January 2009 - Page 2 of 35

Frivolous Friday Open Thread

I’m tired of being freezing cold all the time.

Michael Steele to Head the RNC

Michael Steele will be the new chairman of the RNC. Now the heads of both parties are African-Americans. They are also both exceptionally talented and intelligent people. I watched Michael Steele wipe the floor with Ben Cardin during a debate they had in 2006 in the Maryland senate race. Post-debate, the polls closed considerably, although not enough to put Steele over the top. I wouldn’t underestimate Steele’s abilities. He is an excellent communicator and he comes off as eminently reasonable. At the same time, he isn’t known for having any original ideas. It also took six ballots for Steele to prevail, so he doesn’t exactly have a strong mandate. The problems facing the Republican Party cannot be overcome with rhetoric and talking points. Nevertheless, considering the options, Steele was the right choice for the Republicans and he will lead them at least a couple of steps in the right direction.

What Left Wing?

Other countries have nationalized oil industries and they get quite wealthy when energy is expensive and profitable. We do not have such a system.

Despite a drop in its fourth-quarter earnings and collapsing oil prices, Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, still managed to set a record as the most profitable American corporation ever last year.

As oil prices rose to a record before having their steepest-ever drop, Exxon earned a $45.2 billion in 2008, up from $40.6 billion in 2007. The profit for the full-year came even as Exxon said Friday that its fourth-quarter income fell 33 percent as oil prices declined.

A $45.2 billion profit in a cratering economy? Well, a truly radical left-wing government would seize their profits and use it to help pay for pressing national needs. But, remember, we made the Communist Party effectively illegal in this country and we do not allow even the whiff of debate about such things as the people having an ownership stake in the country’s natural resources (except in Alaska, where it is seen as just fine). I’m no communist, but there is a price to pay when one side of the political spectrum is illegal and the other end is firmly entrenched in power. Whether it is the radical Jacobin-Republicans in Congress or it is Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, the whacko right-wing has influence while the whacko left-wing is so marginalized that it doesn’t even have a face.

The Talking Points

The House Republicans seem to have three talking points. Here they are:

“We have fundamental philosophical differences. We’re in an era of unfunded liabilities,” said John Culberson , R-Texas. “This stimulus is really a Trojan horse. It’s part of a plan that would turn the United States into France.”

“We want the president to call Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and tell her to work with us,” said Minority Whip Eric Cantor , R-Va.

“The president is a naive man. He is naive about what to expect from enemies of the United States overseas and about what to expect from the left wing of his party,’’ added Dana Rohrabacher , R-Calif.

Discuss.

Biden, a Man of the People?

Despite his hardscrabble upbringing, Joe Biden is often justly criticized for putting credit card companies’ interests in front of the interests of consumers. Biden is praised for spearheading the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA), but he is just as often pilloried for his work on the United States Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, where he has perpetuated several layers of insanity in the failed and inhumane War on Drugs. Biden is almost solely responsible for the fact that Robert Bork is not currently a member of the Supreme Court, but he gets less praise for that than he gets criticism for allowing Clarence Thomas to get through his committee.

Biden’s record is complex and it isn’t easy to define him ideologically. But, by background and temperament, he seems a good fit for the job of defending the middle class. That is what Obama has tasked him to do, and that is what Biden writes about in today’s USA Today. Specifically…

Right now, our most urgent task is to stabilize our nation’s economy and put it back on track. That is what our economic recovery package moving through the Congress is all about. We need to make these critical investments to jump-start our economy.

On top of this urgent task, though, we have an important long-term task as well. Once this economy starts growing again, we need to make sure the benefits of that growth reach the people responsible for it. We can’t stand by and watch as that narrow sliver of the top of the income scale wins a bigger piece of the pie — while everyone else gets a smaller and smaller slice.

One of the things that makes this task force distinctive is it brings together — in one place — those agencies that have the most impact on the well-being of the middle class in our country. We’ll be looking at everything from access to college and training with the Department of Education, to business development with the Department of Commerce, to child care reform with Health and Human Services, to labor law with the Department of Labor. With this task force, we’ll have a single, high-visibility group with one goal: to raise the living standards of middle-class families.

Over the upcoming months, we will focus on answering those concerns that matter most to families. What can we do to make retirement more secure? How can we make child and elder care more affordable? How do we improve workplace safety? How are we going to get the cost of college within reach? What can we do to help weary parents juggle work and family? And, above all else, what are the jobs of the future? Here, we’ll be looking at green jobs, better-paying jobs, better-quality jobs.

This seems like something Joe Biden can do and do well. And it will keep him busy so that maybe he won’t have time to come up with any more harebrained schemes to carve up Iraq into pieces.

Black History: The Greensboro Sit-Ins

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing

click to enlarge
Birth Of A Notion Disclaimer

From Wikipedia:
The Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, leading to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in American history.

On February 1, 1960, four African American students – Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain – from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically black college/university, sat at a segregated lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s store. This lunch counter only had chairs/stools for whites, while blacks had to stand and eat. Although they were refused service, they were allowed to stay at the counter. The next day there was a total of 28 students at the Woolworth lunch counter for the sit in. On the third day, there were 300 activists, and later, around 1000.

This protest sparked sit-ins and economic boycotts that became a hallmark of the American civil rights movement.
According to Franklin McCain, one of the four black teenagers who sat at the “whites only” stools:

Some way through, an old white lady, who must have been 75 or 85, came over and put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Boys, I am so proud of you. You should have done this 10 years ago.’

In just two months the sit-in movement spread to 15 cities in 9 states. Other stores, such as the one in Atlanta, moved to desegregate.

The media picked up this issue and covered it nationwide, beginning with lunch counters and spreading to other forms of public accommodation, including transport facilities, art galleries, beaches, parks, swimming pools, libraries, and even museums around the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated desegregation in public accommodations.

In 1993, a portion of the lunch counter was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The Greensboro Historical Museum contains four chairs from the Woolworth counter along with photos of the original four protesters, a timeline of the events, and headlines from the media.

Several documentaries have been produced about these men who sparked the sit in movement, including PBS’ “February One.”

The sit-in movement used the strategy of nonviolent resistance, which originated in Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and was later brought to the Civil Rights movement by Martin Luther King. This was not the first sit-in to challenge racial segregation. As far back as 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952.

In a pre-cursor to the Woolworth sit-ins, on June 23, 1957, seven students organized by a local pastor were arrested in Durham, North Carolina at the Royal Ice Shop for staging a sit-in in the “whites only” section. After being convicted in North Carolina courts, the seven appealed their case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear their case.

On August 19, 1958, the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council began a six-year long campaign of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, restaurants, and cafes in Oklahoma City. The Greensboro sit-in, however, was the most influential and received a great deal of attention in the press.

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War on Terror is Over!

For a change, I agree with Roger Cohen, a frequent op-ed contibutor at the New York Times. Bush out and Obama in has radically changed the way America will approach the problem of terrorism. And that is a good thing. No more grandiose talk from the White House that proclaims “you are either with us or against us” or “bring them on” or comparisons of the certain Middle Eastern countries with the threat Nazi Germany posed before it started WWII. The time for such bombast, for speaking of “crusades” is over. The “War on Terror” was always simply a moronic rhetorical device to provide cover for the illegal and unsound military adventures the Bush administration pursued for reasons that had little to do with combating Al Qaeda. It polarized Americans, and it inflamed the passion of hatred among millions of people, Muslims and Christians and Jews and anyone else who bought into its simplistic Manichean vision of the world following the 9/11 attacks.

Thank God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster that not only does Obama recognize this fact, he has actually taken the first steps to dismantling the crude, ineffective and murderous militaristic policies the Bush administration implemented which led to so much unnecessary death and destruction, and the great cost to our country, not only in terms of dollars wasted, but in lives ruined and civil liberties trampled and human rights disregarded. I’ll let Mr. Cohen explain what the difference an Obama in the Presidency makes:

(cont.)

Yes, the with-us-or-against-us global struggle — the so-called Long War — in which a freedom-loving West confronts the undifferentiated forces of darkness comprising everything from Al Qaeda to elements of the Palestinian national struggle under the banner of “Islamofascism” has been terminated.

What’s left is what matters: defeating terrorist organizations. That’s not a war. It’s a strategic challenge. […]

[Obama’s] tone [in his interview with the Al Arabiya network] represented a startling departure. He was subtle, respectful, self-critical and balanced where the Bush administration had been blunt, offensive, bombastic and one-sided in its embrace of an Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

Speaking as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, began an eight-day visit to the region, Obama described the mission as one of listening “because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

Obama went further. Citing Muslim members of his own family and his experience of life in a Muslim country (Indonesia), he repositioned the national interest and his own role.

He defined his task as convincing Muslims that “Americans are not your enemy” and persuading Americans that respect for a Muslim world is essential. His objective, he said, was to promote not only American interests but those of ordinary people — read Muslims — suffering from “poverty and a lack of opportunity.”

The new president’s abandonment of post-9/11 Bush doctrine is a critical breakthrough. It resolves nothing but opens the way for a rapprochement with a Muslim world long cast into the “against-us” camp. Nothing good in Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan or Iran could happen with that Manichean chasm.

Now comes the hard part: following through. There are still many here in America, and even among members of his own party who see the struggle with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda as a steel cage death match between the forces of good (i.e. the West) and the forces of evil (i.e. the Muslim world). There are still too many people in and out of the military who think that more bombs and bullets and predator drone missiles is the only way to proceed, the only path to “victory” (though even they can’t define what victory might mean). We may mock them as “dead-enders” but the truth is that the represent a sizable minority in America, and their views are well and over represented in the American media.

It is no easy task for Obama to walk back from using the US military as our nation’s only option to terrorism and seeing that in the future diplomacy, the “jaw jaw” which Winston Churchill once lauded, is the superior approach. The Bush wars have caused untold strife in so many ways, but their worst legacy is the creation of a generation of Muslims who view America as their mortal enemy thanks to Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, torture, White phosphorus, Blackwater mercs, etc., etc., etc. President Obama’s action to reach out to the Muslim world was not only the intelligent thing to do, but it was the right thing as well. However, it is only a beginning. The time for the peacemakers has come. Let us hope President obama has the strength, the vision and the courage to follow through on his commitment to diplomacy and negotiations despite the inevitable setbacks to such an approach that the future will undoubtedly bring.

Hey Boo-Tribe!!! Join WWL Radio Tonight

(Or should it be “Tribes of Boo”??) lol

This evening, at 6pm Eastern, join us at WWL BlogTalkRadio as we discuss:

1. Equal Pay – The Lilly Ledbetter Law gets signed!

Call in and let us know if this will effect you, or has effected you in the past.

2. Conyers vs Rove.. Holder vs The Right

Is accountability a pipe dream, or did someone just repack the bowl???

3. Stimulus Package… Is Keynesianism on the Rise, or is this just more Trickle down?

Speak your minds!

Our VERY Special Guest will be OPOL, of Docudharma!!!!

Nothing like One Pissed Off Liberal to discuss with us:

we should have listened to the hippies
we should cease making war on people for bogus reasons
we should re-purpose the MIC to address environmental and energy issues

Tune in and Listen:

Call in with comments or questions to:

646-929-1264

The link to BTR live chat will be available on the WWL 15 minutes before the show!

Friday Foto Flogging

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news. We were inspired by the folks at European Tribune who post a regular Friday Photoblog series to try the same on this side of the virtual Atlantic. We also thought foto folks would enjoy seeing some other websites so each week we’ll introduce a different photo website.

This week’s theme: Cold: Anything that is cold, feels cold, looks cold, reminds you of cold, or even just gives you the cold shoulder

Website of the Week: scottcritiques.com: Send your photographs to professional photographer Scott Bourne and get his opinions and suggestions on how to improve it and your photo skills

AndiF Gets Chilly