would rapidly form through every breach in the rubble. There were no army or police . . . it was the locals who directed traffic, guided cars past dangerous craters and pushed buses up dirt tracks around collapsed bridges. As they neared their homes, the refugees would form great processions. Town after town, village after village was reclaimed. Powerless to confront this human wave, the Israelis abandoned their positions and began fleeing to the border. This flood of people emerged out of an unprecedented mass movement that grew up across the country as the bombs rained down."

The Lebanese resistance, armed and unarmed, is from the same wellspring as other movements throughout the world. Each has learned to put aside its sectarian differences in the face of a common enemy - rampant empire and its proxies. In Bolivia, Latin America's poorest country, the first government of indigenous people since their enslavement by Spain was elected by a landslide this year, after hundreds of thousands of unarmed campesinos and former miners faced the guns of an army sent by the oligarchic dictator, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Marching on La Paz, the capital, they forced him to flee to the United States, where he had sent his millions. This followed a mass resistance to the privatising of the water supply of Cochabamba, Bolivia's second city, and its takeover by a consortium dominated by the mighty Bechtel company. Now Bechtel, too, has been forced to flee.

Throughout Latin America, mass resistance movements have grown so fast that they now overshadow traditional parties. In Venezuela, they provide the popular support for the reforms of Hugo Chávez. Having emerged spontaneously in 1989 during the Caracazo, an eruption of political rage against Venezuela's subservience to the free-market demands of the IMF and World Bank, they have provided the imagination and dynamism with which the Chávez government is attacking the scourge of poverty.
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Dear Lying Ass Denver Media Scumbags

I saw this gorgeous picture at www.ladycelticfire.blogspot.com and just couldn't help but think how perfectly it sums up everything I feel about the Denver/Boulder media this week.

Charlie Brennan, Eternal Cuckold. John Mark Karr Not Charged in Ramsey Killing

File Photo: Center, Charlie Brennan - the Rocky Mountain News reporter who has written over 400 stories and one book on JonBenet Ramsey - at the Boulder DA press conference August 17, 2006.

Let's revisit a now-classic, premature ejaculation from Rocky reporter Charlie Brennan in the story he filed on August 17,2006, shall we?

"The decade-long search for JonBenet Ramsey's killer came to a startling end in Thailand on Wednesday."

Yikes! So the bloody old prig plays the all-too-willing cuckold yet again. You know, you would think he'd have had enough already of being Anybody's Boy. You would think he'd finally get fed up with his own crass desperation.

400 stories, Charlie? Jesus. John Mark Karr wrote less about JonBenet than you! Dude, you seriously need to take a good hard look at your own damn tabloid-tacky life. I wonder if such pathological lying to create a constant, spectacle-driven diversion from the dominant culture's ongoing theft of entire continents really pays so well that you would be so cravenly a part of all this:

Your first wife (of three) carried on with another man for a year before you even bothered to notice.

At forty years old, you built an adolescent shrine to Winona Ryder with pin-ups of her and other objectified, bikini-clad women in your office cube, insulting every woman in your workplace with your creepy sexism.

You created a firestorm of vicious innuendo against the Ramsey's with your No Footprints in the Snow story.

You became a bootlicking embedded reporter with the V Corps, giving the US military a liberal shield behind which to wage race war against innocent Iraqis, who have died in their hundreds of thousands since the beginning of the invasion.

You pimped your pen to any two-bit liar with a political grudge against Ward Churchill in order to smear that innocent man for daring to speak truth to citizens of this country about Amerikan imperialism.

You carried on an adulterous e-affair with a woman who eventually published your self-absorbed letters all over the Internet.

And now you've pimped yourself yet again to a phony-baloney story with this John Mark Karr business.

Fool, is there any tune to which you will not flail a perverted jig for a little attention? Can you really be this shallow, this empty, this vicious, and this lonely? Can you be THAT unaware that what remains of your credibility has cratered faster than the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers? Or the Israeli Defense Forces?

Since we all know what a tragically slow learner you are, let me reiterate for the remedial - if it looks too good to be true, even to your colossal desperation, it probably is.

Some previous Brennan/Ramsey posts:

Boulder DA Conference Ramsey Arrest

Charlie Brennan Killed JonBenet

Charlie Brennan on Larry King: Yep, He's Got Chronic Racist Wasting Away Disease

Bill Johnson Gets It Right on John Mark Karr

Charlie Brennan! What's That Flashing?

All Whitey All The Time: JonBenet Ramsey and John Mark Karr

Israeli Army Morale Shattered

Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army morale

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Halutz smiled with relief and called Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, who was enjoying a cigar as he waited by a secure red phone at his residence in Jerusalem.

“All the long-range rockets have been destroyed,” Halutz announced proudly. After a short pause, he added four words that have since haunted him: “We’ve won the war.”

Even as Halutz was declaring victory, 12 Israeli soldiers from the Maglan reconnaissance unit were already running into an ambush just over the border inside Lebanon near the village of Maroun a-Ras.

“We didn’t know what hit us,” said one of the soldiers, who asked to be named only as Gad. “In seconds we had two dead.”

With several others wounded and retreating under heavy fire the Maglans, one of the finest units in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), were astonished by the firepower and perseverance of Hezbollah.

“Evidently they had never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short engagement with the Israelis,” said Gad.
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Chavez Documentary Online: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Thanks to the Feral Scholar for the heads-up.

The Revolution will not be televised
Filed under: General, Imperialism, Military, Race & Nation, Energy War, The Obsequious Capitalist Male Press, Repression & Resistance, Class
By Stan at 7:56 am, 8/24/06

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED [Link to View Documentary]

This is some of the most remarkable historical footage ever filmed… as well as an inspirational documentary.

Connect The Dots

Top photograph and spot-on cultural critique of male violence in advertising found at Gender Ads.com

Frightened Whites: The Angry Indian Takes On David Yeagley and Pirate Ballerina

The Angry Indian Smacks Down Loser Jim Paine

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And as long as Dr. Yeagley spouts terms like “darkies” and patently suggests that all Black males in America are potential rapists of White women, he can always expect this blog and its editor to unswervingly question him, his commentary and his motives.

Why PirateBallerina entered itself in this fray is beyond me. The only motivation I can surmise is that this blog has expressed its support for Ward Churchill. Period.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to review PirateBallerina, this site exists not as a news and opinion journal but as an on-line over the top personal obsession with Professor Ward Churchill and the right of American Indians to express themselves as anything other than contented and acquiescent relics of a mythic American past.

PirateBallerina like Bad-Eagle cannot accept that some of us realise that the fabricated image of the White Man’s Indian is for the benefit of the subconscious, Eurocentric emotive guilt all conscious White people harbour for practicing genocide. And like Bad-Eagle, PirateBallerina offers no facts, no objective reasoning nor acceptance of actual American history as it relates to United States treatment of the North American Aboriginal.
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Frightened white girl photo nicked from the Try-Works, a website that has some of the best honkey-hokum around. Raise your hand if you're entirely convinced it's intentional.

Oaxaca Defenders Erect Fiery Barricades

A bus burns in the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 21, 2006 in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. Striking teachers armed with pipes, wood planks and clubs seized 12 private radio stations on what was supposed to be their first day back at school on Monday after unidentified assailants shot up a government-owned station already under the strikers' control. The strikers also blocked off all the main avenues and burned several vehicles. (AP Photo/Dario Nolasco)

JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi

JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi

Juan Cole
August 22, 2006

Overseas readers who don't watch US-based cable news may not know that there is a news blackout on the 24 hours news stations, which have shown endless hours of useless speculation on a ten year old small town murder case. Why the cable news channels in the US behave in this stupid and lemming-like fashion no doubt has to do with the severe discipline of the advertising market and its dependence on ratings. I.e., news has to generate 20 percent profits, which it cannot do, and so lurid infotainment is substituted. It is also possible that they are deliberately attempting to turn American gray matter into mush so as to ensure that nobody on this continent notices what is really going on around them.

But although I mind this pollution of the air waves with something that is not, whatever it is, news, the main thing I mind is the racism.

The case of Abeer al-Janabi, the little fourteen-year old Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and killed after being stalked by a US serviceman would never be given the wall to wall coverage treatment.

That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi. Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi's death is not treated obsessively in the same way. In the hyperlinked story above, CNN even calls the little girl a "woman" at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less overed up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.

The message US cable news is sending by this privileging of some such stories over others of a similar nature is that some lives are worth more than others, and some people are "us" whereas other people are "Other" and therefore lesser. Indeed, it is precisely this subtle message sent by American media that authorized so much taking of innocent Iraqi life in the first place. British officers have repeatedly complained that too many of those serving in the US military in Iraq view Iraqis as subhuman (one used the term Untermeschen). Where did they get that idea?

Anarcha Feminist Images Page

Too cool. Click here to see more images.

All Whitey All The Time: JonBenet Ramsey and John Mark Karr

Pravda calls it on the self-absorbed racism of white Amerika. Now didn't ya'll just know when Hizbullah handed those crusader white boys their genocidal butts in Lebanon that the dominant culture would immediately have to find another way to re-establish itself at the center of it's own delusions of heroic grandeur? Yeah, Ugly Amerikans care about kids.

America's corporate-controlled media: garbage disguised as news
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Sadly it is unlikely corporate-controlled media will ever again elevate their journalistic standards, given the “junk-food” culture of America. While many in the developing world are malnourished because of lack of food, America is a nation where people can be gluttonous, and still remain malnourished because of the quality of the food they are consuming.

This analogy also applies to the philosophies of corporate-controlled media: They provide the sensation of being “full” (i.e. informed) while their consumers starve for lack of substance.

Those who doubt this need only be reminded of how differently the media embraced the recent developments in the Christmas Day murder of JonBenet Ramsey and the recent developments in the Christmas day murders of Harry and Harriette Moore. The Moores, two African-American civil rights workers from Florida, were murdered when a bomb exploded in their home on Christmas Day, 1951, making them the first modern-day civil rights martyrs. A few days ago Florida’s Attorney General announced that these murders had finally been solved. Yet a viewer was hard-pressed to find any mention of this on the so-called cable “news” networks. Conversely, coverage of the alleged resolution of the Ramsey murder inundated these networks for hours on end.

That’s not surprising. Three years ago, in a PRAVDA.Ru article entitled THE IDEAL PARADIGM (November 10, 2003), I stated that in America, or at least in American media, apparently the only crime victims worthy of national attention are those who are white, female, fair-haired (preferably blonde), and from well-to-do families.

Clearly all should mourn the Moores, who died in pursuit of racial justice, just as all should mourn the death of an innocent little girl who was brutally tortured and murdered. But for those they left behind who is really more deserving of sympathy?: Evangeline Moore, the daughter who lost both parents because they courageously crusaded to end lynching and gain voting rights for African-Americans, or the Ramseys, the parents who lost the daughter they made-up, dressed and displayed like a grown woman for the vicarious satisfaction of winning a childhood “beauty” pageant.

The corporate-controlled media have given their answer. And, as usual, their answer is wrong.

David R. Hoffman
Legal Editor of PRAVDA.Ru

Charlie Brennan On Larry King: Yep, He's Got Chronic Racist Wasting Away Disease

From all appearances on Larry King Live this evening (transcript here), it looks like our Jon Bon Chucky has managed to lose about 20 pounds since the bloated smear-artist was last photographed (above) a few months ago at the Cherry Creak Sneak 5k in Denver. The Fire Witch saw with her own eyes at the DA's press conference last week how downright anorexic Brennan has become. The poor puppet's bloody shoulder blades were poking through the back of his shirt like a coked-up supermodel's.

Does this mean our Chucky's got Chronic Racist Wasting Away Disease like Rocky editorial mouthpiece Vince Carroll? Charlie told the Mystery Lady in his June 15, 2005 letterthat Vince Carroll was "... getting thinner, seemingly, all the time. Those who don’t like him may be glad to know he appears in danger of just wasting away completely."

Charlie, those who despise yer lying, racist, teletubbie, whiteboy ass like it was going outta style will no doubt be glad to hear YOU now appear to be wasting away as well. Are ya back on the bottle or something there, bub, er what?

Enquirer minds YOU enabled with your tabloid tackiness wanna know.

Excerpt. Larry King has to help addled corporate functionary Chucky think straight:

BRENNAN: Well, I think they've handled themselves in outstanding fashion. It's absolutely right that the presumption of justice has to be there and

KING: Innocence, you mean.

BRENNAN: I'm sorry. Thank you very much. The presumption of innocence. It has to be there for everybody. It has to be honored for everybody. And you know, that's one thing that Michael Tracey and John Ramsey and Lin Wood and I and I think, I would hope most people would be unanimous on.

Keep On Blogging, Ya'll. Corporate Media Ad Revenue Drying Up Like a Peak Oil Well

Newspapers trim work forces as advertising slows

Mon Aug 21, 2006 4:51 PM ET
By Robert MacMillan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The summer of 2006 has brought a rash of notices of job buyouts and layoffs at U.S. newspapers, and experts say more nips and tucks will come as advertising dollars dry up and more readers cancel their subscriptions.

Among others, Belo Corp. said on August 10 its flagship Dallas Morning News wants to cut 85 positions through buyouts as it prepares for a restructuring this fall. A day later, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, owned by privately held Advance Publications Inc., said buyouts were coming.

In July, Tribune Co. said it would cut 120 jobs at the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times Co. said it would cut about 250 jobs in its printing operations.

Nearly all the recent announcements promise pinpoint reductions rather than deep cuts. The reason publishers prefer a steady trickle, experts say, is that newsrooms are stretched too thin to allow deeper slashing.

"Any time you reduce the staffing of a journalistic enterprise, it's inevitable that you're going to lower the quantity, and probably the quality, of the journalistic product," said newspaper analyst John Morton.

The question facing publishers is how deep can they go?
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All the way to the jugular, baby. All the way til you hit bone.

Oaxaca Governor On the Run

While the women still hold the TV station they liberated for the people.

Teacher Rebellion in Oaxaca
By John Gibler | Oaxaca de Juarez, Mexico

Oaxacan teachers take it to the streets.

Thousands of protestors have forced the Oaxaca state government into a bizarre sort of roaming exile, floating between luxury hotels on the outskirts of the capital. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz worked from the guarded Hacienda Los Laureles Hotel before he went underground. No one knows where he is now. The dispossessed state senators declared the elite Hotel Misión San Felipe as its “alternate headquarters,” only to be booted after protesters warned the hotel management that they would “peacefully take over the hotel” if the senators were allowed to hold sessions there.

Oaxaca is a city under siege, but strangely so. In Oaxaca’s occupied town center, tourists browse through hand-woven skirts, wool blankets and painted wooden turtles as they walk amidst the tents and improvised kitchens of the city’s rebels. Shoppers on their way to outdoor cafés duck under posterboard signs calling for the governor’s ousting while marimba players compete for listeners with loudspeakers broadcasting the also-occupied university radio station.

Since May 22, tens of thousands of teachers and administrative workers belonging to Oaxaca’s Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers have been on strike, camping out in the colonial town square, shutting off highways, blocking government buildings and marking their territory—all of downtown Oaxaca—with political graffiti, reading, “The movement has no leaders; it is from the grassroots!” The teachers’ demands include school uniforms and shoes for all students, more scholarships, and an increased budget for school buildings and equipment.

On June 14, Ruiz Ortiz sent riot police into the town square before dawn to disband the teachers’ encampment. Police fired tear gas grenades from helicopters while more than 1,000 officers charged in, swinging their batons at anything that moved. Most of the 600 sleeping teachers scrambled out of their tents and retreated down side streets to seek cover; many were caught and beaten. Shortly after dawn the teachers regrouped, gathered reinforcements of up to 30,000 teachers and outraged residents bearing rocks, sticks and iron rods, and made their way back into the town square. The police apparently did the math and fled without a second round.
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We Can't Make It Here Anymore

While I certainly shed no tears for the end of industrial civilization - the sole, phallocentric purpose of which is to turn the living, natural world (including the human spirit) into the dead through its idolatry of Progress - this video manages to cover a fine amount of anti-crapitalist ground in a very short time:

We Can't Make It Here Anymore - by James Mcmurtry

Will work for food. Will die for oil.

This music video touches on America's economic corporate control, struggles of workers, conditions of veterans, war in Iraq, and the prison industrial complex.

Amateur Warlords

Amateur Warlords

Bush, Cheney, Blair - and now Olmert - have demonstrated they have no grasp of military affairs

By Eric Margolis

08/20/06 "Toronto Sun" -- -- For a leader who styles himself "the war president," U.S. Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush's military record now stands at 0 for 4. Even Italy's born-again "imperial Roman conqueror," Benito Mussolini, fared better.

- Fiasco I: Five years after Bush ordered Afghanistan invaded and proclaimed "total victory," U.S. and allied forces are fighting a losing war against Afghan resistance groups. Afghan heroin exports are up 90%. The U.S. just quietly deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan to hunt Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in a desperate attempt to save Republicans from getting clobbered in November midterm elections.

- Fiasco II: "Mission accomplished" in Iraq. Bush's war in Iraq is clearly lost, but few dare admit it. The U.S. has spent $300 billion on Afghanistan and Iraq, with nothing to show but bloody chaos, deficits, body bags, and growing hatred of America. The Bush/Dick Cheney "liberation" of Iraq has now cost more than the Vietnam War.

- Fiasco III: The White House had the CIA and Pentagon spend tens of millions bribing Somali warlords to fight Islamist reformers trying to bring law and order to their strife-ravaged nation. The Islamists whipped CIA-backed warlords and ran them out of Somalia. Following this defeat, the U.S. is now urging ally Ethiopia -- shades of Lebanon -- to invade Somalia, thus raising the threat of a wider war between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Good work, Mr. President.

- Fiasco IV: Bush and Vice President Cheney egged Israel into the hugely destructive but militarily fruitless war in Lebanon over the past month, in what many view as the first part of their long-nurtured plan to militarily crush Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. They did there best to thwart world efforts to halt the conflict.

To Washington and London's shock and awe, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria emerged the war's victors. Hezbollah is now the Muslim world's new hero after battling Israel's mighty armed forces to a humiliating draw.

Hezbollah's victory put the kibosh on the Bush/Cheney Holy Land crusade.

No sooner had bombing stopped last week than Hezbollah bulldozers were busy clearing rubble, and Hezbollah social workers resettling refugees. Perhaps Bush should ask Hezbollah to take over rebuilding New Orleans.
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Yes, John Temple. We Participate. Like, Duh.

But that does not mean we buy the consumer crap your paper is selling, no matter how many hits you get. You tell lies fewer and fewer people are buying, sweat pea. Yes, the Net is replete with visitors who will link from your site to theirs to give people the real story you still won't. But it was not so long ago that you were censoring those links in some desperate hope that truths would not get out. Ultimately you were forced to yield in the face of public demand for freedom of expression.

And. The collective eye-rolling the blogosphere gave your stupid Karr story put a screeching halt on what you apparently hoped would be a long-running distraction from the ass-kicking Hizbullah just handed genocidal Israel. So much for your desperate attempt to jump start a war with Iran, John Pimple.

Yes we come, we express, and then the vast majority of us leave without buying a frippin' thing from your advertisers. Traffic does not revenue make, despite your chirpy, sacchrine spin on the butt-kickin we bloggers are giving you and your racist rag. And let me say what a pleasure it has been this week watching all those people linking over from the Rocky to this wee blog to see your boy Brennan get his venal pimpitude yanked around by its multiple puppet strings.

Temple: Story Shifts From Cable to Internet

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You see readers sharing their views on our site. You also see them interacting with our own equivalent of a cable-TV anchor, Mark Wolf, who runs the -RockyTalk Live blog on weekdays. One of his posts prompted 155 comments. Another 39. (But just to put things into perspective, another item drew 335 comments. It was headlined "Bed- wetting pampered liberals," about the gloves coming off in the governor's race, with Democrats going after GOP candidate Bob Beauprez's running mate Janet Rowland for her comment associating homosexuality with bestiality.)

Readers are even putting up their own links on our site to Web pages they want others to see. It wouldn't surprise me if the next thing we see is handwriting experts analyzing Karr's penmanship online, comparing a personal letter with the pages left by the killer in the Ramsey house.

We're in a new world, where the fascination with JonBenet's story remains just as intense, but where the public has more ways than ever to satisfy its thirst.

What we have a thirst for, war pimp, is something approximating the real world where most of us who are sane live, not the race war pandering and child porn luridness you call "news."

Charlie Brennan Killed JonBenet Ramsey

OK look people. Here's the deal. Last night, the Fire Witch's site meter reports recorded a visitor from Petaluma, CA lurking on this blog for almost an hour with no less than fifty page views. So that got me thinking....

Thanks to an anonymous source who shared an eyewitness account from inside the sterile walls of the Rocky Mountain News, we know that Charlie Brennan once had an obsession with Winona Ryder. Anon stated that Brennan built a shrine to Winona in his spot by the printer cube at the Rocky. We also know from Charlie's own tortured, Mea Culpa confession that after JonBenet's murder he wrote a book about a "remarkable serial killer" that Hollywood rejected.

Ipso facto (if I have the French correct) Charlie Brennan killed JonBenet out of an obssessed desire to later present himself as a champion of justice that he might win the love of Winona Ryder, who is also from Petaluma California and who championed justice for Polly Klass, who was abducted in 1993 from Petaluma where John Mark Karr used to live, as the AP reports below:

A picture of Polly Klaas is displayed at the Polly Klaas Foundation in Petaluma, Calif., Friday, Aug. 18, 2006. Klaas is the 12-year-old girl who was abducted from her Petaluma home and murdered. Petaluma is also the same town where John Mark Karr used to live. Karr was arrested in connection with the JonBenet Ramsey case. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Apparently, unknown sleuths were getting close to nailing Brennan for the killing, so the Rocky Mountain News crime family went into overdrive to protect their "asset." Jeez, to think now of Brennan last Thursday trying to pass himself off as a serious reporter with real questions at the Boulder DA's press conference announcing John Mark Karr as a suspect in the case. Here it is, a mere two days later, and the bizzaro story on Karr is coming apart like a cheap suit on a G-man, leaving Chuck as plausible a killer as any other nutjob the Boulder authorities could set their sights on. We have the eye-rolling at the Karr story by many sane citizens and bloggers the world over to thank for a collective reality check.



In any event, it does make one wonder if there is no end to what that snarky little ogre will do to get some Winona lovin'.

And this is the dye-job phony whose Churchill Files we are supposed to take seriously?

Gimme a break.

The Increasing Degradation of the US Media

US media disgraces itself once again
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The Ramsey case shows the media at its ugliest, most shallow and most ignorant. No doubt a political motive was involved here too. The terror bomb plot in Britain was threatening to unravel, or at least disappoint, the war in Lebanon had not achieved US aims, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are disastrous. The media instinctively strove to change the subject. What does it know best, what makes it most comfortable? The intersection of sex scandals or sex crimes with the lives of rich or famous people.

Both the billionaires who own and operate America’s “free press” and its leading figures, for the most part, are human refuse. They write or say whatever suits their immediate purposes, which corresponds to the economic and political interests of the largest corporations, the richest individuals and the most predatory circles in Washington. They lie as ordinary people draw breath.

Their behavior in the Ramsey case is of a piece with everything else they do. Nothing they write or say should be given the slightest credibility.

What's becoming more and more obvious to me, is how often the corporate media is going to have to try to keep changing the subject to deflect increasing attention away from not only Amerika's heinous race war crimes but also its own. There is only so much crack you can do or hook people on before the whole endeavor goes into a death spiral. Attention spans, like ever shortening fuses, do eventually burn out.

Bill Johnson Calls It on John Mark Karr

Well, at least some people at the Rocky Mountain News wake up sober on a Saturday morning.

Johnson: Karr may be crazy, but he's not the right man

August 19, 2006

I've had enough. So I will just come right out and say what others in this business apparently will not:

Mary Lacy, that's not your boy.

John Mark Karr as much killed JonBenet Ramsey as Mickey Mouse did. This is a fool's errand you're on, and it won't end pretty.

If you haven't noticed, the guy is a lunatic.

OK, my upbringing tells me that it is a lousy thing to say about anyone. So let me put it this way: He is the saddest of all sad cases, a delusional, completely whacked out, early-teen-girl-marrying sociopath who writes bad poetry to long-dead little girls.

Perhaps that's better.

What I'm saying is no different than anyone capable of reading a newspaper or watching a television is saying.

On CNN this morning, I swore the two anchors were going to fall over laughing after they ran for the 35th-something time the audio of John Mark Karr making his wild, "It was an accident" claim.

Most journalists in this town and across the globe have been falling over themselves trying not to - in the words of Mrs. Lacy - "rush to judgment" on this fool, all the while rupturing an intestine to keep from laughing.

Not me. I can barely get up off the floor.

I watched on TV Thursday as Mary Lacy stood on a big stage, flanked on each side by a line of stiff, grim-faced G-men and cops, solemnly speaking of the "exigent circumstances" that necessitated the man's arrest in Bangkok.

On the other channel is yet more footage of John Mark Karr, staggering, half-leaning and vacant-eyed, in to his press conference, looking like a poor Pee-wee Herman impersonator.

"I'm so sorry for what happened to JonBenet," he said.

Please.
...

And Now. Back to Life in the Real World

Where the Angry Indian lives. A few days ago the Good Reverend kindly gave this humble blog some major props, for which I do most hardily thank him.

Especially spot-on from the Angry Indian recently was a post (excerpted below) that called out white male entitlement to the use of certain words that just don't ever need to be comin' outta no honkies' faces. Ever. To his critique I would also add the words "bitch" and "cunt," whose all-too-quick ejaculation from the thin lips of non-females (especially the white ones) ought to be met with nothing less than a series of rapid-fire jabs that knock their phony, fucking teeth down their throats. The use of the N-word in any of the oppressed neighborhoods I know about would inspire no less.

Here, the Angry Indian at some of his finest:

...
For those of you not familiar with Indian history under the imperial British, Macaque is the equal to "Nigger", "Kike" or "Paddy." In other words, not the sort of language one uses in civilised discourse. But ethno-bigots being what they are, they use these terms openly precisely because they feel that they can.

Why is that? Well, we are in some way responsible for allowing this to occur. Buy any rap or hip-hop Cd and you'll hear "Nigger" all day long. Even White hipsters call each other "Nigger" these days and foolishly, Africans allow White folks to use this term at will.

We see the same thing in the mainstream Gay community as well with the political usage of "Queer." For people in my age group and older, "Queer" was, and is, a grave insult. During the 1980's in New York when many White young Gay people were seeking to define their own political awareness from the Mattachine generation, Or old guard of the Gay rights movement) they decided to take inspiration from Easy-E, a member of the Rap group NWA (Niggas with Attitude). In an interview that for rappers received heavy attention, Easy-E explained to a music journalist that by using "Nigger" often enough, Black people would be turning the racialist significance of the word on its head, thusly releasing the negative connotation of the term.

Well, we've seen the results of that haven't we? "Nigger" is now used so loosely it appears in everything from popular music to heavily stereotypical interracial pornography were African males are depicted sexually brutalising helpless and waif-fish White women.

The Easy-E hypothesis didn't work. In fact it has made identifying institutional racism that much harder being that any ethno-bigot could defend him or herself by claiming that since African people use the word so loosely, it is a blatant contradiction that they cannot do so as well. Well thanks Easy-E, you made White verbal racism commonplace. And like the uneducated slave-minded fools that continue to defend the open use of the term, (actors such as Samuel L. Jackson, Terrence Howard and Ice Cube) young White hipsters who co-opt and do their utmost best to be as culturally Black as possible without sacrificing one iota their White socio-political status and privilege, will use and abuse the term as they see fit.
...

For additional critique of colonized language, see also The Feral Scholar, whose multiple contributors do some of the best demolition work out there on the unholy trinity of sexism, racism, and classism.

Boulder DA Press Conference Ramsey Arrest

Above: Now here is a man who clearly understands that this arrest story is nothing but smoke and mirrors to try to take our eyes off the massacre of civilians by Israelis armed with US weapons. In the background is Charlie Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News braying ceaselessly into his cellphone like a jackass on crack. Really. My ears are still ringing.



Below: Stealing from blogs all they report?



Below: Could this picture shriek any louder "JOURNALISM MAJOR!"?



Below: The feeding frenzy around Professor Michael Tracey, whose email exchanges with the man alleged to have confessed to the JonBenet Ramsey killing are now legend. Funny thing those emails, aye? Get ya everytime.



Below: Professor Michael Tracey. He completely stole the show from the Boulder DA.



Below: Charlie Brennan taking notes on Michael Tracey, who featured Charlie in one of his three JonBenet Ramsey documentaries.



Below: A screen capture of Brennan from the Michael Tracey documentary where Chuck is called out for his despicable "No Footprints in the Snow" story. It's why he is hiding half his face in this pic.



Below: The DA and two gringo federales. Yes, they were as tedious as they look.



Below: A minor media feeding frenzy as the DA and company exited the scene after telling everyone that they really could not tell us anything. Yawn.



Below: Troubled Chuck over bridge and waters. And still braying like a jackass into his bloody cell phone. Christ, what a crass performance we were all treated to hearing him yelling across the crowd at what invariably seemed to be female Rocky Mountain News reporters. If I was Bianca Prieto, I would pull that a-hole aside and shake him until his fillings fell out for barking orders at me that way. Girl, get a spine already.



Remember, it's all a corporate contrived spectacle meant to distract us from inconvenient truths like the US-sponsored destruction of a people's entire fucking country. Yeah, Amerika really cares about kids:

Report Back from the Boulder DA Press Conference on the John Mark Karr Arrest

And yes, it was a big yawn of a tedious two-ring media circus and not much else this morning. If it weren't for that snowjobbing clown of a Rocky Mountain News reporter screaming into his cellphone all morning long, the Fire Witch would have absolutely nothing to report. Ya'll can guess what clown I am refering to by now, right? The little loudmouthed prig absolutely could not more perfectly embody the line from Ward Churchill's 9/11 essay "Braying like donkeys into their eternal cellphones..." if he tried to.

I swear, Brennan's gonna get a nasty big brain tumor right upside the left part of his head if somebody doesn't surgically remove that frickin cell phone soon. Dude, it's a cellphone, NOT A MEGAPHONE ALREADY!!!

Photos and more details coming shortly.

Please stay tuned.

Until then... enjoy this dead-on commentary. Here's a brief outtake:

We reiterate: lynching is what the front range media does. They were the tail that wagged the dog nationally. They killed Patsy Ramsey, and they chortled over it. And the prime mover and shaker in her lynching was the Rocky Mountain News’ Charlie Brennan, who first nailed her in the public eye with the story that no footprints had been found in the snow outside of the Ramsey home, the implication being that the murderers were to be found inside.

Only, as we’ve been saying for a year or so, there weren’t no snow for there to be footprints in.

We’ve said it so many times that we’re blue in the face, but we’ll say it again: what passes for media around here ain’t media. It’s a lynchmob gang, it’s a horrendous conglomerate of smear tacticians that don’t care whose lives they destroy if they can build their own reputations.

These fuckers are scum. And they are murderers. And we hope they can’t live with themselves tonight. We hope they head into their collective garages and initiate a cleansing of the shitty little smear tactics they’ve perfected.

Hell, we’ll donate the buckshot.

They deserve nothing less.

Here, here.

JonBenet Ramsey Killer Arrested. Charlie Brennan! What's that Flashing?

Your career dissipation light just went into overdrive.



Despite your best efforts to cast suspicions on JonBenet's parents with your "No Footprints in the Snow" story, it now appears they have found the confessed killer in Bangkok, Thailand. God only knows how many children have been raped since the tabloid media, and bottom-feeder "journalists" like Charlie Brennan, sensationalized the little girl's murder by focusing on her parents instead of finding a pedophile-at-large.

**FILE PHOTO** Boulder Sheriff's Department cadets V. Montez, left, and E. Hill stand guard outside the home in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 27, 1996, in which 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found dead on Dec. 26. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Enjoy your end-of-career ride on a dead child's corpse, loser. No doubt you'll be on it to the last writhing maggot.

For those of you not familiar with the media attack dog called Charlie Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News, he has a long history of $mear campaigns against innocent people, like the Ramsey's and Ward Churchill. Charlie Brennan's slimy "love" letters to a woman not his wife are not to be missed.

And. I guess the story that Ward Churchill killed JonBenet now dies a much deserved death. Poor Snapple. Well, at least he still has a friend in anti-Churchill smear artist Jim Paine.

Here's Chuck with something god-awful all over his face (I guess the black and white gloves are supposed to be symbolic somehow):



Oh, and here's video of our favorite child-murder junkie giddily describing JonBenet's beating and strangling as "a classic whodunit!"

Who's Crying Now?

Tried to rape sovereign Lebanon; got kicked in the gonads.

Damn. I bet that smarts.

So. Whadya learn, Israel?

Coloradans! Check out which of your legislators endorsed Mass Murder

John S. of Colorado-Palestine Solidarity Campaign kindly left the following info in the comments section:

Couldn't figure out how to get in touch with you otherwise, but thought you might be interested in our new project regarding the Colorado legislators that opted to openly endorse Israel's mass murder campaign in Occupied Palestine & Lebanon.

For the background see: CPSC responds to the Colorado Executive Committee

For the sites we set up, see:

Sen. Andy McElhany: http://www.andy-mcelhany.org/

Sen. Ken Gordon: http://www.ken-gordon.org/

Sen. Joan Fitz-Gerald: http://www.joan-fitzgerald.info/

Rep. Mike May: http://www.mike-may.info/

Rep. Andrew Romanoff: http://www.andrew-romanoff.org/

Rep. Alice Madden: http://www.alice-madden.org/

BTW, we added the link to this posting to our Colorado Palestine Solidarity News & Views page tonight.

John S. / CPSC

CPSC Action: http://colorado-palestine.blogspot.com

CPSC News & Views:
http://colorado-palestine-news.blogspot.com

Folks, the amazing crew over at CPSC have put in some serious overtime to get this information to us. Give 'em all the support you can.

Accountability is everyone's responsibility.

Hizbullah and Lebanon: Still Standing

A displaced Lebanese boy holds a celebration banner as he returns with his family to their home in the Hezbollah strongholds of the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Aug. 14, 2006, after a cease fire took affect. The banners were being distributed by Hezbollah supporters. Israel halted its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas as a U.N.-imposed cease-fire went into effect Monday after a month of warfare that killed more than 900 people, devastated much of south Lebanon and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis into bomb shelters. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)

Crusader Face Plant!

Next, all those race war crusaders on Mt. Rushmore.

A man walks past the statue of President Harry S. Truman toppled during an anti-war demonstration against the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, in Athens, July 25, 2006. (John Kolesidis/Reuters)

Collaborators Will Be Shot

Palestinian gunmen, who identified themselves as members of the Islamic Jihad group, shoot a man in a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin Sunday Aug. 13, 2006. The man, who was executed in front of hundreds of people, was accused by the gunmen of giving information to Israeli authorities, helping them to kill two militants last week in a targeted attack, said witnesses and Islamic Jihad members. The victim was identified as Bassem Malah, 22, who worked in the Israeli Arab town of Umm al Fahm. (AP Photo/Mohammed Ballas)

Shot, because he helped enable pain and suffering like this:



And this:

Denver Colorado Lebanon-Palestine Solidarity Rally and March August 12, 2006