Hasta La Gadget!

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) pushed states to approve the controversial drilling practice known as fracking while he personally stood to profit from the practice, the Tampa Bay Times reported on Friday.

According to the Times, Bush, a likely 2016 presidential contender, urged a group of New York conservatives in 2013 to support fracking, even while he was involved with a private equity group that was raising $40 million for a company acquiring fracking wells.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves drilling water, chemicals and sand into the earth to break up rocks, thus freeing oil and natural gas. Environmentalists who object to the process say that fracking releases hazardous chemicals into the water supply.

“We should be celebrating this phenomenal achievement –- and we do, in North Dakota, in Pennsylvania, in south and west Texas. Some states, like here in New York, are choosing not to grow. They won’t approve fracking,” Bush told the group, according to the New York Post. “Meanwhile, in parts of New York where huge opportunities exist for the restoration of economic activity, people languish.”

Those in the audience probably didn’t know that Bush co-owns a company that is a managing partner of FracStar Logistics, a company that provides sand for fracking. According to the Times, Bush’s son, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, helped found FracStar, whose name has since been changed to Proforce Energy Services. The report also notes that the former governor and his other son, Jeb Bush Jr., are co-owners of the managing group, De Soto Partners.

In addition, the Tampa Bay Times highlighted a speech that Bush gave in Colorado last year, in which he said that a possible statewide referendum that could permit more restrictions on fracking was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”

Bush announced last last year that he was resigning all of his corporate and nonprofit board memberships, but he is still reviewing his role in businesses in which he is a principal partner or owner. The Tampa Bay Times’ report suggests that Bush remains involved with De Soto Partners.

Any appearance of a conflict of interest could prove tricky for Bush as he seeks to earn the Republican presidential nomination.

For example, Bloomberg reported last month that in fall 2014, as Bush was gearing up for a possible presidential run, a private equity fund that listed him as its chairman and manager was raising millions, largely from offshore private investors. According to Bloomberg’s report, the fund incorporated overseas to avoid U.S. taxes.

When the Tampa Bay Times asked Bush about the relationship between his policy positions and his business interests as he considers a White House bid, he said that he was making an effort to separate the two and to be transparent.

“I’m unraveling from every aspect of my business, both the investing company as well as the consulting business. Pretty much there,” he said.

“At the proper time,” Bush added, “should I go forward (with a run for president), I’ll give the people every opportunity to look at everything and they can make their own mind up.”

There’s a long, long trail a-winding
By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji)
© Native Sun News
February 23, 2015

When a ship is about to leave port the boatswain’s mate and the deck crew hoist the anchor and this is where the phrase “anchors aweigh,” originates. The anchor is aweigh when it is pulled from the bottom of the harbor and the captain duly notes in his log book that it is “aweigh” and the ship is leaving port.

As a boy I always thought it was “anchors away” and in a way I suppose it is because when the anchor is hoisted the ship is away. As a ship leaves port those on the dock say, “bon voyage, a French phrase translated to mean “safe journey.”

I have been writing a weekly column, or “blog” as it is now called, since 1978 or 37 years. And aside from that I have been publishing a weekly newspaper since 1981, 34 years. At least twice I have tried to walk away from it but I have always been dragged back into the fray for a variety of reasons. The last time I decided to leave, the noted Lakota artist Del Iron Cloud painted a portrait of me on a horse riding into the sunset and I have since apologized to Del for turning that horse around.

I have stood by the graves of Rupert and Jeanette Costo and shed a tear for the greatness they deserved but were never acclaimed. Rupert, the man from Cahuilla, strove to bring the true history of Native Americans to the public eye with his Indian Historical Society and Indian Historian Press. The monthly newspaper Rupert and Jeanette published, Wassaja, was a classic innovation in its time. The paper was called Wassaja, pronounced Wa-sah-ha, after the great Fort McDowell Apache journalist, Carlos Montezuma; Wassaja was his Indian name. He is buried at the Fort McDowell Apache Reservation in Arizona and I made it a point to visit his gravesite also. In a small way I tried my best to emulate their example.

A few weeks ago I was visiting with one of my dear friends, an attorney named Bob Moore, in Rapid City to discuss some legal matters, and Moore, in his blunt and honest manner said, “Tim, you are now 80-years-old and you have lived five years past your allotted time.” It hit me between the eyes because as most of you know we never really look at ourselves as having aged. We know that the face we see in the mirror is not the face of the person we saw in that mirror 40 years ago, but it never seems to dawn on us that life’s journey has just about reached its course. Like that ship leaving port we found the harbor to be a safe haven, most of the time, and now we are adrift to we know not where.

My journey has taken me from the Model A Ford to automobiles that can drive themselves; from the bi-plane, single engine planes that landed occasionally on my home Indian reservation in South Dakota while the coyote hunters aboard the plane got out to stretch to the monstrous jet airliners that can carry 500 people. My grandmother Sophie was working at an Indian mission boarding school on December 29, 1890, just a few miles from a place called Wounded Knee, at the exact time the Hotchkiss guns were mowing down innocent men, women and children. I also have often visited the mass gravesite where those innocents were unceremoniously dumped into an open pit. Those nearly 125 years that have elapsed since that inglorious day in American history are just a blip on the scale of time.

I firmly believe that knowledge is power and for all of my years as a newspaper publisher and journalist I have tried my very best to bring knowledge to the American Indian people in hopes they would use it to continue the 500 year fight for their very survival.

I leave this world of blogs and columns to devote my final days to completing the book I have been working on all of my life. I leave having made a few enemies, but deeply proud of the many more friends I have made.

I have had the privilege of meeting many great people from senators to presidents, from editors to publishers of great newspapers, and I am most honored to have met so many distinguished Native Americans cut in the mold of a Wilma Mankiller, Gerald One Feather and Vine Deloria.

In 1990 I interviewed a 100-year-old gentleman named Jim Holy Eagle. I asked him, “What is the best thing about being 100?” He replied in a flash, “You don’t care what anybody says about you!”
And I guess the same can be said of a writer who has turned 80. Anchors aweigh!

(Tim Giago was the founder of the Native American Journalists Association and has been inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame and into the Native American Journalists Hall of Fame. His book, Lakota Manifesto, should be on the book shelves next year)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Oscar movies this year may be small, but they’re packing a lot of drama.

When the 87th Academy Awards kick off Sunday night at 8:30 EST, the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles will be buzzing with something the Oscars haven’t always had in recent years: genuine intrigue at who the night’s biggest winners will be.

The Oscars may also have another sight unusual to Southern California: rain. Light afternoon showers are expected, which could dampen red-carpet arrivals (though the carpet itself is under a glass tent).

With a co-leading nine nominations, Alejandro Inarritu’s backstage comedy “Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” flies in with the strongest wind at its back. It topped the acting, directing and producing guild awards, which are often strong predictors of what the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will vote for.

“Birdman” also won best feature at Saturday’s Independent Film Spirit Awards, further boosting its momentum. At the pre-Oscars beachside bash, star Michael Keaton, who won best actor, proclaimed the film “bold cinema” and “a game changer,” a judgment shared by many in Hollywood who no doubt recognize something in Keaton’s character’s out-of-control ego.

But the coronation of “Birdman” is far from assured. Many believe the landmark of Richard Linklater 12-years-in-the-making “Boyhood” will ultimately prove irresistible to academy members. Best director also appears to be a toss-up between Inarritu and Linklater.

Three of the acting winners — Julianne Moore (“Still Alice”), J.K. Simmons (“Whiplash”) and Patricia Arquette (“Boyhood”) — are virtual locks going into Sunday’s show, but best actor will be a nail biter. It could be the young British star Eddie Redmayne for his technically nuanced performance as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything,” or it could be Keaton’s career-topper in “Birdman,” as an actor trying to flee his superhero past.

But whether suspense will be enough to pull viewers to the telecast on ABC remains to be seen. Host Neil Patrick Harris will hope to continue the recent ratings upswing for the Oscars, which last year drew 43 million viewers, making it the most-watched entertainment telecast in a decade.

This year’s crop of nominees, however, is notably light on box-office smashes. Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” (six nominations including best picture) is the only best-picture candidate to gross more than $100 million domestically. (A runaway hit, it recently surpassed $300 million.)

Possibly worse for the Oscars is that the lack of diversity in the nominees this year (all 20 nominated actors are white) turned off many potential viewers and led some to call for a boycott of the broadcast. Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron are likely to aim for a telecast more inclusive than the nominees.

Planned performers include Lady Gaga, Jack Black, Jennifer Hudson and Anna Kendrick, as well as Oscar-nominated original songs: Common and John Legend (“Glory” from “Selma”), Maroon 5 (“Lost Stars” from “Begin Again”), Tim McGraw (“I’m Not Gonna Miss You” from “Glen Campbell . I’ll Be Me”), Rita Ora (“Grateful” from “Beyond the Lights”) and Tegan and Sara with the Lonely Island (“Everything Is Awesome” from “The Lego Movie”).

Oprah Winfrey (a co-star in “Selma”) will be among the presenters, as will Eddie Murphy, Chris Pratt, Kevin Hart, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Channing Tatum and John Travolta.

Increasingly, ratings are driven by moments that spark social media frenzy, like when Travolta famously mispronounced the name of singer Idina Menzel as “Adele Dazeem” at last year’s show. Sunday night, he gets a chance for redemption.

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

One peace ring begets another.

A group of Norwegians plans to link hands and encircle a mosque in Oslo, Norway, next Saturday, offering the symbolic peace gesture as a “thank you” to the city’s Muslim population, more than 1,000 of whom formed their own “peace circle” around Oslo’s synagogue this weekend.

Tonight Norwegian muslims formed a human shield in front of the Oslo synagogue. Historic. #ringOfPeaceOslo #Norway pic.twitter.com/iCQxJrQSrt

— Oda Leraan Skjetne (@oSkjetne) February 21, 2015

1300 Muslims link hands in a Ring of Peace around Jewish synagogue in Oslo. Best news from Europe all year. pic.twitter.com/CnsrbC3o1c

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 21, 2015

Organizers of the event say they want the human shield to be a seen as an endorsement of peace, tolerance and respect for Muslims, who they say are “a vulnerable minority in Norwegian society.”

“We want to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Muslim fellow citizens to show disgust towards increasing Muslim hate and xenophobia in society,” the organizers say, according to a translation of the event’s Facebook page.

“In this time of fear and polarization we feel it is more important than ever to stand together and show solidarity,” the organizers continue. “We believe in and will highlight [the] human will to live together in peace and in [respect] for each other regardless of religion [and] ethnicity.”

This past Saturday, members of Oslo’s Muslim population encircled a synagogue there. The gesture came a week after a Danish-born man, reportedly of Arab origins, killed two people at a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the organizers of the synagogue event, told Reuters. “There are many more peace mongers than warmongers … There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”

This week, the White House held a Summit on Combating Violent Extremism. Walking through the Albuquerque airport on the day of the Summit, I was surprised to see a TV headline ask the question, “Is ISIS a religious group?” It is an absurd question, and one that, despite his comments at the Summit, President Obama cannot be taking seriously.

Of course it is a religious group. ISIS adherents are very clear that their motivations are grounded in faith, and their actions are directly tied to religious scripture. Week after week, they publish the specific Koranic justification for their most gruesome acts, whether it is the beheading of apostates and Christians, throwing gay people off of high buildings, stoning to death women accused of adultery, or the enslaving of women and children. One cannot read the article “The Revival of Slavery” in the ISIS magazine Dabiq, with its debate over how Shari’ah law dictates the appropriate punishment of Yazidi women — enslavement as pagans or execution as apostates — and not see its fundamentalist zeal.

ISIS is the very definition of a fundamentalist religious group. Religious fundamentalism is nothing new in the modern era, and not unique to Islam. Christians and Jews, to say nothing of Hindus, each have their groups that seek to live in accordance with laws and scripture that date back thousands of years. Each has had their zealots who have committed terrible crimes. Each embraces practices that many view to be medieval. Christianity has a strong millennialist tradition, mirrored or even rooted in Judaism, that suggests that a return to the fundamentals of faith will presage the end of days and the second coming, a stance that is widely embraced in Iran, notably by former President Ahmadinejad. ISIS is not unique in its fundamentalism or its apocalyptic vision, but rather in its dictates to conquest that the Prophet — himself a general — set forth in his foundational work.

The White House and President Obama continued to bend over backward this week at a White House summit on combating violent extremism to avoid language that might suggest the broader Islamic world is culpable for the conduct of its most violent and fundamentalist adherents. “No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the President declared. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.” Yet his first statement and his last are not credible. Few would argue that religion over the millennia has been the rationale for countless episodes of terrorism, and all major religions have their own history of war and violence that we would now would label as terrorist. The President’s comment that “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism” echoes the old NRA trope Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and, while true, ignores the role of religion and faith as defining human motivations. The sectarian nature of religious faith revolves around each community’s search for truth, often complicated by a fervent commitment to their own interpretations of ancient scripture. Thus, one community’s essential truth might inevitably be viewed as another community’s “perversion.”

ISIS is not a group that has perverted Islam, as the President would have us believe, but rather has interpreted and embraced it with its own fundamentalist ardor. Like Protestantism and Judaism, Sunni Islam does not have an ecclesiastic structure that can discipline the extremists in its midst. While the Grand Muftis of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, viewed as seminal religious authorities in the Sunni and Wahhabi Sunni traditions, respectively, have each condemned ISIS, there in fact is no central religious authority, no Pope with the authority to tell ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi where he is wrong and how he must align his interpretation of the words of the Prophet to conform to the larger Sunni world. Indeed, like al Qaeda before it, ISIS’s appeal to young Muslims is in part rooted in its defiance of the leaders of the established order.

It is notable that when Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admonished ISIS for the beheading of Egyptian Coptic Christians, he did not suggest that they were wrong in their reading of the Koran, but rather essentially said that you just can’t do that anymore. Perhaps unwittingly, Ali Khamenei was making the case for modernism. He set aside an ecclesiastic debate about the literal words of the Koran in favor of the mores of the modern world. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was more explicit last month when he made a televised appeal to Sunnis and Shi’a alike that ISIS puritanical utopianism posed the biggest threat to Islam in history and called on the entire Muslim world to “work to isolate them, surround them and end it.”

Despite something close to a consensus about the threat posed by ISIS, several of the countries most directly threatened remain consumed by their own politics and rivalries. Turkey, a NATO member state that has military capabilities that dwarf ISIS, should be playing a leading and decisive role in the fight against ISIS. ISIS rhetoric has increasingly focused on attacking the armies of “Rome.” While this has raised alarm flags in Italy, particularly with ISIS forces in Libya poised directly to the south of Italy, Graeme Wood has made the argument in his recent piece in the The Atlantic that Rome in Islamic prophecy is a reference to the Turkish capital Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), the former seat of the Holy Roman Empire and the state that destroyed the last caliphate. Thus, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to regard ISIS as an instrument in his feud with Syria’s Bashir al-Assad — a man Erdoğan long supported until Assad insulted him — Wood suggests that Turkey itself, along with Saudi Arabia, may well be ISIS’s ultimate target. For their part, the Sunni Saudis and their Gulf state partners continue to view Shi’a Iran as their greater sectarian and regional threat and are loath to participate in any anti-ISIS coalition that includes cooperation with the apostate Shi’a.

It is against this backdrop of regional rivalries and hostility that President Obama is working to build a coalition against a common enemy. While the fight against ISIS clearly should be led by the Muslim nations that stand immediately in harm’s way — Turkey, Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — those nations appear incapable of developing and executing a coordinated military response on the ground. With the American public steadfast against a new ground war in the Middle East, the President is left to struggle to bring together a coalition of Turks, Arabs and Persians, Sunni and Shi’a, that by and large dislike and distrust each other as much as they might fear ISIS.

Like President Bush before him, President Obama has sought to moderate the language used by the United States to describe ISIS and the threat of radical Islamists in deference to the Muslim partners in the erstwhile anti-ISIS coalition. Each of those partners is sensitive to any language that might suggest that they are siding with America in a war between the Islam and the West. Under similar circumstances, the Bush administration settled on the term Global War on Terror, eschewing direct references to Islamic terrorism or the term preferred early on, Islamofascism.

It is not difficult to understand the strategic importance of the language used by our leaders to America’s ability to build and sustain a coalition with Muslim partners. Perhaps the American public might be puzzled by the President’s strained parsing of language and his reluctance to call Islamic terrorism by its name, but members of Congress (or former mayors of New York City) have no such excuse. They understand full well what is at stake and the reasoning behind the Presidents use of words.

In the early days of the Cold War, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg articulated an ethos, adhered to in Washington, D.C. for decades, that partisan politics must stop at the water’s edge. This meant that American politicians of all parties should stand together on matters of foreign policy, whatever their political disagreements at home, so that they would not by their partisan actions and words weaken the nation in the eyes of the world. Today, of course, our partisanship knows no limits and few hesitated to attack and ridicule the President this week. Even in a case like the fight against ISIS, a complex and troubling challenge for which few, if any, of the President’s adversaries have any significant alternative strategies to offer, any notion that political adversaries might stand together for the larger interest of the nation has long been rendered quaint.