Posted: March 23, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Religious Fanantics, Tom Cruz |
Good Morning!
I’m going to just give you some links to look at today since I’m probably going to bed to sleep as you’re waking. Such is my life right now. I’ve been trying to keep up with some of the recent political news but frankly, it’s somewhat disturbing and hearkens back to BostonBoomer asking if Republicans are even human beings these days.
The clown car is going to get its first passenger this week and it’s one of the whackiest of the whackadoodles. Dominionist and ego-maniacal fruit cake Texas Senator Ted Cruz is set to kick off with some kind of announcement. You may notice that I have an interesting set of vintage photos up today. These are haunting imagines of the residents of historical bedlams. It reminds me that some times the most dangerous people are not the ones we lock up.
Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington.
Cruz will launch a presidential bid outright rather than form an exploratory committee, said senior advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate.
The senator is scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to declare his campaign for the presidency.
Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog Senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.
The firebrand Texan may have few Senate colleagues who will back his White House bid, but his appeal to his party’s base who vote disproportionately in Republican primaries could make him competitive in Iowa and beyond.
We’ve said this here before, but Ted Cruz and his brand of Dominionism is a dangerous extremist movement that hopefully will be placed in the air and sunshine for all to see. This article by Chris Hedges reminds us
of exactly how deluded these folks can be. BB has done extensive research on the Dominionist movement and its Washington DC insider cult of the “Brotherhood”. You can find her writings in our SkyDancing files. However, I’m going to point at the Hedges article as a good description of the crazy Cruzs.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent, that’s why is important to learn symptoms of spiritual awakening, so you know exactly when your psych powers are starting. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.
Between this odd cult and the Opus Dei Catholics–who the church itself considers a cult–we’ve seen some pretty odd policies come to fruition. The GOP’s current budget recommendations are just one example of the absurdity of giving policy making to people who believe in a literal Satan and think some kind of end time is upon us. It’s back to the 19th Century and then some. Please go read the complete essay written by Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. I’ve skipped the part where he points to the complicity of the Democratic Party which has been essential to this entire debacle.
No period of recorded history made possible the accumulation of so much wealth so quickly, or represented a purer laboratory to experiment with the operations of unfettered and unregulated capitalism. As Marx documented in hair-raising fashion in Chapter 10 of “Capital,” the early 19th century saw industrial wages driven down to the level of bare subsistence, while the advent of gaslight and then electricity stretched the working day deep into the hours of darkness, beyond any limits imagined by the most ruthless feudal aristocrat. (Even the divine right of kings, he observes, could not compel medieval peasants to work after the sun went down.) Profit became the object of stringent mathematical analysis for the first time, and Victorian capitalism learned to maximize profit – or “surplus labor,” the work an employee performs after covering the cost of her own continued existence – with magnificent precision and endless ingenuity.
But there’s more to the allure of the Victorian era, and the renewed class war of the 21st century, than unmitigated greed. Class interests shape ideology, and ideology shapes class interests. I’m inclined to think that the Kochs and their political hobby-horses are not entirely hypocritical, or at least that they genuinely believe the path to renewed American greatness lies in unregulated profit-taking and the political defeat and disempowerment of the working class. All that wealth that was so rapidly created by driving the laboring people of the British Isles into such spectacular misery – by working 7-year-old children 16 hours a day, in numerous documented instances — fueled the rise of a mighty industrial economy, and a globe-spanning empire.
This is where the belligerent foreign-policy stance of Cotton and other Republican radicals, and their naked yearning for war with Iran and an expanded American military presence around the world, dovetails with their Mr. Bumble approach to the ungrateful and undeserving poor. They believe that a nation ruled by the rich – by the very, very rich – is a great and powerful nation, and that in the long run the lower orders will be better off if they do as they’re told. It’s a contradictory blend of macho fantasy, discredited supply-side economics and wishful thinking, which reveals all their rhetoric of fiscal responsibility as utter bullshit (as, in fact, a pretext for class war). But through it all runs a strong current of neo-Victorian and neo-Calvinist morality, and a confused nostalgia for the fixed social hierarchies and uncontested global dominance of the British Empire. Why should we wonder (they ask) at America’s declining superpower status? We have surrendered our moral fiber to minimum-wage laws and environmental regulations and the $121 a month in food-stamp benefits provided to Tom Cotton’s poorest Arkansas constituents.
Big Capital’s mission to remake America through renewed class war is far from complete, and there is no near-term version of reality in which Cotton and Cruz live out their wild fantasies of repealing Obamacare, killing food stamps, privatizing Medicare and Social Security, and all the rest of it. But if I had told you a few years ago that public-sector unions would be eviscerated across a wide swath of the labor-friendly Midwest, that would have sounded outrageous too. Inch by inch, the stealth strategy of the Koch brothers is winning a war that most Americans don’t even recognize as a war, between classes we no longer see as classes. In the greatest victory of all, Marx’s history-making proletariat has been broken down by the scrubbing bubbles of class-war ideology into millions of individual “consumers,” who all happen to have low-wage, non-union jobs in the service sector. Only one side is fighting the class war; the other has been persuaded that no war is even possible, and therefore it must surrender.
Some right-wing outfits contest these numbers and try to make the dubious case that Israel can annex the Palestinian territories and still survive as a democratic Jewish state. Those were the type of voters Netanyahu was fishing for when he said before the election that he would not allow a Palestinian state — and when he warned on election day that “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” But in the end there can be no democratic Jewish state unless there is also a Palestinian state.
My friend Jeffrey Goldberg, in a powerful new article in the Atlantic on the tenuous future of Europe’s Jews, recalled an event he attended in the fall with American Jewish leaders at Vice President Biden’s residence. Biden, Goldberg recalled, told the story of a long-ago visit with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who told him that Israel’s “secret weapon” was that the Jews “have no place else to go.”
“Folks,” Goldberg quoted Biden as saying to the American Jews, “there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.”
Goldberg thought Biden had “antiquated notions about Jewish anxiety.” And it’s true that Jews are safe and happy in the United States today — but that could change. This is why I plunged my baby in the mikvah. And this is why I was appalled by Netanyahu’s disavowal of a two-state solution.
Without two states, there won’t be even one Jewish state if — God forbid — my daughter or her progeny someday have no place else to go.
Then, there are headlines like this that make me furious: “Female IDF soldiers barred from mess hall due to presence of ultra-Orthodox troops.”
The army closed a mess hall to women and barred a female officer from entering when new recruits of the ultra-Orthodox Nahal battalion were having lunch, the Israel Defense Forces said.
The incident happened at the Tel Hashomer induction base Thursday. The IDF explained the move by saying the army had promised that there would be no women around ultra-Orthodox recruits during their induction.
According to Channel 2 News, the battalion commander, Col. Uri Levi, said he thought most of the battalion’s new recruits were not ultra-Orthodox. “A minority come from ultra-Orthodox homes and some are not observant at all,” he wrote in a letter.
According to a reservist at the base Saturday, about 80 recruits were inducted into the battalion, most of them wearing the knitted skullcap identified with the religious-Zionist movement, which is generally more liberal on social affairs.
The reservist said a female officer who arrived at the mess hall was told she could not enter and eat because of the presence of the ultra-Orthodox recruits.
“If a female officer can’t sit in the mess hall on this day, we’ve gone crazy,” said the reservist, who said he knew ultra-Orthodox society well. “What if a group of settlers said they didn’t want to sit with Arabs or Druze, or that we couldn’t serve with Muslims?”
This is really over-the-top discrimination so as not to offend one small minority group of fundamentalists. How does that work in a democracy?
So as not to leave out the crazies in the other Abrahamic cult, the “Islamic State” is calling on its backers to start killing US Military Personnel.
Islamic State has posted online what it says are the names, U.S. addresses and photos of 100 American military service members, and called upon its “brothers residing in America” to kill them.
The Pentagon said after the information was posted on the Internet that it was investigating the matter. “I can’t confirm the validity of the information, but we are looking into it,” a U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Saturday.
“We always encourage our personnel to exercise appropriate OPSEC (operations security) and force protection procedures,” the official added.
In the posting, a group referring to itself as the “Islamic State Hacking Division” wrote in English that it had hacked several military servers, databases and emails and made public the information on 100 members of the U.S. military so that “lone wolf” attackers can kill them.
The New York Times reported that it did not look like the information had been hacked from U.S. government servers and quoted an unnamed Defense Department official as saying most of the information could be found in public records, residential address search sites and social media.
What sort’ve hornets nest has been whacked that has created a swarm of buzzing, stinging, religious pests? More importantly, why are they in high places in governments? This is truly just one of the disturbing trends of this century. Who would think in an age of science and knowledge that religious fundamentalism and cults would carry so much sway?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Posted: March 21, 2015 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads |
Spring Has Sprung!
Good Morning!!
Today is the second day of spring! Isn’t it wonderful? March came in like lion and it looks like it’s going to go out like a lamb; so I’m going to illustrate this post with baby animals to offset the contents of this post, which will be about police violence. Spring fever and computer problems have combined to put me in the mood for baby animals photos. I hope you’ll enjoy them too.
I got really down the last few days because my computer went haywire–after only six months! But I’ve accepted it now, and I’m determined to deal with it as gracefully as I can. I have to send it back to the manufacturer for repairs, so I’ll be without a good computer for a couple of weeks. Fortunately, I have a backup. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it works.
The University of Virginia is back in the news. Martese Johnson, an honor student at UVA was beaten by Alcohol and Beverage Control (ABC) officers outside a Charlotte bar on Wednesday night. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that this young man is black. The incident has led to anger and protests on the UVA campus. From the LA Times:
University of Virginia student Martese Johnson’s bloody arrest sparks protests.
Following a night of heated protests, officials in Charlottesville, Va., on Thursday scrambled to defuse the anger sparked by the arrest of a black University of Virginia student outside a bar.
Martese Johnson, 20, had just been denied entry into a bar near the University of Virginia campus early Wednesday when he was questioned by agents with the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency said.
Johnson’s attorney said during his client’s arrest he was thrown to the ground and hit his head on the pavement, gushing blood and requiring stitches.
Johnson was charged with two counts: obstruction of justice without force and public swearing or intoxication.
Oh dear. Public swearing? No wonder he got his head bloodied. /s
In a news conference Thursday, Johnson’s attorney called him an “upstanding young man” and a scholarship student with “no criminal record whatsoever.”
“As the officers held me down, one thought raced through my mind: How could this happen?” Johnson said in a statement read by his attorney, Daniel Watkins….
Watkins also said that despite media reports claiming Johnson had furnished a fake ID, the student supplied a “valid Illinois state identification card issued in 2011” when an employee at the bar asked him for one.
Oh. I see. He was under age, so of course he deserved the beating. /s
Governor Terry McAuliffe has ordered an investigation, and UVA President Teresa Sullivan has asked for witnesses to the incident to “come forward.”
Michael Daly at The Daily Beast: Bloodied UVA Student Martese Johnson Is Left to Ask: ‘How Did This Happen?’
The official answer was that agents of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) had seen the 20-year-old University of Virginia student being denied entry to the Trinity Irish Pub in Charlottesville.
But that does not explain why the ABC agents chose Johnson in particular.
He surely was not the only person to be turned away from an Irish bar at the edge of a college campus on St. Patrick’s Day.
Yet, he seems to have been the only one who was arrested.
Interesting. Of course he happened to have black skin and that probably made him stand out to the ABC officers.
Johnson had never been in trouble with the law and was understandably surprised to find himself suddenly grabbed by the ABC agents who asked him about a fake ID. He told them he did not have one and reflexively asked them to let go of his arm.
The ABC agents responded by slamming him to the sidewalk like he was a gunman after a shootout, causing a head wound that would require 10 stitches to close.
Johnson repeatedly declared himself to be a legitimate college student.
“I go to UVa! I go to UVa! I go to UVa!” he cried out.
What other explanation is there for this incident other than racism? Read the rest at the link.
Now check this out from ABC News yesterday.
A group of black students walked out of a University of Virginia student meeting in protest this afternoon, claiming they were left out of the planning of the event that stemmed from the bloody arrest this week of fellow African-American student Martese Johnson.
Johnson, who was in attendance, also left after the group dominated the first part of the sometimes contentious meeting with their questions for panelists, who included the Charlottesville police chief, the state’s secretary of public safety, which oversees state alcohol control agents, and UVA police. An overflow room contained more people, in addition to the 350 attendees in the main room….
Today’s on-campus meeting, set up by the student council and local and state officials, was titled “A Conversation with Law Enforcement.” Members of the black community at UVA said they were angry that they were excluded from the planning of the event by the student council. A group of black students quickly dominated the first part of this event with their questions.
Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo acknowledged this has been a hard year for everyone in the university community, noting that the school has been put on the national stage three times in the last seven months. “What happened this past week has shaken your trust. It is my responsibility as the police chief to regain your trust. I commit to you today to do that,” Longo said.
But often when he and other speakers were asked a question, students standing in the aisle said together: “Answer the question we asked” with their fists in the air.
The student protesters brought up an incident that happened Wednesday evening, where a University of Virginia police officer allegedly arrested a student in a chokehold. Captain Mike Coleman with the UVA PD said that situation is currently under review.
About 100 of the student protesters walked out of the meeting chanting, “Black lives matter.” The meeting continued for about 40 minutes afterwards, though most people had already left.
That doesn’t sound like a very productive meeting….
At Slate, Jamie Bouie writes “if you want to understand the anger over the police misconduct and brutal arrest of a UVA student, you must also understand UVA.” Of course the incident also relates to police violence against black males–an issue that has been front and center since the Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri last year. It’s a long article, and you should go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you a couple of excerpts.
Johnson is black, and for himself as well as other students, this linked his experience to other incidents of police violence against black men, part of a larger narrative of race and policing, and reflected in the rhetoric of the protests. Students, black and white, chanted “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” the slogan derived from early—and false—reports of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. No, Johnson wasn’t killed, but his experience resonated with black students at UVA. “It’s still hard for me,” said one law school student at a Wednesday rally for Johnson. “I can’t believe I’m even up here right now, I have no words—because I’m sick and tired of this,” he said. “What I’m going to do is to continue to say that black lives matter until it’s true.”
Bouie describes the state of race relations at UVA:
What’s more, there’s the particular racial atmosphere of the university. It would be inaccurate and unfair to say that all black students at UVA share a common experience of the school and its institutions. Some find community in the student mainstream, others in the rich collection of black organizations and clubs, and others still in their particular networks of friends and classmates. But while experiences vary, many black students can speak to moments of racial tension and outright racist aggression. “People call you the N-word and say that you don’t belong here. They don’t realize what that does to the psyche. Then you have to go to class,” explained one protester in an interview with ThinkProgress. To that point, I spoke with one alumnus who was once taunted with racial slurs while walking through campus, and another who could point to multiple incidents across his college career. Indeed, my first month at UVA was marked by a rash of racial disturbances, including one in which a black student living in a prestigious “Lawn” room—adjacent to the Rotunda, at the center of the university—was greeted with racist epithets (including “Nigger”) on his door.
And beyond these individual experiences is the broad context of black life at the UVA.For most of the last decade, first-year black enrollment held steady at 9 percent. As of 2012, it had dipped to 6 percent, which school officials attribute to the recession, weak economy, and a lack of outreach to younger students and their families. It says something of the present university environment that, out of the 47 Lawn room assignments for the 2015 school year, not a single one of the honors went to a black student….
At a school as large as UVA, shrinking black enrollment—and the persistence of racial microaggressions—can create the feeling of isolation, even as the school keeps its commitment to programs and services for black students and other students of color, from a strong mentoring program and dedicated Office of African-American Affairs to merit scholarships for minority students and a dedicated team of minority college recruiters.
It all adds up to a fraught environment of unresolved problems, where police violence against a black student sparks mass protests of dissatisfied students—black and white—and the school administration joins the criticism. UVA President Teresa Sullivan declared her “commitment to seeking the truth about this incident,” while Marcus Martin, joined with the school’s dean of African-American affairs, Maurice Apprey, to condemn the entire incident. “We are outraged by the brutality against a University of Virginia undergraduate student that occurred in the early hours Wednesday, March 18, 2015,” reads their statement. “This was wrong and should not have occurred. In the many years of our medical, professional and leadership roles at the University, we view the nature of this assault as highly unusual and appalling based on the information we have received.”
When will it end? We need a serious effort in this country to seek law enforcement officers at every level who understand racial prejudice and are committed to ending it. Officers also need to be trained in techniques to deal with violent and/or mentally ill suspects other than shooting and killing them. There have been a number of recent incidents of violence against black men by law enforcement officers around the country. This issue must be addressed, if necessary at the Federal level. A few more links to recent stories on police violence:
Jacksonville.com: Suspect, 16, identified in fatal police-involved shooting; grieving Jacksonville mother has many questions.
Cleveland.com: Tony Robinson shooting: Protestors hit Madison, Wisconsin streets (video).
Chicago Tribune: Kenosha officer kills man upon return from leave for other shooting.
Fox News: 10 protesters arrested after DA says Philly police-involved shooting is tragedy, but not crime.
ABC 5 Cleveland: Teen shot & killed by Cleveland Police on east side identified; source says he did not have a gun.
Vice News: San Diego Police Shoot Man’s Service Dog Dead After Responding to Wrong House.
It just goes on and on. When will it ever end?
Now, what stories are you following today. I hope you’ll post links in the comment thread, and I promise to click on every one. Have a great weekend, Sky Dancers!
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Posted: March 20, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Racism, Reproductive Rights, Robert Durst, Stereotypes |
Good Morning!
I’ve spent this week getting used to some changes in my schedule and activities while trying to find a way to get all the things paid for above and beyond teaching for what seems like next to nothing any more. One of the things I learned this week is that some things really never change.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans is pretty much an endless parade of the same kinds of people in the same groups with the same clothes and looks on their faces. I’ve never gigged on Bourbon Street until this week even though I’ve gigged around New Orleans and the French Quarter a lot over the 20 years I’ve lived here. I usually play at upscale restaurants so mostly, I’m very much in the background.
I’m still somewhat in the background but now it’s more like being the music behind the performance. I’m accompanying a very talented drag performer with an awesome voice and having great fun! I hope you enjoy the pictures! I’m going to share a few other stories that are locally relevant and not as happy. So, this top picture is Miss Jessica Duplantier singing with me checking out her show last week. You’ll see a lot more of her and Eureka Starfish as the post goes on.
I’ve been thinking once again on how tribal human beings can be and how easily we forget how badly we can treat each other. I also think we all have convenient short memories and long standing insensitivities to wrong done to others. I’m getting tired of watching racism parade its ugly head. I’m also getting extremely tired of people acting willfully ignorant about things that seriously represent injurious historical actions.
I‘m pretty sure we all know about “pickaninny” culture even though many of us were not raised in the deep south. It was a staple of Hollywood movies, literature, advertising, and many other aspects of popular culture prior to the civil rights movement. I’m not going to actually reproduce any of that here on the post but I will point to the links and to this article highlighting the new poster for the North Shore Strawberry Festival.
The 2015 Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival poster was unveiled Tuesday (March 17), and immediately provoked a social media debate, with some calling the image racist.
The poster, created by artist Kalle Siekkinen, depicts two faceless children rendered in dark brown or black paint. One holds a flat of strawberries. The poster made the rounds on various Facebook pages, with some saying the image, done in a folk art style, implied cultural insensitivity. Others wrote that such concerns were misplaced.
Shelley Matherne, public relations director for the Strawberry Festival, said that the annual poster is produced by the Ponchatoula Kiwanis Club and that officials of the festival had not seen the work until Thursday’s unveiling. They became aware of the controversy via social media. Festival organizers are meeting with Kiwanis representatives Thursday (March 19) evening to discuss how to proceed, Matherne said.
The festival put a post about the poster on its Facebook page. The comments under the post — 81 as of 5:15 p.m. Thursday — were no longer public.
I have followed, spoke to and seen most of the social media storm. I cannot believe that folks do not recognize the “pickaninny” stereotype and what it means to the historical movement to dehumanize and infantilize Black Americans. You can look at the variety of comments there exclaiming that it’s racist free ‘folk art’ showcasing black children and judge for yourself. The Festival people are standing by the poster and the poster’s defenders are vociferous. I’m still appalled and I stand by that.
I’m appalled on many levels by several recent events indicating that the struggle does indeed continue on many fronts. There were several notable absences in the Selma commemoration including the Congressman that spoke at a White Supremacist gathering on his way to his seat. He was in a posh resort being wined and dined by the AEI. That’s obviously much more important than making a symbolic gesture to his constituents many of whose lives were profoundly changed by the civil rights movement.
U.S. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 House Republican who has been criticized in the past by civil rights leaders, stayed at a posh Georgia resort with his wife earlier this month rather than attend events in Alabama marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march.
A newly filed congressional “post-travel” disclosure dated Wednesday shows Scalise skipped the Selma event to attend a Republican “off-the-record” retreat hosted in Sea Island, Ga. The event was hosted by the American Enterprise Institute from March 5-8.
Not far away from us, Mississipi Trees still bear “strange fruit”. All of this is a haunting reminder that our President may be black, but our American Society still has far to go to achieve the dream of liberty and justice for all.
CLAIBORNE COUNTY, MS (Mississippi News Now) –The FBI and the MBI are investigating a suspicious death in Claiborne County.
A body was found on property located off of Rodney Road.
The Coroner, J.W. Mallett, confirms the man was found hanging from a tree. Officials say the body was hung using bed sheets.
According to the Coroner the body has not yet been identified because the body has apparently been there so long that identification, by visual means, is nearly impossible. The body has been sent to the State Crime Lab for autopsy.
The Claiborne County branch of the NAACP is indicating the man found hanging is Otis Byrd.
The FBI is only saying that he is a “man last seen March 2nd; and his family filed a missing persons report with the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department on March 8th.”
In a news release, the FBI say the body was found during a ground search by the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Wildlife Fisheries and Parks.
54-year-old Otis James Byrd was last seen when a friend dropped him off at Vicksburg’s Riverwalk Casino earlier this month.
His family and friends hadn’t heard from him since then.
The NAACP has now sent an email requesting the US Department of Justice “join the current investigation of the suspicious hanging death of Mr. Otis Byrd.”
The email goes on to say: “Mr. Otis Byrd’s body was [found] today, Thursday, March 19, 2015. After several days of missing, [he] was found hanged to death.”
The FBI says the body was found “a half mile from his last know residence.”
Some odd things have been happening in the city that relate to a really strange true crime case. I thought I’d bring up the arrest and extradition of Robert Durst. It’s one of those stories that makes you wonder 
how our society can manage to let so many folks rot in jail for very little while a true sociopath can wander about at will. I guess you shouldn’t wonder too much because the guy is and was rich and can pretty much afford to work the justice system. It’s a strange story, nonetheless.
Durst was arrested Saturday in New Orleans in connection with the 2000 fatal shooting of Berman at her Benedict Canyon home. He was charged Monday with murder, and the next day transferred to the mental health facility at a state-run prison in Louisiana.
His extradition to California has been delayed as authorities in New Orleans deal with the drugs and weapons allegations.
Meanwhile, New York authorities remain interested in Durst as they continue to investigate what happened to his first wife, Kathleen, who disappeared in 1982.
Kathleen Durst vanished after she expressed the desire for a divorce. To a friend, she had confided worries about what her husband might do.
Following the disappearance, Berman acted as an “informal spokesman” for Durst. The pair had met at UCLA, where they went to school together.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles allege that Durst killed Berman to prevent her from speaking to police about the disappearance of his wife. Durst could face the death penalty for the murder charge with special circumstances.
Less than a year after Berman’s death, Durst turned up in Galveston, Texas, in connection with the killing of an elderly neighbor, Morris Black. Black’s dismembered body, in several plastic bags, was discovered in the waters offshore. A trail of clues led to Durst’s arrest.
Durst didn’t deny dismembering Black, but he said he inadvertently shot him while wrestling a gun from him.
A jury acquitted him in 2003.
Although Durst’s life has seen a series of high-profile brushes with the law, suspicions about him exploded into a national sensation as they played out in a six-part HBO series, “The Jinx.”
The making of the documentary had opened up some new evidence. Durst’s New Orleans Hotel Room is turning out to be one of those FBI forensic crime scenes from TV dramas mixed with crime psychologists and crime scene scientists. Check out the picture on this one. The guy oozes sociopath.
Murder suspect Robert Durst, subject of HBO’s ‘The Jinx,’ had more than $42,000 in cash, a fake ID and a latex mask when authorities arrested him in New Orleans last weekend, newly obtained records show.
Inside Durst’s hotel room at the J.W. Mariott on Canal Street, police say they found $42,631 in cash, mostly in $100 bills packed in small envelopes, according to an affidavit for a warrant to search Durst’s home in Houston, signed by a judge in Harris County, Texas, on Tuesday (March 17).
The new details were made public Wednesday after authorities in Houston searched the real-estate scion’s home at the request of Los Angeles officials, who have charged Durst in the 2000 death of his longtime confidante and spokesperson, Susan Berman.
According to the document, members of the FBI’s Violent Offenders Task Force found Durst on in the lobby of the hotel a little before 7 p.m. Saturday. When FBI Special Agent William Williams approached the 71-year-old man from behind and identified himself, Durst had a small backpack with him but claimed he did not have any type of identification.
When agents searched Durst’s room — he was staying in room 2303 under the name Everette Ward — they found a Texas ID with the same alias, and not his real name, the record states.
“That’s pretty good,” Durst said to the agents when confronted with the fake ID, according to the Texas document.
So, now I suppose I will have to watch the HBO thing.
Well, that’s enough for me today. I’m going back to sleep for awhile! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Posted: March 17, 2015 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, March 15, 2015
Good Morning!!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone who celebrates it. It has always been a big day here in Boston, “the most Irish city in the country,” where people with Irish ancestry make up 20% of the population. Massachusetts is also the most Irish state in the U.S.).
The day tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth because I associate it with the stubborn exclusion of LGBT people from the South Boston parade and with the riots against school busing in South Boston back in the 1970s. I can’t seem to get those associations out of my mind. I do have some Irish ancestry, but I identify more strongly with the Scottish and French Candian parts of my ethnic makeup.
St. Patrick’s Day in Boston
This year there finally was a change in the traditional Southie parade. From the Christian Science Monitor:
For first time, South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade welcomes LGBT groups.
For the first time in its 115-year history, South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade will include groups representing the LGBT community.
OUTVETS and Boston Pride will march in the two-mile parade, which celebrates St. Patrick’s Day and Evacuation Day, the anniversary of the departure of British troops from Boston in 1776. The Allied War Veterans Council, who organizes the parade, accepted the application from OUTVETS, an organization for gay, lesbian, and transgender veterans and service members. On Friday, Boston Pride was invited to participate in the parade as well.
It’s too little, too late, but still a step in the right direction. This year the Mayor of Boston marched in the parade for the first time in 20 years because the ugly ban was finally lifted. But some people still couldn’t accept the change after all these years.
The Massachusetts chapter of the Knights of Columbus cited what they characterized as politicization of the event as their reason for not participating this year.
“We deeply regret that some have decided to use this occasion to further the narrow objectives of certain special interests, which has subjected this occasion to undeserved division and controversy,” the group’s statement read.
Last month, the Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Harvard, Mass., withdrew from the parade because OUTVETS had been invited to march, according to Irish Live. The Catholic Action League, requested that the Allied War Veterans Council rename the parade.
“Call it the Evacuation Day Parade. Call it the South Boston Irish Pride Festival,” Catholic Action League Executive Director C.J. Doyle wrote on the group’s website. “Call it whatever you want, but don’t debase the name of Saint Patrick by associating it with the tawdry circus that will take place on Broadway [Street] tomorrow.”
As Joan Rivers used to say, “Oh, grow up!” Some people who pretend to be Christians are sure filled with hate. You see why I’ve gotten turned off by this day?
But it really is a hard-won breakthrough. The New York Times reports:
Boston Celebrates End of Ban as Gays March in St. Patrick’s Parade.
BOSTON — Despite a gray chill and spits of rain that gave way to a downpour and later snow, hundreds of thousands of people celebrated a new chapter in this city’s history on Sunday as the storied South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade opened its ranks for the first time to gays and lesbians.
“To be included in this parade and be part of this parade is just really special for us,” said David Story, 65, a finance manager and a veteran of the Air Force. A member of OutVets, which honors lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender veterans, he and other members wore navy blue jackets branded with the group’s logo and a rainbow.
“We’re marching not just for us, but for all the closeted L.G.B.T. people who have been in the Air Force, are in the military, for years past, and the ones that may be in now,” he said.
The South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, a private group that organizes the 114-year-old parade, had banned gay groups from participating for decades, saying it was no place for people who were vocal about their sexual orientation. In 1995, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld what it said was the group’s First Amendment right to exclude whomever it wanted.
But that stance turned the parade into an annual battleground for the gay-rights movement, and it forced many Massachusetts politicians, including Boston’s mayor, to skip the parade, which is an essential part of Boston history and culture. Not only does it celebrate the city’s important Irish heritage, but the parade also honors a Revolutionary War holiday unique to Boston and its environs called Evacuation Day. On March 17, 1776, the Continental Army, under the command of George Washington, forced the British to retreat.
You can read more about the history of this conflict at the CSM and NYT links.
Politicians party at St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast 2015
Another long-time Boston tradition is the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at which local politicians get together to tell lame jokes and try to get Irish votes at the same time. This year’s version included a reportedly embarrassing appearance by Vice President Joe Biden, who might have been downing a wee bit of green beer early in the day.
From The Boston Globe: Groans outpace guffaws at St. Patrick’s Day breakfast.
Vice President Joe Biden’s phoned-in appearance at the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in South Boston Sunday was a bit long. It was not terribly funny. And his ode to Irish heritage was more maudlin than moving.
After one attempted — but failed — interruption by the host, state Senator Linda Dorcena Forry, and some awkward silences, the vice president finally yielded to US Representative Stephen F. Lynch….
Sunday’s notable first came not at the breakfast, but at the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade that followed, with organizers allowing two organizations representing gay men and lesbians to take part after years of court battles and recriminations.
US Senator Edward J. Markey, echoing a line from Irish poet Seamus Heaney, sought to link the two events in a paean to inclusivity. “On a day in South Boston, when Linda is to host and the LGBT community can march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade,” he said, “hope and history are rhyming.”
Amid the often flat attempts at humor, a few of the speakers, riffing on Boston’s Olympic bid and the failures of the storm-ravaged MBTA, managed to elicit guffaws from the hundreds dining on sausage and eggs at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who got more laughs than most, took a shot at an erstwhile political rival.
“Since the last time I was here, I’ve really focused on the economy. There are a lot of people out there who have entirely given up on looking for work,” Warren said, pausing for a moment. “But enough about Scott Brown.”
Boston isn’t the only city with weird traditions around this day. I just noticed that in Chicago, they dye the river green!
What does your city, state or country do on St. Patrick’s Day?
Today’s News
I found quite a bit of interesting news this morning, so I’m just going to throw out a bunch of links and you can take what you want and leave the rest.
It’s election day in Israel, and it will be interesting to see whether Benjamin Netanyahu can pull out a win (I hope not).
New York Times: Israel Elections: Live Coverage of the Vote and Results.
Associated Press, Via Newsday: Netanyahu’s future on the line in Israel parliament election.
Reuters, via HuffPo: Millions Of Israelis Head To The Polls To Cast Votes In Tightly-Fought Election.
Salon, Endangered Netanyahu warns supporters that Arabs are voting “in droves.”
ABC News: Israel Election: What You Need to Know, From Candidates to Coalitions.
Raw Story: Paul Krugman exposes how Netanyahu used Iran to conceal Israel’s economic disaster
And just for laffs, from TPM: Chuck Norris Cuts Last-Minute Campaign Video For Netanyahu (VIDEO).
The controversy over Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran’s “leaders” continues.
At Rolling Stone, Jeb Lund writes about “a long history of right wing mayhem” in a piece with the same title (I assume deliberately) of a 1964 far right anti-communist screed, by John Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason.
Rolling Stone: None Dare Call It Treason: Tom Cotton, Iran and Old GOP Ideas.
Bobby Jindal injects his weird opinions on the letter even though he’s not a Senator. From Politico: Jindal to Biden: Apologize to Cotton over Iran letter.
Steve Benen at MSNBC: Being Tom Cotton means never having to say you’re sorry.
Did you know Tom Cotton just made his first Senate speech? And the GOP let this newbie lead them down the garden path?
Huffington Post: It Took Tom Cotton Less Than A Minute To Invoke Hitler In First Senate Speech.
Cotton also made a fool of himself on Sunday on Face the Nation.
Raw Story: Huh? Tom Cotton says Iran must be stopped because ‘they already control Tehran’.
Wonkette: Tom Cotton Regrets Nothing, Except Not Paying Attention In Geography Class.
Other Miscellaneous Links
A couple of interesting stories at AL.com.
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s son arrested, charged with drug possession in Troy.
Alumni won’t leave millions to University of Alabama because of state’s war on same-sex marriage.
Bobby Jindal has screwed up his state so badly that even Louisiana Republicans are getting mad.
Politico: Bobby Jindal’s tax problem: He promised not to raise them. Now, he’s got a huge budget hole to fill – and a big political mess on his hands.
Salt Lake Tribune: Rolly: Mitt Romney’s new opponent is Evander Holyfield.
Charles Pierce on Fox News’ fuss over a town in Massachusetts and its snow days: Here’s Some Stupid For Afternoon Tea. Andrea Tantaros and Congressman Sean Duffy’s intellectual discussion about academic Boston and ethnic Boston.
More from Raw Story: Fox News host Andrea Tantaros: Snow days are a liberal plot to strip schools of religious holidays.
Politico: GOP senators block Ted Cruz move to hold up Loretta Lynch vote
AP via the Star-Tribune: NC man accused of chaining boy to porch with a dead chicken around his neck rejects plea deal.
Raw Story: San Francisco prosecutors will investigate old police cases after discovery of racist texts.
CBC News: Russia’s Vladimir Putin waves the nuclear option.
Foreign Policy: Despite Plea Deal, Petraeus Still Consults for the National Security Council.
New York Times: US Oil Prices Fall to Six-Year Low.
What stories are you following today? Please share your suggestions in the comment thread and have a pleasant St. Patrick’s Day.
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Posted: March 16, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads |
Good Morning!
It never ceases to amaze me how women, their bodies, and their most intimate moments can be co-opted by male politicians. It makes me want to sing a rousing chorus of “You don’t FUCKING own me!”. I’m not sure how we became political footballs, but I sure feel like my privacy and the privacy of every woman in the country has become a source of intense male interest. The absolutely salacious way that the male-dominated press and republican party are going after Hillary’s most personal emails is just one example of how the current patriarchy feels they have a right to view anything of ours and control it. Like James Carville said recently Hillary Clinton ‘Didn’t Want Louie Gohmert Rifling Through Her E-Mails’. Who would?
Longtime Clinton ally James Carville said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account might have been about more than convenience.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Carville defended Clinton, saying her e-mail practices were legal. But, he added, she may also have had prying Republican eyes in mind when she chose to do business through a private e-mail server.
“I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert rifling though her e-mails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take,” Carville said.
Jeb Bush released some emails but, low and behold! None of them are about what he was up to when he was getting in the way of Terry Schiavo’s right to die. It was all information that was basically political propaganda and ‘forward facing’. Remember when we got to see Mitt Romney’s taxes? Neither do I.
As part of presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s quest to counteract his last name, he released a trove of purportedly personal emails in the name of “transparency.” That’s nice, but utterly symbolic: The emails he released were from a public-facing account that he used primarily to communicate with random constituents, not to actually govern. It’s as though he released his spam inbox and proclaimed it as a window into his soul. If Bush really wants to make a statement, he’ll give us the data that actually matters.
In addition to being filled with personally identifiable information that his constituents sent to him in the hopes of resolving their various troubles with state agencies, Jeb Bush’s big noble email dump is completely misleading. “In the spirit of transparency,” Bush states on his newwebsite, “I am posting the emails of my governorship here.” But all that he’s made available is the contents of one email account—jeb@jeb.org. That domain was registered via GoDaddy in 1997 and is owned by his political campaign operation—it is unaffiliated with the state of Florida or the office of governor (his official account was like some variant of[name]@eog.state.fl.us). The emails the public has been given are as much “the emails of [his] governorship” as my ancient live.com inbox would be “the emails of my Gawker job.” It’s a ploy.
The state of womanhood in the US is being significantly diminished. DAILY. There is no obsession on the real issues that make women’s lives miserable. There are only more side distractions that basically put in 
more intrusions in to our moral and legal personhood.
Early last week, while the political world was waiting for Hillary Clinton to address the moral, diplomatic, and technological questions posed by her e-mail habits, the United Nations issued a report asserting that more than one in three women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. One in ten females under the age of twenty is subjected to “forced sexual acts.” In more than thirty countries, it is not illegal for men to beat their wives. In the United States, eighty-three per cent of girls between twelve and sixteen confront sexual harassment in school. Even the earnest bureaucrats of the U.N., who tend to favor euphemism and skip over cruelties like honor killings and “corrective rape,” could not help but label the rate and the variety of mayhem regularly exacted upon half of humankind as “alarmingly high.”
The report went on to say that female political representation, while creeping higher, is still depressingly low––not least in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States. The parliaments of South Africa, Ecuador, Finland, Senegal, Sweden, Cuba, Belgium, and Rwanda are all more than forty per cent female. The percentage of members in the U.S. House of Representatives who are women is eighteen. And, since it will soon be political high season on cable TV and at the town halls and diners of Iowa and New Hampshire, it bears repeating that no woman has ever been the President of the United States.
It was hard not to think of this status report on the condition of women in the twenty-first century while Hillary Clinton stepped into the lights before an agitated crowd of reporters at the U.N. last Tuesday. A large tapestry of “Guernica” hung behind her, and she looked no happier in that setting than the tormented figures in Picasso’s image of civil war. And yet contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled. Asked about the way she chose to deal with federal guidelines on e-mail when she was the Secretary of State, she said, “I opted for convenience.” Clinton’s further explanations were so familiar, such a ride in the Wayback Machine, that you had to wonder, Why do I suddenly feel twenty years younger yet thoroughly exhausted?
That’s not the only thing waiting on old white men to intrude. The nomination of the first black woman to be appointed US Attorney General–Loretta Lynch–languishes while Mitch McConnell pitches a fit that victims of Sex trafficking might be able to use recovery funds for an abortion. Do we get any more intrusive than that?
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday said he plans to hold up attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch’s confirmation until the Senate passes a now-controversial human trafficking bill.
“This will have an impact on the timing of considering a new attorney general,” McConnell told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again.”
Democrats are now holding up the trafficking bill, which glided through the judiciary committee, after they noticed an abortion provision embedded in the bill that would prevent victims of human trafficking from using restitution funds to pay for an abortion.
“We have to finish the human trafficking bill,” McConnell said. “The Loretta Lynch nomination comes next.”
A vote on Lynch’s nomination was slated to take place this coming week, more than two weeks after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Lynch’s nomination.
Democrats have pointed out that Lynch’s nomination has been held up in the Senate longer than any U.S. attorney general nominee in three decades.
President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to lead the Justice Department in November, but Lynch’s committee hearing didn’t come until after Republicans took control of the Senate.
The No. 3 Senate Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer responded to McConnell’s threat on Sunday, calling on Republicans to “stop dragging their feet” on Lynch’s nomination.
“For months and months, Republicans have failed to move forward with her nomination using any excuse they can, except for any credible objection to her nomination itself,” Schumer said in a statement. “Loretta Lynch, and the American people, don’t deserve this. At a time when terrorists from ISIS to Al-Shabaab threaten the United States, the nominee to be attorney general deserves an up or down vote.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said McConnell’s argument that the Senate first needs to pass the trafficking bill amounts to a “hollow excuse.”
We continue to get stories from white male republican men that are actually passing laws that show no understanding of women’s bodies, fetal or human development, or the concept that women are moral agents perfectly capable of making decisions without the injection of any one’s pet religious myth. They continue to say that women who become pregnant by rape should just accept “god’s gift”.
A Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.
According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”
Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-choice activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.
The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.
This kind of mentality leads to the idea that white men can basically do what ever they want to with women and children. We are all chattel to be tossed about as they will. Remember the story of the Arkansas official that ‘rehomed’ and abused two small girls to a rapist after deciding they were possessed and too unruly? Republicans are defending him.
A pair of Arkansas Republicans have stepped up to the plate to defend an embattled state lawmaker accused of “rehoming” his adopted daughters to a rapist, using Facebook to attack the media coverage of their colleague.
On Wednesday, the Arkansas Democratic Party called upon Rep. Justin Harris (R) to resign following revelations that he and his wife made the “unilateral decision to move two of his adopted daughters into another family’s home” where one of the girls was sexually assaulted. The call for his resignation comes following a week of stories reported by the Arkansas Times, — which originally broke the story — containing interviews with Department of Children and Families staffers, previous foster parents, and baby sitters, saying Harris and his wife mistreated the two girls and have lied to the press about their dealings with the DCFS.
All of this comes right in focus with the move to tell these folks that Black Lives Matter too so that overwhelmingly white male police departments do not use deadly force every time they see a black person. It also goes with the idea of driving out immigrants and Republican politicians telling the LBGT community that any potential gay marriage will “offend them.” It’s not about any one else’s right to live their life. It’s all about the privileged white male and his right to force the rest of us to conform to his control. We are all in this struggle together.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a potential Republican presidential candidate, is a self-described libertarian, a position that usually indicates positive feelings on LGBT rights — but Paul showed in a Friday interview that that’s not the case for him.
When Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier asked Paul about his position on same-sex marriage, the senator responded, “I’m for traditional marriage. I think marriage is between a man and a woman. Ultimately, we could have fixed this a long time ago if we just allowed contracts between adults. We didn’t have to call it marriage, which offends myself and a lot of people.”
Having some form of contract rather than state-licensed marriage would give same-sex couples “equivalency before the law” and “would have solved a lot of these problems, and it may be where we’re still headed,” Paul continued.
The degree to which these white Republican Men want to control and determine other people’s lives offends me.
This is an open thread. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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