Jon Stewart on Obama's inauguration speech

This one is just too funny.

Honestly Jon, when Obama says this stuff, I don't think he means it. And that gives me hope.

Yes, the speechwriters are pretty similar at least.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Woodie Guthrie's Anthem (with good old socialist lyrics

The extent to which the Obama administration represents a meaningful policy change from Bush is somewhat debatable, but the change in tone is already very clear. Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen helped to set that tone on Sunday with a version of Woody Guthrie's "This land is your land" that included some of the lyrics that are usually edited out.

My favourite line:
There was a big ole sign there
Said "private property"
but on the other side
it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me

The performance is below and you can click on the picture above to learn more about Woody Guthrie.

What would MLK say?

The last few days have been full of conflicting emotions for me. On the one hand, I'm glad and a little inspired that the people of the United States have elected their first leader from a minority community. For a country born of the genocide of native americans, nurtured on slavery and full to this day of contempt for its impoverished peoples, this is a huge step. It means that we're a far more civilized place than we were even when I grew up in the 1980s, and certainly more civilized than we were in the era of Jim Crow apartheid and before.

But on the other hand, the carnage in Gaza has really left me feeling hollow. To think that a country can impose an economic blockade on its own occupied territory, and then when that blockade is resisted go in and kill more than a thousand, wound several thousand, leave as many as 30,000 homeless... It's terrible and makes one wonder if we as a species have really progressed since the time of the crusades, or Genghis Khan or Hitler. The fact that it is all done with U.S. money and U.S. political support means that all of us are ultimately responsible for this carnage.

Two articles caught my attention today. The first, on the BBC website, shows Ban Ki-moon, secretary General of the UN and a man not known for emotional outbursts to say the least, completely losing control while talking to journalists in Gaza about the devastation.

Appearing stern and at times angry, Mr Ban called the attacks on Gaza "outrageous" and demanded guarantees that it would never happen again.

"I have protested many times. I am today protesting again in the strongest terms. I have asked (for a) full investigation and (to) make those responsible people accountable," he said.

"I am just appalled. I am not able to describe how I am feeling. This was an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations."

Israeli shells hit the UN headquarters as well as two UN schools during the recent three-week offensive. The headquarters were badly damaged and nearly 40 people were killed near one of the schools.

The second article, on Al-Jazeera, shows that the main political fallout of the war is that all the various factions in Gaza are uniting behind Hamas.

The al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, an armed wing of Fatah, once threatened to kill Khalid Meshaal, the leader of Hamas.

However, from the beginning of the war on Gaza up to the ceasefire called by Palestinian factions on Sunday, it was fighting shoulder to shoulder with its former rival, lobbing rockets into Israel from the beleaguered coastal strip, Fatah representatives in Damascus say.

Israel says it has dealt Hamas a crippling blow, but its 22-day onslaught that killed around 1,300 civilians and injured at least 6,000 more has brought together a slew of Palestinian factions, many of them previously sworn enemies of Hamas.

Many observers are left wondering if the Hamas-allied coalition will be a new front against Israel and whether Hamas will be able to prevent other factions from launching attacks from Gaza, breaking the fragile calm.

"Israel's aggression on Gaza has unified the Palestinian groups in the face of the Zionist aggression," says Mohammed Nazzal, a member of Hamas' political bureau in Damascus.

This was completely predictable, of course. When your people are under attack, political differences matter less. The important thing is to get together and fight to protect your homes and your families, and if Hamas is leading the defense, then you fight with Hamas.

Since there's been so much talk of Dr. Martin Luther King around Obama and the inauguration, it's important to remember what he said about wars of aggression. King is most known for his "I have a Dream" speech, but in my mind, this speech given April 1967 - a year to the day before he died - was even more important. The entire speech is worth reading, but for me the most important line is:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

And neither can we.

Here's the first part of the speech. For the rest, you can go here.

Chomsky on Colonialism and Gaza

Photo: AP

A couple days ago I had the opportunity to do an interview with Noam Chomsky. The bulk of the interview was on the economic crisis, but I would have felt guilty not asking him about Gaza given what's going on.

The whole interview is definitely worth reading (like everything Chomsky does) but this line particularly struck me:

I think one of the reasons for popular support for [the Israeli occupation and military offensives] in the United States is that it resonates very well with American history. How did the United States get established? The themes are similar.

Colonialism looks very similar no matter where it occurs. How similar are the ideas of "manifest destiny", which basically said that all land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans belonged to European settlers, and the zionist notion that the land between the Jordan River and the Red sea belongs to Jews?

And of course the really striking thing is what kind of blinders folks in the U.S., Israel, and mainstream media all over the world have to be wearing to not be able to see that. As a friend of mine commented yesterday, if a thousand trees were cut down in a forest, there would be outrage. If a thousand animals were killed in a zoo there would be disgust. A thousand Palestinians - eh, that's ok, I guess. Very disturbing.

Giving Bush the shoe

I'm not sure that any image can sum up what has been the most disastrous presidency in history, but this comes pretty close.

Obama's economic team

The Washington Post says it all:

Understanding Mumbai

The world has been alight with news of the coordinated attacks against targets in Mumbai for the last two days. What has happened is despicable, and for many of us, inexplicable. This reflection in an online cricket magazine sums up what a lot of us with ties to Mumbai and India are going through:

I have watched a city of a million dreams held hostage by 20 or so men who have purged from their souls every trace of humanity - let's not confer on them the dignity of a religion - and I have felt the blood drain out of me.

I have felt a sense of paralysis and rage. My family and I are safe at home, none of my friends were in the hotels or at the other attack sites; but I am numb, not with fear or personal loss, but something far deeper: a sense of overpowering bleakness.

And of course it's not just Indians who feel this sense; we all share in the outrage and shock simply by virtue of being human.

Certainly these are terrible attacks that must be condemned and the perpetrators - including whoever financed this operation - must be brought to justice.

And a lot of us are also struggling with the question of "why?"

While it's difficult to think about at the moment, we should not be afraid to wrestle with this question, and the answers are not straightforward. One answer is that the so-called war on terror has increased the incidents of violence against civilians in the world and introduced a kind of double standard where "their" lives are not as important as "our lives". The three thousand killed in the World Trade center were the victims of terrorism, but the three thousand killed in the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan immediately thereafter were "collateral damage" in the "war on terror".

As Deepak Chopra says so eloquently in this clip, this kind of attitude leads moderates on all sides to become extremists.



52 years ago, two of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell put this question to all of us:

Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?

So far we have been on course for the first option, the annihilation of us all. Let's hope for all our sakes we can learn the lessons that they sought to teach us and get rid of war once and for all.

If successful, we will come a lot closer to ending the insanity like that going on in Mumbai right now.