David Swanson's Blog, page 183
April 4, 2012
Talk Nation Radio: Rocky Anderson on His Campaign for President
Rocky Anderson is the Justice Party candidate for U.S. president. He explains why he's running and what he thinks we need to do to get our country headed in a more just and peaceful direction. Rocky's website is VoteRocky.org.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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April 3, 2012
Catching Rachel Maddow's Drift
People who know better gave Rachel Maddow's new book unqualified praise in blurbs on the dust jacket. Maybe they see more good than bad in the book, which is called "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power." That's a fair assessment. I'd love for a hundred million Americans or so who never read books to read this one. It wouldn't be the first book I'd pick, but it would probably do a lot more good than harm.
April 2, 2012
April 1, 2012
Audio: Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
DAVID AND CINDY AT IMPEACHMENT RALLY
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
March 30, 2012
New York City Tuesday Night: David Swanson, John Horgan, Jackson Lears, Mark Crispin Miller: Peace in Age of Empire
WHEN: Tuesday, April 3, 2012, 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St, New York, N.Y. 10012-3309
Free and Open to Public and Media
David Swanson (When the World Outlawed War), John Horgan (The End of War), and Jackson Lears (Rebirth of a Nation) will talk about war and the need to stop it. The conversation will be moderated by Mark Crispin Miller.
Miller, a professor at NYU and author of many books on politics and cultural history, hosts News from Underground, a monthly series at McNally Jackson. In these tense times, there are many topics of extreme importance that the corporate media tends to ignore or misreport; the panel discussions of News from Underground are here to deal honestly with these forbidden issues.
http://mcnallyjackson.com/event/news-underground-imagining-peace-age-empire
March 29, 2012
The Statues in Our Public Spaces Lie
There are lies of omission as well as commission, and the statues in Charlottesville, Va. -- typical of other towns -- do both. We have statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, a generic Confederate soldier, George Rogers Clark, Lewis and Clark (with Sacagawea kneeling like their dog), and on City Hall a triptych with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. We have a monument to the War on Vietnam. And that's it.
Why We Should Outgrow "Diversity of Tactics" Before Protesting NATO
The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda has nothing on its website about using nonviolence, supporting nonviolence, or opposing violence.
The G8 and NATO Protest also has nothing like that, but does have this:
"As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics."
A month ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because both groups were refusing to state that they opposed violence.
March 28, 2012
Talk Nation Radio: When a War Veteran Tortures His Daughter, and She Survives
Michelle Brown survived a childhood of ongoing abuse and torture at the hands of her father. She is the author of "This Girl's Life: Being the Child of a War Veteran." Brown discusses her experience, her understanding of what caused it, and her advice to others.
The image at right from the book's cover shows the author with her husband.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive.org or AudioPort or Radio4All or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Embed on your own site with this code:
<iframe src="http://archive.org/embed/TalkNationRa..." frameborder="0" height="40" width="500"></iframe>
March 26, 2012
March 24, 2012
To the NYPD Officers Reading My Emails
On Thursday I was on a train to New York and received an email announcing a protest at the offices of New York's two U.S. Senators over their cosponsorship of an AIPAC-driven bill that would move the United States closer to war on Iran. I wrote back, saying, hey, I happen to be on my way to New York and will try to get there.
When I got there, there was a small gathering of protesters, divided into two groups, those choosing to comply with police requests to stand inside a free-speech-cage that they had set up, and those refusing. I joined the latter. Two days later, one of the protesters who had been making his point from within the metal barricades told me that a police officer had approached him with this question:
