A Meanness in This World (tags)
The January 8 shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and murder of federal judge John Roll and five other people in Tucson, Arizona has been blamed on a lone nut, and both wings of the corporate media — center-Right and far-Right — have fallen over each other to absolve the ultra-Rightists of talk radio, Fox News and the Tea Party of blame for the alleged shooter’s actions. Nonsense. Not only did Sarah Palin’s Web page specifically “target” Congressmember Giffords for defeat last April — a piece of hysterical rhetoric Giffords called Palin out on at the time — but the radical Right’s incessant propaganda on talk radio and Fox News, with its ceaseless calls not only to defeat but “eliminate” its “enemies,” created a national climate that ensured that the killer’s madness took the form it did and his delusions led him to attack two individuals that had already been the targets of radical-Right bullying and harassment.
Sep 2nd, 2009 9:09 PM Despite the sweeping Democratic victories in the elections of 2006 and 2008, the Republican party in general and the radical Right in particular have reasserted themselves with a vengeance, especially regarding the health insurance reform proposals of the Obama administration and Congress. They’ve been able to tap into the same reflexive anti-government sentiment that has powered American politics at least since Ronald Reagan’s election (and arguably earlier) to block the reform proposals and set the stage for a Republican return to power that will render Obama as irrelevant historically as Carter and Clinton -- and without a mass progressive movement to push Obama and the Democrats back to the Left, the Right will succeed and triumph.
Congressmember Davis Speaks at Orderly Town-Hall Meeting (tags)
Elsewhere in the country Democratic Congressmembers are being heckled and sometimes driven off the stage when they try to hold town-hall meetings to explain the health-care reform bill the House is currently debating. Not in San Diego August 11, where Congressmember Susan Davis was able to hold a meeting in peace and discuss the issue in a polite, civil manner. This was largely due to the strategy of the sponsoring organization, the Hillcrest Town Council, which admitted their own members and Hillcrest residents first -- thereby assuring Davis a mostly liberal audience that wouldn't try to disrupt her meeting.
PBS Documentary on “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” Airs June 16 (tags)
The PBS documentary “Ask Not,” dealing with the human cost of the “don't ask, don't tell” policy that excludes open Queers from the U.S. military, will be shown nationwide on June 16 and in San Diego June 21 as part of the “Independent Lens” series. The show depicts individuals thrown out of the military under “don't ask, don't tell” and the Queer community's fight-back against the discriminatory policy. In a May 3 preview screening at the San Diego Public Library, activists working against “don't ask, don't tell” discussed why even progressive people who generally oppose America’s wars should be concerned about this issue.