Lauryn Hill - Black Rage

This Guy Is In Baltimore...

How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF


To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.

FOR A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties.

St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin."


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/brandon-darby-anarchist-fbi-terrorism

Titles...

Time Has Come Today

If Bernie wins the Democratic nomination, how do you gauge his chances of winning the general?

At some point one's own political idealism requires a practical & achievable application...

...If one is really serious about getting their particular candidate elected. It's not just about why YOU think that a certain candidate SHOULD be elected, it's about why and how everyone else WILL vote for your candidate as well.

Wishing and hoping is one thing, but connecting with a majority of the electorate is quite another. The first thing to consider is what it is about your choice that appeals to as many people as possible. If you're having a hard time understanding what this thing is, then you'll also have an even harder time seeing that person elected.

The narrower the focus of that candidate, the harder the general appeal. That's why single issue candidates in national elections have the hardest time getting elected. It's also why purity tests set up candidates for failure. Winners usually appeal on various levels, and usually those levels create conflict between supporters. What appeals to Californians may not appeal to Ohioans, even though they may vote for the same candidate.

This is why we have primaries, to chose the person with the most general appeal and support. They can also serve to adjust and spread concerns from fringe issues to a general audience. How candidates accept, support and advocate for these issues is important as well. If you have concerns for a particular issue, the person who initially has your support may not be the person who would eventually succeed at getting you what, where and when you desire it. Especially if that person never got elected in the first place.

Make allies, create a consensus of ideals and form coalitions. Come together and fight together. Find another's champion your own in the end, if need be.

The ultimate goal is winning. Even if you have to support another from within your own party. Never forget that purity driven martyrs are always left out in the cold.

If America had an Intifada, I'm sure it would look like what's going on right now in Charm City

According to our conservative friends, America is supposed to be some social darwinian experiment...

That's been driven off course by liberal meddling. Boo-hoo.

They're lucky that I don't have the power to send them all into some alternate universe America which actually ended up the way that they envisioned it, because if I did have the power I would send them all away to their paradise in a heart beat. I'd doubt that they would last long after being "pampered" so much in this world.

Of course, we all know that for them, the only people who are supposed to get the shitty end of the stick is people that they don't like… And that's a pretty long list, don't we know.

The thing is that they've gotten the lion's share of what they've asked for so far.

Thirty years after Reagan first took office, the momentum to fashion this conservative vision of the country has only gone in one direction, but at varying rates of accomplishment. Just take a look at the fact that income equality is so lopsided, our tax code favors the wealthy and the corporations, we still don't have a national health care system, guns are flooding our streets, racial segregation is still a reality, there are no universal protections for LGBT citizens, abortion access is being restricted unabated, there is no consensus to start a comprehensive program to deal with climate change, we have an outrageously bloated military industrial complex that we're all supporting, elections can be purchased outright by rich Republican donors, Republicans control two-thirds of the federal government and a good number of the states, law enforcement is both militarized and primarily focused against the poor, minorities and anyone else working to improve everyone's quality of life, and over forty million Americans are nutritionally distressed… But they want it all.

They've proven over and over again that they're unfit to govern, mostly because they're rather rule instead.

We are overdue for a correction. Corrections in this country are always painful affairs, because I believe that there's something in our national psyche which prevents us from doing the right, best and most effective thing right out of the gate. And what is that? It has to do with money and vested interests controlling the process, usually the same vested interests that are causing mosts of the problems in the first place. These same vested interests use the vast powers of the media to corrupt the narrative. Speaking of corruption, I've quite sure that every single public and private institution in this country has been corrupted in some way as well. Not matter where you look, there it is. I'm not sounding paranoid, because every single day we all find about some new level of corruption that we've never heard of before. America is a country of blatant opportunists, who will always trying to get ahead even if they're caught. When many of them do get caught, they depend upon the ingrained corruption of their individual institutions to bail them out.

What the eventual correction should look like, I have no idea. But i do know from previous ones that the next one won't be pretty. That's because we have so very far to go.

This country can only take so much stress against this conservative momentum, even when we on the left are doing every that we can to at least hold it all together. So all I can ask of everyone is to hold it together long enough and hard enough to fight back. We can only do that when we work together.

The people who have the most to lose if we change this countries course would rather we'd tear each other apart.

Still Fantastic all the way to the bank...

MrScorpio: Gay marriage will doom us all...

To even more weddings with lots of drinking and drunken friends and relatives doing awkward dances at receptions:



The End Is Nigh.