Song from Iran and other news

For the past few years, I've been receiving emails and attachments from a woman with close ties to Iran. Along with this Youtube she wrote the following:

Here is a song gifted to the new Iran emerging from the 2009 election by the one of the greatest musicians of present day Iran, Mohamad Reza Shajarian. And he rightly calls it "Iran, the land of hope.
She indicates that letters are circulating in Iran to weaken the grip of Mr. Ahmadinejad's government by doing the following:

o Refusing to give ads to the state run TV, and newspapers serving as the voice of the government. o Pulling out money invested in banks and financial institutions run by the government or by the revolutionary guards. o Refraining from contributing to the charity boxes scattered throughout towns all across the country. Protesting has become incredibly dangerous.

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What if record companies hadn’t been asses?

At Truthdig.com, Danny Goldberg has reviewed Steve Knopper’s book, Appetite for Self-Destruction. According to Goldbert, Knopper asks asks some good questions. Was it really necessary that the record companies had to suffer their massive economic collapses? Here are many of the excuses you hear:

If only they hadn’t charged so much for CDs even after the per-unit manufacturing cost went down; if only they hadn’t abandoned the commercial single when it ceased to be sufficiently profitable; if only they hadn’t cooperated with Best Buy and Wal-Mart at the expense of indie stores; if only they hadn’t sued customers for illegal downloading, etc. etc. Referring to the fact that some of Sony/BMG’s ill-fated watermarked CDs damaged some computers, Knopper writes: “This lack of empathy reinforced Napster-era beliefs that the music industry was more interested in suing and punishing its customers than catering to them.”

Goldberg disagrees with all of this. He points to the newspaper industry, which made none of these mistakes, but is also suffering massive economic losses.

This litany of real and imagined insults to the consumer [caused by record companies] ignores the central reality of what caused the decline of record sales: the ability of fans to get albums free.

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It’s 2009

The June 8, 2009 edition of Missouri Lawyers Weekly (not available online) reports that only 1 out of the 17 current judges sitting on the United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals are women. Her name is Diana Murphy and she was appointed by a Republican. All nine of the appointments to the 8th Circuit since 1994 (when Murphy was appointed) have been men. Each of these appointments is made by the President of the United States. To put this in context, 47% of the people receiving law degrees in 2007 have been women. Another note: Of the 179 total judges sitting on the 11 U.S. Courts of Appeals, 26% of them (47) are women.

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Census issues

Here's a topic I haven't followed well enough, as became obvious to me when I saw this little gem of a video on Huffpo. I had NO IDEA that one of the reasons Those-Who-Hate-Government-But-Want-Government-to-Manage-Religion-and-Reproduction are threatening not to fill out their census forms is the fear of being placed in Internment Camps. Yep, that maven of legislative insight, Michele Bachmann, warns Glenn Beck of the dire consequences we may well repeat from the WWII era. She also laments the missing "are you here illegally?" question (because of course all undocumented workers would 'fess right up to that on an official government form).

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How and why to repeal Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

How and why should we repeal Don't ask, Don't tell? Everything you need to know is here, in this presentation by Lawrence J. Korb, Sean Duggan, and Laura Conley of the Center for American Progress. Here's the pdf. Here are some of the facts worth considering:

More than 32,500 gay and lesbian service men and women have been discharged from military service since 1980.

This policy may have cost the U.S. government up to $1.3 billion since 1980.

“No reputable or peer-reviewed study has ever shown that allowing service by openly gay personnel will compromise military effectiveness.”17

Twenty-four countries allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. None of these have reported “any determent to cohesion, readiness, recruiting, morale, retention or any other measure of effectiveness or quality,” according to the Palm Center, and “in the more than three decades since an overseas force first allowed gay men and lesbians to serve openly, no study has ever documented any detriment to cohesion, readiness, recruiting, morale, retention or any other measure of effectiveness or quality in foreign armed services.”

Even the British, whose military structure and deployment patterns are most similar to ours—and who fiercely resisted allowing gays to serve in the military—were forced to do so by the European Court

What is step ONE for ending the deplorable status quo? "Issue an Executive Order banning further dismissals on the basis of DADT and send a legislative proposal on DADT repeal to Congress." We're waiting, Mr. Obama.

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