The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth. Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.
King John Casimer V of Poland abdicates the throne.
1747
The French capture Bergen-op-Zoom, consolidating their occupation of Austrian Flanders in the Netherlands.
1789
Jean-Paul Marat sets up a new newspaper in France, L'Ami du Peuple.
1810
A revolution for independence breaks out in Mexico.
1864
Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest leads 4,500 men out of Verona, Miss. to harass Union outposts in northern Alabama and Tennessee.
1889
Robert Younger, in Minnesota's Stillwater
Penitentiary for life, dies of tuberculosis. Brothers Cole and Bob
remain in the prison.
1893
Some 50,000 "Sooners" claim land in the Cherokee Strip during the first day of the Oklahoma land rush.
1908
General Motors files papers of incorporation.
1920
Thirty people are killed in a terrorist bombing in New York's Wall Street financial district.
1934
Anti-Nazi Lutherans stage protest in Munich.
1940
Congress passes the Selective Service Act, which calls for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.
1942
The Japanese base at Kiska in the Aleutian Islands is raided by American bombers.
1945
Japan surrenders Hong Kong to Britain.
1950
The U.S. 8th Army breaks out of the Pusan
Perimeter in South Korea and begins heading north to meet MacArthur's
troops heading south from Inchon.
1972
South Vietnamese troops recapture Quang Tri province in South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese Army.
1974
Limited amnesty is offered to Vietnam-era
draft resisters who would now swear allegiance to the United States and
perform two years of public service.
1975
Administrators for Rhodes Scholarships announce the decision to begin offering fellowships to women.
1978
An earthquake estimated to be as strong as 7.9 on the Richter scale kills 25,000 people in Iran.
1991
The trial of Manuel Noriega, deposed dictator of Panama, begins in the United States.
1994
Britain's government lifts the 1988 broadcasting ban against member of Ireland's Sinn Fein and Irish paramilitary groups.
2007
Military contractors in the employ of
Blackwater Worldwide allegedly kill 17 Iraqis in Baghdad's Nisour
Square, further straining relations between the US and the people of
Iraq.
Appalled by the murder of four little girls, a white Alabaman
spoke out against racism—and was forever shunned for it.
by Andrew Cohen
"A
bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action,"
proclaimed Charles Morgan Jr. at the Birmingham Young Men's Business
Club.
In the next few days,
you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of
the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed
four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights
in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly
divisive periods in American history, and it's not too much of a leap to
suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as
it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.
What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after
the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama
lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a
Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the
Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white
Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent
the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It
was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power
and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing,
Morgan spoke these words:Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad,
remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was
it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it." Every
last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and
a decade ago. We all did it.
He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later
after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the
vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He
had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from
frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were
shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He
had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong
but didn't try to right it. A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound
another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a
Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault
Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their
mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, "Why?" "Who?" Everyone
then "deplores" the "dastardly" act. But you know the "who" of "Who did
it" is really rather simple.
There was little in Morgan's early life to suggest that he would have
the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of
the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of
parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always
courteous to the "black help." Like so many other local sons and
daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time
he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his
life enmeshed in both. The "who" is every little individual who talks about the
"niggers" and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son.
The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with
laughter. The "who" is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness
and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative
who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the
world that things back home aren't really like they are. It is courts
that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.
He
was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was
present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American
politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom—"Big
Jim"—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to
1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn't uncommon, but was also an
early and ardent integrationist. "As long as the Negroes are held down
by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be
held down alongside them," Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after
Alabama went Dixiecrat.It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too
late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us
who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10
years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of
telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We
are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our
young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept
responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.
I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and
politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of
a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing
line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the
United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in
the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time?
That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept
the pain of being left out.
Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number
of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an
all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been
praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or
so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which
many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would
Negroes think this?
He got married. He became a lawyer. He was active in state and local
politics. By 1958 he had his own firm. And through this era, of Citizens Councils and Little Rock,
he struggled to reconcile his love of the South with his aversion to
its racism, his loyalty to Birmingham with his frustration at its
opposition to integration. What he learned during this time in both law
and politics, he would later say, was that the topic of race was a trap
and that "every white man in Alabama was caught up in it."
There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff's
deputies. Few Negroes have served on juries; few have been allowed to
vote; few have been allowed to accept responsibility, or granted even a
simple part to play in the administration of justice. Do not
misunderstand me. It it not that I think that white policemen had
anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous
bombings. It's just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must
think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think
perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder. They throw rocks and
bottles and bullets. And we whites don't seem to know why the Negroes
are lawless. So we lecture them.
In 1960, The New York Times' correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote a flammable piece on Birmingham titled "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham.
In a tone Morgan would echo three years later, Salisbury wrote of the
city: "Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest,
every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented
by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor,
the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police
and many branches of the state's apparatus." Furious, Alabama officials
quickly sued the Times for libel. Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and
the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers
together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who
have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a
city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city's
"image." Did those ministers visit the families of the Negroes in their
hour of travail? Did many of them go to the homes of their brothers and
express their regrets in person or pray with the crying relatives? Do
they admit Negroes into their ranks at the church?
The libel lawsuit (remember, this was before the Supreme Court issued New York Times v. Sullivan,
a decision that broadened first amendment protections for journalists)
immediately impacted Morgan. He was asked to represent the Rev. Robert
L. Hughes, a white Methodist minister who was a director of the Alabama
Council on Human Relations, a group designed to act as a liaison between
the white and black communities in Birmingham. Hughes had been served a
subpoena to produce the records of all those who supported the council.
And he had decided to fight the request. Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in
Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A
business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police
or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so
hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a
Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not
his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And
what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the
law is not, when they know full well what the law is?
Representing
Rev. Hughes immediately made Morgan the target of the Klan. Its members
accosted him in a courthouse at a hearing. There were anonymous
nighttime phone calls. "How come you'd represent that nigger-lover
Hughes?" he would be asked. "You better watch out, tough guy. Some night
we'll get you alone." The experience made Morgan realize that he and
Hughes, that all moderates seeking to foster equal rights in the South
at that time, were "in the same boat." Whether he had wanted to or not,
he had chosen a side.Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived
their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts
responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city
with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial
offering, a balm for the conscience of the "good people," whose ready
answer is for those "right wing extremists" to shut up. People who
absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this
morning, "Me? I'm not guilty!" he then proceeding to discuss the guilt
of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court
did not properly interpret the law. And that's the way it is with the
Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for
speaking while they sit in fearful silence.
He became radicalized—but only to a point and always within the
structure of the law. He represented a black murder defendant named Boaz
Sanders, a case that further opened his eyes to the state's unequal
justice under law. Then he sued the University of Alabama, his beloved alma mater,
after it refused to admit two black men around the same time it was
stalling the admission of Hood and Malone. These were formal acts of
subversion against a culture he could neither abide nor quit. It was
tough love. It was the tiny ripple of hope that Robert Kennedy, years later, would talk about in South Africa.
Birmingham is a city in which the major industry, operated
from Pittsburgh, never tried to solve the problem. It is a city where
four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system,
live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods,
restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to
Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their
front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names
from obituary columns.
The Alabama of the early 1960s was the Alabama of George Wallace and the Freedom Riders. It was the Alabama of Vivian Malone and James Hood
and Eugene "Bull" Connor. It was the Alabama from which came many
blacks and whites who believed in integration and in civil rights and
who participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And
then, just 18 days later, it was the Alabama that detonated a bomb
inside a church on a Sunday. "My God," a woman on the scene screamed,
"you're not even safe in a church."
And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not
consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the
decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who
has ever said "they ought to kill that nigger," every citizen who votes
for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school
board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge
and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in
this community who has in any way contributed during the past several
years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so,
than the demented fool who threw that bomb. What's it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known
and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States.
Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.
And with those words—"It is dead"—Morgan sat down. In his powerful
book, "A Time to Speak," from which the speech has been transcribed,
Morgan wrote: "There was applause, and then one member rose. He
suggested that we admit a Negro into the club. There was silence. The
motion died. Soon the Young Men's Business Club of Birmingham, Alabama,
adjourned its meeting of September 16, 1963. It was one o'clock.
Downstairs, the troopers still laughed and talked, and blocks away the
carillon again played 'Dixie.'" Postscript
Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The
very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. "Is the mortician
there yet?" a voice asked. "I don't know any morticians," Morgan
responded. "Well, you will," the voice answered, "when the bodies are
all over your front yard." Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his
drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. "They'll shoot you down
like a dog," the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly
closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.
"Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech," recalls Steve Suitts,
the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of
Morgan's longtime friends. "Once we discussed the anonymous threats that
Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after
the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black's papers
saying 'Nigger-lovers don't live long in Alabama.' Chuck smiled and said
he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.
"But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against
his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles," Suitts told me this
week via email. "He once told me that he had received a note that he did
not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that
Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something
like, 'Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain't always getting home. Next
time?' That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had
actually followed his family all day."
What did he do when he left Alabama? A great deal. He led an
extraordinarily vital life on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed
and the accused. Here's how the Times, in its 2009 obituary of him, described the impact of Morgan's work upon the lay of the law:
Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to
desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new
election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black
candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged
racially segregated juries and prisons. After the civil rights movement
began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a leader of the American Civil
Liberties Union, fought three celebrated court cases involving protests
against the Vietnam War.
He represented Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid
being drafted. He represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in
the early stages of an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had
been denied a seat in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar
views. And he defended an officer when he was court-martialed for
refusing to help instruct Green Berets headed for Vietnam.
But it is Suitts, who in many ways carries on the tradition of the
Southern moderate, who deserves the last word as we approach the golden
anniversary of this remarkable act of personal courage. Of Morgan,
Suitts told me:
In many ways, Chuck took one of the key points in Dr. King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail,"
written five months earlier, and extended it into the horrendous facts
of the bombing. (Dr. King wrote: "I have almost reached the regrettable
conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward
freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but
the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice...
who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another
man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who
constantly advises the Negro to wait.")
Chuck's speech carried this theme one step further by suggesting the
white moderate was responsible for the worst of "disorder" as well as
gross injustice ... by asking" Who is guilty?" of the bombing of
innocent little girls and answering "Each of us!" - not the Klan, not
the extremist whites but every white person in Birmingham...
There is no monument or commemoration of Chuck's "Time to Speak" in
Birmingham. Last time I was in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, I did
not see any reference to Chuck's speech. Birmingham's Young Men's
Business Club still remembers Chuck's speech occasionally, but it is not
remembered all that often there or elsewhere in Birmingham.
There is probably more than one reason for this fact. The bombing - not
Chuck's speech - was the event that rocked Birmingham and the nation. It
is also very hard for anyone today, in Birmingham and elsewhere, to
genuinely understand how often and how many good white people kept
silent in the face of rank injustice and racial violence in the South
during the era of Jim Crow.
In fact, in one of the last conversation Chuck and I had, we laughed
about how difficult it is nowadays to find a Southern white family that
does not claim having done at least one heroic act on their part to end
racial injustice during the civil rights movement.
Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to
the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do
so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies...
No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of
Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is
possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take
military action without Security Council authorization...
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict
between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are
few champions of democracy in Syria...
From the outset, Russia
has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a
compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian
government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations
Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s
complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international
relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we
must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international
law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the
Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations
Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every
reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition
forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who
would be siding with the fundamentalists...
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in
foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in
America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world
increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying
solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan
“you’re either with us or against us.”..
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by
growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the
nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on
American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what
makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is
extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as
exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small
countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and
those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too.
We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must
not forget that God created us equal.
MuckRock News reports that Freedom of Information Act requests
faxed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) started coming
back as undeliverable a couple weeks ago. The OSD confirms their fax
machine is down, possibly for another few months, because there's no
money in their tens of billions of dollars a year budget for a new one,
and they can't switch to email as a request method. "The office that
oversees the most powerful military in history (not to mention the
best-funded) is unable to project when its single fax machine will once
again be operational."
The percentage owning refrigerators? 97.8%. Gas or electric stoves? 96.6%. Microwaves? 93.2%. Air conditioning? Over 83%.”
Over
83% of people who live in poverty have air-conditioning. I wonder what
the number is for people who not in poverty. Well, the reason I say that
is there are a lot of people in certain parts of the country who don’t
have air-conditioning but they can afford it because of the climate, and
there are people who are not in poverty who can’t afford it and don’t
have it. But 83% of Americans in poverty have air-conditioning. The
percentage of Americans living in poverty who have a clothes washer, is
68.7%.
The percentage of Americans living in poverty who have a
dryer, 65.3%. The percentage of Americans who live in poverty who use
their washer, I don’t know. (I just thought I would throw that in.) Only
44.9% had a dishwasher. So they’re sacrificing there. People in poverty
are washing their own dishes, or almost half of ‘em are. So poverty in
this country isn’t poverty. Everything’s relative, but that’s not bad.
As we say here, you get 99 weeks of unemployment. Ninety million
Americans are not working, but they’re eating. Ninety million Americans
are not working, but they’ve got their flat screens and they’ve got
their cell phones. (interruption)
Well, that’s a good point. That is an excellent point.
The
reason why only 45% have a dishwasher is because things like Chicken
McNuggets don’t come with dishes. How many people do you think take
their McNuggets home and put ‘em on a plate and grab a knife and a fork,
maybe a bottle of wine and a napkin, and sit down? It’s not happening.
So if you’re eating McNuggets or what have you, you don’t need plates —
and let’s not leave it at McNuggets. Let’s include Big Macs in there
just to avoid any of the leftist trolls out there.
According to StopLush,
McDonalds sponsors Dimbulb’s radio show. I’m pretty sure that they
won’t like how Lush has described their food as meal of choice for the
poor. As usual, Dimbulb was living in a fantasy world and making up his
own facts. The most recent research found that most McDonalds customers are middle class,
“The researchers found that people visited fast-food restaurants more
often as their household income increased — at least up to a point.
Fast-food visits rose along with annual income up to $60,000; beyond
that, visits started to drop back down, replaced by full-service,
sit-down dining at slightly higher prices. Based on the data, the
researchers described the typical fast-food consumer as a lower-middle
income head of household, who is budget-conscious and harried and likes
the convenience and low price of fast food, compared with other
restaurants.”
This was the perfect moment of Lush self
destruction. Not only did Dimbulb insult a sponsor, but he insulted a
sponsor with completely inaccurate information. Dimbulb’s argument that
the poor aren’t really poor is one of the repugicans’ favorite talking
points to use to justify taking from the poor in order to give to the
rich. You know that repugicanism thrives on class warfare. Wingnuts hope that
you won’t notice that they are making the rich richer if they can divert
your attention towards the “undeserving” poor.
McDonalds
shouldn’t be left off the hook either. I have reached out to McDonalds
for comment on Dimbulb’s remarks, but the corporate giant should answer
for sponsoring Dimbulb’s radio show. Lush Dimbulb continues to
implode, and McDonalds needs to know that they can’t escape the fallout.
Sarah
Palin (that's trademarked!) used an iconic 9/11 image belonging to a
New Jersey-based newspaper publisher to raise money for her PAC.…
How
do you know that you’ve crossed that oh so delicate line from seething,
frothing critic to money-grubbing abuser of all things decent?
Here’s a clue. If you get sued for using an iconic image of New York City firefighters hoisting a flag on 9/11 that does not belong to you in order to raise money for your very partisan self, you have jumped the “patriot” shark.
If you put your logo on the bottom of the picture
that did not belong to you, who claim to believe in free enterprise and
private business and who have trademarked your own name out of a
relentless greed, you definitely jumped the patriot shark.
So
it is that Sarah Palin (that’s trademarked!) used the image of a New
Jersey-based newspaper publisher (North Jersey Media Group Inc.) in
order to raise money for her PAC that does nothing much but feed her
lifestyle. They allege that she used the photo on SarahPAC and her
Facebook Page, also known as the cave from which she issues her
rhetorical bombs like her Syrian “Let Allah sort it out!” contribution
to our national dialogue.
Alleging copyright infringement, the publisher sought a court order to bar Palin and her PAC from using the image.
“The
Manhattan federal court lawsuit says that by using the picture “to
promote Sarah Palin and to raise money for SarahPAC” the former
Republican vice-presidential nominee has ‘irreparably damaged’ the
newspaper company,” Newsday reported.
Certainly
no reputable news company would want to be seen as affiliated with
Sarah Palin or her PAC, let alone contributing to raising money for her.
This
is just basic common sense and law. The image is clearly marked,
“EDITORIAL USE ONLY – NO COMMERCIAL SALES”, “Photo by 2001 The Record
(Bergen Co. NJ)/Getty Images”. And again for the reading impaired,
“Restrictions: Contact your local office for all commercial or
promotional uses. Editorial Use Only – No Commercial Sales”.
Partisan
politics are even worse than general commercial sales, because Palin is
implicating the newspaper as supporting her politics by using their
image to raise money.
Sarah Palin claims to be for free
enterprise, but then she took someone’s work and branded it with her
logo for money raising purposes, as if the photo were her property and
implying that the owners of the photo and or the people in it supported
her cause.
I’ll bet the New York City fire department has
something to say about that, especially since it was Palin who called
unions “thugs” and castigated them for expecting taxpayers to fund their “unsustainable benefits packages”.
Yes,
Palin benefited from her husband’s union membership, but that’s
different. When a conservative does it, it’s deserved. When anyone else
does it, it’s entitled laziness…
Just like all private property
belongs to Sarah Palin. The world works for Sarah Palin to use for
money-grubbing from her few remaining cult members, who keep on giving
in spite of the evidence that Ms Palin is only using the money to fund
her lifestyle.
Sarah Palin believes that New York City
firefighters fought on 9/11 in order for her to raise money for herself –
also known as “freedom” – in 2013. Of course they support her, after
all, she’s entitled. And everyone’s work belongs to her, like the Commie
Socialist she is.
The repugicans are using public school funds to teach christian wingnut ideology in place of science and American history.…
Educators
use myriad modalities to transfer knowledge from one generation to the
next based on research, historical facts, and empirical data, unless of
course their knowledge base if founded in superstition and invalid
facts. The separation of cult and state in the Constitution ensures
that taxpayer dollars will not be used to teach religion in public
schools, and besides giving rise to an alarming number of private christian madrassas, repugicans are using public school funds to teach christian wingnut ideology in place of science and American
history. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal devised a scam to transfer
public school students to private religious schools using taxpayer
dollars to inculcate biblical beliefs, but in Texas, repugicans are
taking a more direct approach and inserting christian and wingnut
ideology into public school curriculum.
Real
educators understand that curricula based on superstition and political
ideology academically retards students and leaves them ill-prepared to
function and compete in a rapidly evolving 21st century world. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said “We
do a disservice to children when we shield them from the truth, just
because some people think it is painful or doesn’t fit with their
particular views. Parents should be very wary of politicians designing
curriculum.” The christian repugicans, however, will not be deterred
from their crusade to create a generation of ignorant wingnuts
whose worldview will be founded on ancient biblical mythos and
revisionist history with no basis in facts.
In Louisiana, Bobby Jindal signed a new law
that privatizes public schools to indoctrinate students with
bible-based curriculum and mindboggling pseudoscience. The curriculum’s
textbooks hype “bible-based facts” from christian Bob Jones 'University' Press and christian 'educators' A Beka Book touting “academic excellence and christian character training.” The academic excellence includes teaching children that dragons were real, humans and dinosaurs lived side by side in perfect harmony, and that globalization is the precursor to rapture. The students will also learn that slavery was not horrendous, the Ku Klux Klan was a respectable organization working for the betterment of local communities, and that liberals lie and use propaganda to portray the Great Depression
as something other than Utopia and America’s finest era. In Louisiana,
only students sucked into Jindal’s privatization scam will be academic
retards, but in Texas, all 4.8 million students are bound for an
education founded in christian wingnuttery and lunatic fringe extremists’
revised American history.
The Texas Board of Education went to great lengths to revise curriculum
to adhere to their distorted wingnut religious vision of America,
and their primary goals are emphasizing that America was founded on christian beliefs - (it was not), and that the bible disproves science - (it does not). The repugican christian wingnuts amending Texas textbooks decried state
curriculum they claim was dominated by liberal ideas based on historical
facts and empirical scientific data, and their stated goal was to
reverse the trend. One of the repugican christians, wingnut board
member Don McLeroy said that “we’ve corrected the imbalance we’ve had in the past,” and that he is now “very pleased with what we’ve accomplished.” Another board member said that “I
believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing
that the good book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning
been our guiding geniuses. The objective is a christian land governed by christian principles.” In other words - Treason.
To ensure 4.8 million Texas students are indoctrinated into the “christian nation”
fallacy, the wingnut board concentrated on diluting the rationale
for the separation of cult and state by noting the words were not in
the Constitution. The Founding Father responsible for the “wall of separation”
in the First Amendment, Thomas Jefferson, is hated by wingnuts so
they removed him from a list of figures whose writings inspired
revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century. The
Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was a cultural movement in the 17th and
18th centuries dedicated to reforming society using reason, challenge
ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advancing knowledge through
the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism and
intellectual interchange, and rejected superstition and intolerance. The
Enlightenment influenced Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among
many others, and played a major role in the American Revolution, the
Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. None
of which are included in the christian bible the Texas wingnuts
claim are the Constitution’s source of inspiration.
To make sure Texas students learn that the “good book” and the “spirit of the savior” directed the Founding Fathers, the wingnuts replaced Jefferson with Italian priest St. Thomas Aquinas and French theologian John Calvin
who were alive during the early 1200s and 1500s respectively, and were
as far removed from the Age of Enlightenment as the Texas christian repugicans are from rational thought. The religio-wingnuts also
will indoctrinate Texas students to learn “the consequences” of
the Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX
legislation. They will also focus on the blessings of the conservative
resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s with special emphasis on contributions
by raving lunatic Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With On America, the (Nazi)Heritage
Foundation, the (im)Moral (non)Majority, and every religio-wingnut’s
favorite organization the National Rifle Association. The repugicans on
the board claimed they were just “adding balance” to the curriculum because according to wingnutss on the board, “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left;” likely with historical facts and empirical scientific data.
The Texas curriculum board wields power over the entire nation’s education system because they are one of the largest textbook consumers,
and publishers offer Texas textbooks to other states. In fact, even
textbook publishers are coming under fire from Texas for including
science that does not comport with the bible. The religio-wingnuts enlisted a bank of christian non-scientist-people as science
curriculum reviewers who rejected all references to evolution and just recently insisted
that all biology curricula is based on creationism. California
educators have had to deal with textbooks tailored for Texas idiots in
the past, and to remedy the problem a bill was introduced in the
California state Senate to protect California schools by requiring
California’s board of education to screen state curricula for any of the
new standards adopted in Texas. The bill explains that Texas curriculum
changes are “a sharp departure from widely accepted historical
teachings and a threat to the apolitical nature of public school
governance and academic content standards in California.”
America’s
students, even unfortunate Texas and Louisiana students deserve a
fact-based, historically accurate, and scientifically correct education
that is facing its biggest threat in decades. Whether it is voucher
scams to transfer public school funds to private religious schools, or a
panel of religio-wingnut freaks in Texas degrading education,
America’s children merit the tools they will need to succeed in the 21st
century global economy. They will be academic retards if they learn the
bible is science, the Founding Fathers’ were committed to government by
bible, or that repugican political philosophies are America’s
salvation. However, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said “We do a disservice to children when we shield them from the truth,” and if Americans have learned nothing else from repugicans, it is that their agenda is entirely dependent on “shielding Americans from the truth.” If the American people did know the truth, the wingnut 'movement', like our education system, would soon cease to exist.
Mindy Budgor of Santa Barbara, California has has a book
out about her adventures in Kenya, "training to become the world's
first female Maasai warrior" and, naturally, "saving" the poor
indigenous African people she encounters.
Basically, it's "Eat Pray Love" meets every white-savior-among-dark-natives movie ever.
And, the whole thing was some kind of aspirational sponsored content play? She references Under Armour throughout the book,
wears the athletic apparel brand in Kenya photos, tried to get them to
sponsor her, and says she lied about having a sponsorship from them, to
her parents. Wut? See page 51-52 for starters, and the last graf on page one of the Glamour article.
There's a Guardian story. BBC News TV interviewed her. In Glamour, they also ran what amounts to an excerpt from the book:
That afternoon we headed into the bush. We brought
nothing but the bare essentials (for me, that included a bottle of
Chanel Dragon red nail polish—it just made me feel fierce—and a set of
pearl earrings as a reminder of home) and our warrior gear: two tartan
sheets that we would wrap around us as clothing, and the metal tips for
our spears. Lanet explained that typically, a group of 10 to 20 young
men go through the rites of passage over a period of three to seven
years. "Your situation is different, so we will need to compromise," he
said. "We will test you as we go. If at any time we feel you are not up
for the challenge, then I will take you back to Nairobi. But if you do
well, we will introduce you to the community." He carefully selected six
other warriors who would join us—he knew he'd need persuasive men on
our side when we returned to the village.
I looked at those stone-faced, lean-bodied men and was terrified. Lanet
sensed my trepidation. "I know you're scared," he said. "But these
people have chosen to be with you. You must accept them as your family,
or this is not going to work." I thought of Faith and the promise I had
made, and I told Lanet I would learn to trust them, whatever it took.
Our first task was to collect leaves and branches to sleep on. That was
backbreaking, but the hardest task came next: killing a goat. The Maasai
suffocate their goats, which they believe is the most humane way to
kill. I was petrified, but not about to wimp out on day one, so I held
its mouth closed until it went limp. Another warrior slit its throat,
then everyone stepped forward...
What
looks like a duck but tastes like a potato? 73-year-old retiree
Dorothea Clinton of Shropshire, England, dug up this unusual looking
tuber from her back garden. "I just pulled it out of the ground and I
thought, 'Oooh, it's a duck,'" she told Shropshirestar.
"We normally eat everything we produce from the garden but I can't
bring myself to eat this one, it's got a kind of strange sentimental
value to me now."
Now that's a spud worth quacking about!
A column at Salon offers "Eight signs the rich have way too much money." The Beatles were introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan. "The Beatles didn't fall immediately under the spell of marijuana, but
after a few months, according to John, they were "smoking it for
breakfast," "Let's have a laugh" soon became their code line for "Let's
have some marijuana." Fruit juice may be worse for children than soda pop. "A book from the 1920s on feeding
children by L Emmett Holt says that you should give toddlers just one to
four tablespoons (15-60ml) of fresh orange or peach juice. Compare this with
today's 200ml children's juice boxes, which contain about 17g sugar, the
equivalent of more than four teaspoons.
The biggest problem with juice, as far as Lustig is concerned, is the lack of
fibre."
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone tackles the college loan scandal.
"It's complicated. But throw off the mystery and what you'll uncover is
a
shameful and oppressive outrage that for years now has been
systematically perpetrated against a generation of young adults... our
university-tuition system really is exploitative and unfair, designed
primarily to benefit two major actors [colleges/universities and the
government]."
Anti-bullying
initiatives have become standard at schools across the country, but a
new UT Arlington study finds that students attending those schools may
be more likely to be a victim
Exercise
is essential to a healthy lifestyle, but new research led by the
University of Sydney shows that for cannabis users, it could also lead
to positive drug tests. Tetrahydrocannabinol ...
Scientists in Oregon have made a major leap toward curing
HIV, one of the worst and most feared diseases humanity has ever faced.
Anthony explains what they've achieved and what it might mean for the
millions battling this disease around the world.
Increased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to
older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human
life history pattern differs from other
primates. We believe it is a critical demographic factor in the
development of human
culture. Here, we examine when changes in
longevity occurred by assessing the ratio of older to younger adults in
four hominid
dental samples from successive time
periods... there is a dramatic increase
in longevity in the modern humans of the
Early Upper Paleolithic. We believe that this great increase contributed
to population
expansions and cultural innovations
associated with modernity...
Longevity, in particular, may be necessary for the transgenerational
accumulation and
transfer of information that allows for
complex kinship systems and other social networks that are uniquely
human...
However, whether the result of cultural factors, other forms of relaxed
selection affecting
the mortality of young adults, and/or
biological change, the increase in adult survivorship would have
considerable evolutionary
impact... Increased adult survivorship strengthens those relationships
and information transmission by extending the
time over which people can learn from older individuals and by the
increase
in the number of older people, which promotes
the acquisition and transmission of specialized knowledge such as that
reflected
in the Upper Paleolithic.
Not only does increased
survivorship imply greater lifetime fertility
for individuals, the investment of older individuals in their
children's families
may provide a selective advantage promoting
further population increase.
Peru’s
cloud forests are some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in
the world. A profusion of tree and plant species as well as one third of
Peru’s mammal, bird
Scientists believe they've discovered the largest volcano on
Earth! But, as big as it is, it's still not the biggest one out there.
Trace looks at the greatest volcanoes in our solar system.
Satellite images show how record floods have swollen the Amur
river in Russia , where more than 5 million people there and in China
are being affected by rising waters.
A recent genetic analysis provides evidence that seems to
acquit humans of causing the woolly mammoth's extinction. Instead, it
seems the climate committed mammoth murder.
A South Carolina couple say their dog sniffed out a baby abuser in their
home, the woman who was supposed to be caring for their seven month old
son. The babysitter, 22-year-old Alexis Khan pleaded guilty to assault
and battery Monday afternoon in Charleston County Circuit Court.
Benjamin and Hope Jordan hired Khan to babysit their son Finn last year
after they moved to Charleston. They say Khan came up clean in a
background check.
"We felt like Alexis was a good fit at the time," said Benjamin Jordan.
However their confidence in Khan didn't last too long. "About five
months into her being our baby sitter,
we started to notice that our dog was very protective of our son when
she would come in the door," Jordan said. "He was very aggressive
towards her and a few times we actually had to physically restrain our
dog from going towards her." Thanks to their dog Killian, the now
suspicious parents had a plan.
Hope suggested they place an I-phone under the couch and let the phone
record what happens while they were at work. When the couple got home,
they listened to the tape and were horrified what they heard. "It
started with cussing," Jordan said. "Then you hear slap noises and his
crying changes from a distress cry to a pain cry. I just wanted to reach
through the audio tape, go back in time and just grab him up. To know
that five months I had handed my child to a monster, not knowing what
was going on in my house for that day," said Jordan. Charleston City
Police arrested Kahn a few weeks later, and she confessed to the crime.
Khan was ordered to serve one to three years in prison. As part of her
plea, Kahn also will be placed on a child abuse registry, which means
she is not allowed to work with children. "That is fantastic news to us.
To know that maybe Finn's ordeal has possibly saved another child's
life in the future," said Jordan. "Had our dog not alerted us to the
trouble, had my wife's instincts not said we need to make something
happen, it could have been Finn that was killed by the babysitter. You
never know." Khan will be eligible for parole after serving one year of
her sentence. The Jordans say their son is doing fine and has no
lingering effects from the abuse.
A Chinese woman reportedly suffered a snake bite when the reptile
jumped from her wine bottle and struck her hand. Apparently, the woman
from Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province had been drinking pickled snake
wine to treat her rheumatism, but this particular snake was still
living. Snake wine is a common curative in traditional Chinese medicine. More
Scientists
are testing whether the vocal agility of the Ethiopian gelada monkey
came from hanging out in large groups, like being thrown into a daily
cocktail party with lots of people you barely know.
A deadly dog attack on a four-year-old boy in Bucharest has brought
new attention to an old problem: Romania's hundreds of thousands of
stray dogs. Government plans for mass euthanasia have animal welfare
activists up in arms. More.
We would
like nothing more than to offer this little elephant a hug and a
tissue. The newborn calf reportedly cried for five hours, inconsolably,
after being separated for a second time from his mother, who tried to
kill him, twice.
Keepers at a
wildlife park in eastern China, the Shendiaoshan Wild Animal Nature
Reserve, in Rongcheng, Shandong province, removed the calf from his
mother after she rejected him, stomping on him. Hopeful that the injury
had been accidental, they treated the calf and returned him to his
mother's side. She turned on him again, so they again removed him. The
calf wept under a blanket for five straight hours before keepers were
able to console him.
"He
couldn’t bear to be parted from his mother and it was his mother who was
trying to kill him," a keeper said, according to reports. All was not
lost for the little calf, however. Named Zhuangzhuang, he has been
adopted by the keeper who rescued him and they have formed a strong
bond.
That's because it's not a leaf at all, but an incredible camouflage display by the moth Uropyia meticulodina.
What's truly amazing about this moth is that its wings aren't just the
same color and pattern as a dried leaf, but that they even are curled up
like one.
As a result of climate change, ticks are devastating moose populations.
"They can send a moose to its death, with up to 150,000 dining on
every calf, cow and bull in certain parts of the Granite State, wildlife
biologists estimate. There was a time when eggs laid in this age-old
cycle perished on winter snow. But that hasn’t happened lately in New
Hampshire... As the number of ticks explodes, moose have disappeared by the
thousands in areas where they were most abundant. Many of those still
alive are eerily thin, with rib cages visible through ragged skin. They
are mere shadows of themselves, zombies with antlers."
A Chinese woman reportedly suffered a snake bite when the reptile
jumped from her wine bottle and struck her hand. Apparently, the woman
from Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province had been drinking pickled snake
wine to treat her rheumatism, but this particular snake was still
living. Snake wine is a common curative in traditional Chinese medicine. 
