The Notion

When Snow Melts: Vancouver’s Olympic Crackdown

By Dave Zirin

News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, "With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [British Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games."

Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine.

I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn't going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?"

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February 9, 2010

Lifting the Veil on US Troops in Pakistan

By Laura Flanders

"The deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan." So began a Feb 4th piece by Jane Perlez in the New York Times.

But even all these days on, it's been a very discreet unveiling.

Lest we forget, US servicepeople are not supposed to be dying in Pakistan. It's not Iraq, it's not Afghanistan. There's no agreement for combat troops to operate. Until recently, U.S. officials have repeatedly officially denied having any combat troops in place. This month's killing exposed that lie -- so what were the US troops doing there?

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February 9, 2010

Who Dat? Dat’s the Super Bowl Champs!

By Dave Zirin

The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl 44. I can't believe I'm even typing the words. Five years ago this was the team considered most likely to be moved to Los Angeles. Four and a half years ago, after the levies broke, the concern was not whether there would be a Saints, but whether there would even be a New Orleans. Remember that after Hurricane Katrina, the Speaker of the House, Republican Rep. Dennis Hastert said, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." But now Hastert is on the political scrap heap and New Orleans is the home of the Super Bowl champs. I'm not sure whether it feels like a dream or positively preordained. If nothing else, it's an emotional release from all the idiocy that surrounded the big game. From the military cheerleading, to Tim and Pam Tebow's vapid Focus on the Family ad, to the Who's halftime act which clearly violated the Geneva accords: none of it matters now. We'll go back to building resistance to Obama's wars. Tim Tebow will go back to being the next Eric Crouch. And the Who will go back to Madame Tussaud's. For right now, it just doesn't matter because the New Orleans Saints won the damn Super Bowl.

Quarterback Drew Brees will get a lot of love after a 32-for-39 MVP performance. But this was no one-man-band. This was about a head coach in Sean Payton who, with his team down 10-6, exercised a wicked sense of daring and ordered the first non-fourth quarter onside kick in Super Bowl history. This was about a Saints defense that bent but didn't break, freezing Peyton Manning's Colts at 17 points. This was about an offense that was crisper than potatoes at the bottom of a deep fryer. This was also about a stadium in Miami that sounded nearly as loud as the Louisiana Superdome. But most of all this was about a Crescent City that refuses to die. As Leigh, a friend and blogger from New Orleans, said to me, "The energy in this entire town is incredible. People here have been ready for this for decades...but the way the media is treating the Saints as underdogs isn't a surprise to any of us. The people of New Orleans have been subjected to those attitudes for a long time ourselves, and we still are in too, too many ways, but we're still here. And those who are still unable to return here due to the displacement caused by the storm, or the recession, or other circumstances - they'll return in one way or another, because this is a town that can teach the rest of this country how to live. It always has, and it always will, despite it all."

Leigh's pride runs across NOLA tonight. The same week that Education Secretary Arne Duncan outrageously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans", the city has delivered a counterpunch to Duncan as well as any and all doubters. Their ascendancy means that the arduous post Hurricane recovery work has gotten more publicity in the last two weeks than it's received in the last two years. This is maddening but many New Orleans residents wouldn't have it any other way. As Saints linebacker Scott Fujita's wife Jaclyn said, "The people of New Orleans love the Saints not because they provide a distraction from their fall but because they are a reflection of their rise."

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February 7, 2010

Another Super Bowl, Another Scandal

By Laura Flanders

It's Super Bowl season, another year, another scandal. This year's outburst over CBS's $3 million Focus on the Family ad has revived the mythology around another Super Bowl ad, that one involving domestic violence. As a player in that story, I've come to anticipate game season: the domestic violence Super Bowl so-called "hoax" is one right-wing media-manufactured vampire that just won't die.

Let me lay out the facts one more time. Shortly before the start of the Super Bowl on NBC in 1993, viewers saw a public service announcement that warned: "Domestic violence is a crime." The 30 second moment (worth roughly $500,000 to advertisers) was the result of many weeks of work by FAIR, the media watch group where I co-directed the Women's Desk, and a coalition of anti-violence groups in negotiations with executives at NBC and NBC Sports.

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February 5, 2010

Climate Science Under Fire

By Maria Margaronis

The drizzle of allegations that climate scientists have fudged data, drawn on dodgy sources, withheld information and frozen out dissenters has now become a downpour. Just before the Copenhagen summit there was the damaging leak of documents from the University of East Anglia's influential Climate Research Unit, revealing less than honest research practices there. In January the UN's International Panel on Climate Change was forced to retract its claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 after a piece in the New Scientist revealed that it was based on a single interview, given by one glaciologist to the science journalist Fred Pearce in 1999. The IPCC has said it "regrets" the error, but its chairman Rajendra Pachauri at first dismissed questions about the claim as "voodoo science."

This week, in an extensive Guardian investigation of the CRU emails, the same Fred Pearce (who was as surprised as anyone to find his old article taken as gospel, or at least peer-reviewed science, by the IPCC) has reported serious holes in a 1990 research paper by Phil Jones of the CRU and an American colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang. That paper, another key source for the IPCC, claimed to prove that urbanization's impact on warming is negligible, using data from 84 Chinese weather stations. But Jones and Wang have been unable to say where most of the stations are, and at least 18 are know to have moved during the study--possibly from the outskirts of a sweltering city to the breezy countryside.

So what's going on? Are these revelations part of an evil conspiracy by the deniers of man-made climate change to discredit climate science? Or do they show (as my learned colleague Alexander Cockburn argues) that anthropogenic warming is just one big snow job?

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February 5, 2010

Integrity Isn't Just a Military Value

By Laura Flanders

On Tuesday, several of the nation's top military officials, including Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spoke out in favor of ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Clinton-era policy that can get a lesbian or gay service person fired if their sexuality becomes known.

Mullen tweeted later: "Stand by what I said: Allowing homosexuals to serve openly is the right thing to do. Comes down to integrity."

Hoorah! But before we pat our leaders on the back for talking about integrity, can we just point out that the military is mostly a grand symbol in this debate.

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February 4, 2010

Note to ESPN’s Jemele Hill: Tim Tebow is not Muhammad Ali

By Dave Zirin

First let me put my cards on the table. I consider Jemele Hill, sports columnist for ESPN.com to be as incisive and interesting as they come. She has been a frequent and fearless guest on my radio show and is always aces on the air. That's why I'm so gobsmacked by Jemele's latest column, subtly titled, Laud the Courage in Tim Tebow's Stand.

Jemele makes the case that Tim Tebow's presence in an anti-abortion Super Bowl Ad, funded by Focus on the Family, "should be praised rather than condemned." This by itself shouldn't be too surprising. All week, every sports writer on earth from the Washington Post's great Sally Jenkins to Tebow's personal foot masseur, Sports Illustrated's Peter King, have raised this "defend the courage of Tim Tebow" line to a deafening din. (Tragically in our culture, I would argue that taking a stance against women's reproductive rights, is anything but "courageous." It's clearly as mainstream as the Super Bowl itself.)

But Jemele Hill chose to take it to an entirely higher level: a level that deeply miseducates her readers and demands a response. She chose to write, "Tebow's decision to appear in this ad should be considered just as courageous as Muhammad Ali's decision to not enter the draft, or Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' black power salute at the 1968 summer Olympics."

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February 3, 2010

New Effort Calls on Obama & GOP to Re-Up on Question Sessions

By Ari Melber

President Obama has labored to unite different political factions with policy compromises and conciliatory speeches. But it was Obama's incisive grappling at the Republican retreat last week that really lit a bipartisan fire, drawing politicos and commentators of all stripes to call for more questions sessions for the President and the opposition party.

In "Left-Right Want 'Obama' Question Time," Politico's Mike Allen reports on what may be the first effort uniting conservative tax warrior Grover Norquist and our own Katrina venden Heuvel:

A politically diverse group of bloggers, commentators, techies and politicos on Wednesday will launch an online campaign, Demand Question Time, urging President Barack Obama and GOP congressional leaders to hold regular, televised conversations like the extraordinary exchange in Baltimore on Friday. Supporters include Grover Norquist, Joe Trippi, Mark McKinnon, Ed Morrissey, Ari Melber, Katrina vanden Heuvel ... Eli Pariser ... Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas and Ed Morrissey. The steering committee is made up of Micah Sifry, David Corn, Mike Moffo, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

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February 3, 2010

The Defense Industry Is Pleased with Obama

By Laura Flanders

Who says the president is failing to show leadership? In one area at least, there's no sign of flag or falter. If anything, the administration's only becoming more forthright. Sad to say, that area is military build-up.

Last year, the White House made a big deal of cutting a weapons program -- the F-22 fighter jet -- and the cuts conveniently obscured the growth in spending on unmanned aircraft or drones (the weapons that Pakistanis say killed a record 123 civilians in twelve attacks last month; 41 for every alleged Al Qaeda operative.)

This year, the president dispensed with the window dressing. No big deal about cuts -- except on the domestic side. While the administration's record $3.8 trillion budget cuts or freezes spending on domestic programs, it requests $708.3 billion for war. That's $14.8 billion more than we're spending now.

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February 3, 2010

Noting Setbacks, Plouffe Returns in New Obama Video

By Ari Melber

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who was recently tapped for an "expanded role" advising the White House, just cut a video briefing Obama supporters on plans for the coming election year.

While acknowledging that Obama's organizing operation faced "fits and starts" last year, Plouffe argued that the White House was "still on the doorstep of passing healthcare reform," and he announced some new numbers for the Democrats' ground game. One million new people joined Obama's Organizing for America (OFA) over the past year, Plouffe said, and supporters have now pledged to volunteer 450,000 hours in the coming year. (Have the Tea Parties registered contact information for a million people?) The results are from an online survey of Obama supporters. The survey found over 70 percent of respondents want to support "education reform" and "job creation" in 2010, while over 80 percent are still fired up for health care. (If at first you don't succeed...)

Plouffe also touched on a few areas where supporters thought Organizing for America came up short, pledging to provide more detailed information and communication about legislative and political strategy.

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February 2, 2010