May 2010 archive

From The Plum Line

The SEIU is going up with an ad on black radio in Arkansas that directly contradicts President Obama’s claims about Blanche Lincoln on health care and Wall Street reform.

snip

The script features a number of ordinary Arkansans in succession:

“I’m a strong supporter of President Obama.”

“But I’m voting for Bill Halter for Senate.”

“I love President Obama. But I can’t vote for Blanche Lincoln again.”

“She voted to bail out Wall Street.”

“Senator Lincoln says she supported health reform.”

“But we all know she refused to take on the big insurance companies.”

And so on. The spot directly contradicts Obama’s recent claims that Lincoln is “leading the fight to hold Wall Street accountable” and that she “took on big insurance companies by voting to end discrimination against Arkansans with preexisting conditions.” As Chris Good notes, SEIU is one of Obama’s most powerful backers, and now the union’s support for Halter has them on opposite sides.

It is good to see labor standing up to this.  

Yesterday, Presdient Obama entered into the primary with a radio ad claiming Lincoln was a “populist” friend of the worker!  Lincoln voted to end the estate tax and for all of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.  She helped kill the EFCA and the public option. Some populist.

The odious radio ad itself:

Help Halter: Bill Halter on Act Blue

Maurice Ravel

I know I’ve never prayed to you before.  Truth to tell I don’t believe in you.  No disrespect intended to either you or your followers, but I think you don’t exist.

Before you get too angry with me saying you don’t exist, understand, I’m merely a lowly human who, if you did exist, you supposedly gifted with rationality and who can only go by the evidence of his senses and things that science and rationality (your gift, if you’re there) have given us, such as “objective evidence”.

But, Barack Obama and Congress wants me to pray to you.  So much so that, instead of prosecuting thieves and criminals who wreck lives so badly that they are despoiling your supposed creation and putting little old ladies out on the street, his Justice Department is instead working to ensure that gay people can’t get married or serve in the military, and that his government’s call to demand people to pray to you is enforced and upheld by our country’s laws, despite the First Amendment.

And, Dear God, whom I sincerely hold and believe you don’t exist, it’s not as if I bear any malice toward those who feel otherwise, that you do exist.  But, understand, God, that I all too often think that Belief In You is used for nefarious things, things that if your Books were to believed, even unholy things, done in Your Name, while at the same time no objective evidence exists that we are talking about anything at all.

Dear God, we know that it is held that you love all your Children, even those such as don’t believe in you, or otherwise believe that the running of a just society is possible without a belief in your existence, but who otherwise hold in a belief in Human Morality, which, if you did exist, would be Your Gift, also.

It is in this spirit, I would like to Ask You, to please Inform the Hearts of your Followers, such that they stop doing things like this, yes, even to those who believe in Human Morality as opposed to God-based Morality:

In the late 1980s, protesters burned Crabb’s likeness in effigy after she allowed Indian tribes to spearfish off their reservations – a practice some white fishermen believed ruined their sport. Demonstrators threw rocks, uttered racial slurs and accused Crabb of giving Indians special treatment.

It is Often Asked, by those who profess a Belief in You, What would Jesus do?  I know, Dear God, that if you Do Exist, you would not want to have your Followers Burning People in Effigy, even such as those who don’t Believe that a Belief in You, Personally, is Necessary or Consonant with the running of a Just Government.

In this spirit, so ordered and requested by Barack Obama, among others, that I would like to Abjure, Request and Plead with you for the following.

May 5th, 1970. As Tuesday dawned, the whole country, the whole world, knew about the Kent State massacre. The famous photo of Mary Ann Vecchio on one knee, keening over the body of Jeffrey Miller, snapped by a Kent undergrad seconds after the National Guard ceased firing on Monday, went on the Associated Press newswire that afternoon and was seared into the nation’s consciousness the next morning.

Chip Young, one of several friends who volunteered memories when I started this project, recalls:

I would have been 11. I remember my older brother informing my mom about the killings. Her response: “Oh no, not in America.” Perfect moment of shattered idealism.

Nan Faessler blipped me a single sentence:

Because of the killings at Kent State, I made a decision to drop out of graduate school and devote my time to working with the anti-war movement full time.

John Kaye’s response:

I never went to college, but at the time was living near Marquette U in Milwaukee, working in a Movement bookstore. What the right wing at the time used to call an “outside agitator.” Even before the invasion of Cambodia, at that point in my life activism was everything.

When the news hit, especially about Kent State, and shortly after, about Jackson State, things sort of…exploded. I didn’t sleep for 3 days, up all night at meetings, silk-screening clenched fists on t-shirts, etc. Demonstrations and whatever else we could think of all day and evening. The only time in my life I ever gave an impromptu speech, to a smallish group of students gathered just south of the campus, about the Panthers, I think.

In these three brief recollections, we see events as they actually unfolded–shock, individual commitment to resist, escalation of the struggle.

This could have been a “teaching moment” for the United States.

As much as 100,000 barrels of oil, 4,000, 000 gallons per day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico!

Isn’t there a lesson in there somewhere, that any idiot could understand?

But unfortunately for all of us… and I don’t mean all of us Americans or even all of us human beings, but unfortunately for every living creature on our little blue planet…

Just a couple of weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, Barack “Offshore” Obama opened up more than 300,000,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, and now…

At an ideal time to teach a lesson about our catastrophic addiction to oil…

Our professor is dancing with Exxon, and chanting “Drill, baby, drill!”