Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #69

Posted on March 15, 2007 in Roundup

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”
[[Martin Luther King]]

The stories of the alternative press of today will be the stories of the mainstream media tomorrow provided they prove politically correct to do so and can be spun in such a way that the perpetuation of the war is not threatened. Here and there a scapegoat will be found, but do not expect any genuine change. The people of Iraq will continue to eat, sleep, and work in an atmosphere tainted with spent uranium.

With the war the single biggest outlay of funds from our taxpayer dollars, why do days pass when there is no news from the front? Don’t the lives of Iraqis matter?

Or the lives of the rest of us who will be paying for the war and the bungled Pentagon accounting system for the rest of our lives with money that should have been used for our retirement?

• Medical Marijuana: Today’s decision which makes those who use it subject to prosecution fills me with mixed feelings. The woman who sued for her right to use it needs it: she has an inoperable brain tumor. On the other hand, its prescription has been loose. The grapevine is full of reports of people who have finagled a way to get a supply by finding a doctor who will prescribe it for anything ranging from bipolar disorder to sore knees. If the medical marijuana experiment is going to work, it must be handled like any other legal drug — approved and regulated by the FDA. The next step is Congress.
• Choice Website: Defense in the National Interest
• Choice Videos: Hang-glide over the surface of Mars
• Choice Articles: The Truth in Chains and Is it a man’s, man’s, man’s world?
• Privatisation Taken Too Far: A British scheme proposes that jails be set up in shopping malls. Talks are under way to open the first of these short-term holding cells in Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London. The five purpose-built rooms would be smaller than normal cells and made of Perspex so that suspects are visible. The police will also gain sweeping extensions to their powers to take fingerprints and DNA samples from anyone they suspect of committing a crime. In addition, the proposals appear to lift the barriers that separate the police fingerprint and DNA databases from the new national identity register. I wonder if this will chase customers away or bring new ones to gawk at the accused? War criminals seem to be excepted.
• In the Blood: Blood donors in Los Angeles are testing positive for a parasite called Chagas which is spread by what The Los Angeles Times calls a blood-sucking insect that looks like a striped cockroach. The most likely victims: people who have traveled or lived in rural parts of Latin America.
• O.J.: The rights to that choice bit of violence pornography that he wrote will be auctioned off the steps of the Capitol building in Sacramento and the proceeds go to the family of his victim, Ronald Goldman.
• The End of Vatican 2: The Vatican plans to punish Father Jon Sobrino, an advocate for El Salvador’s poor, on grounds that he has been teaching [[Liberation Theology]]. Few want to talk about how the move appears to be orchestrated at the behest of Opus Dei, a right wing cult within the Church which downplays the social gospel in favor of mind control.

If you find any articles worthy of mention in these roundups, send the URL to gazissax at best dot com. And feel free to comment!

[tags]News[/tags]