Category Archives: Politics

Fighting Words- UPDATED

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Q: What kind of person publicly threatens to hunt down and rape his rivalÂ’s four-year old daughter?

A: One of Clear ChannelÂ’s (former) finest: DJ Star, a.k.a. Troi Torain

Go ahead. Absorb. Let the nausea subside.

Yesterday, I received glad tidings of StarÂ’s termination (Thanks, TAN), but my relief quickly dissolved when I discovered just WHY he had been fired; during one of TorainÂ’s pathetic, IQ-reducing morning shows, he took a dispute he had with a nemesis– DJ Envy–to unprecedented levels of hatred by describing exactly how he wanted to hurt his rival’s innocent little girl. Wow. It is a truly special, powerful man who threatens to defile a child. If anyone needed further proof that Clear Channel was concomitantly useless and evil, look no further than their taste in employees and their amazing ability to reclassify hate as entertainment.

I understand that beef makes for tasty ratings, but apparently TorainÂ’s favorite meal came from a Mad Cow. Only a wasted, sick brain could conceive of and enthusiastically rant the following:

Star continued to digress about Envy’s child, saying, “Yes, I disrespected your seed. If you didn’t hear me, I said, I would like to do an R. Kelly on your seed, on your little baby girl. I would like to tinkle on her.” Even more, the now-removed radio jock stated, “I’m coming for your seed. Did you hear me? I want to do an R. Kelly in the mouth of your seed, fam… I want to put some mayonnaise in between your baby girl’s ass crack and take a bite.”

Quite predictably, Torain was relieved of his duty to shock listeners by spewing filth, but I want to know what took them so long. And I donÂ’t just mean the many hours which Clear Channel enjoyed before canning his ass, I mean these many months. I guess when your transgression involves an innocent Indian call center worker, itÂ’s easier to forgive and forget. No respect please, weÂ’re rat-eaters.

If Clear Channel had any kind of soul, they would have dumped Torain after that example of his intrinsic cruelty, but they donÂ’t, so they continued to remunerate him lavishly, thus ensuring that even more fecal matter would leave his worthless mouth. Much like children who have tortured kittens and puppies are practicing for future, human victims, I think that this descending spiral was predictable and thus, preventable. Shame on you Clear Channel. I rebuke you because your erstwhile star is shameless.
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Charlton Heston, libertine

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The Beeb reports that Afghanistan’s Supreme Court once criticized godless liberal Charlton Heston for wearing shorts 40 years ago in a movie:

… [Afghanistan’s] Supreme Court sought to ban [a TV channel] for showing the Charlton Heston sword and sandals epic, The Ten Commandments, during Ramadan in 2004. “It showed the prophet Moses with short trousers and among the girls,” Wahid Mujdah, a Supreme Court spokesman, said at the time. “He’s a very holy person and Islam respects him. This is wrong.” [Link – thanks, WGIIA]

And that was when Heston was playing bearded ol’ Moses. I wonder what they’d make of Heston’s other works featuring homoerotic bondage and hot monkey love:

But after a little bronze-limbed tussle, I’m sure the Afghan judges and the former NRA president could have a heart-to-heart about the virtues of widespread AK-47 ownership.

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Brutha-on-brutha violence

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The city of Newark, New Jersey just elected its first new mayor in 20 years. Known for its high rate of violent crime, Newark suffered a nasty campaign between golden boy Cory Booker and the candidate anointed by outgoing mayor Sharpe James.

Hizzoner Booker T. Coryngton

Cory Booker swamped his nearest challenger, state Sen. Ronald L. Rice, taking 72 percent of the vote compared with 24 percent for Rice in the nonpartisan election. [Link]

Mr. Booker, a chatty former Rhodes scholar who developed his oratorical talents at Yale Law School, has been tagged by fellow Democrats as a rising star in the party. [Link]

Booker is a vegetarian who doesn’t drink… [Link]

… a Democrat who cites the Republican mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, as a political model, and a churchgoing Baptist who meditates and quotes from Hindu texts… [Link – thanks, Randompedia]

Booker won by a landslide, but the campaign was marred by naked racial gibes from his black opponents. Red in tooth and claw, the ‘insufficiently black’ smear sounds a whole lot like desi racialists who question candidates’ authenticity (e.g. Bobby Jindal) and lob the grenade of Selling Out.

Booker is talking about the blacker-than-thou themes that James has been hammering on for weeks… “Sharpe James is running a campaign that uses every attempt possible to distract voters from the issues. He’s making racial allegations; he’s appealing to people’s worst fears…

“Four years ago, they said I was a tool of the Jews and a member of the KKK.” [Link]

… the battle pits the young challenger against an old-style political machine capable of using any means necessary–including personal harassment and police intimidation–to crush its opponents. Though both candidates are African-American, the race becomes racially charged when the mayor accuses Booker–a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School grad–of not being “really black…” [Link]

… Sharpe James described him — though they are both African-American Democrats — as Jewish, gay, a Republican and a proxy for the Ku Klux Klan… At Oxford, after wandering into a meeting of L’Chaim, a Jewish student organization, he joined the group and was eventually elected its president…

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Witch hunts

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Witch hunts remain a persistent scourge in rural parts of Jharkand state and adjoining areas of Chhatisgarh, Orissa and West Bengal. Periodically there are reports of a woman accused of causing misfortunes through black magic. Once accused, a woman faces hideous treatment, banishment and possibly death:

Recalling the trauma she faced, Ramani narrates: ‘I was tortured and forced to eat human excreta just because I was branded a witch by the ojhas (witch doctors).’ (Â…)

Vaisakhi, in her 50s, had also been brutally beaten up by a villager, who branded her a witch.

There are scores of women who have been branded witch by villagers and tortured. Many were killed, sometimes by beheading or dismembering their limbs.

Many like Ramani Devi are forced to drink urine or consume human excreta. Some are ostracised and thrown out of their villages. [Link]

These occurrences are most common in adivasi (or “tribal”) communities; but they have also been reported in non-adivasi settings. The victim may be a vulnerable woman, such as a widow, or one who has made herself inconvenient to the village power structure by asserting an economic or political right:

In Bijli village in Raipur district of Madhya Pradesh, a Dalit woman, Lata Sahu, contested against a backward-caste woman in the panchayat elections. Lata was prone to epileptic attacks. The Yadavs and Patels, who belong to the land-owning castes, got Lata’s sister-in-law to condemn her as a tonahi (witch). Lata was stripped of her clothes and paraded in the village.

In another case, in Tarra village in Raipur district, a woman was hacked to death after being branded a witch by her brother-in-law after she sought a right over her deceased husband’s land. In yet another case, in Gaandi village in Angara Block in Ranchi, two Dalit widows were tortured, resulting in the death of one of them, who was 75 years old. It began with the death of two children due to malaria and jaundice in September. An exorcist told the father of the children, Mahavir Baitha, that the two widows, Jeetan Devi and Dubhan Devi, were responsible for the deaths. In front of the son, the mother was tonsured, beaten, paraded and burnt. Earthen pitchers were broken on the heads of the two widows. [Link]

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A law changes the face of America

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National Public Radio’s All Things Considered is running a three part series this week that takes a look at the 1965 Immigration Act. As mentioned at various times on SM, this is the law which is responsible for many of our parents being allowed to legally enter the U.S., as well as the reason many of us are born citizens. The series by NPR is particularly relevant because one can draw comparisons between the immigration debate then and now. There are three to four million people standing in line waiting to get into America legally right now.

The FULL story is an audio story (and contains rich detail in the form of short interviews-12 min long). I am excerpting the abridged transcript below, although you are much better off listening to the whole story. First, one must remember the immigration laws before the 1965 Act:

“The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism,” says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. “It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.”

By the 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians were complaining that immigration quotas discriminated against them in favor of Western Europeans. The Democratic Party took up their cause, led by President John F. Kennedy. In a June 1963 speech to the American Committee on Italian Migration, Kennedy called the system of quotas in place back then “nearly intolerable…” [Link]

So Kennedy and the Democrats saw the political advantages to updating the racist laws in order to give an equal shot to everyone in the world, but Kennedy died before the ’65 act was passed. When Lyndon Johnson signed it into law he went out of his way to state that he didn’t think anything would come of it. Neither Johnson, nor most of the government, thought that people would really line up to come to the United States:

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Looking back, Johnson’s statement is remarkable because it proved so wrong. [Link]

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Cowabunga!

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NASA has inked a deal to launch two scientific instruments on an Indian rocket bound for the moon within the next two years. Even space is being outsourced:

The picture either means ‘satellite’ or ‘no head-in parking’

U.S. space agency NASA entered into an agreement with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday to send two scientific instruments on board Chandrayaan-I, the country’s first unmanned moon mission scheduled for 2008…

[The U.S. instruments include] a mini synthetic aperture radar (miniSAR), developed by the agency’s applied physics laboratory and a moon mineralogy mapper, built by [NASA] Jet Propulsion Laboratory…

Chandrayaan-I will be launched from… Sriharikota on the east coast of Andhra Pradesh, using the new polar satellite launch vehicle… [Link]

The first payload will look for polar ice on the moon and the other will study the moon’s surface mineral composition. [Link]

NASA won’t be the only hitchhiker in the galaxy — the Europeans are also aboard:

… the Chandrayaan payload… will have 15-20 instruments, including 11 from India and three from the European Space Agency. [Link]

India’s own payload is a lunar surveyor:

The instruments will perform photo-geological mapping of the lunar surface apart from mineral content. [Link]

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‘Slumming’ Takes on a Whole New Meaning

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Via Albert Krishna Ali at The Other India, a Guardian article about a new tourism phenomenon in India: slum tours. It’s apparently a common enough practice in places like Soweto and Rio, but new to India. For 200 Rupees, tourists get a guided tour of the areas around Delhi’s railway station, where a few thousand homeless children live:slumtour.jpg

The tour guide instructs visitors not to take pictures (although he makes an exception for the newspaper photographer). ‘Sometimes the children don’t like having cameras pointed at them, but mostly they are glad that people are interested in them,’ Javed claims, adding that the friendly smiles of the tourists are more welcome than the railway policemen’s wooden sticks and the revulsion of the train travellers. He hopes the trip will get a listing in the Lonely Planet guides. Nevertheless there is something a little uncomfortable about the experience — cheerful visitors in bright holiday T-shirts gazing at profound misery. (link)

Really, what could possibly be uncomfortable about well-fed tourists paying to gawk at desperately poor children? Continue reading →

Run, Budhia, run (from your coach)

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Four-year-old running prodigy Budhia Singh collapsed due to low blood sugar during a 40-mile run last Tuesday:

The Running Man

Diagnosing Budhia’s collapse during Tuesday’s 65-km run as hypoglycemia, where blood sugar level falls, a doctor feared the boy could suffer serious injuries by the time he reaches 15 if there is periosteal tear on the bones. [Link]

Doctors have examined him and said he should not be allowed to ultramarathon until he’s older:

… the panel headed by the chief medical officer of Capital Hospital… is said to have noted that the boy’s serum urea, potassium and ALKP (alkaline phosphatase) levels were on the higher side. “Signs of under-nourishment, vitamin deficiency and pallor have been noted. The boy should not run, as reflected by the abnormal parameters of health…” [Link]

Heeding the doctors, the Orissa government has banned Budhia from marathoning or being coerced to run marathons:

Orissa government has barred him from running marathons and threatened action against anybody who makes the four-year-old participate in long distance runs… Budhia’s cardiological system was under stress and he was under-nourished with anaemia and angular stomatitis, the [doctor’s] report had said. [Link]

Some activists, disbelieving Budhia’s 40 mile feat, wonder whether he’s living up to his name:

… he may earn another distinction by becoming the youngest in athletic world to go through dope test. “The doctors have suggested dope testing for Budhia who ran such a long distance…” [Link]
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Pursuing the Hayats

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I wanted to provide SM readers with a quick update on the trials of the ice cream truck driver and his son from Lodi, California. As you may remember the father’s prosecution resulted in a mistrial due to a hung jury, while the son was convicted on one charge of providing material support to terrorists and three counts of lying to the FBI (he faces up to 39 years in prison). Last Friday the U.S. Attorney’s office said that it will have another go at the elder Hayat:

Federal prosecutors announced Friday that they will retry a Lodi man whose first trial on charges that he lied to FBI agents during a terrorism investigation ended in a mistrial last month after half the jury voted for acquittal on one of the counts.

U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. set June 5 as the new trial date for Pakistani American Umer Hayat, 48, on two counts that he made false statements about his son’s training at a terrorist camp in Pakistan in 2003-04 and about his own knowledge of such camps.

“In the post-9/11 environment in which we live,” said U.S. Atty. McGregor Scott, “lying to the FBI in the course of a terrorism investigation is serious misconduct. False information may result in agents losing valuable time to foil a deadly plot, or perhaps bringing the wrong person or persons under suspicion.”

After deliberating for more than a week, jurors in the first trial reported April 25 that they were hopelessly deadlocked. According to prosecutors, the jurors split 7 to 5 in favor of conviction on one count and 6 to 6 on the other. [Link]

This wasn’t about just one holdout juror. Half the jury thought that there was reasonable doubt, especially considering the fact that the father was accused of providing misleading statements in order to protect his own son AND the fact that the FBI used shady interviewing techniques. Umer Hayat’s attorney sounded confident with respect to the outcome of a second trial:

“Continuing to pursue Umer Hayat on the charge of lying will have a chilling effect on people in the community coming forward and talking to the FBI,” Griffin said. “Umer Hayat did not have to go to the FBI. He voluntarily went to the FBI to talk with them and then found he was being accused of being a terrorist. When they couldn’t prove that, they accused him of being a liar.” [Link]

As a side note, Hayat’s homecoming upon his release was bittersweet:

Hayat’s homecoming was a mixture of joy and sorrow: Moments after learning of his immediate release Monday morning, Hayat’s attorney told him that his father, who had lived with him in Lodi, died Saturday. [Link]

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The Hindu cows won’t be coming home

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I was quite sad all day yesterday after I learned that the rights of a Hindu family in a small town in upstate New York had been trampled upon. It seems that in every direction that we gaze these days someone else in America is losing a fundamental right that our founding fathers believed in and bled for. In this case it is the right to bear cows for protection. The New York Times recently reported on this gripping story:

The Voiths lament on their front porch. Their cow may now be fifteen minutes away, but they still have their faith and each other.

To Stephen and Linda Voith, keeping cows at their home on Main Street in Angelica, N.Y., a tiny rural village, is a central facet of their Hindu beliefs.

To local officials, though, keeping the Voiths’ growing herd outside village limits is a matter of law, not religion.

The Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Rochester recently agreed, upholding a lower court ruling that prevented a lawyer for the couple from raising the issue of religious freedom when the village won an injunction against them. In 2003, an acting State Supreme Court justice found the Voiths in violation of a law against keeping livestock on parcels smaller than 10 acres.

“We’re being denied our right to practice our religion, because it seems like such a threat to the status quo in this country,” Mr. Voith said, calling attention to a dairy farm across the street behind their home.

The village attorney, Raymond W. Bulson, said the law does not single out any religion and described the dispute as a quality-of-life matter.

“You move to a village because you want the amenities,” Mr. Bulson said. “If you move there to have those amenities, you don’t want a cow next door. I’m sure their religious beliefs are sincere, but that was never an issue…” [Link]

Bigots. They aren’t even ashamed. They just come out and say it. “You don’t want a cow next door.” I guess it doesn’t even matter to Mr. Bulson that the cow in question is both young and in love. This isn’t just a story about religious discrimination but also one about forbidden love. Continue reading →