Unions have been the only powerful and effective voice working people have ever had in the history of this country.—Bruce Springsteen
"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."--Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelenskyy "There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell."--Ukraine's U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya
"You cannot teach about an abomination in polite terms. Monstrous acts deprived of monstrous language will always, always fail to relay the depravity of these events. It has to be upsetting. Has to be unsavory. Has to be ghastly. Or it’s a lie."--Mark Sumner, author and journalist
The Tennessee school board voted unanimously, earlier this month, to remove the graphic novel "Maus" from the curriculum and school library. The Pulitzer Prize winning book, drawn from the author's own life, tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor and his son who is attempting to understand it all. Germans in the book are depicted as cats, while Jews are depicted as mice. The Tennessee school board says they banned the book based on profanity and nudity. The language they cited was the use of the phrase "God damn". Seriously, you will hear far worse than that on any TV show, today. And, even in my era, kids knew all the dirty words by the time they hit First Grade. As for the nudity... Remember, Jews in "Maus" are depicted as mice. We're talking about an image of a naked mouse, for Pete's sake. The Tennessee school board counters that they found the image of the naked mouse gratuitous. But both the "GD" and the naked mouse have to do with the suicide of the author's mother. I find nothing gratuitous there. In Texas, over 200 books have been removed from the shelves "pending review". And Texas teachers have been instructed that they must teach "both sides" of the Holocaust. There are NOT two sides to the Holocaust. In Indiana, a bill is pending that would forbid teachers from taking a side or giving any value judgements on the Holocaust. If we can't agree that the genocide of over 6 million people is a bad thing, then we're already lost as a society. Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with protecting children and will not stop at school libraries. The book banners are already attacking public libraries and the book stores will be next, then the Internets. We know what this is really all about, of course. The same thing book banning and burning has always been about. When knowledge and ideas are deemed by the powerful "too dangerous" for the public at large, what they really are saying is that it is too dangerous to THEM and THEIR hold on power. Ideas and information in the hands of the people are a far more powerful weapon against an authoritarian government than any gun or bomb. "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible"--unknown, but often falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'"--Halford E. Luccock Fascism is here. It's home is the Republican Party. They are the party that is banning and burning books. They are the party that is trying (and succeeding) to take away rights Americans have enjoyed for a generation or more. They are the party that promotes the theory of the "Master Race". They are the party that preaches violence as an acceptable solution to any disagreement you may have with government. They are the party of The Big Lie, "alternative facts", and endless propaganda. They are the party that has given up any pretense of believing in democracy. And they persuade their audience through time-honored authoritarian methods of distraction and misdirection. Do you think it's just a coincidence that the right is seemingly flipping out over the sex appeal of cartoon candy at a time when the economy is going gangbusters and the Nazis are banning books? Find a phony grievance, make it much much bigger, and then blame it all on some group of "the other"--a disfavored minority. When someone--anyone--tells you, "I alone can fix it", you should run as fast as you can in the other direction. When someone tries to take away voting rights, you should throw them to the curb. When someone or some group starts banning books and any attempt to teach about racism and the Holocaust, you should understand that fascism is here, now, today. Be prepared to stand your ground and fight against it, lest we become what hundreds of thousands of our forefathers died to defeat. "A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."--Robert A. Heinlein, "Friday"
New periodic feature. The John Roberts Supreme Court last week made an absurd ruling striking down the administration's OSHA worker protection regulations requiring large American employers to ensure that either their employees are vaccinated OR regularly tested. The reasoning for their ruling was nonsensical and had most legal experts scratching their heads to find even a grain of legitimate, legally based justification for their pronouncement. For one thing, the Court said the OSHA law was 50 years old and Congress needed to act contemporary to the event. ?????? The Constitution is over 200 years old. Should we throw that out as no longer contemporary as well? Perhaps we should. But Congress DID act contemporary to the event. They passed a law that said, basically, we gave you (OSHA) the right and responsibility to require vaccines as appropriate 50 years ago; so now use that power to develop a regulation for Covid. Roberts has pulled this kind of shit before with laws he doesn't like...like the Voting Rights Act. "Oh that law is so old. Fuggedaboutit!" Again, the Constitution... So what we're going to do, here, is attribute every Covid death that has occurred since that ruling to Chief Justice John Roberts in a little feature we call, "How Many People Has Chief Justice John Roberts Killed So Far". I realize that the crap ruling by the Roberts Court is not responsible for every Covid death. OTOH, the Roberts Court has issued many disastrous rulings which have undoubtedly caused many deaths. And it's not an exact science anyway, as daily death totals tend to be adjusted upward after the day's total is reached (owing to uneven reporting from the states). I'm just trying to make a point. Undoubtedly, that ruling WILL cause SOME deaths. And, periodically, I'm going to continue making that point...just to put a burr under that ideologue's butt in some small way. So...How Many People Has Chief Justice John Roberts Killed So Far? 4741 “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.”--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."--Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail “The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”--Martin Luther King, Jr. “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can't make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also.”--Martin Luther King, Jr. The Founding Fathers opposed the idea of a filibuster. They had experience with the idea of super majorities being required from when they were writing the original Articles of Confederation. Ostensibly, nothing gets done and the good of the whole is sacrificed to the whim of the minority. Here's what Alexander Hamilton had to say on the subject in Federalist 22. The man's got his own musical, so you know he's worth listening to.
"To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.... The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. And yet, in such a system, it is even happy when such compromises can take place: for upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy."--Alexander Hamilton |
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June 2023
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