BY TOM TOMORROW
I dunno what it is about CNN, but they’ve been veering more and more into the realm of the trivial and embarrassing lately. This headline on their homepage is the kind of that would make US Weekly blush :
This cartoon ran last March, a few months before the subprime crisis really began to hit critical mass. At the time, most of the feedback I got from readers suggested that I did not know what I was talking about, or that I was making too much out of a minor trend.
Little did we all know …
From Norman Solomon (via email):
When I picked up a ringing phone Monday morning, the next thing I knew a producer was inviting me to appear on Glenn Beck’s TV show.
Beck has become a national phenom with his nightly hour of polemics on CNN Headline News — urging war on Iran, denouncing “political correctness†at home, trashing immigrants who don’t speak English, mocking environmentalists as repressive zealots, and generally trying to denigrate progressive outlooks.
Our segment, the producer said, would focus on a recent NBC news report praising the virtues of energy-efficient LED light bulbs without acknowledging that the network’s parent company, General Electric, sells them. I figured it was a safe bet that Beck’s enthusiasm for full disclosure from media would be selective.
A few hours later, I was staring into a camera lens at the CNN bureau in San Francisco while Beck launched into his opening. What had occurred on the “NBC Nightly News,†he explained, “was at best a major breach of journalistic integrity.†And he pointed out: “The problem isn’t what NBC is promoting. It’s what they’re not disclosing.â€
A minute later, Beck asked his first question: “Norman, you agree with me that they should have disclosed this?†The unedited transcript tells what happened next.
Wexler Wants Hearings, where Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) call for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney, has almost 90,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to sign it—the more people who do, the more likely it is big online groups will jump in and make it a cause of their own. Then we could be talking about 500,000 signatories…which in turn would make room for all kinds of good things.
The Secret Library of Hope
12 Books to Stiffen Your Resolve
By Rebecca SolnitHope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks — or building ladders — rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It’s a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.
Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as “the secret library of hope.” None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.
Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates: