WHY I CAN’T WATCH NETWORK NEWS
THE MEXICAN RECOUNT BATTLE
WAR IN MOGADISHU

So I came home early, lured by my TV , all because ABC News was running a segment on debt and I wanted to see how they would handle a subject I just made a film on. I flipped to Channel 7 just in time to see the promo for the series and to learn it starts tonight. Apparently Oprah focused her show on the issue yesterday but I missed it.

I clicked over to CBS in time for a promo by Bob Shieffer promoting THE COMING OF KATIE. Anchor in waiting Katie Couric was shown in what looked like a filmed spot, working away very earnestly at her desk, no doubt, gathering news. Of course she won’t start until the fall so it was all posed and show. She was wearing pearls, a sign no doubt of her maturity and gravitas.

Over on NBC, Brian Williams was recycling footage of the French World Cup team captain headbutting an Italian player after he was was apparently insulted and lost it. (We still don’t know if he was called a “terrorist” or if he was avenging some provocation to his mother’s honor.”)

Unreported was this account I read on South Africa’s Weekly Mail: “Under a haze of French flags and firecracker smoke, the crowd of several thousand people filling Place de la Concorde on Monday afternoon chanted “Zizou! Zizou!” in a hero’s welcome for Zinédine Zidane, the French football captain sent off for headbutting an Italian player as France lost the World Cup final.” I was also told that while Italian TV has shown the “incident” over and over, it was only shown once in France.

A few minutes later, the PBS News Hour ran an Iraq story voiced over by a reporter in DC and then conducted an inquiry with Phoebe Marr of the Institute of Peace and Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Both managed to avoid discussing the role played by the US in creating the crisis in Iraq but instead suggested that Iran is behind the mounting violence there…Puhleeze….. The actions and incompetence of the occupying power was not raised by Margaret Warner or her guests.

Over on the Discovery Times channel, another documentary was trashing Hamas one more time.

Click.

Later I returned to the tube to find Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 on the Sundance Channel. One discovery—those Bush connected military contractors, The Carlyle Group, who he exposes so well, appropriate the phrase “Global Vision,” also the name of our company, as one of their promotional slogans. Have they no shame?

MEXICO VOTE FRAUD: GREG PALAST IN THE GUARDIAN

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1815750,00.html

John Ross, veteran Mexico correspondent has the background:

“During his nearly six years in office, outgoing president Vicente Fox has often used his attorney general’s office against leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to counter his growing popularity, including a failed effort to bar the former Mexico City mayor from the ballot and even imprisonhim.

“Now in a desperate last minute electoral ploy by Fox’s right-wing National Action or PAN party to boost the fortunes of its lagging candidate Felipe Calderon, the agents tried to pressure Ponce into testifying that AMLO and his PRD party had used city revenues to finance his presidential campaign but Ponce proved a stand-up guy and ultimately rebuffed the government men.

“The imprisoned finance secretary’s refusal to talk greatly disappointed both Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly that together have waged an unrelenting dirty war against Lopez Obrador for months and even years. Indeed, TV crews were stationed out in the La Palma parking lot to record Ponce’s thwarted confession for primetime news and both networks had reserved time blocks on their evening broadcasting, forcing the anchors to scramble to fill in the gap.

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07072006.html

ICH: Democracy, Mexican Style

By Stephen Lendman

”It was learned that Felipe Calderon’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala wrote the vote-counting software, and it’s already been hacked. This new discovery is especially disturbing as whoever controls the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) computer systems can manipulate the vote process, control which votes get counted, which ones don’t, and what the final vote tally will be.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13941.htm

Al Giordano: The Disappearing, Reappearing Votes

http://narconews.com/Issue42/article1962.html

BEHIND THE WAR IN GAZA

JUAN COLE: FAILED-STATE STRATEGY
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/07/07/gaza/print.html

WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE THERE
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5160148.stm

WARNS OF GAZANS’ STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE
By Conal Urquhart Guardian (UK)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1816730,00.html

SANDY TOLEN OM THE SILENCE

Sandy Tolan’s “The Palestinian Catastrophe, Then and Now” (Tolan is a wonderful writer)

He concludes: “The irony is that, contrary to helping build the safe harbor they have sought for so long, the Israeli government, just like the U.S. in Iraq, is only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=100409

JEWS IN CUBA BUT WHAT ABOUT US DESIGNS?

CNN ran a piece on Jews in Cuba which managed not to interview any. The piece was followed by anchor chit-chat about the Bush Administration wanting to promote democracy on the Island. Ricardo Alarcon, the head of Cuba’s Parliament and a former UN Ambassador denounced the Bush plan in a special report. Here’s an excerpt.

ON May 20, 2004, with all pomp and ceremony, George W. Bush announced his Plan for the annexation of Cuba. The interminable monster document – of more than 450 pages – provoked a volley of criticism from all sides.

Above all, from the Cuban people, who are threatened with extermination and with the liquidation of their nation. As the sinister Plan states in plain language, Cuba would simply disappear, would cease to exist. Let us quickly review what would happen here if what Bush has approved was to be applied:

• The return to their former owners of all properties, including all homes from which millions of families would be evicted, in less than one year and under the supervision and control of the U.S. government via the U.S. government Commission for the Return of Properties.

• All aspects of the economy would be completely privatized including education and health services; all cooperatives would be dissolved and the old latifundia restored; social security and assistance would be eliminated, including all pensions and retirement plans, and a special program of public works would be organized for senior citizens which would employ them as long as their state of health allows it; the guidelines of the crudest neoliberalism would be rigorously applied. Another Yankee government apparatus, the U.S. Standing Committee for Economic Reconstruction, would be in charge of all that.

FIGHTING IN SOMALIA

South Africa’s Mail& Guardian reports:

”Fighting surged in Mogadishu on Monday between Islamist militias and fighters loyal to the city’s last warlords, pushing the death toll over two days to at least 60 and pounding a key hospital with artillery and gunfire. Residents feared the death toll would climb even further in the most ferocious fighting in the capital since the Islamists seized it a month ago from an alliance of United States-backed warlords.”

IRAQ IS KILLING THE DOLLAR
Nicholas Von Hoffam discusses the eco impact of the war
http://www.alternet.org/authors/6539/

TACKLING THE DEBT CRISIS—AN EDITORIAL FROM DICK NIXON’S HOME TOWN

“Debt has recently reached new, unsustainable levels, according to recent news reports.”

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/opinions/ci_4030988

WATCH OUT ACLU: A RIGHTWING GROUP IS AFTER YOU

Bringing the church to the courtroom: Right-wing Christian group becomes force in major legal battles

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13774180/