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POPSVEE Day in Alameda, California, we practiced duck-and-cover as well as earthquake drills. Nothing quaint or or historic about it then. Here’s Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan at the Wall Street Journal on the power of “Four Little Words” … you remember them: “Tear down that wall” … and the earth-shaking ideas they represented as well as the action that backed them. The popular myth is that the wall kind of toppled over by itself, with a little push from people power. That of course ignores not only the prior 44 years of Cold War … interspersed with several hot ones that cost us tens of thousands of American lives … it also ignores the massive military buildup of the 1980s, the encouragement of liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, the tough engagement with old-school Soviet leaders and, not least, the cordial engagement with a Soviet leader who realized it was time to throw in the towel. An atmosphere was finally created in which people felt like they could
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POPSThe EU's New Stealth Tax "But in return Britain would be expected to give up its £4.1billion a year rebate, first agreed by Mrs Thatcher in 1984. Other options being considered include taxes on communications and banks and a carbon tax which would push up the cost of fuel, flights and heating."
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POPSOct. 23,1983 Lebanese Terrorists Bomb the Marine Barracks in Beirut
. . with Syria. Although the United States had mounted two previous successful peacekeeping operations in Lebanon in 1958 and earlier in 1982 (to facilitate the evacuation of P.L.O. forces from Beirut that had been defeated by Israel), the ignominious end of the MNF intervention brought disastrous consequences. The failure of the peacekeeping mission led to renewed fighting between Lebanese factions and the ascendancy of Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria. Moreover, the Marine barracks bombing, which was the deadliest terrorist attack against Americans before the 9/11 attacks, later inspired Osama bin Laden, who viewed the United States as a “paper tiger” because of its rapid withdrawal of peacekeeping forces from Lebanon and Somalia after suffering casualties. Al Qaeda members were later dispatched to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon, according to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 68). Posted October 23rd, 2009 in American Leadership.
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POPSObama Wins Nobel Peace Prize Obama is only the third U.S. President to win the Nobel Peace Prize while still in office. Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Former President Jimmy Carter also won the prize in 2002, adds Knoller, but that was more than two decades after he left office
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POPSBand rejects Glenn Beck's endorsement Click through for the audio clip from GB's show. With 19 more advertisers dumping beck and the GB-show-death-watch continuing, nobody wants to be associated with GB's "circling-the-drain kooties". I dig that the band's landsharks got on it before the broadcast was even over.
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POPS The Machine’s Hail Mary Pass The event was a success in that the most countries ever participated, in that it made money, and in that the Soviet Union’s absence was hardly missed. But Los Angeles’ people " not its government " shared the spotlight. Will that be the case in Mayor Daley’s and President Obama’s Chicago? Finally, it will cost a lot of money. Whether private enterprise turns it into a net positive remains to be seen. One thing is for certain: it could have been much less risky. And both Obama and Daley know it. As Air Force One made its trek over the Atlantic, maybe Obama thought back nine years ago, when he voted “yes” in the Illinois Senate on renovating Soldier Field. The project cost more $600 million dollars, and the state and city were left with an open-air stadium with 6,000 fewer seats and a smaller playing field than before. The state could have paid for a larger stadium with a dome that could be used to host more than a handful of events a year.
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POPSThe Politics of Lying When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said. Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned. Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish. An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slat
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POPSUp is Down, Peace is War, Love is Hate - Huh? When you look at how we have made being at war seem nothing more than a video game, is it any wonder that people think the war in Iraq is over, that we are not really at war in Somalia, that Afghanistan is a "good war" like WWII was? I am not sure anymore what it will take for people to wake up to the facts that our economy depends on war, climate suicide and agriculture-based cancers (our steady diet of pesticides and fertilizers in food and water - what do you think is driving pancreatic cancer epidemic?). I do hope that sharing via Amplify helps to dirve real change in not just hand wringing.
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POPSNorman Borlaug: 'The Man Who Saved The World' more ( at source): Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history. Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains. “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”
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POPSNissan Sentra Tail Light Buy Nissan Sentra Tail Light Just at $28.85.Nissan Sentra Tail Light fits 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 engines.
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POPSTed Kennedy's Soviet Gambit "{When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong."
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POPSTony Blair, British Petroleum And The Lockerbie Deal He put compassion for the oil industry ahead of any compassion for my daughter, for the families of all those people killed by a convicted mass murderer and terrorist. It just shows that the power of oil money counts for more than justice.' It sure does. Khadaffi paid out about $1.5 billion in compensation to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing - and then got most of it back in exchange for a deal allowing access to Libya's oil. With the freeing of al-Megrahi, and probably the non-prosecution of whomever it was that fired that shot from inside the Libyan embassy in London that murdered policewoman Yvonne Fletcher while she was patrollingin front of it in 1984, the deal's complete. I think blood money is a pretty appropriate term. And if you look at how al-Megrahi was received back home in Libya as a hero and role model , I can almost guarantee you that there will be a further cost to this whole endeavor in the future. H/T Doug Ross
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POPSGeorge Orwell 1984 Truth will be stranger than fiction...And more frightening! Unless we all wake-up! Could Obama's geopolitical stance be the mirror image of Bush's?
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POPSvideo: The Flaming Lips - Borderline The Flaming Lips covering Madonna's 1984 hit "Borderline". Wow. LOVE this. I think that if you're going to do a cover version, you really should make the song your own — reinvent it. And wow, do Wayne Coyne et al. reinvent this one! Turn it up. :-D
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POPS Conflict of Interest, Connect The Dots! Consulting Firm Tied to White House Given Millions in Health Care Ad Campaign Axelrod left the firm on Dec. 31, 2008, with the agreement that it owed him $2 million -- and some Republican critics now question whether the firm was hired to indirectly fund his severance package. The House Republican Conference issued a one-page memo Tuesday, questioning the sincerity of the administration's calls for change and transparency. "As the pharmaceutical industry spends hundreds of millions supporting a government takeover of health care, some may wonder whether White House senior advisors earning millions of dollars paid for in part by the pharmaceutical industry represents the kind of change American can believe in?" Axelrod, a veteran journalist and former columnist with the Chicago Tribune, founded AKPD Message and Media in 1984 following his work managing Paul Simon's victorious U.S. Senate campaign.
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