You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2017.
These assholes are calling it “fun.”
Do your job, but don’t effing strut and or take pleasure in separating families, dashing dreams, and destroying lives – no matter how righteous you feel about your job and cause. You’re not special with special entitlement because of your skin color of the geography of your birth. Have a little humility and empathy knowing that you and anyone else who was living the life they came from would be here illegally if that was the only way. And in many cases, it’s the only way.
Anybody talking about these arrests as “fun” should be summarily fired. Really missing President Obama. Yes, he deported more than is predecessors, but that’s because he knew how to govern effectively.
Although some growers may rejoice this news of potential renewal of federal enforcement as potential to return to the glory days of 1990s prices. What I see is more violence and more ruined lives.
Probably they won’t try to roll back medical marijuana. That ship has sailed. But it does look like they may try to send a message to states like California and Colorado.
The NRA will be freaking out about this Fourth Circuit Court decision essentially ruling that military-use assault rifles are not protected by the Second Amendment. This is a major reversal of a long sequence of fortune for the more extreme wing of gun rights advocacy, and it could be overturned by SCOTUS. But it may not be.
However, there is a silver lining for NRA types as this could put to rest all hint of any influence of the “well regulated militia” qualification to the Second Amendment. Under prior decisions, the Courts have ruled that sawed-off shotguns and switchblades could be banned on the basis that the weapons served no practical purpose for a militia. Arguably, under that reasoning, the protection of rights to own an AK-47 should have been stronger than that for handguns or hunting rifles. More recently, SCOTUS overturned that line of cases in affirming the Second Amendment protection of nunchuks – also with very little practical application for a militia, but, the Court deemed, relevant to the basic right of self-defense which is deemed fundamental even though not explicitly stated in the Constitution (when strict constructionists and original intenters become Constitutional liberals, you know it’s about a right to guns or prayer). So, having trashed the whole is-it-relevant-to-a-militia analysis process, the question is now whether it’s relevant to personal self-defense.
So as of now, if this decision stands, the process is returned to the realm of democratic processes and elected officials don’t have the cover they once had. They face the most formidable lobby in Washington in the NRA, but they also face a growing fatigue of multiple shootings blamed on everything but mass death weapons. From the decision:
Disenfranchising the American people on this life and death subject would be the gravest and most serious of steps. It is their community, not ours. It is their safety, not ours. It is their lives, not ours. To say in the wake of so many mass shootings in so many localities across this country that the people themselves are now to be rendered newly powerless, that all they can do is stand by and watch as federal courts design their destiny—this would deliver a body blow to democracy as we have known it since the very founding of this nation.
In urging us to strike this legislation, appellants would impair the ability of government to act prophylactically. More and more under appellants’ view, preventive statutory action is to be judicially forbidden and we must bide our time until another tragedy is inflicted or irretrievable human damage has once more been done. Leaving the question of assault weapons bans to legislative competence preserves the latitude that representative governments enjoy in responding to changes in facts on the ground. Constitutionalizing this critical issue will place it in a freeze frame which only the Supreme Court itself could alter. The choice is ultimately one of flexibility versus rigidity, and beyond that, of whether conduct that has visited such communal bereavement across America will be left to the communal processes of democracy for resolution.
I wonder if Justice Kennedy will moderate on these issues in the face of a one party rule over all three branches of government.
Julia Minton and will be hosting Monday Morning Magazine on KMUD tomorrow morning. This is what we have going.
7:00 to 7:30 – Julia and I will discuss the news of the day.
7:30 – Eureka City Councilwoman Kim Bergel will discuss the recently passed Human Rights Statement
7:45 – Supervisor Estelle Fennell will report on County business
8:00 – Eureka NAACP Chair Liz Smith will discuss the organization’s Black History Month events
8:15 – Sean McGlaughlin of Access Humboldt will discuss the current state of the open internet and access thereto.
8:30 – Jennifer Bravo of Centro del Pueblo will discuss ICE activity nationally and locally and resistance thereto.
We’re in trouble.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazis are blaming “the Jews” for the Flynn resignation.
No, the whistle blowing about the thing is not the “real story.” The real story is the thing itself.
Julia Minton and Bob Froehlic will join me on All Things Reconsidered to discuss critical thinking in film. This discussion will focus on movies which present two or more sides to a conflict or disagreement in such a way that the film attempts to present each side with equal favor, disfavor, or both. The kind of film which lets you make up your own mind, or just leaves you thinking. Please call in to discuss our titles and your own. 7:00 on Thursday evening.
Among the films we’re going to discuss are Dead Man Walking, The Caine Mutiny, Judgment at Nuremberg, Utu, Citizen Ruth, and others.
Flynn resigns with a letter “apologizing” for lying to the President and Vice-President, the implication being that Trump knew nothing about it. That Flynn just went and had this conversation, about the sanctions, on his own initiative – just in case, you know, he might someday be in a position to do something about them. Trump knew nothing. Poor Trump.
Does anybody besides JW seriously believe that? Does anybody but the most google-eyed of Trump supporters really believe anything they’re saying now?
I’m not talking about a few weeks ago before the inauguration. That’s bad enough, but they can’t deny that. What the Hell does Russia have on Trump?
I mean seriously!
At what point does the media admit that the White House is in crisis?
That’s how you spell it. The Department of Education got it wrong. Then misspelled the apology. That’s one of the hazards of social media. But the real issue is the whitewash.
Much like Frederick Douglas, I suspect they didn’t vet Du Bois before praising him. Did they know he was a Communist?
Being the red diaper baby I was, I’ve known about him all my life. But the concept was driven home in high school when I was assigned to write a paper about black poets. Even before Hughes, Baraka, Giovanni, and Baldwin, I was introduced to Dudley Randal, who started a black poetry press in Detroit in the early 60s, before the Black Power Movement came to life. He wrote this poem.
Booker T. and W.E.B.
DUDLEY RANDALL
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
<When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.
I had never heard his voice – had no idea what he sounded like, until I found the following audio.
Sohum Parlance II 
Recent Comments