God Bless America

Tahrir Square meets Occupy Oakland, California, USA! Cheryl Contee(Jill Tubman) reports;

People here in the Bay Area have pretty strong feelings about Occupy Oakland. Overall, people are not cool with it. There are real concerns among everyday people about the right of free speech and free assembly being trampled upon. Hundreds of cops used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bang grenades against peaceful protesters. And it is not pretty. It looks like a war zone. Let this be a warning to mayors who want to bust up Occupy protests in the name of cleanliness or law & order.

The Occupation will not be televised

During the Occupy Oakland march tonight (Tuesday), ABC News in the Bay area shut cameras off on the ground and in the sky the moment police attacked.
They said the chopper needed to refuel and will be back, but we all know this was not correct. A coincidence that both CBS and ABC choppers needed to refuel at the time police started attacking?
[...]
There was a camera on the ground for a full minute showing exploding canisters, people screaming, and gas being covered everywhere and that was shut off shortly after.
This is the constitution, protests are allowed by it. For CBS and ABC to shut the cameras off during the time police violated the rights of the American people is journalism at the worst, in fact not even close to the integrity a real media outlet should bring.

Cheryl Contee (Jill Tubman) again;

I don’t really have more to add to that. I mean, what makes us different from places like Syria and Egypt and Libya are our freedoms — including freedom of the press. Journalists’ job is to cover events not cower under police pressure to cover their brutality.

A BlackMan's View

All this "occupy" bullshit needs to be redirected towards it's roots.And the roots run directly beneath Washington DC.These "occupiers" need to take their occupation (insert city here)... to the ballot boxes of that city.
Cut the head off the snake and the body will die.
I'm just saying...

I'm just saying it's the media we have instead of the media we wish we had. If they spent their time informing the masses and telling us what we need to know instead of what they want us to know maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.

GrannyStandingforTruth asks;

Did the "Oakland Occupy Wall Street" protesters break any windows downtown Oakland or were they looters? Did they commit any violent act? Nope! They did not. In fact, they were so peaceful you would have hardly knew they were there accept for the signs and the small corner space they occupied.
Did they chant too loud or throw bricks at the police? What exactly did they do to deserve an Iraq war veteran winding up in critical condition?

"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.."
Reverend Jeremiah Wright

What we have here is an "Effete ruling class at odds with itself"

The Occupation movement illustrates the disconnect between 99% of the American people and the Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads. The media has spent the last three years providing the get away car while the the 1% hijacked our democracy. Para quoting Jesse Jackson Seniors remarks at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial this morning, there are a some people who are willing to sink the ship just to destroy the Captain. What we have developed is an Effete ruling class at odds with itself.

So in the midst of an uproarious campaign season and foolishness beyond compare we are spending precious moments tweeting and twitting about whose religion is the best and most meaningful and deserves the most respect, as if this made the slightest difference in the big political picture. The idea that religion is a primary reason people decide whom to elect rather than an individual judgment individuals make about how to conduct their lives is so absurd it is remarkable anyone would attempt to justify a religious preference rather than old-fashioned common sense and logic. Unfortunately logic and common sense are in dangerously short supply these days so we are forced to get by on whatever belief systems and scraps of information come our way, unreliable as they may be.

What we have here is a media that tells us what they want us to know instead of what we need to know.

The Mormon Church discriminated against Black people and promoted segregation in the church for over 130 years. Black people were not allowed in the priesthood and were not permitted to enter certain Mormon Temples from 1848 to 1978. Darrick Evenson, a former Mormon Missionary and developer of the Black Mormon website, observes that “[f]or 130 years the Mormon Church taught that Negroes were the cursed and inferior children of Cain. This ‘Curse of Cain Doctrine’ was presented as ‘a doctrine of the Church’ from the days of Brigham Young in the late 1840s until June 8th 1978, when the Mormon Church ended the Priesthood-ban and allowed black Mormons into Mormon Temples and the Mormon priesthood (which all Mormon males hold).”

What we have here is a media who used to protect us from being lied to by our elected officials instead of helping them lie to us.

Compare their message to the Tea Party which favors “smaller government.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? It’s only two words and it fits on a car bumper many times over. The problem: how exactly do Tea Partiers suppose we reduce our government? Are they willing to pave their own roads? Educate their own kids? Extinguish their own fires?

Although the average Tea Party member may be armed to the teeth and willing to surrender the local police force to save a couple hundred bucks a year in taxes, that is of little comfort to me as a New Yorker whose greatest instrument for self defense was designed to cut steaks into more manageable bites.

Why, then, does media characterize the Tea Partiers as a legitimate political movement, yet trivialize Occupy Wall Street as “a bunch of hippies with bongo drums and no real point?”Why does sudden Republican primary leader Herman Cain feel completely justified in saying the reason these people don’t have jobs is, ostensibly, because they are lazy?

This is why the Occupation will not be televised.

The Occupation will not be televised

The elitist Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads, are scratching their head pretending they don't know why in the world we the real American people have taken to the streets. According to them the protest doesn't have a clear message for them to mock, and no clear leader for them to bash.

It makes me want to holler, we want what you have...a high paying job...access to quality affordable medical, dental and mental health care.... 401k, portfolios, retirement and stock options.....several homes....an education...the ability to educate our children....the ability to take care of our elderly parents....the ability to travel around the country and the world....the ability to feed our families..... $200 dollar hair styles, designer clothes and shoes....OK, that last part was a snark but you get my drift.

Psst Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads! We the real American people are tired of the rich getting richer while the rest get the shaft.

We the real Americans are tired of being asked to do all the sacrificing of life and limb.

We the real Americans are tired of being lied into unjust, illegal, immoral wars.

We the real Americans want our damn country back.

You got that?

If not, watch, listen and learn as former Congressman Alan Grayson (D. Florida) breaks it down for you, that is if you really want to know what the occupation is all about.

RedEye's Wednesday Whine

Because it's not a bunch of people calling President Obama a Kenyan/ Muslim/Socialist/Anti Christ, you won't see it on TeeVee or read about it in the newspaper, but Wall Street is being occupied by protestors....

The point of Occupy Wall Street is that the political process and culture of the United States is broken, that a lot of people know that its broken, and that the anger has gotten to the point that folks want to deal with it.

What do you want to bet if it were the Tea Party being pepper sprayed there would be wall to wall outrage? Since it's just a bunch of tree hugging/hippy/liberals it's OK because they deserve it. *snark*

The don't deserve the pepper spray because in the current security state (and New York understandably is more in lock down than most cities), just holding a march in the street is illegal. An event permit to assemble for anything in NY costs $4200. That's a high price for freedom to assemble.

Speaking of Wall Street...the latest media made Great White Hope, New Jersey Governor Chris Christy is a former Wall Street Lobbyist. But that's OK.

Please, Gov. Christie, run for president! I so want to talk about how, as you put it, you never even set foot in the Trenton state house until you were elected -- even though you were the NJ statehouse lobbyist for the Securities Industry Association, the Wall Street trade association, under Bernie Madoff.

What's that you say...White liberals are whining whiners too? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you. Not.

Racism isn't responsible for the president's drop in popularity. His right-wing policies are

If it's not racism...what is it?

This truth is everywhere. You can see it in black unemployment rates, which are twice as high as white unemployment rates -- a disparity that persists even when controlling for education levels. You can see it in a 2004 MIT study showing that job-seekers with "white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews" than job seekers with comparable résumés and "African American-sounding names." And you can see it in a news media that looks like an all-white country club and a U.S. Senate that includes no black legislators.

Sweet Home Alabama. Where the skies are blue and the people in power care more about what you read than if you can read.

The New York Times reports that Mark Melvin, an Alabama inmate, has sued the state for denying him the right to read “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” Penned by Douglas A. Blackmon, the senior national correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009.

Melvin, who is serving a life sentence at Kilby Correctional Facility just outside of Montgomery, filed the suit in federal court against the prison’s officials and the Alabama commissioner of corrections, claiming they have unjustly kept a book out of his hands.

Maybe that's why the Huntsville City School System is on the fast road to recovery because they are balancing the budget on the backs of children. But don't whine about it.

11% of the student population is responsible for 61% of the cuts.

RedEye Whine over and out....until next time.

Saturday Links I Like

The Scottsboro Boys and the Scott Sisters. It's not a minstrel show...It's about race and class in America.

A group of about 30 people gathered on Saturday afternoon in front of the Lyceum Theater to protest a matinee of the new Broadway musical “The Scottsboro Boys,” which retells the story of nine African-Americans between 12 and 19 who were falsely convicted of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. The show, written by the celebrated team of John Kander and Fred Ebb and directed by the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman, uses the minstrel tradition to tell the story of how racism infected the judicial system.

“The trials were treated as if the boys were in a minstrel show” because it was such a farce, she said of the production. “The actors actually deconstruct the device in front of the audience,” and in the end, rebel against it.

The Rude Pundit on censoring the N word out of Huck Finn. Warning....it's very Rude.

Watch out for some nasty dangerous white boys: John Boehner and Darrell Issa. Click here for the full article.

Public Employees are under attack because they are public employees.

"Look Over There!"

How do you get regular people to "look over there" with all of that going on? Simple: launch a big campaign to blame the librarians, firefighters and other public sector workers for the hard times. "Don't blame US," Wall Street says, "Look over there!" Blame the economy's victims for economic crimes. And, do you know what? This is a strategy that is proven to work every time.

The Daley Show

I felt nearly as sick earlier this week, when I started hearing the Daley as chief of staff rumors, as I did when Obama sealed his fate just before taking over the White House by announcing that Rahm Emanuel would be his first chief of staff. Emanuel has been an unmitigated disaster for Obama and, worse yet, for the Democratic Party, and I really hope Daley will improve things but, I don't expect any miracles-- unless one interprets "improve things" to mean that Obama will get more credit for the yeoman's work he's been doing for Wall Street, Corporate America and the permanent, albeit shrinking, ruling class at the expense of society.

Happy reading!

Weeping and Wailing is in the eye of the beholder.

Interesting discussion on Left in Alabama last night regarding criticism of President Obama. There are some who feel expectations are too high and President Obama is doing the best he can considering the circumstance and all the weeping and wailing is unproductive and unfair.

I on the other hand argue, it's easy for us to sit behind our computer screens in our comfortable homes, send our students to quality public schools/colleges, take care of our elderly parents, take vacations, have 401k plans and access to quality, affordable health care to be patient. So far President Obamas' policies have benefited Wall Street but not Main Street like he promised.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich reminds us 47 million are with health insurance because they can't afford it. How many times have you seen Congressman Kuchinich on TeeVee talking about health care reform? As my late maternal grandmother used to say, "very few" because the weepers and the wailers are suppressed in favor of polls claiming a majority of Americans are in favor of halting the health care bill. Who did they poll? The media? republicans? Can you say Waterloo?

Progressive Congressional candidate Marcy Wingold says it's not time to back off and soften our approach and without progressive challengers we will continue to see more Massachusetts. I agree.

Silence helps the oppressors not the oppressed.