Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Mark Crispin Miller on Guns and Butter, KPFA Evening News, Pacifica airs Iraq Forum Thurs.

Wally noted two things from Danny Schechter's News Dissector for yesterday. First:

PACIFICA RADIO TO AIR IRAQ FORUM IN CONGRESS
David Swanson writes:
I'll be co-hosting with Verna Avery-Brown of Pacifica Radio, a live broadcast on Pacifica from 8:30-11 a.m. ET on Thursday, April 27, of a forum on Capitol Hill hosted by Congresswomen Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee.

Second:

SCHEDULE
Thanks for tuning in. I will be speaking in Boston at Emerson College on Friday at 7 PM. The film The Jihadi and the Journalist which I worked on opens at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 27th, and South African Broadcasting’s SABC 1 airs on April 26th on SABC 1 at 9 PM. Amandla!

Rebecca and I are both leading with the item above (from C.I.'s morning entry) because Elaine intended to include it. She posted and started trying to get packed for this weekend (she does group on Thursday night and needs to be packed so that she can leave for the airport from work on Friday) when it hit here that she'd forgotten to include it. With packing tonight and a personal errand (plus, she fears, a trip to the drug store because she's not sure if she has any minature shampoos, deodorant, etc.), she grabbed the phone and called Rebecca who told her not to worry and that she'd pick it up and call me to see if I could as well. That's how it works, we all help each other and if one of us forgets something, another can include it. Or, as we do, we can cover different issues at our sites.

Karl Rove testified for the fifth time to the grand jury on Plamegate. "Rove's legal problems stem from the fact that it was more than a year into the investigation before he revealed the [Matt] Cooper conversation." That's from KPFA's Evening News that's on right now. You got two strong announcements and a bit of news and the entry's just getting started! Also Norman Solomon was on evaluating Tony Snow's past work and how that might impact his actions as White House press secretary (replacing Scott McClellen). Solomon thinks that Snow's objective will be to go on the attack with the press (the way he attacked the patriotism of Dems and others during the last few years).

David Enders is doing a report on the missing in Iraq. I'm pausing to listen. More than 34,000 Iraqis are held in prisons and the system still isn't sufficient for families trying to determine where their missing members are -- in a prison or just missing and soon to turn up dead and with signs of torture.

Let me talk about KPFA's Guns and Butter from this afternoon. Mark Crispin Miller gave a talk on the 2004 elections and took questions. He believes the issue of verified voting is a very important one (agreed) and that we can't count on the Democrats for this. He noted how he'd spoken to John Kerry and Kerry said, this isn't a direct quote, that he knew but couldn't interest anyone in the problem. This was noted when Miller was a guest on Democracy Now! Miller talked about how after that, Kerry's people rushed, the same day, to deny the conversation. That's too bad. It's too bad Kerry and Chris Dodd can't see that if we don't have verified voting, we don't have voting. Miller talked about how some didn't want to touch the issue including in the press. In terms of those on the left who are journalists, he noted that many were freelancers and you're talking about them potentially risking their livelihood (presumably because idiots like Tommy Zeller Jr. at the New York Times was immeditately ridiculing people questioning the vote weeks after the election). Miller's a professor and he has tenure so he can put it out there with little risk (other than some slams from the Zeller freaks). Miller noted that Bully Boy "won" in 2004 with either an increase of eleven million from 2000 or by eleven million. (Listen to the program.) He pointed out that the evangical vote couldn't have provided that (despite the press spin) because Karl Rove said repeatedly in 2004 that they were targeting the 4 million evangicals that didn't vote in 2000 for Bully Boy. So where did all these "new" votes come from at a time when Bully Boy lost editorials (papers that endorsed him in 2000 but didn't in 2004) and many Republicans (such as Bob Barr) were warning that he wasn't a conservative. Add in the unpopular war (that's my point). If we don't fix it, we better be prepared for more of the same.

If you missed it, you can listen to an archived broadcast of Guns and Butter online. And remember that the Guns and Butter benefit showing of the film Loose Change is next week:

May 2nd (Tuesday)
7:00 pm
Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Avenue
Oakland, CA
(510) 704-0268

And quick nod to Ron of Why Are We Back In Iraq? who hit hard on the issues of problems with the 2004 vote back in November and December of 2004 (I think January as well).
















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