Democracy Now! | Headlines for March 4, 2005:
Who is surprised by this? Not me. Any voice of change that isn't in sync with the ruling class is a threat.
"Strom Thurmond's FBI Files Show He Hoped to 'Discredit' MLK
Newly released FBI files show that U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond tried to get the FBI to build a case against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 on the grounds that King was 'controlled by communists.' Earlier this week the FBI released 600 pages of Thurmond's FBI file. The files show that an aide of Thurmond once met with FBI officials in order to inquire whether 'there was a concerted effort on the part of the FBI to discredit King.' Around the same time Thurmond publicly criticized King for 'injecting himself into matters of foreign policy.' Thurmond died in 2003 at the age of 100 after serving nearly a half-century in the Senate. While Thurmond was one of the fiercest opponents of the civil rights movement, he kept a secret that only emerged in recent years. 80 years ago he fathered a daughter with his black house servant. Their offspring, Essie May Washington Williams, recently wrote a memoir titled Dear Senator."

"The Bush administration enthusiastically congratulated itself this week for including abuses by Iraqi authorities in its annual report on human rights violations. One State Department official called it proof that "we don't look the other way." But the report did look away - from American involvement in the mistreatment it decried. In the end it was another sad reminder of the heavy price the nation has paid for ignoring fundamental human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo; in the secret cells where the C.I.A. holds its unaccounted-for prisoners; and at home, where President Bush continues to claim the power to hold Americans in jail indefinitely without the right to trial."

NYTimes Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd: "I went to see Al Pacino's 'Merchant of Venice' movie the other day.
It was funny to watch the climactic courtroom scene in which the cross-dressing Portia sets a dazzling legal trap for the cross Shylock.
The vengeful loan shark can take his pound of flesh from Antonio, she tells him, but it has to be exactly a pound. And if Antonio bleeds, the laws of Venice dictate that all of Shylock's lands and goods will be confiscated.
The 16th-century Shylock skulks off. A 21st-century Shylock would have had a solution: liposuction.
Shylock could have extracted his precise pound of flesh, and the fashionably epicene Antonio could have come out of it looking even sleeker.
Shakespeare wrote a lot about the power of beauty and the withering of beauty. As one pre-Botox sonnet went: 'When forty winters shall besiege thy brow/And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,/Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,/Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.'
Shakespeare also wrote about narcissistic personalities and the treacheries of time. So I'm sure he would have been fascinated by the obsession of our modern culture with freezing the clock - and the face - with lifestyle drugs and medical treatments.
Cosmetic enhancements have become so common that you can now get 'frequent flier' cards for wrinkles - racking up rewards every time a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon sticks a needle in your face.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that, following up on Pfizer's success with Viagra 'value cards,' which offer repeat customers discounts, Medicis Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Restylane, an anti-wrinkle skin filler, is offering a rewards program 'to encourage injections every six months by offering gifts that escalate in value with each subsequent appointment - adding up to $375 after the fourth follow-up visit.'
A Restylane treatment is about $500 to $750 and lasts about six months, according to the article. So Medicis says it aims to keep customers on track to maintain their 'corrected look.'
You just get the Restylane syringe box top from your doctor and send it in, as you used to do with cereal boxes to get toys. And you can keep your 'corrected look' going until you hit that 'Alas, poor Yorick' phase.
What Shakespeare could have done with this material. And wouldn't you love to hear the Bard on the Oscars?
Others found the Oscars boring; I found the show slightly alarming.
I used to worry that women were heading toward one face. Sometimes in affluent settings, like the Oscars or the shoe department at Bergdorf's, you see a bunch of eerily similar women with oddly off-track features - Botox-smoothed Formica foreheads, collagen-protruding lips, surgically narrowed noses, taut jaws - who look like sisters from another planet.
It's like that futuristic Sylvester Stallone movie 'Demolition Man,' set in 2032, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as president and Taco Bell as the sole survivor of the Franchise Wars.
In the future, there will be only one face. And if the Oscars are predictive, there will be only one body - big chest, skinny body - and one style. It was bizarre how actress after actress came out in the same mermaid silhouette: a strapless sheath with a trumpet-flared or ruffled skirt.
Where are the good old wardrobe malfunctions of Cher and Barbra?
In decades past, each top glamour girl aimed for a signature face and measurements, a trademark voice, a unique walk. You never saw Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner showing up in the same dress, or Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe looking like a pair of matching candles.
In some wacky, self-defeating conspiracy, stylists have joined forces with surgeons to homogenize today's actresses so it's hard to tell one from another; the Oscars had a safe, boring, generic look. Top female stars who have had a lot of work done start looking like one another on magazine covers, and being confused for one another at publicity events.
Chris Rock was right: star power is in short supply in a town where women would rather be conventional than individual. It's the same problem Hollywood has making movies: too much cloning, not enough originality.
As Shakespeare wrote of the ultimate glamour girl, Cleopatra: 'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.'
Women have become so fixated on not withering, they've forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful."

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: "Your Best Prediction - What Scandal Could the Bush Administration NOT Get Away With?"

Thought this was a good question. I honestly can't think of anything they haven't done already that I would have thought a politician couldn't get out of. Maybe if Cheney killed a person with his bare hands, and it was caught on tape. Or if Bush went on American Idol and lost. I don't know. Even then, Karl Rove would think of something to wash this over with.

NY Times Op-Ed Contributor Robert B. Reich (secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997): "BOWING to intense pressure from neighborhood and labor groups, a real estate developer has just given up plans to include a Wal-Mart store in a mall in Queens, thereby blocking Wal-Mart's plan to open its first store in New York City. In the eyes of Wal-Mart's detractors, the Arkansas-based chain embodies the worst kind of economic exploitation: it pays its 1.2 million American workers an average of only $9.68 an hour, doesn't provide most of them with health insurance, keeps out unions, has a checkered history on labor law and turns main streets into ghost towns by sucking business away from small retailers.
But isn't Wal-Mart really being punished for our sins? After all, it's not as if Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton, and his successors created the world's largest retailer by putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to shop there."

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Moments ago I saw a news bit concerning a woman who gave up her child for adoption, a handful of years ago, in a "distressed emotional state." The quotations aren't for satire, but it was the only justification the mother offered. Now she wants the child back. She's sueing the adoption agency, who is standing their ground to represent the adoptive parents.

It's tough both ways. A lot of people would say it's the most unatural thing in the world for a parent to be kept away from their biological child. But despite us all knowing about adoption, is it not exceptionally unnatural to give up your child by sheer choice in the first place?

If I had to say yes or no to the biological mothers plead, I'd say no: Can you actually pry that child from the parents who did in fact accept it, ultimately, reversing the adoption process? How do you explain this to the child? Do they not have a say in it? The predictability of the child simply wanting to stay with the parents it knows by no means lessens the significance of the childs opinion on the matter. By any standard the adoptive parents have done nothing wrong. Can you actually reward the mother for giving up her child, especially at the expense of those who did the right thing? I must say, you can't. This seems even worse than keeping the mother from the child she wants back. To me at least.

I'd say to anyone who claims she deserves her child back: Note that the her new cause is resulting in a new effect. In the light of her obvious history, you must ask, does this woman have a problem grasping the consquences of her own actions? Is she not playing the same game yet again, this time, at the expense of even more innocent people? How far can she take this habit, if the legal system continues to support her? Is this a quality of a healthy parent?

G Bara