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July 07, 2012 03:02 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 36 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

An evil soul producing holy witness

Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,

A goodly apple rotten at the heart:

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

–From William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Comments

36 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

  1. Carry Me Home by Dianne McWhorter – It’s easily one of the best books I have read about the Civil Rights struggle. She was a 5th grader in Birmingham, AL the year Birmingham was the focus of the struggle – in one of the leading families there (in a middle class branch). That impacts her writing, not that she heard any of it at the time, but that she knows the culture of the rich who controlled the town. And that drives her in to detail that I think an outside historian would never get.

    I read in numerous books how Birmingham was the city of hate. And how the children marching was key to the shift in people’s views that led to civil rights. But this explained why. And did it so well I was reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer at night. Incredibly well written.

    1. By NPR Staff

      Morning Edition, October 13, 2010 В· The life of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is anchored by seminal events in U.S. history, from her youth in segregated Alabama to helping plan the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

      That life arc might strike some as unlikely — and Rice says that when people ask her how she traveled from the civil rights era to the White House, she points to her parents.

      “I always say, you had to know John and Angelena Rice,” she tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “So, this is really their story, and my life wrapped in their story.”

      Read more about Rice and her 1st hand tale Birmingham to Secy of State.

      Extraordinary, Ordinary People

      http://www.npr.org/templates/t

      1. Her dad may well be a wonderful warrior of civil rights. But Condi, to my knowledge, hasn’t done zip for civil rights. She’s not obliged to do so, of course; the goal of the civil rights movement isn’t to make every black person a civil rights activist, it’s to let black folks hold all kinds of jobs and roles in society.

        Yes, Condi befitted from the civil rights work of those in the opposite party who paved the way for her to rise to a position that helped her start a dishonest war for an anti-civil rights President — what a heartwarming tale.

        1. Here’s a taste for you via Wikipedia…

          Rice experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham’s discriminatory laws and attitudes. She was instructed to walk proudly in public and to use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity of “colored” facilities in town. As Rice recalls of her parents and their peers, “they refused to allow the limits and injustices of their time to limit our horizons.”[96]

          However, Rice recalls various times in which she suffered discrimination on account of her race, which included being relegated to a storage room at a department store instead of a regular dressing room, being barred from going to the circus or the local amusement park, being denied hotel rooms, and even being given bad food at restaurants.[97] Also, while Rice was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the problems of Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. A neighbor, Juliemma Smith, described how “[Condi] used to call me and say things like, ‘Did you see what Bull Connor did today?’ She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about.”[97] Rice herself said of the segregation era: “Those terrible events burned into my consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats.”[97]

          During the violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Rice armed himself and kept guard over the house while Condoleezza practiced the piano inside.

          According to J.L. Chestnut, Reverend Rice called local civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his followers “uneducated, misguided Negroes.”[98][99] Also, Reverend Rice instilled in his daughter and students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of advancement, and would simply have to be “twice as good” to overcome injustices built into the system.[100]

          Rice said “My parents were very strategic, I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were revered in white society so well, that I would be armored somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white society on its own terms.”[101] While the Rices supported the goals of the civil rights movement, they did not agree with the idea of putting their child in harm’s way.[97]

          Rice was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair, aged 11, was killed in the bombing of the primarily black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists on September 15, 1963. Rice has commented upon that moment in her life:

          I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.[102]

          – Condoleezza Rice, Commencement 2004, Vanderbilt University, May 13, 2004

          Now someone might call you an ignorant fuck or question your principles and intelligence. I won’t though, your words speak for themselves.

          1. Like most Dems, I agree blacks in the south faced terrible discrimination; I never said otherwise.

            What I said is, “Condi, to my knowledge, hasn’t done zip for civil rights.” She faced discrimination and has benefitted from civil rights work done by others — civil rights work your party has fought tooth and nail for fifty years.

            By the way, a lecture on civil rights from the dude (Libertad) who drew a suspension for using a racial slur to describe the president – awesome.

          2. well, except Richard Clarke’s briefing titled ” Al Quaeda determined to strike in US “.  You mean the Condoleeza Rice who was asleep at the wheel before and during 9/11 ?  Not exactly a honorable distinction.

            Please give our regards to Condi and let her know that Obama found that actionable intelligence.

  2. Reporter’s Note:В President Obama has been trying to explain away the continuingly weak jobs numbers.

    Dear Mr. President,

    I didn’t bring up the latest jobs report yesterday because I figured you’d already had a long week and probably didn’t want to think about it. I suppose that is still true today, but it is the biggest issue in the headlines, so there is no avoiding it forever.

    Of course the numbers are disappointing. In rowboat terms, even with 80-thousand jobs created, the boat is sinking faster than we are bailing and that is a problem.

    Which brings me to a bit of a sore point. I realize that when anyone is trying to get re-elected, he or she wants to emphasize all the positives and minimize the negatives of the passing term in office. But it drives me crazy to hear any politician, Democrat or Republican, cite only half of an equation and call it evidence. You and your campaign folks have been trotting all over the place talking about the 4.4 million jobs you’ve created in the past 28 months. Fair enough. But making that claim over and over without, each time, acknowledging how many jobs we’ve lost since you took office seems misleading.

    ….snip…..

    Simply put: When any politician gives only half of a story, it always looks as if he or she has something to hide. My advice to any of them: If you are proud of your accomplishments then don’t be afraid to hold them up to the full light of scrutiny and have faith that voters too will judge them to be good.

    Hope your weekend is going well.

    Regards,

    Tom

    Source CNN online

    Hint reporters are trying to help you Democrats overcome 8+% unemployment and the host of failed big government solutions that have brought summer bummer year after year.

    Sure there’s a risk with coming clean. Other reporters might call you out on numbers such as the effective unemployment rate or the unemployment rates for women or recent college graduates.

    Don’t worry about the real details though, this reporter reminds you that its ok to still blame Bush…this CNN (wink all of’em) have your backside. Just give them some tidbits of reality from which to weave their cover of your failures.

    Next up….the billion dollar new Obamacare tax, gun walking, and a bevy of other corruptions. Meanwhile CNN reporters want you to acknowledge 5,000,000 missing jobs.

            1. Obama won’t come clean, sends message to union bosses, invested political-corporate class and Obama Super PACs

              . . . _ _ _ . . .

              CNN and other reporters pipe back with demands for accountability. They know what their customers want….and their suggesting Obama needs to atone for he, Pelosi and Reid’s sins.

              ”  . . . _ _ _ . . . ” means using forced union dues as a life raft. Can Obama’s corporate pimps and Super PACs match that or will they demand changes too?

  3. Or, as the gathered bigots called it, the “Western Conservative Summit”. Anyone who attended willingly, it’s fair to ask, “do you agree with this? do you plan to associate with these folks on an ongoing basis?”

    Former Senate President John Andrews, who heads CCU’s Centennial Institute, didn’t mince words …. Saturday afternoon’s topic, Andrews said, would be “the existential threat to the United States of America posed by Islam.” … “I didn’t say ‘radical Islam,’ I didn’t say ‘extremism.’ After you hear from Frank Gaffney and our friend from across the Atlantic, Geert Wilders, you’ll know why I just say ‘the threat of Islam.'”

    State Sen. Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City[:] “mosques are not churches like we would think of churches,” Grantham said. “They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches – we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.”

    http://www.coloradostatesman.c

    1. fire fighters, teachers, and government employees hadn’t lost their jobs because of the Republican’s refusal to keep essential services going, right?

      Say, where ARE all those firefighters right now?  Howz that free market religion bullshit working for you, huh?

      My county clerk just announced very reduced hours, like the library did three years ago. Boy, I can see the economy rebounding as I type without all that government waste.

      Keep yanking your little pub pee pee.  

  4. CPAC’s boy wonder swings left

    Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.

    Now 17, Krohn – who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett – still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.

    http://www.politico.com/news/s

    Money quote:

    “We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia…. The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”

    So basically all Conservatives have the critical thinking skills of a 13-year old? It sounds about right….

    1. There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.  ~unk

              1. than the recognition of the rather astute readership here at Pols.

                Priceless.  Priceless as in having no value whatsoever, but still priceless.

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