From police assaults on citizens photographing Occupy protests to Al Jazeera reporters’ imprisonment by the Egyptian regime, journalists have endured escalating attacks by authoritarian regimes both in the US and abroad.
It’s gotten to the point where simply reporting the news is an act of resistance.
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Apparently, some kind of Worldwide Wave Of Action started last week, billed as a rekindling of the Occupy movement. Having covered at least half a dozen previous “international days of action”, my well-honed cynicism kicked into gear as I remembered how all the previous “worldwide” action days drew hundreds of thousands in cities outside the US — while inside the US, the turnouts could be generously described as pathetic.
The current “worldwide” Wave Of Action was no different, judging from what I was seeing on my Twitter feed. Cities in the UK and Europe turned out healthy numbers while in the meantime, in the US, I saw the usual sad smattering of thin, weak protests, with small veterans’ contingents and others gathering in places like the NYC Vietnam War Memorial and Zucotti Park, only to be chased off or arrested by police.
I was also somewhat less than inspired by the vagueness of their rhetoric and sloganeering. On Twitter I saw pronouncements like “movement of movements” and “bring your own goals”, with no mention of any specific issues, such as war and militarization, unemployment, state-enforced economic austerity, the destruction of civil liberties, or the US-instigated “revolution” in the Ukraine — just lots of lofty faux revolutionary hype and empty poetic slogans.
I won’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, the “Wave Of Action” was more like a “ripple of action”.
Oh, yeah — and, cupcakes.
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It was five years ago this week — this past Thursday, to be exact — that President Sparkle Pony kicked off his murderous drone warfare campaign. Not even a week in office, and already we had some change — you’ve got to give him that.
So, I was reading this article over at the Bureau Of Investigative Journalism and saw this graph showing President Sparkle Pony’s massive escalation of remote-control murder compared to President Chimp, and on viewing the layout of the bars showing the figures for Obama, I couldn’t help noticing something…
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Follow the Bureau Of Investigative Journalism on Twitter.
…and, here’s some more of El Presidente’s dronetastic moments from days gone by:
“Well, Waddya Know?” December 2013
“I Have A Drone” January 2013
“I Am The Joker” July 2012
“My Little Party” February 2012
“Are You In?” April 2011
“Yes, We Can!” October 2010
Now, I didn’t actually watch Obama’s Syria speech last Tuesday — the very sound of his soulless, pompous, officious delivery gives me a Hot Dog Burp Of Disgust — but from all accounts, the whole thing basically boiled down to “Aww, FUUUUUUUUU–“
What really gives me a giggle, though, is all the talk from Obummer and his mob about a “red line”. After all, how long has that whole brouhaha been going on over there — two years or so? Then, after sitting around and pretty much ignoring it, President Sparkle Pony gets a bug up his ass and decides we — “we” being the US State and corporate elites — need to “do something”? Christ, that’s rich.
And whose idea was it to start slinging around the expression “red line”, anyway? That’s got to be one of the stupidest expressions to come from inside the Beltway since “reset button”. You know the Washington insiders and punditocracy are really scraping the bottom of the barrel when they start picking up on a phrase coined by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in that third-grade show’n’tell he put on at the UN last year.
For me, that’s a sure sign that the elites have completely jumped the shark.
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