Hundreds have lost their lives and nearly a million people are without shelter, medical supplies, or food in the aftermath of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike (which is ravaging Cuba at this moment with a storm surge as high as a five story apartment building and winds up to 150 mph, according to Reuters.) But Condi Rice says the Bush administration sees “no wisdom” now in ending an economic embargo against Cuba — even temporarily — despite strong criticism that...
Blog Archives
Robert F. Kennedy: What if he had lived? —– A Golden Age That Never Was
40 years ago today Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the world turned into a darker, meaner place in the decades that followed. As a young student at Columbia University – off for the summer — I was to join the RFK campaign staff the following week. The spring of 1968 had been exhilarating and tumultuous. Gene McCarthy was running an energetic anti-War campaign against the carnage in Vietnam. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April. Students were...
Powerful Video of Ugly Sexist Vilification of Hillary Clinton
Sexism is alive and well in America. One exit poll I saw had almost twice as many voters having trouble voting for a woman for president than voting for a black man. The New York Times had a long piece about a future woman president today, Kate Zernike writes: That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged...
Is Obama Running Away from the Black Community?
Obama has been castigated in the black community for his failure to speak out against the Bell verdict in New York City. The ruling vindicated the right of police officers to fire 50 bullets and kill an unarmed young black man because they thought someone in the car might have been reaching down under the seat for a gun that didn’t exist. Obama also failed to support March for the Jena 6 and of course, he was too busy...
Spring 1968: The Night the Cops Tried to Kill Me at Columbia
April 30, 1968 With billy clubs swinging, bloodying heads, a phalanx of riot police stomped their way through the crowd of faculty supporters standing outside Fayerweather Hall. No one was given a chance to walk away. The police then proceeded to smash in the main doors of the Hall where students had been camped out for a week — and to systematically drag students down the stone stairs to the lawns out front. Nobody was violently resisting. Many of...
Clinton Uses Political Jujitsu to Blunt Obama’s Strength
Rev Wright: “Obama Says What He Has to Say as a Politician” The above quote is from Bill Moyer’s interview with Rev. Wright which is to air tonight. Rev. Wright, referring to Obama’s disavowal of Wright’s more controversial comments, said “He does what politicians do.” Sometimes… Obama’s ambivalence about playing the political game is how the Clinton’s have successfully blunted his message. They have used the strength of his message — that he is above politics, that he is...
Debates are Show Business
They are not usually about Issues. In this primary process, they are about Who Is the Best Candidate? Who can Win? Ever since the first televised debate between Kennedy & Nixon, voters have often judged candidates on inconsequential issues… Nixon lost the 1960 debate, and election, because of such trivia as how much did he sweat?…How much makeup did he have on? As the story goes, voters who listened to the debate on radio were overwhelmingly convinced that Nixon...
Snob-Obama is Not Just Out of Touch. He’s From Another Planet
This is how the Republicans are trying to define Barack Obama: Too Liberal, Too Out of Touch. “I know what makes people there ‘bitter.’ It’s slick-talking politicians who look down on their beliefs and values.” Michael Goodwin wrote in Sunday’s Daily News about his small town in Pennsylvania. The well-circulated quotes from Huffington Post — of Obama telling a closed, well-heeled fundraiser that people in small towns in Pennsylvania are bitter and cling to religion and guns out of...
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