4:01 PM, 04/21/13
GOP Newsletter Floats Idea Of Shooting Lawmakers
3:02 PM, 04/21/13
Dem Rep Scores Big Senate Endorsement
9:00 AM, 04/20/13
25 People Who Are More 'Evolved' Than Obama On Marijuana
The United States Senate's failure to pass common sense gun safety measures is a moral failure of great magnitude. We must stop this relentless war against our children and dethrone the NRA whose reign obstructs what 90 percent of Americans want.
As Boston remains in lockdown mode while law enforcement agencies continue the manhunt for suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, we've invited those in the area to blog about their experience.
At its simplest, politics is about people, and in the midst of national crisis, elected officials should be working to support law enforcement and the citizens involved in the situation -- or they should be quiet.
Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They'd have us believe that minimum-wage workers are teens from '50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe.
Over the course of the past week, we witnessed the power of real-time news reporting with a major story. Here's a look back at 50 tweets, including 15 pictures, and five YouTube videos (one for each day) that tell the story of the Boston Marathon bombing, from beginning to end.
Even before the wild overnight developments in the Boston bombings -- Russians, Chechens, the Caucuses (sic), Kyrgy-what? -- it was clear that we are culturally unprepared for the complexity of the Boston bombings.
More than ever, I am not just a part of my street or neighborhood or town. The Boston Marathon is an international event. Our world is as big or as small as we make it. If we make our world big, then there is no us vs. them. There's just us. No matter where we are, we are Boston.
In the absence of definable enemies, as I learned in Boston, we turn on each other. Democrats and Republicans have turned on each other in the absence of a common enemy, with new permutations of class warfare where it is the wealthy who resent the poor, and where our president is the Anti-christ.
In the same week that Pulitzer prizes were announced honoring the finest in American journalism, many in the far-right media worked to set news standards in mindless, awful behavior in the wake of the Boston attack.
I recognize, as a lawyer, that when you infringe the rights of one citizen you threaten the rights of all citizens. But #2 arguably abandoned and disavowed those rights when he (allegedly) declared war against his people and his country.
Some weeks, I sit down to write this weekly wrapup, and find that there isn't that much to talk about, because nothing much happened that particular week. This isn't one of those weeks.
Our responses may not make intellectual sense tomorrow, or whenever this calms down (hopefully with no or minimal additional violence), when we can look back at things in the cool calm of rational hindsight, but they make emotional sense now. Because we are afraid.
We don't want the Boston Marathon bombers to be us. We don't claim them. They can't be Americans. As soon as suspects were identified, we rejected these young men. Even some of their family did. We blame them because of our fear.
The Waldos stand by our true story of 420 origination about meeting at the Louis Pasteur statue at San Rafael High at 4:20 p.m. during the 1971 school year to smoke and go to Pt. Reyes.
I have yet to see a perfect piece of legislation, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), often referred to as Obamacare, has real flaws. But even at this early stage, its accomplishments are important.
There are currently several pieces of legislation being considered in the U.S. Congress that would include Israel in the Visa Waiver Program -- thus allowing Israeli citizens to enter the U.S. without first obtaining a visa.
It is critically important to understand what, if any, connection these suspects have both to overseas terrorist groups and to domestic folks not yet tied to the bombing, and that project will be far easier if the surviving Mr. Tsarnaev is not killed.
Senator Cruz must lead the fight for aid on the Senate floor. He must explain why federal government aid for West is good and necessary. He must also explain why federal money is justifiable only in an acute disaster, and not in a chronic disaster such as joblessness.
Just as Prohibition did little to stem the flow of alcohol into Americans' gullets, its repeal did little to resolve the problems that alcohol abuse bestows upon our collective psyche. Which is why, when I think about the future of marijuana in this country, it is with a devil on one shoulder, and an angel on the other.
Richard Klass, 2013.21.04
Linda Flanagan, 2013.21.04
Richard (RJ) Eskow, 2013.21.04