December 24, 2014

Rev Al Sharpton preaching at Ebenezer AME Church 2004

Makes remarks that fit people who have been slammed.

That's part of the reason for the Reverend Al hate fest, too.

That's all for today.

December 24, 2014

2004 DemConvention Speeches: Al Sharpton

December 24, 2014

Al Sharpton - Running for a Reason - USA

December 23, 2014

Beautiful imagery. Some music for you:

"What Child Is This?" is a popular Christmas carol written in 1865. At the age of twenty-nine, English writer William Chatterton Dix was struck with a sudden near-fatal illness and confined to bedrest for several months, during which he went into a deep depression. Yet out of his near-death experience, Dix wrote many hymns, including "What Child is This?", later set to the traditional English tune "Greensleeves."

What child is this?
Who meant to rest on Mary's lap is sleeping
Who angels greet with anthem sweet
While shepherds watch our keeping

This, this is Christ, the King
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the Son of Mary

So bring him incense, gold and myrrh
Come peasant King to own him
The King of kings, salvation brings
Let loving hearts enthrone Him

This, this is Christ, the King
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the Son of Mary

Nails fierce shall pierce him through
The cross be borne for me, for you
Hail, hail, the word made flesh
Obeyed the Son of Mary

This, this is Christ, the King
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the Son of Mary

Praise Him, Son of joy
Joy to the risen Lord
Praise Him, Son of joy
Joy to the risen Lord

This, this is Christ the king
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the Son of Mary

Listened to this in the evenings before Christmas:



O come, O come, Emmanuel is a Christian hymn for Advent. While it is most commonly known by that English title, it is in fact a translation of the original Latin, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel; translations into other modern languages (particularly German) are also in widespread use. The 1861 translation from Hymns Ancient and Modern is the most prominent by far in the English-speaking world, but other English translations also exist.

The hymn is a metrical paraphrase of the O Antiphons, a series of plainchant antiphons attached to the Magnificat at Vespers over the final days before Christmas.

Original Five-Stanza Text from Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum (1710)

Veni, veni Emmanuel!
Captivum solve Israel!
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio,
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
nascetur per te, Israel. [7]

Veni o Jesse virgula!
Ex hostis tuos ungula,
De specu tuos tartari
Educ, et antro barathri.
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
nascetur per te, Israel. [3]

Veni, veni o oriens!
Solare nos adveniens,
Noctis depelle nebulas,
Dirasque noctis tenebras.
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
nascetur per te, Israel. [5]

Veni clavis Davidica!
Regna reclude coelica,
Fac iter Tutum superum,
Et claude vias Inferum.
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
nascetur per te, Israel. [4]

Veni, veni Adonai![16]
Qui populo in Sinai
Legem dedisti vertice,
In maiestate gloriae.
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
nascetur per te, Israel. [2]

Additional Stanzas from Cantiones Sacrae (1878)

Veni, O Sapientia,
Quae hic disponis omnia,
Veni, viam prudentiae
Ut doceas et gloriae. [1]

Veni, Veni, Rex Gentium,
Veni, Redemptor omnium,
Ut salves tuos famulos
Peccati sibi conscios. [6]

Some English Translations

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan's tyranny ;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o'er the grave.
Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heav'nly home ;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai's height,
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
And order all things, far and nigh;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And cause us in her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Desire of nations, bind
All peoples in one heart and mind;
Bid envy, strife and quarrels cease;
Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

A lament that centers me at this time of year:



The Coventry Carol is a Christmas carol dating from the 16th Century. The carol was performed in Coventry as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. The play depicts the Christmas story from chapter two in the Gospel of Matthew. The carol refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod orders all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed. The lyrics of this haunting carol represent a mother's lament for her doomed child. It is the only carol that has survived from this play.

It is notable as a well-known example of a Picardy third. The author is unknown. The oldest known text was written down by Robert Croo in 1534, and the oldest known printing of the melody dates from 1591. The carol is traditionally sung a cappella. There is an alternative setting of the carol by Kenneth Leighton.

The only manuscript copy to have survived into recent times was burnt in 1875. Our knowledge of the lyrics is therefore based on two very poor quality transcriptions from the early nineteenth century, and there is considerable doubt about many of the words. Some of the transcribed words are difficult to make sense of: for example, in the last verse "And ever morne and may For thi parting Neither say nor singe" is not clear. Various modern editors have made different attempts to make sense of the words, so that you may find such variations as "ever mourn and say", "every morn and day", "ever mourn and sigh".

The Coventry Mystery Plays, or Coventry Corpus Christi Pageants, are a cycle of medieval mystery plays from Coventry, West Midlands, England, and are perhaps best known as the source of the "Coventry Carol". They should not be confused (though they often are) with the quite separate N-Town plays, sometimes called the Ludus Coventriae cycle from a former mistaken belief that the N-Town was Coventry.

Performances of the Coventry Plays are first recorded in a document of 1392 - 3, and continued for nearly two centuries; the young Shakespeare almost certainly witnessed them before they were finally suppressed in 1579. In its fullest form the cycle comprised at least ten plays, though only two have survived to the present day. Of these two, the Shearmen and Tailors' Pageant was a nativity play portraying events from the Annunciation to the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Weavers' Pageant dealt with the Purification and the Doctors in the Temple.

The only ancient manuscript of the Shearmen and Tailors' Pageant was destroyed by fire in 1879, but fortunately it had previously been transcribed and published by Thomas Sharp. The plays were most recently edited by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson in The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000).

December 21, 2014

You never saw this clip?

For BOG Members: Gee, Obama caught saying what he really thought in 2011. I heartily approve!



CNN: President Obama caught on open mic

Uploaded on Apr 15, 2011 by CNN

The White House is downplaying some behind-the-scenes remarks made about the budget battle that were caught on tape.

The description is wrong. The narrator acts as if this was a 'gotcha' moment, when it is anything but.

Even the video doesn't fit the description when it says, 'The White House is downplaying...' since they said they had nothing to apologize for.

This leads to their meme that 'Obama is weak,' or 'arrogant.' How very GOP of them!

But then, CNN was taken over by the tabloid guy who's done nothing but feed viewers BS for years.

This is same crew who had talks with Beck about bringing him to prime time on CNN this week.

December 20, 2014

The Fearless Leaders of Russia and North Korea are meeting each other. You haven't thought this out.

We've had powerful Americans threaten to nuke North Korea in the past - more than once. Even with the plans all drawn up at a high level. Seriously considered to 'stop Communism.'

Might be part of the reason their leaders get away with behaving like nutjobs. I don't believe any foreign leadrs are nuts, not anymore than their people are. What one group sees as insane, another group sees as necessity or profit.

The only exception to that rule are religious and ideological nutjobs who have enough voters to put them in office. Earth isn't rumored to be the Universe's Insane Asylum for nothing you know.

I understand concerns people should have about an EMF pulse taking out our modern social links - I'm not talking about the internet, but the vital services. So much is digitized. As much as people 'love to hate' the NSA, CIA, FBI and the boogeyman DARFA, these ugly things exist to prevent exactly what you are fearing here.

But more importantly, the idea of taking out NK won't work. Hackers are not all government employees. A nation state or a corporation may or may not be responsible. Shutting down the government of NK, or even nuking the land mass on which it derives its name, into a lump of melted glass, won't end the hacking.

Hackers are often organized crime operatives, and cannot be controlled without crossing borders and doing things DU doesn't like. Not that the world is going to cower before DU in any case. Attacking NK would only give the criminals reason to change zip codes, not what they do for a living.

As far as the movie goes, it was just more unproductive trash from Hollywood. Meant to appeal to the LCD. AFAIK, the threats were made up and the Sony people aren't bothered. I get that you are asking for a take on a bigger issue, but I'm going to leave that response to Obama.

December 17, 2014

Only if they can get it through the inevitable lawsuits. There is a mixed record. Use of the PBGC

to shore up the past and current failures of private corporations to fund costs about half a billion on taxpayers to operate, but as insurance it has in the past paid out ten times that amount.

It really has been blowing in the wind for a while. It's been running in the red a long time, without sufficient funding. And while it was not that great a deal we can't ignore those it was set up to help:

Underfunding Clouds the PBGC's Future

$170 billion is the PBGC's estimated exposure for reasonably possible terminations of single-employer plans, according to its 2010 Annual Report. While this exposure has been relatively steady in recent years, the agency's estimate of its multiemployer reasonably possible exposure increased significantly from $326 million in 2009 to $20 billion in 2010, due primarily to the addition of two large plans.

As of September 30, 2010, the PBGC had single-employer assets totaling $77.8 billion, compared to single-employer liabilities of $99.4 billion (measured in present value though they will be paid over decades). The net single-employer deficit is $21.6 billion. The multiemployer insurance program had a FY 2010 deficit of $1.4 billion, with $1.6 billion in assets to cover about $3 billion in liabilities.

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Pension-Benefit-Guaranty-Corporation-and-ERISA&id=6299285

A failure has been in the making since the founding of the PBGC due to reductions in income to corporations. The underfunding is from the private sector, as they were operating on 'pay as you go' for pensions, dependent on the health of the businesses, not the same as an entitlement by government to act as a safety net. Here is how they are funded:

Revenues and expenditures

The PBGC is not funded by general tax revenues. Its funds come from four sources:

* Insurance premiums paid by sponsors of defined benefit pension plans;
* Assets held by the pension plans it takes over;
* Recoveries of unfunded pension liabilities from plan sponsors' bankruptcy estates;[4] and
* Investment income.

PBGC pays monthly retirement benefits to approximately 631,000 retirees of 3,800 terminated defined benefit pension plans. Including those who have not yet retired and participants in multiemployer plans receiving financial assistance, the PBGC is responsible for the current and future pensions of about 1.3 million people.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corporation

My pension is a defined benefit that was under threat of being turned over to them because the company did not think it could pay due to loss of income and hundreds of thousands of retirees. Actually, Social Security was, for me, and for many others still is, the best return on monies paid and the most reliable. After a few years of being threatened by the loss benefits if the pension was given over to the PBGC, the corporation I worked for who had placed the money in a Wall Street investment fund, felt it had to take control back.

They had to make an offer to the Department of Labor with an infusion of billions of dollars and it took half a year to get us away from what appeared to be a failing government agency that would have paid a fraction.

That's just an anecdote, it sure does not apply to everyyone. My piece of pension money was not much anyway. Social Security will be my main income, as I paid into both. All these things are a PITN.

I've almost convinced an aging bagger that the Scandinavian version of social social net with it's 'we are all together' society, is the way the USA should go. Those baggers don't want to lose their pensions and would adopt 'socialism' if they got theirs out of it, they've proven that already. They are coming to see that destroying everything for ideology will not serve them. I have explained to them why raising the miminum wage is a winner as people currently jumping through hoops for food, housing and medical care would prefer to have enough income to pay for it themselves. Those were both nice little light bulb blinking moments, but then it was still a way they saw they would benefit...

I don't know if Congress has repealed ERISA in its entirety or if the PBGC will disappear and people won't be compensated in by increased Social Security funding to take care of this shortfall if it occurs. The current KOCH/GOP plan is for private charites, churches and families, which failed before and SS to eliminated in total, along with food, medical and all public agencies set to administer the same to everyone. There would be no Social Security, UE or any other such, to be primary for the elderly, disabled and the poor as it is now on the back of government as a universal right.

It still exists, according to the website. Wonder what the GOP dares to do without replacing it:

http://pbgc.gov/

A yahoo source to the full of the PBGC only yields CNN (whom I trust their financial news as much as I do a Republican) and FOX (less so) and the WA Times, another shady outfit to tell people all is lost. Weird that even in the search results, they make it sound like a positive:

Congress moves one step closer to allowing pension cuts

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

...While those sponsoring the pension proposal say it is "the only available option" to save failing multiemployer pension plans, other groups -- like the AARP and the Pension Rights Center -- are crying foul.

Multiemployer pension plans cover more than 10 million workers and retirees in the trucking, manufacturing and other industries. But many of these plans have struggled in the last decade as they grapple with an aging workforce and major investment losses from the recession. Plus, many larger employers have pulled out of the plans.

That has put a major strain on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government agency that insures pension plans, which last month said its reserves are dangerously low.

The Congressional proposal would allow plans that are projected to run out of money in the next 10 to 20 years to cut the benefits they pay to both current and future retirees. Benefits would not be cut for disabled pensioners or those 80 years and older, while cuts would be lessened for those between 75 and 80.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/12/retirement/pension-cuts/index.html?section=money_latest

The PBGC were set up in the seventies to protect people in the face of failures of the private sector, which were coming due to demographics. I feel that while many are being hurt right now, especially public sector and other workers, we're being played or rather conditioned as the GOP has always done since the advent of the New Deal to give up on government leveling th playing field. None of the private sources of welfare are without huge strings and they are very undependable without help from government.

I've posted before Hartmann's video and transcript posted here at DU explaining the generations of propaganda of which you are likely aware:

Thom Hartmann: Conservative Millennials, Boomers & Libertarians all being Conned

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1017&pid=44227

And that was back in the JBS days all the way through to some of the CT sites that still spout all of that. This was and is the agenda of the Koch brothers as revealed by Harry Reid and Bernie Sanders:

The David Koch Libertarian platform since 1980. Sanders put the whole thing online:

http://metamorphosis.democraticunderground.com/1014833821#post10

The GOP has not deviated from that plan and their media has promoted it since then. I urge people to share the piece posted by xchrom last night from Alternet:

True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda

http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda-0

to xchrom:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025970827

Please excuse me, that is my first post of the day and I likely won't take that much time on the rest of them today, having already been shit on for making neutral statements last night that were not answers, just shit. That's what is driving people away from DU. Have a nice week in Minnesota, I think...

December 17, 2014

And VIDEO of Obama's announcement preserving nature on the thread by Steve, with more pictures:

In which Obama explains it better.

This is a blow against corporatism and puts people and the environment ahead of profits and stealing from future generations.

Excellent work, President Obama!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025969185#post15

Check the thread out, good pictures from the White House blog posted by Steve:

to Steve2470:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025969185#op

Thanks for the thread, merry blooms! Really good news!

December 17, 2014

I don't think of it in terms of subservience, more like terrorized. TARP was the first salvo of how

monied interests made the case to Washington, D.C. that they could do a Latin American style coup if they weren't protected. That is why, IMO, it happened, not a pay off or toadying, more like a armed robbery. Wall Street was armed with the debt fo the USA, the capital needed to make it work; and they played their Superman games and would have lost their shirts in the era before Reagan.

But what's the use of being Rand's Superman without being free of regulation and laws that only apply to those lesser than the Masters of the Universe?

They had to get their first, or be subservient to the will of the people and the government. So they held up Bush, Jr., the Congress and then Obama. They had the means to bring the nation to its knees and those Democrats who saw the relationship for what it was made Sophie's Choice to save one innocent.

But the Supermen has tasted blood and set about to ruin the Obama presidency anyway they could, but we've all known logically that they hold the sword over our heads. And it appears that people have just tuned out and are going to let them have their way.

Because Wall Street is not just fat cats. It is the pension fund holders of the investment of millions of Americans, as well as the ones who literally pay the bills for Social Security and other government functions. It has existed longer than our current form of government.

It's all been so tightly woven over the years, that those in power don't actually separate it from the needs of the public anymore. But now it's been infected with virulent greed as suceeding generations fell under the spell of Randian economics and voted in those who would do their will.

Which is so close in its end game to the plantation and colonial systems, that people dare not look it for what it really is. Instead, they fantasize about having simpler lives that they still do not control. The heart of commerce has been gutted. The true boot in the face is one that which cannot be removed from office and does not need to respond to the public will or need, even less than feudal lords did.

JMHO.

December 17, 2014

VIDEO:

In which Obama explains it better.

This is a blow against corporatism and puts people and the environment ahead of profits and stealing from future generations.

Excellent work, President Obama!