Hekate
Hekate's JournalI find myself agreeing with the exerpts from what Bernie said. Mostly. He displays ignorance about
...what is going on in America right now -- and what has been building for over 30 years.
Access to the full range of women's necessary health care has been broken in the US. As before the passage of Roe vs Wade, it is now limited to those who can afford it and who can afford to travel to obtain it.
In addition, for a long time there was something called "the Global Gag Order," which withheld funding from any overseas health organization that so much as mentioned the word abortion or referred women to agencies that would provide it. That included war zones where many women were and are raped as a weapon of war.
Now the Global Gag Order has come home to America -- the GOP is in process of enforcing it here.
So, Senator Sanders has not been paying attention to what a lot of men think is just a "women's issue." He's playing catch-up. Big surprise.
Aside from that, I don't quite understand the frothing outrage here over what he said. Or at least the parts quoted here in more than one thread. He did not say that "brown and black" people need to practice birth control, nor did he even hint at eugenics. He did not say that an i dividual who is poor -- of any color, in any country -- has a bigger carbon footprint than the average American, just that the grand total of population is a problem for the Earth. I agree with that. It is a problem.
Bernie said that "poor people" need to have access to family planning services. Well duh. They don't currently, and they do need it. Also he referred to "over half the population" needing such services -- well, that would comprise all women, seeing as how we are over half the numerical population in every country (with the exception of India and China, where a generation of girls failed to be born at all). Again duh. Bernie is saying all women need these services, regardless, and we do.
I'm going by what was quoted here, mind you, and my response is as a feminist and lifelong supporter of Planned Parenthood.
I have never --ever-- encountered an American of African descent who self-identified that way...
...unless they were in fact born in Africa.
Whatever your acquaintances may intend, if they were born in America there is an implicit denial of the citizenship that is theirs by right.
The political flyer/poster being discussed here contained several clues as to its non-American & possibly Eastern European origin. Taken together, they form a gestalt that clearly indicates that whatever person or group behind it is no friend of African Americans/Black people/POC living in America.
(Take your pick of whatever the current preferred appellation is; I do my best to keep up, but it's changed at least half-a-dozen times in my lifetime, and at the moment I am grimly amused to find we are just about back to my humane and polite grandmother's term "colored people," and she was born in the 1880s and lived through 3/4 of the tumultuous 20th century. And POC is self-chosen, so go figure.)
To my surprise, Michael Moore made some very interesting points...
I originally put this observation in a thread bashing him, and have left it there. But I decided to give it a fresh start, just because.
I heard something completely different than the rest of you:
Moore said that the traditional 'Joe Lunchbox' hardly exists anymore as a % of voters...
...if you're talking about white blue-collar voters. When you are talking about blue collar voters today, you are talking about women, POC, young people, and workers in the gig economy. He talked about the tens of millions (40 million?) young people that have come of voting age in recent years.
About 1/3 of white men voted for Hillary, and God bless them, welcome to the Dem Party. (Did I get that right?)
But in general white men had not been voting for the Dem Party for quite a few presidential election cycles already -- in any case, he did say that to sit around talking about Reagan Democrats and such in 2019 was (for the younger set) like us listening to our parents talk about Woodrow Wilson -- it just made our eyes roll back in our heads and go listen to the Beatles.
Reagan Democrats and their ilk are gone for us. Forget about trying to get them back. Focus in who our constituency really is TODAY: women, POC, young people, and so on.
I was impressed. Dear DUers, based on what you've been complaining about recently, I thought Michael Moore was not our friend any more and had nothing left to contribute. I almost changed the channel but hubby wanted to hear him. This time, I'm glad I heard him out.
That's very Libertarian of you. You think schools should have libraries & science labs...
...if the parents can't pony up? Or maybe only those kids who pay a special fee can use them? Sidewalks on streets? Electricity in the Tennessee Valley?
Did you know that the original school lunch program came about as a national security issue? When it came time to draft young men for the Army in WWII, an uncommonly large number were rejected due to nutritional diseases that never should have happened? It was particularly bad in the South.
Rickets
Pellagra
Scurvy
Xerophthalmia
Beriberi
Goiter
Anemia
In extreme enough forms, most of these things kill the sufferer. In less extreme cases they merely cause a lifetime of skeletal deformity, blindness, and low IQ.
Not seen much in 1900, cases burgeoned in the 1920s - 1930s, thus all the sick young men who failed their draft physicals in 1941. By the time I was growing up in the 1950s - 1960s, I learned about these nutritional diseases in public school textbooks and doctors hardly ever saw them.
To check my memory, I googled the information above, and here's a representative link:
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/canres/35/11_Part_2/3246.full.pdf
Nutrition in the United States 1900-1974
Another thing I recall from my childhood is nutritious school lunches so cheap even my own penny-pinching mother couldn't make a sack lunch cheaper. (I found out later there were still some kids who fell through the cracks.) Hawai'i in those years was not a rich state and we were a blue-collar lower-middle class family. Yet every school had a cafeteria, a kitchen, a chill room and a walk in refrigerator. Every kid from 5th-12th grade was rostered a couple of days a year to help out in the kitchen. The jobs were not outsourced to a private company, and the enterprise was not supposed to make money, any more than the schools themselves were supposed to show a profit.
Wherever did the money come from? Well, SOMEbody thought this was a good use of our tax money, for starters. Also, and Christ on a trailer hitch you should know this, America throws away tons of produce. I suspect some of those big blocks of cheese were government surplus.
The nutritional diseases of today are different. Chldren have obesity, clogged arteries, and diabetes, instead of ricketts and scurvy. It would be nice if someone thought it was a priority.
But you carry on with your Libertarian philosophy. Hope you've paid up your dues to the for-profit fire department and all.
I used to be happy to call myself a "progressive," but to hell with that when Hitler.2 is potus...
I am a Democrat. I am a Liberal. I worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968. My political party is composed of fallible human beings, but gets more things right than wrong.
When I see the "Progressives" going the way of the Greens in terms of losing vitally important elections to the GOP, that's where I get off the crazy-train and go back to first principles: I am a Democrat. I am a Liberal.
Steve Schmidt (former R) is right: the Republican Party has gone rotten to its core and must be not just defeated but expunged.
This is a war, and Nancy Pelosi is one of our most valuable generals. When she says to her troops (the only ones she has, the House Dems) that if they have a problem they should come talk to her personally and not go tweeting all over the place like Trump, she is right. If the House cannot show public unity, we all lose, and lose bigly.
"Sells out to powerful interests" is an extremely loaded & prejudicial phrase...
Unfortunately, I expect to see it used on each of our candidates as they near frontrunner status, just as it has been used on Hillary Clinton and others of our best Democrats.
I just want to point out that it is a trolling term. It is a ratfcking term.
As a phrase it should have no place here. Emotions may run high, but we also have brains, and I hope we will use said brains to think critically about what we are passing along.
No, I have not read the article. The title said it all.
President Eisenhower, the man who forcibly integrated Southern public schools with troops ...
... (yes, that was Ike) also signed off on adding "under God" to the Pledge. You can't get everything right, and it's not his fault that idjits like Sarah Palin who have no concept of history now think we've had The Pledge since 1776 and that our money has included In God We Trust since the same time. Some of the same ones no doubt villify him for school integration.
Which is by way of saying thanks for a fairly comprehensive overview. I researched it back about 2002 after a friend sent out an email blast to her entire address book that began with a soppy picture of two golden-haired tots with prayerful hands and eyes raised to heaven, backed by a flowing US flag, and went on from there to equate patriotism with religion. My reply was well-researched, historical, and blistering, and of course I hit reply-all.
As for Eisenhower, I respect the man, now that I know more about him. I remember his administration from a child's-eye perspective, which is to say the parts I could see and I didn't necessarily connect them with him. My classmates and I had slogged through learning the Pledge back in first grade, and we all had to stumble every morning until we re-learned it with the addition.
Now I know it was related to the Cold War, which to the old general was serious in every way (it was), and he was open to persuasion that one more thing in the cultural part of the war would be to subtly emphasize that while the Commies were godless (they were officially atheist and brutally suppressed religious expression), the US was not godless.
I don't think for a minute he meant the US was supposed to be solely Christian -- post-WWII / post-Holocaust most public religious expressions on civic occasions in the US tended to be relatively generic and inoffensive to any of the three Abrahamic religious traditions. That is, God was referred to as "father" and not Jesus. Evangelicals called themselves Fundamentalists and were considered a fringe group, socially and politically, not a powerful and fearsome socio-political movement.
As for school integration using military troops -- I wonder how many people even remember that it was Eisenhower? We should. Brown vs Board of Education said "with all deliberate speed," and Ike speeded it up all right. The images coming in on our little B/W tv were absolutely searing, as were the ones in LIFE magazine. Little children like me in every way but color were being screamed at by mommies and daddies ... It was a couple of thousand miles away, yet in our living room.
Why integrate and why Eisenhower? If I had to guess, I'd have to say that to the General who liberated Europe and the concentration camps: because America was supposed to be infinitely better than that. If we were not Commies, we were also not Nazis.
Joe is going after Trump personally, *on the facts*. He is taking the heat for other candidates ....
...and carrying that burden for others so they can all talk about their pet policies instead of Trump's nasty nicknames for them. Trump is too busy insulting Joe, who doesn't give a damn what the orange madman says about him.
Joe has always been quick with a quip and a zinger -- but he's fact-based. The only one engaged in a so-called pissing contest is Trump, and he's going to end up with wet shoes while Joe walks away to do something meaningful with his time.
Trump ended up being the last GOP candidate standing in 2016 -- and the way he did it was to pick off all the others one by one by one, dragging each one down into the mud singly and disposing of them. They did not stand unified against him -- and he won. Do you want to witness that with our fine Dems in 2019? I sure don't. I Want him to be taken down by Biden, and I want Biden to stay in one piece, so Trump can't move on to Warren, then Beto, then Harris, one by one by one.
We all should know Joe's background as a Democrat by now. Do you honestly think he would do anything to harm any of the things you mention?
PS: Remember when Rudy Giuliani had stature as "America's mayor"? By the time he and Joe got on a debate stage together, Joe said, "All Rudy has is a noun, a verb, and 9-11" and people laughed like hell not because it was an insult but because by then it was true.
Well, I was concerned about Biden's age & long record *before* he entered the race...
I was looking for someone younger, and I didn't think someone of Joe Biden's stature deserved the mud about to be thrown at him from Left and Right. A public record as long as his gives plenty of ammunition for enemies to twist out of recognition.
Then he released his announcement video, and all my concerns about him went away. As far as I am concerned, he got it exactly right. I read a pundit's take on it that he was only talking to old people in that video, because you know, WWII reference.
Okay -- a question for said pundit and anyone else: since when are White Nationalism and Neo-Nazis only of concern to "old people"? If the Bubonic Plague appeared in Los Angeles (which has a serious rat problem) would that only be of interest to Medieval scholars?
Win, lose, or draw, I am SO glad VP Biden is in this race. He will tolerate no bullshit from Trump. As soon as someone explained the 2019 problem with the Hyde Amendment, he got it. He's running against Trump, not the other Democrats. He looks, acts, and thinks like a man 20 years younger than the two candidates nearest in age to him, i.e. Trump and (seriously, no disrespect) Sanders.
Yes, I have my Senator's avatar on this post. But I have Biden's back at DU, because he has earned it.
No, FIRST she floated the idea he was crazy, which allowed his mental state to be discussed on TV...
...and in the editorial pages damn near every day since then.
Oh, Mme Speaker was sweet about it. She simply came out of one of his tantrum-filled meetings and said she was "praying for the country" and "praying for him," and that she "sincerely hoped members of his family or members of his staff would hold an intervention" for the President.
How's that for making it very explicitly very public? And she was PITYING of his condition. How's that for belittling the bully who hates strong women?
Of course she's being nagged to start impeachment proceedings, but consider the additional context: that as far as we know he can't be criminally indicted while still in office, which gives him all the more incentive to lie, cheat, and steal his way into a second term. Plus the statute of limitations runs out on some crimes the meanwhile.
So in a recent private meeting she said, not that she would not impeach him in the end, but that she "would rather see him in prison than impeached."
How's that for making it very explicit and very public that she knows he has committed crimes and is a criminal? Thus making it certain to be discussed by the punditry.
And the mental deterioration conversation is still really out there.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,627
