Prometheus 6

Lest I forget.

Despotism (1946)

Measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?

The companion Encyclopedia Britannica Film "Democracy" can be found here.

Producer: Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
Audio/Visual: sound, B&W

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I just stumbled on this...I'm recording it for later review. It's being broadcast againg tomorrow night.

Hitler's Courts: The Betrayal of the Rule of Law in Nazi Germany

In this hour-long OPEN MIND special, former New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler joins program host Richard D. Heffner to screen and discuss Hitler's Courts: Betrayal of the Rule of Law in Nazi Germany, a documentary film produced by the Touro Law Center. Debuting during the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which brought chieftains of the Nazi Party to justice, it demonstrates that when those charged with defending the rule of law betray that trust, the victory of tyrants is assured. (Closed Captioning)

Pa. DJ Fired for Repeating Imus Comments
Pennsylvania DJ Fired for Repeating Imus' Racially Charged Comments As Part of Contest
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM
The Associated Press

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - A radio station fired its longtime morning DJ Wednesday after he encouraged listeners to repeat talk-show host Don Imus' racially charged comments in an on-air contest.

Gary Smith told WSBG-FM listeners to call and say "I'm a nappy-headed ho" for Tuesday's "Phrase that Pays" contest, said Rick Musselman, executive vice president of station owner Nassau Broadcasting Partners L.P.

Musselman said three of the listeners who called were awarded tickets to a NASCAR promotion at a local club.

In 1907, then-Gov. J. Frank Hanly signed a state law widely regarded as the first in the world to permit sterilization in a misguided effort to improve the quality of the human race.

Indiana Sorry for Eugenics Role
By AP/KEN KUSMER

(INDIANAPOLIS) — An Indiana official publicly apologized for the state's role 100 years ago in pioneering state-authorized sterilization of "imbeciles," paupers and others it deemed undesirable.

Health Commissioner Dr. Judith Monroe expressed regret on behalf of the state Thursday for its passing of the first such eugenics law. She also unveiled a historic marker that will stand across from the Statehouse.

"It is one [law] that we do regret but we should not forget," she said.

Obama returns more than $50,000 in lobbyists' contributions
By JIM KUHNHENN
The Associated Press
April 13, 2007, 9:25 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has returned more than $50,000 in political contributions after discovering the donors were lobbyists.

Obama, who has pledged to change the ways of Washington, has repeatedly said he will not accept money from lobbyists or from special interest political action committees.

"I am concerned about the role of lobbyists and campaign donations generally in our politics," Obama told The Associated Press while campaigning in Florence, S.C. "That's part of the reason I don't take PAC money and I'm not taking federal lobbyist money in this campaign."

Burim Bezeri, Adrian Missbrenner and Robbins were charged with the assault of the Naperville girl, then 16, during a night of heavy drinking at Missbrenner's home. Sonny Smith was accused of videotaping the incident. Prosecutors offered evidence in the case that the girl was provided alcohol, then woke up naked in bed and didn't remember what had happened. Two days later she went to police.

Bezeri, in statements to police, admitted spitting on the girl while she lay unconscious and putting a lighted cigarette inside her body. Missbrenner and Robbins were acquitted of assault charges in the case. Smith was convicted of manufacturing child pornography.

Final suspect sentenced in alleged rape on video
By Art Barnum
Tribune staff reporter
April 13, 2007, 8:17 PM CDT

The last of four young men accused in the reported rape of a teenage girl in a Burr Ridge incident caught on videotape in 2002 pleaded guilty Friday to misdemeanor assault and bail violation and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.

Burim Bezeri, 21, of Lyons had been charged with 60 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and 38 counts of criminal sexual assault before fleeing to Europe in 2004. He returned to the U.S. in December and was charged with violating bail.

Under the plea deal, the felony sex assault charges were reduced to a single count of misdemeanor battery for which Bezeri will serve 1 year in Cook County Jail. After that, he will serve 4 years in state prison for violating bail, a felony, prosecutors said.

Qusan spotted this. Wanda drops a line that sums up hella Black folks' feeling on explaining the whole race thing (though that may be changing to some degree). I didn't upload this one, but I would have...

Thursday's test was all the more significant as the missile was built with 85 percent Indian know-how.

'We have developed the capacity for the balance 15 percent and will be progressively introducing this,' Natarajan added.

Agni-III range can extend to 5,000 km: scientists

Buoyed by the successful test firing of a nuclear capable ballistic missile they designed and developed, Indian scientists confidently declared Friday it could be inducted into service in two to three years, even as they said its range could be extended to 5,000 km.

From correspondents in Delhi, India, 13 Apr 2007 - (www.indiaenews.com)

More worrying for some of the Iraqis who live in the Green Zone, it smacked of an inside job one of several that have occurred here recently. Waqas al-Ubaidi, 30, was waiting outside for word about his injured uncle, parliamentarian Salman Jumayli. "Tell me how the bombs came here?" Ubaidi asked, noting that many officials with security clearances don't get searched. "I think the days coming are more bad," he said. "I'm feeling that."

Was Parliament Attack an Inside Job?

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Forces Treatment Change
The CDC says the major antibiotics used to the treat gonorrhea are no longer effective. Now there’s only one therapy left.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Mary Carmichael
Newsweek
Updated: 1:51 p.m. ET April 12, 2007

I think y'all oughta listen to the brother . Especially since y'all's rationalizations had nothing to do with what went on in his head.

Imus, Barbara Ehrenreich, Becky, Michael-Anne.

Let me put it this way.

I don't give a sh** how you think you can define the word "Ho".

Anytime you apply the term to my daughter, a black girl, a much-too-soon-to-be black woman, you're going to catch a beat down.

From me.

Literally.

Now, go out there and define "beat down".

At the Justice Department, Mr. Spakovsky helped oversee the voting rights unit. In 2003, when the Texas Congressional redistricting spearheaded by the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, was sent to the Justice Department for approval, the career staff members unanimously said it discriminated against African-American and Latino voters.

Mr. Spakovsky overruled the staff, said Joseph Rich, a former lawyer in the office. Mr. Spakovsky did the same thing when they recommended the rejection of a voter identification law in Georgia considered harmful to black voters. Mr. Rich said. Federal courts later struck down the two laws.

Former lawyers in the office said Mr. Spakovsky’s decisions seemed to have a partisan flavor unlike those in previous Republican and Democratic administrations. Mr. Spakovsky declined to comment.

In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Cobb

See by forcing Imus to resign we have just raised the standards of broadcasting. Why is that a problem? Because we refuse to do it for Ice Cube. I hear you whining. Ice Cube is just an entertainer, nobody takes him serious look at all the crap he's done over the years.... Exactly my point. Which is to say there is a double standard. White men are supposed to be serious and taken seriously at all times. The power of their words resounds around the planet and crushes, kills and destroys, so we must insure that all white men be pure of heart, mind, body and soul. Right? But Ice Cube? Nahh. Nobody needs to take that Negro seriously anyway, ever.

Look at Ice Cube's network. What can they do to you?

Look at Imus' network. What can they do to you?

Have at it if you wish.

My hunch is that Ailes, one of the toughest and smartest in a generation of Republican political consultants, sees his adversaries as playing the kind of political hardball he respects. It's why he's angry. The anti-Fox squad won a second round on Monday when Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined John Edwards in announcing that they would not appear at a debate to be sponsored by Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus in September.

The Fox debate saga is amusing, but it's more than that. It marks a transformation on the left driven by the rise of Internet voices and the frustration of liberals at the success of conservatives in using a combination of talk radio, Fox and the Web to propagate anti-liberal, anti-Democratic messages.

Saying No to Fox News
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 13, 2007; A17

I have this mischievous suspicion that Roger Ailes, the creator and chairman of Fox News, secretly admires the bloggers and other activists working to keep Democratic presidential candidates from debating on his cable network.

The WSJ story will be the semantic history. The somatic history is at Media Matters

UNHORSED JOCKEY
Behind the Fall of Imus, A Digital Brush Fire
In a Blur, Watchdogs, Blogs, Email, Spur Radio Host's Firing
By BROOKS BARNES, EMILY STEEL and SARAH MCBRIDE
April 13, 2007; Page A1

At 6:14 a.m. on Wednesday, April 4, relatively few people were tuned into the "Imus in the Morning Show" when Don Imus referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's."

Our nation, historically bursting with generosity toward strangers, remains remarkably unkind toward its own. Just under our gleaming patina of inclusiveness, we harbor corroding guts. America, I tell you that it doesn’t matter how many times you brush your teeth. If your insides are rotting your breath will stink. So, how do you people choose which hate to embrace, which to forgive with a wink and a week in rehab, and which to protest? Where’s my copy of that rule book?

Our Prejudices, Ourselves
By HARVEY FIERSTEIN

AMERICA is watching Don Imus’s self-immolation in a state of shock and awe. And I’m watching America with wry amusement.

Since I’m a second-class citizen — a gay man — my seats for the ballgame of American discourse are way back in the bleachers. I don’t have to wait long for a shock jock or stand-up comedian to slip up with hateful epithets aimed at me and mine. Hate speak against homosexuals is as commonplace as spam. It’s daily traffic for those who profess themselves to be regular Joes, men of God, public servants who live off my tax dollars, as well as any number of celebrities.

In fact, I get a good chuckle whenever someone refers to “the media” as an agent of “the gay agenda.” There are entire channels, like Spike TV, that couldn’t fill an hour of programming if required to remove their sexist and homophobic content. We’ve got a president and a large part of Congress willing to change the Constitution so they can deprive of us our rights because they feel we are not “normal.”

So I’m used to catching foul balls up here in the cheap seats. What I am really enjoying is watching the rest of you act as if you had no idea that prejudice was alive and well in your hearts and minds.

This is as safe as it gets in Iraq nowadays.

The image of the International Zone as an impregnable fortress had been on the wane. Regular rocket and mortar attacks on the United States Embassy compound in recent weeks have killed a civilian and a soldier, and wounded several others. And senior military officials said two suicide vests were found in a garbage bin about two weeks ago.

Accordingly, news of the attack on Thursday came less as a shock than as further evidence of the government’s impotence, even in the midst of a major security push in the city.

8 Iraqis Killed in Bomb Attack at Legislature
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

C.N. Le, a Vietnamese-American who teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, says the pattern has created some friction in Asian-American communities.

"Some of the men view the women marrying whites as sellouts, and a lot of Asian women say, 'Well, we would want to date you more, but a lot of you are sexist or patriarchal,'" said Le, who attributes the friction in part to gender stereotypes of Asians that have been perpetuated by American films and TV shows.

Taunts and threats, including cross burnings, still occur sporadically. In Cleveland, two white men were sentenced to prison earlier this year for harassment of an interracial couple that included spreading liquid mercury around their house.

More often, though, the difficulties are more nuanced, such as those faced by Kim and Al Stamps during 13 years as an interracial couple in Jackson, Miss.

Thursday, Apr. 12, 2007
Interracial Marriage Rate Soars
By AP/DAVID CRARY

The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world's best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.

For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.

It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.

Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.

"Every day on talk radio and cable news, journalists, hosts, guests and commentators cross that same line. Regardless of who the victim of that hate speech is, it is damaging and hurtful both to the public debate and the public at large," Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, said on Thursday before the CBS announcement.

...and talk radio is the root, the training field, for the worst of them. 

Boortz, Limbaugh and Beck remain in their jobs, and Boortz was among a group of conservative radio hosts who met U.S. President George W. Bush in the White House for 90 minutes last September.

Furor over Imus puts heat on other broadcasters
Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:56 PM EDT
By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Corporate decisions to cancel Don Imus' U.S. radio and cable television shows have some commentators wondering what may happen to other media personalities who have also pushed the bounds of civility.

The Imus Fallout and Lessons for Black America

One area of fallout that has to be explored is the detoxification of the public airwaves and Black America's role in that effort. This is where we arrive at a "mirror moment" for Black America to come to grips with its own culpability in this regard. For far too long, prominent African Americans have played lip service to challenging Black "artists" who sellout Black people for money, offering "art" that only serves to enrich themselves while degrading, debasing, and disrespecting women. There is little sadder than hearing young Black boys and men refer to Black women as bitches and ho's, emulating their entertainment heroes. Apologists such as Russell Simmons have defended the efforts of these traitors on entrepreneurial grounds suggesting that society is better because these sellouts have done something other than crime to get by. Meanwhile, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and others have been timid in their efforts to turn up the heat on these "artists" in the same way they went after Imus. They and other prominent African Americans can only have credibility on this issue if they are as aggressive with Black "artists" who are far worse than Imus.

Main Stream Media, "Black Leaders", and Ignorance

The Don Imus fiasco, once again, shows exactly how much the "main stream media" ignores so-called "Black leaders" and the Black media when Blacks are attempting to address issues in the Black community?...

Listening to mainstream talk radio in the Baltimore-D.C. corridor, it was evident that they had no clue that Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Sr., and Lewis Farrakhan, to name a few, have blasted the lyrics in rap and rappers. The popular refrain was, "Where are [ insert so-called last name of Black leader here ] criticizing the lyrics in rap?"...

It's funny how the "mainstream media" can give coverage to so-called "Black leaders" at certain times while ignoring them at other times. For example, when Cosby was given press for his comments, how many in the press stated the NAACP audience applauded vs. how many stated otherwise?

CBS fires Don Imus
By David Bauder
The Associated Press

NEW YORK — CBS fired Don Imus from his radio show today, the finale to a stunning fall for one of the nation's most prominent broadcasters.

Imus initially was suspended for two weeks for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" on the air last week, but outrage continued to grow and advertisers bolted from his programs.

In my ongoing attempts to have disciplined discussions yet have as open environment as possible, I have added a Drupal module that lets me move comments between threads. I haven't tested it yet. But...

New Rule: I'n going to create an open thread every day. I know y'all never use them, but this is for me. Whenever someone tries to hijack a thread, the hijacking comment will be moved to the open thread of the day.

That is all.

Howard Fineman's little on-air talk with Imus convinced is proof his whole entourage is complicit.

"There is a clubbiness to it," said Alter, who said Imus's recent comments were "racist" and "despicable." "It's a strange hybrid of serious, in-depth coverage with locker room banter. Fortunately I have never been on the air when that banter went over the line."

"Fortunately"? Why? Because you wouldn't have to take responsibility? You could ignore it the next time you go on his show?

Guess what...you ARE responsible.

Imus started a movement that made public hostility acceptable. But he didn't do it alone...he couldn't. You respectable types that yuk it up with him place him under YOUR ambit as much as he had you under his.

YOU ARE AS FUNDAMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LOSS OF CIVILITY YOU DECRY AS IMUS, BOB GRANT, RUSH LIMBAUGH, BILL O'REILLY AND ANYONE ELSE YOU CAN NAME.

Congratualtions.

No One to Talk To?
For Don Imus's Frequent Guests, A Moral Dilemma
By Sridhar Pappu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 11, 2007; C01

Don Imus's program relies on a stable of regular guests, many of them luminaries of politics or journalism. Tim Russert, Sen. John McCain, Bob Schieffer -- these and dozens of other notables call in every few weeks and spend 15 or 20 minutes batting around the issues of the day after some light banter.

Over the years, many of these stalwarts have developed a bond of friendship with the host. Imus mentions gifts that Russert has sent to his young son, and recounts donations that some guests have made to Imus-associated charities.