O.N.E. FARMERS MARKET GRAND OPENING JUNE 23

The Old North End Farmers Market Grand Opening celebration is this Tuesday, June 23 from 3-6:30 in front of HO Wheeler School, 6 Archibald St. The Market will host 13 vendors this year, the largest market ever in the Old North End!

A great event for kids and adults! There will be live music, livestock petting area, games for kids, face painting, free ice cream from Ben and Jerry?s, and you can plant your own vegetable to take home! Come to the grand opening and you will receive a one dollar coupon for future markets. This year there will be produce vendors, prepared foods, crafts, baked goods, flowers, and more.

We accept Farm-to-Family Coupons and EBT/Debit cards. For more information contact S'ra at 324-3073, sra@riseup.net

Please spread the word and help support the local economy!

Happy Birthday, Alfred Kinsey

The House of LeMay remind us it's Alfred Kinsey's birthday.

Ponder This

Vermont Progressives are just Democrats who eat "organic," read Seven Days and shop at City Market.

Burlington Progressives do all of the above, but have aligned themselves with the Republicans so much, they've lost their credibility with the citizens of Burlington as a party that cares about the people and environment.

Self-censorship by journalists

Former (fired) Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .

There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.

Obama a very smooth liar

Very clear and concise, from The Providence Journal by John R. MacArthur on how Barack Obama cheated his way into office:

It isn't quite fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to take back later. For now, I won’t quibble with The St. Petersburg Times’s Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises and breaking only six.

And yet, broadly speaking, Obama has been lying on a pretty impressive scale. You just have to get past his grandiloquent rhetoric — usually empty of substance — to get a handle on it. I offer a short, incomplete list, which I’m sure others could easily enlarge.

• Obama portrayed himself as the peace candidate, or at least the anti-war candidate. He is not a peace president, nor is he stopping any wars. True, he promised military escalation in Afghanistan (to blunt John McCain’s accusations of wimpishness), but well-meaning folks believed their new hero would genuinely move to end the occupation of Iraq and seriously try to negotiate with the Taliban. Instead, he has not only increased the number of troops and attacks against the Afghan insurgency, he has also expanded on George Bush’s cross-border raids into Pakistan, which have killed many civilians. The way things are going, Pakistan could become the new Cambodia and Obama the new Nixon.
  
  In Iraq, Obama has promised to withdraw all the troops . . . unless, which means that we’re not leaving. Whether it’s 50,000 troops remaining at the “invitation” of the so-called government of Iraq, or just enough to man the 14 permanent military bases, or some combination of U.S. military personnel and private mercenaries that exceeds 50,000 soldiers, our army will almost certainly stay in Iraq past the stated deadline of Jan. 1, 2012.



• Obama said he wanted to reform Washington and “fix” its “broken” system of corrupt lobbying. But Obama is neither a reformer nor a skilled legislative mechanic. Hatched from the Daley Machine in one-party Chicago, Obama wouldn’t be president today if he rocked boats. Witness the appointment of Roland Burris by the corrupt former Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill Obama’s Senate seat: not a word of public protest from the new administration because Burris is a made man in the Chicago Democratic organization. So what if “Tombstone Roland” can be heard on the U.S. attorney’s wiretaps of Blagojevich, dancing around the delicate question of how to raise money for Blago without appearing to be buying his seat.
  
  As for pork-barrel politics, Obama named one of its greatest champions, Chicago’s own Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff, and the new budget (as well as the “stimulus” package) is loaded with pork. Meanwhile, have you heard anything serious about campaign-finance reform from Obama? Not very likely from someone who refused public financing and still has about $10 million left over from record receipts of $745.7 million. It’s just a detail, I know, but Obama’s naming of former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn III as deputy secretary of defense seems to be at odds with the president’s alleged crusade against special interests and the “revolving door” between private business and government. He has also “sold” ambassadorships to campaign donors. The biggest plum, London, is slated for Lou Susman, a Chicagoan and former Citigroup executive who bundled $239,000. Paris has been reserved for Charles Rivkin, who raised about $500,000 for Obama.



• Obama, with his Arabic middle name and his big Cairo speech, wants people to think that he is the Muslim world’s new best friend. Well, the photograph of a cheery Obama with Saudi King Abdullah and a smiling Emanuel with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, proves the contrary. The Saudi royal family hates the idea of representative government for ordinary Muslims and is cruelly indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. A democratic, independent, partly secular Palestine could only make the Saudi oligarchy look bad. Thus, the House of Saud is perfectly happy with the status quo, and so, evidently, is Obama.
  
  Without Saudi pressure, there will be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Saudi oil is the only lever that would cause America to press Israel into making real concessions. Indeed, the president doesn’t mean for one minute to force Israel into anything more than symbolic withdrawals of its illegal settlements on the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Saudi elite continues to play its double game, paying protection money to extremist Islam and granting pensions to the relatives of suicide bombers. It’s just politics, say Barack and Rahm, grinning ear-to-ear with their sleazy new friends from Riyahd. Just keep the oil pumping around election time and all will be well.



• Obama makes like he’s a friend of organized labor, at least he did during the Ohio primary when he needed to beat Hillary Clinton. At the time, he put out a flier headlined “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals” and charged that “a little more than a year ago, Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was a ‘boon’ to the economy.” In a debate with Clinton on Feb. 26, 2008, he said, “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA] in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about” and “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to get “labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”
  
  But two months ago, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk said such a blunt instrument was no longer necessary and that the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were now “of the mind that we should be looking for opportunities to strengthen [the North American Free Trade Agreement].” And, of course, there is no discussion at all about renegotiating Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, a “bad trade deal” that has done even greater harm to American workers and unions than has NAFTA.

Meanwhile, as I noted in my April 15 column, “Wall Street sharks circle the UAW,” Obama and his banker friend Steven Rattner are liquidating the United Auto Workers even as they liquidate the American auto industry. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s pseudo-secretary of labor, said as much. “The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bailout is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise,” he wrote last month in the Financial Times — no surprise, considering that Obama’s chief economic adviser remains Lawrence Summers, a champion of deregulation and “free-market” economics in the Clinton administration and very much the enemy of labor unions.

Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.

Western media coverage of Iran

By As'ad Abukhalil, Angry Arab News Service, June 21, 2009

As I am still on the road (returning tomorrow night), I have not been able to comment on the developments as much as I have wanted. But I did manage to see some CNN coverage this morning at my hotel. What do you expect from a network that relies on Octavia Nasr as "the senior Middle East" expert for the network? But the hypocrisy is quite stunning. They are admiring the dare of the population when the Palestinian population shows more dare. They are outraged at the level of repressive crackdown by the regime when Israeli crackdowns on demonstrations are far more brutal and savage? They are admiring the participation of women in a national movement, when Palestinian women led the struggle from as far back as the 1930s (see the private papers of Akram Zu`aytir). They are outraged that the Iranian government is repressing media coverage, when the Israeli government is far more strict: when it was perpetrating slaughter in Gaza few months ago, the Western press was not allowed any freedom of movement except the hill of death where Michael Oren led reporters to watch Israeli brutal assualt on the Palestinian civilian population from a distance. The media coverage in the US and UK prove beyond a doubt that increasingly the Western press has been serving as a tool for the various Western government. If the government cheers, the media cheer, if the government condemns, the media condemns, etc. And would the Western media ever be as unrestrained in its glamorization and glorfication of demonstrators and demonstrations in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan as they are now? There are no claims of even covering a story anymore: it is merely how can we best help the beautiful demonstrators who are not bearded and whose women are more loosely veiled. This is not to say that the Iranian regime is not repressive and needs to be overthrown: far from that. But it is to say that the Iranian regime is as bad (in fact Saudi Arabia and Egypt are probably worse) and as unjust as the various Middle East governments that are supported by the Western governments and Western media.

The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos

From Episcopal Cafe's Art Blog

"The word "disappeared" was redefined during the mid-20th Century in Latin America. "Disappeared" evolved into a noun used to identify people who were kidnapped, tortured and killed by their own governments in the latter decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. Colombia with its fifty-year civil war and Guatemala with its own thirty-seven-year civil war further expanded the meanings and uses of "disappeared."

"The exhibition contains work by more than fifteen contemporary artists from these countries, who over the course of the last thirty years have made art about the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others have lived in countries maimed by endless civil war.

"This traveling exhibition, curated by the North Dakota Museum of Art, will be exhibited jointly by the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, the Centennial Museum and the Union Gallery, all on the UTEP campus.

Luis Gonzáles Palma, (Guatemala, lives in Argentina)
1997 diptych, Empty Shirt.
One frame contains the frontal image of a Mayan woman,
the second, an empty white shirt
which stands in for the disappeared husband
Courtesy: North Dakota Musem of Art

"These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others live in countries maimed by endless civil war. Disappearance was inevitably linked to torture. Laurel Reuter, curator of the exhibition and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, was struck by the timelessness and truthfulness of the art. For example, when Identidad, a collaborative installation made by thirteen Argentinean artists, opened in Buenos Aires, three people discovered their long-hidden identities. They had been taken at birth from those who opposed the government and adopted into military families. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again." Text courtesy of the original exhibition website at the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Current show curated by Laurel Reuter
June 18 - September 11, 2009
Rubin and L Galleries and Project Space
University of Texas at El Paso Dept. of Art
500 W. University, El Paso, Texas

Veterans say NO to war and occupation

Thanks to Left I.

Health Care Alert: Horrors! Zombies!

This message brought to as a public service by FireDogLake.

How's He Doing?

Well, Ed Koch is recovering from surgery. The 84 year old former mayor of NYC has undergone surgery at New York Presbyterian Hosptial to replace a heart valve.

Koch suffered a heart attack in 1999. That's when he famously asked, "How'm I doing?"

Koch, who served as mayor of New York City from 1978-1989, is expected to take a week to recover, followed by three weeks of rehab.

And soon, he'll continue to write movie reviews, too.

PETA asks Phish to change name in solidarity with seafood

We all know how PETA - in its misogynistic world - exploits women for its own ends. (Ironic for an organisation that claims to be against the exploitation of animals, right?) Now they've gone after Vermont's own -- Phish. From a story today in the Burlington Free Press:

“We were hoping that if Phish would become Sea Kitten, the band’s legions of fans would start using the word Sea Kitten to describe Phish, and fewer of these sea animals would be violently used for food,” Byrne said. “Hooking a fish through the mouth and dragging it out of the water is really the same as hooking a dog through the mouth and dragging him behind your car.”

Fucking Democrats II

I am not surprised. From Jeremy Scahill:

Obama-backed Bill to Ban Release of Bush-Era Torture Photos Passes Senate

Fucking Democrats

We are in for many more years of war and bloodshed, funded by US taxpayers and approved by a Democrat controlled White House and Congress.

I can't believe Leahy voted for the supplmental war bill.

Sanders didn't.

Welch didn't.

Dennis Perrin was right all along.

Fucking Democrats.

Happy Juneteenth!

From Texas Liberal

What is Juneteenth?

Juneteenth is the celebration to mark the end of slavery in the United States.

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, landing at Galveston, Texas, made the announcement that the Civil War was over and that slaves were free.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, it took time for word to get around that slavery was over. People went around for two years not knowing they were free.

The knowledge you need for your freedom is out there. You just may not be aware.

It’s up to you to gain the knowledge you require about your history. I mean this for people of all colors because history is a shared thing. The fate of all people is connected.

Yeah, but how many trees died in vain?

On Thursday, Greenpeace handed out print copies of a spoof edition of the IHT ...

to press world leaders to agree on ambitious efforts to tackle climate change.

The eight-page mock-up included everything from an environmentally friendly Garfield comic strip to a horoscope (Sagittarius: 'There is a limit to what you can do with the resources available to you').

There was even a full-page, but fake BP advert bearing the slogan: "We changed our logo. We can change the world".

The paper was handed out in Brussels' European quarter shortly before EU leaders were to begin a two-day summit at which the environment is on the agenda.

In all some 50,000 copies were distributed free in the European capital as well as several cities in Asia, the United States and Mexico.

The edition was dated December 19, 2009, the day after a global climate conference will take place in Copenhagen.

An Open Letter to Bishop Henry Parsley from Two Named 'Louie Crew'

Bishop Parsley,

In 1911, when his son Erman was only six, the local Klan came in the dark to
the home of my grandfather and demanded:

"Louie, it is time for you to do your civic duty."

Louie stood them down while Erman watched from behind a window, frightened
by the torches and the hoods.

Then to Erman's amazemenet, Louie called out the name of every hooded man.
Erman thought his father had magical skills, not realizing that as president
of the local bank, his father had loaned the money used to buy most of the
buggies and horses of the vigilantes.

"John! Gary! James! Henry!......" Louie called to the panel before him; "you
know that you are up to no Christian good when you have to hide your face to
do it."

----

+Henry, Bishop of Alabama, Ernest and I still pay taxes on Louie's property
in Coosa County. You know that you are up to no Christian good when you have
to hide the identity of the special panel that you have appointed to study
us secretly.

Nor do you treat all parties equally. This week the MISSIONER, published by
Nashotah House, identified The Rev. Daniel Westberg, a professor at Nashotah
House, as a member of the secret panel and Dr. Ellen Charry, a professor at
Princeton Theological Seminary, as the panel's chair. (See page 3 of the
current issue)

The writer had sufficient knowledge to characterize the theologyical
position of each member of the secret panel.

Why does one of our most conservative seminaries have access to information
that you have denied to all who have requested it, including those of us who
share fiscal responsbility with you at General Convention?

End the duplicity. Take the hoods off all members of the committee. Let
there be transparency and decency.

I have been baptized.

Louie Crew, L1 Newark

Fill 'Er Up

My friend posted this on his Facebook profile: "The random things that drive by my workplace."

'The Unbearable Lightness of NPR'

"NPR announced today that in a cost-cutting move they have replaced their news writers with a computer program that uses a simple formula to generate stories..."

The Royal Palace Amsterdam has been restored

It's certainly an improvement over how it was.

After undergoing extensive renovations and restoration (at a cost of 80 million euro), the palace is ready again for state banquets, the accommodation of (foreign) guests, official acts and... open to the general public. [Story: De Telegraaf (Dutch).]

Today HM The Queen and Princess Margriet opened the newly restored Royal Palace on Dam Square, Amsterdam. Here's a video.


The photo shows HM The Queen and Princess Margriet in the restored Throne Room (© ANP, photo: Marcel Antonisse).

The renovations brought back the French Empire Style, from the time when Louis Napolean Bonaparte was King of Holland. Senior restoration architect Krijn van den Ende: "The palace... will always symbolize the ultimate Seventeenth century classicism ánd the grand Empire style with which the history of the building as a royal palace started."

Restoration artisans have recovered antique furnitures, marble fireplaces and paintings. Several carpets and nearly a thousand historical pieces were refurbished and re-upholstered. (For my tastes, the carpets on the marble floors makes it too cosy Victorian, but I'll have to see for myself next visit to A'dam.)

In many rooms, the original chandeliers have been brought back. The kitchens were modernized for preparation of large dinners and banquets for more than 300 guests. (There are fifty toilets and a few dozen bathrooms added for guests and senior staff aparments.)

Preparations are being made to clean the exterior of the palace, the first time since it was built 350 years ago.

(Exterior photo of the Paleis op de Dam, credit Paleisamsterdam.nl.)

Call Wilders what he is: a racist

This commenter calls Wilders' Party for Freedom racist. A shame we don't do the same with the party of Limbaugh, Fox News and Gingrich!

NRC.nl/international

Published: 11 June 2009 13:11 | Changed: 12 June 2009 17:12

By René Danen

The foreign media routinely describe Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom as an "extreme-right" party. Yet the Dutch media, including NRC, seem to be deadly afraid of calling the PVV by its name, preferring to describe it as "populist" or "anti-Islam".

After Wilders released his [anti-Islam] film Fitna, for instance, the Dutch government was mostly worried about its effect on Dutch trade interests. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon went much further in denouncing Fitna. He said there was "there is no justification for the hate speech or incitement to violence" in the film and that taking legal action against the film was not a violation of the principle of freedom of speech.

Dutch politicians moved on as soon as the Fitna hype died down. Luckily, the Amsterdam appeals court later ordered Wilders to be prosecuted for "incitement to hatred and discrimination". There was good reason to do so if you look at some of Wilders' positions.

The PVV wants to close the borders to people who belong to one particular religion, and ban the houses of worship and schools for one population group. Wilders once told De Limburger newspaper that he wants to "tear down the mosques". He told HP/De Tijd newsweekly that "it is okay for the Netherlands to have Jewish and Christian school but not Islamic schools". In other words: pure discrimination.

Wilders has also said that his utopia is a Netherlands without immigrants, and that it is unacceptable that Dutch cities could one day have a majority of non-white people. He is also anti-democratic. He is the only member of his private party. PVV parliamentarians are not elected by the party but appointed by Wilders himself. The PVV meets behind closed doors in meetings where no one has the right to vote. So the main defining characteristics of an extreme-right party - nationalist, anti-democratic and racist - are all found in the PVV.

The party also likes to flirt with violence. Wilders has referred to his own parliamentary group as a "motley crew marching into parliament". He has said Moroccan football hooligans ought to be knee-capped, and that race riots are "not necessarily a bad thing".

When the racist Centre-Democrats entered the political arena in the eighties and nineties, Dutch public and political opinion united against it, and the party never won more than a couple of percentage points of the vote. After its leader, Hans Janmaat, was convicted for discrimination in 1996, the party disappeared from the parliament altogether. A similar tough approach to the PVV's discriminatory viewpoints - in the public debate as well in the courts - is called for now.

Yet, the opposite seems to be happening. Calling racism by its name has become the newest taboo in the Netherlands. At a time when everything is debatable in the Netherlands, and some politicians are even defending the right to give offence, still no one dares to call xenophobia by its name. It is almost as if racist politicians can only exist in other countries. We have no problem condemning [Belgian Vlaams Belang leader Filip] Dewinter or [French National Front leader Jean-Marie] Le Pen because of their views, but we seem determined to keep pretending that there is no xenophobia in the Netherlands.

Foreign research proves the opposite is true. Last March, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights said he was deeply worried about the "racist, anti-Semitic and other intolerant tendencies in the Netherlands, notably intolerance against Muslims." In an earlier report the council had expressed surprise that so few Dutch politicians were speaking out against the PVV's hatespeech. In the Netherlands, the Anne Frank Foundation researched the PVV and concluded that it was indeed an extreme-right party. A report by the association of Dutch municipalities said many towns have more problems with extreme-right youth than with Muslim extremism.

Still our own media and politicians continue to deny that the Netherlands has a racism problem. The most striking example was a statement by Rita Verdonk at the launch of her new nationalist party, Proud of the Netherlands: "We keep seeing these reports accusing us of discrimination. But Dutch people just don't do that!"

The left-wing liberal party D66 is the only party in the Dutch parliament to openly address Wilders' xenophobia. The Green party GroenLinks is reluctantly following suit. But the other mainstream parties should also step up to the plate, instead of leaving the fight against racism to the courts. They should speak out against racism - in parliament and in the streets.

Pretending that the PVV doesn't exist is clearly not working as a strategy - its recent success in the European elections is proof of that. Calling it what it is - a racist party - and firmly condemning its viewpoints will.