I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
Filed under Politics
Another brilliant – and frightening – column from Leonard Pitts, Jr in the Miami Herald.
Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full column:
Then you realize it was not so long ago that a man blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City out of anti-government sentiment not so different from that espoused by the tea party. And you remember how that tragedy exposed an entire network of armed anti-government zealots gathering in the woods. And you read where the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of radical anti-government groups spiked to 824 in 2010, a 61 percent increase over just the previous year.
And you wonder.
This is not a prediction, only a speculation — and a suggestion that those of us who have regarded the craziness of recent years as an aberration, a temporary temper tantrum from people who feel threatened and dislocated, may have been entirely too sanguine. In less than 20 years, the locus of radical anti-government extremism has moved from remote woods to Capitol Hill.
How should the rest of us respond? That’s a question we urgently need to answer. They say they’ve come to take “their” country back.
Maybe it’s time we took them at their word.
Full Column: Tea party more than a temper tantrum – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com.
Filed under Politics
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker
Filed under The Economy
Interesting article from Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches.
For the record, she is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and an African-American woman.
While I continue to support President Obama, I have my concerns as well.
He’s been much friendlier to Wall Street than Main Street…
Now he’s pushing some buttons with another core constituency.
I hope he’s had a true realization- on the Road to Damascus, so to speak- and this isn’t just fear driven based on recent polls.
If he had pushed the agenda he was elected to pursue, instead of tilting at the windmills of compromise with the GOP, we wouldn’t be having this dialogue…
Here is an excerpt from Dr Butler’s column and a link to the full version:
Obama’s performance of black preaching may play well to church folks who love him no matter what, but to those critical of his policies that have placed African Americans at the highest unemployment rates, the president’s fake whooping rings hollow. Why is it that every time the president speaks to a predominately black audience, he goes into a preacher’s cadence, and starts to speak as though he were at a pulpit? Why is it that he never gets “righteously angry” with the white folks as often as he does at the black folks?
If you think I am harsh, consider a segment of the president’s 2010 CBC speech: “I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods to go back to your workplaces, to go to churches and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops, and tell them we’ve got more work to do.”
Damn. I think most black people I know do more than just work, go to church, and get their hair done.
Let me say it more bluntly. The president said at the end of his CBC speech: “[I] expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.”
That was the moment that the president turned into a jackleg preacher. A jackleg preacher is an untrained preacher who relies on tried and true tropes to get his audience to respond to preaching. If a jackleg is really good, he or she can get the money or whatever else they want by hitting the sweet spot, that emotional place where the congregation always responds well, because they recognize the feelings and emotions the jackleg preacher wants to evoke. Referring to taking off the slippers and putting on marching shoes is a tired racist trope, and besides, isn’t Snooki the person who wears her slippers in public? I don’t think she’s African American.
There is a history with Obama’s speeches to predominantly black audiences that either try to use respectability or shame to change steroetypical behavior. Obama’s 2008 speech excoriating absent black fathers at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, and his comments on the campaign trail in 2008 in Beaumont, Texas urging black parents “not to feed their kids cold Popeye’s chicken for breakfast,” are just two examples of how Obama deploys this racially-coded rhetorical strategy. The president’s behavior since taking office towards the African American community has been either to tell black folks to get in line and get to work, or gee, I love ya’ll, but I need your vote. If only he would speak to Republicans and Tea Partiers in the same harsh manner.
MORE: Obama’s Preaching Doesn’t Reach | Religion Dispatches.
Filed under Politics
Uh, why am I not surprised?
Various studies have suggested that a certain kind of psychological profile gravitates toward the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of the trading floor — and that this profile probably has more than a little in common with psychopathic personality, a clinical condition marked by gregariousness, impulsiveness, dishonesty and lack of empathy.
A recent study from the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, goes one step further. The research, led by forensics expert Pascal Scherrer and prison administrator Thomas Noll, finds that professional stock traders actually outperform diagnosed psychopaths when it comes to competitive and risk-taking behavior.
According to Der Spiegel, Scherrer and Noll had a group of 28 stockbrokers participate in various simulations and intelligence tests, and then compared their results to a group of psychopaths.
They found that the traders showed a higher degree of competitiveness than the psychopaths — and that the traders were surprisingly willing to cause harm to their competitors if they thought it would bring them an advantage.
via Stockbrokers More Competitive, Willing To Take Risks Than Psychopaths: Study.
Filed under The Economy
I hate to tell you “I told you so….”
But not really…..
I warned folks a few weeks ago the GOP Establishment and the Bushies would not tolerate Governor GoodHair. He made it really easy for them to take him down and down he’s going…..
When you are a Republican and you’ve got Fox News turning on you like this, your days are numbered…..
WASHINGTON — After a weak debate performance and a loss in the Florida straw poll, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is having his fitness as the GOP presidential frontrunner seriously questioned.
These doubts were on display during the roundtable on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Perry really did throw up all over himself in the debate, at a time when he needed to raise his game. He did worse, it seems to me, than in previous debates. … Perry is one-half a step away from almost total collapse as a candidate,” said Fox News commentator Brit Hume.
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol wrote an editorial titled “Yikes” on Friday, writing of Thursday’s debate, “[N]one of the candidates really seemed up to the moment, either politically or substantively. In the midst of a crisis, we’re getting politics as usual — and a somewhat subpar version of politics as usual at that.”
The alternative, he wrote, is for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to jump into the race.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol said his editorial reflected what many Republicans are thinking, as evinced in Saturday’s straw poll in Florida, where Herman Cain won with 37 percent of the vote. The results were considered especially embarrassing for Perry, who came in second, since former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney did not officially compete. (He ended up coming in third.)
But Kristol said it was a repudiation of both the frontrunners.
Fascinating story from the Institute for Southern Studies about racism, the death penalty and it’s roots in Slavery….
The regional disparity is striking. Since the Supreme Court lifted a ban on death sentences in 1976, 1,264 people have been executed in the U.S. And 921 of those executions — or 73 percent of the total — took place in 13 Southern states.
Its true that Texas — and what some call its death machine — skew the numbers: Its 474 executions account for nearly 38 percent of the U.S. total. But the fact remains: Of the many things you can call the death penalty, one fitting adjective is that its largely Southern.
What has made the South the home base of capital punishment? As you might suspect, executions have their roots in the history of slavery. As noted in A Short History of the American Death Penalty [pdf]:
“In contrast to capital punishment in the northern states, capital punishment in the South was not limited primarily to common law felonies. Rather, the death penalty was a powerful tool for keeping the slave population in submission. Crimes that interfered with the ownership of slaves were punished by death. In 1837, North Carolina, which lacked a penitentiary, had about 26 capital crimes including slave-stealing, concealing a slave with intent to free him, second conviction of inciting slaves to insurrection, and second conviction of circulating seditious literature among slaves.”
This racially-influenced law-and-order mentality spilled over into other crimes: In North Carolina, stealing bank notes, “crimes against nature” “buggery, sodomy, bestiality” and a second offense of forgery and statutory rape came to be considered capital offenses.
Racial disparity was literally written into the law with the Southern death penalty. After the Civil War, Black Codes created more crimes punishable by death for African-Americans than whites. In the 1830s, Virginia had five capital crimes for whites but an estimated 70 such crimes for black slaves.
Today, the well-documented racial disparity in death sentences has become one of the central arguments among opponents for ending capital punishment.
But less discussed is the racial divide in how people view the death penalty. For example, underneath the polls showing widespread support is one of the most well-documented facts in death penalty research: that it enjoys much higher support among whites than other racial groups, especially African-Americans.
For example, a 2005 Gallup poll was typical in finding that, while there was little difference in death penalty support among different age groups, and only a moderate 12-point gap between men and women, there was a 27-point difference between white 71% and black 44% support.
Filed under Death Penalty, Justice System
I’m sorry, but we should never take the chance we are killing an innocent man…
That is nothing more than state sanctioned murder.
That’s why I do not support the Death Penalty. There is no way to rectify the situation if something goes wrong…
We should be giving life without parole as the sentence in these cases so there is always the chance to fix it if the system goes astray.
Texas has already executed a man who was probably innocent- at least once. And Rick Perry has tried to cover it up….
We have to stop doing this….
If you are poor, Black and in The South, you already have three strikes against you before the system even begins to move…
There is just too much doubt here….
Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of Savannah, Ga., policeman Mark MacPhail, and had his execution stayed four times over the course of his 22 years on death row, but multiple legal appeals during that time failed to prove his innocence.
Public support grew for Davis based on the recanted testimony of seven witnesses from his trial and the possible confession of another suspect, which his defense team claimed cast too much doubt on Davis’ guilt to follow through with an execution.
Several witnesses recanted their testimony that Davis fired the shot that killed MacPhail. His impending execution has brought those efforts to a head.
via Troy Davis Execution Stay Denied by Supreme Court – ABC News.
Filed under Justice System
How can people be so blind- and so cruel?
I guess it’s easy to be hard….
Ron Paul told TPM on Wednesday that even if there’s a “case or two” that makes Americans uncomfortable, the government should stay out of the health care business. Even if one of the cases in question is his former campaign manager, Kent Snyder, who died with $400,000 in unpaid medical bills after being unable to secure health insurance due to a pre-existing condition.
via Ron Paul Says Aide Who Died With $400k Medical Bill Didn’t Need Government Help | Election 2012.
Filed under Elections, Health Care, Medicare, Politics, Uncategorized
The White House really needs to start playing up the benefits of Health Care Response and this is a big one….
For years, the insurance companies required parents to drop their children from their policies when they reached either the age of 18 or 21 if they were in college.
Now, thanks to Health Care Reform, they can carry them until they are 26. This is a great benefit to young people and their parents. It’s just no one seems to know it….
And when the GOP talks about “repealing Obamacare”, remember, this is what they are talking about repealing….
From the New York Times:
Young adults, long the group most likely to be uninsured, are gaining health coverage faster than expected since the 2010 health law began allowing parents to cover them as dependents on family policies.
Three new surveys, including two released on Wednesday, show that adults under 26 made significant and unique gains in insurance coverage in 2010 and the first half of 2011. One of them, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that in the first quarter of 2011 there were 900,000 fewer uninsured adults in the 19-to-25 age bracket than in 2010.
This was despite deep hardship imposed by the recession, which has left young adults unemployed at nearly double the rate of older Americans, with incomes sliding far faster than the national average.
The Obama administration, intent on showcasing the benefits of a law that has been pilloried by Republicans, attributes the improvement to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that permits parents to cover dependents up to their 26th birthdays. Until that measure took effect one year ago this week, children typically had to roll off their parents’ family policies at 18 or 21 or when they left college.
via Young Adults Make Gains in Health Insurance Coverage – NYTimes.com.
Filed under Elections, Health Care, Politics
Lost in the 21st Century 