8. October 2008 by admin.

This video was created by Robert Greenwald, a documentarian who has made some great documentaries about Murdoch/Fox, Iraq War, etc.  He is currently focusing his efforts on exposing the real McCain.

If you’re a McCain supporter, check out this video.  If you’re not, you probably won’t be surprised by what you see.

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8. October 2008 by admin.

Recently, Marion Wright Edelman, an amazing woman who has devoted more than 40 years to the protection and advocacy of children’s rights in the U.S., was interviewed on Democracy Now. Following is a brief extract from that interview, one which highlights some amazing statistics about children in the United States.

It’s amazing to think that when Wall Street needs money, we can act to address it in less than 2 weeks, but when children’s fates are at risk, we can debate the issues surrounding the children for years or simply claim that government isn’t the answer. 

Remember, earlier this year, when there was an effort by Congress to pass legislation that would have ensured no poor child in the U.S. was without health care? This legislation would have cost $35B, 1/20th of what the bailout costs (at a minimum…estimates of the true figures in the bailout go as high as $850B).  Bush vetoed it claiming that government couldn’t afford the expenditure.  He had no problem finding the money for his friends ‘the have-mores’ when they needed it.

What are our country’s priorities?  Why aren’t people outraged over the plight of children as they are over the plight of Wall Street. Perhaps they don’t hear the true figures via corporate media.

Extract from Edelman’s appearance on Democracy Now…

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: And the real crisis in America is not the real bailout on Wall Street; it is what we’re doing with our children and our failure to invest in our human capital for the future. What is happening in our country, where a child is born into poverty every thirty-three seconds, and we have seen an increase in child poverty, 500,000 in the recent—in the last three years.

AMY GOODMAN: Half a million?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Half a million children between 2005, 2006, and that’s before the downturn in the economy; where we have a child who is born without health insurance every forty-one seconds, is neglected or abused every thirty-six seconds, is having a child every minute; and where we have got one in three black boys who are seven years old today who is going to go to prison in his lifetime, one in six Hispanic boys likely to go to prison in his lifetime, one in seventeen white boys to go to prison in his lifetime—we’re the world’s biggest jailer, and we’re spending three times more on incarceration than on public education per pupil—and where we’ve got ten percent of our—children drop out of school every ten seconds of every school day; and where 65 percent of all of our children are not reading at grade level in twelfth grade if they’ve stayed in school, and a half of them have not; and where over 80 percent of our black and Hispanic children cannot read at grade level in fourth, eighth or twelfth grade. The real economic downfall and the—is in these figures, and we have got to begin to get our heads screwed on straight and to begin to invest in the future and in our young people today.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, we’ve been told that we can’t afford that.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, we can’t afford not to. We have seen, in effect, an ideological and economic coup d’etat over the last decade, where we’ve taken from the poor, taken from children, and given in massive tax breaks to the rich and in prosecuting several wars. And, you know, this is just—we are upside-down.

We have got to reset our moral compass. We have got to redirect our attention to our internal human infrastructure, because I am convinced that what we are failing to do today in educating our children, providing them very basic healthcare, is going to be a moral and economic Achilles’ heel that is going to topple America’s leadership in the world in the future.

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8. October 2008 by admin.

I don’t know if mixing Microsoft technology and food preparation/consumption is such a good idea (just like mixing TV watching and Microsoft Media Center was cause for concern in previous years), but it’s happening anyway. 

A chic restaurant in London, ‘Inamo’, is using the Microsoft Surface technology and projecting designs, menus, ‘themes’, etc. on to the surfaces of patrons’ tables.

You can read more here.

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8. October 2008 by admin.

If you get a chance listen to the October 6, 2008 podcast of Democracy Now.  You can download it from iTunes, Zune Marketplace, or from Democracy Now’s own site.  Naomi Klein’s speech to the University of Chicago, Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism, about the failure of Milton Friedman and about the relevance of Disaster Capitalism, Friedman’s legacy, to our current financial crisis is quite good.

You can acccess it here.

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8. October 2008 by admin.

To quote the site Gizmodo, ‘It’s official. We’re hosed. The National Debt Clock near Times Square has just run out of spaces to add more zeroes to its running count of our national debt, thanks to the one-two punch of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and the $100 billion used to prop up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before that.’..

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