Just days after he took the helm of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, John McCain, R-AZ, stood next to several hawkish Republican
senators and attacked President Obama in typical McCain fashion.
He
slammed the White House for releasing prisoners from the military’s
Guantanamo Bay prison, even though McCain held that very position for a
decade, from 2003 to 2013.
“The prison is a symbol of torture and justice delayed,” McCain said in November 2013, reading
from a letter from 38 retired military officers on the Senate floor.
“More than a decade after it opened, Guantánamo remains a recruiting
poster for terrorists, which makes us all less safe.”
As late as mid-December, McCain had been saying he backed Obama’s effort to close the prison. But last week, McCain abruptly announced that he and other Senate hawks would be co-sponsoring a bill to bar the White House from releasing prisoners who have never been charged and the military had cleared for release.
“This administration never presented to the Congress of the United States a concrete or coherent plan,” McCain said, offering a thin rationale because he knew that congressional Republicans have been blocking Obama's efforts to close Gitmo for years.
This
about-face was merely the latest example from McCain in a long career
that has been marked by an astounding record of what pundits call
flip-flops, the polite word for opportunism, hypocrisy and outright
back-stabbing.
“What the heck has happened to John McCain,” CNN.com’s Sally Kohn wrote
last July, in another high-profile example. “First he flip-flopped on
immigration reform…Then he flip-flopped on legislation meant to address
the dangers of climate change… And now we have Bowe Bergdahl.” McCain,
who is granted too much deference because he endured years of captivity
in the Vietnam War, was all for bringing the captured soldier home in a
prisoner swap with the Taliban—until he wasn’t, which the Washington
Post derided, earning him an “upside-down Pinocchio, constituting a flip-flop.”
Longtime
McCain watchers are used to shaking their heads. Those covering his
2008 presidential campaign, which was mislabeled the “Straight Talk
Express,” compiled lists of dozens and dozens of flip-flops that traced an ever-accelerating turn to the right.
“In
theory, John McCain’s right-wing madness could come to an end on
Tuesday, when he is expected to prevail over former Rep. J.D. Hayward in
Arizona’s Senate primary,” MotherJones.com wrote
in 2010, when he beat a Tea Party challenger. “In fact, his
transformation from aisle-crossing, party bucking maverick to
cookie-cutter conservative has been years in the making.”
MotherJones
focused on four issues illustrating McCain’s high-level hypocrisy: he
was for comprehensive immigration reform before he wasn’t; he was an
advocate for stricter gun controls before he wasn’t; he wanted to end
the military’s ban on gay soldiers but then didn’t; and he backed a
cap-and-trade system for climate change emissions before he changed his
mind.
“His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was the final
blow for some of his truest believers, who saw it as political pandering
at its worst,” MoJo's Suzy Khimm wrote,
referring to to his supposed political independent streak. “But the
failed White House run was just the beginning of McCain’s transformation
into an ideologue.”
Today, with McCain chairing the Senate
Armed Services Committee—which writes much of the Pentagon budget, and
boosts his power and influence—McCain is poised to wreak real havoc. The
day after the president’s State of the Union speech, he went after
Obama’s claim that America has emerged from crisis. Of course, Obama was
talking about the domestic economy, but McCain seemed to take it as an
invitation to rechallenge the Democrat who stopped him from becoming
president in 2008.
That year, Steven Benen, who is now with MSNBC,
listed 61 flip-flops by McCain on almost every issue in an extensively
documented AlterNet
report. Of these, 18 concerned national security policy, foreign
policy, and military policy—all areas that are touched by the Armed
Services Committee.
On national security, McCain was against
warrantless wiretapping until he was for it. He said Gitmo prisoners
deserved some kind of trial, until he changed his mind. He opposed
indefinite detention by the military until he didn’t. The Vietnam War
prisoner of war who was tortured wanted to ban waterboarding—until he
changed his mind. He slammed the White House’s use of military drones in
Pakistan until decided to support it.
On foreign policy, McCain
was for kicking Russia out of the G8 economic club until Obama pushed
for that after war broke out in Ukraine. He supported normalization of
relations with Cuba but now opposes it. He believed the U.S. should
engage with Hamas and with Syria’s dictator, but no longer. He backed
the Law of The Sea convention but now opposes it. He was against
divestment from South Africa but now says backed it.
On military
policy, he claimed that he was the “greatest critic” of Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraqi policy, until he reversed course a year
later. He has been on both sides of the fence with a long-term U.S.
troop presence in Iraq. Before the Iraq invasion, he predicted the war
woud be short and easy, but now it is hard and unending. He said
repeatedly lambasted Obama’s announcement of troop withdrawals, but then
took credit that most troops would be home by the end of 2013. He
opposed expanding veterans benefits in the GI Bill before he reversed
course.
These examples have special salience because of McCain’s new Senate chairmanship. They are augmented by many others—remember
him slamming Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s “wacko bird” efforts to derail
Obamacare, before he favored its repeal? Or his flip-flops on
reproductive choice (pro-Roe v. Wade before favoring repeal), or on the
environment (against offshore drilling before being pro-drilling), or on
tax cuts for the rich (opposing them before they passed under George W.
Bush and then rejecting repeal).
This is a dizzying array of
political about-faces. They more than suggest that McCain’s judgment is
as opportunistic as it is unreliable. It is astounding that a senator
who is this fickle is now one of America's top civilian military
commanders.
The Associated Press reported
that McCain said his new Senate role was to educate the chamber—of
“which 46 of 100 members are in their first term, some with little
foreign policy experience.” He plans to bring in a parade of hawks to
testify at his committee.
“He’s an anarchist,” Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk show host said
a year ago, after he changed his Obamacare stance. “I’d like to call
him the good senator from Arizona, [but] I think he’s a lousy senator
from Arizona – when the lousy senator from Arizona decides, ‘Oh, wait a
minute. Now the political winds have changed, now he wants to jump on
[whatever bandwagon presents itself].”
Whether the correct word
describing McCain is opportunist, hypocrite, or anarchist—and perhaps
with Beck, it takes one to know one—it’s clear that a newly empowered
McCain is as unpredictable as he is dangerous. And now he has a Senate
chairmanship podium and the power of the Pentagon purse at his disposal.
The Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper,
the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the
Navy SEAL who chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military
during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political
battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq
engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the
innate good of the American soldier.
And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been
treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic
Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending
time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley
Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite
talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war
film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an
obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a documentary.
So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded
a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members
who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:
American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were
brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity
so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See,
the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries
to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean
it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude
Pundit had was pity, not pride.
After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what
can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to
hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The
father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking
order of the universe. This hypermasculine bullshit plays out, as it
does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to
become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads
to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to
constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World
Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to
Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after
9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is
set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife,
rinse, repeat for four tours.
Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a
more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us
like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the
truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in
order to convey its simplistic message that American soldiers are
awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up.
So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents.
They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one
Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a
fuck it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he
gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher."
(Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear
to Christ, "Biggles," like a fuckin' cat.) That family, the only "good"
Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In
another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less,
take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on
some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of
course, he ends up dead.
Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper
seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes
of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the
psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during
firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission
and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he
suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was
necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb
man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young
men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for
nothing.
It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for
nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the
invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We
know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed
were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their
lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our
freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell
ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is
that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we
pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight
and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching
reality of our national complicity in the crime.
American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone
who would point it out. Shit, once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so
devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam
Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't
mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that,
if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they
will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of
their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never
enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because
Iraqis are trying to kill us, fuck if we care whose house it is.
At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame
it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the
hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade
heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and
American flags. No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like
Kyle defend us. We should instead feel intensely angry that they died
in vain.
2015? And we’re still talking PSP's? Heck yeah! I mean why not? After
all this site started as PSP Homebrew site. Anyways, today I will
present to you 10 homebrews that are worth looking forward to from the
year of 2014.
The production of
PSP homebrews has drastically decreased compared to years of 2010-2012.
Although this hasn’t stopped some developers from injecting their
softwares into the PSP scene! Take note that this is entirely based on
my opinion, feel free to state yours in the comments. Anyways without
further ado: Number 10: One Installer – Developer Davis9278
Thanks
to the new lua interpreter by gdljjrod, this homebrew has made its way
onto the PSP scene. One Installer is an application designed for
downloading and managing PSP applications homebrew, plugins and themes,
directly from the PSP, similar to PSP Installer by spike_132000. The
application has the option to install all contents directly into your
memory stick.
Not
really a fan of putting my own projects in the front page, but from the
very few homebrews released this year, I believe this deserves a spot.
This homebrew’s aim is to be equivalent to iRshell (without its ir
functions), designed similarly to the modern look of android’s custom
rom, CyanogenMod. However it’s still in beta and only offers a few
features as of now. These features include: File Manager, Music Player,
Gallery viewer, browser (PSP’s default netfront browser), and some
recovery menu functions, all designed exactly like Android.
Number 8: Flappy Bird PSP – Developer Sandoron
The
frustrating yet popular mobile game has been bought to the PSP thanks
to developer Sandoron. You know the code! Avoid them green pipes and
beat your highscore!
How would we play our homebrews and backups without this? I mean, well yeah we have other sources like Pro CFW,
TN Hen and signed homebrews using OFW, but this CFW has proved its
standards and is still being updated today. This CFW is the most
updated, and includes almost all must-have CFW features. This includes
the time machine (for PSP’s with hack-able mobos only), leda
for 1.50 homebrew support and also PRO Online! The one thing this CFW
is missing is the permanent patch that allows permanent CFW access on
PSP’s with firmwares over 6.20 and unhackable motherboards. Let’s hope
Davee can achieve this, because with that this guy is complete!
Wish I could post more of Insoft’s homebrews for the year, but we needed more room for others J Nibbler
is a remake of an old arcade game, where you navigate a snake through a
maze, while collecting apples before making progress to the next level.
It consists of a neat retro look and feel to it.
This game was coded during “AC” party which was held near Paris at the month of April 2014.
You must destroy a lemon pie by smashing a ball into it. The lemon pie
will send you lots of surprises and traps. It’s a pretty cool
arcade-like game, definitely worth giving a try if you ask me.
Zelda
– Navi’s Quest is a PSP port of the fourth game in the french homebrew
tetralogy which was created by Vincent Jouillat. The current version is
based on the 1.3 PC version and can be completed 100% on the PSP. Do
note that his homebrew won’t be compatible with the old PSP 1000 (phat)
due to memory problems.
This is the most recently updated Lamecraft
mod which offers a plethora of features! This mod is only based on
survival mode. Some of fascinating features it includes are: seed
generating option, new terrain generator, biomes, crafting, shadows,
fogs, and much more! Happy Crafting
RetroArch is
an open source, multi-platform frontend designed to be a fast,
lightweight, and portable multi-system emulator. The emulator currently
contains the following cores: gambatte, tempGBA, fceumm, fmsx,
beetle-pce-fast, nxengine, prboom
NZP
is a “remake” of call of duty’s game mode (zombie mode) aimed for PSP.
This game lets you fight endless amount undead in a closed and limited
area. You gain points from killing them, which you can then spend on
purchasing weapons, and advancing further on the map. You can get some
things to help you out, but eventually you will die. Your goal is to get
to as further as you can through each round.
According to Johnson, multiple sources within the Tea
Party confirmed that Fisher had a prolonged affair with Joel Frewa, a
now-former video editor for the Tea Party News Network. Johnson says
Frewa resigned after word of the affair began to leak out.
“The affair took place at a “Restoring the Dream” event, a Faith
& Freedom conference, and on Election night 2014,” Johnson said.
Fisher claimed that the “rumors” were a product of “vengeful people” who were out to get her:
But then she saw the light and admitted the whole thing.
I lost my faith in this life that not only I’ve chosen
for myself, but a life that I promote. Happy military wife with kids and
church and happy, happy, happy. False. My life crumbled. My marriage
crumbled. I lost my faith in God. I didn’t know where I was going to go
next or what I was going to do. For a very short period in the middle of
that, I actually believed my marriage was over and found someone else.”
Is there irony in the fact that Charles C. Johnson, smear merchant of
the conservative blogger corps, finally hit a true story when he ratted
out this conservative poster child? You betcha.
Mitt Romney began to more forcefully articulate his case
for a third run for the presidency Friday, telling a crowd of Republican
activists and power brokers that the party needs to emphasize a more
robust foreign policy, opportunity for all, and a fight against poverty.
RADDATZ: OK, but look at -- look at Mitt Romney. And you
saw him sort of lay out where he would go with this if he does it --
heavy on foreign policy, looking out to -- to solve the poverty
question.
Does he risk having people say who is this guy?
DOWD: Well, I think that's a huge risk for Mitt Romney. And it's in
-- it's not only a risk, it's a reality for Mitt Romney. He ran one
campaign in 2008, a different campaign in 2012. And to me, this campaign
he's now developing -- obviously, he should be talking about foreign
policy. We have, as you led into all of this, we have huge foreign
policy concerns.
I think it's very problematic for Mitt Romney, who has car
elevators, to run a campaign on poverty. I think you want to be
authentic and genuine on it. And that's not to say wealthy people can't
talk about those issues.
It's difficult.
Wealthy people can of course run on an an anti-poverty platform, just
not ones like Mitt Romney that have mocked the middle class by calling 47% of the country moochers.
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with
him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are
victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for
them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to
housing, to you-name-it.
That
that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And
they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who
pay no income tax..."[M]y job is is not to worry about those people.
I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and
care for their lives."
In 1966 James Baldwin wrote an
essay in which he described the tense relationship—really no
relationship at all—between the police and the people of Harlem. Sadly,
it hasn’t dated much.
The
thickety mash-up of police brutality and race is an irrefutable part of
our history and our present reality. That in mind, we’re especially
proud to share this piece—published for the first time online—by one of
our most brilliant writers.
James Baldwin wrote “A Report from Occupied
Territory” for The Nation on July 11, 1966. It is featured in the essential anthology, James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison and published by The Library of America. It appears here with permission from the James Baldwin Estate.—Alex Belth
On
April 17, 1964, in Harlem, New York City, a young salesman, father of
two, left a customer’s apartment and went into the streets. There was a
great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring
day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys.
They were running from the police. Other people, in windows, left their
windows, in terror of the police because the police had their guns out,
and were aiming the guns at the roofs. Then the salesman noticed that
two of the policemen were beating up a kid: “So I spoke up and asked
them, ‘why are you beating him like that?’ Police jump up and start
swinging on me. He put the gun on me and said, ‘get over there.’ I said,
‘what for?’ ”
An unwise question. Three of the policemen beat up
the salesman in the streets. Then they took the young salesman, whose
hands had been handcuffed behind his back, along with four others, much
younger than the salesman, who were handcuffed in the same way, to the
police station. There: “About thirty-five I’d say came into the room,
and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the
chest, beating us with a padded club—spit on us, call us niggers, dogs,
animals—they call us dogs and animals when I don’t see why we are the
dogs and animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat me they
beat the other kids and the elderly fellow. They throw him almost
through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there.”
“The
elderly fellow” was Fecundo Acion, a 47-year-old Puerto Rican seaman,
who had also made the mistake of wanting to know why the police were
beating up children. An adult eyewitness reports, “Now here come an old
man walking out a stoop and asked one cop, ‘say, listen, sir, what’s
going on out here?’ The cop turn around and smash him a couple of times
in the head.” And one of the youngsters said, “He get that just for a
question. No reason at all, just for a question.”
No one had, as
yet, been charged with any crime. But the nightmare had not yet really
begun. The salesman had been so badly beaten around one eye that it was
found necessary to hospitalize him.
Perhaps some sense of what it means
to live in occupied territory can be suggested by the fact that the
police took him to Harlem Hospital themselves—nearly nineteen hours
after the beating. For fourteen days, the doctors at Harlem Hospital
told him that they could do nothing for his eye, and he was removed to
Bellevue Hospital, where for fourteen days, the doctors tried to save
the eye. At the end of fourteen days it was clear that the bad eye could
not be saved and was endangering the good eye. All that could be done,
then, was to take the bad eye out.
As of my last information, the
salesman is on the streets again, with his attaché case, trying to feed
his family. He is more visible now because he wears an eye patch; and
because he questioned the right of two policemen to beat up one child,
he is known as a “cop hater.” Therefore, “I have quite a few police look
at me now pretty hard. My lawyer he axe (asked) me to keep somebody
with me at all times ’cause the police may try to mess with me again.”
You
will note that there is not a suggestion of any kind of appeal to
justice, and no suggestion of any recompense for the grave and
gratuitous damage which this man has endured. His tone is simply the
tone of one who has miraculously survived—he might have died; as it is,
he is merely half blind. You will also note that the patch over his eye
has had the effect of making him, more than ever, the target of the
police. It is a dishonorable wound, not earned in a foreign jungle but
in the domestic one—not that this would make any difference at all to
the nevertheless insuperably patriotic policeman—and it proves that he
is a “bad nigger.” (“Bad niggers,” in America, as elsewhere, have always
been watched and have usually been killed.) The police, who have
certainly done their best to kill him, have also provided themselves
with a pretext derisoire by filing three criminal charges against
him. He is charged with beating up a schoolteacher, upsetting a fruit
stand, and assaulting the (armed) police. Furthermore, he did all of
these things in the space of a single city block, and simultaneously.
* * *
The
salesman’s name is Frank Stafford. At the time all this happened, he
was 31 years old. And all of this happened, all of this and a great deal
more, just before the “long, hot summer” of 1964 which, to the
astonishment of nearly all New Yorkers and nearly all Americans, to the
extremely verbal anguish of The New York Times, and to the
bewilderment of the rest of the world, eventually erupted into a race
riot. It was the killing of a 15-year-old Negro boy by a white policeman
which overflowed the unimaginably bitter cup.
As a result of the
events of April 17, and of the police performance that day, and because
Harlem is policed like occupied territory, six young Negro men, the
oldest of whom is 20, are now in prison, facing life sentences for
murder. Their names are Wallace Baker, Daniel Hamm, Walter Thomas,
Willie Craig, Ronald Felder and Robert Rice. Perhaps their names don’t
matter. They might be my brothers, they might also be yours.
My report
is based, in part, on Truman Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers (The Garrison Press, 15 Olive Street, Newburyport, Mass., with an introduction by Maxwell Geismar). The Torture of Mothers is a detailed account of the case which is now known as the case of The Harlem Six. Mr. Nelson is not,
as I have earlier misled certain people into believing, a white
Southern novelist, but a white Northern one. It is a rather melancholy
comment, I think, on the Northern intellectual community, and it
reveals, rather to my despair, how little I have come to expect of it
that I should have been led so irresistibly into this error. In a way,
though, I certainly have no wish to blame Mr. Nelson for my
errors, he is, nevertheless, somewhat himself to blame. His tone makes
it clear that he means what he says and he knows what he means.
The tone
is rare. I have come to expect it only of Southerners—or mainly from
Southerners—since Southerners must pay so high a price for their private
and their public liberation. But Mr. Nelson actually comes from New
England, and is what another age would have called an abolitionist. No
Northern liberal would have been capable of it because the Northern
liberal considers himself as already saved, whereas the white Southerner
has to pay the price for his soul’s salvation out of his own anguish
and in his own flesh and in the only time he has. Mr. Nelson wrote the
book in an attempt to create publicity and public indignation; whatever
money the book makes goes into the effort to free The Harlem Six.
I
think the book is an extraordinary moral achievement, in the great
American tradition of Tom Paine and Frederick Douglass, but I will not
be so dishonest as to pretend that I am writing a book review. No, I am
writing a report, which is also a plea for the recognition of our common
humanity. Without this recognition, our common humanity will be proved
in unutterable ways. My report is also based on what I myself know, for I
was born in Harlem and raised there. Neither I, nor my family, can be
said ever really to have left; we are—perhaps—no longer as
totally at the mercy of the cops and the landlords as once we were. In
any case, our roots, our friends, our deepest associations are there,
and “there” is only about fifteen blocks away.
* * *
This
means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in
the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of
the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know
what it is to find oneself blinded, on one’s hands and knees, at the
bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled. I
know something else: these young men have been in jail for two years
now. Even if the attempts being put forth to free them should succeed,
what has happened to them in these two years? People are destroyed very
easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality
which can afford to destroy so many?
They
are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of
equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since
they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot
possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.
There
was a game played for some time between certain highly placed people in
Washington and myself before the administration changed and the Great
Society reached the planning stage. The game went something like this
around April or May, that is as the weather began to be warmer, my phone
would ring. I would pick it up and find that Washington was on the
line.
Washington: What are you doing for lunch—oh, say, tomorrow, Jim? Jim: Oh—why—I guess I’m free. Washington: Why don’t you take the shuttle down? We’ll send a car to the airport. One o’clock all right? Jim: Sure. I’ll be there. Washington: Good. Be glad to see you.
So
there I would be the next day, like a good little soldier, seated
(along with other good little soldiers) around a luncheon table in
Washington. The first move was not mine to make, but I knew very well
why I had been asked to be there.
Finally, someone would say—we would probably have arrived at the salad—“say, Jim, what’s going to happen this summer?”
This
question, translated, meant: Do you think that any of those unemployed,
unemployable Negroes who are going to be on the streets all summer will
cause us any trouble? What do you think we should do about it? But,
later on, I concluded that I had got the second part of the question
wrong, they really meant, what was I going to do about it?
Then
I would find myself trying patiently to explain that the Negro in
America can scarcely yet be considered—for example—as a part of the
labor unions—and he is certainly not so considered by the majority of
these unions—and that, therefore, he lacks that protection and that
incentive. The jobs that Negroes have always held, the lowest jobs, the
most menial jobs, are now being destroyed by automation. No remote
provision has yet been made to absorb this labor surplus. Furthermore,
the Negro’s education, North and South, remains, almost totally, a
segregated education, which is but another way of saying that he is
taught the habits of inferiority every hour of every day that he lives.
He will find it very difficult to overcome these habits.
Furthermore,
every attempt he makes to overcome them will be painfully complicated by
the fact that the ways of being, the ways of life of the despised and
rejected, nevertheless, contain an incontestable vitality and authority.
This is far more than can be said of the middle class which, in any
case, and whether it be black or white, does not dare to cease despising
him. He may prefer to remain where he is, given such unattractive
choices, which means that he either remains in limbo, or finds a way to
use the system in order to beat the system.
Thus, even when
opportunities—my use of this word is here limited to the industrialized,
competitive, contemporary North American sense—hitherto closed to
Negroes begin, very grudgingly, to open up, few can be found to qualify
for them for the reasons sketched above, and also because it demands a
very rare person of any color to risk madness and heartbreak in an
attempt to achieve the impossible. (I know Negroes who have gone
literally mad because they wished to become commercial air-line pilots.)
Nor is this the worst.
The children, having seen the spectacular
defeat of their fathers—having seen what happens to any bad nigger and,
still more, what happens to the good ones—cannot listen to their fathers
and certainly will not listen to the society which is responsible for
their orphaned condition. What to do in the face of this deep and
dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me—I would say, sipping coffee and
trying to be calm—that the principle of what had to be done was
extremely simple; but before anything could be done, the principle had
to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the
government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in
its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to
say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living
or my right to live anywhere I choose.
Furthermore, no nation, wishing
to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What
to do? Well, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and
this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for
money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Harlem and
the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools
there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not
possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more
important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks
printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these
textbooks to be controlled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial
health of publishing houses? What to do?
Why are Negroes and Puerto
Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center,
and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto
Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be
done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem
know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous
state of affairs came about. If some of these things are not begun—I
would say—then, of course, we will be sitting on a powder keg all
summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if
it doesn’t.
They thanked me. They didn’t believe me, as I
conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent.
And, in the spring, the phone began to ring again.
Now, what I
have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco—is true of every Northern
city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired
enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his
place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other
function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very
grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly
ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always
afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for
cruelty.
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,”
always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto
explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my
master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in
the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to
surrender his self-respect.
* * *
On April 17, some school
children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere
childish prank if the children had been white—had been, that is, the
children of that portion of the citizenry for whom the police work and
who have the power to control the police. But these children were black,
and the police chased them and beat them and took out their guns; and
Frank Stafford lost his eye in exactly the same way The Harlem Six lost
their liberty—by trying to protect the younger children. Daniel Hamm,
for example, tells us that “…we heard children scream. We turned around
and walked back to see what happened. I saw this policeman with his gun
out and with his billy in his hand. I like put myself in the way to keep
him from shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a
leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of
them.”
He was arrested, along with Wallace Baker, carried to the
police station, beaten—“six and twelve at a time would beat us. They got
so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us—they
even bring phlegm up and spit on me.” This went on all day in the
evening. Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm were taken to Harlem Hospital for
X rays and then carried back to the police station, where the beating
continued all night.
They were eventually released, with the fruit-stand
charges pending, in spite of the testimony of the fruit-stand owner.
This fruit-stand owner had already told the police that neither Wallace
Baker nor Daniel Hamm had ever been at his store and that they certainly
had had nothing to do with the fruit-stand incident. But this had no
effect on the conduct of the police. The boys had already attracted the
attention of the police, long before the fruit-stand riot, and in a
perfectly innocent way.
They are pigeon fanciers and they
keep—kept—pigeons on the roof. But the police are afraid of everything
in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they
consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of
Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the
streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very
air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed
the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter
one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will,
at any hour, and search him.
Harlem believes, and I certainly agree,
that these laws are directed against Negroes. They are certainly not
directed against anybody else. One day, “two carloads of detectives come
and went up on the roof. They pulled their guns on the kids and
searched them and made them all come down and they were going to take
them down to the precinct.” But the boys put up a verbal fight and
refused to go and attracted quite a crowd. “To get these boys to the
precinct we would have to shoot them,” a policeman said, and “the police
seemed like they was embarrassed. Because I don’t think they expected
the kids to have as much sense as they had in speaking up for
themselves.” They refused to go to the precinct, “and they didn’t,’’ and
their exhibition of the spirit of ’76 marked them as dangerous.
Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in
that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in
occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be
executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of
the occupying forces. Furthermore, since the police, not at all
surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent—for neither, in fact, do they
have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either—Harlem and
all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes. A crime, as we know,
is solved when someone is arrested and convicted. It is not
indispensable, but it is useful, to have a confession. If one is carried
back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is
likely to confess to anything.
Therefore, ten days later,
following the slaying of Mrs. Margit Sugar in Mr. and Mrs. Sugar’s
used-clothing store in Harlem, the police returned and took Daniel Hamm
away again. This is how his mother tells it. “I think it was three
(detectives) come up and they asked are you Danny Hamm? And he says yes
and right away—gun right to the head and slapping him up, one gun here
and one here—just all the way down the hall—beating him and knocking him
around with the gun to his head.” The other boys were arrested in the
same way, and, again of course, they were beaten, but this arrest was a
far greater torture than the first one had been because some of the
mothers did not know where the boys were, and the police, who were
holding them, refused for many hours to say that they were holding them.
The mothers did not know of what it was their children were accused
until they learned, via television, that the charge was murder. At that
time in the state of New York, this charge meant death in the electric
chair.
Let us assume that all six boys are guilty as (eventually)
charged. Can anyone pretend that the manner of their arrest, or their
treatment, bears any resemblance to equal justice under the law? The
Police Department has loftily refused to “dignify the charges.” But can
anyone pretend that they would dare to take this tone if the case
involved, say, the sons of Wall Street brokers? I have witnessed and
endured the brutality of the police many more times than once—but, of
course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police
Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only
to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself; it
must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is
legally sworn to protect; and if American Negroes are not a part of the
American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud.
* * *
This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police, not only in New York, by the most powerful forces in American life—otherwise,
they would not dare to claim it, would indeed be unable to claim
it—creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already,
visibly, is close to martial law.
Here is Wallace Baker’s mother
speaking, describing the night that a police officer came to her house
to collect the evidence which he hoped would prove that her son was
guilty of murder. The late Mrs. Sugar had run a used-clothing store and
the policeman was looking for old coats. “Nasty as he was that night in
my house. He didn’t ring the bell. So I said, have you got a search
warrant? He say, no, I don’t have no search warrant and I’m going to
search anyway. Well, he did. So I said, will you please step out of this
room till I get dressed? He wouldn’t leave.”
This collector of evidence
against the boys was later arrested on charges of possessing and
passing counterfeit money (he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor,
“conspiring” to pass counterfeit money). The officer’s home in
Hartsdale, N. Y., is valued at $35,000, he owns two cars, one a
Cadillac, and when he was arrested, had $1,300 in his pockets. But the
families of The Harlem Six do not have enough money for counsel. The
court appointed counsel, and refused to allow the boys counsel of their
own choice, even though the boys made it clear that they had no
confidence in their court-appointed counsel, and even though four
leading civil rights lawyers had asked to be allowed to handle the case.
The boys were convicted of first-degree murder, and are now ending
their childhood and may end their lives in jail.
These things
happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact,
and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our
doom. Here is the boy, Daniel Hamm, speaking—speaking of his country,
which has sworn to bring peace and freedom to so many millions:
“They don’t want us here. They don’t want us—period! All they want us
to do is work on these penny-ante jobs for them—and that’s it.
And beat our heads in whenever they feel like it. They don’t want us on
the street ’cause the World’s Fair is coming. And they figure that all
black people are hoodlums anyway, or bums, with no character of our own.
So they put us off the streets, so their friends from Europe, Paris or
Vietnam—wherever they come from—can come and see this supposed-to-be
great city.”
There is a very bitter prescience in what this
boy—this “bad nigger”—is saying, and he was not born knowing it. We
taught it to him in seventeen years. He is draft age now, and if he were
not in jail, would very probably be on his way to Southeast Asia. Many
of his contemporaries are there, and the American government and the
American press are extremely proud of them. They are dying there like
flies; they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more
hideously than flies.
A member of my family said to me when we learned
of the bombing of the four little girls in the Birmingham Sunday school,
“Well, they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the
gas ovens?” Many Negroes feel this; there is no way not to feel it.
Alas, we know our countrymen, municipalities, judges, politicians,
policemen and draft boards very well. There is more than one way to skin
a cat, and more than one way to get bad niggers off the streets. No one
in Harlem will ever believe that The Harlem Six are guilty—God knows
their guilt has certainly not been proved. Harlem knows, though, that
they have been abused and possibly destroyed, and Harlem knows why—we
have lived with it since our eyes opened on the world. One is in the
impossible position of being unable to believe a word one’s countrymen
say.
“I can’t believe what you say,” the song goes, “because I see what
you do”—and one is also under the necessity of escaping the jungle of
one’s situation into any other jungle whatever. It is the bitterest
possible comment on our situation now that the suspicion is alive in so
many breasts that America has at last found a way of dealing with the
Negro problem.
“They don’t want us—period!" The meek shall
inherit the earth, it is said. This presents a very bleak image to those
who live in occupied territory. The meek Southeast Asians, those who
remain, shall have their free elections, and the meek American
Negroes—those who survive—shall enter the Great Society.
Bar Marco in Pittsburgh sets a golden standard for paying their
employees a fair wage, along with giving benefits rarely granted to food
service staff. Ed Schultz, co-owner Justin Steel, and employee Andrew
Heffner discuss these incredible steps for worker’s rights.
Movies like The Help, with white protagonists, get lots of recognition, while cinematic classics like Do the Right Thing and Lumumba don’t get their due.
David Oyelowo as Selma’s Martin Luther King Jr. talks to director Ava DuVernay.
Courtesy of Paramout Pictures
Social media is abuzz with news that Ava DuVernay’s towering film Selma received
only two Academy Award nominations, for best picture and best song. The
best film ever made about the civil rights movement, Selma was
shut out of nominations for best director and actor that seemed
inevitable just weeks ago. And the popular Twitter hashtag
#OscarSoWhite, which is trending now, tells us only part of the story.
This is not the first time the Oscars have snubbed a black filmmaker
whose artistic achievements seem to be overwhelmed by a storm of
political controversy.
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
is rightly regarded as the director’s masterpiece, a scintillating
meditation on American race relations that turned the summer of 1989
into a national conversation about racial conflicts simmering across the
nation. Many in Hollywood, including actress Kim Basinger, who said as much
during the 1990 Academy Award show, felt that Lee should have received a
best director nomination, and the film nominated for best picture.
Instead Lee was nominated, but did not win, for best original
screenplay.
Three years later, Lee’s searing three-hour biopic, Malcolm X,
was again shut out from the best picture and best director categories,
although Denzel Washington did receive (but did not win) a best actor
nomination.
A less-recognized and more recent slighting of a seminal black film is Raoul Peck’s woefully unrecognized Lumumba,
which tells the story of Congolese prime minister and Pan-African icon
Patrice Émery Lumumba, whose fight against colonialism influenced
African-American leaders from Malcolm X to Amiri Baraka. Independently
produced and helmed by a Haitian director, Lumumba features an electrifying performance by actor Eriq Ebouaney.
Selma is simply the latest black-directed masterpiece whose
artistic integrity confronted the unapologetic racism of a film industry
more comfortable with white fantasies of black life than the genuine
article.
We live in a world where the 2012 film The Help,
a fictionalized account of the civil rights era featuring actress Emma
Stone as the Jackson, Miss., black community’s white savior, not only
was nominated for four Oscars but also became a box office sensation,
grossing $216 million worldwide.
Unfortunately for the brilliant and bold Ava DuVernay, many academy voters didn’t get the message that The Help was a work of fiction. Instead, as they watched Selma’s
provocative and inspired blend of history and artistic integrity
unfold, they waited. And waited. And waited. For the kind of white
protagonist (read: hero) that enables white voters to identify with
films presenting black subject matter. Even 12 Years a Slave
provided white characters that allowed contemporary mainstream
audiences to relate, even if simply through an act of personal revulsion
that allowed 21st-century liberals a measure of moral superiority.
Selma offers no such embellishments.
Just the humbling experience of witnessing a period in American
history when black folks stood at the cutting edge of a movement that
was both morally specific and expansively universal. DuVernay’s camera
does not avert its gaze from white violence or black resistance. Most
important, she embraces, even takes as a given, the transcendent glory
of African-American intelligence and self-determination. Black women and
men, young and old, are portrayed as leaders, not victims; as
strategists and tacticians, and not simply obedient followers of Martin
Luther King Jr.
Selma’s purposely unglamorous depiction of a warts-and-all
King offered a heartbreaking entree into the story of an icon and his
wife whose images have become calcified to the point of being disfigured
in our own time.
But it’s arguably the depiction of President Lyndon B. Johnson that sealed Selma’s
Oscar fate.
DuVernay’s LBJ is presented as a wary ally of the movement;
a man pulled by competing political interests who only grudgingly
supported the voting-rights movement. This contrasts with
the historical Johnson’s more robust support for civil rights, but did
little to diminish the film’s artistic power and achievement. Yet the
controversy over historical accuracy—one that largely escaped other
prestige pictures, like American Sniper, Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, all also based on historical events, and that have been accused of taking literary license with history—focused squarely on Selma, the awards season’s lone film directed by a black woman.
If there’s a silver lining to all this talk of Oscar snubs,
disrespect, sexism and racism, it’s that it will both inspire more
people to see the film and inspire more black women and men to—following
in DuVernay’s footsteps—dare to make films of such power and grace that
they defy conventional standards of artistic and commercial success,
even as they take black culture to new cinematic heights.
We've written for years on C&L of how much of a crackpot Ron Paul was
while he served in Congress -- and still is. His rise to
pseudo-political prominence came after he was a frequent guest and
peddler of the 9/11 inside job conspiracy theories led by Alex Jones and
his ilk. Yesterday The Ron Paul Institute published a piece called : Charlie Hebdo Shootings: False Flag?
The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics
of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a
disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly
trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and
killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets
of people.
It shouldn't surprise anyone who has covered Ron Paul in the past,
but most of the media only focused on Paul's popularity rise during the
2008 Republican presidential primaries and never bothered to ask why he
was able to raise so much money with his "money bombs.' Being a right
wing extremist or a conspiracy theory nut pays good dollars and Ron Paul
capitalized on it big time.
Senator Rand Paul, (his son) is no slouch when it comes to conspiracy theories either, but I do wonder if the media will ever ask Rand about his father's nutty proclivities? Don't hold your breath.
Led
by Elizabeth Warren, this week progressive Democrats and the American
people scored an unusual victory over Wall Street, Too Big To Fail
Banks, and corporate Democrats.
Wall Street investment banker
Antonio Weiss -- President Obama's nominee for the third ranking
position in the Treasury Department, who had helped Burger King merge
with a Canadian company to avoid U.S. taxes and stood to receive a $20
million payout from his bank for taking the Treasury job - withdrew his
nomination rather than face questioning on his Wall Street ties in a
Senate confirmation hearing.
On its face, Weiss's withdrawal might
seem like a relatively small thing. But in politics, this is the
equivalent of a large earthquake, and a big boost to Elizabeth Warren's
political influence.
A presidential appointee is almost never withdrawn because of opposition from the president's own party.
The last case I can remember is in 2005 when George W. Bush withdrew
the Supreme Court nomination of his friend Harriet Miers after she was
opposed by Republican Senators and activists.
As Joe Biden is known to
say, "This is a big deal".
This political earthquake is a
barometer of the growing influence of Sen. Warren, without whose
outspoken opposition - joined by a grassroots campaign which generated
over tens of thousands of signatures -- the nomination would have sailed
through.
Four weeks ago, I wrote a piece on The Huffington Post entitled The Speech That Could Make Elizabeth Warren the Next President of the United States.
Much to my surprise the piece went totally viral. Over the next few
days, the piece was "Liked" by 243,000 readers, reposted by over 37,000
people on their own Facebook pages, and Tweeted by thousands more
(including by Mark Ruffalo to his 1.2 million followers). The piece seemed
to have touched a nerve in the political zeitgeist. The response
indicated that there's a hunger for new leadership which is not bought
and sold by corporate America, whether it's another Bush or another
Clinton.
Even as Jeb Bush is staring to lock up Republican donors
in the money primary that hugely influences who wins the actual voter
primary, and Hillary adds top Clinton and Obama advisor John Podesta to
her potential campaign staff, there's a growing grassroots outcry for a
Warren candidacy.
MoveOn has raised $1m for a Draft Warren
campaign, has opened staffed offices in Iowa, and has gathered over
200,000 signatures (sign here)
which are growing daily. Democracy for America is launching an
on-the-ground grassroots campaign this Saturday in New Hampshire. 300
former Obama campaign staffers have signed a letter urging Warren to run.
It's
clear that if Warren runs, she'll have an army of experienced
grassroots campaign organizers and donors. And unlike with Barack Obama,
they're the type of grassroots organizers who would stay organized if
she won to be sure that she and a reluctant Congress lived up to her
campaign promises.
Even though it's early to put much stock in polls, a Colorado focus group
of Republicans, Democrats and Independent organized by the Annenberg
Center expressed widespread distaste for both Clinton and Bush and
strong positive interest in Warren. A Republican-leaning independent,
supported by half the participants, said "I wouldn't be opposed to
Congress saying, 'If your last name is Clinton or Bush, you don't even
get to run'". Words used by participants to describe Clinton were
"Hopeful." "Crazy." "Strong." "Spitfire." "Untrustworthy." "More of the
same." "Next candidate, please."
Comments on Jeb Bush were even worse.
But
many participants responded positively when Elizabeth Warren's name was
mentioned. Words used to describe her included "Passionate." "Smart."
"Sincere." "Knowledgeable." "Intelligent." "Capable. Half of the
participants said they'd pick Warren as their next door neighbor,
including the most conservative member of the group. A
Republican-leaning independent said, "She's personable and
knowledgeable, and I think she's got a good handle on what's going on in
the country". The Washington Post reported the pollster's takeaway:
"'One
is [that] the political classes told us it's going to be Bush against
Clinton. But these people are hundreds of miles away from that choice.
Essentially what they're telling us is, 'I don't trust these people.
They're part of an establishment that I don't like.'
That was one
turning point, he said. The other was Warren. 'Elizabeth Warren, from
every part of the compass, had a level of support," he said. "She's not
invisible. She's not unknown. She's not undefined.' And, he added, she
reached them on the issues so many people spoke about, which is their
own economic concerns.
'You couldn't leave this without feeling
how hard-pressed these people are and how they're looking for someone
who will be a force for their cause. And Elizabeth Warren has broken
through.'"
Given that Elizabeth Warren is the only
national politician who addresses the economic concerns of the American
people without the corporate ties of Bush, Inc. or Clinton, Inc., as an Atlantic Magazine" column put it, if Warren doesn't run, "she'll do a tremendous disservice to her principles and her party."
"Warren
is the only person standing between the Democrats and an uncontested
Hillary Clinton nomination. She has already made clear what she thinks
of the Clintons.
Warren has suggested that President Bill Clinton's administration served the same "trickle down" economics as its Republicans and predecessors.
Warren has denounced the Clinton administration's senior economic appointees as servitors of the big banks.
Warren has blasted
Bill Clinton's 1996 claim that the era of big government is over and
his repeal of Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations...
Lead
a fight for America's working people? Hillary Clinton wouldn't lead a
fight for motherhood and apple pie if motherhood and apple pie were
polling below 70 percent."
In contrast, Warren lays
out a concrete program for giving average Americans a fighting chance in
an increasingly unequal economy. As she told the National Summit on Raising Wages last week,
"We need to talk about what we believe:
• We believe that no one should work full time and still live in poverty - and that means raising the minimum wage.
• We believe workers have a right to come together, to bargain together and to rebuild America's middle class.
• We believe in enforcing labor laws, so that workers get overtime pay and pensions that are fully funded.
• We believe in equal pay for equal work.
•
We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to retire
with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security, Medicare, and
pensions.
We also need a hard conversation about how we create
jobs here in America. We need to talk about how to build a future. So
let's say what we believe:
• We believe in making investments - in
roads and bridges and power grids, in education, in research -
investments that create good jobs in the short run and help us build new
opportunities over the long run.
• And we believe in paying for
them-not with magical accounting scams that pretend to cut taxes and
raise revenue, but with real, honest-to-goodness changes that make sure
that we pay-and corporations pay-a fair share to build a future for all
of us.
• We believe in trade policies and tax codes that will
strengthen our economy, raise our living standards, and create American
jobs - and we will never give up on those three words: Made in America.
And
one more point. If we're ever going to un-rig the system, then we need
to make some important political changes. And here's where we start:
•
We know that democracy doesn't work when congressmen and regulators bow
down to Wall Street's political power - and that means it's time to
break up the Wall Street banks and remind politicians that they don't
work for the big banks, they work for US!"
Given the
stark contrasts between Clinton's corporate bromides and Warren's
specific plans to make the economy work for the 99%, how can Warren cede
the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton without a contest?
Moreover,
Warren's current political influence derives, in no small part, from
her potential as a Presidential candidate. If she wins the Democratic
nomination, she will become the most influential Democrat in the
country, and if she wins the Presidency, she has a chance of effecting
some of the transformational changes she proposes. Even if she loses a
close nomination battle with Hillary, she will have established herself
as a defining national figure and might force Hillary to move in a more
populist direction.
But if, after all the fiery rhetoric, Warren
sits out the presidential race, her political influence will quickly
wane. She will become one more backbench Senator with little political
influence. She'd be something like Bernie Sanders (whom I personally
like) who's little more than a political gadfly but is unable to achieve
much in the way of concrete accomplishments. And Elizabeth Warren
doesn't strike me as the type of person who would be satisfied with
talking big and accomplishing little.
So, Run Warren, Run.
Anything less would be a disservice to yourself, your principles, your
millions of supporters, and the American people.
It makes me sad that people feel so desperate and are so ill they
would even consider attacking a public official. But the most shocking
part of this sad story is how many times Michael Hoyt, former bartender
at John Boehner's club, made threats before he was actually arrested.
“Hoyt told the officer he was Jesus Christ and he was
going to kill Boehner because Boehner was mean to him at the country
club and because Boehner is responsible for Ebola,” United States
Capitol Police (USCP) Special Agent Christopher M. Desrosiers said.
“Hoyt advised he had a loaded Beretta .380 automatic and he was going to
shoot Boehner and take off.”
Officers said Hoyt told them he regretted not having enough time to put something in Boehner’s drink. It was also discovered Hoyt emailed Boehner’s wife about the plot a day before he called police, Desrosiers said.
Boy, is that email a doozy, too. Here's his reply to Mrs. Boehner
after she emailed him back asking what the first one was all about.
Mrs. Boehner, I was fired. I could not email Mr. Boehner
directly because of the zip code block on his email. It doesn’t matter
anyway. If he took a real interest in anything he would insure his Club
was better than the Country, but they are exactly the same and life goes
on SSDD. Sincerely, Mike. Mike, your former bartender.
In addition to the emails and erratic behavior, Hoyt also posted his
thoughts online. The Ebola crisis in particular was stressing him.
Authorities said Hoyt also typed an 11-page blog
detailing his thoughts about Boehner being the devil and emailed it to
his father, ex-girlfriend and neighbor.
Hoyt said he used to pour wine for Boehner often and could have easily poisoned his drink, but didn’t, special agents said.
He said no one checked the drinks he poured for Boehner, and it would
have been “very easy to slip something in,” according to Desrosiers.
Hoyt also told agents he imagined a scenario where he confronted
Boehner about Ebola in front of one of the sports stadiums in downtown
Cincinnati. He said he wanted large crowds to be present.
Obviously Mr. Hoyt has serious psychiatric problems, which is why this find in his apartment is that much more disturbing:
Police searched Hoyt’s home on Oct. 31 and seized an SKS assault rifle magazine,
two boxes of 7.62 ammo, 35 loose rounds, a speed loader and a box of
.380 rounds. A notebook containing “John Boehner” and “Ebola” were among
other writings found during the search, as well as two envelopes with
lists of country club members, authorities said.
Agents said they also found a bullet hole in the upper wall of Hoyt’s first-floor bedroom.
When he voluntarily agreed to a 72-hour hold, police took his .380 handgun from him for safekeeping.
Officers said they later recovered Hoyt's SKS assault
rifle at his mother’s home in Hebron, Ky. She told investigators she
removed it from his home while he wasn’t there because she noticed he
was not eating or sleeping and becoming increasingly agitated,
Desrosiers said.
People so desperately ill should worry John Boehner and everyone
else, too. I'm sure his mother was concerned, since he had suffered a
previous psychotic episode but had discontinued his medications. But
there wasn't a thing she could do, because the laws in this country are
so incredibly draconian when it comes to dealing with the mentally ill.
Family members have no rights without extensive and lengthy court
proceedings.
I'm glad he didn't shoot John Boehner -- or poison him. But I do wish
it would give Boehner pause about the ACA, which covers mental health
issues as well as physical health.
Update: Please note: This response came from the right, not the left:
More
and more people are on disability. This reflects an aging and sick
population, not fraudulent activity. Demographics explains most of the
increase. See Just The Facts on Disability.
Republicans fought against SSDI throughout the 50s its passage was a dramatic story that few know or remember today. The current "crisis" is a manufactured one,
part of the long-view Republican strategy to eliminate SSDI and a
broader attack on Social Security. In 1983, a Republican effort moved
funds that had been allocated for the disabled into the Social Security
Retirement program, artificially creating an imbalance that is coming
due today.
“[People
in power] use the word ‘reform’ when they mean ‘privatize,’ and they
use ‘strengthen’ when they really mean ‘dismantle.’ They tell us there’s
a crisis to get us all riled up so we’ll sit down and listen to their
plan to privatize … Democrats are absolutely united in the need to
strengthen Social Security and make it solvent for future generations.
We know that, and we want that.” (Senator Barack Obama, 2005)
Senator Ted Cruz will chair the committee that oversees science and Nasa in the new Republican-controlled Congress, raisingfears that the conservative Texan will cut funding to the space agency and science programs.
Cruz’s appointment to the space, science and competitiveness subcommittee comes amid a broad shift of power
in the Senate, where the GOP won a majority in the 2014 midterm
elections. Cruz was the top Republican on the subcommittee before the
elections.
He has publicly stated support for Nasa but has also attempted at
least once to cut the agency’s funding, arguing that larger government
cuts necessitated changes to the space program’s budget. In 2013, Cruz
both tried to reduce Nasa’s budget and said: “It’s critical that the United States ensure its continued leadership in space.”
Cruz has constituents invested in the space agency’s future – for instance, Nasa employees and contractors at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Cruz has also spoken out against decades of science that indicate climate change, telling CNN
last year that in “the last 15 years, there has been no recorded
warming” to support “a so-called scientific theory”. His vociferous
opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his support
of extreme budget cuts could spell trouble for Nasa’s less prominent
programs, such as its own climate research and sophisticated supercomputers.
His role on the front lines of the 2013 government shutdown, which critics say had lasting negative effects
on public safety, Nasa research and EPA scientists’ ability to visit
contaminated sites, also suggests at best a narrow focus on Nasa’s
largest projects and at worst a disregard for agencies that require
science funding.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican from Florida, was named chair to the subcommittee on oceans, atmosphere, fisheries and coast guard,
which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(Nooa) and the protection of oceans and marine life in US jurisdiction.
Rubio has said
he does not “believe that human activity is causing these dramatic
changes to our climate”, which is a more lenient position than the new
chair of the environment committee, Jim Inhofe, who denies climate science outright.
In December, Congress gave Nasa a boost to its 2015 budget, setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars for its planetary science program and new Space Launch System rocket, which aims to revolutionize advanced rocketry.
Due to budget cuts and programs that the government has allowed to
lapse, Nasa has increasingly relied on private space companies in recent
years, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX. On Saturday SpaceX tested its own experimental rocket system, delivering supplies to the International Space Station before failing to land its reusable rocket on a floating platform.
From eHistory, a time lapse view from 1776 to the present day of how the
US government systematically took land from Native Americans through
treaties and executive orders that were rarely honored for long.
The final assault on indigenous land tenure, lasting
roughly from the mid-19th century to 1890, was rapid and murderous. (In
the 20th century, the fight moved from the battlefield to the courts,
where it continues to this day.) After John Sutter discovered gold in
California's Central Valley in 1848, colonists launched slaving
expeditions against native peoples in the region. 'That a war of
extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian
race becomes extinct, must be expected,' the state's first governor
instructed the legislature in 1851.
In the Great Plains, the US Army conducted a war of attrition, with
success measured in the quantity of tipis burned, food supplies
destroyed, and horse herds slaughtered. The result was a series of
massacres: the Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho (1863), the Sand
Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado (1864), the Washita Massacre in
western Oklahoma (1868), and a host of others. In Florida in the 1850s,
US troops waded through the Everglades in pursuit of the last holdouts
among the Seminole peoples, who had once controlled much of the Florida
peninsula. In short, in the mid-19th century, Americans were still
fighting to reduce if not to eliminate the continent's original
residents.
FYI, it's always a good rule of thumb to not read comments on
YouTube, but in this case you really really shouldn't read the comments
on this video unless you want a bunch of reasons why it was ok for
Europeans to drive Native Americans to the brink of total genocide.
Thanks
to the new lua interpreter by gdljjrod, this homebrew has made its way
onto the PSP scene. One Installer is an application designed for
downloading and managing PSP applications homebrew, plugins and themes,
directly from the PSP, similar to PSP Installer by spike_132000. The
application has the option to install all contents directly into your
memory stick.
Not
really a fan of putting my own projects in the front page, but from the
very few homebrews released this year, I believe this deserves a spot.
This homebrew’s aim is to be equivalent to iRshell (without its ir
functions), designed similarly to the modern look of android’s custom
rom, CyanogenMod. However it’s still in beta and only offers a few
features as of now. These features include: File Manager, Music Player,
Gallery viewer, browser (PSP’s default netfront browser), and some
recovery menu functions, all designed exactly like Android.
How would we play our homebrews and backups without this? I mean, well yeah we have other sources like Pro CFW,
TN Hen and signed homebrews using OFW, but this CFW has proved its
standards and is still being updated today. This CFW is the most
updated, and includes almost all must-have CFW features. This includes
the time machine (for PSP’s with hack-able mobos only), leda
for 1.50 homebrew support and also PRO Online! The one thing this CFW
is missing is the permanent patch that allows permanent CFW access on
PSP’s with firmwares over 6.20 and unhackable motherboards. Let’s hope
Davee can achieve this, because with that this guy is complete!
Wish I could post more of Insoft’s homebrews for the year, but we needed more room for others J Nibbler
is a remake of an old arcade game, where you navigate a snake through a
maze, while collecting apples before making progress to the next level.
It consists of a neat retro look and feel to it.
This game was coded during “AC” party which was held near Paris at the month of April 2014.
Zelda
– Navi’s Quest is a PSP port of the fourth game in the french homebrew
tetralogy which was created by Vincent Jouillat. The current version is
based on the 1.3 PC version and can be completed 100% on the PSP. Do
note that his homebrew won’t be compatible with the old PSP 1000 (phat)
due to memory problems.
This is the most recently updated Lamecraft
mod which offers a plethora of features! This mod is only based on
survival mode. Some of fascinating features it includes are: seed
generating option, new terrain generator, biomes, crafting, shadows,
fogs, and much more! Happy Crafting 
RetroArch is
an open source, multi-platform frontend designed to be a fast,
lightweight, and portable multi-system emulator. The emulator currently
contains the following cores: gambatte, tempGBA, fceumm, fmsx,
beetle-pce-fast, nxengine, prboom
NZP
is a “remake” of call of duty’s game mode (zombie mode) aimed for PSP.
This game lets you fight endless amount undead in a closed and limited
area. You gain points from killing them, which you can then spend on
purchasing weapons, and advancing further on the map. You can get some
things to help you out, but eventually you will die. Your goal is to get
to as further as you can through each round.
