test blog 5

Happy Birthday to the Red Sox's hottest rookie and my current baseball crush. Jacoby Ellsbury, known to Joy Nation as LBJ, turns 24 today. Ellsbury can hit, he can field, and man, can he run. Ellsbury is the first Major League player of Navajo descent. He's got a killer smile. And let's just say his uniform fits him very nicely. And yeah he's half my age, you got a problem with that?

I have a tremendous Keith Olbermann for you. His anger brings tears to my eyes. Please watch the whole thing. Thanks to Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire for posting, and to Allan for sending it to me.

Remember Cody and her sticks? When we lived in Port Credit, the backyard was full of mature trees, and very overgrown. When I started trimming dead branches, we discovered that Cody loved big sticks. (The things you never know, living in the city!) I'm telling you, she adored them. She hoarded big sticks in a special corner of the lawn - her toy chest. When Allan would mow, he would move the sticks, mow underneath, then put them back. When we moved from Port Credit to the Cooksville area of Mississauga, we knew there wouldn't be many good stick opportunities. So Allan picked up all the sticks, put them in the car and drove them over to the new place, so our Cody could feel more at home. Since then, most of the sticks have disappeared, having been chewed up, or rotted under the snow, or destroyed during tug of war games. Those of you who attended wmtc2 might have noticed that our lawn was graced by a dead spruce tree. Although birds liked to hang out in its top branches, the de...

For this September 11, I was going to post a bunch of numbers. I was going to collect statistics. Deaths caused by US wars, deaths of Americans and deaths of "the others". Deaths from terrorism all over the world. I was going to try to find statistics on people left wounded, homeless, displaced, through US invasions and wars. Then I was going to compare all those many millions to the number of people who died on September 11, 2001. I stopped myself, because that could seem somehow callous to the people for whom September 11 truly is a day of mourning and remembrance. The importance of September 11 is exaggerated out of all proportion by the US propaganda machine. The stories told about it are all lies. But the day's importance can never be exaggerated to people who lost their sons, daughters, mothers, best friends, and so on, on that day. So, no numbers. Instead, I'll look forward to a time when the day can be remembered privately by anyone who chooses to. A day when ...

As I look for news on the APEC protests in Australia this past weekend, I'm struck by how the mainstream media, following the wire service stories , lead with the number of arrests. Seventeen people arrested in a crowd of thousands? Why is that so noteworthy? We also learn that two policemen were injured. Policemen are probably injured on the job every day. Were their injuries caused by protester violence? Were any protesters injured? This might or might not be newsworthy, but why is it the lede? We're so accustomed to reading these kinds of stories, we might not stop to question them. What is the obsession with the possibility of violence at mass protests, and how many arrests were made? Mass protests have been happening all over the world for well over 100 years. In most countries with a semblance of democracy, they occur peacefully. If there are a few arrests, so what? People are arrested all the time. [I was reminded of something from Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edg...

From From Frank Rich, via Truthout : It will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam. That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice - were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch co...

If you know anyone who still believes the hype about Rudy Giuliani, you'll want to send them this website . Great stuff, very well done. If you insist that the war in Iraq has been a complete failure, you might want to ask, for whom? And then read Naomi Klein's new book, Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . It's getting a ton of press, at least here in her native Canada. The Globe and Mail has an exclusive excerpt , including a short film by Klein and Alfonso Cuaron, director of "Children of Men". Also, sociologist and media critic Todd Gitlin reviews Shock Doctrine here .