A New Day Post

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There has been wide spread discussion amongst democrats that Joe Lieberman be formally tossed out of the democratic caucus in the senate. This is a measure many think appropriate especially if Lieberman address the republican convention. Anger with Lieberman comes not over his independence or even his backing of the Republican nominee, but from his willingness to publicly besmirch the character and qualifications of the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Now comes a poll that shows that Barack Obama is more popular amongst Jewish voters than is the 2000 democratic nominee for Vice President.

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This stuff really is out there folks. It’s interesting that as our society may be stepping closer towards an expression of healing and reconciliation, the forces of ignorance and division are simultaneously intensifying under the pressure of moment

Get your “If You Want to Catch Osama You’ve Gotta Vote Obama” sticker here

See the Huffington post story about the GOP Obama/Osama propaganda

It’s hard to believe that a publication as respected as the New Yorker would allow something like this to take place. In looking at the controversial cover and listening to the back and forth in the media over the issue, I kept asking myself how many people had to have signed off on this before it went to print. How many experts, how man people with experience, how many editors, thought this was appropriate? The answer: enough, enough for this piece of “satire” to grace the cover of the New Yorker.

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It might be hard to believe but there were some of us out there in the progressive community who still admired Ralph Nader, even after his questionable presidential runs. Today, after his racist comments about Sen. Obama, there is one less progressive in that already dwindling category.

Mr. Nader has done more good for the consumers and citizens in this country than almost anyone you will find on our currency, but the words he has now uttered sound like they could have come from the mouth of Don Imus. For some time, questions have been raised over the role Nader’s ego has played in his choice to campaign in swing states; where his marginal successes have been blamed for throwing the race to the republicans. What is not in question is the effect of those republican victories; they have pushed back the progress in consumer safety, workers rights, and environmental protections, that Mr. Nader had spent the greater part of his life fighting for.

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          This is brave and accurate and gusty. Keith Olbermann was one of the first in the media to tell the truth about Iraq and Katrina and so many other debacles that should call any thinking president to shame. He was the very first on cable news to draw attention to the disturbing link between the timing of Bush administration political scandals and the heightening of the terror warning level. Again and again he has done what everyone in the media should be doing, he has looked out for the American people; job well done again.

 Go to A New Day Post’s coverage of the democratic primary race

This week, while speaking in front of the NRA who interestingly banned guns from their convention, the former republican presidential candidate, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee made what I guess we can call a joke, about Barack Obama diving for cover when someone aimed the barrel of a gun at him. He has since apologized for his poor delivery of a joke that he says came out wrong. But its hard to figure out how any comment with those components could come out any way but wrong. After Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, what does Mike Huckabee think is funny about a gun being aimed at the man who may well be the first black president of these United States? And what are we to think of these sort of people, people like former preacher Huckabee, good natured , quick to laugh, presumably wholesome, and then they say something like this, something so racist and treasonous.

                On April 4, 1968 the Revered Dr. Martin Luther King was shot dead the morning after delivering his “mountain top” sermon in Memphis Tennessee. CNN reported in their recent special that he slept in and even started a pillow fight on that morning . Though an imperfect man, Dr. King was a wise and a kind and a decent man, a man of God, and for all time a hero, not just to African Americans but to everyone who cares about human rights. It’s hard not to imagine that if he were alive today, the 79 year old non-violent civil rights icon would be a critic of the current war in Iraq, and perhaps heartened by the historic democratic primary race.

(This is not news, this is an unmeasured, and sure to be regretted later, reaction to all the anti-reproductive rights, anti-woman’s rights, anti-black equality, anti-Islam propaganda that I have the misfortune of being privy to. If you too have been wanting to vent self-righteously about this subject then you might well enjoy what follows, but if you are worried that the angst contained here in might harsh your ‘one love’ / ‘yes we can’ mellow, then by all means skip this piece.) 

              I’m sorry, but I have to say something about all these closet racists who keep passing around their outrageously ignorant, stubbornly uninformed, not-so-subtly bigoted propaganda. I grew up in the church and spend a lot of time standing up for people who have values, and beliefs, and faith communities, but I must say that this stuff come almost exclusively from people who are quick to identify them selves as good Christians. Some of you folks out there are being duped by these people. If  you’ve come in contact with this, then perhaps it came from your barley literate, never been out of the country, family members/co-worker/classmate; Mr. or Ms. White Anglo-Saxon (so called) Jesus-fan..

              (These particular) Jesus-fans who, mind you, know nothing about Judaism, or ancient Israel, or Roman Occupation, or the crusades, or the dark ages, or the reformation, or any fair notion of anything from modern philosophy. I cant understand why anyone would trust these people about the unknowable; what happens when you die, the meaning of life, the origin of the universe, when they have made no effort to become informed about the knowable; natural selection, climate change, world history! 

            Now I am a person who has a lot of sympathy for working class people, and poor people, and rural people, and religion, tradition. I am white myself, and not as well educated or well traveled as I wish I was, and I, like Sen. Obama and almost every american, am even related to people who share some of these views. I’m the last person who wants to hold working class American traditionalist feet to the fire. But I have my limits.

              Everyday I get email forwards from people who I actually know in which the racism is about as subtle as a big burning cross in your front yard. Do people not realize that their racism is showing? Do these people not worry what others will think of them, or do they assume that everyone shares their prejudices?  Some of us are intellectually curious adults, some have read a book or two, a few have even been to philosophy class.  That fact in mind, you shouldn’t send us this of hardly disguised white power rhetoric.