Robert Redford Calls for Courage to Rise Up: Radical Videos to Pass Around

Redford To Democrats: Show More Courage

WASHINGTON — The Sundance Kid gathered up the nerve to jump off a cliff with Butch Cassidy. Now, he wants Democrats to show similar backbone.

"Democrats need to regain the courage that’s lost with political compromises over the last few years," actor and environmental activist Robert Redford said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press. "They’ve got to get it together. If they don’t, it will not only be a tragedy for them, but a tragedy for the country."

The Oscar-winning director was in Washington to discuss energy policy with the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future and to present an award to Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, for his work on energy independence.

Redford addressed the group after Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada made a pitch for using less gasoline and taking global warming seriously. On energy, the actor said the first step is to acknowledge there is a crisis.

"It’s hitting a tipping point, but so are the opportunities for solutions," Redford told the group.

Redford said efforts to talk with the Bush administration about energy policy is a waste of time. "Things will really improve when they’re out of there, so the next elections are going to be very important," Redford said.

The actor, who turns 70 in August, has starred in numerous films, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Way We Were," "Out of Africa," and "All the President’s Men." He won an Academy Award in 1980 for his direction of "Ordinary People."

Redford argued that Democrats who take a strong stand are often tarred as radicals, but they’re just being reasonable.

"Republicans are not about substance, they’re about strategy, and they’re good at it," he said. "Democrats could learn a lot from the Republicans about strategy."

Redford, who also starred in "The Candidate," laughed when asked whether he’s ever considered running for office. "If you saw that movie, you’d know that I would never enter that field."

During his speech to the Democrats, Redford recalled giving a passionate speech years ago about his political views, leaving the crowd silent. As he departed, someone in the crowd came up to him and asked: "Mr. Redford, did they make you jump off the cliff in Butch Cassidy?"

The crowd on Monday laughed loudly.

http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah584.shtml

How the Chicks survived their scrap with Bush

Adam Sweeting assesses how the Dixie Chicks have weathered a political storm

Will it be the salmon teriyaki with organic greens, or asparagus tempura and tuna sashimi? As the waiter hovers with pencil poised, the Dixie Chicks debate the menu with the practised air of professional restaurant critics. The Chicks have traditionally been branded a country band, but clearly it’s some time since their diet consisted of ribs, tacos and pancakes.

Unapologetic: The Dixie Chicks

Sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire project a polished Fifth Avenue elegance, and vocalist Natalie Maines is a vision of sculpted cheekbones and smoky eye-shadow.

With their origins as bouffant-haired ingénues playing bluegrass music long forgotten, the Chicks are in Miami to attend a Sony BMG conference, where their new album, Taking the Long Way, is high on the corporate agenda. It’s their first release since the group weathered the storm of outrage triggered by Maines’s expression of shame that President Bush was from her home state of Texas. Although they’ve sold 30 million albums, the company was concerned about their commercial future.

When Maines made her comment on March 10 2003, 10 days before Operation Iraqi Freedom unleashed "shock and awe" over Baghdad, the Dixie Chicks were probably the biggest act in country music. Yet within days, their music vanished from the charts and the airwaves, apoplectic rednecks crushed piles of their CDs with tractors, and the FBI was feverishly monitoring death threats against the trio. It was the most heinous pop-star outrage since Ozzy Osbourne urinated on the Alamo.

"The reaction was as if Natalie had said ’Death to the President’ or something," says violinist and vocalist Maguire.

"It was the bullying and the scare factor," shudders banjo and guitar player Robison. "It was like the McCarthy days, and it was almost like the country was unrecognisable."

The level of debate can be gauged from the way Maines was compared to "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, who was photographed manning a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun at the height of the Vietnam war.

The Chicks can’t hide their disgust at the lack of support they received from other country performers. "A lot of artists cashed in on being against what we said or what we stood for because that was promoting their career, which was a horrible thing to do," says Robison.

"A lot of pandering started going on, and you’d see soldiers and the American flag in every video. It became a sickening display of ultra-patriotism."

"The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism," Maines resumes, through gritted teeth. "Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country... I don’t see why people care about patriotism."

There can be no rational explanation of how Maines’s remark came to drive a red-hot poker into America’s divided soul, but it’s only now that some of the poison has begun to dissipate.

Early concerns about the premature demise of the Chicks’ career subsided when the furiously unapologetic single Not Ready to Make Nice became the most downloaded track on iTunes, despite a lack of radio airplay. Then the album went to number one on the Billboard 200 after selling half a million copies in the week after its release in America last month. It looks set to be their first UK top 10 album this Sunday.

The recruitment of Rick Rubin as producer, the man who rejuvenated Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Diamond and others, is guaranteed to extend the Chicks’ appeal, though it would be disappointing if the album’s thoughtful range of subject matter (from IVF to Alzheimer’s) was overshadowed by the Bush episode.

"I think for longevity’s sake, our music had to mature and we had to mature as people," says Maguire. "Not that this particular event had to happen, but it sped up the process for us and helped us make a record that’s really meaningful to us, whether or not other people see that."

’Taking the Long Way’ is out now on Sony. The Dixie Chicks are on ’Later’ tomorrow (BBC2, 11.35pm).

Bacharach writes anti-war lyrics

Burt Bacharach co-wrote his first hit with Hal David in 1957
Pop composer Burt Bacharach has written his first lyrics in a career spanning nearly 50 years, expressing his disillusionment over the war in Iraq.
The 77-year-old, who wrote songs such as Walk On By with lyricist Hal David, has written a number of political songs on his latest album At This Time.

"I had to do it. This is very personal to me," he said.

Bacharach previously left David and his ex-wife Carole Bayer Sager to write the lyrics to his songs.

Frustration expressed

Bacharach won three Oscars and six Grammys and co-wrote more than 50 chart hits including What the World Needs Now is Love, Make It Easy On Yourself and Alfie.

He also expresses frustration with US political leaders.

"You could say ’how does a guy who has written love songs his entire life suddenly decide to rock the boat?’" he said.

"I thought that was very important because I couldn’t have somebody else write these lyrics."

He added: "I never was a political person in my life. I wrote songs during Vietnam, not about Vietnam. I was just writing love songs. Leading my own life in my own insulated world."

Singers on his album include Elvis Costello and Rufus Wainwright, and rap producer Dr Dre provides some drum loops.

"It’s very streety, as streety as I can make it," Bacharach said.

Dean: ’We’re About to Enter the ’60s Again’

By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor

(CNSNews.com) - America is about to revisit one of the most turbulent decades in its history, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told a religious conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "We’re about to enter the ’60s again," Dean said, but he was not referring to the Vietnam War or racial tensions.

Dean said he is looking for "the age of enlightenment led by religious figures who want to greet Americans with a moral, uplifting vision."

"The problem is when we hit that ’60s spot again, which I am optimistic we’re about to hit, we have to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes," Dean added. See Video

Anger over the Vietnam War and the country’s escalating racial tensions made the late 1960s one of the most painful eras in American history. Republican Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy, as well as the riot-marred Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Later in his speech Tuesday, Dean appeared to backtrack. "I’m not asking to go back to the ’60s; we made some mistakes in the ’60s," he said. "If you look at how we did public housing, we essentially created ghettoes for poor people" instead of using today’s method of mixed-income housing.

Another mistake Democrats made in the ’60s, Dean acknowledged, was that "we did give things away for free, and that’s a huge mistake because that does create a culture of dependence, and that’s not good for anybody, either," he noted, a reference to the Great Society welfare programs created by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s.

"Those mistakes were not the downfall of our program," Dean added. "They helped a lot more people than they hurt. But we can do better and we will do better and our time is coming." See Video

Alternating between references to the "McCarthy era" of the 1950s, which he accused the Bush administration of reviving, the decade of the 1960s and the current era, Dean explained that he was "looking to go back to the same moral principles of the ’50s and ’60s."

That was a time that stressed "everybody’s in it together," he said. "We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds."

Dean’s comments Tuesday came at a religious gathering convened in the nation’s capital to discuss ways of eliminating poverty. After stating that America "is about as divided as it has been probably since the Civil War," Dean declared that "we need to come together around moral principles, and I’m talking about moral principles like making sure no child goes to bed hungry at night."

"I’m talking about moral principles like making sure everybody in America has health insurance just like 36 other countries in the world," he added. "This is a moral nation, and we want it to be a moral nation again."

As one method of accomplishing that goal, the DNC chairman called on Congress "to raise the minimum wage until we have a living wage in this country." He dismissed criticism of a minimum wage hike as "economists’ mumbo-jumbo."

"We’re simply asking to give the people who are working for minimum wage the same raise that Congress has had every year for the last 20 years," he said.

Dean also stated that the Democratic Party helped give people "the opportunity to become middle class" during the 1960s.

"I do think that empowering people to help themselves is what we should be doing in the 21st century," he added, stating that the Democratic Party now emphasizes the value of work.

"If you work hard, you ought to be able to support your family," the DNC chairman noted, and "in America, you need the opportunity to work hard, and that means some level of support from government — no handouts, but some level of support so that you really do have a genuine opportunity to contribute to the country."

The DNC chairman pointed to President Bush’s tax cuts as a major obstacle to what he called "tax fairness." He also criticized the Republican Congress for being "the biggest ’big government’ government we’ve ever had," though he did make at least one positive comment about the GOP.

"How about if I’m a wild-eyed radical liberal who is willing to say the conservatives had some good ideas?" Dean told his audience. "But let’s go back and make what we wanted to work, using some of their ideas to make sure that the mistakes don’t get made again," he added.

"It’s nice to see that Howard Dean’s hostility to the religious community ends when people of faith vote Democrat," Republican National Committee spokesman Josh Holmes told Cybercast News Service.

Holmes added he was not surprised that "Howard Dean’s political perspective is derived from a 1960s counterculture view of the world. What is surprising — and disturbing — is that he can urge a massive expansion of government and denounce the Democrat mistake of creating a ’culture of dependence’ in the same speech."

"He may want to revisit that mistake to update his talking points and the Democrat policy manual," Holmes said.

Before leaving Tuesday’s conference, the DNC chairman thanked those in attendance for giving him "a big lift."

"I came in the wrong door when I first got here," Dean said. "I came in the back, and everybody was talking about praising the Lord, and I thought, ’I am home. Finally, a group of people who want to praise the Lord and help their fellow man just like Jesus did and just like Jesus taught.’ Thank you so much for doing that for me."

Posted By:Ministry of Mutation
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Silence

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.

But silence is impossible.

Silence screams.

Silence is a message,

just as doing nothing is an act.

Let who you are ring out & resonate

in every word & every deed.

Yes, become who you are.

There’s no sidestepping your own being

or your own responsibility.

What you do is who you are.

You are your own comeuppance.

You become your own message.

You are the message.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

Leonard Peltier

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ’stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
– Bertolt Brecht

OLBERMANN PROPERLY NAMES BUSH AS AMERICA’S GREATEST THREAT

Mr Bush, your words are lies that imperil us all Sadly, of course , the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you: Keith Olbermann

Yesterday marked the signing of the Military Commissions Act by George W Bush and the loss of Habeas Corpus.

A silent America watched in cowed silence but many, including myself, felt the first cold breath of fascism chilling our bones and the fall landscape.

Last night Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, marked the death of habeas corpus with an eloquent speech which spoke to the heart of the matter. As he noted we have suffered similar temporary loses of freedoms, but we have never lost the heart of our liberty - habeas corpus which dates back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

Every American should hear this 8 minute video or read the enclosed text.

Here is the video:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/

Olbermann: And lastly, as promised, a special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived. as people in fear.

And now - our rights and our freedoms in peril - we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before - and we have been here before led here - by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.

We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans.

While his man-in-charge.General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen - he is still a Japanese."

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did - but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900-thousand votes though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely. from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.

The most vital. the most urgent. the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been, only human.

We have let Roosevelt’s "fear of fear itself" overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."

We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute. the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always. wrong.

"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly - of course - the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital. the most urgent. the most inescapable of reasons.

And - again, Mr. Bush - all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere - anywhere - but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" - exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."

’Presumed innocent,’ Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

’Access to an attorney,’ Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

’Hearing all the evidence,’ Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies, that imperil us all.

"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday. "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas Corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush. they would be "the beginning of the end of America."

And did it even occur to you once sir - somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 - that with only a little further shift in this world we now know - just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died -

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, sir, all of them - as always - wrong.

Good night, and good luck.

Every American should hear this 8 minute video or read the enclosed text.

Here is the video:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/

Here is the text:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2006/10/19.html