Obama Calls For Up-or-Down Vote On Health Care, The Quake In Chile, The Right Fired Up
February 28th, 2010 - by: danny
Welcome to March, no lambs this time. It is the 60th day of the year, the anniversary of the Korean independence movement, the day that the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the day the Salem Witch Trials got underway, and in 1954, the day that Puerto Rican Nationalists attacked the US Congress.
Today, Congress is under attack from within with late night battling Saturday in the Senate over one member’s unilateral decision to object to, and thus put a hold on an extension of unemployment benefits.
A former ball player, Mr. Jim Bunning of Kentucky stayed on his own mound and took all sorts of balls aimed at his head. He would not back down insisting that the benefits be paid for first. As a result, tens of thousands of families on the edge will not have money to buy food or anything else this week. The Dems raised a ruckus but then backed down.
RELATED:
• A Fast-Growing, New Labor Union For People WITHOUT Jobs! h/t Carolyn Baker
The Unemployed Now Have Their Own Union, and It’s Catching on Quickly – An ingenious grassroots union for the unemployed is only a month old – and its numbers are growing.
It’s been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grassroots organizing campaign. In case you haven’t heard about it, the union’s name is “UR Union of the Unemployed” or its nickname, “UCubed,” because of its unique method of organizing. [More here →]
UnionofUnemployed.com: Useful. Unique. Unified.
You lost your job. You’re not alone. 31 million Americans face the same challenges. You want your job back. You want your life back. But you can’t do it alone. Neither can anyone else. You all need each other. That’s what UCubed is here to do: Help you and 31 million other Americans organize, work together and get back to work. Let UCubed help you connect. Form a cube, and multipy your political and economic power by 6. Then by 36. Eventually, by 31 million. Take Control. [More here →]
• Obama Is Going For It (Supporting the plan, flaws and all)
WASHINGTON — The White House called for a “simple up-or-down” vote on health care legislation Sunday as Speaker Nancy Pelosi appealed to House Democrats to get behind President Barack Obama’s chief domestic priority even it if threatens their political careers.
In voicing support for a simple majority vote, White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle signaled Obama’s intention to push the Democratic-crafted bill under Senate rules that would overcome GOP stalling tactics. [More here →]
More Lobbyists On The Way
There were rallies on all sides of the health care war with the insurance companies vowing to spend more and even send more lobbyists into the fray – there are already 8 Lobbyists working on each member of Congress, wearing them down with a mountain of minutia and probably dooming the prospects of any change that will cost them a dime.
The New York Times ran a long piece in the Week in Review making clear that killing the bill will not kill an increasing cycle of increases in costs and higher rates with devastating consequences for the economy. Inaction will have a high cost but its not one the industry and its allies worry about.
• HP: BATTLE CONTINUES ON THE AIR: A ROUND UP OF THE SUNDAY INTERVIEW SHOWS
Hello, good morning, welcome to you Sunday Morning Liveblog. My name is Jason and today we will talk about health care reform for the 4,398th time in the past year on a Sunday because of the Health Care Summit where no one solved the problem but nobody killed each other either, so, win for America. I think that the Congressional Democrats are going to finally nut up and try to pass the reform or not.
I hope that’s the case. It’s been so long that I cannot remember a time before health care reform. As far as I can remember, this nation was founded specifically so that we could have a health care crisis. Someone hit me up on IM on Friday asking if it was true that Obama was going to ask for three more months of deliberations on health care reform, and I was like: “Uhm? Is having a hole
The Earth Is Quaking
The makings of a catastrophe are here but more physical disasters are all over the news. The threatened tsunami in Hawaii did not happen, disappointing the mad surfers who had vowed to ride the big waves in. In Haiti, flash flooding arrived with the rainy season further jeopardizing the million people who are still homeless. The quake in Chile was causing aftershocks with two million said to be affected a state of catastrophe in effect and over 700 dead as of last night. That number will go up. Who knows if somehow the Gods weren’t mad at the people there for choosing another right-wing government.
• AP reported:
AP – Heroism and banditry mingled on Chile’s shattered streets Sunday as rescuers braved aftershocks digging for survivors and the government sent soldiers and ordered a nighttime curfew to quell looting. The death toll climbed to 708 in one of the biggest earthquakes in centuries. (NOTE: How quickly The Chileans responded. There was no three day “assessment” delay as there was in Haiti.)
The Daily Beast reported earlier:
National Emergency Agency officials say the Chilean death toll is over 300 after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake shook the South American country yesterday. The shock was the most powerful earthquake to hit the area southwest of Chile’s capital, Santiago, in 100 years, damaging nearly half a million homes and throwing residents from their beds. After the shock, seven-foot high waves rattled the Pacific, killing at least five people on remote islands. While a massive disaster in itself, the quake poses an incredible challenge for Sebastian Pinera, who will take office as Chile’s president in two weeks. “We’re preparing ourselves for an additional task, a task that wasn’t part of our governing plan: assuming responsibility for rebuilding our country,” he said.’
While the world reacts in shock and with offers of help that the Chileans have yet to accept, this is the news that is twittering young America according to the timelife blog:
“You’re probably aware of the 8.8 mega-earthquake that shook parts of Chile Saturday morning. American Idol’s Elliott Yamin was present for it, and tweeted the details of the earthquake in Chile about what he’s calling the “scariest nite/morn of my life.”
By Saturday morning Elliott Yamin had nearly 15,000 followers on Twitter. He spent the early part of Friday complaining about a competition he’d been participating in while he was in Chile, saying, “Thanks 4 nothing Chile!…what an awful experience!” and calling his trip “an incredibly huge waste of time” during which he was “treated like an amateur.” [sic]”
Poor dear.
• TIME was quick to assess the comparisons between Haiti and Chile:
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile early on Feb. 27 was 500 times stronger than the 7.0 quake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians last month. And yet the number of casualties in Chile appears to be exponentially smaller, with the official death toll still in the hundreds. Far fewer people were rendered homeless than in Haiti, and much of the telephone service in Santiago and parts of central Chile had been restored within five hours.
Comparisons between the two countries will no doubt be much discussed when the U.N. hosts a conference in New York City on March 31 to hash out how best to help Haiti rebuild. Donor governments already know why there was so much less destruction in Chile: it’s because the government there forces builders to adhere to rigorous codes, while Haiti’s incorrigible corruption and carelessness left such regulation all but non-existent. (NOTE: No reminder here of the history of oppression, exploitation, US invasion, US backed dictatorships, massive poverty, extraction, etc. It’s all their fault implies the “blame the victims” boneheads at TIME.)
Michael Moore.Com, HAITI’s New Needs Assessment Rejects Militarization of Aid
• You can see citizen videos from Chile on GlobalVoices online
• Undernews: Reality Check — Big Earthquakes
THE GUARDIAN has a lot of interesting data about past earthquakes such as: “the most deadly earthquake to strike over the past 110 years hit Tangshan in China in July 1976. Measuring 7.5, the quake caused 255,000 deaths.
Over the past ten years the world has averaged about 15 earthquakes a year that were strength 7.0 or higher and about 1.4 a year that were strength 8.0 and higher. The world has average about 26,000 earthquakes a year with last year’s total – 14,788 – being the lowest of the decade. If earthquakes continue at the rate of the first two months of 2010 the figure for the year will be even lower – around 10,000.
Death rates vary markedly, however, ranging from the over 200,000 this year and in 2004 to only 712 in 2007.
• Afghanistan: the Big Picture
• RT: Feminist Group Accuses Israel in Ethiopian Baby Contraceptive Scandal
• IRIN: Fighting for Peace in Congo
RELATED:
• IRIN: GLOBAL: Forced to Flee – New series of short films on displacement
Millions of people around the world have been forced to leave their homes. Some have been driven out by conflict, some by natural disasters. Some have been displaced in the name of development, others by climate change.
Even before a devastating earthquake hit Haiti on January 12th, tens of thousands of Haitians were internally displaced. Meet the residents of Haiti’s homeless hotel.
Almost two years after election-related violence in Kenya forced more than half a million people from their homes, some communities are using government payments to buy land and build new settlements from scratch.
Now that the war in Northern Uganda has largely subsided, hundreds of thousands of people have left protected camps and returned to their villages but many of the most vulnerable remain.
Meet Kamarik and his wife Dharma, who, in 2001, were chased out of their mountain village in Nepal by Maoist rebels. For the past eight years, they and their six children have lived “worse than dogs” in the capital Kathmandu.
Hear the moving story of 50-year-old Sum Rin, displaced from a shanty town in the centre of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to make way for a new commercial development.
Or ex-child soldier Emmanuel, who witnessed his parents’ murder and, as a consequence, can never go back to his village in Liberia. More IRIN coverage of displacement and refugee issues here.
Fighting the Right
• FRANK RICH: NYT, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
• Ocean Beach Progressives visit Tea Party In San Diego
• Pelosi says GOP has hijacked ‘tea party’ movement
“Pelosi spoke in an interview with ABC’s ‘This Week’ that was airing Sunday.”
• George Packer of the New Yorker on Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck delivered the keynote speech at the CPAC conference over the weekend. He spoke for almost an hour, and I watched so you don’t have to. In a recent Times story about the Tea Party movement, Beck’s Fox News show comes up again and again as the bolt of lightning that illuminated the dark sky of Obama’s America for the – mostly aging – people who are turning to radical anti-government politics for answers. One of them is a sixty-six-year-old woman from Sandpoint, Idaho, named Pam Stout. [More here →]
RELATED:
• CrooksandLiars.com: Glenn Beck’s eliminationist attacks on progressives: How long before someone acts on this violent rhetoric? by David Neiwert
“David Sirota observes in his column this week the really ugly nature of Glenn Beck’s express hatred of progressives, embodied in his CPAC speech:
To wild applause, he labeled this alleged tumor of “community” the supposedly evil “progressivism” — and he told disciples to “eradicate it” from the nation.
The lesson was eminently clear, coming in no less than the keynote address to one of America’s most important political conventions. Beck taught us that a once-principled conservative movement of reasoned activists has turned into a mob — one that does not engage in civilized battles of ideas. Instead, these torch-carriers, gun-brandishers and tea partiers follow an anti-government terrorist attack by cheering a demagogue’s demand for the physical annihilation of those with whom he disagrees — namely anyone, but particularly progressives, who value “community.” [More here →]
See the whole Post / →
Daily Financial CAPSULE: Community Banks Will Start To Fail, Causes Of The Crisis, Clean Energy Now! Obamatalk
February 28th, 2010 - by: danny
• This Just in: NY Times-Prudential of Britain to Buy A.I.G. Unit in Asia for $35 Billion.
The British insurance company Prudential said Monday it had agreed to buy American International Group’s big life insurance business in Asia in a deal valued at $35.5 billion. The sale of American International Assurance would allow A.I.G. to make the biggest repayment yet toward the more than $180 billion it received as part of a U.S. government bailout.
•WSJ: Soros Criticizes Obama On Bailouts
WASHINGTON – Billionaire investor George Soros, who helped U.S. President Barack Obama raise money for his presidential campaign in 2008, said Sunday he wasn’t happy with Mr. Obama’s handling of the financial crisis.
Mr. Soros said the government should have taken over U.S. banks instead of bailing them out, a move he suggested would have been more popular with Americans.
“The solution that he found to the financial crisis, which was to effectively bail out the banks and allow them to earn their way out of the hole, was, in my opinion, not the right solution,” Mr. Soros said in an interview with CNN. “He should have compulsorily replaced the capital that was lost.”
•Paul Krugman’s Latest Column On Financial Reform
• Tavis Smiley Interviews Van Jones, former White House Green Jobs Czar On The Jobs of Tomorrow Today
“Here’s what I know – we need jobs in America, and right now if you want the jobs of tomorrow you have to make the products of tomorrow. That’s the only way you’re going to get those jobs.
While we’re having this kind of back-and-forth and arguing about whether the science is real, blah, blah, blah, our sisters and brothers in China, God bless them, have now leapfrogged us in the past year on now they are the number one producer of the wind turbines we’re going to need, the smart batteries we’re going to need for advanced cars, the solar panels we’re going to need.
We’ve got tremendous wind and solar resources here, but I’m not talking about green jobs of just somebody putting up Chinese technology and going home. I want us to have the factories producing that stuff here so
I do not want to see this country go from importing dirty energy from the Middle East to importing clean energy technology from China and skip all the jobs in the middle.” [Watch the full interview here → with transcript ]
• The White House: Recovery Act – Year One
One year in, the evidence is clear — and growing by the day — that the Recovery Act is working to cushion the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and lay a new foundation for economic growth. Public and private forecasters ranging from the Council of Economic Advisors to Moody’s Economy and IHS Global now say the Recovery Act is responsible for 2 million jobs or even more nationwide. These jobs have also laid the groundwork for a new clean energy economy, revitalized infrastructure and transportation, helped transform health information technology, and helped make America more competitive for generations to come.
And while the President will not be satisfied until he sees strong job growth, job losses one year in were a fraction of what they were before the Recovery Act was signed. Learn about the progress made through the Vice President’s report, through video from mayors representing towns and cities in every part of the country, and through a map highlighting just a tiny sample of the projects underway. Read the Vice President’s First Annual Report to the President on Progress Implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Recovery Snapshots: Learn About Some of the Diverse Recovery Projects Across the Country. View the full interactive map.
Progress Report: The Transformation to a Clean Energy Economy
[snip]
By 2011 — Nuclear Power: By the end of the President’s first two years in office, we will have provided conditional commitments for loan guarantees for two nuclear power operators to add three to four new nuclear reactors. [More here →]
• Rory O’Connor: Stop The Nukespeak: Tell Us The Truth About Nuclear Power!
Nearly twenty years ago I co-wrote Nukespeak, a cultural history of the selling of nuclear technology for both peaceful and military purposes.
My co-authors and I dedicated the book to George Orwell, whose literary creation of ‘newspeak’ in the classic novel 1984 illustrated the power to control reality through the adroit manipulation of language. The euphemisms, obfuscations and omissions employed by nuclear boosters throughout both industry and government — what one writer has called the “linguistic cosmetics” used “to avoid communicating uncomfortable or threatening thoughts so that the nuclear industry can control the images and perceptions of nuclear power” – were so clearly reminiscent of Orwellian thought control that the homage seemed, if anything, perhaps a little too obvious. [More here →]
• Hip Hop Tour Rolls into Washington: We are the Light, Clean Energy Now!
“Give light and people will find the way.” This quote by Ella Baker, civil rights leader and youth activist, sums up the last day of the Hip Hop Caucus Clean Energy Now! Bus Tour. Baker mentored young civil rights stalwarts like Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks and Bob Moses. Today, she would be proud as the new generation of activists rallied behind the need for clean energy jobs and their right to economic equality in our nation’s capital.
Imagine it. After touring the nation and meeting with young people in urban communities all along the way, the Hip Hop Caucus Clean Energy Now! Bus Tour brought its message of clean energy solutions to the steps of the Capitol Building for a closing rally. The event began with music from DJ Biz Markie. His classic beats were heard around the Capitol while hip hop echoed off of our nation’s government buildings. As Biz began, a bus full of Howard University students marched up to the rally with Clean Energy Now! signs and took their place on the stage. [More here →]
• RepowerAmerica.com: Support a clean energy jobs bill: Call your Senator today
The Senate recently introduced their version of landmark clean energy legislation we’ve been working on for years. We need this bill to create jobs and to end the destructive cycle that hurts our planet and our economy by sending millions of dollars overseas that could support clean energy produced by American workers.
Call your Senator: 1-877-9-REPOWER (1-877-9-737-6937)
When you use our hotline, you will be given talking points and simple instructions on how to leave a message with your Senator. After the call, report it to the right so we can coordinate our campaign.
HEADLINES:
• The Great American Bank Robbery – How did the big banks nearly take down the entire economy and still continue to profit? Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains.
Bankruptcy is a key feature of capitalism. Firms sometimes are unable to repay what they owe creditors. Financial reorganization has become a fact of life in many industries. The United States is lucky in having a particularly effective way of giving firms a fresh start – Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, which has been used repeatedly, for example, by the airlines. Airplanes keep flying; jobs and assets are preserved. Shareholders typically lose everything, and bondholders become the new shareholders. Under new management, and without the burden of debt, the airline can go on. The government plays a limited role in these restructurings: bankruptcy courts make sure that all creditors are treated fairly and that management doesn’t steal the assets of the firm for its own benefits. [More here →]
• THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO AVOID THE FINAL COLLAPSE
• INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND WANTS MORE POWER AND A NEW GLOBAL CURRENCY
• THE AXIS OF GREED: THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMIC ELITE
• THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: THE REAL TRUTH
FLASHBACK:
• MISH’S Global Economic Trend Analysis: Elizabeth Warren On Crash of More Banks
Please consider In D.C., more evidence that commercial real estate headed for foreclosure crisis.
A mortgage crisis like the one that has devastated homeowners is enveloping the nation’s office and retail buildings, and few places are likely to be hit as hard as Washington.
The foreclosure wave is likely to swamp many smaller community banks across the country, and many well-known properties, including Washington’s Mayflower Hotel and the Boulevard at the Capital Centre in Largo, are at risk, industry analysts say.
“There’s been an enormous bubble in commercial real estate, and it has to come down,” said Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, the watchdog created by Congress to monitor the financial bailout. “There will be significant bankruptcies among developers and significant failures among community banks.”
Nearly 3,000 community banks — 40 percent of the banking system — have a high proportion of commercial real estate loans relative to their capital, said Warren, whose committee issued a report on commercial real estate last week. “Every dollar they lose in commercial real estate is a dollar they can’t use for small businesses,” she said. Individuals — who saw their home values drop in the residential mortgage crisis — would not feel that kind of loss, but, Warren said, a large-scale failure would “throw sand into the gears of economic recovery.” [More here →]
WSJ: Academics on Causes of Financial Crisis
Naked Capitalism: EXAMINE AND CRITIQUE THE PRESIDENTIAL DISCOURSE
Before Barack Obama’s next televised speech, prepare your “Bullshit Bingo” card by drawing a square. I find that 5″ x 5″ is a good size – and dividing it into columns —five across and five down. That will give you 25 1-inch blocks.
2. Write one of the following words/phrases in each block:
• Restored our reputation • Strategic fit • Let me be clear • Make no mistake • Back from the brink • Signs of recovery • Out of the loop • Benchmark • Job creation • Fiscal restraint • Win-win • Affordable health care • Previous Administration • At the end of the day • Empower (or empowerment) • Touch base • Mindset • Bipartisan • Trust • Inherited as in “I inherited this mess” • Relief for working families • Unprecedented • Accountable (or held to account) • Free market • Reform
Players can make substitutions to this list, but only one phrase can be used in any one block. Alternatives include:
• Change (as in “change you can believe in) • Universal health care • Brought the economy back from the brink
3. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases.
4. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout “BULLSHIT!”
See the whole Post / →
Reconcile This: Can We Bridge The Partisan Gap Or Are The Two Sides More Alike Than We Think
February 28th, 2010 - by: danny
RECONCILE THIS!
Reconciliation is one of those words that sound great when used in another country.
Right-wing whites along with the rest of the world embraced South Africa’s peace and reconciliation process as a way to put apartheid crimes on the record without a punitive witch-hunt that would intensify racial and political tensions. Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired a panel to hear evidence without the power to execute or imprison or execute wrongdoers.
The idea was to disclose the truth while attempting to bring a dangerously polarized society together. Forgiveness, it was thought, could help the country move on.
In the US, at least these days, reconciliation has another meaning and purpose; to allow legislators to find compromises in enacting legislation by reconciling Senate and House versions of the bill.
Republicans used this tool to pass the Reagan budgets and Bush tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and arguably helped bankrupt the economy. Their legislative maneuver was justified as a necessary method of getting done what they wanted done. There was no moralizing about it, no shame.
Now that Democrats are talking about reconciling the Senate and House versions of the Health Care Reform Bill so that it can be passed by majority vote many of these same Republican windbags are up in arms charging treason and worse. Obama says that he endorses an up and down vote on the issue. He didn’t use the word reconciliation, but that’s what it is.
Suddenly, when a tactic they used may be used against them, they are on the ramparts screaming about a betrayal of the Constitution.
Never mind that more than a year has been spent debating —and watering down so-called reforms including the junking of a wildly popular public option. Never mind that way more than a majority of Senators and a majority of the House backed the measure with certain differences of course.
To the Republican bluster uber alles squad, the only acceptable remedy would be to “start over,” as if the election of 2008 never happened. It is always their way or the highway. For them, the political jihad comes first and killing the bill and all health care reform is the crusade dujure, smirks, invented arguments and all. They have wrapped themselves in their message points and just love the drone of their echo chamber.
Wink, Wink!
It was so obvious at the CSPAN Summit that Obama was talking to the wallpaper.
Also obvious was how unwilling the Obamacrats have been to leave what they perceived as the political safety of the center, unwilling to use what power they have to push their agenda through, and in the process incur the wrath of Fox News and middle of the Road DINOS (Democrats In Name Only) who are totally integrated into the system, if not, bought off, or at least leased, by the Insurance lobby. They live in a gut-free zone.
They may pay lip service for the need for change but lack the spine and will to fight for it. They had already disregarded and dissed those in their own ranks pushing for Single Payer, Medicare for all etc. They bombed a public option the way the Israelis want us to treat Iran. (Israel, by the bye, has a government backed health care system.)
You can’t totally blame Obama for this muddle of the middle, because of the way Wall Street bought the Congress. What is troublesome is his continuing stated hope against hope that somehow he can use rationality and logic to appeal to the illogical and irrational. At the same time, he worked on the Hill and must know who he is dealing (or not) dealing with. (Yes I remember Rumsfeld’s dicta, “you go to war with the army you have.”)
This is a political game that has more dicey parts than a Toyota. The extreme partisans on the right project more certainty in their convictions and in their demagoguery. They have a big noise machine to drive them on – even if it is to the abyss. As one of my readers noted, they seem programmed by Fox News.
In the old days, media outlets reported what politicians say; today some are browbeating them into what to say! Notice how in sports coverage, the records of athletes are always shown graphically; they are totally absent in news coverage.
As for health care for all, the Repugs don’t care about it. They never did.
There can be no reconciliation between these two “sides”—or, should we say wings on the same plane, even if there may be more similarities here than appears. Most of the Dems have a stake in serving the system; few have the independence or willingness to go to the mattresses or stand up for what they say they claim, at times, to believe in.
They wouldn’t be politicians if they were not wedded to wheeling and dealing and perpetual compromise. It is their waffling that also gives Republicans the encouragement to take a harder and harder line. They project no patience for ˆwusses” and whiners. They believe they will cave, and they may be right.
The Dems know a hotly contested election is coming and are banking on their incumbency and money raising capacity to insure re-election. They don’t like ideological battles maybe in part because they don’t know what they think most of the time.
They want to please their voters, not challenge them.
The TV media bigs know that interest in politics has gone way down except among the most politically aligned. (MSNBC’s audience is off 60%.)They know that to build bigger audiences, they have to pour oil on the flames and amp up the confrontation.
Heat sells, light doesn’t.
Keep the scandals and the manufactured “showdowns” coming!
So can you reconcile this – our vast needs and a political system that can’t address them? An economy in free fall and policies that fall way short of fixing it? And, politicians who want to posture and lecture each other rather than organize their supporters and defend their programs?
If health care reform disintegrates, if financial reform flames out, if the consumer protection agency is deep-sixed or pushed into a back office in Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department, many of Obama’s backers will have fewer reasons for reconciling themselves with a Titanic that seems to have nowhere to go but down.
Will this/can this crisis lead to a new political initiative? If not now, when? Help me reconcile all this, help me now.
OTHER HELP NEEDED: Globalvision will be forced to vacate its office space come May. We are looking for affordable office space to rent or share in Manhattan at an affordable rent. Suggestions welcome.
We are also seeking two interns to help with the distribution of our film PLUNDER: The Crime of our Time. Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org
Milena Kaneva sends greetings to all Mediachannel readers from Bulgaria:
“The month of March has arrived again and according to the ancient Bulgarian tradition we greet each other with: “CHESTITA BABA MARTA!”, which means “HAPPY GRANDMA MARTA” (representing the month of March) And we wear from the 1st. of March the red and white wool ornament called “Martenitza” for HEALTH, JOY AND SUCCESS!”
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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