“Daughters”
John Mayer Trio

From the ACLU Blog and cross posted on “Crooks and Liars”:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public hundreds of claims for damages by family members of civilians killed or injured by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU received the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in June 2006.

The hundreds of files provide a vivid snapshot, in significantly more detail than has previously been compiled and released, of the circumstances surrounding reports of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.[..]

The ACLU pointed out that during both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department has instituted numerous policies designed to control information about the human costs of war. These policies include:

* Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas;
* Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort;
* Inviting U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review;
* Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan; and
* Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The files made public today are claims submitted to the U.S. Foreign Claims Commissions by surviving Iraqi and Afghan family members of civilians said to have been killed or injured or to have suffered property damages due to actions by Coalition Forces. The ACLU released a total of 496 files: 479 from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan. The documents released by the ACLU are available online in a searchable database at www.aclu.org/civiliancasualties

It’s apparent that record companies just “don’t get it”. I realize record sales are down and that the brunt of the money from touring goes to the artist performing, BUT the recent ruling you’ll see below is going to cut their profits back even farther than they think they’re being cut back by Internet music “airplay”.

Being a 25 year veteran of radio, I still remember the days of having to write down every song that is played for a two week stretch, then the list is sent to either BMI or ASCAP to calculate how much money the radio stations pay, then how much the songwriters get for the airplay. That is perfectly fair. One objection to that right now is the smaller market radio stations having to pay for the CD or a service to get them new music. It ain’t free anymore. Unless you’re in a medium or major market, the record companies will tell you that your market doesn’t matter, as far as sales are concerned. So what’s a radio station to do? Threatening to lift every major label off the air and play just Independent artists will only have listeners switching to the bigger stations that do get the freebies. So the smaller stations just buck up and pay twice to entertain their audiences with the music they want to hear.

As far as Internet, file sharing and copying are concerned, the record companies should have seen it coming. I’m hard pressed to believe that these major conglomerates don’t have the know how to see advanced technology on the horizon.

But now, they want to get paid by anybody and everybody that plays the music by their artists, now matter how it’s “broadcast”. Hear it on sound systems in the grocery and department stores? They’re paid for that. Hear it in an elevator? They get paid for that. Hear a band play a cover song from Van Halen or The Beatles? Believe it or not, nightclubs pay them too.

Like so many other major corporations, they are selling a product…yes! But they only answer to shareholders and damn the public.

Now the story:

LAS VEGAS - Internet radio broadcasters were dealt a setback Monday when a panel of copyright judges threw out requests to reconsider a ruling that hiked the royalties they must pay to record companies and artists.

A broad group of public and private broadcasters, including radio stations, small startup companies, National Public Radio and major online sites like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, had objected to the new royalties set March 2, saying they would force a drastic cutback in services that are now enjoyed by some 50 million people.

In the latest ruling, the Copyright Royalty Board judges denied all motions for rehearing and also declined to postpone a May 15 deadline by which the new royalties will have to be collected.

read the full story at YAHOO!

You know, this just goes to show, that no matter how much the Bush administration SAYS we’re ready for any terrorists threats HERE, that’s not the case. Virginia Tech case in point. A person on campus kills two people in a dorm. He has not been apprehended. They really don’t know who he is or where he is. Yet, they didn’t lock down the campus. They didn’t do anything to secure the students, the facility. And two hours later, 30 more people are dead on another end of the campus. Tonight on the news, the police chief says they don’t even know if there were more than one shooter. WTF??? Sorry, but this is some dumb shit…..and if I had a kid on that campus who had been killed in the second round of deaths, I’d be beyond pissed.

Just had to get that off my chest.

(Early-evening Club Blue. Just because…)

Draggin’ the Line

BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, shot up a classroom across campus Monday, killing 32 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. The gunman committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 33.

Students complained that there were no public-address announcements or other warnings on campus after the first burst of gunfire. They said the first word they received from the university was an e-mail more than two hours into the rampage - around the time the gunman struck again.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

He defending the university’s handling of the tragedy, saying: “We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.”

It’s all about one name: Alberto Gonzales.

The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold some interesting meetings this week dealing with the way the Bush administration has decimated the Army and Marine Corps. There will be hearings on Tuesday to examine “whether the Army and Marine Corps are properly sized, organized, and equipped to respond to the most likely missions over the next two decades while retaining adequate capability to respond to all contingencies along the spectrum of combat.”

On Wednesday, Armed Services looks at issues affecting support for military families in a hearing about “quality of life and family support programs to assist families of Active Duty, National Guard, and Reserve military personnel.”

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee will look into the controversy surrounding subprime mortgages.

But, of course, all eyes this week will be on the Judiciary Committee Tuesday as Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) swears in U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to get to the bottom of the shady personnel dealings at the Justice Department.

Cross posted at Crooks and Liars

Barry Nelson, an actor who had a long career in film and television, starred in some of the more durable Broadway comedies of the 1950s and ’60s, and achieved a permanent place in the minds of trivia buffs as the first actor to portray James Bond, died April 7, his wife said. He was 86.

The cause was not immediately known.

Mr. Nelson became familiar to many moviegoers in his middle years, appearing in films such as “Airport” and “The Shining.” But it was onstage more than half a century ago that he made perhaps a more enduring mark. Though not a matinee idol, he was blond and handsome and excelled in light romantic comedies, often playing the somewhat overmatched partner of an irrepressible leading lady.

read more at The San Francisco Chronicle

And now the Iraqi police force is protesting against us? Ahhhhhh, it’s way past time to get out!!!! 4 US and 2 UK soldiers killed over the weekend.

BAGHDAD - Cars, minibuses and roadside bombs exploded in Shiite Muslim enclaves across the city Sunday, killing at least 45 people in sectarian violence that defied the Baghdad security crackdown, while a radical anti-U.S. cleric raised a new threat to Iraq’s government.

Two officials close to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said his followers would quit their six Cabinet posts Monday - a move that could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s already weak administration without enough support to stay in power.

And in a rare gesture of dissent from America’s partners in Baghdad, dozens of Iraqi policemen demonstrated in front of their station, accusing U.S. troops of treating them like “animals” and “slaves.”

More at YahooNews

Gee, they don’t trust the CIA funded intelligence agency. Imagine that!

Suspicious of Iraq’s CIA-funded national intelligence agency, members of the Iraqi government have erected a “shadow” secret service that critics say is driven by a Shiite agenda and has left the country with dueling spy agencies.

The minister of state for national security, a Shiite named Sherwan al-Waili, has built a spy service boasting an estimated 1,200 agents out of a second-tier ministry with a minimal staff and meager budget, Western officials say.

“He has representatives in every province,” a Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “At the moment, it’s a slightly shady parallel organization.”

Shiite officials say the minister is providing information on al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party that isn’t being supplied by the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, the institution meant to be Iraq’s primary spy service.

The INIS was established in the spring of 2004 by the U.S. occupation authority and since then has been under the command of Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a Sunni who was involved in a CIA-backed coup plot against Hussein a decade ago. Over the past three years, Shahwani’s agency has been funded by the CIA, according to the U.S. military and Iraqi officials.

The service reports directly to Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but Shiite members of his government distrust the agency, which contains intelligence agents from the Hussein era. For most of 2005 and the first part of 2006, Shahwani was banned from attending Cabinet meetings.

More at SFGate.com