Two cartoons on racial profiling in Arizona-any person who has brown skin in Arizona could be stopped at check points or elsewhere at any time day or night could be harassed and stopped a number of times in a single day or week.
even Obama if not with his official entourage would or could be stopped and the police demand his ID and papers proving he's American citizen.
This second cartoon I wasn't sure about posting because it may be seen as racist but is that what the political cartoonist wanted to portray or is it a message that Obama should be more sensitive to these draconian laws regarding undocumented workers or illegal aliens in Arizona or the other ten or more states wanting to enact similar laws .
The complication in this cartoon is a reference to the unreasonable fanatic anti-Obama Birthers (fringe loonies) who believe Obama was not born in the USA and so has usurped the presidency . And further the Birthers argue that Obama and his friends have been covering up this fact for decades on his behalf.
But it puts Obama in a difficult situation if he appears to be too lenient on illegal-immigration the uberconservative critics might argue that the only reason he is sympathetic to illegal immigrants is because he is black . On the other hand if Obama were to take a hard-line on immigration he would be accused by many believing he's taking such a stance to prove he is not influenced by the color of the skin of illegal immigrants and that after all is said and done he is a real American. So he is between a rock and a hard place
If this cartoon strikes you as racist let me know. .
First sage advice to The Tea Party /GOP Uberconservatives from Bill Maher- No. 1 if you want to lower deficit reduce the size of America's Empire.
Bill Maher To Tea Baggers: End Empire To Cut Deficit via Ole Ole Olson ,May 2, 2010
"Here's Your hat and what's your hurry"
Neocons religious right the industries PR will flood the media with alternative scenarios rather than talk about regulations and corporate responsibility well that's a stretch corporations are above or outside the law-odd didn't SCOTUS decide that a corporation is to have the same rights as any other citizen-this brings us to the difficult part for these necons and Uberconservatives to understand that ipso facto they therefore as an equal to any other citizen then they also have the same degree of responsibility.
Ed Shultz
Papantonio: BP Unleashes the Flying Monkeys
BP is a major player in Washington, but is their political influence and money going to be enough to keep the regulators and investigators at bay? Mike Papantonio appears on MSNBC's The Ed Show to talk about the political aspects of the BP oil spill.
New York Times Defends BP and other Oil Interests while dismissing concerns over the Environment
To begin we should remember the case of columnist Judith Miller at New York Times in the lead up to the Invasion of the Sovereign nation of Iraq.
Judith Miller played her role as a faux independent non-partisan non-aligned journalist who in fact actually sided with Bush and his gang of neocons or was just paid to lie who fed her misinformation regarding the propaganda pieces she fed to the NYT through Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld . She helped out CIA agent Valerie Plame on behalf of the Bush regime as punishment for her husband telling the truth about the non-eistent yellow cake purchased by Saddam a lot of smoke and mirrors . Her articles were part of a media blitz conducted by the Bush administration to influence public opinion on going to war with Iraq.
Did the New York Post or other big newspapers such as the Washington post ever offer an apology to the American people for ginning up the unnecessary War in Iraq to placate the Bush administration the Neocons and other hawks. But they should apologize not just to the American people but especially to the American families who lost someone or has a veteran who has returned home damaged in the ill-advised illegal war of aggression in Iraq. And will these newspapers and other media who led the American public astray with their lies and propaganda apologize to the 750,000 dead Iraqis or do those Iraqi lives mean nothing to America's Mainstreamedia . Anyone stood up against going to war with Iraq was labeled Unamerican, anti-American, a traitor , a fool and possibly part of a fifth column conspiracy to undermine America and to help and give aid and comfort to the Terrorists.
Once again the New York Times as it did with the Iraq War has shown it is more interested in defending the status Quo of Wall Street and rapacious unadulterated unapologetic capitalism including the oil industry than presenting the facts. They seem dismissive of anyone who suggest that the latest oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexica is an environmental catastrophe even if one of those people is the president of the United States- when Bush was in power the NYT supported most of his policies without question or used their position of trust to delude the American public over the Iraq War or the Bush regime's lack of interest in Osama Bin Laden before 9/11 or on the torture of POWs by American personnel or renditioning prisoners to countries with a poor track record regarding human rights and treating prisoners humanely.
Nonprofit Conservation Group Has Ties to Oil Interests, Gulf Oil Spill by Marian Wang, ProPublica - May 4, 2010
With crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico every day, the conventional wisdom about last month’s explosion and spill has been that this is an environmental disaster of unpredictable scale. The New York Times, in a story published today on Page One [2], challenged this conventional wisdom by citing several experts. One of those was from a nonprofit group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation:
“The sky is not falling,” said Quenton R. Dokken [3], a marine biologist and the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Tex. “We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.”
The Times doesn’t offer any more information about the foundation. So we decided to poke around. The Gulf of Mexico Foundation [4]‘s website says it was “founded in 1990 by citizens concerned with the health and productivity of the Gulf of Mexico.” Its site shows it has sponsored conservation and educational programs and partnered with the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The site also says the group represents a “wide range of interests,” including “agriculture, business, fisheries, industry, tourism, and the environment.”
But as it turns out, industry appears to be the most represented of those interests.
At least half of the 19 members of the group’s board of directors [5] have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry. One of them is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded last month, causing millions of gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico
Seven other board members are currently employed at oil companies, or at companies that provide products and services “primarily” to the offshore oil and gas industry. Those companies include Shell, Conoco Phillips, LLOG Exploration Company, Devon Energy, Anadarko Petroleum Company and Oceaneering International.
The Gulf of Mexico Foundation’s president is a retired senior vice president of Rowan Companies Inc., an offshore drilling contractor.
and from NYTPicker blog which monitors NYT fact checking stories and their biases
Huh? Using Anonymous And Dubious Sources, NYT Wonders Whether Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Is Really That Bad. at NYTpicker, May 4, 2010
A bizarre page-one news analysis about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill today asserts that the damage isn't going to be as bad as you think -- and lamely attempts to prove its point with anonymous sources, and experts with ties to the oil industry itself.
Under the headline Bad? But An Apocalypse?, reporters John M. Broder and Tom Zeller Jr. attempt to put recent events in historical perspective, reminding us of the damage wreaked by such memorable spills as the Exxon Valdez in 1989 or the Ixtoc 1 in 1979, which dumped 140 million gallons of crude oil.
After quoting President Obama's assertion that the spill is "potentially unprecedented," the reporters counter with several unprovable assertions designed to suggest that the president's concerns may be misplaced -- a view presumably shared by the corporate interests charged with cleaning up the horrific mess they made.
"Yet the Deepwater Horizon blowout is not unprecedented," the reporters assert without explanation or attribution, "nor is it yet among the worst oil accidents in history."
How does the NYT know this? An expert told them! Which expert? Oh, you know...an unnamed expert!
And to add to the problem, it's an unnamed expert who speaks in meaningless metaphors -- and is allowed to do so in the story's fifth paragraph, right there on the front page of the NYT:
"As one expert put it," Broder and Zeller write, "this is the first inning of a nine-inning game. No one knows the final score."
Yikes! Let's just hope our team wins, and the game doesn't go into extra innings.
Lies Judith Miller Told Us By Joel Bleifuss at In These Times Oct. 21,2005
In the last few months all manner of gas has been expended on the Valerie Plame case.
Did Karl Rove and Scooter Libby out Plame as a CIA officer to punish her husband Joseph Wilson IV? Who else in the White House knew of or condoned this crime? And is there some kind of medal we can bestow on Judith Miller, who suffered prison to protect her First Amendment rights?
Yes it makes for good drama, but in a perverse way the Plame case obscures the larger story. The media understandably finds it more interesting to ferret out the specific crimes of a Karl Rove than to reflect on the larger, more profound crime: how we were misled into invading Iraq. First, the Bush administration created a catalogue of lies and misinformation in order to justify invasion. Second, some prominent members of the national media parroted those lies.
And no one squawked louder than the New York Times’ Miller. As a former CIA analyst told Salon’s James C. Moore: “The White House had a perfect deal with Miller. [U.S.-funded Iraqi dissident Ahmed] Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a ‘senior administration official.’ “
For example, on September 8, 2002, Miller reported on the front page of the Times that intercepted aluminum tubes indicated that Saddam was developing a nuclear bomb. That day, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney all appeared on Sunday morning talk shows, citing Miller’s sensational exposé, which was debunked, with much less fanfare, five days later.
On May 26, 2004, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller explained that an internal audit “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.” He cited six faulty stories about the threat posed by Iraq, all but one of which was written or co-written by Miller, who was not mentioned by name.
CounterPunch Diary
Judy Miller's War By ALEXANDER COCKBURN at Counterpunch Aug. 18,2010
Lay all Judith Miller's New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists.
And while Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, --at the height of her scare-mongering campaign--it was up to #1. If we were cynical...
We don't have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller's major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam's palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive towards invasion.
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