Here in the United States, July 4 is also known as “Independence Day”. As President Bush spoke today in a Fourth of July speech to the nation from Monticello, Virginia:

“You represent many different ethnicities and races and religions. But you all have one thing in common - and that is a shared love of freedom. This love of liberty is what binds our nation together, and this is the love that makes us all Americans.”

My theory is that there are other people around the world, who are not Americans, who also love things like liberty and freedom. So I think it’d be terrific if all the freedom-loving Americans President Bush is talking to would stand up and commit themselves to stopping their own country from denying freedom and self-determination to people elsewhere. Seriously, you can’t have democracy and occupation at the same time.

To acknowledge the concept of independence, today we release a new episode - Iraq Under Occupation: Raed Jarrar decodes the misinformation. I admit it’s a little long (~ 1 hr 10 min), but I hope everyone who is not already familiar with Raed Jarrar or his work will take the time to watch it. It is crucial that every American understand the implications of what he is saying.

Watch the video here.

- Bunny

[ note from Kim: Please be careful of hot dogs and soda, they are not good for you no matter how yummy they are. *smack smack* ]

Yesterday morning we shipped our Pinky Show stuff to Arlington for the Picturing Politics 2008 exhibition. I couldn’t believe how expensive it was to ship - I think it was about $160 - more if you include the ridiculous amount of bubblewrap and coroplast Pinky used to wrap everything up. (Can you say “anal retentive”?)

Anyway, if any of you live near Washington D.C., please go see the show (August 15-September 27). And if you could take a picture of our work in the show, that’d be great because we can’t afford to actually travel to Arlington to see the show ourselves. If we get any good pictures of our work installed in the AAC galleries I’d like to include it in the On Native Land entry in our Commons Gallery.

By the way, in response to questions about the art pieces (For example, “But what does it mean???”, etc.), Pinky has expanded the explanatory notes that appear as mouse-overs in the gallery. You have to put your cursor over the picture in order to have the notes pop up.

Bunny

[ Kim: Lost in all this is Bunny forgot to mention that the art work came out really beautiful! Just wanted to say that! ^_^ ]