Poor Mojo's Newswire

Kent, Ohio - On May 1-4, 2010, filmmaker Michael Moore will livecast the hearings of the Kent State Truth Tribunal, streaming in real time the accounts of participants, witnesses and family members of the 1970 Kent State shootings that left four students dead and nine injured. The livecast is the first real-time broadcast of a truth-seeking initiative of this kind and will air on www.MichaelMoore.com from 10am-7pm daily eastern. The Kent State Truth Tribunal was convened by family members of students killed at Kent State in order to record and honor the stories of those directly affected by the shootings. The Ohio National Guard who opened fire on the protesters has never publicized the findings of its investigation of command responsibility for the shootings. And there has never been a public inquiry to hear, record and preserve the stories of those directly impacted by what happened on May 4th, 1970, at Kent State. "It is an honor to work with the families of the victims and the participants in the May 4, 1970, protest at Kent State University to bring you their stories, beamed in from the Kent State Truth Tribunal through my website. We have never been told the whole truth about these killings and we deserve to hear that truth," said Mr. Moore. The Truth Tribunal will generate a comprehensive historical record of the Kent State massacre. Interviews will be recorded by award-winning filmmaker Emily Kunstler and will be simultaneously livecast on the home page of www.MichaelMoore.com. The footage and mementos collected by the participants will then be archived and available for viewing by the public. The archive will be preserved as part of the permanent collection at the renowned Tamiment Library at New York University. The tribunal will take place on four consecutive days, May 1, 2, 3 and 4, 2010, marking the 40th anniversary of the events of 1970, and held at Franklin Square Deli Building, at the corner of Water and Main Streets, 110 S. Water Street, in downtown Kent, Ohio. Organizers are asking for all original participants and witnesses of the 1970 Kent State shootings to pre-register at www.TruthTribunal.org.

The anti-Obama forces, it seems clear, are rooted in classic American know-nothing populism--nativist, isolationist, paranoid. Today's Exhibit A is from the Drudge Report, in which the newly designed $100 bill is slagged for, as the headline has it, "looking European." Drudge links to this report from Bloomberg, which describes the reasons for the new look: But...reasons? Rationality? Greater security against counterfeiters? Feh! It looks like a freakin' Euro, which means it must be a precursor of socialism. That Obama is one sneaky crypto-muslim. But then, the same sort of cosmopolitanism was suspected of Ben Franklin--one of our most secular humanist playboy founders--after he sampled the bright lights, and women, of London and Paris. I mean, isn't it, like, suspicious that Obama would want this Christian Nation to continue to feature someone as insidious as Franklin on its $100 bill? Why not Billy Graham or Ronald Reagan? Or Tom Tancredo? Can't we get some real reform around here?

Lawsuit: School administrator 'may be a voyeur' who spied on kids for personal gratification A Philadelphia-area school district secretly took "thousands" of webcam photos of students in their homes and tracked their Web site visits and parts of online chats through spy software installed on the students' school-issued laptops, a Pennsylvania court heard yesterday. In February, the family of Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High School in Rosemont, sued the Lower Merion School District after the district admitted to them it had been spying on students via a remote-activated feature on the laptops it issued to all its 2,300 high school pupils. In a motion filed in court on Thursday, Robbins' lawyers asserted that the school district had taken at least 400 snapshots of 15-year-old Robbins, including some of him sleeping. The motion also stated that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. And in a strange twist to the story, the lawyers also suggested that Carol Cafiero, one of two school administrators with access to the spying technology, "may be a voyeur" who spied on students for her personal gratification, as some of the images taken by the laptops may have ended up on her personal computer.