January 31, 2017

Barbara Hale, the indomitable Della Street, has died at age 94.

Barbara brought a lot of joy into a lot of lives with her talent.

Rest in peace, Barbara Hale.

January 29, 2017

Maybe Trump was right. This image could explain why inauguration attendance was

underreported. It's simple folks, open the link below and look at the image the author has supplied. You will see a closeup that clearly explains all that white!

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/23/1624076/-Maybe-Trump-was-right-This-image-could-explain-why-inauguration-attendance-was-underreported?

January 21, 2017

Night has fallen.

“There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

“Like a tornado swirling around you, you are the eye of the storm. A front row seat to the destruction of everything you worked so hard to build. But like all tornadoes, the rain will halt and the winds will calm. The pieces that remain from the cataclysmic destruction of your former self, will soon dissolve and you will find that the only thing that was destroyed was the illusion, the attachment. Allowing for you to rebuild a new, a stronger, a more mature, and spiritually evolved you, that you didn’t even know existed. So have faith, this too shall pass.”
― L.J. Vanier, Ether: Into the Nemesis

January 19, 2017

The DNC Contenders Are Not Interested In Your Populist Moment (Huffpo)

Rank and file voters are angry, but nobody told the candidates. Candidates couldn’t even acknowledge the DNC had botched the 2016 process. When asked whether the DNC “put its thumb on the scale” in favor of Hillary Clinton, no candidate would agree. “That’s a gotcha question,” Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton Brown said. “I’m not going to answer.” The contentious 2016 primary between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) exposed major fissures in the party. But the candidates studiously avoided emphasizing those divisions. Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, called the idea of the DNC race as a proxy battle between the Sanders and Clinton wings of the party a “false choice.”



The candidates almost universally agreed that lobbyists should be allowed to keep giving money to the DNC. President Barack Obama banned lobbyist contributions to the party in 2008, a ban then-DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz quietly lifted in the 2016 election.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dnc-debate-courage-opposition_us_58803552e4b02c1837e9bf7f

sigh...

January 11, 2017

'Waiting for Trump' a poem by Hilton Obenzinger, Dec. 30, 2016

I sit in one of the greasy truck stops on Interstate 5, near Red Bluff, dizzy and scared.
Decades of hope seem suddenly to turn to bullshit.
Dread and rage swirl around the country, but the lunch counter is quiet with snoozing baseball caps tipping into coffee cups.
Fox is on the TV, yet no one needs to watch the news.
They already know the news.
Something bubbles in the kitchen, like death.
Soon we will have to eat those French fries.

On the frozen plains, in howling snow, Indians come to stop the Black Snake.
They stand to block the way, whether the Iron Horse or the Black Snake, waiting as the new president takes his seat.
We all wait.
Perhaps the ghosts will return and not the cavalry.

Tonight the deeper darkness comes, darker than before.
Spies denounce the spying of other spies.
The Kremlin carries the paralyzing kryptonite, as hulking cyber armies gather in the night.
Menacing men rip scarves from the heads of women.
Kids scrawl ugly slogans on school walls.
Burning crosses dance in the eyes of White Nationalists like the sugarplum fairies of the shopping season.
And we wait.

Cops who are honest worry what they may be called to do.
And those who are not touch their holsters, assured that they may impose order and nature’s law at will, and they wait to pursue someone’s happiness because they fear for their lives.
Farm workers, hunching over the entire Sacramento Valley, tear plants up by the roots, and fear for their lives.
Violence has found its season.

Tired truckers stretch out in the rear of their cabs, about a dozen rigs lined up in the dark along the shoulder of the freeway, and they get some shuteye.
I rearrange the eggs and bacon on my plate and wonder what those men think.
Perhaps they believe that everything will be great again when they open their eyes and find themselves back on the road.
They were given a promise.
Perhaps they will really pay off all their credit cards because they work hard and they’re white.

We wait for robot drivers to fly up and down the Central Valley, picking up apricots and dropping off tractor parts, with no need to shit at the truck stops, no need to sip the chicken noodle soup.
And the day the robots begin to drive, the dreaming truckers will sleep in the back seat of their old Chevrolets, their steering wheels taken from their hands, waiting for the promise.

We wait for everything and for nothing.
There is no singularity, no instant wide horizons, no ironic lights, but a grim stupor, as the tycoon casts a long shadow from his golden tower, lumbers to the White House to take possession of one more property, while delirious settlers really do slouch towards Bethlehem.

The Great Man holds court.
His loyal children seek his hand, the great and the rich, the powerful and the ridiculous float up the elevator shaft to meet the wizard king. Generals, CEOS, moral monsters, angry souls, fools of exceptional quality, celebrities, they all rise up to the tower, taken to the penthouse to bend before the greater fool.

We wait.
There is a pervasive sense of dread before the beast takes the oath, before the Republic becomes a wholly owned subsidiary.
Ordinary life goes on, and we wonder.

We must love one another and die.
Our danger is great, and we must love one another or die.
Is it love and die?
Or is it love or die?
Do we have a choice?

What’s on TV?

******

You can find this, as well as many thoughtful articles on current events at: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/ which is Rabbi Michael Lerner's website.

January 10, 2017

Unions Facing the Trump Era by Jonathan Rosenblum January 3, 2017

Beginning in 1979 in Seattle, WA, Jim Levitt expertly fabricated custom aircraft parts and tools, helping make the Boeing Company one of the most successful businesses in the world. But in 2013, corporate executives issued a threat: They demanded that Levitt and his fellow machinists surrender their pensions, and that Washington State political leaders hand over a record $8.7 billion in tax benefits. In exchange the company promised to keep production jobs in-state. The Democratic governor of Washington, along with virtually the entire political establishment, caved in to the blackmail. So did Levitt’s international union leadership – they had bargained the deal secretly with the company. The capitulation cost 32,000 Boeing workers their pensions.

“We’ve lost collective bargaining, for all intents and purposes,” Levitt observed in the wake of the corporate blackmail. In recent weeks we’ve seen no shortage of reasons – and excuses – for why Hillary Clinton blew the election and Donald Trump will be our next president: the Russians, an unfair Electoral College system, FBI Director James Comey, xenophobia/racism/sexism, a weak Democratic candidate, Wikileaks, and faked news. Some Clinton backers even blame the “tough” primary run that Bernie Sanders gave their candidate. What’s barely given any attention in the mainstream media is the role that decades of destruction of union power played in the 2016 election debacle. But it’s no mystery to Levitt, his fellow Boeing workers, and millions of other workers from all walks of life who’ve justifiably grown cynical about a political establishment that repeatedly has failed them over the years.

This, my friends, is the difference between third way and New Deal socialist Democrats. A lot of people are cynical, and we blame them for that, particularly if they voted Trump or worse, did not vote at all. But Levitt and his fellow union machinists were betrayed, simple as that. They have every right to be cynical; they had a reasonable expectation that our party to help them when Boeing made the attempt to steal their pensions, but our party did not.

Decades of Democratic leaders caving in to corporate crimes has so eroded our party's base that it has made the entire American public a bit cynical. It is sometimes difficult to understand what our party actually stands for, particularly when we can observe that much of our leadership has the same corporate donor base as the other party.

We have to learn, people, to better articulate our positions (and please don't say we did a good job of that, because we did NOT). We must also learn to stand up against the immorality and odiousness of corporate greed like the Washington Dems DID NOT. We need to call things like what Boeing did what they are - horrible moral wrongs foisted off on innocent people so corporate coffers can become even more swollen with profits.

Start doing that and backing it up with deeds, legislation, and votes, and we will begin winning elections. Most Americans HATE living and functioning in this dog-eat-dog 'real world.' They yearn for something else, leaders who at least try to mitigate the worst of the corporate greed, employee, consumer and environmental abuse, and who address the yearning we all have within our hearts for a kinder, gentler world where we can at least sometimes believe justice will prevail.

I don't, in short, want to be told that my way isn't even feasible because that's not how the world works. blah blah blah.

Because to that I say, "WHY????"

When our party leaders hear messages like this, and act on them, then we will begin winning elections and we together will create a better world.