I am sitting here trying desperately to think of something to write about and am coming up with nothing. So consider this an open thread day.
Well, except for this - Even though we set aside Martin Luther King Day to celebrate Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, it is important that we listen to his words again and again:
And few of Dr. King's many famous quotes to consider:
Well, except for this - Even though we set aside Martin Luther King Day to celebrate Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, it is important that we listen to his words again and again:
And few of Dr. King's many famous quotes to consider:
- I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
-We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
-Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
-Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
-Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
-Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?
-The time is always right to do what is right.
-Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.
6 comments:
Careful, Bev. Some of what MLK said is viewed as hate speech on college campuses today. Seriously, a world where people are judged on the basis of their character rather than the color of their skin? What kind of racist are you!
As an aside, I have to agree with Trump about the approval polls being rigged. They are laughably stupid:
Jimmy Carter (78 percent)
Ronald Reagan (58 percent)
George H.W. Bush (65 percent)
Bill Clinton (68 percent)
George W. Bush (62 percent)
Obama (79 percent)
The only one of those even close to accurate was GW Bush. He was very popular when he took over, piggybacking on the most popular President since FDR.
Clinton won 43% of the vote and never really dug out of that until after Newt took over his presidency. Reagan began around 50% and didn't dig out until the economy turned. Neither Clinton or Reagan had a honeymoon period. Obama probably had just above 50%, but the idea that anyone had 79% is laughable, especially in the hyper-partisan 50/50 world of today. W Bush was HATED by the left (Florida) and the right was cautious. He was probably just below 50%. Carter at 78%? Hardly.
And Trump at 40% means that without even taking over yet, Trump lost 20% of his voters? Yeah, bullshit on that.
As an aside, to get to 40% approval, means that 100% of Democrats, 100% of independents and about 12% of Republicans disapprove of Trump. Does that seem possible? Nope. Especially as I saw the other day that Democrats were the most unified opposition with 73% opposing Trump.
To get to 79% for Obama means that 100% of Democrats, 100% of independents and almost 50% of Republicans approved of him. Think that's true? Nope.
so i knew something would happen today - "President Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, according to a report from The New York Times. While not technically a pardon, the order reduces Manning’s sentence from 35 years to just over seven years, the majority of which Manning has already served. As a result, Manning is due to be released from federal custody in just five months, on May 17th."
Obama clearly doesn't care about information security unless Hillary is embarrassed.
I am in the middle of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. It is a stellar book filled with a lot of interesting bits of history.
Here is an especially messed up case Marshall was involved in. The clearly innocent plaintiff (a black shareholder named Lyons) in the case below spent two decades in jail.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/20/the-awakening-of-thurgood-marshall#.VEqSQgNmf
On the evening of Dec. 31, 1939, Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Rogers had been attacked (by ax and shotgun) and killed in their home. Their tenant house was then doused with coal oil and set afire, and 8-year-old James Rogers managed to flee the home, carrying his baby brother, Billie Don, to safety. Four-year-old Elvie Dean Rogers perished in the blaze. Newspapers at the time reported that officials from the Fort Towson prison camp (adjacent to the Rogers home) had allowed prisoner-trustees to go on unsupervised hunting expeditions with shotguns, and even gamble and consume alcohol with local residents. After a farmer signed an affidavit claiming that he had witnessed three convicts enter the Rogers home on the night of the murders, warden Jess Dunn promptly closed the prison camp and shuttled all convicts to the more secure state penitentiary in McAlester. A camp sergeant was soon fired amid reports that two convicts, who had lost $90 to Rogers in a dice game earlier that evening, had been arrested after confessing to the murders. But Oklahoma Gov. Leon Chase Phillips surely sensed in the lax discipline at the prison camp the potential for a crippling political scandal. He dispatched his special investigator, Vernon Cheatwood to Fort Towson, and after Cheatwood’s investigation, the two arrested convicts were released1, and an illiterate, 21-year-old black sharecropper, W.D. Lyons, was arrested by local police.Over the course of the next two days, Lyons was beaten senseless and told to confess to the murders. Denied sleep and food, and still groggy from the beatings, Lyons was visited in the middle of the night by the special investigator, who approached with a large black pan, which he dropped in the sharecropper’s lap. “There’s the bones of the baby you burned up,” Cheatwood told him.Superstitious and in fear for his life, Lyons broke down as Cheatwood grabbed him by the neck and pushed his face into the pan. Only a confession would end his agony, Lyons was told, and the young sharecropper quickly obliged. He later stated that he confessed twice because he “didn’t want to be tortured anymore” and “couldn’t stand any more of the beating.”In an uncharacteristically slow crawl toward justice, Lyons lingered in prison. Marshall believed that the Choctaw County attorney was “scared to try the case for a whole year” because the Fort Towson prison camp scandal might erupt again and become an issue in local elections.
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