Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 248
June 30, 2013
Truth and Allies
Sunday Morning in the Church of Beethoven
Our weekly feature. Last night I hosted an evening of the wonderful Lisa Yui playing four sonatas at the Nyack Library, including one of my ultra-faves, the Waldstein, so here's movement no 3 with Mr. Barenboim. If the Waldstein had been Beethoven's final sonata, it would have been considered his greatest and a fitting summit for his career. Instead, he wrote a few even greater and innovative ones...
June 29, 2013
Drake's Voyage
Newly media-prominent whistleblower Thomas Drake even gets a Q & A thing in the Sunday NYT, just online, where they ask him to tell them what he 's reading, watching, listening to, etc. Among other things we learned that he is something of a Trekkie and currently works in an Apple store as a resident "genius."
Spock answers one of the most famous lines in Star Trek lore: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” I stood up to bureaucracy and the secrecy of government and did so at great risk. I had to resign. I no longer had income or retirement. I lost all of it. I am over it.
Sully's View
Another great post from NYT public ed. ln Margaret Sullivan on continuing debate over who is "journalist" and who might merely be a "blogger" or "activist" or "advocate." Greenwald and Gregory and more.
That Greenwald Speech
Many watched live Glenn Greenwald's speech, via Skype, to national socialist confab last night, introduced by Jeremy Scahill. On what makes a "real journalist." Discuss. Here it is as recorded:
June 28, 2013
No McDonald's in Occupied Territories
Great move by McDonald's today refusing to open burger franchise in new mall in newly-settled area of West Bank. Move was taken by its Israel ring but okayed by parent.
The McDonald's restaurant chain refused to open a branch in a West Bank Jewish settlement, the company said Thursday, adding a prominent name to an international movement to boycott Israel's settlements.
Irina Shalmor, spokeswoman for McDonald's Israel, said the owners of a planned mall in the Ariel settlement asked McDonald's to open a branch there about six months ago. Shalmor said the chain refused because the owner of McDonald's Israel has a policy of staying out of the occupied territories. The decision was not coordinated with McDonald's headquarters in the U.S., she said. In an email, the headquarters said "our partner in Israel has determined that this particular location is not part of his growth plan."
The Israeli branch's owner and franchisee, Omri Padan, is a founder of the dovish group Peace Now, which opposes all settlements and views them as obstacles to peace. The group said Padan is no longer a member.
Like, 'Wow,' As Maynard Would Say
NYT with big piece on how one of my favorite boyhood series, Dobie Gillis, anticipated much that was to come. But surprise: actress, Sheila Kuehl, who played zany Zelda Gilroy later went on to become...the first openly gay candidate elected to Calif state legislature. Here's a bit when series regulars included Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld:
But Oscar More Grouchy Than Ever?
Next week's classic New Yorker cover on gay marriage rulings, finds Bert & Ernie on the couch.UPDATE Wow, Gawker learns the main image for the cover was actually last year and recycled here.
What Snowden Gave Us (So Far)
Roger Cohen with an important column at NYT, including a handy list of all that Edward Snowden has done (after the usual love him or hate him intro). Cohen concludes that history will judge him kindly. Here's why. Without him:
We would not know how the N.S.A., through its Prism and other programs, has become, in the words of my colleagues James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike.” We would not know how it has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or videos of citizens across the world; nor how it has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; nor how through requests to the compliant and secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F.I.S.A.) it has been able to bend nine U.S. Internet companies to its demands for access to clients’ digital information.
We would not be debating whether the United States really should have turned surveillance into big business, offering data-mining contracts to the likes of Booz Allen and, in the process, high-level security clearance to myriad folk who probably should not have it. We would not have a serious debate at last between Europeans, with their more stringent views on privacy, and Americans about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
We would not have legislation to bolster privacy safeguards and require more oversight introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Nor would we have a letter from two Democrats to the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, saying that a government fact sheet about surveillance abroad “contains an inaccurate statement” (and where does that assertion leave Alexander’s claims of the effectiveness and necessity of Prism?). In short, a long-overdue debate about what the U.S. government does and does not do in the name of post-9/11 security — the standards applied in the F.I.S.A. court, the safeguards and oversight surrounding it and the Prism program, the protection of civil liberties against the devouring appetites of intelligence agencies armed with new data-crunching technology — would not have occurred, at least not now.
All this was needed because, since it was attacked in an unimaginable way, the United States has gone through a Great Disorientation. Institutions at the core of the checks and balances that frame American democracy and civil liberties failed. Congress gave a blank check to the president to wage war wherever and whenever he pleased. The press scarcely questioned the march to a war in Iraq begun under false pretenses. Guantánamo made a mockery of due process. The United States, in Obama’s own words, compromised its “basic values” as the president gained “unbound powers.” Snowden’s phrase, “turnkey tyranny,” was over the top but still troubling.
