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Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
—Groucho Marx
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Glenn Greenwald on the High Cost of Government Secrecy
Glenn Greenwald on the Boston Siege and the state’s reaction. He remains the most intelligent and principled political / legal pundit I follow. His analysis and commentary is spot on. Definitely worth a listen.
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Still remains the single greatest piece of graffiti in the city.
Yo Apoyo Hombre de Tamales.
Tengo Hambre para el Hombre!
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Just a reminder of the single greatest cable news broadcast ever recorded.
Miss you Karl.
Miss you.
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‘In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. Incredibly, the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent. In the last study done on income distribution, we learned that 93 percent of all new income generated between 2009 and 2010 went to the top 1 percent while the bottom 99 percent split the remaining 7 percent. This extraordinary unfairness is not only morally reprehensible, it is bad economics. It will be very difficult to create the jobs that our people need when so many Americans have little or no money to spend.
25 February, 2013
Tagged as Bernie Sanders Congress Economics politics inequality class antagonism class warfare
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What causes the inequitable distribution of wealth? It is not competition, but monopoly, that deprives labor of its product. … Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.
—Benjamin Tucker, in a 1892 edition of Liberty
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Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important and radical political activists of the 20th century. Not “civil rights figures.” Not “African American leaders.” Not “non-violent reformists.” When I say “radical political activist,” that is exactly what I mean. The scope of his vision for a better world was wide in breadth and deep in root. In his 13 short years of public activism, he (and his many allies) courageously addressed issues of race, class, materialism, war, moral culture, sex, and religion. The medicine Dr. King prescribed for each of these interrelated topics was bitter and centered around a “radical revolution of values“ (video here).
On this blog, I’ve noted modern culture’s attempt to retroactively “speak for” and water down Dr. King’s truly radical politics several times. This impulse to memorialize and canonize Dr. King and his ideas is so strong, you might think we as a people had actually consummated his vision for a better America. Sadly, I suspect the true reason to be much more banal; that is, we memorialize because “it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
Well. Today is once again Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I thought I’d use the occasion for a somewhat novel purpose. Instead of focusing on the richness of Dr. King’s activism, I’d like to share a singular example of how this nation’s federal government thanked him for his efforts at peaceful democratic change. The following is from the excellent website “Letters of Note.”
In November of 1964, fearful of his connection to the Communist Partythrough Stanley Levison, the FBI anonymously sent Martin Luther King the following threatening letter, along with a cassette that contained allegedly incriminating audio recordings of King with women in various hotel rooms — the fruits of a 9 month surveillance project headed by William C. Sullivan.
Unsurprisingly, King saw the strongly worded letter as an invitation for him to take his own life, as did an official investigation in 1976 which concluded that the letter “clearly implied that suicide would be a suitable course of action for Dr. King.”
Transcript follows, free of most redactions.KING,
In view of your low grade… I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII…
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God… Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.
No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself… I repeat — no person can argue successfully against facts… Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness… King you are done.
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.Dr. King was not perfect, no man can be; but he was brave and righteous, which few even attempt. Let’s take this moment to remember not only his beautiful vision for the way-the-world-could-be, but also the wretched way the world-as-it-was thanked him for his efforts.
21 January, 2013
Tagged as Martin Luther King Jr. FBI government America civil rights politics culture radical activism
Notes (13) -
God Bless Joe Biden.
For all my frustrations and anger towards Capitol Hill, this guy manages to inject a much needed sense of humor and charm.
“Anybody else want to be sworn in as a senator today?”
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Rest In Peace Senator Daniel Inouye (September 7, 1924 – December 17, 2012)
Senator Inouye should be fondly remembered for many things:
- At the age of 17 he enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He served with ‘E’ company of the 442 Regimental Combat Team, a group consisting entirely of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Senator Inouye lost his arm charging a series of machine gun nests on a hill in San Terenzo, Italy on April 21, 1945. His military service earned him the Medal of Honor, the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the Chief Commander of the Philippine Legion of Honor, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, the Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Paulownia Flowers,
- After leaving the service, he graduated from the University of Hawaii and George Washington University School of Law. Later he worked as a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for the City and County of Honolulu.
- In 1959, he became the first Japanese-American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1962, the first in the U.S. Senate
- A fierce anti-corruption advocate, he sat on committees investigating both Watergate and Iran-Contra.
- He represented Hawaii in Congress since it achieved statehood until his death (2012). He was the second longest serving Senator and served as the Senate’s President Pro Tempore since June, 2010.
Now I’m not saying that his military service is the most important part of his impressive career, but it is decidedly the most badass. In order to convey just the faintest suggestive hint of his full badassery, I’ve copied the following excerpt concerning that fateful day in Europe from Badass Of The Week; which I assure you in a real internet publication.
Inouye went back to Italy, where he performed what is now his most famous act of totally badass shit. Inouye’s platoon had been ordered to capture a German strong point along the Colle Musatello Ridge, so naturally this guy decided to go in guns blazing. He led his team through intense fire to capture an observation post, a mortar team, and an artillery position (no bigs), and then moved his troops within 40 yards of a heavily-fortified defensive line, where they immediately came under heavy suppressing fire from three different heavy machine gun positions. Inouye didn’t give a fuck. He started chucking grenades like a madman, trying to blast the bunkers apart. This was fun for a while, but as he stood up to lob yet another explosive he was suddenly shot through the abdomen by a German MG bullet that passed all the way through his torso and came mere inches from severing his spine.
Naturally, this only pissed him off.
So, with the rest of his men pinned down by heavy weapons, the wounded Lieutenant grabbed a backpack of frags and started army-crawling up the ridge towards the enemy guns. As soon as he was close enough, he assaulted the first machine gun nest on his own, taking it out with a grenade from just five yards away and then clearing the rest of it out Al Capone-style with a spray of .45-caliber ammunition from his badass Tommy gun. When that one was taken care of, Inouye sprinted to a second position, dual-chucking two grenades that redecorated the walls of the bunker with Fascist parts.
Unfortunately, the time Inouye was headed for the third position, the Germans were ready for him – the dudes in this nest had just watched this insane-as-fuck little Japanese dude flying around bombing the shit out of their buddies, and these motherfuckers weren’t about to sit back and let Inouye just hand-deliver a fragmentation explosive into their rectums without a fight. So when Inouye was sprinting across open ground a mere 10 yards the machine gun nest, suddenly he saw a German dude pop up from behind a sandbag, aim a rifle-mounted grenade at him, and blast him at point-blank range with the WWII version of an RPG.
The blast covered Inouye with shrapnel and shredded his right arm to the point where it was barely still attached. This, however, failed to stop him. Inouye simply looked down at his useless arm (which was still clutching a hand grenade), pried the grenade out of it with his left hand, and lobbed it underhand right into the dumbfounded German’s face from about 15 feet away. The results weren’t pretty.
From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn’t even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.
While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evauated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he’d literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, “No, that can’t be… you’d have to be insane to do all that.”
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On September 27, 2012 Paul Broun gave a speech stating unequivocally that “all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.” Broun also said that the “Earth is about 9,000 years old,” that “it was created in six days as we know them,” and that mainline Christian denominations are “going to send their people to hell.”
Broun concluded on this note, regarding his personal interpretation of the Bible, “It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society.”
Paul Broun is a Republican Congressman from Georgia. He was reelected earlier this week and continues to sit on the House Science, Space and Technology committee.
