A Rambling Post For Friday
I’m going to be on the road for the next ten days so blogging may be a little sporadic. Hopefully my boys, Man of American Dissent and Mark W. Bradley, will help me out and keep you entertained on the days that I can’t find internet access, although I figure that even rural areas and seaside towns have at least one Starbucks. I won’t drink the coffee, but I’ll surely use their WiFi!
If you haven’t already checked out this disgusting ad, do so now. Apparently the GOP thinks that black folks are stupid and will fall for their revisionist history lesson, including such gems as Democrats started the KKK and Dr. King was surely a Republican! I’m not going to say that the Democrats are the answer to anything, but I will say that liberals are (not to mention that we have a proven track record of supporting minorities of all stripes), and there aren’t any liberal Republicans anymore. The GOP is corrupt, cynical, backwards and will do anything to hide their true purpose, namely widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots! Mission Accomplished on that one.
In an interesting and rare, truth on television moment yesterday, Nora O’Donnell had Greg Palast on MSNBC and he threw out some truth bombs that made the Republican guest go apoplectic and Ms. O’Donnell go silent for a change. It was great fun to watch, I wish there was a video. Palast was on to talk about Hugo Chavez and his speech at the UN and Palast tossed out that Chavez was just saying what 90% of the rest of the world is thinking. He also said that most of the world knows that Bush stole the presidency through fraud and that it’s time the American people heard it as well! I guess real journalists aren’t afraid to speak the truth on television, I mean really, what are they gonna do, have Homeland Security pick him up and toss him in jail? Oh, yeah, they already did that but even that didn’t shut him up.
I get the feeling that MSNBC executives see dollar signs when they look at us liberals clamoring for some real news on television. We’ll have to keep their motivations in mind if they do decide to claim the identity of “liberal cable news network”. Perhaps their slogan can be, “We don’t care about democracy, but there are barrels full of money to be made pretending that we do.”
posted by The (liberal)Girl Next Door @ 11:04 AM
8 Comments:
Apparently the FCC suppressed not one but two reports it commissioned on media concentration. No wonder Americans never hear the Truth.
The NYTimes actually wrote a trivial piece on Chavez's speech in which it described the reponse to "The Devil was here yesterday and it smells of sulfur still" as embarrassed laughter and giggles. One can go to www.un.org and watch the entire speech. The laughter is hearty and mixed with applause --and that's from the leaders of the world! And Chavez received such thunderous applause that the Madame Chairwoman had to call for order.
BTW, I hear Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival" has shot to #1 at Amazon.
The following from Wikipedia:
Orval Eugene Faubus (7 January 1910–14 December 1994) was a six-term Democratic Governor of Arkansas, infamous for his 1957 stand against integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
Faubus' name became internationally known during the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, when he used the National Guard to stop African-American children from attending Little Rock Central High School as part of federally ordered racial desegregation.
The stand was ironic, considering that in 1954, Faubus had run for governor as a liberal promising to increase spending on schools and roads. In the first few months of his administration, Faubus desegregated state buses and public transportation and began to investigate the possibility of introducing multi-racial schools.
However, by the start of 1957, Faubus had passed a controversial tax in order to increase teacher salaries, and also faced an election challenge from Jim Johnson, leader of the right-wing of the Democratic Party in Arkansas and supporter of segregation.
Critics have long charged that Faubus' fight in Little Rock against the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that separate schools were unequal, was politically motivated. The ensuing battle helped shield him from the fallout of the tax increase, as well as diminish the appeal of Johnson.
Faubus's decision led to a showdown with President Dwight Eisenhower and former governor Sid McMath. In October 1957 Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to return to their barracks which effectively removed them from Faubus's control. Eisenhower then sent elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to protect the black students and enforce the Federal court order. In retaliation, Faubus shut down Little Rock Schools for the next two years.
Southern Democrats were a curiously divided group of progressive liberals, conservatives, and racists. With the start of the Civil Rights movement conservative and racist Democrats became "Dixiecrats", see the Wikipedia entry,Dixiecrat. Gov. Faubus is a odd case of someone who acted both progressively and regressively. As his main opponent was far to the right, he may have simply been shifting the blame of desegregating schools to the federal level. However, the Civil Rights movement ended his political career. Meanwhile, the Dixiecrats morphed into Reagan Republicans.
Now, if only Republicans had remained like Eisenhower's kind. Eisenhower addressed the nation on the Arkansas School Crisis with these words:
At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that communism bears towards a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence and indeed to the safety of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations.
Can one imagine President Bush speaking these words and meaning them. I can't. But Eisenhower also wrote the following to his brother in 1954,
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Have a great time, but mind those evil e coli-spewing deer in the baby spinach fields!
BTW, I've seen the text of Hugo Chavez's speech to the UN Assembly on several websites, but the UN.org's webpage for the 61st Assembly claims "English text is unavailable" and only offers video in English or Spanish. Why is that? I mean, the building is awash in translators.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan foreign minister was detained at the NY airport and strip-searched because his ticket flagged him as "almost a terrorist". A diplomatic incident followed. American officials protested, "There was no evidence to support the claim...." Please note: They didn't say it didn't happen, just that there was "no evidence".
Later, Hugo Chavez said "Mr. Diablo" was just trying to get even because the great Chavez can actually read serious books written in dense prose while "Mr. Diablo" is still waiting for the movie to come out.
Where does an over bloated, two bit, tin pot dictator get off coming here and insulting ANYONE. Chavez should have been forced to submit to a body cavity search.
Anonymous? Come on, admit it: you're really John Bolton. I'd recognize that suave diplomatic style anywhere.
David,
Bwahahahahaha. Not bad.
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