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This is a huge, unfortunate decision. Oh, what, Kelly is going to decide that “stop and frisk” wasn’t such a good idea? Are all ex-government officials who can do “good television” and happen to be available going to get a chance to defend their decisions and provide prejudicial information about future events by being “news consultants”? The networks seem to be impressed with themselves that they can hire “authoritative” sources to help explain the news, but all these kinds of people can do is continue to defend the actions of police and government “authorities”. Putting them on the air is giving them a PAID position they can use to propagandize for what they have believed all their working lives: the police are always right. Tune to ABC News and get the official story. These kinds of hires downgrade what reporters are supposed to do: collect information and then assemble it for readers and viewers into the best available version of the truth. Hiring big names distorts that process, it puts one source, the hired one, ahead of everything else. Reporters might as well quit. A reporter runs around all day gathering information, then the source comes on the air and says everything he or she has reported isn’t quite right. The big name source winds up with more air time and gets to give opinions as if they were fact while the reporter can’t do likewise. News is supposed to stand apart from government, and the positions its officials take, to provide honest information to citizens. One person, Raymond Kelly, is going to have a national platform to distort events that relate to himself, his old job and police enforcement actions in general. This guy, whatever his accomplishments and credentials, was in charge of one of most questionable tactics used in current day police work, stop and frisk, which many consider unconstitutional harassment. One can be certain that ABC News is not going to hire a civil liberties advocate or lawyer to counter what Kelly has to say on the air. |
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A 50 year old Volkswagen Beetle lurches along the streets of Merida, Mexico. Naturally, it is mother-in-law in the front, wife in the back. All of the seats are uncomfortable, so why does it even matter? Probably hard for the mom-in-law to climb in the back. |
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America’s southern states, the least progressive of all of the states save, perhaps, the hard rock conservativism of the upper far western states (before the coastal states), have an outsize power over the course of the nation. Is this right? Should 37 percent of the population be able to stop what the rest of the country needs or wants? The TerryReport is republishing a commentary first published elsewhere on this subject. |
YET ANOTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT OVERSTEP IN WASHINGTON STATE RESCUE EFFORTS |
Time and time again, the “official” first responders, police and fire departments, try to prevent capable volunteers from helping in search, rescue and recovery. They seem to want any credit for themselves. This happened in New Orleans in 2005 as hundreds of men with boats were turned away from rescuing people trapped by flooding while the news media went in without restriction. The loggers in Washington state made the police step aside by the force of their presence and their ability to get the job done. Details here |
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Dan Snyder, the much criticized owner of the Washington Redskins football team, has been busy in the off season. He and his staff have visited 26 American Indian reservations discussing the name of the football team, which he does not want to change. Now, he has decided to create a foundation for the benefit of the original American population. His four page statement can be found in pdf form here. |
“The more I heard, the more I’ve learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community. In speaking face-to-face with Native American leaders and community members, it’s plain to see they need action, not words.” |
NOTE: Everyone born in the U.S. is a “native American”. It is our tribes that are not native. |
WILL ABC CHOOSE ANOTHER BRIT TO HEAD UP A MAJOR AMERICAN NEWS OPERATION? |
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Note: The TerryReport has written repeatedly about the “bubble effect” of America’s right wing taking its news from news outlets dominated by right wing views and the persistent slant of the news itself toward a rightward angle. Indeed, the tendency “never to hear a discouraging word” is a critical weakness that haunts the right because it does not allow for early, corrective action.This kind of closed system was a critical factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. They only had “state media” and state media recycled the lies party officials told them. Eventually, the Soviet empire drowned in its own lies. Is it fair to ask if the center and left of American political life is subject to the same forces? |
A huge, 750 million dollar resort and casino is being launched for the Catskills of New York. What the NY Times and some other NY media are not offering, however, is a map of the planned site on the same ground where the famed Concord Hotel once stood. You can see the full artist rendering of the plan for the development at this link. |
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RIPPLES OF LIGHT ON SMOOTH SURFACE, by Doug Terry (copyright, 2014) |
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When the massive fertilizer explosion hit the town of West, Texas, last year, Obama and “Washington” were denounced for not taking on the full costs of the recovery. This came from politicians who spend a major portion of their time saying they want to downsize the federal government and who, such as Perry, rejected the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. Meanwhile, South Carolina gladly accepts federal money when a disaster strikes. Can you have it both ways? Apparently, yes. Here is a republication on this issue of an article published in Charleston Currents recently. A TerryReport commentary is also on the page. |
This photo, which was not taken during this “winterus horribilis” of 2014, nonetheless encapsulates the suffering, dismal aspect of this long, snowy winter in the east coast of the U.S. It was taken of my house, facing possible water damage from clogged rain spouts. We made it through that one and we are trying the same now. |
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MONEY, POWER AND INFLUENCE COLLIDE IN THE COMCAST DEAL TO BUY TIME-WARNER CABLE |
HOUSE REPUBLICANS SURRENDER ON THE DEBT CEILING, ADMIT THEY HAD A STUPID, NON-STRATEGY |
The Coke commercial with America the Beautiful that was presented on the Super Bowl broadcast |
Some amazing new video has become available of Felix Baumgartner’s fall from near space (24 miles up) Take a look at this link. “What a piece of work is man...” |
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What’s wrong with our government in Washington, DC? One can argue that the idealistic motivations that bring people to government get corrupted by the process of trying to get enough power to have influence and, through that, often get lost entirely. Here’s a quote from Jay Carson, former press aide to Bill Clinton: |
“Everybody, almost to a person, in every party, comes to Washington initially for the right reasons. But some people, and it’s not a small amount, lose sight of why they came there. It becomes, for a significant portion, a quest for more power.” |
Quoted in the NY Times in an article about the Netflix show,House of Cards. Link here |
FREE desktop/screen saver of the New York skyline available from The TerryReport |
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The “stop and frisk” policies of the New York police department are being greatly altered by the new mayor. This is important to everyone across the country because the tactics of major police departments, whether constitutional or not, are often copied by police departments everywhere. The NY Times, which has editorialized against the massive program, ran an editorial praising the new mayor and including this telling paragraph: |
Times analysis in 2010 found that the police had logged nearly 52,000 stops within eight or so blocks over a four-year period. This meant that young people in the area were growing up in the equivalent of a police state where they could be detained on the sidewalk at any time for no reason at all. |
One of the great mysteries of American politics is why those on the right have a default position of approving anything the police do (and the military, too, for that matter) when they say they defend “freedom” and “liberty”. Of course, what they seem to mean is “my freedom” (not yours) and “my liberty” to make and keep as much money as possible. Liberty equals money? The new radicalism in America equates any taxation as theft by the government, thus a threat to liberty and the corollary of that radicalism holds any tax increase as also a threat. Isn’t it wonderful when personal interests are so neatly aligned with big principles? |
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Glen Beck confesses to helping to divide America. The quote below is from the NY Times and came during an interview on the cable channel that gave birth to Beck, Fox News. |
“I remember it as an awful lot of fun, and that I made an awful lot of mistakes, and I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language. Because I think I played a role unfortunately in helping tear the country apart. And it’s not who we are. I didn’t realize how really fragile the people were. I thought we were kind of a little more in it together. And now I look back and I realize if we could have talked about the uniting principles a little more, instead of just the problems, I think I would look back on it a little more fondly. But that’s only my role.” |
In keeping with our strict editorial policy (“You never know what you’ll find on The TerryReport”) CLICK HEREfor video from the 2014 edition of the Washington, DC, Auto Show. This is one a a series of shows across the nation that kick off with the Detroit Auto Show in early January of each year. At the DC show, in addition to showing cars, the auto makers meet with representatives in Congress and regulators in the Executive branch, trying to smooth things over and keep the dogs at bay. |
AT BUSINESSWEEK.COM |
The World’s 85 Richest Are Now Worth as Much as 3.5 Billion Poorest |
On the eve of World Economic Forum, when the global elite gather in Davos, Switzerland, to forecast international trends, Oxfam International has released a new report, Working for the Few, (PDF) documenting yawning global wealth disparities. |
“I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right.” |
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Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers has died at the age of 74. A lot of commentary appearing online and in major publications is saying that the Everly Brothers “influenced” the Beatles, the Beach Boys and many other rock performers. This is understating the case. They were a lot more than an influence, they defined early pop/country/rock. They, along with Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly and a very few others were rock n’roll in the mid to late 1950s.They made it happen. This is far beyond being an influence. They were pioneers of the first order. They set the standards for others to follow. Even though I started listening to rock at around the age of seven, the Everly Brothers were “before my time”, as the saying goes. (What the hell does that mean, anyway?) Their music lived on well into the 1960s, but eventually, since they weren’t making new music that anyone knew about, their old stuff faded as newer, harder more raucous rock music took over. The Everly Brothers can be seen as a kind of bridge between the old and the new, as defined in the late 1950s and very early ‘60s. Because they borrowed from older styles and fused it with a kind of country rock sound, their music seemed to get dated rather quickly. Here’s the deal: these guys were not merely an “influence”. If John Lennon were alive today, he could tell it straight: there wouldn’t have been a Beatles without the Everly Brothers. There wouldn’t have been a lot of things that shook the ear drums and helped people to keep going over the last 60 years. That important, yes. They were giants. Doug Terry, 1.4.14 (more here) |
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The Washington Redskins, who are likely to get a new team name once, at some point in the distant future, Dan Snyder decides to sell the team and move on, have just finished one of the worst seasons in the last 40 years. They managed to win three games. It was dismal, even though under their substitute quarterback they came within a couple of points of winning two more games. Doesn’t help. A loss is still a loss. So, they got rid of Mike Shanahan after four reasons, presumably leaving him with a parting gift of close to seven million dollars for firing him one year before the end of his five year deal. The New Yorker published an essay about the firing of football coaches and along with it was a chart showing how quickly they come and go. |
The general who was in charge of opening Gitmo during the Bush years says it should be closed down forthwith. |
“We squandered the goodwill of the world after we were attacked by our actions in Guantanamo, both in terms of detention and torture. Our decision to keep Guantanamo open has helped our enemies because it validates every negative perception of the United States.” |
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The annual defense bill before Congress would give President Obama more flexibility in closing Gitmo, but the General said it still contains an “unwise and unnecessary” ban on transferring any of the prisoners to U.S. soil (some of their home nations have refused to take them back.) |
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“Still, this is a step forward toward closing our nation’s most notorious prison, a prison that should never have been opened”. |
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LINK TO THE OP ED in the Detroit Free Press: |
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Michael Lehnert: Here's why It's long past time that we close Guantanamo |
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LEHNERT WROTE: “The U.S. has held 779 men at the detention facility over the past 12 years. There are currently 162 men there, most of them cleared for transfer, but stuck by politics.” |
The Coen brothers are out with another of their often unfortunate and frequently ugly movies. |
The new New York skyline, with the One World Trade Center nearing completion. The building on the left side of the image is actually in Jersey City, New Jersey and is closer to the camera, so it appears almost as tall as One World Trade. |
Millions of words are being written and spoken about Nelson Mandela, but I don’t care. I am in mourning today for a man who I feel like I knew personally, even though I never met him. Thousands of people die around the world every day, but when was the last time we cared about the leader of a foreign nation dying? Almost never. We are highly America-centric in our news and in our concerns. We seem only to care about what happens “over there” (meaning anywhere but here) when our government is about to invade another place or drop bombs. The rest of the time, we are focused right here. What was so special about Mandela? His decency and humanity that lasted through all of his years in prison and into his old age are two points that come immediately to mind. That he was able to act peacefully, reasonably and without taking retribution after being unjustly put in prison for more than 27 years was more than remarkable, it was astounding. His broad smile, his kind wave all spoke of a man who one would love to have as a grandfather or a kind uncle, but, as the man who helped bring down the evil system in South Africa, he was, of course, much more than just a father figure. He demonstrated to all of the world that good can triumph over some of the most destructive forces of the human race. He came to personify the long struggle in South Africa and to prove with every moment of his life his words as a young man that he was willing to die for freedom. As it was, he lived for freedom and shines as an example for the entire world and, one can hope, for the ages. Doug Terry 12.6.13 |
POPE SLAMS THE “TYRANNY OF UNFETTERED CAPITALISM” |
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From the same Reuters news report: |
...economic inequality features as one of the issues Francis is most concerned about, and the 76-year-old pontiff calls for an overhaul of the financial system and warns that unequal distribution of wealth inevitably leads to violence. Denying it was simple populism, he called for action "beyond a simple welfare mentality" and added: "I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor." |
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IS “OBAMACARE” HELPING ANYONE? TWO TESTIMONIALS FROM THE NY TIMES COMMENTS SECTION. |
MORE THAN HALF OF WORKERS AT WALMART MAKE LESS THAN $25,000 A YEAR. The story is at Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. |
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The new skyline of lower Manhattan with the World Trade Tower nearing completion, rising from the site of the 9-11 attacks. |
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