Blah, blah, blah

The latest Pew Research poll shows that Clinton and Obama are now neck and neck, whereas last month, Obama had a 10 point lead.

Harpers

• Turns out most people choose cooperation over competition: “why, if humans prefer cooperation when given that option, are there so many instances of competition shown in everyday life?”
• Hawaiians make move for national sovereignty and occupy historic palace, declaring it would take over the official government duties. The Hawaii Kingdom Government is a constitutional monarchy of the rightfully independent nation of Hawaii. They do not recognize Hawaii as a U.S. state, but as an autonomous nation occupied by the United States.
• Radiohead joins MTVexit to make this video about sweatshop labor.


Because the project is funded in part by USAID, I’m surprised how not terrible it is. Sure, it’s cliche and not insightful, but at least, it’s not dehumanizing and it makes the connection between the two kids.

It just doesn’t offer any analysis about the problem — why is the white kid wearing the shoes made by the other kid? And who is profiting from the exploitation of child labor? Corporations — like those who sponsor MTV programming and that of other Viacom networks.

And it doesn’t really offer any solutions. But MTVexit isn’t really about stopping sweatshop labor. Their mission statement says they want to increase awareness about human trafficking through education and outreach with local anti-trafficking organizations. Sounds like they’re trying for an easy PR boost.

Few would deny that child labor and human trafficking are bad — besides Nicholas Kristof, Milton Friedman and a few other insane ideologues who deny reality and ignore human suffering — so I can’t see what this campaign actually hopes to do — besides give MTV the false appearance of caring.

By the way, MTV’s website has a whole section on activism, listed under the subtitle “Movies, Games & More.”

• Clinton makes cheap attempt to appear in touch with working folks, AP couldn’t even resist scoffing:
  
  

  SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former first lady who hasn’t driven a car or pumped gas in many years because of Secret Service restrictions, joined a blue-collar worker at a filling station Wednesday to illustrate how the high price of gasoline is squeezing consumers.

  
  The Democratic presidential candidate and sheet metal worker Jason Wilfing, 33, pulled into the station in a large white Ford 250 pickup truck, Clinton riding shotgun. Never mind that it wasn’t even Wilfing’s truck — he had borrowed his boss’s larger vehicle to accommodate Clinton’s security agent and personal assistant, who rode in the back.

  Trailing Wilfing and Clinton was a Secret Service motorcade consisting of six gas-guzzling Suburbans, two squad cars and a green SUV bearing photographers and TV cameras. Several other reporters and cameramen stood shivering in unseasonably cold temperatures, ready to capture the multi-vehicle arrival.

  Clinton and Wilfing stepped out of the car and approached the pump. Wilfing chose regular unleaded gasoline, and began filling the tank. The two engaged in chit chat, with New York senator mentioning her proposal for a temporary gas tax holiday to ease the price pinch on consumers.

  The tank filled, Clinton looked at the price recorded at the pump and shook her head.

  “Sixty-three dollars,” she said. “For just about half a tank.”

  Shutters clicked, cameras whirred. Point made.

First they randomly (racially profiling) targeted Sean Bell and two of his friends as they leave a club after celebrating his bachelor party. As he got into a car, the police began shooting at them - firing 50 rounds and killing Sean Bell.

The police claimed that they were fired on, but no gun was found on the other side. The men were completely unarmed and guilty of NO CRIME.

The trial only lasted two months.

This is a disgusting outcome. Shame on Judge Arthur J. Cooperman.

And why was there no jury trial? oh right, the three police didn’t want it and opted to go before the superior court. Good ‘ole democracy.

Civil rights leaders demanded a federal investigation and vowed to march through the streets in protest after three police officers were cleared of all charges in the killing of an unarmed black man. (April 25)

“We’re going to demonstrate to the government that New Yorkers will not take this abortion of justice lying down,” said Al Sharpton, prominent civil rights leader.

From Sept. 11, 2007:

A few pies to the face greeted Thomas Friedman - New York Times columnist - as he was preparing to give the keynote address on Earth Day before a packed auditorium at Brown University.

His talk - titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” - was about how corporate environmentalism (which would give corporations ownership of our common resources and legal rights to pollute our air and water under the facade of conservation) can restore the United States to its “natural place in the global order.”

“Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a surprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas.”

That’s a very successful pieing. You can see Friedman flustering as he visibly debated himself about whether to continue with the speech.

He decided to go back and clean up before delivering his address.

And his lecture made the reasons for the pieing — his racism and imperialism — all the more apparent.

For example, two of his talking points:

• “He used two hands to graph the price of oil against the freedom of the people in the country selling it, which he argued is an ‘inverse correlation.’”
• “We’re going to get really super-efficient at raping the natural world,” he said during the lecture, adding that clean, cheap energy can become “a license to buy a Hummer and drive it through the Amazon.”

Right, corporations are kicking families from their homes and communities, destroying the farmland and natural environment to produce pseudo-fuels known as biofuels — e.g., corn ethanol — for fucking hummers that CEOs can then drive over the ruin they caused — a purely callous final insult.

———-

The Guerrillas also threw leaflets to the audience, stating:
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George Bush has set a new record: the lowest approval rating in the 70 year history of the Gallup Poll. The poll taken over the weekend found that 69 percent of people in the United States disapprove of Bush’s job.

1. “Attack Iran”

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Hillary Clinton declared to an early morning audience on Good Morning America. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Not quite what I want to wake up hearing. What the fuck. She may as well have sang it as McCain did, “Bomb, bomb, bomb. bomb-bomb Iran.”



It’s official. I despise her.

But at least she’s now being honest about how hateful she really is. No more of those silly lies about diplomacy and measured action. Is this truthfulness a new shift in her campaign strategy?

Next up: “I supported and still support NAFTA - it was good for my friends at Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and other former clients.”

And “I’m actually much wealthier than Obama; the poor chap has made less than 4 percent what Bill and I’ve made since 2000. And Obama would not be welcomed at our country club - not just because he’s not big money, but also because he’s black.“

Yeah, that’s right, the Clintons were members of an all white country club in Arkansas, which might explain the following.

2. “The Race Card.”

Yesterday during a radio interview, Bill Clinton said, “[Obama and his campaign] played the race card on me.” Right, because black people have a special card - not only does it help them win the presidency (so successful in the past!), but it can also get them out of jail free and let them off with a warning when police pull them for speeding.



Come on, Billary, stop being such a supercilious racist. Race privilege doesn’t mean that black people have a card they can pull, but that white people have a knapsack full of shit they didn’t earn.

“Hold on a second,” Obama responded when asked about Clinton’s recent remarks. “So former President Clinton dismissed my victory in South Carolina as being similar to Jesse Jackson and he is suggesting that somehow I had something to do with it?

“You better ask him what he meant by that. I have no idea what he meant. These were words that came out of his mouth. Not words that came out of mine.”

His words? Bill says they’re not. Billary’s now denying he made the comments that he made while on-air. Frankly, by now, he should know the futility of disavowing something recorded. Ridiculous.

• Lower life expectancy in disadvantaged counties:

People are dieing younger in many of our nation’s worst off counties, a new study has found. The study authors conclude, “[T]he 1980s and 1990s marked an era of increased inequalities in mortality in the United States.”

“[These inequalities are] particularly troubling,” the researchers explain, “because an oft-stated aim of the U.S. health system is the improvement of the health of all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparities.”

Despite its stated goals, our health system is leaving many people without the care they need to live. The insurance driven healthcare is not covering everyone. It is inadequate and the price is deadly.

We need universal, single payer healthcare to remove these unjust inequalities, so no one’s life is needlessly cut short.

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A lifecycle analysis of the environmental impacts of the food you eat shows that transportation contributes relatively little to food’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

While food does travel an average of around 1,000 miles from the farm to the store, this transportation accounts for only 4 percent of greenhouse gases on average. Most are released during the production phase.

While travel doesn’t have a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions, the type of food eaten does. Beef and milk release the most greenhouse gases (think methane). So not only is red meat bad for your heart, it also is bad for the environment. It releases around 150 percent more greenhouse gases than chicken or fish.

New Zealand taxes cows’ gas.

Travel makes up around 1 percent of the total greenhouse gases of red meat, and 11 percent of fruits and vegetables. So if you’re already vegan, buying locally is the next step.

If you’re an omnivore, buying locally isn’t the most effective way to save the environment. Eating less meat - red meat, in particular - is the best way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Two researchers from the University of Cambridge studied the testosterone and cortisol levels of 17 men trading on the London stock exchange. The findings? High levels of testosterone are associated with risky decisions and higher earnings. Cortisol with stress, caution and loss.

Of course, all traders are men. And of course, that means they’re controlled by testosterone. And thus, the market is controlled by testosterone.

The researchers found that the economy’s “bubbles and crashes are coming from these steroids.”

So it was testosterone that led many of these men to a house-load of money from the housing market crash that cost many people their homes.

The researchers suppose, “If more women and older men were trading, the markets would be more stable.”

Gee thanks. I love it when science uses a social characteristic to understand a biological concept that then is used to explain that very social characteristic.

Men are aggressive and testosterone is the “male” hormone, so testosterone causes aggression. If testosterone causes aggression, men are aggressive because of testosterone.

It’s circular, just like balls, that’s where testosterone comes from, so these men scientists use circular reasoning because they’re dicks!

Obama doesn’t sound so bad in his Dreams from My Father:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

And now he makes about a million dollars a year - about half of which comes from sales of his two books. His family’s gross income was $3.9 million from 2000 to 2006.

Meanwhile, Clinton made 28 times what Obama did, with income totaling more than $100 million in the same period.

• CEOs are overpaid, more executives are saying - up 14 percent since last year.

A recent poll found that 35 percent of corporate executives think the heads of their companies are paid too much. Last year, 21 percent said the same. The median compensation for a CEO of a large U.S. company is $8.8 million.

Over the past decade, CEO pay (for the companies of the Dow Jones industrials) increased at a whooping annual rate of 15.1 percent - while the median household income rose at a rate of 0.68 percent annually from 1996 to 2006.



• More people are losing their home - bank repossessions soared 129 percent since last year

And the rate of foreclosure is up 57 percent since last year. People were forced out of 234,685 homes just in the month of March.

• “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”

Today the Haartz editorial board spoke against Israel’s boycott of Jimmy Carter - who Israel PM Ehud Olmert refused to see because of his visit with a Hamas leader - declaring that “he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.”

More to the point, Haartz agreed with Carter’s characterization of the situation in Palestine and acknowledged that it “begs” such a comparison to Apartheid South Africa: “the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel’s control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed.”

No, not Obama. Not today, at least.

• Facebook. Officials in Israel Defense Forces have identified a “new threat to Israel’s national security - the popular social networking Website Facebook.”
• Jimmy Carter. Carter - you know, the Nobel Peace Prize winner - is meeting with Hamas officials, whereas Obama said he would never “until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.” But he at least wouldn’t condemn Carter, “I’m not going to comment on former president Carter.”

  Whereas, Condi Rice has no qualms taking on the Nobel Peace Prize winner saying, “Hamas is in fact the impediment to peace.” And she has previously characterized the party - that holds a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority - as a “terrorist organization.” But as it goes, it was IDF that has killed 16 people in the last two days - including four teenagers and two children.

Who’s the terrorist?
Brothers and sisters of twelve-year-old Riad Al-Oweisi, sit next to his body at his family house in al-Bureij refugee camp in the middle of Gaza Strip, April 11, 2008. Israeli forces launched air strikes and a ground raid on Gaza Friday, trading fire with fighters in clashes that killed seven Palestinians including the 12-year-old boy, Palestinians said. The deaths drove the Palestinian death toll to 15 in Israeli strikes retaliating for a fighter attack that killed two Israeli civilians at a vital Gaza fuel depot Wednesday. MaanImages/Wissam Nassar.

And who’s kissing some Israel booty?

• Scientists use performance-enhancing drugs -

20 percent of scientists polled by Nature Magazine use either ritalin (66 percent of users), provigil or beta blockers (this was just an April Fool’s Day joke)

• Republicans boo latest addition to the U.S. Congress - Jackie Speier (D-CA).

“The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately,” she told Pelosi. “The president wants to stay the course and a man who wants to replace him suggests we could be in Iraq for 100 years. But Madam Speaker, history will not judge us kindly if we sacrifice four generations of Americans because of the folly of one.”

She’s not particularly different from other democrats, so why the hostile reception? If anything, her life is just tragic.

• Bush cries -

No, not for the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis killed by his stupid war but during a ceremony honoring a Navy SEAL.

• You can buy stolen military weapons on Ebay and Craigslist -

including parts for F-14 fighter jets, unused chemical-biological canister and a used Nuclear Biological Chemical protective suit, all stolen from the Department of Defense, of course.

Obama is a friend of Palestine? So says an article on the front page of the L.A. Times.

The Nation implies it is poor and misleading reporting on the LA Times part, and I agree. By hyping up the article and catering to Anti-Palestinian groups, the author confounds the facts and obscures the truth.

The author apparently just ripped off an article by Debbi Schlussel, an ultra-conservative blogger known for “racist hate speech.”

The evidence that Obama supports Palestine? He attended events with prominent literature professors and scholars of Arab history - Edward Said [an influential critical theorist and major contributer to the founding of postcolonial theory] and Rashid Khalidi [the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University].

From left to right, Michelle Obama, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama, Columbia University Professor Edward Said and Mariam Said at a May 1998 [TEN YEARS AGO] Arab community event in Chicago at which Edward Said gave the keynote speech. Electronic Intifada

I think it’s great that Obama heard lectures from the late Edward Said - I wish I could have! Said as “a Palestinian and a leading American intellectual” wrote one of the most important critiques of Western constructions of the East - Orientalism.
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Apparently, the punishment for corporate fraud is further bribery in Bush’s Department of Justice, according to a recent NYT article.

When facing charges for bribery and fraud, corporations can sideswipe criminal indictment by merely paying small token fees - “peanuts” compared to damages paid after criminal conviction.

For example, a medical supply company [Zimmer Holdings Inc.] avoided criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice by paying up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, to act as an “outside monitor.” Sounds like a little conflict of interest, no? or a “a backroom, sweetheart deal” in the words of the chairperson of a House Judiciary subcommittee.
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The Atlantic Monthly offers a good assessment of the media’s reaction to Jeremiah Wright and his condemnation of racist U.S. policies. The uproar of many white pundits was less to do with the content of Wright’s message - as demonstrated by their rampant de-contextualizing - and more to do with how that message shattered their dearly-held conceptions of who Obama is.

Many white people finally realized Obama cannot be colorblind because he, in fact, is a black man with the lived experiences of a person of color in a racist society. And because of that, he may very well - let’s hope - share some of Wright’s opinions.

No matter the rhetoric he employs, Obama cannot be “post-racial” in a world that still churns profits and white comfort out of oppressions based on race.

His glamour explains a campaign paradox: how a man who wrote a race-conscious coming-of-age memoir about his search for a black identity could be touted as a “post-racial” candidate. The allure of his origins obscured his own account of his inner life.

That’s one reason the revelation of his religious mentor’s racially charged sermons proved so potent. Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright revealed to white audiences that the senator is a self-defined black man who listens sympathetically to—and might even share—the angry grievances of other African Americans. His rhetoric may be inclusive, but he is not colorblind. He does not, by his mere existence, make America’s racial divisions disappear.

“The peril of Obama,” The Atlantic Monthly

The Huffington Post has received an advanced copy of Cliff Schecter’s biography of John McCain - The Real McCain.

Schecter’s research reveals that McCain got into a physical brawl with his fellow Arizona congressman Rick Renzi (R). I think it has something to do with gender roles.

In 2006, the Arizona Republican congressional delegation had a strategy meeting. McCain repeatedly addressed two new members, congressmen Trent Franks and Rick Renzi, as ‘boy.’ Finally, Renzi, a former college linebacker, rose from his chair and said to McCain, “You call me that one more time and I’ll kick your old ass.” McCain lunged at Renzi, punches were thrown, and the two had to be physically separated. After they went to their separate offices, McCain called Renzi and demanded an apology. Renzi refused. Apparently this posture made McCain admire him, as they became fast friends.

Oh, what good friends he keeps: On February 22, 2008 Rick Renzi was indicted on 35 criminal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and official extortion stemming from land deals in his state.

McCain also called his wife a “cunt.” The vagina as an insult. What a misogynist.

Bill Clinton, who passed NAFTA during his reign, supports a free trade agreement with Colombia. The agreement would undercut environmental regulations, unions and workers’ rights to fill the pockets of multinational corporations.

Hillary Clinton says she would vote against such a deal and has recently employed a little “historical revision” to her initial stance on NAFTA, now claiming she has always had reservations about it. Will she fire her husband like she fired her top strategist Mark Penn for supporting the Colombian deal?

We’ll see if she sticks to her word. On Monday Bush sent the agreement to congress, which has 90 days to act on it.

And what about the violent oppression of trade unions in Colombia, Bush/Clinton? And NAFTA’s legacy of jobloss and economic hardship for U.S. workers and Mexican farmers?

Fortunately, Mike Michaud (D-Maine), co-founder of the House of Representatives Trade Working Group, says, “The Colombia FTA is dead on arrival.”

I like it - the idea behind the ad, that is, not the ad itself.

Today the company pulled it because cranky u.s.ers hate thinking about their violent history and theft of land. I guess people don’t care that the map looked like that a little more than a century and a half ago (1848).

Nevertheless, it was just an ad - meant to capitalize on a popular sentiment.

Source: Reuters

Three pro-Tibet activists scale the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to hang huge banners in protest the coming Olympic torch and China’s violent repression of the Tibetan uprising.

Now that’s how you do a banner drop.

A provocative new study from Northwestern University suggests that whites who are particularly worried about appearing racist seem to suffer from anxiety that may cause them to avoid interaction with blacks in the first place.

“The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biases,” by Jennifer A. Richeson, associate professor of psychology and African-American studies and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern, and Sophie Trawalter, post-doctoral fellow, IPR, recently appeared in the journal Psychological Science.

The study participants - 15 white college students - tried to act in unprejudiced ways toward blacks primarily for appearance’s sake to avoid social disapproval — not because of their personal values.

And a related topic, “I’m not a racist; I have black friends”:

black people love us

While men are more likely to tolerate of discrimination, everyone tended to accept the most prejudice against poorly educated immigrants and Arab American airplane travelers, according to a study by the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.

Through both phone and internet surveys, researchers asked more than 3,300 people to evaluate five scenarios, each of which dealt with a form of discrimination targeting a distinct class of people: Arab American airplane travelers, seriously overweight people, the genetically disadvantaged, poorly educated immigrants and African American motorists.

Based on the phone interviews, men were 7.6 percent more likely to tolerate discrimination against the obese and 8.9 percent more likely to accept racial profiling of African-American motorists. And men were even more tolerant of discrimination in the Web survey: men were 19.6 percent more likely to tolerate discrimination against the obese and 17.4 percent more likely to accept racial profiling.

Tolerance Index: A ranking of acceptance of discrimination

• Poorly educated immigrants - around 30 percent
• Arab-Americans airplane travelers - around 20 percent
• Seriously overweight people - around 14 percent
• African American motorists - around 13 percent
• Genetically disadvantaged people - around 5 percent

Conclusions: nearly one-third of people surveyed tolerate racism against brown people, one-third of the respondents suck and men suck more.

We should never tolerable discrimination and oppression.

Men are often praised for losing their cool in the workplace, but everyone else can’t show anger without losing the respect of their peers, according to three studies by Yale University psychologist Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann.

And to mitigate this damage, they must to explain why they were upset. But it doesn’t bode well for men to explain why they were angered.

I wonder if the study from a former Hillary Clinton Congressional Fellow (Uhlmann) considered race and other social factors in their analysis.

Of course, white men are rational and everyone else should be presumed emotionally liable until proven otherwise. And yet, when a man explains himself, his peers lose a little of their credence in his reasoning ability. Perhaps, his actions are a little less justifiable - he is used to getting his way without needing to explain himself.

“I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this [climate change] problem,” Barack Obama said today. [CNN Political Ticker]

I wonder if he’d ask Gore to head the EPA. Wouldn’t that be a major change for environmental health?

This latest information from CNN adopts a slightly different tone from MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann’s ramble a few nights ago. The credulous Olbermann spent considerable time supposing a Gore victory in the democratic primary — as if it were in any way acceptable for delegates to throw away popular opinion and vote for someone who is not even running for office.

“If it goes into the convention,” said Representative Tim Mahoney (D-FL) last week, “don’t be surprised if someone different is at the top of the ticket.” [The Daily Mail]

“What? Does Olbermann smoke crack?” In the words of my friend, “Not a single democrat would be happy about that.”

While U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama leads rival Hillary Clinton in the polls, Palestinians in Gaza are launching their own attempt to boost his campaign.

Isn’t this support a bit bizarre? Obama has made considerable effort over the last year to demonstrate his allegiance to Israel. And in his appeal to U.S. Jewish communities, the deputy speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Josh Shapiro proclaimed Obama’s “100 percent voting record on Israel issues.”

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During her bid for the democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton has been ardently denying her support of NAFTA - an epic disaster for U.S. and Mexico workers - but MSNBC has pulled up some of her earlier statements during her hubby’s term when she expressed clear and strong support of trade deal.

Not that Barack Obama hasn’t lied in his campaign, but come on, Clinton, this is ridiculous.

Clinton Surprise: “I’m Stepping Aside for Obama”
Hillary Clinton shocked the nation this April Fool’s Day by announcing early this morning that she was pulling out of the Democratic presidential race and throwing her support to Barack Obama. “I cannot in good faith continue my candidacy when the math says I cannot win,” Clinton stated, surprising a crowd of supporters at a breakfast event in Philadelphia.
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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Israel is increasingly turning away sick Gazans who seek medical treatment. Several Palestinians die each month because Israel refuses to let them leave Gaza for necessary medical care.

In the last five months, 32 people have died while waiting for travel permits. “All these tragedies could have been easily avoided,” said Ambrogio Maneti, WHO’s head of office for the West Bank and Gaza.

Egypt has allowed some Gazans in for treatment but has agreed with Israel to keep its border largely closed.

A Palestinian carries his sick son as they make their way to Egypt after crossing the destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 24, 2008. Reuters

Palestinian medical officials in Gaza say more than 100 Gazan patients have died since June after Israel denied them permits to seek medical treatment. That’s really sick.

A medical officer points to a wound on the head of a newborn Palestinian baby, who Palestinian medics said was killed by Israeli forces gunfire, in the central Gaza Strip March 4, 2008. Reuters

Doesn’t it make you want to cry?

After receiving permits through a maze of government offices, graffiti artists organized a large community art project to decorate an ugly 10,000 square foot block of concrete along the L.A. river. Six months later city officials now want the project organizers to whitewash it or pay a $70,000 fine.

“It would be beautiful if the river went back to its natural state and was actually a river and a park,” said Alex Poli, a graffiti artist, gallery owner and an organizer of the art project. “But right now we have concrete walls, so the next best thing is to beautify it with art.”

How sad that the city would destroy art.