Long and strange

I remember Huey Newton, standing on a platform at Clark and Jackson, speaking to a Chicago crowd by the courthouse where The Chicago 7 trial was going on. A chant of "free Bobby Seale" had just ended. Mother Fuck, he began.

It was rare in those days, and possibly still rare to hear someone saying mother fuck in public, rolling the phrase around his mouth, savoring it like a piece of candy. Mother Fuck!

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution."

He was holding up a little boy, speaking about the brave new world he would grow up in, a world of justice, equality, opportunity and most certainly legal Marijuana. Are we there yet?  It's hard to say.  that boy would be the age of our president, Who would have believed that?

 The thing I recall most clearly about that day was saying to one of my fellow office workers, in our suits and ties and wingtip shoes, that these kids, the age of my own kids, would be so heavily propagandized by the time they were adults that they would hate and ridicule us more than the "hard hats" as we used to call them did. Nixon's "silent majority" -- lambasting us as unwashed slackers looking for handouts, dreading work and responsibility enemies of "law and order."  Indeed, an the last year of the 1960's even a modest, trimmed mustache and slightly longer than military hair could elicit shouts of "get a job." 

Indeed the generation following became young Republicans, carried briefcases around college campuses, talking about LBO's, made the word 'hippie' a vicious pejorative and forgot about Kent State and the obscenity of the '68 Chicago convention. By the time Forrest Gump came out, the vision of the hippie with red armband beating up on women was an easy sell.

Newton, by then Dr. Newton, was murdered on the street by a rival  Black Guerilla Family activist in 1983, when it seemed that everything had been lost: movement discredited, leaders gone, history rewritten and America  in love with a clueless cornball buffoon. The young seemed to have inherited the Reagan Revolution and trampled on the ruin of our hopes.  The movement was killing itself off, discrediting itself.  Michael J. Fox became a role model for conservative youth.

Bobby Seale and the rest of the group on trial for having incited the police riot directly attributed to the police and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.were eventually acquitted of  the obscene and absurd 
charges, but Fred Hampton, co-founder of the Black Panthers was murdered in his bed, shot three times in the head at point blank range by the Cook County State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan and the FBI 45 years ago last week.

"We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark."
—FBI Special Agent Gregg York--

That they claimed self defense and got away with it, that the State's Attorney was billed as a hero inspired the Weather Underground, some of whom the young Barack Obama was idiotically accused of "palling around with"  by people of the same age as that child held hopefully up before the crowd on a sunny noon in Chicago.  Welcome to his world.    

The End is Nigh

You don't mention the Southern Poverty Law Center down here in the South and you certainly don't want just anyone to know you're a supporter.  You'll be ostracized at best because they are on the shit list of every right wing group from top to bottom, all with their own pet hate, usually centering around that bogeyman : the United States Government.

SPLC's Hate Watch Blog had been tracking the pair of raving lunatics who murdered

two policemen, declared a revolution and killed themselves in a Las Vegas Wal-Mart.  They were part of the idiotic standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy this Spring and are fond of spewing the apocalyptic, revolutionary idiocies typical of a huge number of armed, hostile and bellicose Americans identifying themselves as "patriots."   SPLC is right to do so and too bad more attention wasn't paid to the warnings.  The as yet unnamed couple is hardly unique either in their armaments or attitudes and if the flood of e-mails I've been getting addressed to "fellow patriots" is an indicator, there are a number of them out there. A week hasn't gone by in years without a prediction of something horrible that Obama and the Liberals were about to do that fellow 'patriots' needed to be aware of.

No need to elaborate -- suffice it to say, none of their predictions have ever come true to the slightest degree, the FEMA concentration camps or the National Guard rounding up guns, although people like that will still still hang on to hope that there will be an excuse to get into the fortified bunkers and the armored vehicles and get out the big guns. I have no idea why these people chose today over yesterday or tomorrow, but perpetual predictions of that financial collapse and that gun grab would only make sense to a psychotic spoon fed hatred and lies by not only the militias and survivalist groups, but Karl Rove and Fox News and the Republican Party.

It's hard to crack down on people who haven't yet done anything and of course the above mentioned groups make it harder, portraying the subhuman hordes as heroes, but it's time we admitted we have a problem more serious than making sure no one ever says anything racist, or misogynistic or insensitive and it's time we pay attention.  History seems to be trying to repeat itself and the cast of characters is already in costume.

Iran Elections: Quit Turning Your Twitter Avatars Green And Do Something

Iran Elections: Quit Turning Your Twitter Avatars Green And Do Something - Air America Media - Kase Wickman

(The whole article is damned good and well worth reading, but I'm only reposting the "here's what you can do" paragraphs (the meat) below. I'm also leaving my twitter avatar green because, while it's usefulness pales in comparison to the suggestions in the post, I do think that little green tag makes a psychological difference. YMMV...)

So instead of empty gestures and hashtags, why don't we actually engage in some activism and help, instead of whispering about this like some kind of neighborhood scandal that will never catch up to us because it's an ocean away?

There's always the option of an online donation to a relief agency like Red Crescent, for something immediate and helpful. The world runs on money and blood (as the events in Iran over the last week and a half have so morosely reminded us), and America is too far away to donate the blood that the wounded in Iran so desperately need.

You can also make donations to those covering the ongoing protests and violence, like Tehran Bureau, which is run by an Iranian-emigre out of a house in Newton, Massachusetts and is in need of financial support to keep the site live and bandwidth plentiful. Reliable information is harder and harder to come by, already 24 journalists have been arrested in Iran, and the majority of the rest have been forced out of the country by expired visas and government intimidation.

Don't have cash? There are ways you can help for free without ever leaving your computer. You can create a proxy or Twitter relay to help keep those ever-important Iranian Twitterers connected and informing the world about the situation in Iran. Or change your location and time zone to match Iran, in hopes of tripping up government censors looking for active sources.

If you're more diplomatically-inclined, and looking toward the long term, write a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council and urge them to take action on international election standards and protection for citizens.

Above all, the thing you must do before any difference can be made is to inform yourself. The term "knowledge is power" wouldn't be repeated so much if it wasn't true. So spend some time reading the news, know what the hell you're talking about, and go out and tell someone else about it, and how they can help.

If anyone has any further suggestions or links to sites & or other things worth doing, please add them in the comments. I'd prefer that this post stay as non-partisan as possible. We all know that "that" side sucks, but wingnuts, moonbats, partisans of all other stripes... ...this isn't about us here in the US.

h/t Twitter / @DivadNhoj1981

Maybe Something About Foreign Policy, Too...

"Whether you golf or not, go to a driving range and hit a bucket of golf balls. Begin by hitting everything as hard as you can; gradually decrease your power until near the end, you're barely swinging. Notice that as you decrease the power of your swing, your accuracy improves. There's a lesson about life, here." - The Check Book - Nicholaus & Lowrie

(X-post @ Wingnuts & Moonbats)

Our Mutual Enemy.

I'm now convinced that this is the time. This is the time for all of us to come to the aid of our country, to stand up for civilization, for what is right and true; for our way of life, for our future, for our families, our homes and our fortune. This is my call to revolution.

The time to break the bonds imposed up us by an arrogant and assumed oppressor; a power that has made the truth its enemy, democracy its victim and the American people its hostage, is now. Indeed the time is now or the time will never be. Let us declare undying enmity toward Fox News.

Not to change the subject, but I have to ask "what do we know about Cindy McCain?" Not much really. Michelle Obama has been chopped up and re-assembled as a Terrorist, an opportunist, an elitist and many other silly things, but Cindy is an enigma. When the New York Times ran a long and somewhat sympathetic article about her and her unusual life with John, our mutual enemy, Fox News, decided without evidence that it was a "dirt Digging" article and opened the gates of hell in the direction of Barak Obama. Glenn Greenwald at Salon found it to be no more than

"just generally dissecting her private and emotional sphere for no apparent reason beyond idle voyeurism,"

but it's not partisan, he says. They did worse to the Clintons. That's true, but the idea that Presidents are entitled to secrecy when Republican is Fox policy, not the Liberal Press stereotype they peddle. She has become a public figure and thus has waived the right to privacy of a private citizen just as everyone does. "what do we know about Cindy" is as a legitimate question as is "what do we know about Sarah Palin, or Michelle Obama or the "first Dude" and his secessionist, anti-American "pals."

Because Mrs. McCain was said to have suffered from Migraines and took pills to ease the suffering, Fox News has decided that Barak Obama is a drug addicted criminal and has launched a crusade to find his "drug dealers" and search out anyone who may have bought "drugs" and hence can be associated with him. This is more than idle voyeurism, this is an attempt to twist the truth, to mold truth from the clay and animate it by blowing the breath of ignorance into its nostrils -- and for no reason other than to destroy anyone running against a Republican. Were this not obviously so, they would not have rolled their eyes and chanted Liberaliberal when George Bush's adult drug and alcohol problems, including a DUI conviction, was discussed.

"It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book"

said Fox and Friends. Oh really? The New York Times should inquire as to who passed Barry the joint at some party 25 years ago? Perhaps when Fox stops suggesting mob ties and terrorist ties of the Obamas; perhaps when they stop suggesting that his education was paid for by shadowy jihadists, that he was trained at terrorist training camps, that he supports the bombing of government property, that he's a disciple of Karl Marx and all the other foul things that issue from the anus of Fox - perhaps then.

Will we as patriotic Americans permit the quiet destruction of our country by the world's foremost propagator of terror, fear, hate and propaganda, or will we turn these bastards off? Will we sit idly by as associates, friends and others present Fox Facts as truth? Or will we do what we need to do to prevent our country from sinking into the cesspit from which nations never emerge whole?

Death to the Fox!