PULSE: 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009 and Comments

Amy Goodman
Sherine Tadros/
Ayman Mohyeldin
Jeremy Scahill
Jim Lobe
Mary-Kay Wilmers (London Review of Books)
Mondoweiss
Philip Weiss
Adam Horowitz
Le Monde Diplomatique
Patrick Cockburn
Gareth Porter
Rahimullah Yusufzai
Gary Younge
Amira Hass/ Gideon Levy
Verso Books
The Electronic Intifada
Paul Jay (Real News)
Nora Barrows-Friedman / Dennis Bernstein (Flashpoints)
Laura Flanders
Glenn Greenwald
Jane Mayer
Ramzy Baroud

Robert Fisk,
Jasim al-Azzawi,
Comedy Central (Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert),
Dahr Jamail,
Rachel Maddow,
Nir Rosen,
Tony Karon,
FAIR,
Stephen Walt,
Matt Taibbi, '
Peter Oborne,
Naomi Klein,
Bill Moyers,
Richard Silverstein,
Helena Cobban,
Paul Woodward,
Afshin Rattansi,
Nick Turse,
Lewis Lapham,
Seumas Milne,
Jonathan Cook,
Antony Loewenstein,
Antiwar.com,
The Onion,
Alternet,
Chris Hedges,
Hamid Mir,
Alexander Cockburn,
P. Sainath,
Juan Cole,
Gregory Wilpert,
Uri Avnery,
Max Blumenthal,
Mohammed Omer,
Laila El Haddad,
Ron Suskind,
Shihab Rattansi,
Clayton Swisher,
James Bamford,
Seymour Hersh
Keith Olbermann,
David Edwards and David Cromwell,
Robert Greenwald,
John Pilger,
Venezuela Analysis,
Roane Carey,
George Monbiot,
Black Agenda Report,
Robert McChesney,
C. S. Soong,
Dori Smith,
Rose Aguilar,
Pluto Press and
Abdul Bari Atwan.


Ward Churchill
Dr. Azmi Bishara Al Ahram Weekl
Free Speech Radio News
Al Giordano (and the Narco News contributors),
Adrienne Pine (and her terrific blog quotha.net),
Tamar Sharabi,
Oscar Estrada,
Sandra Cuffe,
Jeremy Kryt (In These Times)
Belen Fernandez

Dennis Perrin
“Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War.”
http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/

Al Jazeera
Ward Churchill, Perversions of Justice
Winona La Duke, All My Relations
Edward Said
Michael Parenti

PULSE: 20 Top Global Thinkers of 2009 + Comments

Arundhati Roy
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Mahmood Mamdani
Shlomo Sand
Pankaj Mishra
Vandana Shiva
John Pilger
Chris Hedges
Tariq Ali
Amartya Sen
Ilan Pappe
Philip Weiss
Ali Abunimah
Robert Fisk
Naomi Klein
Eduardo Galeano
Omar Barghouti
Slavoj Žižek
John Gray
Tariq Ramadan

Alice Walker,
Andrew Bacevich,
Azmi Bishara,
Bill McKibben,
Breyten Breytenbach,
David Harvey,
Germaine Greer,
Gore Vidal,
Ha-Joon Chang,
Howard Zinn,
James Hansen,
Joseph Stiglitz,
Karen Armstrong,
Ralph Nader,
Richard Falk,
Stephen Hawking, and
Walden Bello.
Howard Zinn
Jeffrey Blankfort

Barbara Ehrenreich,
Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Jacqui M. Alexander,
Amy Goodman,
Radhika Desai,
Ellen Meiksins Wood,
Marilyn Waring,
Cynthia Enloe,
Brooksley Born,
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz,
Mimi Abramowitz,
Michaela Di Leonardo,
Angela Y. Davis,
Nancy Folbre,
Elaine Scarry,
Marianne A. Ferber,
Julie A. Nelson,
Jan Jindy Pettman,
Charlotte Bunch,
Medea Benjamin
Cynthia McKinney
Frantz Fanon
Norman Finkelstein

THE REAL NEWS

by Paul Jay,

---

The Real News journalist committee includes Lewis H. Lapham, Gore Vidal, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and Howard Zinn.^[5]

The most regular political analysts are Aijaz Ahmad, Pepe Escobar and Eric Margolis.

---

Host and senior editor: Paul Jay.

Main journalists: Jesse Freeston covers a wide range of topics but specializes in Latin America and resource exploitation. Lia Tarachansky covers Israel and Palestine from the region, and Ania Smolenskaia covers U.S. domestic policy and the health care debate.

Global senior analysts: Pepe Escobar, Aijaz Ahmad, Minqi Li, and Forrest Hylton

Other guests: David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis, Michael Ratner, Gideon Levy, Helen Thomas.

THE AWFUL TRUTH AGAIN

The liberal intelligentsia, once again with the

• least-worst mindset.

Some still believe that sometime, somewhere, Obama will

• show his liberal stripes.

They are no longer loyally silent in the face of,

• escalating war in Afghanistan

• near collapse of key provisions in the health insurance legislation

• likely anemic financial regulation bill

• obeisance to the bailed out Wall Street gamblers

Bob Herbert, columnist for The New York Times, treated

• “as if they have nowhere to go.”

Brainy Gary Wills, upset over Afghanistan in a stern essay of admonition, calling the escalation

• “a betrayal.”

• “If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption,

we could have voted for John McCain.
At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.”

Progressive Populist shows the velvet verbal gloves are coming off

Jim Hightower, “I had hoped Obama might be a more forceful leader

• who would reject the same old

interventionist mindset of those who profit from permanent war

Obama signed on to the Wall Street and military-industrial complex from the get-go

Norman Solomon, “President Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while delivering—to the world as it is—

• a pro-war speech.

The context instantly turned the speech’s insights into flackery for more war.” Strong words indeed!

Arianna Huffington, her disillusionment is expanding. “Obama isn’t distancing himself from ‘the Left’ with his decision to escalate this deepening disaster [in Afghanistan].

• He’s distancing himself from the national interests of the country.”

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, never an Obama fan, upset with what he calls “the liberal adoration of Obama.” In the Providence Journal
cites

• Frank Rich of The New York Time,

• Hendrick Hertzberg of The New Yorker

• Tom Hayden

all showing mild discomfort in the midst of

• retained hope over Obama’s coming months.

They have not yet cut their ties to the masterspeaker of “Hope and Change.”

The liberal-progressive commentariat has another two years to engage in challenge and chagrin

For in 2012, silence will mute their criticisms as the stark choices of the two-party tyranny come into view and incarcerate their minds into the least-worst voting syndrome. It is hard to accord them any moral breaking point under such self-imposed censorship. Not much leverage in that approach, is there?

LEFT VERSUS LEFT

I am in the process of working on a broader piece regarding the split between the so-called activists versus the more incrementalist wonks on the health care bill (focusing particularly on the ludicrous notion of a possible netroots and tea party convergence -- holy fucking dimestore Marxism, Batman!). In this narrative, it's the true-blue lefties as embodied by Jane Hamsher and others at Firedoglake, the kosacks, Glenn Greenwald, the Huffpost, and (maybe) Atrios versus the more tepid and technocratic -- Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Josh Marshall, and Nate Silver, among others.

ISRAEL'S LUNCH COUNTER

from: Mondoweiss

One of [the] themes on this site is that Jewishness played a role in the prowar movement (just as Islam plays a role in jihadist radicalism). Jewish neocons were aggressive about using American power to preserve Israel's security, while liberal Jewish hawks asserted over and over that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and completely neglected the apartheid road system that is talked about across the Arab world.

Until liberal Jews come to terms with this element of the war support, Jewish intellectual life will remain in denial/crisis, the left will be riven by unspoken suspicions on this score and will remain ineffective, the neocons will remain unchallenged intellectually, and our foreign policy will remain broken.

In dismissing Judt's view that Zionism is anachronistic and must yield to ideas of a binational state in Palestine, Cohen writes with typical bombast: "I suppose India can save itself from being an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan..." The key error in this statement is that partition actually worked 60 years ago in India: Pakistan became a state.

The Palestinians are stateless; the Israelis are expansionist. If the Palestinians had been given a state when real opportunity arose, there wouldn't now be a high concrete wall on their land, the hilltops wouldn't be colonized by religious settlers, and Muslims would have freedom to visit their holy sites.




Of course Cohen writes that he opposes the "settlements." He says this in passing as an example of legitimate criticism of Israel. The settlements. The issue here is how monstrous the Israeli policies in the West Bank are to you. One line about the settlements is like an American of 40 years ago saying, Of course I am opposed to those whites-only lunch-counters and bathrooms. The issue then was: segregation and the South were corrupting American society. We couldn't make any claim to real democracy in the eyes of the world so long as those conditions existed. This is Israel's situation today, and the reason that progressive intellectuals are attacking Zionist ideas.