Uncle Scam Cartoon by Ed Newmann Feb 2023 River Cities Reader
One year ago, we published the article “Journalism Not a Crime, Quite Yet – Julian Assange Wins Right to Have Extradition Ruling Appealed in U.K. Supreme Court” by Kevin Gosztola, editor at Dissenter.org. And, one year, later Assange still rots in jail.
This is unacceptable and horrific. We've published many, many pieces about how Assange has been double-crossed by the mainstream media that lauded itself with awards using the information Assange published at Wikileaks.org, only to abandon him going on 13 years now. Read them at RCReader.com/tags/assange. How the press-titute editors and publishers at publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post can live with themselves is beyond me. Please read Kevin's latest reporting on the Assange case, recounting the Belmarsh Tribunal presented at the National Press Club on January 20, 2023. Belmarsh is the name of the prison where Assange is in England. Organizations will rent out the prestigious National Press Club in Washington D.C., so that the press will ostensibly cover their events and presentations. Did you hear anything in the local, national, or international news about the January 20 Belmarsh Tribunal for Assange? Now you have.
Issue #1006 of the Reader has several firsts highlighted in it. Who knew Rock Island had the first public library in Illinois? And who knew the first librarian in Illinois, Ellen Gale, was hired in 1868 in Rock Island? Read about it here.
And did you know that the first modern computing concepts were documented on the back of a bar napkin at what is now the shut-down Hunter's Club in downtown Rock Island? Well, that's what some of us would like to believe. I wrote about this in 2009 when a crew filmed a documentary at Hunter's Club to explore John Vincent Atanasoff's story of how he conceived that a more efficient calculator should use binary arithmetic using 1s and 0s rather than decimal arithmetic and use regenerative memory to store information (what we now call RAM). The debate of where Atanasoff actually was the fateful winter night in the Tri-Cities in 1937 will happen at Augustana College later this month. Read all the details here. Regardless, the Quad Cities' should leverage this legacy further, as we all know this is a great creative place where innovation and problem solving thrive.
And this is the first time we have published James Corbett's Annual Fake News Awards – The DINOs. DINO stands for dinosaur news media. It's tough to keep up with all the gaslighting and propaganda that we are bombarded with every day. Corbett keeps track like no other.
Lastly, my apologies for mistakenly not publishing FM 107.7 WQUD Vintage Radio's Mama C's Top 10 Local Licks in our 2022 Year in Music article. It's a rarity for local musical artists to get precious air time on any radio station and WQUD consistently promotes local talent. Below are the Top 10 Requested Local Licks for 2022 (Band – Song)!
1) Angela Meyer - “Row 24”
2) Avey Grouws Band - “The Devil May Care”
3) Been There Done That - “Pretty Lies”
4) 3 on the Tree - “Dig that Gasoline”
5) Avey Grouws Band - “Two Days Off”
6) The Dawn - “1984”
7) The Mamiltons - “Highway Unknown”
8) Subatlantic - “Villians”
9) Unidynes - “All Along”
10) Ian Bebon - “Water and Whiskey”
