Even as journalists at The Times adjust to their new home, they worry about the future. As advertising inches decline, the paper is literally shrinking; its page width was reduced in August. And some doubt that newspapers will even exist in print form a generation from now.
During eight years in office, Chávez has already taken control of Venezuela's courts, congress, television stations and petroleum industry; his congress granted him the right to rule by decree. The constitutional rewrite will allow him to control the central bank and its reserves, override elected local governments with his own appointees, declare an indefinite "state of emergency" in which due process and freedom of information would be suspended, and use the army to maintain domestic political order under the slogan "fatherland, socialism or death!" It will also abolish any limit on presidential terms for a 53-year-old ruler who would otherwise be compelled to step down by 2012.
If you're thinking you haven't heard much about this transformation in a major oil-producing country two hours by air from Miami, you're right. U.S. media and human rights groups have basically ignored Chávez's latest power grab. Human Rights Watch, which has been conducting a campaign about what it says is the "human rights crisis" in neighboring, democratic Colombia in close cooperation with congressional Democrats, has issued no statement on the Venezuelan violence -- including the shooting of the students by government-backed paramilitaries on Nov. 7 -- and objected to only one of the 69 new constitutional articles.
Yet Benazir Bhutto is no savior. The queen of hypocrisy, she has managed to hypnotize Western liberals with her claim to represent progressive elements in the Muslim world. Bhutto is a charlatan. How can she call herself a democrat while also appointing herself head of the Pakistan People's Party for life? Her time as prime minister brought staggering levels of corruption and graft. Bhutto's niece and sister-in-law accuse her of conspiring to murder her own brother, Murtaza, who challenged her power during her second term. She continues to see Pakistan as her personal feudal fiefdom to be plundered. A false prophet of democracy, she threatens to bring back the rule of the gangster rather than the rule of law.
During the late '90s, I recorded a song called "Accountability" and made a video that satirized Pakistani politicians whose corruption scandals were being reported internationally. The response of Bhutto's government was to ban the video and threaten my life. In the years since Bhutto fled Pakistan to escape corruption investigations, her desire to regain power has blinded her to the struggle being waged by Pakistanis on behalf of true democracy. A member of her own party, Aitzaz Ahsan, the lawyer who won Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry's reinstatement as chief justice of the Supreme Court after Musharraf dismissed him early this year, languishes in jail -- along with thousands of others. Meanwhile, Bhutto attends diplomatic receptions and makes speeches about freedom and liberty. While lawyers and human rights activists faced the threat of injury and death for standing up to Musharraf's regime, she was in sunny Dubai, waiting for Washington's go-ahead to return.
The United Nations could argue that it lacks the funds to pay judges. But then why does it pay an employee from Sierra Leone more than $11,000 per month to teach Kosovars how to run their railroads? The Kosovar railroad workers, who survive on just over $200 per month, were more than a little offended to learn that Sierra Leone's last trains stopped running in 1975. Their teacher was an expert on harbors.
U.N. top brass knows full well that Kosovars are losing patience. Last year Inga-Britt Ahlenius, U.N. undersecretary general for internal oversight services, warned if the administration continued to ignore corruption, the whole mission could be jeopardized. "[T]he reluctance by senior Mission management to address fraud and corruption will have a devastating impact on public perception inside and outside of Kosovo," she wrote.
George Orwell would have understood the attraction of privileged young people to the Peace Racket. “Turn-the-other-cheek pacifism,” he observed in 1941, “only flourishes among the more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The real working class . . . are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it.” If so many young Americans have grown up insulated from the realities that Vegetius and Sun Tzu elucidated centuries ago, and are therefore easy marks for the Peace Racket, it’s thanks to the success of the very things the Peace Racket despises above all—American capitalism and American military preparedness.
What’s alarming is that these students don’t plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations.
In this "regime adjustment" the Bush administration has found allies amongst Pakistan's elite, which is unremittingly feudal. Bhutto, for example, comes from a traditional feudal family and married into another traditional feudal family; for her, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) formed by her father, is her fiefdom -- she is president for life. Inner-party democracy is the stuff of fiction. It is important to keep in mind that the PPP and Nawaz Sharif's PML(N) are not the secular modern parties voters are accustomed to in the west.The authors produced a film for PBS's Independent Television Service about Pervez Musharraf, titled Dinner with the President. Here are their bios from the ITVS website:
Feudals in both parties oppose Musharraf's reforms tooth and nail. Because his administrative modernization set up, for the first time, representative, elected local government institutions (Nazims) and politically empowered the poor; his economic liberalization (including privatization) is promoting the growth of the middle class -- universally recognized as the backbone of liberal democracy. Both hit at their feudal roots. Predictably, the judiciary has time and again ruled against Musharraf's privatization of key economic sectors.
The clerics in the religious coalition -- the MMA -- resist his educational reforms and promotion of women's rights since both are undermining the ideological domination of the religious establishment. In the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) the ruling MMA is systematically sabotaging Musharraf's reforms.
By all accounts, Musharraf allowed the highest degree of media freedom ever experienced in the country's history. This is exposing the average Pakistani to the world outside, and to modern values of democracy and individual rights.
Not surprisingly, the PPP, PML and the MMA are ranged against the army, led by Musharraf.
It is crucial to keep in mind that he is the first leader who has attempted the modernization of Pakistani economy and society.
Many prominent lawyers leading the opposition to Musharraf are either members of PPP or are closely connected to it through kinship links. A majority of the lawyers and judges and "liberal" defenders of human rights are part of the feudal elite; the rest share in the feudal values. They feel extremely threatened by Musharraf's modernization and are bent on protecting their inherited status and privileges. They are hardly the stuff of independent, modern professionals.
Some of the street support for Bhutto on TV is, of course, from party workers. But a lot of it is the poorest of the poor, most of whom are serfs who live a hand-to-mouth existence on the fiefs of feudals. They are lured in truckloads with the offer of two meals a day, which is a luxury for them.
This is the background to and the essence of the sordid "pro-democracy" movement.
It would be a real pity if American opinion makers and professionals lose sight of this unfolding power struggle between the army led by Musharraf on the one hand and the obscurantist feudal and clerical forces on the other.
Sabiha Sumar, Director
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Sabiha Sumar studied filmmaking and political science at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and history and political thought at the University of Cambridge. She has directed both documentaries and narrative films that have won worldwide acclaim.
S. Sathananthan, Producer
S. Sathananthan was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka and read for the PhD degree at the University of Cambridge. He co-founded Vidhi Films and has produced several documentaries that have played important national and international roles in catalyzing social change. His films include Suicide Warriors, a documentary about the female suicide brigade of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; On The Roofs Of Delhi, a short film about the dreams and aspirations of a poor 14-year-old girl; and Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, a feature film about the growth of Islamic extremism in Pakistan. The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2003.
The media adore Bhutto because she went to Harvard and Oxford, which I consider two more strikes against her. A degree from Harvard is prima facie evidence that she's on the side of the terrorists. I note that Bhutto demonstrates her own deep commitment to democracy by giving herself the title "chairperson for life" of the Pakistan Peoples Party.
Liberals hysterically opposed our imposing a democracy on Iraq and despise Nouri al-Maliki, the democratically elected leader of Iraq. Say, has Maliki ever been convicted in a Swiss court of money laundering?
Compared to Pakistan, imposing democracy in Iraq is like imposing democracy in Darien, Conn. But in Iraq, liberals prefer an anti-American dictator, like Saddam Hussein. Only in Pakistan do liberals yearn for pure democracy.
You wouldn't know it to read the headlines, but Musharraf has not staged a military coup. In fact, he was re-elected -- in a landslide -- just weeks ago under Pakistan's own parliamentary system.
But the Pakistani Supreme Court, like our own Supreme Court, believes it is above the president and refused to acknowledge Musharraf's election on the grounds that he is disqualified because he is still wearing a military uniform. That's when Musharraf sent them home.
Musharraf's election was certainly more legitimate than that of Syrian president Bashar Assad (with whom every leading Democrat has had a photo-op) or Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (adjunct professor at Columbia University) or Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (loon).
Where were the headlines like this week's Economist's ("Time's up, Mr. Musharraf") about those lovable rogues? They hate America, so they can stay.
The last time liberals were this enthusiastic about popular rule in some Third World country was in 1979, when they were gushing about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University assured liberals in a 1979 New York Times op-ed that the "depiction of Khomeini as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false."
Soon Pennsylvanians and Virginians and Tennesseans would feel like Americans. All across the country towns were named Lafayette, or Fayette, or Fayetteville, or — after Lafayette's French estate — La Grange. In New York, we remember him in the name of Lafayette Street, where the old row of stately houses now known as Colonnade Row was originally named La Grange Terrace, in the early 1830s. A statue of a rather foppish Lafayette stands in Union Square; its artist was Frédéric Bartholdi, who also gave us the Statue of Liberty. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a splendid Lafayette Memorial on Prospect Park West at 9th Street was designed by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, who also did the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial in Park Slope became a rallying symbol for American aid to the French in World War I.
Recalling the filming of "Marty," Borgnine said that "we just enjoyed ourselves working, and [Mann] never made it hard for anybody. It happened so easily and nicely."
Actress Eva Marie Saint, who appeared in numerous live and filmed TV productions directed by Mann, said Monday that he "was just a prince of a guy."
"You never heard a word against Delbert," Saint said. "He was wonderful on the set. He was so patient, and you take your cue from the director, so it was a quiet set.
"If something really went wrong, he could raise his voice, and when Del Mann raised his voice everybody listened, because he never did."
Mann, who also won a best director award from the Directors Guild of America for "Marty," went on to direct 15 more feature films, including "The Bachelor Party," "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," "Desire Under the Elms," "Separate Tables," "Middle of the Night" and the Doris Day comedies "Lover Come Back" with Rock Hudson and "That Touch of Mink" with Cary Grant.
Between 1949 and 1955, Mann directed more than 100 live television dramas. But even after turning to films, he returned to television and directed productions for "Playhouse 90," "Ford Star Jubilee" and other dramatic television anthology series.
He also directed more than two dozen films for television from the late 1960s to the early '90s, including "Heidi," "David Copperfield," "Jane Eyre," "Kidnapped" and "The Member of the Wedding."
"I missed the excitement and concentration that live TV gave us in those days," he said at the time. "I was able to achieve the artistic freedom I can't get in films."
Mann, who served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1967 to 1971, received the DGA's Honorary Life Member Award in 2002.
Diwali today is the homecoming of King Rama of Ayodhya after a 14-year exile in the forest. The people of Ayodhya (the capital of his kingdom) welcomed Rama by lighting rows (avali) of lamps (deepa), thus its name, Deepawali, or simply shortened as Diwali.
Some view it as the day Krishna defeated the demon Narakasura or in honor of the day Bali went to rule the nether-world by the order of Vishnu.
In Jainism it marks the nirvana of Lord Mahavira, which occurred on Oct. 15, 527 B.C.
The Sikhs have always celebrated Diwali, however its significance increased historically when on this day the Sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind Ji, was freed from imprisonment along with 52 Hindu Kings (political prisoners) whom he had arranged to be released as well. These prisoners were all released at the same time from the famous fort of Gwalior by Emperor Jahangir in October, 1619. Since the kings were also freed, Guru Ji became known popularly as the "Bandi Chhorh" (deliverer from prison). He arrived at Amritsar on Diwali, and the HarMandar Sahib (the "Golden Temple") was lit with hundreds of lamps in celebration. For Sikhs, this day was thereafter known as the "Bandi Chhorh Divas" (the day of freedom).
In India, Diwali is now considered to be a national festival, and the aesthetic aspect of the festival is enjoyed by most Indians regardless of faith.
Indeed, in a single week, the president of Georgia -- Mikheil Saakashvili, or "Misha" to his friends -- probably did more damage to American "democracy promotion" than a dozen Pervez Musharrafs ever could have done. After all, no one expected much in the way of democracy from Pakistan. But a surprising amount was expected of Georgia -- a small, clannish, mountainous country wedged between Russia and Turkey -- expectations that have now vanished in the crowds of riot police and clouds of tear gas that Saakashvili sent pouring out over the streets of Tbilisi, breaking up street demonstrations there last Wednesday. Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, put it best: "Even for those of us who work professionally with self-destructive countries, this was an exceptionally bad day."
It is no secret that I am a life long admirer of America. I have no truck with anti-Americanism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and I believe that our ties with America - founded on values we share - constitute our most important bilateral relationship. And it is good for Britain, for Europe and for the wider world that today France and Germany and the European Union are building stronger relationships with America.
The 20th century showed that when Europe and America are distant from one another, instability is greater; when partners for progress the world is stronger. And in the years ahead - notwithstanding the huge shifts in economic influence underway - I believe that Europe and America have the best chance for many decades to achieve historic progress ----
· working ever more closely together on the project of building a global society;
· and helping bring in all continents, including countries today outside the G8 and the UN Security Council, to give new purpose and direction to our international institutions.
And while no longer the mightiest militarily, or the largest economically, the United Kingdom has an important contribution to make. Just as London has become a global hub linking commerce, ideas and people from all over the world, so too our enduring values and our network of alliances, can help secure the changes we need.
is already in the black, with about 1000 units shipped. According to google, the DVD is carried by a surprising number of vendors. Enough to make one a believer in The Long Tail...
Veterans Day is an American holiday honoring military veterans. Both a federal holiday and a state holiday in all states, it is celebrated on the same day as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)
The holiday is commonly misprinted as Veteran's Day or Veterans' Day in calendars and advertisements.
