FIRST MOTHER'S DAY WITHOUT MOM

I got nothin'.

I mean, I could go into some deep contemplation, I suppose, of what it means to spend Mother's Day without Mom, like I did when I chronicled my thoughts and feelings in the weeks and months immediately after her death last October, but it would just be too painful. That is, I'm not thinking about it at all. Trying not to.

I'm on for the dinner shift Sunday at work, starting at three, which means I'll be coming into Mother's Day restaurant mayhem, and that might be difficult, seeing everybody dining out with their mothers, all happy and everything, but focusing on table-waiting multitasking ought to dilute it to some extent. But right now, there's no way I'm going to personally rub my own nose in it.

Instead, here's a picture of Mom with me holding my first bass guitar when I was fifteen, back in 1983. She really did love me.



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Reine



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Gay group reaches out to Lakewood

From the Houston Chronicle:

The son of evangelical Tammy Faye Bakker Messner will spend his first Mother's Day weekend since her death in Houston, waiting to hear from Lakewood Church Pastor Joel Osteen.

Jay Bakker, a high-profile supporter of Soulforce — a group that fights religious and political oppression of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders — wants Osteen to join the nontraditional families at a picnic Saturday and welcome them to church on Sunday.

As the tattooed and pierced Bakker spoke at a Soulforce news conference Wednesday, it was clear his mother was in his thoughts. Though she died of cancer last July, she remains a near-legend in the LGBT community.

And

Donald Iloff, Lakewood's chief of communications, later told the Houston Chronicle that Osteen wasn't able to meet with Bakker or attend the picnic because he is busy writing his Sunday sermon. It's a four-day process, he said.

Iloff went on to say, "If we met to talk, would this group be satisfied if we agreed to disagree? ... Soulforce wants to use Lakewood to further their agenda."

Click here for the rest.

Yeah, Iloff is right, ain't gonna happen, and Soulforce is, indeed, trying to use Lakewood to further their agenda. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If religious gays are trying to change American Christianity for the better, mega-churches aren't a bad place to start. I just wonder if they're wasting their time.

Long ago, back when I was a Southern Baptist, the first few chinks in my fundamentalist world view happened over the course of a few years when a couple of my close friends from high school came out of the closet while we were attending the University of Texas together in the mid and late 80s. One of them, also raised as a Southern Baptist, told me that he had always been gay. After a while, I believed him. The chain of logic isn't hard to follow: if my pal had always been gay, then he was born that way, which means that's how God made him. Why would God make somebody gay and then insist that his very nature, his identity itself, was abhorrent? It made no sense to me. God, if he is truly just and good, would never do such a thing. Ergo, the Bible must be wrong.

That was a big step, philosophically speaking, because once a fundamentalist decides that the Bible has mistakes, he's no longer a fundamentalist. Over the next few years, I kept finding new and confounding contradictions in the Bible, and in Christianity in general. I discarded chunk after chunk of my Christian beliefs. By the mid 90s, I was a Christian in name only. Another friend pointed this out to me, and I finally said "enough." I was no longer a Christian.

So, while I think what Soulforce is trying to do here is a pretty good thing, relatively speaking, I also think that they're trying to tinker with some very essential elements of Christianity's very nature. That is, the Bible seems, to me, to be extraordinarily clear in its stance on homosexuality, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament: gay sex is a major sin against God. Of course, that's not true, whether God exists or not, but most Christians think it is, and they base that view on their most central and absolute document, the Bible.

Now, I've read a bit about some gay-friendly interpretations of the Bible, that the passages widely understood to be anti-homosexual are actually anti-pagan, which means being gay is a-okay in the eyes of God, as long as you're not worshiping Baal, but this is a wildly weak argument, especially when seen in the light of how a pro-heterosexual mandate makes a great deal of historical sense for an ethnicity, the Jews, constantly on the verge of extinction--not that it makes any real sense, of course, but you see what I'm saying; if your people are in fear of being wiped out, making babies becomes really, really, really fucking important, and gay sex doesn't do much as far as that goes.

But hey, who am I to tell people how to interpret the Scriptures? I'm just saying that these Soulforce people would spend their efforts much better by trying to make Christianity more tolerant rather than accepting.

On the other hand, I've known a few gay Christians, and I used to teach a gay Mormon. Like I've said here before, religion is far less about rational consideration of the nature of the universe, and far more about identity: being a Christian is incredibly important to believers, and gay people are no different from straight people in this respect. It may not be logical to try to make churches accept what is clearly unacceptable to them, but the gay faithful must necessarily stake their lives on it. Otherwise, they lose an elemental part of themselves.

Who knows? Maybe this is how religions change over the years. But I wouldn't bet on it.

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ONE FLEA SPARE

From the Houston Chronicle:

One Flea Spare is haunting and beautiful

A strange and beautiful poetry pervades One Flea Spare. It is chiefly this quality that distinguishes Naomi Wallace's prize-winning drama in its sturdy Houston premiere by the enterprising little Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company.

Clearly meant to provoke and disturb, the play is set in London in 1665, the year of the Great Plague.

The aristocratic Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrave, having endured a 28-day quarantine imposed after the deaths of their servants, are about to flee to the presumed safety of the country when a guard catches two intruders breaking into their house. Thus, the Snelgraves are forced into another 28-day quarantine in a boarded-up room of their house, this time with the unwelcome refugees: Bunce, a stoical sailor; and Morse, a mysterious adolescent who turns out to be a serving girl from a neighboring household where all have perished.

With the conniving guard Kabe popping up periodically as their sole contact to the outside world, the four play out various conflicts, revelations and lewd propositions as they wait to see if they will live or die. In the extremity of their situation, with bodies piling up in the blighted city around them, the established social order unravels and moral strictures disintegrate.

Wallace is as much concerned with class struggle, social injustice and sexual politics as she is with the torments of plague-ravaged 17th-century London.

More here.

Big time congrats to my pals back in Houston with Mildred's Umbrella for the fab reviews they've been getting for this show. I mean, it took years for H-Town's underground theater scene to get the Chronicle's grand poo-bah of theater, Everett Evans, to even notice that the scene existed. And now Evans is gushing. It couldn't have happened to a more talented and nicer group of people: I'm not surprised by the attention they're getting. With the sad demise of IBP, and yet another indefinite hiatus for my Houston theater home, dos chicas, Mildred's Umbrella is now unarguably the best that underground theater in the Bayou City has to offer.

Really, I think they're better than the assembly line stuff produced by the Alley. But what do I know? I've just got an MFA in theater. Oh wait, that means I know a lot. Yep, better than the Alley. At any rate, the show closes this weekend, so if you're in Houston, you'd better go check it out. I'm sure it's great.

And here's why I know it's great: I'm playing Kabe in a production of the same play in New Orleans opening Thursday night. That is, I know the script really well, and I know Mildred's Umbrella well, too. Put them both together and you get great art. That's how I know.

And hey! The one I'm in is great art, too. I've found a group of young upstarts here called the Cripple Creek Theatre Company which is "dedicated to producing dramatic works of cultural, historical, and political relevance in order to provoke the general public into social action." Right on, man. They're a political company. I just can't believe my luck running into these people; I've found a ready made solution to my always vexing problem of how to fuse my artistic impulse with my political impulse. I'm doing some theater in which I totally believe, and it feels fucking great.

This is also my New Orleans debut, which is significant, if only to me, because I so utterly adore the culture here--this is a town that has always respected artists and the arts, I mean, for centuries; as Wynton Marsalis once said, or something to this effect, in other cities they have history, but in New Orleans people do history. Acting in the Big Easy is like nothing I've ever experienced.

Anyway, if you're here at some point over the next four weekends, come and check us out. You won't be disappointed--see the above linked Cripple Creek site for performance info.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Mr. Scott!

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Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Click here for the rest.

If anything, remembering the Loving v Virginia case reminds me of just how far we've come on race issues in my lifetime. The ruling was only a year before I was born, and I still recall from when I was a kid in Texas how it took social attitudes among whites a while to catch up. Hell, to this day there are still some people who haven't caught up. But whatever. They're dead-enders.

But it is amazing, isn't it?

Forty one years ago it was illegal in over a third of the country for Black and white people to love each other, which reflects just how uncomfortable, disgusted really, many many white people were with Black people as human beings, just because they were Black. You've just got to wonder how conventional wisdom could be so fucking stupid and so fucking widespread.

What pieces of conventional wisdom today, things that everybody "knows," will be derided as barbaric and idiotic in forty more years?

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How FOX Won and Obama, Clinton, and Democrats Lost

From AlterNet:

FOX viewers also won’t be impressed that Democrats like Obama and Clinton are trying to reach out to them because FOX viewers don’t want to join forces with Democrats — they want to beat them into submission, irrelevance, or extinction. They don’t want to find common ground — they want to amplify differences. It’s shocking to me that after 12 years of constant abuse, Hillary Clinton doesn’t realize that FOX viewers snarl like Pavlov’s dogs at the mere mention of her name. And with FOX’s long history of hating black people from Al Sharpton to OJ Simpson, Obama never had a chance. A Democrat trying to win votes on FOX is like a Democrat trying to win votes at the Republican National Convention, or Sammy Davis Jr. trying to win fans at a KKK rally. FOX viewers are not open to being swayed — these are the same people who still think that Bush is doing a great job.

And

But, more likely, it’s because FOX knows that it already won. This is where so many Democrats who have applauded Clinton and Obama’s decisions to go on FOX have completely missed the point.

By going on FOX without attacking them and calling them out for what they are, Obama and Clinton lost, the Democrats lost, and FOX won. Obama and Clinton will win no votes, and they reinforced and enhanced FOX’s most prized possession — the illusion that they are a legitimate news organization, not a Republican propaganda machine.

Click here for the rest, which includes YouTube video of Hillary's appearance on Butthole O'Reilly's show.

There's a lot about the Democratic Party that I find infuriating, chiefly their long and slow lurch toward the right by way of embracing neoliberalism, which necessarily includes an embrace of the corporate power that has rendered American democracy moot. But I'm also infuriated by their arrogance, their disdain for any real discussion of issues, their timidness in challenging Republican narratives and ideas, and their utter lack of understanding of how political "discussion" actually functions in the cable news era.

Case in point: Obama and Hillary going on FOX. The above excerpt, and the essay from which it comes, spell out in great detail exactly why this was so stupid. The short version is that this is yet another instance of Democrats accepting and legitimizing the Republican political narrative, very much along the lines of idiot John Kerry showing up at the DNC to accept the nomination back in '04, and starting his speech by jumping to attention, making a military salute, and spewing some gobbledy-gook about "reporting for duty." The Republicans wanted the election to be all about fighting Muslims, and the Democrats all said, "Yeah, that's right, it's all about fighting Muslims!"

The only thing Democrats should say when Republicans insist they buy their bullshit is "Fuck off; you're wrong. Here's what it's really all about."

Instead, the two front runners this year continue the Democratic tradition of allowing the GOP to set the debate parameters, to set the national narrative. And I continue my tradition of being outraged by how fucking stupid the Democrats are. Why won't they understand that there is no such thing as civilized debate with Republicans? Why must they even respond?

It's doubly disturbing to see that Obama, the new and different Democrat, has the same mental illness as his political elders.

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The All-White Elephant in the Room

From the New York Times, an op-ed piece by resident culture critic Frank Rich:

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

More here.

I've said it here before, and it's well worth saying again: the Republican Party is racist.

Qualifier: I know well that there are many individual Republicans who are most definitely not racist. However, the Party is an organization, with specific values and norms to which individual members may or may not adhere. That is, there is a big difference between the organization and the people who comprise that organization. Indeed, individual membership in no way affects what the party does at the local, state, or national level. I'm talking about the Party, not you or your equal opportunity GOP pals.

With that in mind, I'll say it again. The Republican Party is racist.

The well known Southern Strategy, if anything, makes the GOP's racism obvious for all to see. But it is also obvious in the day-to-day actions of Republican office holders. They appoint judges and pass laws that put a much higher percentage of the Black population in prison than whites. Their pro-business and anti-poor rhetoric, their bogus "welfare queen" mythology, as with the criminal justice system, affects a much higher percentage of the Black population. More recently, their zealous anti-immigrant rhetoric has deeply disturbed the US Hispanic community.

But this racism isn't like the old school stuff. No robes or burning crosses for the GOP: the national party's public relations panic back during the early 90s over former KKK leader David Duke running for governor of Louisiana as a Republican led to the GOP's endorsement of his Democratic opponent, convicted criminal Edwin Edwards--on the other hand, it is interesting that Duke had so much support in the first place. At any rate, my understanding of current Republican racism is that it is about power and indifference. That is, I don't think Republicans hate African-Americans so much as that they are willing to use them as political pawns, and couldn't care less what happens to them as a result of their pro-wealthy policies.

In short, the Republican Party doesn't care about Black people. They know African-Americans aren't going to vote for them, so they just don't give a shit. And it's completely obvious. But, as Rich observes, the political and media establishments just go nuts when anybody actually says it, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because Republicans are so good at freaking out on particular subjects they insist are taboo.

Remember how everybody freaked out on this one?



Thing is, as impolite as the suits in Washington believed it to be, Kanye West was absolutely right. George Bush doesn't care about Black people. I mean, I'm sure he's cool enough to have a beer with whatever Black acquaintances he has, but he clearly doesn't care about Black people. People plural. And I think that's a big part of the problem, ideologically speaking. Republicans simply don't acknowledge any validity to the notion of various groups within society. Everybody's an individual to them, with the freedom to exploit the masses, or to be victimized by power, just like everybody else. I mean, we are all individuals, but we're also parts of various groups--I'm white, and I definitely have some privilege because of that, especially when a cop pulls me over, or doesn't pull me over as the case usually is. This intense focus on individuality, to the exclusion of ethnic status, allows the GOP to pretend that their policies and ideas don't have racist consequences.

So the Republican Party is definitely racist, even if they don't think so.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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THURSDAY WAS INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' DAY

From Wikipedia:

International Workers' Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement. May Day commonly sees organized street demonstrations by millions of working people and their labour unions throughout most of the countries of the world — though, as noted below, rarely in the United States and Canada. Communist and anarchist organizations and their affiliated unions universally conduct street marches on this day.

International Workers' Day is the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when Chicago police fired on workers during a general strike for the eight hour day, killing a dozen demonstrators. In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually right as the first day of May begins. It has also seen right-wing massacres of participants as in the Taksim Square massacre of 1977 in Turkey.

And

The United States has its own Labor Day holiday, celebrated on the first Monday in September instead of on May Day. The U.S. version of Labor Day was a creation of the Knights of Labor, and was adopted officially in 1887 in an effort to disassociate labor activism from the radical left. Subsequent efforts to officially switch Labor Day to the international date of May 1 have failed. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 both as Loyalty Day and as Law Day.

Click here for more.

I've been so busy with work and the show I'm about to open that I almost forgot. But my old anarchist pal Vince, the guy who once introduced me to the only real communist I've ever met, emailed me from the Far East to wish me a happy May Day. He called me "comrade." I fucking love that. We ought to call everybody we work with "comrade." But not the people we work for. Only the people we work with.

Anyway, the point to observing May Day here at Real Art is to stress that, in the United States, workers have no sense of unity. We're all on our own. I mean, sure, go back six or seven decades and the story was different; workers understood that they shared common goals and interests, and were able to force the wealthy elite who own and run the country to give them a greater share of the wealth they created with their labor. This actually affected mainstream culture such that the middle class became the huge social sector that it was after WWII. Cab drivers, butchers, ditch diggers, all these people were able to afford homes, able to have a comfortable lifestyle with only one bread winner in the family.

Not anymore.

Decades of propaganda telling us that we're just the same as the wealthy, that their interests are our interests, that business success is the same as worker success, have turned all of that upside down. Now days, if you're out of work, or get shitty wages, conventional wisdom is that it's your fault. Even the press, which once considered itself to be working class, laughs at the notion of worker solidarity. We're supposed to compete with each other these days, not help each other.

Well, that's all crap. We're not the wealthy, and most of us never will be. But I am at a loss for how to get Americans to understand that. I mean, of course most people know that they're not rich, but so many Americans get starry-eyed when politicians talk about tax cuts and getting the government off the people's backs: they think the politicians are talking about them--the reality, rarely exposed by Big Media, is that tax cuts are for the rich, and getting the government off the people's backs means deregulating big business so they can pollute the environment, poison our pets and children, and send good jobs overseas.

Man, if the working Joes in this country ever figured it all out, it'd be over. I mean, O-V-E-R. Can you imagine what a general strike lasting only a week would do? It would freak out the elite so much they'd be falling all over themselves to get us good health care, shorten the work week, raise wages, lower college tuition, and on and on and on.

We need some good old fashioned class war in this country, and I don't mean the kind that the elite have waged relentlessly on the population throughout American history. I mean some real flexing of national might. A real demonstration that America really can be of, by, and for the people.

I'm not looking to the Democrats to lead the charge.



Happy belated May Day, comrades!

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Obama No

From the Progressive, an essay by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr.:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much, partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia compromise speech—a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring “acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies—has gained him breathing room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.” But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black “anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s.)

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Click here for the rest.

Reed expands on that last paragraph during a debate on Wednesday morning's Democracy Now:

But the answer to the question is that Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tact that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.

In some ways he's saying exactly what I've been saying for a while now, that Obama cannot be the unifying force he is perceived as, but Reed takes it several steps further, and articulates it much better. That is, I've been imagining, hoping really, as recently as yesterday, that Obama is much more liberal than he's letting on. Reed will have none of that, calling Obama a "neoliberal" in the first paragraph of his essay. In other words, to Reed, Obama is a right-leaning, Clinton-styled, pro-corporate Democrat pretending to be a liberal when addressing liberal audiences, pretending to be more conservative when he addresses more conservative audiences.

Indeed, on the same day Reed was debating on Democracy Now, AlterNet was running a new essay by Chris Hedges called "Corporate America Hearts Obama." Hedges paints a compelling picture, drawing from Obama's book The Audacity of Hope and scrutinizing his voting record to find unmistakable messages of reassurance to the corporate elite who own and run the country. The huge amount of money Obama's gotten from corporations show that they have definitely been reassured.

Without any clear evidence that Obama is actually the liberal that I want him to be, I am now very inclined to see his potential presidency as being very much like Bill Clinton's, possessing a feel-good liberal vibe, but with an oppressive pro-wealthy right-wing substance. Barack Obama is apparently running, like each and every Democrat after Mondale, a Republican Lite campaign, but this time he's trying to head off progressive insurgency by pretending to be a liberal.

If what Reed and Hedges are saying is true, this is the same old bullshit that has me refusing to vote for Democrats until they get their shit together. Obama isn't the unifier. Obama isn't forging a new post-racial, post-partisan America. He's John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. He's Hillary Clinton. He's business as usual.

He's bad for the country.

Nader in '08!

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Obama says he's outraged by ex-pastor's comments

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference.

After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, Wright made three public appearances in four days to defend himself. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has been combative, providing colorful commentary and feeding the story Obama had hoped was dying down.

On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.

And perhaps even worse for Obama, Wright suggested that the church congregant secretly concurs.

"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Obama stated flatly that he doesn't share the views of the man who officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and been his pastor for 20 years. The title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, came from a Wright sermon.

Click here for more.

Oh for cryin' out loud!

Obama's clearly in some deep trouble at the moment. Running scared, in fact. His rhetoric is now about denial, insisting that he's not in any way like his preacher of twenty years. You can't win with an argument of denial. As Noam Chomsky once said in frustration back in the 1980s when liberal French Zealots branded him a Nazi for supporting the free speech rights of a French academic who had denied the Holocaust, "What am I supposed to say, 'I am not a Nazi'?"

What I'd like to know is when Obama quit beating his wife.

The point is that this ongoing Scary-Black-Preacher-Gate scandal has exposed the cracks in the Senator from Illinois's soaring unity rhetoric. That is, Obama, as well as his supporters, seem to believe that, if he avoids actually talking about the deeply divisive issues facing our country, we can all come together as a post-racial, post-ideological, forward-moving nation. This was bunk from the beginning. I mean, as a campaign strategy, it's worked well. So far. But, to borrow a very apt and very recycled phrase, the chickens are coming home to roost.

There are just too many issues about which Americans disagree intensely. Reverend Wright may be jump starting the process, but this day was bound to come. Obama was always going to have to start talking about actual issues, always going to have to take sides. In this most recent attempt to continue sitting on the unity fence, to convince Americans that the scary Black preacher doesn't represent his views, Obama has already taken sides: he's alienated tens of thousands of African-Americans, white progressives, and others who essentially agree with Reverend Wright. And just like that, Obama's fallen of the fence.

I mean, I don't agree with everything Wright's said. The government creating AIDS assertion is flat out wrong. But the Reagan administration did sit on its hands while countless gay men died in the early 80s, and every administration since has ignored the soaring HIV infection rates in Africa. So Wright's wrong, but he's only a stone's throw away from the truth.

The only way for Obama to survive this crap-scandal is to take charge of the narrative. He's got to get out of the rhetoric of denial, which is now doing nothing but digging a bigger hole, and start talking about real issues, the ones that piss people off. He's got to take sides. He's got to declare enemies. He's got to tell Americans that, even though he would never phrase it as "God damn America," we have some horrific sins on our national conscience, with which we have never dealt.

The time for uplifting good vibes is over. Obama's got to roll up his sleeves and ball up his fists. Time to fight. 'Cause right now, he's getting his ass kicked.

Anyway, John Stewart gets the last word. As usual, his commentary makes more sense than anybody else's:



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PHOTOSHOPPING SYRIAN NUKE PICS

From the Los Angeles Times courtesy of AlterNet:

SYRIA: More questions about alleged nuclear site

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman's source alleges that the CIA "enhanced" some of the images.

And

The author points to more questions about the photographs of the Syrian site.

1. Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
2. The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
3. Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.

More here, including the photos in question.

Okay, it's pretty safe to say at this point that we know for sure that the current administration, at least, has absolutely no problem with lying to the American public to get us into a war--Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction serve as the smoking gun here, which was clearly not in the shape of a mushroom cloud, not in the shape of anything, really, because there weren't any WMD in Iraq when we invaded. We also know that the agencies under Bush's control are willing to keep on lying, or at least willing to covertly alter news coverage, in order to keep us at war.

And now we're seeing some saber-rattling about Syria's supposed nuclear weapons capability.

Why the fuck should we believe a damned thing these people have to say about anything at all? At this point, the American people are total suckers if they buy this business about Syria without any independent corroboration. But then, there's a big difference between the American people and the political/media establishment. They're already suckers, and if they get behind this dubious nuclear Syria story, and keep pounding away at it like Goebbels, there just might be enough gumption among the elite to open yet another front in the endless War on Terror.

For some reason, Nancy Pelosi continues to keep impeachment off the table, faux liberal that she is. She's just as bad as Bush.

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Sharpton vows to 'close this city' after officer acquittals

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

NEW YORK — Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to "close this city down" to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.

"We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians," Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. "This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell."

Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell — a black man — and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.

The rally at Sharpton's office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem's main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out "Kill the police!"

Click here for the rest.

Let's assume, for a moment, that there was no racism in this case. And, no, I'm not saying that because two of the cops involved were Black--there are studies suggesting that all cops, black and white alike, tend to internalize traditional police attitudes towards minorities. I'm just going into hypothetical mode. Let's also assume that these three NYPD officers did everything by the book, that, according to the law and rules of police procedure, they did everything perfectly.

Don't we still have an enormous problem?

No matter how you size this up, the cops fired fifty shots at a group of unarmed African-American men. Whether the individual cops had racist motives is irrelevant: when seen against the backdrop of our nation's racist history, police killing innocent and unarmed Black men is racist oppression, plain and simple--as if cops killing any innocent and unarmed human being wasn't bad enough. I, for one, am not at all satisfied to say "unfortunate accident, bound to happen from time to time" and then forget about it. Because this kind of thing has happened many times before, and it's definitely going to happen many more times in the future, maybe tomorrow, maybe right now.

Why must cops use lethal force at all?

We've put men on the moon. We can communicate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. It seems to me that guns are insanely old-fashioned. And if good technology actually doesn't exist right now, if Tasers really are as problematic as reports suggest, then it's insane that we're not pouring billions into research to find workable alternatives. It makes no sense to me that cops have to kill anybody at all, except in the most dire of circumstances.

Why do people of color, especially African-American men, bear the brunt of most police violence, whether it's legal or not?

It is no secret that Blacks are disproportionately represented in our criminal justice system. It seems as though it's all geared toward keeping African-Americans down. If Blacks simply commit more crimes, which I doubt, then we, as a society, need to deal with the social situations that breed such crime, which would hopefully translate into a positive shift in above mentioned traditional police attitudes toward minorities. If Blacks are simply targeted more than whites, which I think is entirely possible, then we're in big fucking trouble: police departments throughout the nation are totally and straight-up racist. I don't even know how to begin unraveling that one.

I've called Al Sharpton a Bozo before, for his grandstanding and narcissistic grabs at media coverage, which I believe tend to alienate would-be white supporters. But that doesn't mean he doesn't do some good work, and he's totally in his element here, doing the old school civil rights agitation on which he cut his teeth. Nobody else seems to be asking these kinds of questions. The political and media establishments appear to be silent on this. If Sharpton wasn't out there leading this protest, the murder of Sean Bell would be, in the eyes of the white power structure and its propaganda, just another "unfortunate accident" to be forgotten about, and Black Americans, all Americans really, at least those who give a shit, would be once again left to just fume about it.

I really do hope they shut the city down. This kind of violence is completely unnecessary and must end. Now.

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OBAMA'S PREACHER

From the latest episode of PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, an interview with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

REVEREND WRIGHT: In Genesis:2 it says God breathes into the nostrils of what God had formed from the dust. God donated some divinity to some dirt and we became living souls. That's God breath you have in you, that's God's breath that you just breathed. God is the giver of life. Let me tell you what that means. That means we have no right to take a life whether as a gang banger living the thug life, or as a President lying about leading a nation into war. We have no right to take a life! Whether through the immorality of a slave trade, or the immorality of refusing HIV/AIDS money to countries or agencies who do not tow your political line! We have no right to take a life! Turn to your neighbors and say we have no right to take a life!

And

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the members of Trinity leave the world of unemployment, leave the world of discrimination, leave the world of that daily struggle and come to church for-

REVEREND WRIGHT: For encouragement, to go back out and make a difference in their world. To go back out and change that world, to not just talk about heaven by and by, but to get equipped and to get to know that we are not alone in this struggle, and that the struggle can make a difference. Not to leave that world and pretend that we are now in some sort of fantasy land, as Martin Marty called it, but that we serve a God who comes into history on the side of the oppressed. That we serve a God who cares about the poor. That we serve a God who says that as much as you've done unto the least of these, my little ones, you've done unto me, so that we are not alone. Because that same God says I'm with you, and I'm with you in the struggle. Our United Church of Christ says courage and the struggle for justice and peace that is an ongoing struggle.

Click here to watch the interview or read the transcript.

Okay, I already knew that I like this guy, but I had no idea that I would walk away from this interview so intensely admiring him. That is, if God exists, and there is some truth to the Bible, Reverend Wright is much closer to what I hope and imagine the Divine to be than most any other holy man I've encountered. Sure, Wright's rhetoric can be fiery and offensive to those who prefer American mythology over American history, but his condemnations, replayed so often on cable news channels, come from a deep sense of compassion and love for the human race--Wright rhetorically tears down America's facade in order to build up its people. And it is very important to note that, as far as I can tell from this interview, Wright is much more about the positive message of God's love, and how that love brings strength and hope, than he is about examining what's wrong with our country.

This guy fucking rocks.

Watching this, I found myself deeply moved by what he had to say, especially the first part of the transcript excerpt above: "We have no right to take a life." To extend his line of thinking, if all humans possess a spark of the divine, then killing somebody, anybody, is tantamount to killing God, to personally crucifying Jesus. And America has killed millions throughout its bloody history.

God damn America, indeed.

Here's another thought. Yesterday I watched CNN for a few minutes and saw a couple of the usual idiot pundits asserting that Obama, after attending Wright's church in Chicago for twenty years, simply must have been influenced by his rhetoric. The point was to make Obama look like a wild-eyed leftist, dangerous to the country, and most decidedly not to be elected President. Although I totally disagree with their conclusion, I have to admit that I'm inclined to agree with the initial assertion: Barack Obama must have been influenced by his preacher after all these years. But what the pro-war, pro-exploitation, pro-establishment CNN pundits see as dangerous, I see as wonderful.

Obama probably is a bigtime lefty. And it drives me nuts that he thinks he's got to hide it.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil and Reine



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"
Local Edition

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

NOPD officer arrested for pandering, resigns job

A veteran New Orleans police officer resigned his position with the department after Kenner police arrested him during an undercover prostitution sting on Thursday afternoon.

Raynard Lyons, a 17-year veteran of the department, was booked with pandering after officers watched him drop off a prostitute at an undisclosed Kenner apartment building, Kenner Police Chief Steve Caraway said.

Caraway said Lyons had driven the woman to the spot after undercover detectives agreed to exchange sex for money. The connection was made through Craigslist.org, a popular advertising Web site.

More here.

Also from the Picayune:

2 deputies fired after woman says she had to expose herself

Two Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies have been fired and one faces criminal charges after authorities say one of them forced a female motorist to expose herself and the other deputy did not report it.

Clyde A. Clarke, 45, of 438 Holy Cross Place, Kenner, was booked with malfeasance in office after authorities claimed he forced an unidentified 26-year-old woman to expose herself to avoid arrest on two occasions. Demond T. Ferguson, 24, 1740 Hampton Drive, Harvey, was fired by the Sheriff's Office but was not arrested.

Click here for the rest.

Yeah yeah, corrupt New Orleans, yadda yadda.

The point is that dismissing police misdeeds because of a popular perception of overall corruption is just about as short-sighted as dismissing cop misdeeds as "isolated incidents" or "a few bad apples." That is, cop corruption isn't limited to places like the Big Easy; indeed, it's all over the place, systemic, chronic, always in the newspapers, and the stuff we hear about is only when cops actually get caught--one must assume that the problem is far worse than the constant stream of reporting would suggest.

And these two cases from the New Orleans area are utterly typical. The first story shows a cop who was either so stupid, or so possessed of typical police self-righteousness, that he used frickin' Craigslist to solicit his hooker. Either way, stupid or perceiving himself as above the law, this is some lame shit. Like I keep saying, I'm on the fence as to the morality of prostitution, but it is illegal, and cops, above all other Americans, ought to obey the laws they've sworn to enforce.

The second story is also classic cop corruption. Yet another cop sees himself as an elite, above the law, able to do whatever he wants, just because he's a cop. His partner isn't really such a bad guy, but cop loyalty, the "code of silence," motivates him to look the other way.

This bullshit happens throughout the nation, again and again, every day of the year. Why the fuck don't people see that we have a big fucking problem?



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DUMBASS DEMOCRATS
Remark about 'race card' was misinterpreted, ex-president says

From the New York Times courtesy of the Houston Chronicle:

Clinton confronted the issue of race again on Monday when he was asked by an interviewer for WHYY radio in Philadelphia about his remarks earlier this year on the results of the South Carolina Democratic primary. At the time, he likened the victory of Sen. Barack Obama to that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1998; Clinton's comparison was denounced widely by black officials who believed he was marginalizing Obama's victory with a racially tinged allusion to Jackson's failed presidential bids.

His comments became a turning point for many black officials and black voters, who cited them over and over in the weeks afterward as reasons they had coalesced behind Obama.

Susan Phillips, the WHYY reporter who interviewed Clinton on Monday, asked him whether he would still make that comparison or whether it had been a mistake, prompting Clinton to reply: "No, I think that they played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the campaign and everything, that they planned to do it all along."

More here.

(Correction to the article: Jackson won S.C. in 1988, not 1998. Stupid New York Times.)

What memos? What the hell is he talking about? There aren't any memos. Old Bill should just throw in the towel and apologize.

When people get pissed off about negative racial remarks, it's not playing "the race card." It's righteous indignation. That is, President Clinton is the one who played the race card, or rather, the racist card, when he compared his wife's competition to Jackson: the whole point was to connect Obama, in the minds of whites, to old school civil rights agitators, making him, to the many fucktards out there who are receptive to such a racist idea, just another angry black man mouthing off.

That's definitely racist. Not to mention insulting to pretty much everybody's intelligence.

I'll rejoice when Obama finally gets the nomination, if only because the Clintons will be shoved back into the 90s where they belong.

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JOHN LENNON AND...THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION?!?

Yeah, that's right.

In an immortal and glorious moment back in 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono joined Frank Zappa and the Mothers on stage at the Filmore East in New York City. I've never really heard any of the music from that concert, even though it's been available for years so maybe I should pick it up sometime soon, but if the Youtube clip below is any indication, glorious is something of an understatement. That is, Zappa clearly had an understanding of what John and Yoko's weird rock/avant-garde fusion was all about, and managed to seamlessly incorporate the hippie duo into his overall aesthetic.

This particular song is an old standard, Walter Ward's "Well (Baby Please Don't Go)," that Lennon claims to have not played since he was with the Beatles before they were famous. He, with the Mothers improvisationally backing him up, gives it the standard Lennon sound from the period, bluesy, with some cool and classic primal screaming a la Plastic Ono Band, aided and abetted by Yoko's unfathomable banshee wails. Things really get going, however, during the last couple of minutes, when FZ and John trade conducting duties back and forth, while members of the Mothers begin to wail along with Yoko. Sure, it's for hardcore fans only, but it's fucking brilliant.

Unfortunately, the whole meeting-of-gods thing ended up being a bit tarnished. From a Wikipedia talk page:

Lennon released an album of a "live concert" entitled "Sometime in New York City" which apparently featured a guest performance by Zappa on a tune called "Scumbag".

However - this was not the true case, it was Lennon who was the guest - he performed with Zappa at the Fillmore East in June 1971, the tune being played was "King Kong" (by Zappa) and the band was the Mothers. Zappa simply gave Lennon a copy of the tape of the concert. The entire performance is available on the Zappa CD "Playground Psychotics" (track 25-26) and the band line-up is given, verifying whose concert it actually was. Zappa was furious at Lennon for releasing the recording under a different name, and also for giving himself a "writer" credit on a song that Zappa had written and released on an album in 1967.

This is absolutely true: I've listened to an FZ interview from '72 or '73 where he essentially tells the same story, that John and Yoko ripped him off. I guess you can blame it on the drugs or dumbfuck hippie attitudes about property and art--along those lines, it is interesting to note that Zappa never did drugs and often lampooned and otherwise rhetorically blasted hippies on a regular basis back in those days. The whole thing kind of makes me think that maybe Paul McCartney had a good point when he sued the other three Beatles over ownership and business issues in 1970.

But whatever. John and FZ have both passed on, and the dispute, I hope, is now meaningless, which is cool because this fucking rocks:



Did you catch that kickass Zappa guitar solo about a third of the way through? This is, to me, like finding an authentic lost book of the Bible.

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CREATIONISM'S MCCARTHYISTS

From Science After Sunclipse courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Creation, Power and Violence

Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.

Just ask these people.

Steve Bitterman was an instructor who taught the Western Civilization course at Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa. In 2007, at the age of sixty, he was fired because he did not teach the story of Adam and Eve as literal truth.

And

Likewise, Richard Colling graduated from Olivet Nazarene University and taught there for twenty-seven years. A man of strong religious convictions, he argued that one could believe in the Christian God and still accept the scientific truth of evolution. In 2004, he published a book about this belief, and for his pains, he was barred from teaching general biology or having his book used in the school.

And

Paul Mirecki was professor of religious studies and department chair at the University of Kansas. He planned to teach a class called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies,” but canceled those plans after two men beat him in the street one December morning. He had displayed an acerbic tongue in online discussion forums, and he later apologized for his less temperate remarks; neither that apology nor sympathy for a physically assaulted human being stayed the KU administration, who forced him to step down as department chair.

Much, much more here.

I suppose McCarthyism isn't quite the right metaphor to use here: that was all about intimidating people into shucking one bogus ideology, communism, in favor of another bogus ideology, capitalism and the "American Way," whatever that means. What the above excerpted blog post is talking about is embracing a bogus ideology over objective, verifiable, scientific truth. And I had no idea that things had gotten so bad, as if the existence of such a bullshit "controversy" in the first place wasn't bad enough.

That is, evolution is a scientific fact. As Carl Sagan once said in his badass PBS science show Cosmos, "it really happened." Any "controversy" about evolution must necessarily exist only within the minds of religious believers who are unable to find a way to make their supernatural cosmology compatible with natural, that is, real, cosmology. And that's it. End of story.

There is no public "controversy" over evolution. Only a bunch of weirdo fundamentalists insisting that everybody else buy their religious views without any evidence at all, in spite of, at this point, literal mountains of scientific evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, it appears these weirdos have amassed enough power to put the squeeze on the individuals stuck on the front lines in this horrid culture war, teachers, who are a relatively easy target for various reasons.

This is some pretty sick shit. It forces teachers into choosing to either do their jobs honestly, or lying in order to feed their families. That's shitty. And the people making these bogus ideological attacks don't have to deal with the same real world issues as the people they victimize. That is, they can say any kind of crazy shit they want, and continue to get their paychecks because they're not teachers. Fucked, fucked, fucked.

At any rate, I had hoped the forces of fundamentalism were on the way out these days, given how badly fundamentalists have been feeling lately about how the GOP has been treating them. Guess I was wrong. Seems they've got a bunch of hot air left in their lungs.

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