Linkmeister

Saigon, Parts Two & Three

Part Two of the USS Kirk's story aired this morning on Morning Edition.

Part One below

Part Three here, later this evening.

What, another?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!

The Fall of Saigon, the untold story

Most of us have seen the photo of the helicopter leaving the embassy roof in Saigon on April 29, 1975. (It wasn't actually the embassy but rather an apartment building where senior CIA employees lived, but never mind.)

NPR is airing a three-part story on All Things Considered beginning today which tells the story of the USS Kirk and its ocean rescue of some 20,000 - 30,000 Vietnamese in May of 1975.

It's got interviews with some of the sailors, but even more amazingly, it's got tape recorded contemporaneously by the Kirk's ship's engineer.

It's one hell of a story, well worth the 13 minutes of your time to listen to it.

Here, Obama, lemme help you with this election

Read this article about all the projects the stimulus bill is funding. Then ask yourself why you've heard so little about any of them.

For example:

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet.

[snip]

The stimulus is also stocked with nonenergy game changers, like a tenfold increase in funding to expand access to broadband and an effort to sequence more than 2,300 complete human genomes — when only 34 were sequenced with all previous aid. There's $8 billion for a high-speed passenger rail network, the boldest federal transportation initiative since the interstate highways. There's $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to promote accountability in public schools, perhaps the most significant federal education initiative ever — it's already prompted 35 states and the District of Columbia to adopt reforms to qualify for the cash. There's $20 billion to move health records into the digital age, which should reduce redundant tests, dangerous drug interactions and errors caused by doctors with chicken-scratch handwriting. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls that initiative the foundation for Obama's health care reform and "maybe the single biggest component in improving quality and lowering costs."

But wait, there's more!

The Recovery Act's clean-energy push is designed not only to reduce our old economy dependence on fossil fuels that broil the planet, blacken the Gulf and strengthen foreign petro-thugs but also to avoid replacing it with a new economy that is just as dependent on foreign countries for technology and manufacturing. Last year, exactly two U.S. factories made advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The stimulus will create 30 new ones, expanding U.S. production capacity from 1% of the global market to 20%, supporting half a million plug-ins and hybrids.

Mr. Prez, buddy, your political team stinks. Why have they not been screeching about these accomplishments from the day after the bill passed? It may be too late, but if you want your side to keep its losses to a minimum in November, ramp up the seemingly non-existent White House PR machine and start talking.

Six of one, two dozen of the other

Headline: Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers?

A question I'd like to have known the answer to before I gave up alcohol back in 2000.

Hey! Does this mean I have the best of both worlds?

Where's the anti-Obama propaganda come from?

Well, in part, it comes from e-mail like the one I received this morning:

6. When he traveled to Pakistan , after college on an unknown national passport, people said it didn't matter.

7. When he sought the endorsement of the Marxist Party in 1996 as he ran for the Illinois Senate, people said it didn't matter.

8. When he sat in a Chicago Church for twenty years and listened to a preacher spew hatred for America and preach black liberation theology, people said it didn't matter.

24. When the place of his birth was called into question, and he refused to produce a birth certificate, people said it didn't matter.

40. When as President of the United States, he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, people said it didn't matter.

41. When he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking of her greatness, people said it didn't matter.

42. When his actions concerning the Middle-East seemed to support the Palestinians over Israel, our longtime ally, people said it didn't matter.

43. When he took American tax dollars to resettle thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to the United States, people said it didn't matter.

44. When he upset the Europeans by removing plans for a missile defense system against the Russians, people said it didn't matter.

49. When he took away student loans from the banks and put it through the government, people said it didn't matter.

50. When he designed plans to take over the health care system and put it under government control, people said it didn't matter.

51. When he claimed he was a Christian during the election and tapes were later made public that showed Obama speaking to a Muslim group and 'stating' that he was raised a Muslim; was educated as a Muslim; and that he is still a Muslim-- people said it didn't matter.

52. When he set into motion a plan to take over the control of all energy in the United States through Cap and Trade, people said it didn't matter.

This is the kind of crap being passed around through e-mail. It's taken as gospel by some of the more credulous recipients (many of whom we saw at that rally Glenn Beck held yesterday in Washington). It's all recycled nonsense left over from the presidential campaign, all of it addressed and refuted, but that doesn't matter. It gets repeated over and over until some begin to believe it must be true. Worse, the truth tellers in the media believe it's been addressed and refuted so there's no need to continue to do so.

Thus it keeps proliferating.

Imagine this

Suppose you're Tom & Ray Magliozzi, hosts of NPR's Car Talk. Then suppose somebody calls you up to say you've just bought this car at auction, and you feel to make it street legal you need to remove some of the extras.

What would you say?

Buy a clue, Bernanke

Fed Chairman Bernanke gave a wishy-washy speech today.

Bernanke disputed the notion that the Fed is out of ammunition, saying in his speech that “should further action prove necessary, policy options are available to provide additional stimulus.”

Er, Ben? With unemployment at 9.5% and possibly rising, why don't you think further action is necessary? Part of your mission is, after all,

conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment.

So why aren't you trying to get to maximum employment?

Krugman has more.

Who you callin' "We," Mr. Beck

Outsourced to Leonard Pitts, Jr..

A few words about who “we” is.

“This is a moment,” said Glenn Beck three months ago on his radio program, “... that I think we ‘reclaim’ the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down. ... We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place!”

Beck was promoting his “Restoring Honor” rally, to be held Saturday, Aug. 28, at the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King famously spoke there. You’ll notice he didn’t define the “we” he had in mind, but it seems reasonable to suppose Beck was speaking of people like himself: affluent middle-age conservatives possessed of the ability to see socialism and communism in places where it somehow escapes the notice of others.

Glenn Beck was born in 1964. The Voting Rights Act was passed a year later. I don't think he got out of his crib to lobby in favor of it.

Pitts goes on:

Here’s who “we” is.

“We” is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. “We” is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. “We” is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. “We” is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. “We” is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. “We” is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of “Bonanza,” lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom.

“We” is Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Cynthia Wesley, Andrew Goodman, Denise McNair, James Chaney, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, shot, beaten and blown to death for that cause.

“We” is Lyndon Johnson, building a legislative coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat intransigent Southern Democratic conservatives and enshrine that cause into law.

And “we” is Martin Luther King, giving voice and moral clarity to the cause — and paying for it with his life.

The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried “socialism!” “communism!” “tyranny!” whenever black people and their allies cried, “freedom.”

And he stills sees "socialism" and "communism" and "tyranny" whenever his perceived notion of "freedom" might be accessible to those he thinks of as inferior.