"Remember January 6th" should become as important as "Remember Pearl Harbor" in our national fight against fascism

 

The actions of the trumpists at the U.S. Capitol one year ago should never be whitewashed.

Watch Joe Biden's Gettysburg Speech - October 6, 2020 - "Again we are a house divided"

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who missed seeing Joe Biden's speech on the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, battlefield yesterday. It was easy for the media and voters to be distracted by the steroid-fueled tweetstorm from the recently-dehospitalized White House resident trying to divide us further with strings of short all-caps tweets while Biden was speaking about bringing us together (without mentioning his opponent's name).

I did miss the speech when it was being delivered live on a Tuesday during a work week, but the beauty of the internet is that I can watch it now -- and so can you, if you have 22 free minutes. You don't need my commentary; just watch it.

Two Gettysburg Addresses

Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address, but we shouldn't let that overshadow our current White House resident's Gettysburg Address on October 22, 2016. Only a candidate at the time, Donald Trump promised a major address about his first hundred days as president at the site of Lincoln's immortal speech. The speech quickly devolved into a typical airing of grievances about the media, lies about the Clinton campaign, and gloating about his crowd sizes, but included one key specific threat that he never followed up on (and never will). With news of his history of sexual assaults and the Access Hollywood tape (below) dominating the news, candidate Trump made this promise:

"Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign. Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over."

Even Donald Trump must remember what happened when Bill Clinton was forced to lie under oath about his sexual past; Donald Trump will never want to face any of his many accusers in a court room.

Michelle Obama already delivered the best response to Trump's misogyny.

So, this morning the following misogynistic blast of twitterrhea oozed through the tiny digits of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Screen captured on June 29, 2017 at 9:02 AM EDT, because I thought the writer would immediately delete or alter it. I gave him too much credit; it's still up in this form at 2:45 PM.

There have been a number of responses around the web (many of them from my own twitterfingers), but the more I think about it, the more it seems that the best response already came from Michelle Obama a few weeks before the election, on October 13, 2016, in Manchester, New Hampshire. I posted this video on that date, but this great speech needs to be seen again:

The fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for president of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning, I simply will not repeat anything here today. And last week we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can’t believe that I’m saying that. A candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women and I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. So while I’d love nothing more than to pretend like this isn’t happening and come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous for me to move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream. This is not something we can ignore. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season. Because this was not just a lewd conversation. This wasn’t locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior. And actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us are worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV. And to make matters worse, it now seems very clear this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life. I have to tell you that I listened to all this. And I feel it so personally. And I’m sure that many of you do too. Particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It's frightening. And the truth is, it hurts. It hurts.

Bob Dylan's Nobel Lecture is worth your time...

...so I'll add nothing else here.

A Presidential Commencement Speech Worth Watching

As I type this, the 45th president of the United States is getting ready to give a commencement speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia (established 1971), though he would have preferred to have given this address at Trump University if fraud charges hadn't brought it down.

As an antidote, here is the 44th president of the United States giving the address to Rutgers University's (established 1766) graduating seniors almost exactly one year ago, on May 15, 2016.

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his most important speech exactly fifty years ago.

In my last post I pointed toward the dramatic end of Dr. King's life, which took place 49 years ago today. Exactly one year earlier, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he gave what very well may be the best and most important speech in his brilliant career.

The speech is commonly referred to as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In 1967 it was a brave move to come out so strongly against the war, advocating (among other things) conscientious objection among draft-age men, an end to U.S. bombing and a unilateral cease-fire, but the speech was so much more. It would be just as radical, and just as timely, if delivered today, 50 years later, when we have a billionaire president looking to increase a bloated military by another 54 billion dollars while cutting programs for the poor and middle class to exacerbate atrocious economic inequality.

Please read Martin Luther King's whole text, but here's a taste from that historic speech...

... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. 

   A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

    A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 

   A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

   America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. ...

Please read the whole thing here at Stanford's King Encyclopedia website.
Here's a story about the speech that was on NPR's All Things Considered tonight.
Here's The New York Times' "When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam."

Michelle Obama has given the two best speeches of 2016

The first was, of course, her "When they go low, we go high" speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The second was at noon today in Manchester, New Hampshire:

The fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for president of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning, I simply will not repeat anything here today. And last week we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can’t believe that I’m saying that. A candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women and I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. So while I’d love nothing more than to pretend like this isn’t happening and come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous for me to move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream. This is not something we can ignore. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season. Because this was not just a lewd conversation. This wasn’t locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior. And actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us are worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV. And to make matters worse, it now seems very clear this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life. I have to tell you that I listened to all this. And I feel it so personally. And I’m sure that many of you do too. Particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It's frightening. And the truth is, it hurts. It hurts.

Barack Obama at Hiroshima

I woke up this morning at my normal time to come to work and turned on WAMC a little before 5am, when the BBC Witness segment is usually airing, but I heard Barack Obama in the middle of his remarks at Hiroshima, as the first sitting President to visit the site of the first atomic bombing. As I listened, I couldn't help thinking once again how much we will miss him -- how much the world will miss him -- when his successor takes her (or, shudder, his) seat in the Oval Office next January.

My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell.
That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
--Barack Obama, Hiroshima, 27 May 2016

Maybe I shouldn't speak for the whole world, but I will miss him. I'm 60 years old and he is, without question, the best president of my lifetime.

President Obama at Rutgers Today

America's All-Trump-All-The-Time mass media won't show you this great speech, but it was streaming live in a couple of places and now it's available on YouTube if you're interested in today's address at my old school:

I couldn't be more proud to be a Rutgers alumnus or an American after watching President Obama's address. It's hard to believe that anyone who's running for President in 2016 will be anything other than a step down from our current President.

Separation of Church and State in Iowa 2016

"I want to thank an all powerful and mighty God for the chance that he has given us to be a part of this endeavor here in Iowa." Marco Rubio started with the God talk early in his triumphalist "victory" speech last night in Iowa (celebrating his third place showing behind Cruz and Trump). A little later, he made it clear that he was not talking about just some vague Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Deist lip-service God, he was referring to a very specific manifestation of the One True God: "I thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I thank God for allowing me the opportunity to come this far with each of you."

And Marco Rubio is supposedly not one of the chief Bible thumpers in this year's Republican field. The Southern Baptist Minister Mike Huckabee dropped out of the race after the caucuses last night, but the winner, Ted Cruz, while not ordained, is well known to be holier than thou, me, the rest of the Republican field, and the Pope. Cruz began his speech with the words used by most repeatedly-concussed NFL players whenever they see a microphone, "Let me first of all say, to God be the glory," but once he got that out of the way, I couldn't find the words "God" or "Jesus" again in the rush transcript of his speech. Of course the transcript cuts off when the Fox News cameras (the last network covering him) finally left him alone with his followers. He may still be up there speaking in tongues and quoting scripture.

The winner of the Republican speeches last night was, shockingly, Donald Trump, who was short, polite, congratulatory, and completely God-free.

The Bernie Sanders Speech You Didn't See On Your Television

Yesterday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination with the following speech in Burlington, Vermont. When I got home from work I watched all of ABC World News Tonight and the PBS Newshour and it was not even mentioned on either show. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by ABC finding more worth in stories about Jeopardy and how to save money on your cell phone bill, but I expect more from PBS.

Here's Bernie's whole policy-heavy speech with Lake Champlain in the background:




I recently downgraded my cable, so I no longer get MSNBC where I assume this speech did get at least a nod. However, it won't help if MSNBC is the only channel covering Bernie's campaign. He is a much more serious candidate than at least 8 or 9 GOP candidates who are given more mainstream air time. His support will come from the bottom up, and not from corporate and billionaire supporters. One thing we know for sure: attendance in Burlington was not mandatory yesterday (unlike Ted Cruz's very-well-publicized kickoff at Jerry Falwell University).

Video proof that Iraq and Iran are still indistinguishable to some people.

If the US decides to be the volunteer police force for this guy again, maybe we can create another ISIS.

Sarah Palin & Donald Trump must be pissed at The New York Times (again)

In this chart on the Times website today, those pointy-headed eastern liberals list the following twelve potential candidates as expected to compete for places on the stage of the 2016 GOP Clown Circus: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson.
No Donald?
No Sarah?
How can they not take this woman seriously as a candidate for the clown college?