UK – Page 8 – Citizen Reporter

bm159 Hungarian Political Lies

You may have seen images of angry citizens clashing with police on the streets of Budapest recently. But did you hear the real story of what happened and why the Hungarian electorate rose up? And what will happen from here, how will people, in the long run, feel towards a goverment that admitedly lied to them? A familiar theme in Eastern Europe and North America, Henrik of the blog Hungarian Accent helps explain was has happened and what can be learned from this.

Heres a Guardian article for further illustration

JetLAgged

Hit me today while watching the Cobert Report.. Jetlag with a Vengence. Where am I.. who am I.. what year is it. Must.. go .. to .. sleep.

Ive noticed Soda everywhere. Everyones drinking soda. Terrible Terrible High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Phosphate whats-it-called and all the tooth decay and the pestisides… why do these soda companies do this to people? And why do people volunteer to ingest this crap?

The Soda wars continue in India. The US needs some Soda wars of its own. Starting with the childen.. keep soda out of the hands of children.

bm154 How Red Ken Changed London and Beyond

Tim from Radio Clash joins me in this first installment of the Global Mayor series. We focus on Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, and how he came to be elected and what he has done since coming to power.

Wikipedia on Ken Livingstone

I’m Done With Ray Nagin

You remember Ray Nagin right? The mayor of New Orleans during the largest humanitarian crisis in the history of the United States? The guy who you hear in that radio clip where he starts crying and yelling at the rest of the country for not doing anything while people were dying while staring up at the sky begging for help. Her earned alot of respect for his directness and honesty during that disaster. Hell, I respected him for it.

Of course that was before I knew more about the man and what he had done with the city. Mostly nothing if you don’t count fostering curruption and fiscal irresponsibility. But still I held out hope that Nagin might be a changed man, having seen bodies of his own voters floating around face down throughout his streets. I still wanted to cheer for him… until now.

I’m done with Ray Nagin. Besides the numerous episodes that had shown he was two faced and a typical wishy washy politician, this latest appearance on Meet the Press did me in… or rather.. him in.

Anytime the man was asked if the federal government had failed him, a government that took over a week to respond, and when they finally did it consisted mostly of private contractors and overzealous military police, he refused to acknowledge it. As if someone is pulling his strings or controlling his speech, he refused to admit the the US government has a double standard when it comes to saving the lives of black people. To his credit, he did acknowledge it was a matter of class. Still, a man who once sounded unafraid to speak his mind and admit what a disaster his city had become, now he chose his words carefull, dodged criticizing anyone in particular, and pretended his city was doing rather well in terms of recovery.

Sorry Ray, you’re pathetic and I’m over you. I hope you fall into obscurety after serving your zillion terms as mayor of a city that will never recover, and will never have a leader who will push for a true investigation and trial for the crimes against humanity resulting from the neglect of the federal government, as well as that of the state and local governments.

About the only cool thing I could find in his whole interview, was when he called the site of the former WTC in NYC, a big hole in the ground and Tim Russert got all preachy and bitchy like it was a sin to say so. Of course he backed down on that one too, even though it is, when it comes down to it, a big hole in the ground.

Poor New Orleans. First Katrina. And then this fakester gets re-elected.

Yawn, Plane Turns Around

Dear US and UK, please keep your terrorism paranoia to yourselves. We have quite enough of our own here in the Nertherlands.

Like a media sucker, I’m watching the news reports from the BBC. Amazing that they have news reports even though the have no information. They even tell the viewer they have no information. They then proceed to show you video footage of airplanes behind a fence and they invite experts to talk about how they don’t know anything either. Go to commercial, back to our wall street analyst in New York.

They arrested a bunch of people. I can already tell you why. The reason is: if you turn around a plane and scramble f16’s to guide it back to Amsterdam, then someone’s at least gotta get arrested. It’s the least they can do.

One of the girls on the plane was describing what she noticed on the flight, she said

“we were in the air, and some people noticed that a group of south asians were not paying attention to the flight attendants guidelines.”

If being uninterested and ignoring the flight attentant with the useless seatbelt overview is terrorism, than I’ve been terrorizing the skies since I was 12 years old.

bm149 Australian Immigration Struggle

Throughout the past 5 years you may have seen the occasional story about immigration and Australia. As the government plays the law and order card, how do Australians, many once immigrants themselves, see their governments policies? Warwick of Nimbin Radio joins me from New South Whales, Australia, to share what has happened and what may happen when it comes to Australia’s attitudes and policies towards immigration.

Related: Roger Maynard’s Article in the Guardian