August 20, 2010

A Holocaust Documentary Raises Questions about What We See And What We Know

By Danny Schechter
Author of the Crime Of Our Time

A very old movie was offered up as something very new at New York’s Film Forum, as an unfinished Nazi propaganda film shot just before I was born became the subject of an Israeli filmmaker’s dissection titled A Film Unfinished.  It’s a film about a film, footage from which has been used in legitimate documentaries to show what the Ghetto was like,  but,  as we came to see, some of it  was staged and is illegitimate.

The human suffering of millions in Pakistan’s floods may have just begun if the country destablizes — meaning, the U.S. could be there for a very long time.

The world is seeing a tragedy unfold as monsoon rains swell the expansive Indus River and flood large parts of Pakistan from Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa province to the Arabian Sea. Whether directed by Pakistanis or outside agencies, relief will not always be a straightforward humanitarian effort – neither in intent nor result; it will be tempered with civil-military issues, international politics, and concerns with Pakistan’s very future.

It’s just a matter of time before we are eating clones, if we are not eating them now.

When Canadian agricultural leaders asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week after a scandal about unlabeled clone products in Europe if “cloned cows or their offspring have made it into the North American food supply,” he said, “I can’t say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don’t know.”

As the evangelical Right’s influence has declined, conservatives are adhering to another religion — one based on the scribblings of a sociopath.

Up until a few years ago, right-wingers who needed to believe in something larger than themselves chose Jesus. But with the evangelicals fading from the Republican coalition, and Obama’s social programs making the whole “compassionate conservative” thing suspect, it look like Jesus is out and Ayn Rand is in.