The Wild Tchoupitoulas:
Put the lime in the coconut
Harry Nilsson:
Disgusting. Horrifying.
I can’t think of words terrible enough for this kind of evil:
Their names are Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, 17. They were once soccer players in the West Bank. Now they are never going to play sports again. Jawhar and Adam were on their way home from a training session in the Faisal al-Husseini Stadium on January 31 when Israeli forces fired upon them as they approached a checkpoint. After being shot repeatedly, they were mauled by checkpoint dogs and then beaten. Ten bullets were put into Jawhar’s feet. Adam took one bullet in each foot. After being transferred from a hospital in Ramallah to King Hussein Medical Center in Amman, they received the news that soccer would no longer be a part of their futures. (Israel’s border patrol maintains that the two young men were about to throw a bomb.)
This is only the latest instance of the targeting of Palestinian soccer players by the Israeli army and security forces. Death, injury or imprisonment has been a reality for several members of the Palestinian national team over the last five years. Just imagine if members of Spain’s top-flight World Cup team had been jailed, shot or killed by another country and imagine the international media outrage that would ensue. Imagine if prospective youth players for Brazil were shot in the feet by the military of another nation. But, tragically, these events along the checkpoints have received little attention on the sports page or beyond.
Much has been written about the psychological effect this kind of targeting has on the occupied territories. Sports represent escape, joy and community, and the Palestinian national soccer team, for a people without a recognized nation, is a source of tremendous pride. To attack the players is to attack the hope that the national team will ever truly have a home.
The Palestinian national football team, which formed in 1998, is currently ranked 144th in the world by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). They have never been higher than 115th. As Chairman of the Palestinian Football Association Jibril al-Rajoub commented bluntly, the problems are rooted in “the occupation’s insistence on destroying Palestinian sport.”
Honest broker
Enron billionaire John Arnold assures us he can tell us what we should do about worker pensions because he has no investment in it.
In his response to Pando’s investigative reporting, Arnold is asserting that his status as a billionaire with “no financial interest” in the debate should make him more credible and beyond reproach. But would it?
One school of thought says yes it would, because he would have nothing personally to gain or lose in the debate. The idea is that the concerns and arguments of public-sector workers and retirees should be dismissed, or downplayed, because their economic survival depends on the public pension debate’s outcome. At the same time, the idea is that the oligarch is uniquely able to be objective because his wealth means he doesn’t really have a personal stake in whether to fulfill pension obligations or to renege on those obligations and throw untold numbers of retirees into poverty.
This is the self-serving notion typically forwarded by plutocrats to try to appropriate even more privilege than their billions afford them — and there is at least some logic undergirding it.
Continue reading “Honest broker”
The beauty of baseball
Happy Mardi Gras
Your librul media
How the Washington Post chooses to cover Venezuela.
So the white supremacists are rising in the new Ukraine
*Hint: When he says “degeneration,” he means homosexuality.
They’re hanging white power flags (including the Confederate flag) in Kiev’s City Hall (stop me if this sounds familiar: They hate Jews and gay people):
The head of the new defense council (their NSC) was a founder of Ukraine “Social Nationalist Party” & leader of its paramilitary unit. We also know now that the new Deputy PM & defense minister are Svoboda (the white supremacist/nationalist group and waiting for confirmation that they now control the cabinet posts of ecology, agriculture & prosecutor general.
Can the Ukraine control them? You tell me.
Oh, and here’s Billmon with the Mainstream Media Cycle of Doom.
Quote of the day
Vladimir Putin on the situation in Ukraine:
The American political technologists they did their work well. And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this in Ukraine, no. Sometimes, I get the feeling that these people…these people in America. They are sitting there, in their laboratory, and doing experiments, like on rats.
Your Librul Media calls him crazy and paranoid. Sounds pretty sane to me!
Oh dear
WASHINGTON — CIA director John Brennan told a senior lawmaker Monday that a 1997 treaty between Russia and Ukraine allows up to 25,000 Russia troops in the vital Crimea region, so Russia may not consider its recent troop movements to be an invasion, U.S. officials said.
The number of Russian troops that have surged into Ukraine in recent days remains well below that threshold, Brennan said, according to U.S. officials who declined to be named in describing private discussions and declined to name the legislator.
Though Brennan disagrees that the treaty justifies Russia’s incursion, he urged a cautious approach, the officials said. Administration officials have said Moscow violated the treaty, which requires the Russian navy, which bases its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, to coordinate all military movements on the Crimean peninsula with Ukraine.]