Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

Friends, I hate to summarize a summary, but this piece from Project Censored is pretty long. If you go to their website, you’ll get quite an education. This message is available online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/061222projectcensored2006

Dear friends,

Project Censored specializes in covering the top news stories which were either ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media each year. Project Censored is a research team composed of more than 200 university faculty, students, and community experts who review about 1,000 news story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources, and national significance. The top 25 stories selected are submitted to a distinguished panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. The results are published each year in an excellent book available for purchase at their website, amazon.com, and most major book stores.

A brief summary of last year’s top 25 censored news stories provided below proves quite revealing and most informative. After the headline of each news story is a link for those who want to read the entire article. These links contain the sources for the censored news. For whatever reason the major media won’t report these major stories. Thanks to the Internet and wonderful, committed groups like Project Censored, the news is getting out to those who want to know.

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Let’s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2006
By Medea Benjamin
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Friday 29 December 2006

As we close this year on the low of a devastating conflict in Iraq and a president contemplating sending yet more troops to fight and die in an unwinnable war, let us not forget that it was a year of many positive gains for the progressive movement.

Here are just ten:

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This is just the plain truth.

I think that historians will mark Hurricane Katrina as the turning point. Suddenly, public support for the current maladministration collapsed, because it suddenly became obvious that nobody in charge was competent. They could attack, they could demonize their opposition, they could spy on people, they could perhaps assassinate political opponents — that’s what at least two suspicious airplane crashes look like — but they could not really govern. After Katrina, it suddenly became obvious even to all those people who wanted to believe the lies they had been fed for so long.

A Failed Revolution
By Paul Krugman

The New York Times

Friday 29 December 2006

After first attempting to deny the scale of last month’s defeat, the apologists have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist explanations for the failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you see, was that the noble ideals of the Republican revolution of 1994 were undermined by Washington’s corrupting ways. And the recent defeat was a good thing, because it will force a return to the true conservative path.

But the truth is that the movement that took power in 1994 - a movement that had little to do with true conservatism - was always based on a lie.

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Via truthout.

Here Are the Christians!
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Friday 29 December 2006

My recent column “Where Are the Christians?” drew a bundle of answers in emails from Truthout readers. That piece was about the bigoted remarks of Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) attacking newly-elected Congressman Keith Ellis, a Muslim, for taking his unofficial oath of office with his hand on the Quran - and mindlessly predicting that this would somehow lead to a vast increase in illegal Muslim immigration (unless, of course, we close our borders).

It might be instructive to quote a couple of the emails I received.

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This, via a friend, came from Rachel’s Democracy & Health News #887 www.rachel.org and originally appeared in the Toronto Star (Ontario, Canada) Dec. 10, 2006. A remarkably perceptive description of the process of the gradual introduction into the mainstream of an idea and practice that at first people would find repellant.

OP-ED: ONE GENERATION IS ALL THEY NEED

By Kevin Haggerty

By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old
age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone
he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically
tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases
monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.

Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified
disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology,
however, already exists.

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I don’t much care for what I call “horse-race journalism,” non-stop speculation about who is ahead and who has a real chance and who is not thought to have a chance, etc., etc. Most of these stories are a total waste of time, one set of reporters looking over their shoulders at other reporters, each wanting to not be out on a limb by actually saying something different from all the others.

And so we hear endless stories about polls and tactics — all the while ignoring the question of who the person’s backers are, what they will likely want from him, what he is likely to wish to do should he get elected, etc., etc.

At the risk of adding my fill to such stories, let me merely say that my hunch since the 2004 primary season is that at some point John Edwards will become president, unless of course the powers that be shoot him down as they did the Kennedy brothers, and George Wallace, people who authentically challenged the way things really are done in this country.

I am not sure how many more assassinations this country can stand. Hopefully the people who have been arranging them will share those qualms, and lay off.

Edwards Embarks on Cross-Country Tour to Advance His Candidacy

By Nicholas Johnston

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) — Former Senator John Edwards embarked on a cross-country campaign to promote his new presidential bid after getting the jump on some fellow Democrats by announcing his populist candidacy in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

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A friend sent me this link, which brought a smile as I remembered the message. I downloaded and saved it long ago, and I listen to it every once in a while. I think you will like it too.

http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml

I’m already tired of hearing about Virgil Goode, who is supposed to represent me in Congress. At the risk of adding one more tiresome log to the fire, though, I add this piece to the blog, from truthout.org.

Where Are the Christians?
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Wednesday 27 December 2006

It’s not rocket science to understand why Republicans have gone into hibernation on the issue of Rep. Virgil Goode’s outrageous rant against his fellow Congressman, Keith Ellison - the first Muslim ever elected to either legislative house - who wants to take his oath on the Quran.

After all, Goode is one of their own. He’s from the same party that brought us George Allen’s “Macaca Moment” and the flirtatious “Call Me” tagline from a cute white blonde in a campaign commercial in the recent senate race against black Rep. Harold Ford.

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It’s amazing. Suddenly Virgil Goode, obscure political hack, Democrat-turned-Republican, is in the news all over the world, because of publication of his letter beating the drums of fear lest we be overrun by Muslims getting elected to congress and taking their oath of office on their own book of scripture.

A friend of mine, Tom Hansen, sent me an email saying he wasn’t surprised by Goode’s remark because Goode had told him that he is against all foreign aid except military. I asked if I could reprint the article Tom had written that cited the conversation, and here it is. As Tom said, “He is consistent, at least.”

What They Think of US

Thomas Hansen, Ph.D.

It is good for us here in the U.S to know more of what others think of us.
Foreign polls show that over 85% of the respondents think the U.S. poses the
greatest danger in the world. Only 7% picked North Korea. I think that we here
need to deal with this perception, for perception shapes policy and action and
anger. We can understand why this perception exists, for we have forged ahead in
our current war on false premises, disregarding the advice and counsel of
allies, asking that they join us only on our own terms, actually misrepresenting
the facts in the General Assembly of the UN, refusing to listen to expert
advice, and the list could go on and on. We have made many mistakes here, and
those mistakes need to be acknowledged and corrected, which is not happening yet.

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Friends, this is a serious problem! But it can’t be solved except person by person, one by one. Yeats in his memoirs asked why the struggle to come to truth takes away our pity, and why the struggle to overcome our passions restores it.

I well remember being a teenager (in another century!) and having a need for absolutes. Teens, youngsters in general, tend to be absolutists. They want things to be black and white. You might almost say that one defining characteristic of maturity is the ability to recognize that life requires a great tolerance of ambiguity.

Of course, while we’re talking about tolerating ambiguity, it is as well to remember that this isn’t just a problem with religions. It is equally common to see blind faith in atheism, in science, in “progress” (whatever that really means) — even in skepticism. There are always idols to worship, even the idol of anti-idolatry.

From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/21/opinion/edtaylor.php?page=1

Faith that refuses questions
Mark C. Taylor Published: December 21, 2006

WILLIAMSTOWN, Massachusetts: More American college students seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in my 30 years of teaching.

At first glance, the flourishing of religion on campuses seems to reverse trends long criticized by conservatives under the rubric of “political correctness.” But, in truth, something else is occurring. Once again, right and left have become mirror images of each other; religious correctness is simply the latest version of political correctness. Indeed, it seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.

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