A Worker Without a Union...

My wack-job cousin, as regular readers know, is constantly needling me about my leftwing views. Recently she sent me an email she got from one of her fascist friends about the public sector union movement. It was the usual bullshit:

...the left seem to conflate private sector unions with those in the public sector, which obfuscates the real problem. I've not heard any outcry to dismantle private unions. But public employee unions are an entirely different problem ... a very large problem.
Without question state budgetary issues related to public union excesses have done as much as anything to create fiscal crises across the country. Public unions have deliberately and systematically worked to overcharge for their services by "negotiating" with the powers that be, resulting in fat salary and benefit packages and retirement plans...

And on and on in that vein. It's nothing new. I've been hearing this crap for 30+ years, how the greedy public employees who are lucky to have a job have been sucking up all the tax dollars, blah blah blah.

You can't reason with these people and it's best to ignore them.

Except I did send her back this little zinger:

A worker without a union is like a mouse in a roomful of cats negotiating what to have for lunch.

That kind of burnt her, I think, since she doesn't belong to a union and has been whining for years about how low her pay is, how fucked up her working conditions are, etc etc etc.

Snark. Take that.

"I Knew Something Was Wrong..."

That's the word from the mother of one 16-year-old high school moron named Chad Farnan, who came home from his first day of honors history class taught by James Corbett and told his parents that Corbett had stated that there is no evidence that George Washington ever prayed in public.

"I knew something was wrong," Teresa Farnan said, "because we have a picture of George Washington praying in our home."

It boggles the mind -- calling Sarah Palin...

But wait, there's more: When crybaby Chad complained that Corbett was "attacking" his christian faith, his parents did the only sensible thing: Instead of directly confronting the teacher, they sent Chad to school with a tape recorder so he could record these horrible antiamerican antichristian so-called "ideas" that Corbett was spouting in his nefarious attempts to poison little Chad's mind.

And following this surreptitious -- and likely illegal -- recording, they took what can only be seen as the next sensible step: Instead of contacting the principal or the teacher, they filed a lawsuit, using something called the Advocates for Faith and Freedom, which I will admit I hadn't heard of before, but it appears to be "one of those" organizations, set up for the sole purpose of filing frivolous lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved believers in the One True Faith. Okay, not the sole purpose, since they appear to be pretty good at self-promotion and raising money.

It didn't take them but a few days to book appearances on the media outlets of the Usual Suspects -- Bill Orally, Slanthead Hannity, etc. -- in an attempt to inflame "the base" into sending them money for their "defense" -- never mind the fact that THEY filed the lawsuit and it was the poor history teacher who was the defendant.

Anyway, for what it's worth, the kind-of-reliable-but-not-really LA Times has most of the details, if you want to read them, but you can get a better picture of what happened if you read the article by the teacher himself, James Corbett, "In Defense of 'Jesus Glasses'":

The facts of my case are fairly simple. Chad Farnan, a 15-year-old self-described Christian fundamentalist student in my Advanced Placement European History class, sued me for a “pattern” of statements unconstitutionally hostile to religion. His claim was based on hours of illegal and surreptitious recordings.
. . .
I could criticize voodoo for animal cruelty in disemboweling a chicken, but not call the belief in entrail prophecy “superstition” or “nonsense.” By “Lemon” logic, the fundamentalist Muslim belief in jihad would be protected from criticism by a government actor as long as no crime was committed. How many government actors, including U.S. presidents, have criticized radical mullahs for their belief that the Koran demands death for infidels? I doubt any were in violation of the Constitution. Certainly, no legal scholar would argue that Christian beliefs have a special, and protected, place in constitutional law. So it may be upsetting to Christian fundamentalists for a teacher to say, for example, that a talking donkey is ridiculous, but should he be open to a lawsuit? I feel like I’m the donkey Chad and the Advocates are riding for fun and profit, but because I requested a summary judgment I—unlike biblical Balaam’s donkey—have no voice, “magic” or legal.

As we all know, the whole point of this lawsuit, and others like it, are not to "preserve the religious freedom" of poor put-upon students like whiny little Chad. No, they are intended to (1) Raise money for the Xian Right, and (2) Exercise a "chilling effect" on freedom of thought and its natural corollary, freedom of speech.

I wish that Corbett had not asked for that summary judgment. He should have gone full bore jury trial against these assholes. They need some "tough love" public humiliation. So they can be true "martyrs" for their faith...

Damn Those Atheist Muslims

You'd think that Newt Gingrich, who has a degree in history, would know better. But here's a guy who will pretty much say anything that comes out of his lizard brain, without the automatic self-guidance system that the rest of us normal people have.

Here's his latest:

"I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

It truly boggles the mind. Of course what the Newster would much prefer, I presume, is that this secular atheist country be dominated by the Xian Right. Yeah, that makes much more sense, and is much more palatable.

And I feel sorry for those two grandchildren, who are being dragged into politics as props for this kind of nonsense. Like Sarah Palin's offspringlets.

But it must be okay, since these are Republicans, the Party of Family Values^tm...

Malignancy, the GOP & Lance Armstrong

I see from The News that Iowa's own Steven King (not related to the famous author) has likened the health care reform act to a "malignant tumor" that must be yanked from the body for the patient (i.e., the US) to survive.

It's no secret that I am a cancer survivor myself, and it's good to see that a fellow cancer survivor, famous cyclist and record Tour de France seven-time-winner Lance Armstrong is calling King out on his bullshit:

"That is certainly a poor choice of words, I think. Certainly he would admit that. … I hope? ...Maybe he should use a sports analogy, or something, for his own sake."
Armstrong is in Washington to urge Congress not to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, which faces a 5.1 percent cut over the next six months as part of a House-passed spending bill.

You go, Lance!

Okay, so who the fuck is Steve King? For the novices, King is a Rethug asshole (but I repeat myself) from Iowa who thinks that he's "all that", much more than he really is, and I guess he thinks that he can play "kingmaker" in the Iowa caucuses next year.

Fuck him. And the hose horse he rode in on.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Frances Perkins, and the New Deal

Just 100 Years Ago Today:

Saturday, March 25, 1911, was a raw and chilly day in New York City. Just because it was a Saturday, that did not mean a day off work for the five hundred employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a typical urban sewatshop which occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Square, in Greenwich Village.

The employees, mostly young women between the ages 16 and 23, worked ten-hour days Monday through Friday, and an additional eight-and-a-half hours on Saturdays, all for an average pay of $6 per week ($135 in today’s dollars).

At 4:45 PM the work day was finally winding to a close for the tired sweatshop workers when a fire broke out on the 8th floor. The actual cause of the fire was ultimately undetermined, but fire marshals concluded it was likely due to an unextinguished match or smoldering cigarette butt discarded in a bin of scraps under the table of one of the fabric cutters.

Smoking was prohibited on the premises, but that generally didn’t stop the workers from sneaking a cigarette now and then.

Given the incendiary nature of the material -- fabric for women’s blouses -- the fire spread rapidly until it engulfed the entire floor, and then spread to the floors above.

While there were a number of exits available to the workers, several stairway doors were locked -- “to prevent theft” was the official excuse of the business owners, but some of the survivors had another explanation: The doors were locked to prevent, in a tragic irony, “the girls” from taking unauthorized smoke breaks. Managers who had the keys to the doors escaped early, somehow neglecting to unlock the doors on their way out.

The building did have a single fire escape, but it was so flimsy that it quickly became overloaded with people trying to escape and crumpled, sending many to their deaths on the sidewalk below.

Within minutes so much panic had set in that the employees started leaping from windows to escape the flames. The sidewalks became so littered with the dead and dying that fire fighters had difficulty even getting into the building.

When the day was over 146 persons had perished in what remains the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City and the fourth largest in the history of the country.

The owners of the sweatshop, along with many of their employees, had managed to flee to the roof of the building and they survived.

The owners were charged with manslaughter by a grand jury and went to trial but they were ultimately found not guilty; they were almost equally as fortunate in the civil trial which followed three years later -- they were required to pay compensation, but in the amount of only $75 per victim (about $1600 today). The owners’ insurance company in turn paid them $400 per victim (about $8500), so the “unfortunate incident” actually turned out to be quite profitable for them.

However, in spite of this, some positive things came about from the terrible tragedy that was Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Because of the public outrage over the causes of the deaths and the tremendous loss of life, the state of New York launched several investigations into workplace safety and workers’ rights.

During the investigations, the fire chief of New York City stated that there were over 200 similar factories where another conflagration was not only possible, but likely.

The investigations also focused on workplace sanitation and occupational diseases in addition to fire safety, and as a result the state of New York enacted new laws and established new standards and regulations to ensure worker protection on the job. With these modernized labor laws, New York became one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform and worker protection.

The labor movement, especially the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, got a tremendous boost in membership and influence, as did the Socialist Party.

Rose Schneiderman, a union activist and a socialist, spoke at a memorial for the victims a week after the tragedy and tied the event to the necessity for union organization:

…you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us....I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

But by far the most lasting legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire came from a young woman who, by sheer coincidence, an accident of time and place, was an eyewitness on the ground.

Frances Perkins, a 28-year-old recent graduate student at Columbia University and head of the New York Consumers League, was enjoying a cup of tea near Washington Square when she heard the fire engines. She hurried to the scene just in time to see the doomed workers plunging to their deaths from the upper stories of the building.

Appalled by what she saw, Perkins became very active in the movement to reform working conditions and worked tirelessly on the Committee on Safety of the City of New York to improve factory safety.

In 1918 she was the first woman to be appointed to the New York State Industrial Commission, and she became its chair in 1926.

She ended up working closely with the New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was inaugurated to the US presidency in 1933, he named Perkins to the post of Secretary of Labor, the first woman cabinet secretary in the history of the country.

As Secretary of Labor, Perkins put her tireless energy to work developing the sweeping reforms which were the hallmark achievements of the New Deal, most importantly, both the watershed Social Security Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, both of which had long-term positive results for the working men and women of the United States.

Later Perkins said that the New Deal actually started on March 25, 1911 with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Now, just 100 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy, we are engaged in a new struggle to preserve the worker protections and the regulations on business ultimately brought into existence by the outrage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a new struggle to prevent the overturn and disestablishment of the greatest achievements of the New Deal.

The Republican Party has made no secret of the fact that they want to roll back the New Deal and reinstitute the systems and the regulations -- or rather lack thereof -- and the kind of laissez-faire capitalism that made their industrialists so obscenely wealthy in America’s so-called Gilded Age, a time when labor was viewed as just another production commodity, another raw material to be used up and thrown out.

Are we not so very far away from a repeat of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy? All one needs to do is to look at what is continuing to happen in Wisconsin, not to mention the ongoing efforts in my own state to dismantle, piece by piece, the protections afforded by our own Department of Labor and Industries.

How many bricks can you take out of a wall before it collapses?

We must remain vigilant and keep fighting, so we don’t have to find out the answer to that question, and so we don’t have a repeat tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

Let us always keep in mind the slogan of the old IWW: An injury to one is an injury to all.

Oh, the Irony!

You all know that I just launched my Internets business, Privacy Guaranteed Data Recovery, so it was ironic to the max that yesterday morning I woke up to...you guessed it...a fried hard drive.

But, fortunately for all involved, I was able to go buy a new hard drive, install it into The Beast (what I call my circa 2006 desktop) AND successfully recover ALL of my data from the dead drive.

In the long run, it was a good thing that it happened, since I needed the refresher course, and there were a few things that I had somehow forgotten over the few years since I retired, but in the end I was able to recover all of my email, all of my passwords, all of my browser settings, and all of my personalization of Word.

Now I am refreshed, as is The Beast, and all is right with the world.

Ahhh. It's time to tipple a few micro-brewskis and kick back.

The Reality-Challenged American Public

Ann Davidow has a great piece over at Buzzflash called Americans Often Refuse to Accept Reality. One of my favorite print media columnists, Leonard Pitts, has a column today entitled When Ears Don't Hear, Truth is Futile.

Both of these deal pretty much with the same topic, the tolerance of otherwise laughable concepts and ideas which in a Reality-Based world would not even come up for consideration, let alone discussion.

Davidow:

...in almost every area of concern to the country there is a level of disbelief about anything that resembles fact-based information that is truly astonishing. Despite overwhelming support in the scientific community, for instance, that climate change is a serious challenge to the environment, many voters prefer to ignore those conclusions and turn instead to the limited intellects of political deniers. Perhaps the truth is too scary to contemplate or maybe the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Bachmans are just more entertaining and, besides, thinking otherwise requires greater mental capacity than they possess...

Pitts:

...what many people already believe could not be clearer: Black equals crime. We’re talking about at the mitochondrial level. We’re talking a crime strand on the DNA.
Black equals crime is a formulation as old as slave manacles and as modern as e-mail, the engine driving lynch mobs and lawmen who sold black men into slavery as late as 1945, and cops who pull black drivers over because .?.?. And the tragedy is not simply that many white men and women embrace this damnable lie in the face of all refutation, but that black children hear it and breathe it in like poison till it becomes part of them, till it informs how they see themselves in the world.
Some years ago, I posed a question to an audience of school kids. If a white person is murdered, what are the odds the assailant is black? Seventy-five percent? Hands — every hand in the room, it seemed — bolted into the air. Most of them belonged to black kids.
For the record, the actual number is 13.

Answers to this problem? I don't know. It seems insurmountable. When you have members of congress and presidential candidates believing -- seriously believing -- that the earth is only some 6,000 years old, and otherwise intelligent beings pushing for the inclusion of that "theory" as part of science education in our public schools, when the airwaves are polluted daily by the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who I think is intelligent and doesn't believe half the stuff he spouts -- all the more dangerous for that) and Glenn Beck (who I think is not intelligent and actually does believe the stuff he spouts, all the more dangerous for that), then I seriously question whether this great experiment in democracy (the USA) can long survive.

Jeez, what a bummer today has been... Hopefully I'll get some funny bone back tomorrow. Sorry to be such a buzzkill downer, man...

No Looting in Japan

It's become a talking point for the wingnuttery, including a letter to the editor today in my local paper: There was no looting in Japan following the earthquake. Flat out statement. Sounds good, looks good.

Because, of course, only BLACK people loot after a natural disaster.

Too bad it's not true. But of course, you know that anything coming out of the mouths of the ClusterFox "News" blowholes and their ilk is, ipso facto and QED, a lie. No, make that a FUCKING LIE.

Here's a story with the facts. At least 146 known cases of looting. With video.

The Grade School Solution

It's a lot like grade school, where the boys pick on only the girls that they like.

It's a funny thing that pretty much the only countries in the Middle East that we care enough about to bomb are ones that we "like", i.e., the ones that are actually sitting on a gazillion barrels of oil (Iraq) or sitting astride valuable real estate that can be used to throw down oil pipelines (Afghanistan) from the mid-Asian oil fields to the sea.

For the record, I do not support the Obama Administration's attacks on Libya. I know that I am at odds with a large portion of the nation, and even with my own Democratic Party, but I didn't back Bill Clinton's foreign misadventures, either.

And it's no secret that I hated Dubya for his illegal war on Iraq.

So back to Libya and Moammar Kadaffyduck. He's gone from a faintly humorous footnote to history to being painted by the CPM/SCLM* as the walking talking ranting raving embodiment of the love child of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin by way of Mao Tse-Tung (or "Mao Zedong", or however the old dead guy is spelling his name this week). How long until the American populace gets ginned up for yet another "humanitarian" invasion of a Middle Eastern country?

BTW, where is Congress on all of this? John Boner is too busy getting drunk and playing golf to do anything except cut funding to NPR, and have we heard a single fucking word out of Mr. Orange Smash about all of the goddam JOBS he was supposed to be creating?

Of course, invading Libya will create a lot of jobs, I guess. Jobs for Halliburton, jobs for Blackwater (Motto: "If Jesus had chosen us for his security, he'd still be here"), and especially jobs for Arab terrorists, who will have yet another new rallying cry for jihad against the American Crusaders.

---

[* CPM/SCLM = Capitalist Pig Media/So-Called Liberal Media]

Stone Homosexuals to Death? The Bible Says So...

Just when you thought that things couldn't possibly get any fucking weirder, the news out of Pennsylvania that an elderly man was beaten to death with a sockful of rocks swims to the surface.

According to the SF Gate website, Murray Seidman, a 70-year-old man in a Philadelphia suburb was beaten to death by a young "friend" (somewhat strangely named "John Thomas"...who can make this shit up?) who is now trying to claim that he was following the biblical injunction to stone homosexuals to death.

Must be true if the bible says so. Plus the little fucker with the sockful of rocks even prayed about it. Yep, sure enough, his god told him to go for it...

Perhaps the fact that he was the executor and sole beneficiary of the dead man's estate had just a minor bearing on that answer from god.

Naaa, probably not. As we all know, god works in "mysterious ways" and the fact that the perpetrator stood to gain from his foul deed, thereby having a clear motive, isn't a mystery at all, even though it shows up time and again in "mystery" fiction.

Go figure.

Welfare "Reform" Minnesota Style

The latest in loony behavior from Minnesota (Michelle Bachmann is from there, if you recall) is a proposal -- by RepubliCONs, naturally, the party of "government should leave people alone" -- to prohibit welfare recipients from having more than $20 in their pocket at any one time. Prohibit, as in "make illegal". Prohibit, as in "make it a crime"...

I don't know how they plan to enforce this -- maybe an army of welfare cops shaking down known poor people that they think have more than twenty bucks, maybe a pack of welfare-money-sniffing Alsatian Hounds (aka "German shepherds") roaming the streets of Poortown and snarling down any hapless welfare leaches who happen to have cash on them.

Jeez, this goes beyond what is normally weird, even for Rethugs. Hmmm, I wonder what's behind it...

No, I don't really, because if you study a little further, you find that welfare recipients in Minnesota get their benefits in the form of a debit-card-like device, which is good only in certain terminals. If this bill passes, then welfare recipients will not be able to draw out cash to pay their bills, buy food, etc. They will have to use the "special terminals" for each and every separate transaction, from buying groceries to buying gas to renting a video.

As you know, all of this electronic banking does not come free. Each and every transaction that goes through a cash machine generates a profit for the company that owns or administers the machine.

So who administers the processing and payment of this welfare debit card system?

Bank of America.

Surprised? No, me neither.

Future ClusterFox "News" On-Air Personality?

Here's a YouTube video that is going viral. It stars a UCLA student named Alexandra Wallace going on a racist rant against, of all people, Asians:

Okay, call me naive, but it strains credulity to think that this young woman would go on YouTube with such a racist, nativist, idiotic rant. I think that this was dreamed up as a joke and in the execution and delivery it went horribly wrong.

Now she'll have to live with this as her fifteen minutes of fame the rest of her life. Can you imagine her first job interview when she graduates?

Of course she can always go to work for the media wing of the RepubliCON Party. They love them some racists over there, 'specially them that gots them some push-up-yer-boobs bras and bubble-head-blond hair... Want to bet that she gets a permanent gig on ClusterFox "News" out of this?

Oh, and be sure to catch one Asian guy's answer to little Alexandra.

Japan Earthquake Relief

Here are five charities you can donate to for help in relieving the suffering from the 8.9 earthquake in Japan (from Yahoo! News):

Global Giving
With Global Giving, you choose what relief you're interested in donating to, and the organization gets your funds to your cause. If Japan is where you are sending your donation, Global Giving also provides you with updates of what is happening in the region. The Global Giving project for Japan is working with other relief organizations, with a funding goal of $90,000. Donate one time, monthly, or make a gift in memory of a loved one.
Red Cross
When you think of disaster relief organizations, the American Red Cross, founded in 1881 by Clara Barton, probably comes to mind.
You may contribute to the Red Cross on-line or by mail. Companies can look into matching gifts with the Red Cross. If you prefer to call in your donation, you can do that at 1-800-RED-CROSS for English or 1-800 257 7575 for Spanish. Or, you may text REDCROSS to 90999, and $10 will be added to your cell phone bill.
AmeriCares
The AmeriCares International Disaster Relief Fund has been working with international disaster relief since 1982. Your donation helps with medicine, medical supplies and other assistance. In addition, as reported at the AmeriCares website, "Your gift will only be used to support our work at times of an international disaster."
UNICEF
The focus of UNICEF is children around the world. They work in over 150 countries and help support children with "health care and immunizations, clean water, nutrition and food security, education, emergency relief and more." Americans can send in their financial support for the Japan earthquake online or by mail.
International Medical Corps
International Medical Corps focuses their efforts on "saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training and relief and development programs," globally.
Nancy Aossey, President and CEO of International Medical Corps released a statement, "We are putting together relief teams, as well as supplies, and are in contact with partners in Japan and other affected countries to assess needs and coordinate our activities. While Japan has a large capacity to manage a disaster of this scale, we will respond as needed."

Please consider making even a small donation to one or more of these worthy relief organizations. When humanity is on the line, it's up to all of us to help out.

I'm Now an Internet Businessman

So it turns out that being retired isn't as lucrative as I thought it was going to be, what with all of those pesky laws concerning the importation and distribution of rare South American herbs...

Just kidding. But I actually have started a business. I call it Privacy Guaranteed Data Recovery. Check it out. As the name implies, I extract data from your fried hard drive and guarantee personal privacy in returning it to you... Trade secrets, company plans, compromising emails or embarrassing photos -- no one will see them except you.

I decided to put to good use all that knowledge that I absorbed over my working life as a so-called Information Technology Specialist with the state of Washington.

Besides, it ought to keep me off the streets, out of the pool halls, and put some beer money in my pocket. Not to mention keeping She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed in new shoes...

So if you know anyone with a fried hard drive and some ... compromising ... information on it that they don't want anyone else to see, do them -- and me -- a favor and send them my way.

Thanks.

Islam Hater? This Video is for You

Here's US Rep Keith Ellison in response to the McCarthy-like witch hunt "hearings" of the King of the Khyber Popguns:

Jesus, when will we ever learn?

Prosecutors: 'Oh, Waaah! We've Lost Our Death Penalty'

With today's watershed political-bravery action, Illinois has abolished the death penalty.

Predictably there's a flurry of wingnut hand-wringing rage over it, but the most poignant is this story out of Chicago, wherein the prosecutors are crying the blues because they've "lost their leverage" over murderers, rapists, etc., because...get this...they can no longer dangle the death penalty over someone's head and get them to cooperate by pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

Ex-fucking-cuse me? That is exactly what is wrong with having a fucking death penalty in this country. It's exercise is totally at the whim of a local prosecutor. So it happens that a local yokel prosecutor in a big Kill-em-All-Let-God-Sort-Em-Out state who is out to make a political name for himself can bring death penalty charges against pretty much anybody, and the more executions he can carve on his pistol-grip, the farther in politics he will advance.

On the other end of the scale is my own Washington State and its refusal to bring death penalty charges against America's most prolific serial killer Gary "Green River Killer" Ridgway, who has been convicted of 48 49 murders and who is believed responsible for something in excess of 70 killings.

If anyone deserves the death penalty, it is Gary Ridgway, yet he is over there at the maximum security pen at Walla Walla serving 48 life sentences -- no wait, make that 49, since he was recently transported back across the state for yet another trial and another guilty verdict and another life sentence, at the cost to the taxpayers of several hundred thousand dollars in a time of cramped budgets and forced layoffs from every state agency, including the Department of Corrections, who had to lay off correctional workers, with the result that one of their remaining employees was murdered by an inmate inside the Monroe prison...

But I'm starting to rant.

The bottom line is that as long as the death penalty is subject to the individual whim of politically ambitious prosecutors and as long as serial killers like Gary Ridgway can skate by while some crack-addled gang-banger who can't really figure out how to even handle a weapon shoots a bystander and ends up on death row for it, it's time to end the Ultimate Penalty.

I say Hooray for Illinois!, and you local-yokel ambitious prosecutors who claim that "the death penalty is how we express our respect for human life" and want a free ride to the top on the corpses of executed "criminals" can stick it up your collective asses.

---

Update 3-10-11: Apparently I failed, when I wrote this post, to make it clear that I am fundamentally opposed to the death penalty in all of its permutations. Well, I am, and that's that...

The Dark Side of Positive Thinking

Think there isn't a dark side to positive thinking? Think again. Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking:

Cartoons by the RSAorg

Well worth the time to watch to the end. It puts a new spin on all that "Power of Positive Thinking" crap that we've been culturally saddled with forever -- well, since the early 50s -- but which got a whole new life with the ascent of the I-Got-Mine-So-Fuck-You generation.

Women's History Month: Louise Bryant

March is Women's History Month, so I'd like to kick it off with a short homage to Louise Bryant.

Those who have seen the epic 1981 historical film Reds will remember Diane Keaton playing the role of Louise Bryant opposite Warren Beatty as John Reed, but a movie can only do so much to illuminate a historical figure.

Louise Bryant (1885-1936) came from modest roots (her father had been a coal miner and railroad worker) and she eventually became active in the Suffrage Movement in Portland, Oregon.

It was also in Portland where she met native Portlander John Reed, and followed him to New York City, where she became active in left-wing and socialist causes. She also went to Russia with Reed, where they witnessed the 1917 Russian Revolution firsthand.

Most people know that John Reed wrote the definitive study of the revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, published in 1919, but most people don't know that Louise Bryant beat him into print a year earlier with her reportage, Six Red Months in Russia, which is available for download at the University of Pennsylvania's digital library.

Both Reed and Bryant were dedicated communists by this time, so their reportage is a little ... shall we say "slanted" ... but they are nevertheless classic descriptions of one of history's most momentous events, one that pretty much shaped the rest of the 20th Century and one whose aftermath we are still dealing with today.

Oh Sweet Schaudenfreude!

For years the Rethugs have been crying about "voter fraud", and there's never been a single shred of evidence.

Until now.

Now the evidence is in, and -- sit down for this because I could hardly believe it myself -- it was the Republican Secretary of State in, of all places, Indiana who has been charged with it!

Well, in the words of Jane Ace, you could have knocked me over with a fender...

Ah, schaudenfreude, you are sooo sweet!!!

Book of the Month: The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!

Way back in 1974, Otto Bettmann, of the world-famous Bettmann Archive of photography and images, wrote The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!. It was intended as a nostrum against what Bettmann saw as an erroneous -- even dangerous --
reliance on the golden years of the past, a nostalgic longing for an America that was somehow...better...than the one of the early 1970s. It turned out he was right, for this longing for a better America past resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and we all know what happened after that.

Now that the Republicans and their Teabagger enablers appear to be in ideological ascendance, and want to "take the country back", this book will provide a sobering look at the kind of country they want to take us back to. Wealthy and corrupt corporations with their tentacles spread over the nation, child labor, horrific working conditions in unhealthy environments for low pay, the absence of food and drug laws that prevent the corporations from poisoning children and women, the suppression -- the outright murder -- of union organizers. It's all in this book, and much more, and it is profusely illustrated with contemporary illustrations from the vast library of the Bettmann Archive.

This book ought to be required reading for every American who longs to take us back to "the good old days"... But, as in most things, I am afraid that the people who really need to read it won't. And even if they did, they would most likely, against all odds, relate to the capitalist pigs who brought about such destruction and not to the vast majority of people who suffer under it. Jeez, just like they do now...

A Facebook for the Fringe

I wasn't aware of this until I just saw it on the Fossicking blog, but the wingnuttery under the aegis of, who else, Glenn Beck, are fighting back with their own version of Facebook. It's called Freedom Connector, and it says you can "use FreedomConnector to connect with Tea Party activists and other conservatives taking action for less government and more freedom".

Check it out. Know thy enemy. Here's what Melissa of Fossicking has to say about it:

The site functions as a social network for like-minded Tea Party supporters/ members. From what I can gather, the site was launched on the 14th of February and is run by FreedomWorks – a conservative Astroturf organization.
According to Glenn Beck, he wants to take the tools that the socialists and communists and radical Muslims (progressives and terrorists) have been using, and in turn use them for good. FreedomConnector is the answer.
However, a peek at the Privacy Policy or Terms of Service and you’ll see that your “private” information is not so private, but owned by the website – including photos and activity carried out on the site.
The homepage of the site gives the first and last name of its members along with their geographical location. The site goes even more in depth by allowing a search for other members by issues, congressional district, state or county. You even have the option of directly linking your FreedomConnecter profile with Facebook or Twitter.
This is no different than most online services, but for a political organization with a platform of smaller government and less control over the lives of Americans – this is just plain weird.
I promise George Soros didn’t pay me, either directly or indirectly, to post this.

Okay, there you go. You can even check out what's happening in your own county and see who is your "enemy". I checked out the Thurston County page and saw a few people who say they had been facing us across the way at the Saturday rally. The people on the opposite side, the steps across the way, that you can see in the background of the photo, were "activists" from Glennbeckistan, teabaggers who are at least consistent: They don't taxes but they want all the services, and they don't want unions but they are perfectly happy to take the benefits that unions have provided them -- a working wage, the 40-hour week, etc. Check out some of the comments on their page.

Oh, and George Soros didn't pay me, either...

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 4: Jermain Wesley Loguen

Today's Forgotten Man, Jermain Wesley Loguen was born in slavery in Davidson County, Tennessee, in 1813, the son of a white man and a black slave mother.

At the age of 21 he took his master's horse and made tracks north, eventually ending up in Canada. After working a series of jobs in Canada and the US, he eventually settled in Syracuse NY, which was a major stop on the Underground Railroad.

He became a popular abolitionist and was well known. He wrote an autobiography, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, a Narrative of Real Life.

When the book was published and word of his fame reached his former masters, the wife actually sent him a letter demanding his return or the payment of $1000.

Loguen's scathing reply, in the form of an open letter published in the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, is a classic:

Mrs. Sarah Logue. .. . You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "You know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? . .. Shame on you!
But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle, and steal me? . .. Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me.. . .
Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen

(As quoted in Howard K. Zinn's A People's History of the United States)

Rally in the Snow

Yesterday some of my friends and I spent much of the day outside in the snow with about 3500 other people in solidarity with our union brothers and sisters in Wisconsin.

As a rule, we don't get a whole lot of snow here in Western Washington, but we had our share yesterday. It was pretty cold, but not too cold to chant and sing and generally make ourselves obnoxious to the counter-demonstrators -- less than 100 from the looks of it -- across the way carrying signs about "Union Greed" and shit like that. You can see them on the steps of the legislative building in the background of this photo.

They were put up to it -- and bussed in from various rural parts of the county and the ultra-conservative county to the south of us -- by a pack of neofascists from the Orwellian-named "Evergreen Freedom Foundation", which is a rightwing "think" tank here in Olympia. It was pathetic and if that's all the counter-demonstration I could do, I'd slink away in shame.

Anyway, great day and then lunch and beer at my favorite pub afterwards. Mmmmmm.....

Outside Agitators = "Reds"

Outside agitators. Yeah, that's who to blame for the unrest in Wisconsin. Not those victimized-by-commies state employees who, up to now, were happy to just have a job...

Jesus, could it get any more blatant? Case in point: I grew up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, where "everyone" knew that the "negroes" were a bunch of happy-go-lucky-but-lazy chuckleheads who could barely manage to tie their own shoes, even while they were shining yours, and who were just fine with their second-class-citizen lot in life, until those goddam "outside agitators" (aka "Reds" -- e.g.., communists, socialists, liberals, voting rights reformers, civil rights activists, etc. etc.) got them all stirred up against their benign benefactors in the white race. After all, everyone knew that the "negroes" were just a shade above the animal level, and they were run basically by their lowest emotions. No wonder that they were easy prey for those goddam Red agitators...

Jesus, it would be funny if it weren't so fucking seriously pathetic. "Outside agitators"? Really, governor?

Here's an appropriate quote from The Grapes of Wrath:

[Tom Joad:] "Well, I was there. They wasn't no agitators. What they call reds. What the hell is these reds anyways?"
Timothy scraped a little hill level in the bottom of the ditch. The sun made his white bristle beard shine. "They's a lot of fellas wanta know what reds is." He laughed. "One of our boys foun' out." He patted the piled earth gently with his shovel. "Fella named Hines- got 'bout thirty thousand acres, peaches and grapes- got a cannery an' a winery. Well, he's all a time talkin' about 'them goddamn reds.' 'Goddamn reds is drivin' the country to ruin,' he says, an' 'We got to drive these here red bastards out.' Well, they were a young fella jus' come out west here, an' he's listenin' one day. He kinda scratched his head an' he says, 'Mr. Hines, I ain't been here long. What is these goddamn reds?' Well, sir, Hines says, 'A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five!' Well, this young fella he thinks about her, an' he scratches his head, an' he says, 'Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines. I ain't a son-of-a-bitch, but if that's what a red is- why, I want thirty cents an hour. Ever'body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we're all reds.'" Timothy drove his shovel along the ditch bottom, and the solid earth shone where the shovel cut it.
Tom laughed. "Me too, I guess." His pick arced up and drove down, and the earth cracked under it. The sweat rolled down his forehead and down the sides of his nose, and it glistened on his neck. "Damn it," he said, "a pick is a nice tool ( umph ), if you don' fight it ( umph ). You an' the pick ( umph ) workin' together ( umph )."

Yeah, when it comes down to supporting the Working Man against the Corporations, we're all "Reds".

Santorum: "Crusades Not Aggression, Smeared by The Left..."

Just when you thought that they couldn't get any fucking crazier, Rick "Man-On-Dog-Sex" Santorum comes out with a doozy:

Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom ... The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
He added, “They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem.”
After asserting that Christianity had not shown any “aggression” to the Muslim world, the former Pennsylvania senator — who is considering a 2012 run for the White House — argued that American intervention in the Middle East helps promote “core American values.”

Anti-historical???!!!! As in when you raise an army of avaricious "Christians" and invade another culture's homeland which is thousands of miles away from your own and you do this repeatedly over the course of a couple of centuries and you do this in the name of your god and you slaughter not only those heathen and nasty adherents to a "different" god but also a bunch of adherents to your own god who look and dress and smell different, that's NOT aggression?????

WTF??????

I mean, you can actually look this up in a couple of seconds and see that Ricky is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

Jesus, and just the fact that Little Ricky Dogsex Santorum can spew it right out of his mouth to a knuckledragging crowd of awe-struck true believers tells me that as a nation, as a culture, we are fucked. No one has a sense of history any more, so anything that anyone wants to say about historical events, regardless of how many lies they contain, is swallowed whole by the Moron-American Voting Bloc.

A Little Help Here, Please...?

Bernie Weisz is not a Vietnam veteran, but he is a historian of the Vietnam War, and has written many detailed and coherent reviews of books that have come out of the war (uh, ahem, mine included...).

And now he has developed some temporary, but nevertheless severe and debilitating, medical problems ... and he also has lost his job. Which means he has no medical insurance and is facing the inevitable financial disasters that these events lead to.

He needs some help, so please, everyone, consider going to over PayPal and kicking a little dough into Bernie's account. Even just a few bucks will help him out immensely.

His PayPal account is (naturally) his email: BernWei1@aol.com

Thanks in advance to everyone who contributes. You will be helping out a good guy and someone who really needs the money.

Meeting Dennis Kucinich

I haven't posted much this week since I've been involved in the local Democratic Party politics all week:


That's me with former Presidential candidate and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, in case you didn't recognize the guy on the right.

And that's me on the left, and they say that if you are to the Left of Dennis Kucinich, then you are a card-carrying radical for certain-sure! Of course I am on his "picture-left", but in real life, he was the one on the left...

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 3: George Washington Williams

George Washington Williams was a soldier, minister, writer and diplomat. His greatest feat is one that has been totally forgotten today. Read on.

George Washington Williams was born in Pennsylvania in 1849 and at the age of 14 he joined the Union Army under an assumed name, where he managed to get into some of the final battles of the Civil War. Following the war, he went to Mexico and joined the rebel army which was fighting to overthrow the Emperor Maximilian. He was commissioned a lieutenant, brushed up on his Spanish, and finally returned to the US in 1867.

He must have loved military service, since he immediately rejoined the army and was sent to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where he was wounded in 1868. After getting out of the army because of his wound, he attended Howard University and then the Newton Theological Institute; he became the first African-American to graduate from there.

He was ordained a Baptist minister, moved around the country, then studied law, and became the first African-American elected to the Ohio State Legislature. He was well-connected enough to be appointed Consul General to Haiti by President Chester A. Arthur, although he never served.

Williams was also the author of a sprawling and somewhat long-winded two-volume 1883 History of the Negro Race in America, which is available for download from Project Gutenberg at Volume 1 and Volume 2.

But what he is should be most noted for -- and sadly forgotten for -- was his journey to the so-called Congo Free State to investigate the conditions "on the ground" in King Leopold's personal African domain.

What he found shocked and appalled and sickened him: Brutality, repression, slavery, physical disfigurement (slaves who failed to meet production quotas lost their hands) and various other "crimes against humanity", for which he sent an accusatory open letter to King Leopold of Belgium, who owned and ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom -- there was no official Belgian colonization of the Congo; Leopold owned it outright and reaped the huge financial benefits of the reign of terror that was the Congo "Free" State.

It was Williams' report and this open letter that first revealed to the world the atrocities that had been hidden in Leopold's "heart of darkness". Finally with public opinion turned against him Leopold abandoned his personal stake in the Congo and the government of Belgium took it over as a colony in 1908.

Williams' trip to Africa and the worldwide effect his J'Accuse! had on Leopold is fascinatingly told in great detail in Adam Hochschild's highly-recommended book, King Leopold's Ghost.

It's a Beckonspiracy!

I just discovered a terrific online application, the Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theory Generator:



It is, as it claims, Fair and Balanced Paranoia, Delivered on Demand.

Check it out.

Birthers Love Palin

A recent poll shows that 51% of likely Rethug primary voters still believe, in the face of all of the evidence , that Obama was not born in the US and they still want to see the birth certificate.

Interestingly enough, this is the same group that puts Sarah "Caribou Barbie" Palin at the very top of their choices for president in 2012.

(Okay, I knew that this was supposed to be Palin-Free February, but come on...)

So I think it's a fair question, and one that gets asked on the always valuable and freely entertaining Palingates blog: Where is Trig's birth certificate?

And those of you who think it's somehow "not fair" to drag a politician's children into the debate, where were you when Rush Limbaugh called the then-12-year-old Chelsea Clinton the "White House dog"? Besides, Mama Grisly has been exploiting her children for political gain since day one; she's the one who dangled them out there over the balcony railing like Michael Jackson. As Palingates says, "We would love to leave them alone, but Sarah Palin keeps shoving them in our faces to market her Christian/real American family values..."

Sarah Palin's Alaska? Really, that was really all about Alaska and not all about furthering her own selfish political aspirations? Especially when, in numerous shots, from inside a moving vehicle, and neither she nor her daughter, Willow, are even pretending to wear seat belts? I call that child endangerment, and the laws of every state, including Alaska's, agree with me.

I also call that child exploitation for political gain -- after all, if that kid was sitting back in the seat with the belt fastened properly around her, she wouldn't be visible to the camera, and what would be the point of it all then? Sarah talking to herself? I'm sure she does enough of that as it is, but chances are she wouldn't want it caught on camera...

So, getting back to the topic. If that 51% of voters vote with their True Beliefs, then we can look forward to Sarah Palin being the GOP nominee.

Bring it on! If the Democrats can't beat Caribou Barbie*, then they deserve to be out of power.

----

[* In a fair election, that is. If she does win, it will be fraud at the polls in numbers so frightening that it will make the old Soviet Union elections look scrupulously honest by comparison.]

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 2: Henry Ossian Flipper

Today's Forgotten Man is Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African American to graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point.

Flipper was born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1856. He attended Atlanta University (under the protection of the presence of the United States Army during the Reconstruction period) and while he was still a freshman he was appointed to West Point by Representative James Crawford Freeman (who, despite his last name, was not of African-American descent...).

Flipper, a member of the Class of 1877, joined four other
African-Americans at West Point. They were harassed and ostracized by the white cadets, to the point that the other four eventually dropped out. Flipper was left to eat his meals alone, study alone, and attend class with cadets who refused to speak to him.

Regardless of the hardhips he was forced to endure (Jackie Robinson's seem to pale by comparison), Flipper graduated West Point in 1877 and was commissioned a lieutenant in the US Army. He was assigned to the 10th Cavalry Regiment and was the first African-American to command a troop of Buffalo Soldiers.

Read the entire history of Flipper, and especially the part that the appropriately-named William Rufus Shafter (aka "Pecos Bill") played in kicking Flipper out of the Army with the officer-equivalent of a dishonorable discharge, which happened apparently only because Shafter hated seeing black officers. BTW, Fort Shafter in Hawaii is named for this racist pig of a general, as is the town of Shafter, California.

Anyway, Flipper spent the rest of his life trying to contest the charges brought against him on Shafter's behalf, and trying to overturn his discharge. Flipper died in 1940, but the battle was fought on by his descendants and others, who finally were successful only in 1999 when Bill Clinton finally pardoned Henry Flipper.

This pardon resulted in a bust of Flipper being on display at West Point, along with an annual award to the cadet who exhibits "leadership, self-discipline, and perseverance in the face of unusual difficulties." Indeed...

Fortunately for history, Henry Ossian Flipper was also an accomplished writer, and his autobiography, The Colored Cadet at West Point, is available for download in a variety of formats from Project Gutenberg.

Still I Rise: Our 2nd Book of the Month

In honor of Black History Month, I've decided to add a second Book of the Month. Still I Rise, by Roland Laird and Taneshie Nash Laird, illustrated by Elihu "Adofo" Bey, was originally published in 1997 with the subtitle A Cartoon History of African Americans.

This new, revised and updated version no longer has that subtitle; instead it's now subtitled A Graphic History of African Americans. My best guess is that "cartoon" has, over the ensuing years, taken on a tone that is not seen as "serious", and that "graphic" -- as in the "graphic novel" genre -- is the new descriptive buzzword for a serious story that is hand-illustrated in the classic comic book format.

Nevertheless, this is a valuable book for anyone who wants an "easy way" to learn about African-American history. I highly recommend that parents get this book for their children (minimum age, I would guess, would be about ten or so -- the concepts are probably too sophisticated for kids younger than that), since they mostly likely are not getting a good grounding in African American history in their schools.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the book. It's a bit critical of the illustrations, which are flat and not very inspiring, but we're not really looking at it for the pictures...

Media Whore Sells Out Electronic "Plantation"

I've always had my suspicions about Arianna Huffington. After all, she was a darling of the Right back in the day, calling for Clinton's resignation and hinting that an ambassador to somewhere-or-other died "mysteriously" after The Big Dog slept with his wife -- or that he was ineligibly buried in Arlington because of that, or something like that... She was even a member of Newt Gingrich's Orwellian-named "Progressive and Freedom Foundation".

Then she inexplicably appeared to move to the left, divorcing her fabulously-wealthy-but-also-fabulously-gay husband, got literally zillions in the divorce settlement, and started the Huffington Post. Which I read on a more-or-less regular basis, until it started skewing away from politics and turned into to a digital version of the National Tattler with breathless bits on who is sleeping with whom in Hollywood, etc.

Now she says that we have to somehow "get beyond" right and left, and proves it by selling HuffPo to, of all things, the rightwing AOL!

For a measly 30 pieces of silver. Okay, it was a little more, like 18 million bucks, but still.

I think it's unconscionable that she could build up that business -- and business it was -- on the backs of free labor (the leftwing bloggers that contributed their stuff -- for free -- turned out to be slave laborers on the Yassuh-Miz-Adrianna electronic plantation) to the point where she could sell it without a backward glance.

So here's to Adrianna Huffington. Media Whore of the Century (so far...)

Deifying Saint Ronald

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I am not a fan of Ronald Reagan.

But now with his 100th birthday in the offing (or has it already passed? I'm too lazy to look it up), there seems to be even more of the sainthood-politicking for RR, which is normally seen in the Vatican to promote to sainthood a particular "holy person" -- you don't have to look any further than the drumbeat to elevate to sainthood the most recent pope, whose post-mortem "miracles" defy all reason.

As Ann Davidow recently pointed out on Buzzflash:

As we take note of what would be Ronald Reagan's one hundredth birthday it remains a mystery why he is revered by so many Americans and held up as an icon by the Republican Party. Everyone in the GOP takes a crack at explaining why he is a splendid example of everything a leader should be and a patriot par excellence.
. . .
In the area of civil rights alone he trampled on basic values by using the "Southern Strategy" to promote his political fortunes. He kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County where Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman had been lynched some years before as they worked to establish voting rights for black southerners - a despicable exercise in gutter politics. Asserting "I believe in states' rights before a "white, and at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000" (Bob Herbert, the NY Times, 11/2007) Reagan shamelessly made the case for bigotry and exclusion in his pursuit of the White House. Everyone got the message, especially in the South, and as President he consistently vetoed programs that sought to level the playing field for minorities.
. . .
How is it that a man of such monumental failures is celebrated on the right as something of a political saint? Republicans and many others refuse to replace the myth with facts, and we are in danger of repeating many of the same deceptive practices in the conduct of our political life today.

Indeed. Even at the time I had a lot of trouble understanding the magnetic attraction of Ronald Reagan.

I still do. And I guess that there still is a movement to do a little "plastic surgery" on the face of Teddy Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore and turn him into Ronald Reagan. After all, who the fuck was Teddy Roosevelt, who became a traitor to his class and demand social justice and an end to the capitalist fuck-everyone-beneath-me-and-that-means-you system of trusts and monopolies?

I mean, really. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican??? Come on.

Today's One-Question Quiz: Will He Do It???

Seventy-four US Congressional representatives have signed a letter to Justice Clarence Thomas asking him to recuse himself from future deliberations over the health care law because his wife works for the Heritage Foundation, one of the most vocal -- and most wealthy -- of the organizations which are actively working to disable the law.

So guess what party the Reps belong to. That's right: The Democratic Party.

And if SCOTUS "House Boy" and Scalia Lapdog Clarence "Uncle" Thomas was shamelessly willing to try to hide his wife's income from even the fucking IRS, then what are the odds that he will actually recuse himself from those deliberations?

That's right: Zero.

Okay, I cheated and gave you two questions on today's quiz, but I know that you are all smart people and could get the answers right away. Unlike the wingnut readers of this blog (both of them), who probably couldn't count to ten if you spotted them nine numbers...

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 1: Homer Plessy

He's not really "forgotten": His names lives on in a weird kind of "infamy" -- after all he was on the losing side in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case which officially established the segregationist "Separate but Equal" doctrine of race relations in this country that held sway from 1896 until it was reversed and repudiated by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

But just who was Homer Plessy?

Home Plessy was born in New Orleans in 1862 and grew to adulthood in the Reconstruction Era, when black people could sit anywhere they wanted on the streetcars, marry whomever they pleased, and attend integrated schools. But that was with the protection of the US Army, which enforced on a reluctant defeated-but-unbowed South equal rights and protections for former slaves and blacks in general.

But with the Compromise of 1877 -- known forever after as the Corrupt Bargain -- that installed Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House despite the fact that he was the loser in the popular vote (sound familiar, anyone?), Reconstruction ended, the Yankee armies left, and the states of the former Confederacy were free to go back to their segregationist ways. It didn't take long to resegregate the schools, the marriage laws, and especially, in Plessy's case, the trains.

Home Plessy was, according to the official record, 7/8 white and 1/8 black, or, in the parlance of the day, an "octoroon". There is some disagreement over the exact percentages, but for this case, that doesn't matter. What does matter was that he had that infamous "one drop of Negro blood" and was therefore considered to be black. As in Not White. As in You Have to Sit in the Back of the Bus. Or, in Plessy's case, in a whole different train car.

In 1890 the City of New Orleans had, belatedly when considered with the rest of the south, instigated the separate train car rule. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans recruited Plessy to test the law. Because he looked white, he could purchase a ticket for the "whites only" car without any protest. He could even ride the whites only car without fear of being molested, because he looked white:

But of course under the law he was Not White. When the conductor asked him if he was "colored" he admitted that he was and allowed himself to be arrested and charged. The case was a cause célèbre at the time, and culminated in the Plessy v. Ferguson SCOTUS decision that enshrined in US law the racist doctrine of Separate but Equal. Only one justice, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, from ironically a slaveholding family, dissented from the majority. But man oh man, what a dissent:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved...
If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

The problem as Harlan pointed out so eloquently, was that the separate facilities for black people were never, in any way, shape or form, equal to those of the whites. I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and attended segregated schools. The white kids had a nice one-story brick neo-colonial school while the black kids -- on the other side of the tracks, naturally -- had an old three-story firetrap that looked like it had already been condemned before the Civil War...

Sidebar: In a weird kind of synchronicity, John Marshall Harlan had a grandson and namesake, John Marshall Harlan II, who also served on the US Supreme Court, from 1955 to 1971. Illness forced him to retire from the court, which then allowed Richard Nixon to appoint William Rehnquist to the bench. And it was the same William Rehquist who had stated in a memo in 1952, when he was clerking for Justice Robert Jackson: "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.... To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."

But enough digression. Let's get back to Plessy.

But actually, there isn't much left to tell. After the famous court case, he faded back into relative obscurity, and he lived out the remainder of his life in New Orleans. He died in 1925 at the age of 61. Finally, in 2009, a historical marker was erected at the site of his arrest:

Fighting Back

Cock-fighting -- not what you think, the kind with real roosters -- received a severe hit recently in Kern County, California.

It has been long derided as a cruelty-to-animals blood "sport", but finally there seems to have been some revenge on the part of the chickens.

An autopsy has shown that local cock-fighting entrepreneur-and-legend-in-his-own-mind Jose Luis Ochoa died as the result of being stabbed in the leg by ... his own rooster!

Okay, maybe not his own rooster, but Ochoa was definitely stabbed by a razor-spur-wearing bad-boy rooster and bled out about two hours later.

In the words of the rooster involved [translated]: "Take that, motherfucker!"

Gone but not Forgotten

So Baby Doc Bush had to cancel his trip to Switzerland, huh? "Security reasons" were cited as the reason for the trip cancellation.

Security reasons such as this?

Off Line for a Couple of Days

Apparently I've been offline for a couple of days. I didn't even know about it until I met some of my buddies for lunch and one of them mentioned in passing that he wasn't able to get in.

"Blog Suspended" is the message he got. This doesn't normally happen unless someone lodges a formal complaint.

Jeez, who could it be who would lodge a "formal complaint" against something on this blog...?

Let's just say that the person who doesn't know what a "practical joke" is will find out soon enough...

I'm just sayin'...

Just Two Years Later: Another Anthem

Just two years after Louie Louie was the Anthem for a Generation, we got another one:

This time it's not the beat -- it's the words: "The eastern world, it is explodin'..."

Yeah... Hard to believe it was 45 years ago. But you know the old saying, "Time's fun when you're having flies..."

John Boehner's Boner...

...has apparently led him astray, right into the arms of an evil temptress/minion of satan.

Okay, I'm not usually one to repeat unsubstantiated rumors, but this one is too good.

Allegedly Speaker of the House John Boehner, an upstanding Republican stalwart of good moral values, has been linked to a sexual "liaison" ... with a lobbyist.

First of all, if this is true ... eeeeeewwwwwwwwwww!!!!!! What is wrong with her???

And second of all, it ought to be easy enough to verify -- just look for something that looks like orange popsicle stains on certain parts of her anatomy... Again, eeeeeewwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!

But this is all for naught, since anything is okay as long as you are a Republican... Besides, lobbyists are like groupies: They are put on earth by a merciful god with the sole purpose of satisfying every need -- real or imagined -- of congressmen and senators.

Book of the Month: Roots

Since this is Black History month, I thought we'd kick it off with Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley.

Roots was first published in 1976 and became a television "event" the next year, a miniseries that was broadcast over seven consecutive nights. I saw the television series, but somehow I had not managed to read the book at the time.

Now I have corrected that oversight, and that's why it's the book of the month, despite the controversies over parts of the book that may have been plagiarized from another author (a court case settled that portions of Roots were identical to some sections in another book) and the historical problems -- whether Haley actually found the ancestral village of Kunta Kinte, and whether his characters were "real" people.

Roots is a densely packed historical fiction that illustrates the basic evil -- but also the confusions, the complexity, and the complications -- of the slavery system. As Thomas Jefferson said, slavery was dehumanizing for both slave and master; even the "best" master was still a slaveholder, and even the "best" slave was still held in perpetual bondage.

There are always differences between books and the movies made from them, but one the major differences between Roots the book and Roots the miniseries was that, as best as I can recall anyway, not much if anything was made of Kunta Kinte's religion before he was kidnapped out of Africa. In the book he was a devout Muslim, and therefore his captivity and enslavement by the "infidels" (i.e., Christians) is seen to be even worse, especially when as punishment he is forced to work with the plantation's pigs.

Haley researched the book for nearly ten years, and it shows. The African segments especially -- which take up much more space in the book than they did on the screen -- seem to be right on the money, and they stack up well against the best of other African writers, such as South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and her powerful July's People.

When it comes to the depiction of slavery in the United States, nothing else comes close to Roots ... with the possible exception of the actual stories told by the former slaves themselves. In the 1930s, as part of the Federal WPA Writers' Project, some 2500 Slave Narratives were gathered by interviewing the aging former slaves who had been freed by the 13th Amendment. Most of these slave narratives are available for free download from the Gutenberg project. They make for some pretty sobering reading, and they ought to be required for those in the government -- and out of it (are you listening, Toad?) -- who think that the constitutional three-fifths of a person for a slave was just fine and the 13th Amendment, along with the rest of the constitution, doesn't really mean what everyone thinks it means (are you listening, Scalia & Thomas, et al on SCOTUS?)...

Black History Month

February each year is Black History Month, and it's a time for reflection, remembrance and consideration of the African-American experience, to honor some of the pioneers of American History who just happened to be Black.

I know that some of my "fans" (The Toad and his moronic minion come to mind immediately, but there have been others) are already pissing and moaning and whining: "This is raciest [sic] ... there ain't no White History Month!"

But they don't get -- and will never understand -- that every goddamn month of the year is "White History Month". It's like that old saying, A fish is the last one that's going to understand the principles of water... So, short form, screw The Toad and his toadies. I'm gonna celebrate Black History Month.

BTW, on the other side, it's also been a staple of Black comedians for years: "It figures; they gave us the shortest month of the year..." But there are actually some solid historical reasons for the choice of February.

So watch for some more posts during the course of the month that will celebrate and bring to the fore some of the "forgotten men" of African-American history and their contributions to the world in which we live.