Safe passage on the Earth

In 1975 Dorothy T. Samuel published  "Safe Passage on City Streets," a book that examined the state of mind and behavior of people who tended not to get attacked on city streets or tended to walk away unscathed.  She found that the safest people were not those who focused on the danger, not those who walked in fear, and not those who carried weapons – which, as often as not, were turned against them.  The safest people – though there was no guarantee – were people who put danger out of their minds and when attacked reacted with surprise, indignation, or humanity. 

More of Butler on Coulter

Not to extend Ann Coulter's fame past the news cycle on her latest indescretion but I have to say Bill O'Reilly got it right when noting that people like her make for bad PR for the "convervatives." It makes me wonder what they are conserving? Ann Coulter gives Connecticut Yankee such a bad connotation I want to take the name off the candle.

How the mainstream media consistently panders to the right and screws the left

Conservatives love to talk about the so-called "liberal media" and its influence over the news. But just the opposite is true. And they know it. The media is either dominated by full-fledged kool-aid drinkers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Rupert Murdoch, or sympathizers like Wolf Blitzer, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and, yes, even the NY Times. It's the Repuglicans whose influence dictates the media's direction, and its coverage of both parties.

Global warming, local hope

As the evidence of global warming becomes inescapable, I fear Americans will switch instead to a fatalistic pessimism. Maybe it’s real and maybe it’s our fault, this sentiment goes, but at this point there’s nothing we can do, so we’re off the hook.

It’s hard to deal with melting arctic glaciers, Katrina refugees who might never return to New Orleans, and floods that recently covered half of Bangladesh. Weather-related catastrophes cost a record $225 billion last year, with the impact of global climate change just beginning. Add in a president deep in denial, and it’s tempting to feel powerless.  We can’t even escape to the Weather Channel without a sense of impending doom.

"Godless" is gutless

Anne Coulter says we’re “Godless” — we “liberals.”  And by “liberals,” she means anyone who wants to keep the government out of our underpants, out of Iraq, and out of the business of helping Big Business shoplift America. 

It’s time someone took on the blonde bully.

Anne, I realize yesterday was special day for you, releasing your book on June 6 — 06-06-06.

Going through it, I must, admit, is heavy going:  ‘Godless’ is a 300-page brick of solid meanness and pin-head hatreds packaged like a fashion magazine:  Big Brother wears Prada.

You accuse those who don’t sign on to your list of prejudices as the Lord’s enemies.   That’s not original, Anne:  the Taliban thought of it before you and they too were partial to dressing in black.

You want to talk about Godless?  OK, let’s go:

Would the Lord lie us into a war?

Would the Lord let thousands drown in New Orleans while chilling at a golf resort?

Would the Lord have removed tens of thousands of Black soldiers from the voter rolls as the Republican Party did in 2004?

A good about-face

AUSTIN, Texas -- It occasionally occurs to me that if I could understand the Bush administration's foreign policy, I might like it. After months of threatening Iran with everything up to and including nuclear war, we are now full of Sweet Reason and offering to have diplomatic talks with the very people we have been denouncing as Beyond Vile.

I never mind a good about-face in foreign policy myself. Always reminds me of the times when that great duo Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided it would be a good thing to convince the world they were both quite perfectly mad. They succeeded. (Bonus point: What did Richard Nixon say upon first seeing the Great Wall of China? He said, "This is, indeed, a great wall." Almost as good as the time George H.W. Bush barfed on the prime minister of Japan.)

Truth hound

"Governments don't keep secrets to protect the public, but to deceive the public."

Greg Palast happens to be talking about a certain Big Oil-friendly blueprint for the future of the Iraqi oil industry when he makes this point, almost in passing, in his just-released book, Armed Madhouse (Dutton), but he could be stating the general premise of the whole book, or of his career as a journo-sleuth in the Jack Anderson mold and stand-in for the little guy in the global economy. His raison d'etre is to ferret out those secrets and those deceptions and present them in all their cynical glory to the people for whom such knowledge is vital: you and me.

In my humble opinion, Palast, an American investigator better known beyond our borders, through his BBC current-affairs show "Newsnight," than here at home, is exactly what a journalist is supposed to be - a truth hound, doggedly independent, undaunted by power. His stories bite. They're so relevant they threaten to alter history - simply by letting the hoodwinked public in on the game while it's happening, which is precisely the role America's mainstream media have abdicated.

Ann Coulter- don't bother

The Ann Coulter book "Godless" tells that pretty much anyone in America can get a book deal if they look hot enough regardless of whether they are completely ignorant over matters over which they profess expertise and live close enough to New York.  I should think of moving for just that reason.  Publishers want revenue plain and simple, so if Anna Nicole Smith wanted to opine on Supreme Court precedents she too could get a book deal. That is because the crowd who judges books by their covers forget that every shade of blonde comes in bottles and contact lenses come in three shades of hazel.  Men flock to book signings just to give her their card in hopes she calls. That doesn't mean you or I should have to listen to her or care what she thinks in between the polluted air in her head.

What to worry about

AUSTIN, Texas -- Thank goodness the Republicans are around to tell me what to worry about. The flag-burning crisis -- here in Austin, there's that pall of smoke rising from the West every morning (it's from an area called Tarrytown, where they burn hundreds of flags daily).

You didn't know hundreds of flags were being burned daily? Actually, you can count on your hand the number of incidents reported over the last five years. For instance, there was one flag burned in 2005 by a drunken teenager and one by a protester in California in 2002. This appalling record of ravishment must be stopped. You're clearly not worried about what matters.

Gay marriage, now there's a crisis. Well, OK, so there isn't much gay marriage going on here in Texas. None, in fact. First, we made it illegal. Then, we made it unconstitutional. But President Bush is all concerned about it, so I guess we have to alter the U.S. Constitution.

Gus and Captain Call (of "Lonesome Dove" fame) will be an item -- with who knows who waiting in line right after them.

Corporate Media symptom number 13: Play along, get along.

Dotty Lynch's May 30th editorial on the CBS News web site asks the plaintive question, “Where are all the young people?” who should be protesting this ugly war. The question ought to be, “Where was Dotty Lynch and the rest of corporate-controlled media in 2003?”

Her column ends with the statement that people at CBS News were touched personally when 2 correspondents were killed Monday. The rest of us are sad too, but explain to us why the deaths of 2 correspondents are center headline news when tens of thousands have died before them. Did “we” not care until somebody “we knew” got killed?

Let's take a trip back to when Dotty might have done something about this war other than wish those lazy college students would stir themselves to action. Just check the CBS News archives if you think I'm being unfair.

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