Clipmarks | Delegates Clips

Wrong Woman; Wrong Message

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:46:12 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

Hillary must win 80% of every remaining primary to tie Obama

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:08:15 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: How her arguments have changed as hope dimmed

Clip Source: www.slate.com

According to Slate's Delegate Calculator, Clinton would need 80 percent of every remaining vote to catch up with Obama on pledged delegates. There's no chance anyone inside the Clinton campaign believes that is going to happen.

When Hillary started falling behind in primary delegates, her campaign emphasized her lead in superdelegates

They gave that up when superdelegates started drifting Obama's way

Then the Clinton campaign started arguing that you can't nominate

someone who lacks a popular-vote majority

They're starting to give that up because Clinton now has little chance of surpassing Obama in the popular vote. (That's just as well, because

the caucuses screw up popular-vote counts as a reliable measure of candidate support.

This isn't arithmecracy. It's arithmetic idolatry—the worship of irrelevant numbers

Does that mean the end of her campaign is near? I'm beginning to suspect so. Hand me that slide rule …

Tags: clinton, election, obama, politics

How Global Should the Internet Be?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:23:57 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.businessweek.com

Domain names are a sore point with nations who use alphabets other than Roman. Now, the group that oversees domain names is trying to translate

Lest you think a U.N. meeting to discuss the future of the Internet would be a ponderous, low-key affair, consider this remarkable tale. Back in 2003, when the U.N. held just such an event in Geneva, the delegates unexpectedly decided to close the meeting to nongovernmental officials and to eject a handful of attendees. One of them was Paul Twomey—president of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), a private, nonprofit company that oversees technical aspects of the Internet's address system—who was escorted by guards to the exit.

The surprising turn of events underscored the simmering resentment felt by many nations, especially in the developing world, over the governance of the Internet.

Limitless Domain Names?

Tags: the net, global, domain names

Pre-RNC raids: so who hates freedom now?

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:50:01 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Doesn't look like any evidence has been uncovered thus far of intent to commit anything beyond non-violent protests. Kind of an unnerving story if you ask me, but, hey, it's a post-9/11 world, and the cops are just trying to keep us all safe, right? (It's funny, when I was a kid growing up in the eighties, there used to be after-school specials about how this kind of thing happened in apartheid South Africa.)

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Dozens Detained Ahead of Convention

ST. PAUL, Minn. — On the weekend before the Republican National Convention, law enforcement agencies detained dozens of people and issued a series of search warrants aimed at groups believed to be organizing demonstrations while delegates and Republican officials are in town.

Enlarge This Image

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Police released one person at a time from a protest-planning headquarters where people were detained in St. Paul on Friday night.

On Friday night the Ramsey County sheriff's department, accompanied by the St. Paul police, detained people inside a building here that was being used as a headquarters to plan protests.

“They handcuffed all of us,” said Sonia Silbert, 28, from Washington. “They searched everyone.”

People who had been inside said teach-ins and legal training had been conducted there, and that the space was also a repository for such items as computers and bicycles.

Tags: news, politics, presidential_campaign_2008, police, crime, civil_rights, law

"The world’s greatest war criminal" addressed the UN, again

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:37:53 GMT

clipped by: righthand
clipper's remarks: "'No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,' a principle that the Bush White House has explicitly repudiated, both by renouncing the Geneva Conventions and subjecting those detained in the US “war on terror” to waterboarding, beatings, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation and other forms of torture and degrading treatment.

"The declaration affirms that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” practices that the Bush administration has carried out with impunity, through the holding of detainees without charges, not only at the infamous detention facilities in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, but also at secret CIA prisons around the world. It has introduced “extraordinary rendition” into the lexicon of foreign policy, a discreet term for kidnapping people, drugging them and then sending them in hoods and chains to other countries so that they can be tortured."

Clip Source: www.wsws.org

the assembled UN delegates could sit through and then politely applaud such a hypocritical harangue from a man who is without rival as the world’s greatest war criminal is testimony to the spinelessness and complicity of both the world’s governments and the United Nations itself

he is attempting once again to utilize the world body—much as his administration did five years ago in relation to purported Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”—to secure a phony pretext for another war of aggression, this time against Iran

to deliver a belligerent speech demanding action by the UN against Iran would only recall the lies and intimidation used by the US

to prepare its war against Iraq

“liberation” is continuously invoked as the description for the war to impose semi-colonial domination by the US over Iraq and its oil wealth

a more detailed citation of the Universal Declaration would have sounded like a war crimes indictment against his own administration

amounting to further restrictions on visas

Tags: bush, un, iraq

Virtual climate change

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:38:22 GMT

clipped by: shunyax
clipper's remarks: More in this link :
http://tv.oneworld.net/mediamanage/play/4601//

Clip Source: blogs.guardian.co.uk

Whilst delegates and activists from 180 nations - estimated to be in the region of around 10,000 people and causing as much pollution as 20,000 cars in one year - have jetted out to Bali to participate in the UN climate change conference, you can actually take part from the comfort of your own chair.

OneWorld.net, the civil society portal, has set up a Virtual Bali on Second Life, for residents of the cyber world to come together and grill representatives from the different countries and organisations attending the main event.

"A virtual world offers far more participation than passively watching something being streamed. And it includes a strangely human sense of meeting and being present at an event. You can even wander off to have side meetings with people you meet there - whether new people or people you already know

Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany...

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 03:17:45 GMT

clipped by: jatfla

Clip Source: www.haaretz.com

Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany; Ahmadinejad is preparing another Holocaust

LOS ANGELES - Drawing a direct analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu asserted Monday that the Iranian nuclear program posed a threat not only to Israel, but to the entire western world. There was "still time," however, to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he said.

"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. "Believe him and stop him," the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."

When asked if Bush could afford embarking on another "military adventure" after Iraq, Netanyahu said acting on the Iranian nuclear program would not be adventurous but necessary.

Tags: israel, war on terror

Climate Change Is as Serious as WMD: Annan

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:02:01 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.commondreams.org

Climate Change Is as Serious as WMD: Annan

UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan addresses delegates Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N. conference on climate change Wednesday that it's clear it will cost far less to cut greenhouse-gas emissions now 'than to deal with the consequences later.'(AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

Annan made the appeal as he launched a three-day gathering of environment chiefs, tasked with stepping up action against global warming.

In his valedictory speech to the annual meeting, the UN secretary-general painted a sombre tableau about the effects of climate change, especially on impoverished countries that were least to blame for it.

Tags: climate change, kofi annan, united nations

Party Unity My A**

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:10:02 GMT

clipped by: n2sooners

Clip Source: voices.washingtonpost.com

A number of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top advisers will not be staying in Denver long enough to hear Barack Obama accept the nomination for president, according to sources familiar with their schedules.

Clinton will deliver her speech Tuesday night. She will hold a private meeting with her top financial supporters Wednesday at noon, and will thank her delegates at an event that afternoon. Former president Bill Clinton will speak that night. Several of Hillary Clinton's supporters are then planning to leave town. Among them, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman, and longtime supporters Steve Rattner and Maureen White. Another of Clinton's top New York fundraisers, Alan Patricof, did not make the trip to Denver.

Tags: clinton, obama, democrats, campaign, election, convention

Lesotho gardens relieve food crisis

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:53:39 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Lesotho gardens relieve food crisis

As delegates at the UN food summit in Rome tackle concerns over food production, the BBC's Peter Greste visits Lesotho, one of the countries most at risk from climate change and global food and fuel price rises.

Lesotho's vast highland plains are spectacular places for tourists. Broad and treeless, they offer stunning views of the mountains looming over shimmering gold grasslands.

But they are terrible for farmers.

But Lesotho cannot wait for the UN food summit in Rome to come up with ideas, so it has developed some of its own.

(Mahaha's family) has three keyhole gardens and that's more than enough to supply all 10 of them with all the vegetables they need, and with some left over to sell - it's changed their lives

Ntsie Tlali, Care

Saudi king wants inter-faith talks to include Judaism

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:51:03 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.middle-east-online.com

King Abdullah asks Christians, Jews to meet Muslim counterparts for dialogue among civilizations.

RIYADH - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Monday proposed inter-faith talks between Muslims, Christians and Jews in a first for the ultra-conservative kingdom, the official SPA news agency reported.

"I ask representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith," the king told delegates to a seminar on "Dialogue Among Civilisations between Japan and the Islamic World."

SPA reported that top Saudi clerics had given the green light for the idea, and that Muslim leaders from other countries would now be consulted.

"If God wills it, we will then meet with our brothers from other religions, including those of the Torah and the Gospel... to come up with ways to safeguard humanity," the king said.

Tags: muslims, jews, saudi arabia

Recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:18:23 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: sciencepolicy.colorado.edu

Here's a recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming:

1. Start with 30 new nuclear power plants around the world.

2. Add 17,0000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, and 42 coal or natural gas power plants equipped with still-experimental systems to sequester their carbon dioxide emissions underground.

3. Build everything in 2013. Repeat every year until 2030.

As delegates from 190 countries gather here on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a "road map" for the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, some experts are wondering whether the meeting has lost touch with the reality of tackling climate change.

But while the debate continues, the most fundamental question of what it will take to achieve meaningful reductions has gone largely forgotten.

Tags: envionment, climate, science

U.N. panel blames humans for warming

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:18:35 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The draft accord projects that Arctic ice will shrink, and perhaps disappear in summers by 2100, while heatwaves and downpours would get more frequent. The numbers of tropical hurricanes might decrease but the storms would become stronger.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

U.N. panel blames humans for warming

PARIS (Reuters) - The U.N. climate panel agreed its starkest warning yet on Thursday that human activities are causing global warming that may bring more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas, delegates said.

The report, due for release on Friday and bolstering conclusions from a 2001 study, may put pressure on governments and companies to do more to curb greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.

Scientists and government officials in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, agreed it was "very likely" that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, delegates said.

In IPCC language, "very likely" means at least 90 percent probability and is the strongest link to human activities since the IPCC was set up in 1988. The previous study in 2001 said a link was "likely," or 66 percent probable.

IPCC officials declined comment, saying that the report would be issued on Friday at 0830 GMT.

Tags: climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases

African child death shock

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:02:08 GMT

clipped by: michellezm

Clip Source: www.health24.com

Every five minutes, eight African children under the age of five die of vaccine-preventable diseases, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Polio, tetanus and measles are the primary killers of the children, said a UN statement released at a meeting in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Delegates were discussing ways to increase child vaccination rates in Africa, Agence France-Presse reported.

About 155 of every 1 000 children born in Africa die before the age of five, the UN said. The UN's World Health Organization and children's fund UNICEF want to halve that death rate by 2015. - (HealthDayNews)

Tags: africa, children, medical, health, current affairs

Bush and Pinochet

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:06:44 GMT

clipped by: Bizi_Poz
clipper's remarks: I sugest you read the full article of you want to learn about the atrocities commited by your countries past and present presidents...

Clip Source: consortiumnews.com

Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.

Pinochet’s History

Pinochet’s years in the service of U.S. foreign policy date back to the early 1970s when Richard Nixon’s administration wanted to destroy Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

The CIA launched a covert operation to “destabilize” Allende’s government, with the CIA-sponsored chaos ending in a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973. Gen. Pinochet seized power and Allende was shot to death when Pinochet’s forces stormed the Presidential Palace.

Thousands of political dissidents – including Americans and other foreigners – were rounded up and executed. Many also were tortured.

With Pinochet in control, the CIA turned its attention to helping him overcome the negative publicity that his violent coup had engendered around the world. One “secret” CIA memo, written in early 1974, described the success of “the Santiago Station’s propaganda project.” The memo said:

“Prior to the coup the project’s media outlets maintained a steady barrage of anti-government criticism, exploiting every possible point of friction between the government and the democratic opposition, and emphasizing the problems and conflicts that were developing between the government and the armed forces. Since the coup, these media outlets have supported the new military government. They have tried to present the Junta in the most positive light.” [See Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File]

Operation Condor

In November 1975, the loose-knit collaboration among the Southern Cone dictatorships took on a more formal structure during a covert intelligence meeting in Santiago. Delegates from the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia committed themselves to a regional strategy against “subversives.”

Tags: bush, pinochet, chile, coup, allende