white house

Painting for Worship

Martin Kelley — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 21:06:48 +0000

I didn’t know of Adrian Martinez before I was introduced to him in this QuakerSpeak video. He seems like quite a character (“art attack!”) but I’m intrigued at how his paintings have brought primal Quaker values into unexpected spaces like the White House (not the occupant you might guess!) and corporate America. His story of a very specifically Quaker picture being bought for a boardroom hints at messages Friends might still have for the world:

The painting I did, Meeting for Worship, I just knew was not something that was going to get sold. It was not an economic decision. It was a necessity to do, nonetheless. When I did it, I had this big show and it was immediately purchased. First one. And it’s interesting: where it went went was the boardroom of an insurance agency. The man that owned the company bought the painting because he said, “The reason I need this painting, and I need it in the boardroom, is because we need more of that in our business.”

http://quakerspeak.com/painting-for-worship/

Michelle Alexander on the black vote, the Clinton brand—and of course, mass incarceration

Martin Kelley — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 16:57:59 +0000

Michelle Alexander on the black vote, the Clinton brand—and of course, mass incarceration.

Alexander is one of the leading voices on the rise of a level of mass incarceration in this country in the last 25 years. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating our prison-industrial complex has become. The huge numbers of African American men in jails for nonviolent crimes begs comparison to the darkest days of slavery. Bill Clinton escalated mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs” as a way to prove his political toughness.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

We tend to remember the Clinton Administration through rose-colored glasses but there were a lot of WTF moments we’ve forgotten–three strikes, the sanctions against Iraqi civilians, the way cruise missile strikes seemed to magically coincide with administration scandals, Bill’s serial philandering and Hillary’s slut-shaming responses. On paper, HRC is the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency. But if she’s running on the Clinton brand, she needs to explain how her political choices differ from her husband’s 20 years ago.

Smoking gun: the oil companies did write America’s energy policy

Martin Kelley — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 09:14:46 +0000

Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America’s energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the “task force” meetings. All we’ve known for sure is who wasn’t invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
We’ve long suspected that Cheney’s special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of “Big Oil” over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney’s energy task force.
Liar liar, pants on fire.
The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Nonviolence.org

Martin Kelley — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 12:45:27 +0000

Nonviolence.org readers may not be aware that my personal site has been the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting an “account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist”, I’ve been linked to by a Who’s Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati’s Politics Attention index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a program on an issue that’s central to Nonviolence.org’s mandate: conscientious resistance to military service. After looking over the material, I thought the interviews of resisters who have fled to Canada would be interesting to my readers and so wrote a short entry on it. Thinking it all a little funny that a publicist would care about Nonviolence.org, I mentioned the incident in the “Stories of Nonviolence.org” section of my personal site. One by one the leading political sites of the blogosphere have run the story as further proof of the vast left-wing mainstream media conspiracy. It’s rather funny actually.

I have to wonder is who’s kidding who with all this feigned outrage? For those missing the irony gene: the Nonviolence.org PayPal account currently has a balance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last donation–$5.00 back on November 20th. My corner of the left wing conspiracy is funded by the vast personal wealth I accumulate as a bookstore clerk.

Wonkette’s pages advertise “sponsorship opportunities,” she’s a recent cover girl on New York Times Magazine, her husband is an editor at New York magazine and in October she cashed out her blogging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first novel (“It’s not Bridget Jones does Washington, it’s Nick Hornby does politics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Sandra Day O’Connor), teaches law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee, has served on White House advisory panels, and is a paid correspondent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the others, calls a two minute phone call “recruiting”?

I’m beginning to think the real interest comes from the fact that this top tier of bloggers is totally in bed (literally) with the MSM. Their income comes from their connections with media and political power. Their carefully-crafted fascade of snarkish independence would crumble if their phone logs were made public. They’re not really blogging in their pajamas, folks.

By mentioning the existance of blog publicists, I’ve threatened to blow their cover. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtains: my social gaffe was in publicly admitting that the mainstream media courts political blogs. Kudos to journalist Derek Rose on admitting the practice:

But why shouldn’t a news organization’s publicity department court bloggers? As a MSM member, I get emails from TV flacks all the time promoting their scoops. From ABC, for example, I’ve received emails regarding a tape they got of the Beltway sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Barbara Walters’ Hillary Clinton interview; and their ‘Azzam the American’ video … as well as a Rush Limbaugh drug laundering story that never panned out. I even got attention from publicists when I was working for a newspaper that didn’t have a 20th of the circulation of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incredible distortion in the “reporting,” a term I have to use very loosely. Wonkette says “Kelley claims that a CBS minion put the screws to him to post something about a ’60 Minutes’ package on conscientious objectors” yet all readers have to do is follow the link to see I never said anything like that. Why do the cream of bloggers feel like a posse of self-absorbed seventh graders? When I started Nonviolence.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new political world of the internet might be All the President’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

Torture Apologist Nominated as Attorney General?

Martin Kelley — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:02:33 +0000

President Four More Years, George W. himself, thinks the best pick for the nation’s top law-enforcement official should be a lawyer who advocated throwing away the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, working as a senior White House lawyer said in January of 2002 that the war against terrorism:
bq. “in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/politics/10cnd-ashc.html
The man who would enforce U.S. laws thinks that the most important international law in human history should be chucked. In arguing that the law against torture of enemy soldiers was now irrelevant, Gonzales helped set the stage for the “Abu Ghraib prison atrocities”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact. Instead of being tried in international criminal courts as a war criminal, Gonzales is being promoted to a senior United States cabinet position. When liberty for all fails, destroy their cities: watch Falluja burn. When justice for all fails, torture the bastards: away with the Geneva Convention.
What? Forgotten what torture looks like? The folks at antiwar.com have a “collection of Abu Ghraib images”:http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444

Watergate Web-Style

Martin Kelley — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:30:04 +0000

In the papers, a story of “extensive Republican spying on Democrats”:www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive made possible by a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Information from the memos was passed to conservative columnist Robert Novak, who was the conduit for White House dirty tricks last summer–he was the one who revealed classified information meant to hurt a prominent “WMD scandal whistleblower Joseph Wilson”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000168.php. The plot thickens.

Thirty years later: Kissinger’s war crimes

Martin Kelley — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 21:01:57 +0000

Newly-declassified documents from the U.S. State Department show that former U.S. Secretary of State “Henry Kissinger sanctioned the dirty war in Argentina”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed.
bq. “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,” Mr Kissinger is reported as saying. “I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems, but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better … The human rights problem is a growing one … We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”
Forgiving away human rights abuses in Latin America was standard U.S. policy in the 1970s. Washington favored strong military power and control over messy unpredictable democracy (a formulation which could be a shorthand definition for post-Nazi _fascism_). After reading this week that the U.S. is wrapping entire iraqi villages in barbed wire, it’s hard not to see us returning to this era. What will declassified documents reveal about today’s White House occupants thirty years from now?

Scandal du Jour: Vice President leaking CIA Names

Martin Kelley — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 17:05:40 +0000

In the last year scandals seem to follow a curious pattern: they rise up, get a lot of talk in Washington but little elsewhere and then disappear, only to come back three months later as massive public news.

Back in July, we posted a number of entries about White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower’s wife. For those who missed the story, diplomat Joseph Wilson had traveled to the African nation of Niger to investigate the story that that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from it. Wilson easily determined that the story was a hoax and reported this information back to Washington. Despite the debunking, President Bush used the allegation in his State of the Union address and Wilson later came out and told reporters the President knew the information was false. A short time later someone in the White House let a conservative columnist know that Wilson was married to an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, exposing her name and endangering both her mission and the lives of those helping her.

We called this a treasonable offense but the news blew over and few people outside Washington seemed to follow the story. Last week it blew up big again and it’s been creating headlines. Rumor has it that the White House leak came from very high up in the Vice President’s office and the questions have mounted:

who leaked the information?
what did the Vice President know?
what did the President know?
did the President and his advisors know the Niger story was false when he addressed the nation and use it to call for war in Iraq?

The in’s and out’s of the renewed scandal are being ably tallied by Joshua Michal Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. He’s situating the leak in the backdrop of an ongoing war between the Vice President’s office and the CIA. As we’ve been documenting for a year now, the Vice President has been pressuring the CIA to skew their findings to suit the political needs of Administration. Most of the pre-war reports from the CIA found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, which made Vice President Dick Cheney furious and he was somewhat sucessful in getting them to rewrite their story. Now of course we know the CIA was right, and that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.

We have independent intelligence services precisely so we will have the best information possible when making decisions of national security. To politicize these services to serve the agendas of a pro-war Administration (who salivated over an Iraq invasion long before the 9/11 bombings) is wrong. It’s the kind of thing a banana republic dictator does. It’s not something that the American people can afford.