WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's JournalPlease take me to the hospital.
My wife has been worried for the last couple of days because our daughter Lola hasn't pooped, and has been a bit of a pill. She was worried Lola was constipated. We put Lola down for a nap today, Cailen left for work...
...and later, I went to get Lola when she woke up, and the smell hit me in the face like a dead fish. I cracked open the diaper and it was civilians fleeing, the seas boiling, a thousand years of darkness, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA.
Constipated? Nope. N to the ope. NOPE.
Thunderdump.
Good girl.
Please take me to the hospital.
Objects in Mirror Closer Than They Appear: The Sanders Surge (By me)
May be of use.
Objects in Mirror Closer Than They Appear: The Sanders Surge
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31268-objects-in-mirror-closer-than-they-appear-the-sanders-surge
Objects in Mirror Closer Than They Appear: The Sanders Surge
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a town hall event at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on
Friday, February 20, 2015. (Photo: Alex Cooney/StumpSource.org)
Objects in Mirror Closer Than They Appear: The Sanders Surge
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Tuesday 09 June 2015
How many times do you have to get hit over the head until you figure out who's hitting you?"
-- President Harry S. Truman
A few miles down the road from here, due west on 101, is the town of Brattleboro, Vermont. The architecture is a landscape of long brick, blocks and blocks of old mill buildings, a throwback to the days when the textile industry dominated this little corner of the country before the chance to find cheap labor elsewhere motivated a migration. The passing of that industry devastated many local economies for a very long time, and laid waste to many families, businesses and towns, another verse in the scripture of corporate greed.
In Brattleboro, Sen. Bernie Sanders is a household name. The same goes for Burlington, where Sanders served as mayor for four terms in the 1980s, a tenure that catapulted him into the House of Representatives in 1988. He was re-elected to that office by landslide margins until 2006, when Vermont's Sen. Jim Jeffords announced his retirement. Sanders ran for the seat, and won it handily by about a 2-1 margin. When he ran for re-election in 2012, Senator Sanders won with 71 percent of the vote.
He went back to Burlington to announce his intention to campaign for the Democratic nomination for President at the end of this past May. Five thousand people attended. He pulled in three thousand people in Minnesota, and enjoyed a large crowd when he recently came through Keene, New Hampshire.
When he came through Iowa, he drew the largest crowds of any candidate, regardless of party, so far this year. According to a report on the visit in The New York Times, a Democratic county chairman named Kurt Meyer fired off a text to Hillary Clinton's Iowa political director. "Objects in your mirror," he wrote, "are closer than they appear."
(snip)
Bernie Sanders is preaching a different gospel. He wants to break up the "too big to fail" institutions that burned the economy down to the stumps. He is against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone XL pipeline. He is a blood enemy of the Patriot Act and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. He wants Wall Street regulated far more deeply, and believes the wealthy should be taxed to the degree they actually deserve.
Unlike far too many of his congressional colleagues, he actually believes climate change is real, and that it is coming on strong, and is deadly dangerous. He supports breaking up the massive media conglomerates that spend so much time trying to convince people that such bedrock common sense ideas are scandalous, if not treasonous. He is a stout ally of the LGBTQ community, and of veterans, and of the separation of church and state.
Hillary Clinton - former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State - is in every sense the powerhouse candidate in this race. Lincoln Chafee, former Senator and Governor from Rhode Island, has thrown his hat into the ring, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley appears prepared to do the same. More contenders may come.
Yet Senator Sanders remains a fascinating candidate. An Independent social democrat from a small state is drawing huge crowds from diverse parts of the nation because maybe, just maybe, he is speaking his heart at a time when - after decades of looking for a job and finding none, of looking at their bank account or savings and finding them barren, of going to the well of this alleged version of "freedom" and finding it dry - people may finally be taking Harry Truman's advice, and are listening to a guy who has spent a career explaining who, and what, is hitting them.
Time, that funny little bird, may be turning on its wing. Bernie Sanders is the very definition of a long shot. He is campaigning like a cannonball on a shoestring budget against seemingly impossible odds ... but objects in your mirror are closer than they appear. The man bears watching, and whatever happens, this promises to be one of the most interesting Democratic campaign seasons since time out of mind.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31268-objects-in-mirror-closer-than-they-appear-the-sanders-surge
On this day, they hit the beach...and took it.
With the arguable exception of the Mercury and Apollo astronauts getting strapped to the nosecones of questionable ballistic missiles to be shot off the skin of the planet, this day witnessed the greatest acts of pure courage the 20th century ever saw.
For Beau Biden, on his parting day.
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
-- Walt Whitman
...for Beau Biden on his parting day. He contributed a verse.
Question submitted by WilliamPitt
Robert Kennedy died today.
I wrote this a bit more than a year ago.
The Lost, Lingering Legacy of Robert F. Kennedy
Forty-six years ago, on the fifth of June, 1968, the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy came to an abrupt and horrific end. Having just given his victory speech after winning the Democratic primary in California, Kennedy was struck by three bullets fired by a man named Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. He clung to life for a time at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, and died early the following morning.
History, as recorded, has a way of focusing on the primary colors of a particular individual's impact. The Robert Kennedy who is generally known is remembered to be the son of a rich industrialist, the right-hand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red-Scare witch hunts, one of the original architects of the Vietnam War debacle, the Attorney General, the Senator, and finally, the brother of an assassinated president. His own run for the presidency in 1968 lasted 82 days, and ended on a dirty kitchen floor in Los Angeles, with his life's blood pumping into the empty air along with the hopes and dreams and aspirations of millions.
But Robert Kennedy - son of the oligarchy, scion of a family of the ruling elite after his two older brothers were laid low by war and another assassin - was so much more than that. When President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, Robert Kennedy was destroyed. Annihilated. Ruined utterly. He disappeared within himself and his overwhelming sorrow for a time, emerging eventually to win a US Senate seat for New York in 1964...and that is when the new, true Bobby Kennedy emerged.
You see, Bobby Kennedy had been a child of exceeding privilege and astonishing power from the moment of his birth. At no point, from his birth until his dying breath, did he ever know want, or hunger, or discrimination. When his brother was murdered in Dallas, however, the comfortable world of Robert Kennedy exploded, and for a time he was lost...and then he found himself anew, reborn, and unleashed himself upon American politics as an avatar for the poor, the downtrodden, the sick, and the hopeless.
The all-encompassing agony of his brother's murder, the bottomless loss he felt in the aftermath, birthed him again into the real world, and he saw the pain endured by so many people, and shared it as if it was his own, and went to work to try and fix it immediately.
Robert Kennedy, in the mid-1960s, ventured where few American politicians dared to go. He went to rural Mississippi, and saw Black children living in squalor with distended bellies because they were starving to death, right here in America. He went to places like the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Native Americans lived with no jobs, no running water, no electricity, and no hope. He went to the urban core of American cities, where Black youth seethed at the utter disdain the so-called "American Dream" had for them, and reached out his hand, and swore he would make things better.
There are two stories about Robert Kennedy that stand out in my mind, one well-known and the other nearly unheard-of.
The first story, well-known: Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4th, 1968, just as Kennedy's campaign was getting underway. Kennedy was in Indianapolis, slated to give a speech to a large crowd of Black supporters. When he arrived, no one in the crowd had heard the grim news, and it fell to Kennedy to tell them.
(snip)
Every major American city burned that night, as the rage in the aftermath of King's murder took hold...except Indianapolis.
The second story, far less known: Robert Kennedy had been an advocate for Native Americans since well before his time in the Senate, and had visited a number of reservations over the years. His work was so appreciated by Native Americans that the National Congress of Indians in 1963 adopted him into the tribes, and bestowed upon him the name "Brave Heart."
During his 1968 presidential campaign, he had only two days to spend in his swing through South Dakota, and over the bellowed protestations of campaign staffers concerned about votes, spent one of those two full days at the Pine Ridge Reservation. He spent the entire day in the company of Christopher Pretty Boy, a 9-year-old child whose parents had been killed in a car accident the week before. Kennedy sat with Christopher for hours, and when he went on a tour of the reservation, held Christopher's hand the entire time.
One year later, Robert F. Kennedy and Christopher Pretty Boy were dead.
The 1968 presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy centered on two distinct yet inseparable themes: The blood-soaked immorality of the Vietnam War, and the astonishing fact that the richest nation on Earth tolerated the enormous poverty and deprivations suffered by its poorest citizens while vomiting billions of dollars into the bucket of that war. He spent 82 days shouting these desperately uncomfortable truths from the rooftops, until he was laid low.
Forty-six years later, the legacy of his campaign, of his cause, has been all but forgotten. Today, our politicians again wage war for political and financial benefit, ignore the rampant poverty and suffering of the citizenry, and in fact work hammer and tong to devise bold new ways to rob from the poor to fatten the rich. It is all too easy to imagine the better world that may have come to pass had Kennedy not walked into that kitchen, but that, in the end, is fantasy. It happened, and we are here.
There was a time all those years ago when, for 82 days, we were given an opportunity to believe that we as a nation can be better than what we are. The legacy of Robert Kennedy is still there, lying fallow, waiting to be born anew.
The time is just right, and anything - everything - is possible.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24908-william-rivers-pitt-
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." -- Aeschylus, by way of Bobby, on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. died
The Westboro Baptist shit-souls claim they'll protest Beau Biden's funeral
Hm.
"Hi, we're the Westboro Baptist Church!"
"Hi, we're the Secret Service!"
CRUSH ANNIHILATE DESTROY SHOOT REPEATEDLY STOMP AND CRUSH
"Well, that settles that."
One can dream.
Here's the bare fact: *I* should have been banned well before NYC_Skip.
This is not meant as a call-out to the admins, or to anyone at all actually. I'm calling myself out, truth be told.
I posted a thread calling the president a POS used car salesman !!!here!!! because I lost my temper with the only insurance company the ACA allowed me to access in NH, and was stupid enough to take it out on my keyboard. I had my reasons, and it was because my wife with MS and my baby daughter were being put in peril by a gruesomely selfish and greedy insurance bureaucracy the ACA handed us to as our only choice in this state...but I'm not getting into it again, and if you want to, you'll be talking to yourself and not me.
The point: We've all said some rotten shit on this board over the years. Some of us (me!) have said shit that would hyperactivate a statue. It's amazing they still let me in the door...but they do, and that's my ultimate purpose with this post. Skip wasn't just a member here. He gave service to the organization as a Mod back in the Mod days on DU2. He was a hard-boiled contributor, and if his contributions made me want to beat him with a length of lead pipe - aaaaand they did on many times many occasions - well, that's the price of admission.
He fucked up big time, and no mistake. That was a shit stupid ugly thing to post. He got lost in the forest of the argument and ran smack into a tree...and I know I know I know he pissed off and offended a lot of people whose opinions I deeply respect...but if my opinion carries any degree of respect in this demented joint, here it is: Give the cat a break. I cannot honestly say I like him very much - we've had our share of round-and-rounds, and they have seldom been pleasant - and I don't at all respect everything he has to say by any means.
That goes for quite a lot of you assholes, as it turns out.
He has put in the work with this joint. Like it or lump it, he's part of the DNA.
He fucked up badly. Allow him a chance to apologize, and open the batwings for him again. I was given that chance once. So should he.
One man's opinion.
-- WilliamPitt
DU Member since May 21 2001
I didn't know this Group existed until about 90 seconds ago.
This is a completely useless fuzz-post.
But anyway, hi! It's a privilege to be here.
Go Bernie. Go go go.
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
