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Update: Coming into the final stretch and, thanks to a flood of donations the past few hours, we're almost at our goal. It's been incredible, the support and encouragement that's come this way. I can't begin to express my humble gratitude to all of you for your kindness, your generosity and your support of Newstalgia. Sometimes it's difficult, posting day after day, not knowing if anyone besides me is actually listening to any of this stuff or really cares about its existence. Clearly, the past several days have proven you are out there reading and listening and enjoying what Newstalgia has to offer, and that is gratifying, to say the least. It has certainly given me renewed enthusiasm to bring as much interesting, rare and essential material as I can drag out of the Archive. For the moment, we're right at the home stretch, within a few hundred dollars of our goal. If you haven't considered making a donation, please do - no matter how much you are willing to donate. No amount of money is too small that it won't make a huge difference. - it all does. We're getting there - we've almost done it!

Taking a break from sessions this week and diving into no genre in particular. Tonight it's 60's Folk-Pop-Psych icon Donovan and one of the Jazzier selections from his Mellow Yellow album of 1967, The Observation. With the exception of his debut, most of his earlier projects of the 60's were a combination of Folk, Pop, Psychedelia and a nod in the direction of Cool-School Jazz. Usually making for an interesting and somewhat eclectic listening experience, it also tried to deflect from the stereotype that Donovan was presented to mainstream music as a sort of Bob Dylan-Lite, which just wasn't true. But in the world of pigeon-holes, he had to be put in one, and as we all know, Jazz isn't big commercially.

So here's Donovan's nod to Beat-Poetry and Word Jazz from 1967.

Grandma and Grandpa send a wedding toast via webcam. h/t The Daily What.

Note: We are less than a thousand dollars away from saving our sister site Newstalgia. Seriously folks, if you care about fighting the GOP War on History, here's your chance to throw in five bucks to the cause. It will make a real difference.

Open thread below....

Dignity & Shame
	Artist: Crooked Fingers

Crooked Fingers has released a few really good records since 2000, but 2005's Dignity And Shame is my favorite from start to finish. Former Archers of Loaf singer Eric Bachmann's lyrics on this song do it for me and the trumpet is a nice touch, too. What are you listening to tonight?

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur takes apart the 60 Minutes interview with former CIA torture architect Jose Rodriguez which we posted on earlier here – Whitewashing Torture, Redux.

I'm quite sure that Rodriguez would never come on the air with someone like Cenk, who unlike Leslie Stahl during her softball interview with this man, who was openly admitting to torture and war crimes on the air, actually articulated the amount of disgust that Rodriguez deserves.

And Cenk's exactly right. This is what happens when you don't prosecute people for their crimes. They end up on television giving interviews trying to sell books instead of landing in a jail cell where they belong. And allowing this to go unpunished means that it will happen again. Sadly, our history in recent decades has proven him right about that already.

The purpose of the Progressive Information Project is to more widely share resources and information created to advance progressive causes. A lot of good work is being done, but the average progressive often doesn't learn about it or know what is available. This series is designed to help alleviate that problem.

This week's post is very simple—it's an attempt to round up all of the online progressive radio shows, podcasts, and video shows that are regularly produced. I'm sure the list below is incomplete, so let me know what is missing and I'll update the list regularly to make sure everyone can find the progressive media voices available to us online ...

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In Tennessee politicians continue to try and legislate morality, instead of making reality-based decisions to address social problems such as teen pregnancy and STDs, with depressing if predictable results: Tennessee ranks 8th worst in the nation for teenage pregnancy. In fact, states with abstinence-only policies ranked dead last.

via the Tennessean. Newsclip clipped from WSMV in Nashville on 4/27/12.

Legislation banning teachers from promoting or condoning “gateway sexual activity” is headed to the governor’s desk after approval by the state House of Representatives on Friday.

The bill, which passed the full Senate earlier this month, would require all state sexual education classes to “exclusively and emphatically” promote abstinence while banning teachers from promoting any form of “gateway sexual activity.” The latter term, which has garnered national media attention and been lampooned by comedian Stephen Colbert, is not specifically defined in the bill.

The vote was 68-23, with all but one Republican for it.

Here is the Stephen Colbert segment ("Gateway Hug") from his April 18th show.

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Dan Savage, creator of the It Gets Better Project, gave a talk about anti-gay bullying at a conference for high school journalists a couple of weeks ago, which after just being upped to YouTube has caused an uproar through the usual channels as an attack on the Bible, this time by "rightist rag" Citizen Link, a James Dobson outlet.

Towleroad details the manufactured outrage, where some High School journalism students were so offended by Savage they walked out.

A great brouhaha is stirring in the nation's conservative publications over comments Dan Savage made two weeks ago while addressing the JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention. The convention was entitled "Journalism On The Edge," which you'd think would prep participants for a certain amount of edginess in the presentations. Alas, the audience was not prepared for edginess. Savage's subject was to be bullying, and he got right to the point:

The Bible. We’ll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can’t help it — they can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong.

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way, the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.

Savage's full remarks below the fold, about 3 minutes of his nearly 90 minute presentation.

Continue reading »

Dignity & Shame
	Artist: Crooked Fingers

Crooked Fingers has released a few really good records since 2000, but 2005's Dignity And Shame is my favorite from start to finish. Former Archers of Loaf singer Eric Bachmann's lyrics on this song do it for me and the trumpet is a nice touch, too. What are you listening to tonight?

DOWNLOADS: 90

PLAYS: 24

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Update: Still hovering at the 3/4 mark with just a little ways left to go. My deepest appreciation and sinceret thanks to those of you who have donated in the last few hours. Your contributions have been lifesaving. We're so close to hitting our goal and I am so blown away by your support of this site and what we're trying to do. We're getting there and,with your help, we'll succeed. Any amount you're comfortable with, it is all needed and it all chips away at the problem. You're making a huge difference. Just a little bit more to go - we can do it - we are doing it! You are all amazing.

April 29th may have marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the now-famous Rodney King Trial verdict insurrection, but April 30th was when the shit truly hit the fan and the streets were filled with anger and violence. Fires sprang up everywhere, most raging out of control because fire fighters were in short supply and the ones who did respond were attacked. The Police were mostly powerless to stop the rage and stores and businesses throughout the city were broken into, ransacked and burned. As of the start of the morning of the 30th, 9 had already been reported dead, with scores injured and a city in chaos and spreading.

Here is coverage, as presented by Public radio station KCRW, who also broke in and out to carry news reports from the local TV outlets as well as CNN. This recording covers the period of time from 8:55 am until roughly 10:00 am on the morning of the 30th. There are two press conferences, one from Mayor Braddley assessing the situation and Chief Darryl Gates. Also covered are statements from President Bush and a lot of eyewitness accounts.

And this day was only starting.

I have such a difficult time with all the misinformation and propaganda surrounding Iran and any nuclear program that they may or may not be developing. It's impossible for an intellectually honest discussion to happen. And even when we have positive developments, members of the news corps are still fear mongering the great Iranian nuclear bogeyman:

Last Saturday—the same day the United States and Iran were having "constructive and useful" discussions on Iran's nuclear program in Istanbul, according to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton -- the New York Times published a piece titled, "Seeking Nuclear Insight in Fog of the Ayatollah's Utterances," over the byline of James Risen.

That piece contained the following paragraph:

Complicating matters further, some analysts say that Ayatollah Khamenei's denial of Iranian nuclear ambitions has to be seen as part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling. For centuries an oppressed minority within Islam, Shiites learned to conceal their sectarian identity to survive, and so there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community.

No "analyst" at all was specifically cited in support of this argument anywhere in the article. It should be obvious that when the United States has threatened war against a country, it treads in the precincts of racist war propaganda for a news article about that country to essentially say, "Because of their religion, their leaders aren't like our leaders—they lie," without substantiating that claim at all or presenting balanced views of experts on the topic.

In his blog Informed Comment, Middle East scholar Juan Cole notes that taqiyya has been "widely misrepresented by Muslim-haters and does not apply in Khamenei's case." Cole explains that, historically, taqiyya was not a license to lie about anything, but permission to conceal one's religious identity in the face of life-threatening sectarian prejudice. He also notes that, in the twentieth century, the tide of Shiite legal opinion ran against taqiyya; and that Imam Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, demanded that taqiyya be abandoned. Cole concludes by saying that the taqiyya argument is "just some weird form of Islamophobia."

Oh, for crying out loud. If lying makes a nation unfit for diplomacy, where does the U.S. stand? Of course national leaders lie. Nation, meet George W. Bush. But to insinuate that there is something inherently deceptive about Islam that makes anything uttered by Iranian mullahs suspect is just straight bigotry. Look at Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in the video above. How many times has that now admittedly false meme been used to justify hostility and aggression towards Iran? How many American politicians have invoked it?

What message do we think we're sending Iran? Certainly not one desiring of peace.