After all those nice stories about how ‘something must be done’, the European Union is sending in its troops to Darfur by way of neighboring Chad. In so doing, it will be propping up a French maintained puppet dictator that is so unpopular, that even some of his own relatives are trying to overthrow him along with much of the population at large. Oh, Go blame it on the Arab horsemen and the Chinese, I suppose?
What is all this Chad, Darfur, and Sudan stuff really about to our Western ears? Does our ruling class now have soft hearts and now are turning to stop bad things going on in the big bad, world? Pretty comical notion I think. ‘Save the Blacks! Save the children!’ What noblesse oblige!
Is this the new compassionate conservatism in action? Oh No…. It’s the liberal Democrats once again! Working with Bush and Sarkozy all together! Oh, and it’s to ‘Stop Terrorism’, too. It’s all part of the ‘Global War on Everybody and Everything’, patent pending in Washington DC office (or is it in Alexander, Virginia?). We got such good ol’ soft hearts, we going to save the world once again.
OK, actually the news is keeping the news away from us on this one. Too early to announce yet. We have short attention spans and need to stay focused on CHANGE and DARFUR. Chad is, well it is, politically incorrect to think about. There will be no Chad displays at the local library quite just yet. Hold your breath! And whatever you do, VOTE! The System need you.
Socialism does not equal tyranny, unlike the claims and demagoguery of the capitalists. A true democratic Socialism and fair market system is a natural course for human society. It is free of predatory and parasitic capitalist schemes to dominate and exploit everyone and everything. It is decentralization of power distributed to citizens, as opposed to the fascist model that benefits from centralization and concentration of power. It can disperse wealth and enrich citizens if they can be de-programmed of their false worship and idolization of wealth as success and exploitation as the norm.
And it doesn’t have to be an exact model of Marx or Engels or Trotsky or Lenin. But it should include the takeover of production from the fascists with community worker councils in control. And the shift away from enslavement of the worlds workers by the bankers and through globalisation. And control of currency back to the citizens. The capitalists are middlemen who get in our way of a just fair society that we have the ability to create. It is they who have created all of the false propaganda about Socialism. They who choke by way of embargoes, sanctions, and political disruption, any countries attempt toward a just socialist society. Their domination as a minority over the majority cannot and should not stand any longer.
Here’s a good read. Dated but still valid. Enjoy. Also enjoy the many thorough and insightful articles on www.wsws.org
Socialism and Democracy James P. Cannon gave the following talk to a meeting at the Socialist Workers Party’s West Coast Vacation School, September 1, 1957. It was first published in the Fall 1957 International Socialist Review.
Comrades, I am glad to be here with you today, and to accept your invitation to speak on socialism and democracy. Before we can make real headway in the discussion of other important parts of the program, we have to find agreement on what we mean by socialism and what we mean by democracy, and how they are related to each other, and what we are going to say to the American workers about them.
Strange as it may seem, an agreement on these two simple, elementary points, as experience has already demonstrated, will not be arrived at easily. The confusion and demoralization created by Stalinism, and the successful exploitation of this confusion by the ruling capitalists of this country and all their agents and apologists, still hang heavily over all sections of the workers’ movement.
Shakespeare’s Mark Antony reminded us that evil quite often outlives its authors. That is true in the present case also. Stalin is dead; but the crippling influence of Stalinism on the minds of a whole generation of people who considered themselves socialists or communists lives after Stalin.
Now, of course, the Stalinists and their apologists have not created all the confusion in this country about the meaning of socialism, at least not directly. At every step the Stalinist work of befuddlement and demoralization, of debasing words into their opposite meanings, has been supported by reciprocal action of the same kind by the ruling capitalists and their apologists. They have never failed to take the Stalinists at their word, and to point to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, with all of its horrors, and to say: “That is socialism. The American way of life is better.”
They have cynically accepted the Stalinist definition and have obligingly advertised the Soviet Union, with its grinding poverty and glaring inequality, with its ubiquitous police terror, frame-ups, mass murders and slave-labour camps, as a “socialist” order of society. They have utilized the crimes of Stalinism to prejudice the American workers against the very name of socialism. And worst of all, comrades, we have to recognise that this campaign has been widely successful, and that we have to pay for it. We cannot build a strong socialist movement in this country until we overcome this confusion in the minds of the American workers about the real meaning of socialism.
After all that has happened in the past quarter of a century, the American workers have become more acutely sensitive than ever before to the value and importance of democratic rights. That, in my opinion, is the progressive side of their reaction, which we should fully share. The horrors of fascism, as they were revealed in the ’30s, and which were never dreamed of by the socialists in the old days, and the no less monstrous crimes of Stalinism, which became public knowledge later—all this has inspired a fear and hatred of any kind of dictatorship in the minds of the American working class. And to the extent that the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia has been identified with the name of socialism, and that this identification has been taken as a matter of course, the American workers have been prejudiced against socialism. That’s the bitter truth, and it must be looked straight in the face.
The socialist movement in America will not advance again significantly until it regains the initiative and takes the offensive against capitalism and all its agents in the labour movement precisely on the issue of democracy.
The authentic socialist movement, as it was conceived by its founders and as it has developed over the past century, has been the most democratic movement in all history. No formulation of this question can improve on the classic statement of the Communist Manifesto, with which modern scientific socialism was proclaimed to the world in 1848. The Communist Manifesto said:
““All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority. The Stalinist claim—that the task of reconstructing society on a socialist basis can be farmed out to a privileged and uncontrolled bureaucracy, while the workers remain without voice or vote in the process—is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, and of all their true disciples, as the reformist idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees by the capitalists who exploit them.
All such fantastic conceptions were answered in advance by the reiterated statement of Marx and Engels that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.” That is the language of Marx and Engels—“the task of the workers themselves”. That was just another way of saying—as they said explicitly many times—that the socialist reorganization of society requires a workers’ revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class, which is itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic than that.
Moreover, the great teachers did not limit the democratic action of the working class to the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy. They defined democracy as the form of governmental rule in the transition period between capitalism and socialism. It is explicitly stated in the Communist Manifesto—and I wonder how many people have forgotten this in recent years—“The first step”, said the Manifesto, “in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”
That is the way Marx and Engels formulated the first aim of the revolution—to make the workers the ruling class, to establish democracy, which, in their view, is the same thing. From this precise formulation it is clear that Marx and Engels did not consider the limited, formal democracy under capitalism, which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority by the few, as real democracy.
They never taught that the simple nationalization of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That’s not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Nationalization only lays the economic foundations for the transition to socialism. Still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism could be realized without freedom and without equality; that nationalized production and planned economy, controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and forced-labour camps, could be designated as a “socialist” society. That unspeakable perversion and contradiction of terms belongs to the Stalinists and their apologists.
All the great Marxists defined socialism as a classless society—with abundance, freedom and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers’ state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority.
The Soviet Union today is a transitional order of society, in which the bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority, far from serving as the agency to bridge the transition to socialism, stands as an obstacle to harmonious development in that direction. In the view of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin and Trotsky who came after them, the transition from capitalism to the classless society of socialism could only be carried out by an ever-expanding democracy, involving the masses of the workers more and more in all phases of social life, by direct participation and control.
Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist Manifesto said: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association.” Mark that: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
I say we will not put the socialist movement of this country on the right track and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class of this country and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did. Until we make it clear that we stand for an ever-expanding workers’ democracy as the only road to socialism. Until we root out every vestige of Stalinist perversion and corruption of the meaning of socialism and democracy, and restate the thoughts and formulations of the authentic Marxist teachers.
But the Stalinist definitions of socialism and democracy are not the only perversions that have to be rejected before we can find a sound basis for the regroupment of socialist forces in the United States. The definitions of the social democrats of all hues and gradations are just as false. And in this country they are a still more formidable obstacle because they have deeper roots, and they are nourished by the ruling class itself.
The liberals, the social democrats and the bureaucratic bosses of the American trade unions are red-hot supporters of “democracy”. At least, that is what they say. And they strive to herd the workers into the imperialist war camp under the general slogan of “democracy versus dictatorship”. They speak of democracy as something that stands by itself above the classes and the class struggle, and not as the form of rule of one class over another.
Capitalism, under any kind of government—whether bourgeois democracy or fascism or a military police state—is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slaveowners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy.
To be sure, the workers in the United States have a right to vote periodically for one of two sets of candidates selected for them by the two capitalist parties. And if they can dodge the witch-hunters, they can exercise the right of free speech and free press. But this formal right of free speech and free press is outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the big presses, and of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information.
But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better than none. We socialists have never denied that. And after the experiences of fascism and McCarthyism, and of military and police dictatorships in many parts of the world, and of the horrors of Stalinism, we have all the more reason to value every democratic provision for the protection of human rights and human dignity; to fight for more democracy, not less.
Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn’t want to be ruled by a dictatorship. Rather, we should recognise that his demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. The Marxists, throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilized them for the education and organization of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether.
The right of union organization is a precious right, a democratic right, but it was not “given” to the workers in the United States. It took the mighty and irresistible labour upheaval of the ’30s, culminating in the great sit-down strikes—a semi-revolution of the American workers—to establish in reality the right of union organization in mass-production industry.
When it comes to the administration of workers’ organizations under their control, the social democrats and the reformist labour leaders pay very little respect to their own professed democratic principles. The trade unions in the United States today, as you all know, are administered and controlled by little cliques of richly privileged bureaucrats, who use the union machinery, and the union funds, and a private army of goon squads, and—whenever necessary—the help of the employers and the government, to keep their own “party” in control of the unions, and to suppress and beat down any attempt of the rank and file to form an opposition “party” to put up an opposition slate.
In practice, the American labour bureaucrats, who piously demand democracy in the one-party totalitarian domain of Stalinism, come as close as they can to maintaining a total one-party rule in their own domain. The Stalinist bureaucrats in Russia and the trade-union bureaucrats in the United States are not sisters, but they are much more alike than different. They are essentially of the same breed, a privileged caste dominated above all by motives of self-benefit and self-preservation at the expense of the workers and against the workers.
The privileged bureaucratic caste everywhere is the most formidable obstacle to democracy and socialism. The struggle of the working class in both sections of the now divided world has become, in the most profound meaning of the term, a struggle against the usurping privileged bureaucracy.
In the Soviet Union, it is a struggle to restore the genuine workers’ democracy established by the revolution of 1917. Workers’ democracy has become a burning necessity to assure the harmonious transition to socialism. That is the meaning of the political revolution against the bureaucracy now developing throughout the whole Soviet sphere, which every socialist worthy of the name unreservedly supports.
In the United States, the struggle for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organizations That is the necessary condition to prepare the final struggle to abolish capitalism and establish democracy in the country as a whole. No party in this country has a right to call itself socialist unless it stands foursquare for the rank-and-file workers of the United States against the bureaucrats.
Capitalism does not survive as a social system by its own strength, but by its influence within the workers’ movement, reflected and expressed by the labour aristocracy and the bureaucracy. So the fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory. Workers’ democracy is the only road to socialism, here in the United States and everywhere else, all the way from Moscow to Los Angeles, and from here to Budapest.
Many liberals and Leftists support independence for Kosovo just as they have done previously with East Timor. In short, they have supported their own imperialist governments dividing up other countries, and this they call ‘supporting national self determination’!
Let’s face it though. The real reason the Western imperialist powers (NATO) went to war together back then against the government of Milosevic was to destroy the remnants of state socialism in Yugoslavia, and by doing so they split up the old multi-cultural Yugoslavia into many bits and pieces. The last battle was over Kosovo, where the US went to battle alongside allies and proponents of a Greater Albania together against the supporters of a Greater Serbia. Bombs away!
The collateral damage still remains, just as it does in Bosnia and throughout the former Soviet Union. Ethnic manipulation can get rather messy, USA, but of course, this is the preferred method of warfare for the US government, using one ethnic group against the next. We see it again and again and again. We see it in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
So Kosovo’s Albanians demand ‘independence’ from Yugoslavia. They demand 2 ethnic Albanias then. Or rather, they demand (indirectly) confederation with Albania instead of with Serb dominated Yugoslavia. Should they get it? If so, will the Serb’s living within Kosovo demand an even smaller ‘state’? Yugoslavia will back that, but then should they, the Kosovar Serbs, get what they want? Is that, too, ‘national self determination’?
Kosovo demonstrates once again that a world where each national group demands an ethnic state of their own all the time will be a messy and continually contentious one. At one time, many American Blacks and groups supporting them against White racism toyed with the idea of demanding that a state like Mississippi or Alabama be made a Black country for ex-slaves to inhabit. In fact, throughout Canada and the US, indigenous groups have something like that already, called the ‘Indian reservations’. Where do we stop in supporting ‘national self determination’ then? Would America and its Black population have been better served by creating an ‘independent’ country back in the ’20s or ’30s in a Southern state? One doesn’t think so today.
Maybe Kosovo is the right place to stop splitting people up further. Instead of wars spent to do this why not support economic plans of peace that would unite Serb and Albanian within Kosovo? Is it really that hard to implement such a program? I thin not but the political will to start such a program is entirely absent, and no more so than in the imperialist countries themselves which continue to prefer to rule by divide and conquer.
NATO out of the Balkans NOW! US out of the Balkans NOW! Monery for economic assistance, not military occupation!
UPDATE: The Gazette article is still among the top commented.
Here’s a string of the initial comments, in chronological order:
hmmmmm wrote:
Well this proves that if you break the law, and they did, and complain and whine enough then you can get off. Very disappointed in our DA on this one. quote “When you consider dragging an old woman across the street and not lifting her up, it’s really hard to see how that’s doing nothing wrong,” Verlo said. end quote. When this “old woman” refuses to get up and follow police orders, Yes they did nothing wrong. It’s called the law, and they broke it.
11/28/2007 7:44 PM MST on Gazette.com
csaction wrote:
No part of this trial was ever in the public’s interest and the city prosecutors were the last to see that. Some of the police used excessive force and that ruined their case. The parade rules weren’t applied to everyone equally, and that ruined their case. You aren’t guilty of obstructing the street when the police throw you down in the street. Explaining that you have a permit to march, just like the year before, is NOT failure to disperse. Allowing every politico in town to make a political statement EXCEPT those with a message of peace, is NOT equal protection under the law.
The strangest part of the city’s position, other than the obvious lame claim that they could get a conviction but decided not to, is Ms. Kelly’s apparent distrust of the legal system: “everything the police did was justified and there was probable cause for an arrest, but getting a conviction is another story”.
It is NOT another story IF the police did nothing wrong and there WAS probable cause for an arrest, and that’s ALL been decided by a jury of their peers when they couldn’t prove their case to 6 people in this town.
Is she suggesting that the jury system is wrong or that we, the people, are too stupid to see that the police and city are always right, no matter what they do? Does she think we can’t sit on a jury and decide the ruling based on the evidence, and get it right? The jury already got it right and the city wanted to intimidate the remaining 2 people with the threat of a trial, until the last minute, to stop them from suing for the police brutality, already proven to a jury.
11/28/2007 7:49 PM MST on Gazette.com
mananamaria wrote:
Apparently a jury couldn’t agree anyone broke the law in the first place. As far as I can tell, the threat to file charges against Verlo and Fineron, who both may or may no longer have pending lawsuits against the city and then dropping those is pretty telling. Besides did our finest not learn appropriat compliance tools that avoid the spectecals of dragging old women across a street and flagrantly threateniing people with tasers?
11/28/2007 8:03 PM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
CS, correction–they had a permit to march in a parade, not to interrupt the parade with a demonstration. In addition, Kelly is stating that another trial would be a waste of resources because the outcome would be the same…there is no insuation here.
11/28/2007 8:04 PM MST on Gazette.com
back2colorado4go wrote:
csaction, you have lost ALL credibility on these boards! And Manawhatever, you do not follow ANY of the facts about this. JWSTrue has it right. These people broke the law, and most people I know of agree that these people needed to be taught that what they did in public was a disgrace! The police PICKED THEM OFF OF THE STREET, and with resistance these people ended up hurting themselves! They are deceptive by lying for the permit and needed to be removed. No one, especially the children there to see the parade, needed to be subjected to these adults acting unruly and not listening to the police! You can protest many other ways without this sick little show! And I agree with the DA in one way though. For the little satisfaction we (the public) would get in prosecuting these people, it is not worth the cost and the publicity it would give these pathetic people in the process! And yes, juries are full of creepy people that let off murderers every day, so it is not so hard to see one that can’t decide this one! These people were LUCKY it was the police that dragged them from the streets after hearing how ticked some parade watchers were at these people when this happened! Way to teach our kids!!!
11/28/2007 8:21 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (4)
jwstrue wrote:
back2colorado4go, thanks for the support. Now we sit back and wait for jtrione to chime in…sometimes I think CS and jtrione are one in the same, maybe??
11/28/2007 8:50 PM MST on Gazette.com
tonytee wrote:
hey post person hummmmmm cops broke the law many times and have not been charged, people sometimes who break the law in history end up being heroes, sometimes the letter of the law is not always correct and golden, sometimes to make a difference in life you must break the law to make the world a better place to live and not not let the law become too powerful in trying to silence free speech.
11/28/2007 8:52 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (2)
pc12784 wrote:
CSaction, with the possibility of people like you in the jury pool, it is entirely reasonable to think that the jury would be too stupid to see that the police and city are right in this case. Your statement about excessive force still baffle me. If you don’t want to be dragged off the street by the police, MOVE when officers give you a lawful order to do so. It’s really quite simple. But JWS and back2colorado pretty much discredited everything you said in this thread anyway, so I rest my case.
11/28/2007 9:18 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (4)
lexiii wrote:
I wish they’d have gone ahead and prosecuted, but the county is trying to save money, and they are basically focusing on more important crimes, I think, which is a good thing.
However, I am not on the side of the protesters here, if there weren’t more important cases that need attention, I’d be screaming and hollering myself right now, but our jails are already over filled and we need the room for more violent offenders.
Even though they’re not going to be prosecuted, the stupid protesters still look stupid in the eyes of the public, that opinion will not change.
11/28/2007 9:37 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (4)
pastor wrote:
one thing I have learned about csaction is he is right and everyone else is wrong. Have anyone every read where he admitted he was wrong and said he was sorry. In his world the peace protest are always right and can do no wrong.
Here is an example of his world view “One more point: look at the list of issues that made the gazette change this blog. ALL rightwing issues. All rightwing hate speech. Vile, putrid, racist, sexist, Fox Noise, Rush Limpboy, dittohead, FotF issues. NONE leftwing.” ”
Mr. Rust, I see you like your peace activists stupid, brain addled, stoned hippies, with no fight in them, passively accepting any abuse from the enemies of the state. Or perhaps you like the theological activists looking for another martyrdom opportunity and willing to help any enemy nail them to the cross. Or perhaps activists that are just too stupid to see hypocrisy in the national (and local) theocracy proponents, or the threat that ALL theocrats represent to the peaceful majority. Sorry to disappoint. (not)” ” The theocratic party that wants to turn this nation into a theocracy, and is the Christian equivalent of an Islamic Republic, are who get criticized, along with the hypocrite, hate monger, adulterer, homophobe, foot tapping bathroom boys, and televangelist funditards. It has nothing to do with the religion and peaceful, loving followers of the Prince of Peace. It has to do with those straying from the message as much as the other Taliban, who want to turn back the clock on progress to created a biblical theocracy. It has to do with those that want to legislate “throwing the first stone”, battling those that want to legislate “thou shalt NOT throw the first stone”. The concept of the protection of targeted groups, is the application of that principle and those against it are NOT Christian, because it is the principle of their lord. BTW, preacher, I won’t cut you as much slack as the other guy. You know exactly what “Christian” Taliban means, you just defend them. I’ve explained this before and will not again.” all of these quotes are from him. FOR SOMEONE WHO BELIEVES CHRISTIAN ARE LIKE THE TALIBAN, WILL ALWAYS DEFEND HIS PEOPLE WHEN THERE ARE WRONG. So I am sure he will blame Christian for his friends getting in trouble, and that all of this is to silence his friends message.
11/28/2007 9:39 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
on the issues of the protester, they now know, if they disobey the police, they can get away with it by yell, that it is all the police fault. An make sure people like csaction spread their lies on line and in the newspaper, this is the normal blame the cops for our behavior.
11/28/2007 9:45 PM MST on Gazette.com
101abn wrote:
Once again, lazy DAs. I rest my case. Prosecuting the prostestors would probably cut in to the time they spend plea bargaining away other cases…
11/28/2007 10:10 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (2)
101abn wrote:
Neva Nolan. Nearly a HUNDRED COUNTS PLEA BARGAINED DOWN TO *TWO*. Did you watch the Channel 11 report on the clown with over a HALF DOZEN DUIs – INCLUDING KILLING A MAN – WHO LOST HIS DRIVER’S LICENSE, LEFT COURT, DROVE TO A LIQUOR STORE AND BOUGHT A BOTTLE OF BOOZE??? ALL FILMED AND CONFIRMED BY CHANNEL 11 NEWS CREWS. Our DAs are a BAD JOKE!
11/28/2007 10:26 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (3)
tonytee wrote:
actually lexiii i do not see the protesters as stupid in the eyes of the public, being one that is in the public i commend them for standing up for what they beleived in and taking it as far as they did, in this country too few people are sheep and will not step out and stand for what they beleive in that is why our country is in the dilemma it is in currently with politicians and fiancially, maybe more people need to step out of the box for what they beleive in instead of letting senior citizens do it for us, but maybe that is the only generation that has any guts left to stand up for something.
11/28/2007 11:50 PM MST
just1voice wrote:
Tony I think you are way off base on that one. Its not that people arent willing to stand up for what they believe in or that they are sheep following the flock. The majority of them do it WITHIN the limits of the law so it doesnt make headlines like these clowns did. Have you gone out and asked the “public” their opinion on what these people did? I have and as Lexi said, they look stupid and will continue to think they are stupid even though they wont be punished for it.
Besides, I can think of several other ways to punish a business owner besides sending him to jail so that is something the public needs to consider.
11/29/2007 7:10 AM MST on Gazette.com
skiracer wrote:
Tony – not sure exactly how you are in the public eye as I have never heard of you outside these boards and can’t find any information on basic internet searches. Someone mentioned on another thread you ran for a public office and lost. With the skewwed view points you have shown throughout the threads on this website and the apparent lack of a marketing plan I can see why.
Maybe the senior citizens in these case were convinced/brainwashed in to thinking they were standing up for a good cause. Heck, my grandmother voted for Clinton the first time around because she thought he was handsome and someone came around to her nursing home and told everyone there what a great guy he was and how his moral standards would help improve their lives in the retirement community.
The problem with what they did is that they lied their way into the protest (privately funded and run) and then refused to leave when organizers asked them to and then police asked them to. Arguing that you have a permit is not leaving. Step to the side of the road and then show your permit. But since it was privately run it doesn’t matter. Your permit can be revoked at anytime at the organizer’s discretion.
As far dragging rather than carrying an old lady across the street. I am going to guess that she was pushing 200 lbs if not more. Has anyone here tried to carry a oddly shaped, limp sack of potatoes weighing this much before. Now add some squirming into the equation and you can see why they dragged this person off the straight. Besides, I would be willing to bet that should she have been carried off we would hear about her injuring either her arms or her ribs.
11/29/2007 7:38 AM MST on Gazette.com
skiracer wrote:
And regardless of the cost, the DA should be prosecuting those who break the law. The problem with our legal system is not that too many people are getting 2nd chances, it’s that too many people never even have to plea bargain or go to court because of lazy prosecutors.
The DA just lost my vote when up for re-election. If you didn’t have enough evidence say so, but to say that you are backing out because you don’t have faith in the system you are supposed to uphold on behalf of the people is a bunch of BS.
11/29/2007 7:41 AM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
pastor wrote:
The next’s round of the peace protester hand book is to bring a lawsuit against the city and police for false arrest. I hope that everyone who hand entry for parade take notice and when this group try to entry next time, they make it clear to them no anti-war message permitted in the parade. If you bring in you anti-war or peace message (joke because they seem to end up in some type of fight with someone) you will be removed. This will stop them from cause trouble again.
11/29/2007 7:57 AM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
I went to war to push peace and democracy on other nations. In this nation, or atleast in this city peace is considered hate speach. This city had no case, thats why they lost and are hanging their heads in defeat.
11/29/2007 7:57 AM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
This city is changing, just drive on Fort Carson one day, count how many anti-war, anti-Bush stickers you see on people’s cars. It will shock you. But you people on this blog will probably just call those troops “phoney soldiers” or “anti-americans” or “unpatriotic”. We appreciate that. Thanks for the support. Go when Physical Training (PT) ends at 8:30am, you’ll see these troops in their cars where their PT uniform with with what you people call “propaganda” on their car. I love an America where our troops have the right to free speach, which you call “hate speach”.
11/29/2007 8:03 AM MST on Gazette.com
erniezippreplat wrote:
Break the law get away scott free with the Colorado Springs DA. Whoever run against the current DA next time around gets the five votes in my family
11/29/2007 8:08 AM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
lexiii wrote:
iraqwarvet, throwing yourself on the pavement during a family event isn’t speech, and it certainly isn’t peace.
If idiots want to stand up for peace, they need to be peaceable about it.
These protesters were no more peaceful than anyone else.
tonytee, the protesters were stupid. They acted like a bunch of tantruming toddlers. Grown men and women throwing themselves down like three year olds in front of little children, no less, because they were asked to leave and they didn’t want to leave.
Not only was that against their own message of peace, it was a bad example for the children concerning adult behavior, and it was completely inappropriate in the first place.
A family event is no place for a war protest, these selfish minded brainless old farts who think they’re still in the sixties need to grow up and find a more appropriate means of communication.
How can they send a message of peace when they, themselves, are not being peaceful?
11/29/2007 8:10 AM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
smackermack wrote:
GUYS your anger is in the wrong place!! It is the CITY ATTORNEY – not the DA who decided this!!! Read the headline and the first Paragraph of the article!!!
11/29/2007 8:55 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
No one want to silence the peace protesters right to speak, but we believe that there is a time and place for it. An most people believe that the St. Patrick’s Day parade was not the right time and place. Most people also seem to believe that if a cop asked you move you move you do not act like a baby. But I also must remind everyone that the peace protesters hand book, when the police ask you to move you drop an make a scene, so that it is caught on film, the reason is so you can make the police look like the bad guy.
Iragwarvet I have a question for you since you agree with the anti-war groups. Is it ok to block soldier return from the war? Is it ok to delay the soldier meeting with their family? Is it ok to destroy railroad tracks and stop the return of the military equipment from the war?
11/29/2007 8:56 AM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
TONYTEE, taking a stand or speaking out for what you believe in is one thing. Causing a disturbance during a public family event is quite another.
2 other bits:
– This country is in dilemma (according to you) because of corrupt politicians…
– This country is in dilemma (according to you) because of imminent recession…
Neither has anything to do with “stepping out or standing for”.
You wouldn’t happen to be one of the individuals who ran for mayor last term, would you?
11/29/2007 9:02 AM MST on Gazette.com
rambone wrote:
pastor wrote: “No one want to silence the peace protesters right to speak, but we believe that there is a time and place for it. An most people believe that the St. Patrick’s Day parade was not the right time and place.”
Oh, but it was the right time and place for an old pickup to drive in the parade with juveniles in the back, lifting kegs, acting like idiots?
Was it the right time and place for the police to scare the living daylights out of young children as they drug that poor old lady across the street by the back of her shirt?
Were you even there pastor? I was, and it was terrible that these fine police had to act like they were imposing martial law.
11/29/2007 9:11 AM MST on Gazette.com
davidb wrote:
Eric Verlo and Elizabeth Fineron should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. According to their own statements, they intentionally and premeditatedly challenged the police that day. Attorney Kelly, you do NOT speak for the public on this one. Do your job!
11/29/2007 9:20 AM MST on Gazette.com
rambone wrote:
lexiii wrote: “These protesters were no more peaceful than anyone else.”
Were you there lexiii? Or its this just another story you want to weigh in on? I watched the whole thing, from the moment they walked out of Acatia Park, to when they got beat down 1 block away. Their signs were just peace symbols, they were not yelling into the crowd. One more thing, that pig that drug that lady across the street is lucky to be walking on two legs today. Pull off that act in front of my kids is enough to get me sent to prison.
11/29/2007 9:20 AM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
Iraqwarvet, actually if any one in a position of authority sees an active duty soldier driving around with this propaganda displayed on his/her POV–they will more than likely be ordered to remove it and potentially face administrative action.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits any type of slander against the Commander-in-Chief–in any form or fashion. While military members may disagree with the policies and procedures set forth by the Commander-in-Chief, they are prohibited by law from open criticism of those policies/procedures or the CIC himself.
Yes, military members can exercise freedom of speech–but only accompanied by certain restrictions as outlined in the UCMJ.
11/29/2007 9:22 AM MST on Gazette.com
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pastor wrote:
So it is ok for these people to act the way they did. So again it is the police fault for doing their job, an the protester are not responsibility for their actions. So when is it ok for the police to move someone who does not listen?
11/29/2007 9:27 AM MST on Gazette.com
lwirbel wrote:
Lexii, you still aren’t describing this event accurately. Some people, like the AIM Indians at Columbus Day in Denver, choose to get arrested and commit civil disobedience by symbolically blockading an event. Verlo and Fineron were parade participants who the parade marshall decided, after the fact, he didn’t want in the parade, who were removed from the parade. The courts have a very mixed record on the right of a parade organizer to set rules, particularly in an ex post facto way. St Patricks Day organizers in Boston and elsewhere have some limited rights to exclude in advance gay and lesbian marchers, but once they’re in a parade, you have only limited rights to take them out. What’s also relevant here is what the courts have said about Apple Computer’s right to define who is a journalist. The company wants to exclude some people in advance because it says, “they’re only bloggers.” The courts say, no, Apple, even if it’s your press conference, you do not have the right to decide who is a legit participant and who is not. The St. Paddy’s Day organizer was really bordering on the edge of legality when he decided to remove folks with peace shirts after allowing Bookman in (and like Rambone said, they weren’t yelling, just marching).
11/29/2007 9:31 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Rambone if the police tell you to move out of the way, you listen and sort out the problem once you are off the street. You do not act like a little child. Rambone read your past posting you are some one who has a problem with Authorize and police. I was not there but people I know and trust were there an witness the whole thing from start to finished. They witness the police asking them to leave and witness the people not listen to the police officers.
11/29/2007 9:35 AM MST on Gazette.com
skiracer wrote:
Smackermack – My bad on the City Attorney vs the DA. Guess I heard DA used and skipped over the first few lines of the article on my reread after reading other comments. Regardless, the DA’s office should still be looking at this as Colorado Springs is in El Paso County, which is covered in the area he is responsible for. At a minimum a better reason/story/lie needs to be provided to the people of the city regarding why these charges were actually dropped. Saying you have evidence to convict but we are not going to is the same as saying we will chose which laws we are going to enforce.
As for the City Attorney (appointed by our wonderful all knowing and responsible City Council). You should be fired for either lying in your statements to the Gazette or for not upholding the law regardless of cost. If you have enough evidence a crime was committed and the police were correct in their actions you owe it to those of us who follow the law to uphold it as well as to the police officers who just had their name dragged through the mud because you are either a liar or lazy.
11/29/2007 9:36 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Lwirbel my problem is how they acted once they were told by the police to leave. I do not agree with the message they were bring in the St. Patrick’s Day parade but that is my opion. I feel that there is a time and place for that message and this to me was not the right place. With that said, I still feel they were in the wrong once the police ask them to move out of the way. They had to two choices 1. to move out of the way and sort the mess out. 2. Do not listen to the police and risk getting in trouble. The choices was up to them.
11/29/2007 9:47 AM MST on Gazette.com
justanothervet wrote:
That is right . Every time the police or any authority figure tells you to do something than do it. No protesting allowed. No thinking allowed. Vote Republican.
BTW you can send your Tea Tax to the Queen care of the United Kingdom.
11/29/2007 9:47 AM MST on Gazette.com
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lwirbel wrote:
That’s the main difference between you and me. If there was a huge accident or similar crisis and the police were getting everyone to move, I’d high-tail it. If the police were asking me to do something that was clearly a violation of my rights, I would challenge them and ask for their badge number. Never kowtow to someone simply because they are in uniform.
11/29/2007 9:54 AM MST on Gazette.com
duncan wrote:
lwirbel, from your comments I can only conclude that you had no issue with the Valedictorian from Lewis Palmer giving her speech about faith AFTER deliberately misleading the event organizers about her intentions. Is that correct? Or are you blocking that piece of evidence out to make your case? I guess lies and deceit in the name of a “cause” are complete justification to getting ones message across.
rambone, your internet tough guy act is tired. By your own admission since you watched the whole thing you had your chance with “that pig” and you did nothing. I doubt there would have been any change if your kids were there or not. It sounds like you could have used it as an example to your kids of what not to do when they grow up.
11/29/2007 9:57 AM MST on Gazette.com
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rambone wrote:
Selective discipline? I had three short paragraphs to you. You chose to only comment on some short sighted belief that the police are the rule makers. These peace activist had the permits to be in that parade.
Act the way they did? You admit you were not there. Last I remember, he told me/she told me wasn’t admitted in a court of law. So why are you even making assumptions?
11/29/2007 10:00 AM MST on Gazette.com
lwirbel wrote:
Duncan, I actually know Erica from Lewis-Palmer and I have mixed emotions about it, I don’t think her case will stand up in court because of those deceptions, though her intention was partially admirable. I think this issue will stand up in a civil-suit court because the marchers were NOT engaged in deception. Bookman has always been an activist bookstore, and no great deception is involved in putting on green T-shirts. What about the Boston parade, if a bookstore known to be lesbian applied to the Catholic group to march, would it be deceptive to somehow have a lesbian sign on that float? I would say no.
11/29/2007 10:05 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Iwirbel I have no problem with your statement “I would challenge them and ask for their badge number. Never kowtow to someone simply because they are in uniform.” But can you not do this by getting out of the way of everyone else, so that you are not causing a delay in the parade? by doing this are you not listen to the police and showing respect to them and everyone else.
11/29/2007 10:06 AM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
Quick question to someone in the know. What reason did the protesters use to apply for a permit under a business name that had nothing to do with their organization? Or is their organization called The Bookman?
11/29/2007 10:11 AM MST on Gazette.com
obxman wrote:
if the d.a.[could mean anything]had to pay for legal expenses in a failed prosecution,half these jokers would be out of a job.if civilians sue each other without merit,the losing party can be held liable for legal fees…..why not the government?!they don’t have to be right when they arrest you….you just have to be able to afford justice.
11/29/2007 10:33 AM MST
jwstrue wrote:
Come on Rambone…that’s like saying because airplanes crash, I have no respect for pilots and will never fly an airplane…you sound pretty libertarian to me. Perhaps you should relocate to one of those compounds in Montana or Utah. Be careful, you may need these guys some day…
lwirbel, most folks with common sense would not challenge authority while in the midst of a direct order–most folks would follow the appropriate complaint or challenge process. Sounds like you have the same problem as the protesters–there is a time and place for everything. When you are given instruction by a police officer–this is not the time to argue or challenge unless your desire is to be incarcerated. Yes, there are exceptions–but judgement and good sense is everything…
11/29/2007 10:35 AM MST on Gazette.com
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lwirbel wrote:
Jwstrue, Eric has had The Bookman in the parade (and MLK parade, etc.) for several years’ running, usually has a sign about peace on the van, etc. He said something to J&P members a couple days beforehand, saying “Anyone want to be with the float?” Before that time, none of the peace groups had even thought about applying for the parade, whether or not they’d be allowed. The Justice and Peace Commission often has a float in the Christmas parade every year, allowed by the sponsors, usually with an alternative-energy theme, but no one ever thought of applying for some of these other parades.
11/29/2007 10:39 AM MST on Gazette.com
just1voice wrote:
Rambone, ignorance is bliss isnt? Why dont you check the app requirements for applying to be a cop before opening your mouth and making yourself look like more of an idiot. As for the State Trooper, he sure as anything could have made your day a whole lot worse by holding you and calling social services to come and collect your child. Dont think he had the right? Go and find out. Then you could sit here and complain about how he held you againt your will, kidnapped your child and made you look like even worse of a father than you probably are.
11/29/2007 10:41 AM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
jwstrue wrote:
Come on Rambone…that’s like saying because airplanes crash I have no respect for pilots and will never fly…you sound pretty libertarian to me. Perhaps you should relocate to a compound in Montana or Utah. Be careful, you may need these guys some day.
lwirbel, you may have the same problem as the protesters. There is a time and place for everything. Most folks, when instructed by a police officer to take some action, would comply and complain or challenge later. The only thing you will accomplish by direct rebellion is most likely incarceration. True, there are exceptions, but good sense and judgement apply here…
11/29/2007 10:44 AM MST on Gazette.com
just1voice wrote:
Here is the sad part of all of this. Hopefully everyone will live and learn. I guarentee you the parade organizer is amending his rules and regs and next he will not have this problem. I would imagine EVERY parade orgainizer is doing that so it is very unlikely that this “message of peace” they wanted to get out will not be seen again at any function like this. Why would you want someone hell bent on causing problems in your show anyway?
11/29/2007 10:44 AM MST on Gazette.com
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jwstrue wrote:
…sorry, didn’t mean to repeat myself–couldn’t see the first comments
11/29/2007 10:46 AM MST on Gazette.com
jtrione wrote:
(laughing) Some of these comments get so hilarious. Makes for entertaining reading. And, just to clarify JWS, CSAction and I are two different people. I would think our approaches to various topics and our facility with the language would distinguish us in several ways, but, alas, not clear enough.
I cannot comment definitively on the actions that day, as truthfully, I was not there. I do, however, know that the sentiment at the time which drove and continues to drive this debate was that from the early moments of the war, Colorado Springs and our illustrious police department were forever enshrined in history as “Thugs of Intolerance”. We, the citizenry, witnessed the teargassing of peaceful protesters early on in 2003 and made the nightly news across the country for same.
So, I could see why the perception, real or not, existed during this parade event. The message which seemed to come through loud and clear from city government and the police force was “How DARE you liberal freaks question the certitude of our celestially ordained Bush administration and its actions in the world ? We will use EVERY means legal and illegal to keep you silenced.” So, no, all the comments below that those on the right welcome free speech are, frankly, prevarication. Conservatives during this period fell into a mindset that they could shout down or silence any dissent as they claimed to have higher moral authority, e.g. Bill O’Reilly’s infuriating habit of cutting off the microphone of those who disagree. The Gazette’s infuriating habit of editing AP news stories during that time to remove any possible anti-war opinions.
Those who are intellectually HONEST cannot dispute that such a pervasive mentality existed in this country for the last six years. Given that framework, it is not difficult at all to see the anguish from the left at a system which tried strenuously to silence dissent. And, for those on the right who are unable, for a moment, to see the frustration from the left, then, I’m sorry, but you would have to be CLUELESS to forget the Cheney-isms where he called into question the patriotism of those who dared to dissent.
Dunno, gang, hopefully we’re moving in the right direction. Remember, the bulk of the blame for the lack of unanimity toward the war effort falls squarely at the feet of the Loser in Chief who was unable to make a cogent case for military action and failed miserably at being a leader. A “leader” is able to rally people to his cause, not just browbeat them into obeisance. So, yes, maybe these protesters broke the law. I haven’t a clue. But, if they did, don’t they answer to a higher moral authority than some law designed to stifle protests of the left ? I think so. jtrione@mac.com
11/29/2007 10:59 AM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
Thanks Jim for the clarification. I apologize, I was being sarcastic. For those who aren’t familiar, the distinction could be difficult because you both speak in dissertational formats and CS usually follows in support of your views…
Your comments are sometimes pretty hilarious as well…especially when the disdain for Christianity and the liberal arrogance shines through–all in good fun though.
11/29/2007 11:14 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Hey Jim, how are you today, I would never confuse you with csaction (I know everything) you have always been respectful to me and other. I think you are off base here on this issue. I for one question those in leadership who are against the war,why? for declares we have lost, meeting with out enemies and using those who hate us talking points as their own. Those in political power who support the peace movement have done everything in their power to ensure our solider will lose this war in order to win this next’s elections. I agree that Bush has made mistakes which war time president have not. Right now we have a chance to win this war but instead of backend our troops and giving them the funds and equipment need to fight this war the democrat’s want to withhold money in order to keep theses peace protester happy and to make sure that we do not win this war.
11/29/2007 11:28 AM MST on Gazette.com
pondfrogz wrote:
Wow, it appears I missed quite a conversation. Have a good day all and remember, there’s no problem that a six-pack and a good game on TV can’t cure. Just my meaningless comment of the day before tackling my fiancees chore list from $%*# on my day off.
11/29/2007 11:30 AM MST
turdman wrote:
Rambone-You are as lame as Tony Boy. Whine, Whine, I got stopped and I want to complain because I got caught and it isn’t fair.
11/29/2007 11:32 AM MST on Gazette.com
turdman wrote:
Bottom line in this case is the protestors are cowards. They protested and were legally arrested for violating the law. Then they all complained because they got arrested for again, breaking the law. Now they will sue the city because they believe their rights were violated. This group is really no better than the Westborough Baptist bunch. I hope next year they go to Denver to protest one of their events, so they can get what they really deserve.
11/29/2007 11:39 AM MST on Gazette.com
just1voice wrote:
Rambone dont flatter yourself. It would take a lot more than your couch commando comments to get under my skin. I never said your opinion made you those things. However, your lack of knowledge does. That and endangering your own child, setting a horrible example, and your running your mouth makes you a bad father. Whats wrong did I get under your skin?
No Im not one of them but I would give just about anything to watch you go one on one with the officer that you call “a pig”. Then you could teach you kids something useful, like how not to get your tail whipped.
11/29/2007 11:46 AM MST on Gazette.com
jtrione wrote:
Hey, Pastor Roy. Well, respectfully, I will disagree on some points. How do you equate “protesting” with “wanting to lose the war” ? That seems quite the logical leap to me. And, for the record, I have never taken a position on bringing the troops home early — I’m ex-military and understand the difficult role they are playing which does not fit nicely in “bumpersticker arguments” one way or the other. As one who has worn the uniform, I often cringe at some MoveOn.org statements and positions as shortsighted and limited. But, I realize that we on the left, have our normal centrists and our own “lunatic fringe”. We have to somehow work with both to craft a clear, cogent message.
I, personally, have never seen withdrawal from Iraq as a viable option and agree that a permanent presence of 50K per year is likely for the next few decades. As far as the failures of this administration (arguably in the running for the top five worst since the founding of the republic), there are not enough electrons to waste on these blogs. Yet, what seems more telling to me are the HUGE legions of right-wingers who, TO THIS DAY, support this guy. How many Bush-Cheney stickers do we STILL see on cars here ? It boggles the mind. All I know is that it certainly attaches a ‘stain’ to conservatism that will last for quite some time. For the next few decades, “conservative” will be automatically linked to the policies and actions of the Bush Administration. Nice albatross, guys, heavy enough for ya ?
And, PR, the point of this article was whether or not the protesters were in the right or not. Perhaps, they are reflective of a sentiment, wholly pervasive at the time, now weaning somewhat, that TO EVEN QUESTION the actions of the Bush-Cheney elite was somehow tantamount to disrespect for this nation. “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.” Who thinks in such puerile, oversimplistic absolutes ? Republicans, that’s who. C’mon, to impugn the patriotism of Senator Max Cleland ? Seriously, how do they look themselves in the mirror in the morning ?
(laughing) I recall a comment at some point during all this when a secular progressive was asked about the disdain toward conservatives, especially religious ones, phrased as “you don’t need them to just be wrong, you need them to be evil”. As wrongheaded and awful as that statement appears, I think it’s dead-on. Perhaps where we liberals lose our footing is when we become unable to see the folks on the other side of the table as loving, compassionate humans who happen to be a bit misguided in their beliefs in our opinion. Maybe if we on the left felt that those on the right were truly championing our rights to hold (in their view) misguided beliefs, then protest incidents like these would be few and far between. But, when we feel that the cards are “stacked against us” by those in power and their representatives (the police), it’s easy to see the animus. jtrione@mac.com
11/29/2007 11:59 AM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Can someone please explain to me what this has to do with art.
“Fake mug shots of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other White House officials are on display at the main branch of the New York City Public Library, and the exhibit has caused quite a commotion.
About six manipulated photographs of members of the Bush administration made to look like mug shots are lining one of the landmark building’s hallways, with each current and former official holding a D.C. police date-of-arrest placard bearing the date they made “incriminating” statements about the war in Iraq, The New York Daily News reported.”
This is an perfect example of what is wrong with the peace movement and those who are against the war.
They love to Forcing their views on people by saying it is one thing and doing something else.
What does this have to do with the above story. The answer is both enter something under a different idea or name, but when there their used it to express a political view.
11/29/2007 11:59 AM MST on Gazette.com
csaction wrote:
Well, the parade arrests are still a hot topic on the ole blog. Where to start? It’s an amazing amount of misinformation but more importantly the correlation to those that would summarily convict us is 100% with those that know nothing about the basic facts. Disagree all you want; you would be amazed at how much I disagree what what was done, but understand this: the neocon tactic of revisionist reality (war is peace) doesn’t work when you want to battle videotape and photos with ill-informed subjective opinions. The city prosecutor couldn’t make that work and neither can you kids.
Glad to see Lexi prove she was the MIA tractor gurlie. Thanx. Glad to see preacher roid make no sense as usual. So on a day of great vindication, I’m glad to see those that hate peace lose a small battle.
To address as much as I have time for: “”whining and complaining” does not defeat prosecutors in court, Evidence does.
Elizabeth and Eric were not “PICKED OFF THE STREET” but pulled off their feet by Paladino, who emmbarrassed the department in 2003 with the “Dairy Queen Dozen” arrests outside the city limits.
There was no lie on the permit. We were invited back after walking in the 2006 parade. No subterfuge, and O’Donnell said he had no problem with our message. The problem was with the lie he was told by the same person who lied to police about the permit. http://csaction.org/StPatsDay/Odonnell.html
David B, all 7 were “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” in fact the charges were changed twice to make it easier, but the city didn’t make it’s case, so hung jury, then dropped charges. Patty Kelly is right that the outcome would be the same or they would loose outright with another trial. She wrong that the jury just didn’t get it. They did, except for the wife of the defense contractor who should have been recused at the start.
There are larger community issues of how private is a function held in the middle of Tejon and subsidized 50% for the cost of police? For such “private” events, does the 1st amendment apply, or does a permit void the constitution? If the constitution is voided by “private” events, does that mean our permit the next day, for our 4th anniversary rally mean that we could ban people we don’t agree with from Acacia Park? (like we would want to) http://csaction.org/31807/31807.html
In the end, when we have become a total fascist state and have no rights left, (while the American equivalent of the Germans in 1938 sleep) you won’t be able to find anyone who will admit they fought those fighting for rights and peace just like you can’t find anyone who will admit they voted for niXXXon.
In the end, this is a great conversation for our city to have and any city in America, because we need to understand our system in it’s superiority and not get in the way of it’s progress in the world. The lack of understanding of how our constitution works is appalling, but this is progress.
I guess we’ll see all of you at the 5pm press conference in front of the courthouse?
11/29/2007 12:00 PM MST on Gazette.com
hmmmmm wrote:
For someone who complains about being lied about, you sure post a lot only when it comes to your ridiculous protest where your people broke the law and got treated accordingly. Your people refused police orders, were subsequently moved, forcibly as you left no other option, after your “old lady” asked several officers what it would take to get arrested, and then appropriately charged. Where is the mis-information in that csaction? Your people are not martyrs, not worthy of anything but contempt. A full video of the incident shows the truth, and as much of a spin as you put on this, your people are still wrong. Next time, don’t expect any nicer treatment when you pull the same stunt.
11/29/2007 12:06 PM MST on Gazette.com
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hmmmmm wrote:
Rambone, are you speaking from experience on the gangbang comment little guy? Sure sounds like it. Maybe the aggressive defense of the police is a direct result of your ridiculous aggressive contempt for them. You opinion is ignorant. Nice racist photo by the way, Mark Fuhrman is still in Idaho if you need a place to move to.
11/29/2007 12:09 PM MST on Gazette.com
coloradogirl wrote:
I am a true believer in that life is just not fair sometimes. Justice does not ALWAYS prevail. I don’t think this was a vindication, just an abandonment of justice in the best interest of the situation.
I applaud the City Attorney for “giving up” so to speak. It’s like arguing over a $700 couch in divorce proceedings. You spend twice that to the attorney’s arguing over it. In the end, it’s just not worth it and the bigger person has to give up. Just like in this situation. The City Attorney didn’t want to waste anymore money on such frugal matters.
I personally was a witness to the groups display at the parade and I’m just as disgusted now as I was then. I wish we could send the protesters over to Iraq and let them protest there. Now THAT would be worth watching….
11/29/2007 12:32 PM MST on Gazette.com
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hmmmmm wrote:
Been here 20+ years, have a BS in computer related fields. I did military work in communications and do this job to defend the good people of my city from people like you. If you like I can send you the links for “aggressive” and “defense” definitions in great big letters and really small words so you can understand.
11/29/2007 12:52 PM MST
turdman wrote:
Rambone-Come on dude just having a little fun! I am just shocked is all. I mean I have never heard a grown man whine like a school girl. If you keep pushing out that lower lip of yours when you pout, you should put some sunscreen on so you don’t get a sunburn.
Can we still be friends?
11/29/2007 12:59 PM MST on Gazette.com
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jeep4fun wrote:
If protestors wish to protest they should apply for a permit through the city as any march is required to. For protestors to ruin what should be a community event for the purpose of enjoyment is simply silly. I believe parade organizers have the right to prohibit those groups (which this was)who wish to disrupt parade proceedings. The police acted appropriately in this instance. I grow tired of seeing idiots place the police department in a bad light due to their poor choices and actions. If you wish to truly disrupt a community event then you have to pay the piper. If you disagree with a particular event or view, request a permit from the city for your own event, but let our citizens truly enjoy the parades provided without divisive and inciteful actions and messages
11/29/2007 12:59 PM MST on Gazette.com
turdman wrote:
Hey Rambone,
Since your not doing very well on this blog today, maybe you can go down to the Gazette Telegraph office and protest this blog. I mean really, we must be violating your rights in some way. Maybe CSACTION can go with you and video tape the whole event. He can can then edit out the truth and you two can have a local TV station air your story. Maybe a lawyer can take your case and you could win millions by suing us. Maybe an officer will drive by and you could sue the city as well.
Justice, isn’t it a beautiful thing.
11/29/2007 1:09 PM MST on Gazette.com
jtrione wrote:
So, Jeep4Fun, what I hear you saying is that some government functionary, probably a conservative Republican appointee, gets to decide who does or does not get to be included in an event for “our citizens” (your words)? Based on what set of criteria ? Who are those “special” citizens ? Thought we all had a right to peaceably assemble or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Where do you find justification to abridge those rights or place boundaries on them ? Remember, if not expressly enumerated, then those rights reside in the people. Not in you, dear friend, or in local laws designed to limit speech. Talk about “special rights”. 😉
11/29/2007 1:20 PM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
Great points coloradogirl and jeep4fun….
11/29/2007 1:24 PM MST on Gazette.com
lwirbel wrote:
Jeepforfun, what you describe is not what the Constitution intended freedom of speech to mean. There are limits to allowing a soapbox speaker to stand on private property and say something. However, Mike the anti-abortionist has every right to show big pictures of foetuses on public land outside the World Arena, and it doesn’t do any good to say,
“He’s disturbing me because I’m going to see an entertainment event, Cirque de Soleil or Lee Ann Rimes or whatever.” James Madison and those writing the Bill of Rights wanted to make sure that freedom of speech WAS in your face, did NOT require a permit, and was bound to be incendiary and controversial. That’s the only way to protect it. Otherwise, our nation would be a larger version of Singapore.
11/29/2007 1:36 PM MST on Gazette.com
justhefacts wrote:
jtrione- This is not a “free assembly” issue. O’Donnell owns the right to the parade which means, he can deny access if he chooses. If the protesors want to make fools of themselves they can do it from the curb which is protected by the Constitution.
11/29/2007 1:38 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Jim, I may be wrong, but my understanding on these parade, when you applied for permission to be in the event you must fill out paperwork with what type of display you are going to enter. So if this is the case can not the group in charge make it clear on their paperwork, what type of display is permitted and what type is not? So if this group next’s year make it clear to all involve what will be permitted and what will not be permitted, we may be able to avoide this problem next’s time.
11/29/2007 1:38 PM MST
csaction wrote:
Hmmm, if you are a cop, thank you for your service and sacrifice.
Now, post the video. No one on earth has sifted through this evidence more than I have and I know every second of video and every photo. The lawyers and cops don’t know this evidence better than I do. You don’t need to post 165 videos on YouTube like I have, just 1. The one that shows what you say it shows. Just 1 video. 1 photo. 1 piece of evidence. 1 thing to back up what you say. You all have the same burden of proof as I do, so pony up. http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=csaction
Factual correction: Elizabeth asked several officers to arrest her, AFTER being dragged, because she had already gotten the punishment (not by a jury of her peers) but from Paladino, and wanted the rest of her day in court. She knew enough about it to know she had no recourse for the thousands in medical costs without the system’s protection, which she insisted on. (not contempt for the system, but admiration)
Jeep, we followed all rules and got a permit. We paid for a permit the next day in the park, and decided NOT to have our protest rally for the 4th anniversary the same day as the parade, which would have gotten us much more exposure with the thousands downtown. We decided to do both the parade with the peace message, welcomed the year before, and then the protest the next day. (4th year) Separate things with separate intentions. Everyone didn’t participate in both.
We did not make the police look bad and I don’t think the department looks bad. I think we’ve lost the PR battle, not them, and people (other than here) are capable of seeing that a couple of cops going too far does not a department make. The rest did their jobs with respect and professionalism and garnered admiration from us all.
We deal with cops all the time, and for those old gray beards like em, we’re talking 40 years of activism. I admire police, have 1 in my family, 1 was arrested at the parade and 1 testified for us along with photo evidence. I respect the new chief, and I’m pissed about the budget cuts. The rogues hurt the force, the majority are a credit.
11/29/2007 1:41 PM MST on Gazette.com
jwstrue wrote:
Jim, this was a community event–someone has to be in charge or it wouldn’t be an “organized” event. Jeep4fun is merely stating those in charge should have discretionary authority when it comes to eliminating participants who are suspect. In addition this was not the time for an assembly, whether peaceful or not. Compare this to a recent public democratic debate when a heckler became disruptive–was the heckler allowed to remain in the debate audience?
Just the fact this group applied under a separate entity makes them suspicious from the start (my opinion). Some would view this as a sneaky attempt to disrupt the event by attempting to hide their identity from the start.
11/29/2007 1:41 PM MST on Gazette.com
jtrione wrote:
Pastor, Loring said it beautifully when he said that the Framers did not intend for anyone to limit speech. That person, authorizing a placard or not, is, by definition, infringing on the rights of free speech. O’Donnell’s claim that he could restrict displays of “social advocacy” during the parade is the problem. He does not retain any such right.
On public streets, the public can say whatever it wants, tasteful or otherwise. During PrideFest, would it be legal to restrict Phelps and his Westboro Lunatics from marching around with their tacky signs ? Of course not. Did the Nazis march in Skokie during the 70’s ? Heck ya. Freedom comes with a price tag that says “everything you see or hear may or may not offend your sensibilities”. Tough noogies. Deal with it. So, however misplaced an anti-war protest might be during a civic event, it is well within the purview of what the Framers intended. Period. Stylistically is that the best forum ? Well, that’s a question worthy of debate.
11/29/2007 1:46 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Iwirbel, this may shocked you and other but I am against those who do what do you call it “Mike the anti-abortionist has every right to show big pictures of foetuses on public land outside the World Arena, and it doesn’t do any good to say,” I believe this type of behavior does more wrong then good. I am against those who protest gay event with signs that use the f word or condemn them to hell, I am against those who hold signs calling our soldiers babe killer and such.
11/29/2007 1:55 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Jim are you telling me that if I show up for the Gay Pride event and want to march down the street with signs that say they need to repent. I have the right to do it and they must let me into the event? I am using this example to get an understand of what you are saying. I was always under the impression that the group in charge off the event has the right to say who can be involved with the event and who can not.
11/29/2007 2:02 PM MST on Gazette.com
justhefacts wrote:
CSACTION-I do not like what you stand for; however, your last post is the most honest thing you have written in a long time. I disagree with you on when Fineron poked and begged the officer to arrest her.
My point is this; The officers were there legally and had ever right to remove Fineron and others from the event. Just because she got dragged across the street does not make it excessive force. Refusing to leave the area after being ordered is a crime and the officers had every right to arrest them. If the city decides not prosecute that is their loss. Obvious the police dept agreed that there was no use of excessive force used by the officers because nobody got disciplined. We all know the police dept disciplines their own people.
The only good thing out of this whole incident is that none of these protestors will even disrupt the parade again. Thay will have to wait for another Palmer Park incident to spew their lies.
11/29/2007 2:03 PM MST on Gazette.com
csaction wrote:
The 2 issues are the heart of the matter. jtrione and lwirbel are correct. Follow the logic path. If the laws of the land don’t apply to a “private” function or property, then I can grow pot across the street from any school where I own property. Of course not. It’s illegal, and my private ownership does not circumvent the law.
Mr. O’Donnell gets the nonprofit (disputed) rate for police protection just like we did, the next day, in Acacia park. Half off. $25 per hour per cop, for 2 at a time, which is $50 per hour.
Acacia Park is public property, andthat designation does not change, when it is rented out for an alloted time. Anyone that disagrees with us about this war (and there are still some) can show up and protest our rally. They usually do. They are always offered water and respect. Our permit does NOT give us the right to say “the 1st amendment of the constitution does not apply for you today, so shut up”. (we, of course, would never even try that)
In the middle of Tejon, closed to the public traffic, for hours, with 46 police subsidized for thousands by the city through the tax payers, Mr. O’Donnell’s permit CANNOT allow him to do what I describe above.
Further, he cannot be allowed to apply his “new and improved” constitutional protections for free speech to ban a message of peace, BUT have military guards, political candidates, political parties, labor unions, and many other political issues raised at the same place at the same time.
I don’t think it’s difficult to see how far this would go if we were to allow it. You either understand the beauty of what the founding fathers did, or you don’t. You have to listen to me disagree with you. The Cost? I have to listen to you. (giggle) It’s a great burden some days, but the nation needs us all to be strong. LOL.
11/29/2007 2:06 PM MST on Gazette.com
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iraqwarvet wrote:
I love hearing people tell protestor how to protest. Like lexii, telling these people that they must protest a certain way. Or Pastor Roy using a totally different subject to illustrate what he means and making no sense. These are the same people who if they lived back in the 1950’s and 60’s would be hitting and beating the nicely dressed black men sitting at the lunch counters. Lexii tell the truth, you hate freedom? Please leave my country then. I defend the rights of all Americans, while you spit on the constitution.
11/29/2007 2:12 PM MST on Gazette.com
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justhefacts wrote:
Pastor-The event coordinator can prevent anybody they want from entering their parade, event or gathering as long as they have a permit to close the street. If the protestor’s wants to stand on the street corner and display signs they have the right to do so as long as they are not on private property or impeding veh or ped traffic. Westboro never entered any event, they just stood on the outside and protested.
11/29/2007 2:12 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
OK, If I am holding a parade and I want it to be all about St. Patrick’s Day . An I make it clear no political message permitted, how is that stopping some one’ s1st Admen tent, because I am sure next’s year and maybe the next’s parade in town this will be happen. Why? To ensure we do not have another problem like this.
11/29/2007 2:16 PM MST
iraqwarvet wrote:
Hey Pastor Roy, I’ll help you out. Next Friday night in Manitou Springs, Iraq Veterans Against the War will be putting on a concert at The Ancient Mariner. How about you come down there and walk around the place with your pro-war banners. And Pro-War doesn’t mean Pro-troop. Hold high your “Death to all who are not Christian, White, and American” sign. I promise not to kick you out. And so will all the active duty troops and veterans of this war that will be at the show. Deal?
11/29/2007 2:16 PM MST on Gazette.com
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jtrione wrote:
And, yes, Pastor, that’s exactly what I’m saying. You have the freedom to walk down Tejon during PrideFest wearing a giant A-frame sign quoting pithy silly verses from some retarded book of allegory talking about how all the other right-wing zealots want to create a permanent second-class citizen status for GLBT people. That’s your right, hon, and many have fought and died for you to exercise that freedom. You might get some perplexed looks, but more likely than not, you’d get propositioned or invited for drinks and a party. Tough noogies. Deal with it. Price of freedom sort of thing.
11/29/2007 2:19 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
pastor wrote:
Iragwarvet I reposted this just for you since I had a question for you.
pastor wrote:
No one want to silence the peace protesters right to speak, but we believe that there is a time and place for it. An most people believe that the St. Patrick’s Day parade was not the right time and place. Most people also seem to believe that if a cop asked you move you move you do not act like a baby. But I also must remind everyone that the peace protesters hand book, when the police ask you to move you drop an make a scene, so that it is caught on film, the reason is so you can make the police look like the bad guy.
Iragwarvet I have a question for you since you agree with the anti-war groups. Is it ok to block soldier return from the war? Is it ok to delay the soldier meeting with their family? Is it ok to destroy railroad tracks and stop the return of the military equipment from the war?
11/29/2007 8:56 AM MST on Gazette.com
11/29/2007 2:22 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Hey Pastor, I counted 15 anti-war, Anti-bush bumperstickers today just driving through post going from gate 20 to the car wash near the B-street entrance. You should probably call the Post Commander and bring an end to this. But DOD Directive 1344.10 says they can, you know why? Because their Americans.
11/29/2007 2:24 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Now Jim you last posting was an insult to me why did you have to act that way toward me. I do thank you for your stands .
11/29/2007 2:25 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Iragwarvet sorry that is my 20th year of marriage dinner to one of most wonderful women in the world. Also I was not the posting about the soldiers getting in trouble. Oh by the way my nices husband had someone put one on his truck at night and he was very upset about it.
11/29/2007 2:28 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Pastor Roy, again asking a black or white question. But, I’ll try to answer it for you. No, I don’t think its alright to block troops. So what now? What brillant thing do you have to say now?
Now I have a question for you, did you think black men trying to sit at a all white lunch counter in the late 50’s and early 60’s was a bad way to protest segregation or did they make a point? Maybe you should read Thoreau someday.
11/29/2007 2:30 PM MST on Gazette.com
justhefacts wrote:
CSACTION-Once again your mudding the water. Nobody is talking about your right to protest. You just can’t jump into a parade without permission. If the coordinator, holding the permit, decides they don’t want you to enter their parade they can exclude you from participation. If you choose to stand on the curb and spew then go for it.
If a war vet decided to get up on your stage during your permitted event in the park and take over the microphone he could be arrested. If you, the event coordinator, decided he was not welcome you have that right to exclude him.
Pretty simple stuff.
11/29/2007 2:30 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Okay Pastor Roy, since you can’t make it, I’ll invite you to our next tower guard. You can bring your sign then, and its fine with us. Since it would be a good change, only two people actually had a problem with us 2 weeks ago. Or atleast only two people had the balls to come down to Acacia Park and say something. Pastor do you have the balls?
11/29/2007 2:34 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Hey justthefacts, I’ll ask you the same question. Shouldn’t the black men in the 1950’s and 60’s been arrested for doing that illegal action of sitting at the white-only lunch counters? You probably think they should have been beating by the police and angry white men, right? Oh wait, thats what did happen…sound familiar?
11/29/2007 2:37 PM MST
justhefacts wrote:
Hey Pastor when you go to the show this weekend don’t forget your “Hillary in 08” poster.They probably wii have quite a few for rent there. You might be able to buy a Hillary shirt from them also.
11/29/2007 2:37 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
They were peace protester who say they have the right of free speech, and that blocked the soldiers coming back from Iraq from seeing their family. As one soldier was quotes as saying “ We all wanted to be the ones to remove these people from our post” These protester destroy the railroad tracks going into the base and the Dem. Governor and Dem. Mayor stopped the police from doing there job and removing these people.
11/29/2007 2:41 PM MST on Gazette.com
justhefacts wrote:
Pastor- Don’t forget your “Hillary in 08” poster when you go to Manitou this weekend. Bring money also, they will be selling Hillary and Bill shirts there.
11/29/2007 2:42 PM MST on Gazette.com
justhefacts wrote:
Vet-pick a fight with somebody else. Your comment has nothing to do with this blog.
11/29/2007 2:45 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
justthefacts, for your information since we are a 501(c)3 we don’t endorse any candidates, but personally I won’t vote for anyone who voted for this war. Please go read H.J. 114 from Oct. 12, 2002. Senator Clinton voted for it. Can’t do it. And none of us are Democrats. So try not to pigeon hole us
11/29/2007 2:46 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Pastor, I read the news. I know what your saying and I didn’t agree with their actions. So what else do you got?
11/29/2007 2:47 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Oh by the way I drove by the Guard tower that week and I counted about 15 people and that was including the homeless people hang out in the park. So yes I did go by, on both Sat and Sunday during the day and I counted about the same amount of people.
11/29/2007 2:48 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
justthefacts, haha! can’t answer the question so you run. You are sad.
11/29/2007 2:48 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
JusttheFacts, why don’t you just show up. Why do you have to get someone else to do your work? I don’t like Hillary and never voted for Bill. I don’t vote for people who use the military as nation-builders. Sound like a current President?
11/29/2007 2:51 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
Justefacts so much for peace love people inside the peace movement, I took it what he was trying to do was pick a fight with everyone who is against the peace movement, By trying to call us raciest.
11/29/2007 2:52 PM MST
pastor wrote:
Justefacts so much for peace love people inside the peace movement, I took it what he was trying to do was pick a fight with everyone who is against the peace movement, By trying to call us raciest.
11/29/2007 2:53 PM MST on Gazette.com
peanuts wrote:
So now it is politically correct to try people, WHAT AN INJUSTICE!
11/29/2007 2:53 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
JusttheFacts, my comment has nothing to do with this blog? What do you mean by that? Americans protested in the late 50’s and early 60’s by doing something illegal, if you know anything about history, black men sat at lunch-counters in the south which were labeled white-only. They were beaten by both the police and angry white men. It was illegal what these black men were doing. Their is some history for you, since obviously your still in grade school. Now, were the Black men back then justified for what they were doing, or should the white police and white men have continued doing what they were doing? Should the Black men have just been arrested?
11/29/2007 2:55 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
So that would leave FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. You would not vote for.
11/29/2007 2:57 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Pastor, I answered your question, why can’t you or justthefacts answer mine? I’m not saying your a racist, I’m just comparing the non-violent protests of the civil rights movement to what happened here on our streets of Colorado Springs, specifically what you people think is unjustifable behavior, since back then it was also considered unjustifiable behavior by the black men in the south. Whats your opinion?
11/29/2007 3:00 PM MST on Gazette.com
iraqwarvet wrote:
Pastor, again not black and white. I never said I’m anti-all wars. Just this one. Open your mind dude.
11/29/2007 3:02 PM MST on Gazette.com
rambone wrote:
hmmmmm wrote: “Been here 20+ years”
So this gives an implant like you the right to tell native born people like me were to go? I bet I got the California part right.
“BS in computer related fields”
I never heard of that degree. I that like,”I started but transfered when courses got tough”?
“defend the good people of my city from people like you”
Me, with no criminal record, military service, college educated? Yeah right, defend from people like me. Maybe what the people need is to be defended from rouge cops like you.
“for “aggressive” and “defense” definitions”
No thanks, but I would like the definition of the combined words. You know, the way you posted it earlier. Nothing over two syllables please, I don’t have all week for you to spell check.
11/29/2007 3:03 PM MST on Gazette.com
Recommend (1)
iraqwarvet wrote:
Oh yeah, Pastor, I’m only 35. I don’t really remember FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, or Nixon (even though I was two when he resigned).
11/29/2007 3:03 PM MST on Gazette.com
pastor wrote:
The issue is we have always been involved in nations building in one form or another.
11/29/2007 3:16 PM MST on Gazette.com
Dear John,
I’m sorry to have let you down in your efforts to negotiate a settlement with the city on the Saint Patrick’s Day affair. I have always valued your advice and I remain hopeful that the city will consider a reconciliation over this matter.
If it’s alright I’d like to explain my position relative to your proposed terms of a settlement offer to the City Council. I am absolutely in favor of foregoing any civil lawsuits, but this must be in exchange for an admission of wrongdoing on the part of the police department.
Why would the city or police department have to cling to the formality of denying culpability if there would no longer be a threat of a lawsuit? You’ve described that having the police attend a public discussion would be admission enough, but I fear that if I am so hard to convince, probably most of Colorado Springs will not grasp the subtlety either.
You may insist that the police department will never admit it conducted itself improperly. I say it must. Excessive force and reckless endangerment must be condemned.
As I’ve explained before, I have no interest in being awarded a public meeting only to give the police chief a forum to cross his arms and reiterate both that his men did nothing wrong and that firm policies are necessary when dealing with unpredictable crowds.
You also make the point that we cannot hope to reprimand Officer Paladino, owing to the strength of police union and the brevity of our police chief’s tenure, etc. The most we could hope for according to you would be to have an unspoken agreement that Paladino would not be assigned to protest or parade duty. Even that request you fear may out of the question. I say with all due respect, nonsense.
Officer Erwin Paladino was the direct instigator of our unnecessary arrests and the escalation of violence, Probably not by coincidence in 2003 he was also found to have acted outside his jurisdiction in the Dairy Queen arrests. Would it be enough to ban him from functions requiring crowd control? No! Paladino is on the New Hire Police Advisory Board. We must ensure that his dim regard for dialog and non-violence is not perpetuated with new officers.
What happened to my friends and I at the St Patrick’s Day parade should not have happened, and I fear that the repercussions may still be felt next year. As the city prosecutor persists in trying to justify the actions of its police, I have no alternative but to stand firm.
An expeditious settlement with the city might be better for public relations, but it does not address the need to assure the rights of citizens will be respected in the future.
Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of what is often described as America’s royal family, built his fortune by bootlegging whiskey during the Prohibition and rose to power by mob control of the unions.
Ill-gotten gains are credited by some for the fate of Joseph’s offspring: the “Kennedy Curse.” Son JFK, elected president, shot; son Bobbie, declaring candidacy, shot; son Ted suffers a car-crash which derails his political aspirations; son of eldest son dies in a 1999 plane crash.
While Christian America ponders whether curse or karma, another constituency retains a dogged skepticism about the official account of both assassinations. That the details are still shrouded in secrecy suggests that whoever gained by killing the Kennedys is still around, and is still powerful enough to intimidate accomplices.
A lesser celebrated 20th Century up and comer is la familia Bush. Prescott Bush made his money in oil and nefarious financial deals with Hitler, and with influential friends formulated the CIA in 1947. His son rose through the CIA to be president. His eldest grandson was appointed to the presidency and to infamy as well.
Deathbed confessions, among other evidence, have tied the CIA to the assassination of JFK. “Conspiracy Theories” link the grassy knoll to ex-Batistas to George H. W. Bush’s little Zapata offshore Anti-Castro operation. (Alex Jones recounts that in the CIA Bay of Pigs Operation, launched without Kennedy’s permission, one of the American ships had been renamed “Barbara II,” its namesake perhaps the Grumman Avenger “Barbara” which H. W. crash-landed in WWII.) In fact, FBI records place G. W. on the first plane to DC (from Dealey Plaza?)
Recent improved photo-analysis show several high-ranking CIA operatives present at the RFK assassination in 1968. I’ll leave Chappaquiddick and John John’s Martha’s Vineyard plane crash to future leaks and investigators.
In the meantime, John Hinckley Jr., attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan while Vice President Bush was next in line, was not just any mentally disturbed highly-suggestible boy, but the son of friend of Bush’s son Neil.
And how about those fixed elections of 2000 and 2004? Never mind whatever it was that happened on 9/11!
Is America more prepared to accept a Kennedy Curse, than the possibility that one family’s and a nation’s bad fortune might really have been blood spilled by Long Knives, one Fascist putsch after the next, until the burning of the Reichstag?
The Labour Party of Britain has changed nothing at all from Tony Blair under PM Gordon Brown, just as the Democratic Party has changed nothing 7 years into the Bush presidency. Both still are corporate creations masquerading as popular parties of the common folk.
The latest political scandal in Britain shows that ‘The Labour Party’ should actually be called The Property Developer Party.
In the US we really no longer have even the semblance of a Labor Movement, after its stagnant and corrupted leadership has spent decades after long decades monetarily supporting The Property Developer Party aka as The Corporate Trial Lawyer’s Party, etc. Union dues promoting corporate views, in short.
There is nothing democratic at all about The Democratic Party so this strategy of top down nothing (voting DP candidates) has led all of us into the dead end alley of total corporate control over ALL. We now hardly have a hint of what alternative direction would be like.
Because of this labour misleader co-option, all real organizing of the US Labor Movement will now have to be essentially a totally illegal activity if it is to have any chance to succeed at all, and American (and British workers, too) have gotten way too soft for this sort of battle. It was always the industrial workers that were the backbone for tough fights anyway, and much of that base has been ‘outsourced’ to outside the national borders of ‘The Homelands’. So what we have today, is a Labor Movement where Starbucks’ and Borders’ clerks make up some of the more militant sectors of the Anglo-Saxon working class. Oops!!! I hope I didn’t scare anybody with that word?… working class…
Liberals are now not from Labour, but are from the middle class, and worry about their food intake (healthy or not?), bowel movements (regular or not?), and image (polite or not?) while ‘protesting’. They are non-violent, turn the other cheek types, and not picket sign carriers walking the line subject to the company’s goons coming their way. Liberals now come more from churches than they do from blue collar jobs, so they are not going to bruise it out ‘violently’ witht he companies, as actually ultimately this has to be done again for progress to be made on class issues.
US Labor is now isolated,tasered, jailed, and sick (due to worsening health care and job conditions, worsening diet, and worsening ‘entertainment’ options). The only help for this sad situation might just have to come from workers in foreign countries actually standing up to the corporate goon squads (US military) we now, in America, consider absolutely normal to have all around us?
OK, that’s all I got to be said about Liberals and Labour… I gotta go shopping now! I got some coupons I need to use. Workers United For Good Coupons!
Forget Michael Moore. Forget all the other liberal/ Left movies out there, but go see Ratatouille. Rats to power!
The same director that directed the movie, The Incredibles, has made a movie where French rats once again come to power and overthrow elite snobbery and capitalistic trash to improve basic food consumption for the masses. Power to the rats, and rats to power!
The Soviet Union may have fallen, China is capitalist-roading it, but subversion is still alive. Maybe those rats that ‘infested’ that New York Taco Bell just a while back were merely trying to better the menu? Ratatouille!
Hillel, the US’s most prominent student Zionist group, is actively pushing for US intervention against and into Sudan. On their web site which passes itself off as progressive and green, you will not find any concern for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan. All these being countries currently being torn apart by US interventions into their affairs.
Instead, Hillel is all into encouraging the notion that US and British imperialism is a benign humanitarian thing for the peoples of Sudan to experience, just as so many other colonized and semi-colonized peoples have. Onward Christian and Jewish soldiers, I guess?
One local activist who is often times connected with the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission through his work at Springs Action Alliance, is now celebrating Hillel’s work over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There some students have erected a ‘shanty town’ to ‘call attention to Darfur’. Some of these folk were Hillel sutdents for sure.
The Springs Action Alliance’s most recent newsletter called our attention to this ‘shanty town’ constructed by a few students over at the UC at Boulder. This activist is concerned about Darfur. Good. He wanted us to know about this ‘shanty town’ build for us to try to get our support for intervention into Sudan.
I guess though that this individual has forgotten about the segregated shanty towns of White Apartheid South Africa that Zionist groups like Hillel enouraged Israel and the US to accept for decades? He, and other local liberal Darfur fetishists seemingly are blind to the allies they sometimes keep, it seems. They focus on Darfur alongside at many times a rather mixed crowd, Zionists included. These Zionists of today want us to forget about Apartheid shanty towns, and to think that Muslims are putting people into shanty towns instead of Christian Whites, or Jews.
These liberals that push us to become more concerned about Darfur don’t seem to understand that we already are concerned about the violence there. We don’t need Hillel to ‘inform’ us of the problem. We don’t need the Carter Center folk either. We, too, are concerned with all the dying that is going on in that region of Sudan.
We don’t need Zionist backed construction of fake ‘shanty towns’ at UC-Boulder to prompt our interest. We are against the continued bloodshed in that sad region of Sudan, Darfur, with or without Zionists and Israel pushing the issue.
Unlike the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian in the US, we don’t primarily hold the mainly Muslim government of Sudan to be alone responsible for the killing that has occurred there. We also don’t think that an increase in US-British govenrment directed intervention is the solution to what decades of British colonialism in the region has brought about.
More Imperial directed colonialism is not the solution to problems accruing from several centuries of European colonialism, even if it comes disguised as UN or African Union intervention instead of directly Brit and American.
Hillel and Darfur? How sweet their concern for Africa certainly is. It’s just not very sincere though. Instead, it’s little more than a propaganda tool they hope to use to gain support for more Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians off more of the Palestinian’s land.
Who are they really going to fool long term here? Their concern about any killing going on in Sudan is nothing more than a distracting device, to help keep people’s attention away from Israel’s own crimes committed with the help of the US government. If they want to worry about shanty towns, then worry some about those refugee camps both Israel and the US have created all over the Middle East. Until then, their concern about shanty towns in Sudan rings a little too false to me.
Immigrant workers are our allies, not our enemies is a talk given by Garrett Brown of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network that packs a lot of facts in it. One fact he mentions is that more than 1/2 of Mexicans are living on $3 or less a day income.
Do you really want to have the government tracking these immigrants down like they were mere dogs, and not human beings like you and your family are?
Also of note, is that 1 hour south of Douglas, Arizona, an American owned mine is out once again trying to destroy the miner’s union located there in a small Mexican town. The town where the mine is located is called Cananea, Sonora.
Below is some info about this, and once can also check out the film called Cananea, too, for some historical reference and background to this union struggle.
…………………………………
From: Garrett Brown (received today)
Dear Colleagues:
I am writing to see if anyone is, or knows of any, Spanish-speaking
occupational physician, occupational nurse or industrial hygienist who
would be available for a 4-day trip to Cananea, Mexico (just south of
the Arizona border) over the Columbus Day weekend (Oct. 5-8, 2007).
We are trying to put together a volunteer team, all expenses paid but
no fees, to conduct limited medical screenings and IH-related
interviews of some of the 1,300 copper miners who have been on strike
for 7 weeks against the giant Grupo Mexico conglomerate at the
historic Cananea mine where the 1910 Mexican Revolution began.
The key demands of the strike are over workplace health and safety,
and the decision of Grupo Mexico to close the miners company-paid
health clinic. Grupo Mexico has vowed to break the union in Cananea —
which would be a historic defeat — as well as impose its demands on
the workers. The strike is being strongly supported by the United
Steel Workers (USW) union in the United States in a heartening display
of international solidarity.
The goal of the US team, which will partner with Mexican health
workers in Cananea, will be document as thoroughly as possible in a
short time the health problems experienced by both retired and active
miners; and to collect information on the working conditions in the
Cananea facility. The medical team will conduct the medical
evaluations and the IH team will conduct interviews with the workers.
A report will be issued following the visit to provide information to
the public in both Mexico and the United States about the working
conditions that provoked the strike and the needs of the miners.
Further details of the timing (not completely confirmed at this
writing) will be available in the next several days.
If you — or anyone you know — are potentially available for this
emergency, short-term but very important project, please contact
Garrett Brown at gdbrown@igc.org
In solidarity,
Garrett Brown
Coordinator, Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network
The corporate propaganda machine has been working full blast to convince the public that worldwide children are doing better than ever before! Oh how much progress we are making so goes their chime. As usual, the UN is the fountain of this sort of idiotic ‘positive thinking’ passing itself off as real fact.
This of course goes entirely counter to what Americans know, but a lie, especially a statistical lie, repeated over and over sounds so convincing. Only 10,000,000 kids per year are dying before they reach 5 y/o? Oh how cheering, right? Instead of around 13,000,000 kids dying as in 1990, now they say only 10,000,000 per year die. We’re saving lives, oh yes!
Isn’t this sort of nonsense obscene? 1990 was the time of the dismantling of the social security network of the former Soviet Union. Living standards plummeted for several hundred million. What a base level to now start claiming that great strides in world public health are supposedly now being made. Sure they are….
This report is utter nonsense as it claims great strides are being made yet admits that half the developing world lives without any basic sanitation. And 1,000,000,000 of the world’s population lives on less than $1 per day. Does that seem like a world where solely 10,000,000 kids before age five are losing their lives unnecessarily? Common sense would dictate that that is a totally false and misleading measurement of the numbers.
Liars have so much money to spread their lies with. And those who try to counter the piles of propaganda have so little. Don’t buy such obvious bullshit saying that the world is getting better, when it obviously is not. Even if they repeat this sort of crap over and over and over….
Not only is it not getting better for children these days, we might not even have a world left for them in a generation or two. If we do, it might have hardly any wild animals left alive, and it is likely to be a planet where pollution causes disease everywhere for everybody.
Thank you United Nations for trying to pretend otherwise for the benefit of the super rich who want all to think the present world is just peachy keen. I would expect nothing less from such a US government controlled institution. That is the job of the UN… to massage, message, and manipulate. Save the children because certainly the UN is not going to be doing that by their constant cleanup operations in support of the Pentagon, and with their fudging and fiddling with statistics.
Do a Google image search for ACLU and you get an almost unanimous gaggle of hateful yahoos cursing the ACLU. You’d think the American Civil Liberties Union was made up of a bunch of commie traitors.
Come on! The ACLU defended Rush Limbaugh’s keeping his medical records from law enforcement officers eager to nail him on his Oxycontin Hillbilly Heroine habit. They defend the right of white supremacists and Nazis to march in public. What does the ACLU do which upsets you?!
The only people with a legitimate gripe against the ACLU are prickish totalitarians who do not want YOU to have claim to rights, arms or voice. You’re more afraid to retain your right to remain an American Idiot.
Maybe when environmentalists set their sights on NASCAR for setting a gas-guzzling, dick-centric bad example, the ACLU might be your best only hope.
When your teenager gets pregnant, and you want to force her to keep the baby to term, who’s going to keep social services from interfering with your authority? It’ll be the ACLU.
If you want to go on beating your wife or molesting your children, and value keeping it private from the police, you have the ACLU to thank.
I approached my fellow board members at the ACLU to add their organization’s name to the list of cosponsors of the upcoming PPJPC social event: Give Peace a Dance. They turned it down.
Do I bite my thumb at them?
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado Springs stands only for the civil liberties of Americans. Yes, this would exclude non-citizens, guest workers or refugees, not to mention world citizens. Where does this leave populations under American occupation, whose welfare is our responsibility according to the Geneva Conventions?
(Actually, the Bill of Rights applies to anyone on American soil, citizens and non-citizens. And laws of war dictate that such protections are also owed to people under occupation. I don’t care if you are not concerned about your fellow human beings, you’re bound by law to care for the victims of our war. Do you have any particular affinity for the principles of the ACLU in the first place?)
My colleagues’ rationale? The ACLU should not dilute their focus, nor offend their conservative base, by speaking up against war, in this casethe deprivation of rights of millions which illegal US actions have wrought.
If the Justice and Peace were to have any allies, to my mind the ACLU would be a likely candidate. Unfortunately the peace movement in Colorado Springs is not gathering momentum through the coordinate efforts of organizations. This city is still vastly overpopulated with people who may know the right thing to do, but who aren’t up to the task of doing it.
They are cowards. There will always be an excuse, won’t there? It’s hard to argue with a man who wants to run from the lion, but this isn’t about our own self-preservation is it? The only way to stop this lion is to keep marching. That is our only hope that it might someday stop attacking others. I don’t think it takes any courage to do the right thing. To do the wrong thing, for lack even of knowing what to do, is cowardice.
My efforts to persuade the ACLU were heavy handed and condescending, I wish I could have spoken otherwise. I called their excuses morally bankrupt. So why stop now? These do-gooders may be wrapped in the fog of Bush’s war, but they’re not stupid. They’re cowards.
I was very heartened to catch sight in the Indy of a local protest against KFC Kentucky Fried Cruelty, organized by PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I didn’t know there was an active chapter in Colorado Springs. I’ll try to be in contact.
Another friend wasn’t so excited. “Sometimes, he told me, I think PETA goes too far.” I had to agree.
But I’m convinced that sometimes you have to go TOO FAR. In fact I’m not sure we don’t ALWAYS have to go that far. And looking at our own efficacy, including that of PETA’s, perhaps we are not going FAR ENOUGH!
PETA is being maligned with the same character assassination used to sideline America’s unions. Labor too greedy, the corporate press told us. Fat cats and layabouts, wanting high wages for nothing, going TOO FAR. Never mind that the unions gave us every work regulation we enjoy today, the public believed the media slander. The multinationals and their media broke the power we had to bargain collectively. Globalization will finish the job. TOO FAR my foot.
Might I ask: what about the systemic dehumanization being pushed on us? When will you decide that what they’re doing goes TOO FAR? I’d love to see somebody watch a video capturing the mistreatment of animals by our food industry –brought to us through the great efforts of PETA– and recoil in horror at what they see. Let them decry THAT’S GOING TOO FAR!
I had tears of both laughter and sorrow in my eyes reading this lament by Bill Fletcher, a long time union radical, concerning the sad state the American labor unions have sunk to when they have to hire the homeless to picket for them. Actually, even worse is when they hire professional organizers to get whipped around the country from one organizing drive to the next, instead of local workers in the industry/ company trying to be organized? So why just point out the Carpenters Union alone for having lost its way?
And a note aside…. Me and a comrade doing antiwar street vigils together, out of desperation also began to playfully ponder the idea of doing the same. We knew that we’d never be able to get the already paid (why? I don’t know) staff of the Justice and Peace Commission to ever leave their enclosed walls and to publicly carry a sign against the war on a street corner. They can’t even get themselves together to drag themselves over to Toons Video to do such with the director of that group (and proprietor of that store), a whole 30 minutes, a Monday or two during the year. These ‘leaders’ seem to me, much like the ‘leaders’ of the Carpenters Union. Sedentary.
The homeless have more work ethic perhaps? And more sense of solidarity with their membership, than the ‘leaders’ over at the Justice and Peace pavilion. The Homeless for Peace! The Homeless for Unions! If we wait on the middle class radicals to get their act together, we’ll be waitin ’till Hell freeezes over. Tears…. Easier to hire the homeless than to get the ‘Peace’ crowd to do that work. Less aggravation, too!
A friend of mine is a restauranteur who by his own admission doesn’t know much about wine. Never the less his wine rep was bringing over a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem for some occasion. I asked my friend if he’d read up on Sauterne vintages, the better to appreciate it. He looked at me quizzically. I persisted, thinking something along the lines of Tom Wolfe’s Painted Word, that you had to know about the theory of abstract art to appreciate what you saw. I didn’t get far because my friend was attuned to the un-abstract measure of his customer’s palate. Did they taste a distinctive quality? That was enough. You don’t need a text to appreciate pre-abstract art. Epicure likewise is not abstract.
Many aspects of our lives have become experiences of abstract quality. We may not prefer a fashion, but are happy enough with it so long as we believe others like it. A designer label says what we want about us, regardless whether we have a say about it. Marketing goes a long way to produce our appreciation. When we use the product we feel ourselves in the commercial. For some beverages, I’m certain the commercial has become the product. We begin enjoying the Coke from the first cold beads of condensation on the can, through the Shtffk of cracking the pop tab, until it’s down our throat. Right then we all know Coke doesn’t satisfy our thirst, because we already want more. It satisfies our craving to inhabit the Coke world.
Sugar is not an acquired taste, but wanting to be a Pepper is. Breakfast cereal feeds a pathetic sweet tooth. Cheap beer and the new soft-liquors feed conditioned desires.
Not only is the processed food industry relying on its talent to taylor our appetite, it undermines our reliance on our own senses. If something is not advertised, can it be of value? Ice cream flavored of cookies ‘n cream isn’t good enough unless they are Oreo brand cookies. Toffee must be Heath Bars, peanut butter must be Reeses. Except for regional salsas or steak marinades, products fade from the supermarket shelves if nt cross branded with a national identity. This has become an easier feat for the big guys because they’ve conglomerated so many diverse products, from babies diapers to tobacco.
The brand name is now the critical ingredient which we all taste with our imagination, crafted by ceaseless ad campaigns. A product’s advertising is itself a stipend paid to the media companies to ensure a brand stays on the public palate. Remember Oh Henry? Somebody lapsed in their payment.
Now the powerhouse food corps are using the same manipulative method to plant doubt in the consumer’s mind about their own ability to judge taste. (I remember an subscription tag line for GQ magazine to this effect: You don’t know fashion, let GQ tell you.) How could what you think tastes good, have any bearing on what they tell you tastes good?
With health food the fearful conglomerates caution, how do you know it’s really organic? But isn’t that the same assumption I threw at my friend? It’s true with processed food, we can’t taste BGH or Mad Cow spinal matter, or protein additives necessarily. But other factors like refined sugars, fats, or chemical pesticides we can detect. In the produce department, it’s not just a matter of stickers that say “organic” or higher prices or more easily blemished fruit, it’s the taste. Organic produce tastes fuller, richer, more pleasing, more satisfying.
Our own natural sense of taste tells us whether we are enjoying it or not. No textbook, afficionado’s article, or 30 second commercial need tell us what we think of that apple. Or what we think of the non-stickered apple which tastes like the floor cleaner we thought they used in the supermarket. That isn’t the floor we were smelling, it was the apples. If it weren’t for the antiseptic packaging, the inert food content and the slick marketing directing our taste buds, we’d realize the whole supermarket smelled of Union Carbide and Monsanto.
Brent’s going to be taking all of his animated films on tour this fall! Here are the dates- more are being added- but this is the idea. We hope you can get out to one of these shows:
August 11- Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum
August 15- LA- The Silent Movie Theatre
August 16- Las Vegas
August 17- Phoenix- Modified Arts
Sept. 7- NYC- Rooftop Films (with The Quavers)
These are all with Sin Ropas playing a set of their songs and helping out on Brent’s films:
Sept. 18- Baltimore- Metro Gallery
Sept. 19- DC- Warehouse Next Door
Sept. 20- NYC- Knitting Factory
Sept. 21- Philadelphia
Sept. 22- Pittsburgh- SPACE Gallery
Sept. 24- Cleveland- Beachland Ballroom
Sept. 26- Athens, OH- Union Arts
Sept. 27- Columbus, OH-
Sept. 28- Indianapolis- Big Car
Sept. 29- Chicago- Gene Siskel Center- as part of the Empty Bottle and the UK music periodical the Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music Festival
Oct. 3- Memphis- Memphis Media Co-op
Oct. 5- Birmingham- The Bottle Tree
Oct. 6- Mobile, AL- Satori Sound
Oct. 8- Tallahassee, FL- The Atlantic
Oct. 10- Brooklyn, NY- BAM’s “Next Wave Festival” (just Brent solo performing Carlin live)
Oct. 11- Gainesville, FL- San Marco Theatre
Oct. 13- Knoxville, TN- The Pilot Light
Oct. 14- Asheville, NC- The Grey Eagle
I sat in the church pew absolutely shocked to be reminded how many times the word peace is mentioned at mass. I was struck mainly to think that American church-goers pay lip service to this word every weekend, year by year at war, and yet our military aggression persists without congregations raising their voices to protest. What kind of peace are they praying for? You know it of course, for peace at the barrel of a gun.
These churchgoers also listen every week to readings and homilies about religious virtues. What context is piety given in the midst of deliberate war and economic predation?
Last Sunday I was treated to the parable of the good Samaritan. Probably you know it, Jesus’ answer to how we should treat our neighbor. Jesus told of a man fallen victim to brigands, left for dead at the side of the road. A priest passed unmoved, so too a fellow Jew, crossing to the other side to avoid the man in need. Finally the Samaritan, an ethnic origin unchosen by God and held in general suspicion and disdain, interrupted his journey and the rest is history, well biblical history. The Samaritans might have been dog-fighting Nazi bastards every last one, until Jesus immortalized the hypothetical actions of one and now Samaritan is synonymous with good.
Today we hear the story about the traveller in need and think it’s a no brainer. We liken ourselves to natural Samaritans and can all but visualize our fellow parishioners lining up to help as readily as we queue for communion. But would that be true? Why were the original passersby so reluctant to help? I wondered if our priest sermonizing on the moral was prepared to explain his ancient colleague’s un-priestly callousness.
Perhaps the priest and the other unhelpful fellow formed a particular opinion about the denuded victim. Maybe he was thought to have been damn foolish or careless to have fallen victim to the bandits. What good does it do to help a person who doesn’t have sense enough to help himself? Give him money and it will likely flow directly to the next bandits on the trail. Perhaps that’s what the passersby were thinking. The Samaritan knew better, he knew that true compassion shows itself toward your enemy. Compassion toward your brother or compatriot is just teamsmanship. Real compassion is finding sympathy for someone unlike you out of kinship for all beings.
It’s certainly time to update the parable. How likely is it for any of us today to encounter a denuded mugging victim? Of course we’d be on board, but we’re never tested. What if, however, the victim is a welfare recipient beaten down by the system? Or a fat person on food stamps duped out of an understanding of health and self-preservation by predatory capitalism? What about a drunken derelict whose self-destructiveness is owed to some demon and now he’s likely to medicate himself to death and even rob you of more than your assistance to do it?
What if it’s a drug pusher or pimp or gang banger, who’s been given no other option? Perhaps a gambler who’ll throw away the last cent meant for his baby’s formula? Or perhaps a well-fed hag who runs a windowless bordello full of girls abducted from the countryside, she herself dying of cancer, a victim of tobacco brigands or chemical pollution robber barons? That person. Would you stop to help that person, as Jesus asks, as a good neighbor?
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Where is the war profiteering Center of Evil located in Colorado Springs? That is located at the well hidden away Lockheed complex at Fountain and Academy Blvd. You might be driving by it every day and not even have noticed the 3 groups of buildings in that area belonging to Lockheed.
Right down the road is the huge Satellite Hotel. There are other ‘defense’ companies located in the same area but easily missed by those driving by.
Poor Richard writes that his bookstore will neither carry the Ted Haggard expose nor host a book signing by its author Mike Jones, sex worker to reluctant habitue, Ted Haggard. Skorman can do what he wishes, but to say the reason is because the book is badly written is a cop out. Any bookseller in this city has to admit they carry a not inconsiderable mass of atrocious dreck. Bad books sell, and alas Richard’s stand for a higher literary standard is the first to my knowledge.
I think Jones’ choice of an incompetent writer to ghost his Haggard Days memoir is likely spot-on for a Colorado Springs audience. What’s the best selling book here? The home-grown LEFT BEHIND series! I guarantee you a fourth grader has not encountered less inspired writing.
Not that our city is atypical, even today’s NYT bestsellers play to a descending literary IQ. From Dan Brown to whoever is your cheesy favorite I’ve no doubt. This phenomena was clocked most distinctly when Stephen King was given the 2003 National Book Award for his contribution to [the sales of] American Letters. What a banner year it was, 2003.
So why pick on poor male escort Mike Jones? I think it’s pure political cowardice. The New Life Crew and their fallen gay-bashing leader have done irreparable harm to the progress of acceptance of homosexuals. Here’s a chance to teach them something about from where comes their misplaced hatred, and Mike Jones stands without allies to do it. Jones is not an opportunist, he’s a hero doing a dirty job. Maybe the right man for the dirty job, to crack a cheap joke, but if Jones was truly out for himself, he’d have taken a mega-fortune from a conglomeration of fundie gay-hating institutions interested in keeping Haggard in the pulpit. Remember Bill O’Reilly’s non-consensual phone-sex while penetrating himself with a lifelike vibrating phallus? He and Fox paid an undisclosed fraction of a BILLION to make that story go away.
If I knew THE BOOKMAN could handle the heat of accusations that we were only doing it for the attention –we’ve exceeded our limit, thank you KVOR creeps particularly– my bookstore would of course host this reading and book signing. And I commend Jones for tastefully steering past whatever might have been the unwelcome lascivious play by play.
I believe the Ted Haggard comeuppance is of capital importance for Colorado Springs, not to gloat about Haggard’s suffering or about the humiliation of his flock, but to lift the veil from their self-hatred of homosexuals. Haggard is unrepentant about this by the way, and if I might offer a simplified analysis, he hates gays because he hates himself. What reason has he the temerity to suggest that we should hate them?
Let’s welcome Mike Jones to our town. Jones unmasked the Haggard hate monster, let him claim the lair. Jones can satiate our curiosity, feed the spectacle, accept our thanks for showing personal integrity, and move this story along. I most certainly think it took a lot of bravery for Mike Jones to do what he did. He showed the kind of courage we can’t even summon, as we deliberate about whether to extend him our hand.
Perhaps as a community of independent booksellers we can do it. Why ever are we afraid of the religious right? They don’t buy our books. When Christians do buy a book they buy it new from an Inspirational Bookstore, because it feels like a more deliberate investment in their faith, I’ve heard it explained, sort of like paying down on a tithe or Indulgence.
Do I fear the Fundamentalist wrath? If they’re under-educated, under-literate, bigoted ditto-heads, of course I do. I fear them like I would Brown Shirts or union busters. Fundamentalist have a terrible tradition for that kind of immorality. Ask anyone in retail, if a customer declares themselves to be a Christian, you actually have to watch them closely because experience has shown they are more likely to try to steal or cheat. Probably because that’s the sort of conflicted person who is drawn to simplistic religious dogma in the first place.
Of course I fear them. But Ted Haggard’s fall must not go without every spotlight we can summon. He’s still behaving like a bastard and we really should shout him down. Jones has given us Haggard’s Achilles Heinie/ [Meth]Habit, let’s use it! If no one is really going to step up to ask Mike Jones to town, I most certainly will. I’m sorry I came late to this discussion but good grief!
There is little news in the US press about it, but Mexico is beginning to sink into chaos. After stealing the Mexican federal presidential election in mid 2006 with US support, Felipe Calderon (FeCal), now acting president, began a struggle to obtain some public legitimacy by initiating a war with Mexico’s drug lords. He is now losing that war.
Of even more potential interest to the Mexican public as well as to the international public, is a split forming in the Mexican political establishment, exemplified by a new book by long time PRI leader, Roberto Madrazo entitled ‘La Traicion’ (The Betrayal). Madrazo book claims that Mexico was betrayed, as well as himself, by a secret pact made between previous Mexican presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. He dates that secret pact as having begun in 1994.
The essence of that pact was to seemingly end the over a half century dictatorship of one party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, and to begin a planned-on ‘alternancia’, where political power would alternate between the PRI and PAN kind of like it does in the US between the Democratic and Republican parties. Except the pact was actually broken when Felipe Calderon followed Vicente Fox into presidential office, since both are from the same political party. Madrazo knows about this secret plot well, since he was a full participant to it when it was initiated. But he thought that it would guarantee him the presidency in 2006. Instead, he came in third, hence the ‘betrayal’.
But what political forces actually launched this secret plot? Roberto Madrazo dates this well and it is easy to follow the money. He dates the plot as beginning in 1994 and it was in precisely the time that the Clinton Administration and Mexican PRI government were negotiating an economic ‘bailout’ to stop the Mexican economic crash of that time. In 1995, the cash began to flow to the tune of over $55 billion dollars from the US into Mexico. What was purchased by the US government?
The US was sick of having ties to a corrupt Mexican dictatorship that had no world legitimacy. The European Union was formed as an economic bloc, but the US only had Mexico and Canada to work with, and Mexico had a most unsavory reputation. What was purchased by the bailout was an agreement to open up the Mexican system to another pro-big business political party, the Partido Acion Nacional or PAN. That way, the US would not be seen as dealing with a dictatorship.
The PRI establishment wanted some guarantees as to their future though, and Roberto Madrazo wanted the 2006 presidency to come back to himself. Well it simply didn’t, as change began to spin out of control of the PRI bigwigs in charge up to that time of all that was Mexico.
So where will the political chaos brake at? A lot will depend on what happens in the war of Mafias now engulfing Mexico. Presidente FeCal (Felipe Calderon) thought he had the best armed and best situated mafia. Perhaps not? Like Colombia, Mexico might now best be considered an evolving Narco-Death Squad state. Lots of dealing and wheeling gone bad. And FeCal as well as Roberto Madrazo may well fall to the wayside.
In March of 2003, as an invasion of Iraq loomed ever imminent, citizens of 800 cities worldwide mounted the largest peace rally in history. In Colorado Springs three thousand people assembled in Palmer Park to urge President Bush to chose diplomacy instead of war. The participants were peaceful, but the police incited frustrations by diverting traffic from Academy Boulevard which prevented drivers from seeing the anti-war banners and eventually used tear gas to prompt the crowd to disperse.
Colorado Springs was one of only two peace rallies in the world where police used tear gas that day. Many Springs families with small children were caught with no way to escape the gas. After a subsequent review, the CSPD admitted it had overreacted. As part of a legal settlement with the people they had arrested, the department agreed to host a public meeting to discuss matters of police conduct with respect to a citizen’s right to assemble peacefully. The meeting would involve a panel discussion on the issues and would be videotaped for public broadcast and for purposes of training incoming police officers. After four years of legal wrangling, the meeting is finally scheduled to happen this Friday, May 4th, at the Senior Center on Hancock and Uintah.
What an unfortunate coincidence that the arrests this Saint Patrick’s Day happened before Friday’s citizen-police meeting. As we are now well familiar, on March 17 at the annual parade, forty five permit-holding participants were prevented from carrying peace banners in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Ten of them were brutally removed and seven of those were arrested; I was among them. The police and parade organizers still admit no wrongdoing, but bystander videos and photographs captured the police display of excessive force.
In the aftermath of the arrests, the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission has asked the Colorado Springs City Council to hold a public meeting to address police department policy with regard to what happened that day. As yet they’ve only agreed to meet in private, to acquaint themselves better with peace activists.
While we welcome a better acquaintance, the PPJPC is not interested in obtaining a permission slip to exercise our right to self expression. We are interested in every American’s natural rights and civil liberties. We hope to establish an understanding that our city police department will implement a policy to honor and respect those rights. For that purpose we are requesting a public meeting where Colorado Springs residents who were alarmed by the heavy handed law enforcement can voice concern and give their input. The meeting on Friday will only address the police misconduct of 2003.
The Saint Paddy’s Day Seven, as we are being called, currently face charges in Municipal Court for obstructing a public event. The American Civil Liberties Union has agreed to represent us because at play are violations of multiple amendment rights. The police use of illegal choke holds, menacing with a taser and reckless brutality causing physical injury fall under illegal search and seizure and citizenship rights.
We are called called the Seven but in reality we are the Saint Patrick’s Day Forty Five, because forty five of us were deprived our first amendment right to freedom of speech. The parade is described as a private event, but it is held on public property and is underwritten with public resources. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
We are called the Saint Patrick’s Day Seven, but we are in reality the Saint Patrick’s Day Forty Thousand, who saw that day the attempted abridgment of a fundamental American right. A right which Americans aspire to extend to all people of all nations. Many of us watching that day had no idea we would have to fight for that right here.
Reports are that 150,000 in Chicago marched for a Just Immigration Reform and an end to the government raids launched in the last year by the Bush Administration. That one was a huge demonstration by any standards. The march and rally I went to in Denver had somewhere between 8,000 to 10,000 participants by my estimate, and started off very spirited.
The march route was way too long, though, as it wrapped from Lincoln Park to Cuernavaca Park, and that ultimately made the march a somewhat grueling experience for many participants. Overall though, it boasted the sprits of most of the marchers to come together in the streets in such large numbers.
May Day 2007 has to be counted as a big success as many have become quite demoralized by the Immigration Raids like the one in Greeley, Colorado at the Swift plant there. The numbers showed that despite all the obstacles that now confront immigrants, they still have the ability to mobilize huge numbers of people and that these workers make a huge impact on the US economy. Without continual immigrant labor, the US economy would collapse and come to a standstill.
How sad though to see, that native American workers of non-Hispanic background seem to no longer mobilize themselves much for any defense of their rights. It would have been much better for the Colorado unions to have participated in the May Day rally held by the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. They should be ashamed that they did not. ‘Workers United Will Never Be Defeated’, but the Colorado labor movement played dead at this May Day. Shame on you, Denver Unions!
Congratulations go out to the ‘Save Darfur’ community of liberals. How pleased you have to be now. Your campaign to send US troops and US directed troops to intervene in the affairs of yet another nation are now bearing fruit, and the Bush Adminstration is now mobilizing itself with Democrats to invade yet another country, that country being Sudan. Oh for sure you never called it a ‘Send in the Troops campaign’, but called it a ‘Stop the Genocide’ campaign instead. How clever! How so ever decent of you.
Funny though that genocide was never used to describe what happened (and still probably is happening) in the Congo, and not once did I hear you sweethearts call for a campaign to stop the US GENOCIDE in Iraq. Since 1991 the US has killed several million Iraqis through war and economic sanctions, yet somehow that never sparked your indignation and labelling of the US as a genocide perpetrator? Why not? Instead you call upon the genocidal US forces to ‘save’ others, all located far outside US borders. How very bizarre. I just don’t get it? Are you liberals total numbskulls. or what?
Yesterday John Negroponte, Ronald Reagan’s master architect of screwing up Central America during the ’80s, was in North Africa threatening US military intervention into Sudan. Joseph Biden, a leading Democratic Party hack, is also calling for US troops to be sent in. Anbd unbelievably in this context, many liberals ac`tually are holding a week of rallies around the planet in 2 weeks to rally support to this cause! Two weeks from Sunday there is one to be held in Denver, and liberals lost in fantasy land here in Colorado Springs also plan to attend the rally! How about using some of that gray matter in your skulls and reconsider what you are actually mobilizing for?
I will be attending this rally, too, with signs calling for the US to get out of Africa, not into it. What a radical concept, ay? I will have signs calling for the US to get out of Somalia, and calling for the US to terminate its new military African command center called, AFRICOM. We need to be calling for the demobilization of US controlled military forces, not calling for further extension of their warfare. Activists working for US and European intervention into Darfur are doing the absolute worst thing possible at this time when they should actually be working to pull US troops out of Iraq instead. Stop getting yourselves lost in space, Space Cadets! If you are against genocide, then at least educate yourselves enough to know which countries perpetrate it. The US would be at the top of the list, FYI.
Liberals sometimes just seem to be totally living in a fantasy world. Just this week I was at a Justice and Peace event where the speaker was actually praising the United Nations! How ass backwards is that? The US controls the UN Security Council and has these military forces doing its dirty work around the globe. The UN is now a thoroughly controlled and thoroughly reaccionary force everwhere. It specializes in mop up operations for the Pentagon, from the Balkans to Haiti to Iraq and Afghanistan. It will be a blissful day in heaven when liberals in the US can begin to put 2 plus 2 together and begin to differentiate reality from their fantasies some little bit. Praising the UN and/ or calling for African Union troops, NATO troops, and UN troops to intervene in places like Sudan is not a move towards world peace and an end to conflict, but are words and actions that will just help increase US military interventionism everywhere.
US OUT OF AFRICA NOW, not into it! Nobody likes the mass deaths inside Africa and that’s why we need the imperialists out, and not in. Demonstrate to withdraw US forces now. Get the US Out of all the foreign places where they are now repressing the world’s peoples. Our government has absolutely no progressive role to play in world politics until we can radically alter it. Since we are not even close to doing that at this point, the call for troops to be used elsewhere is about as backwards as liberal Democrats can be. You should be trying to demobize the military-industrial complex, not use it abroad! Get with the program, Liberals. And I’m not talking about getting with the Bush program for Africa, as you are currently doing.
For what unearthly reason has the Canadian government sent its troops to occupy Afghanistan? These are tag along American-led imperialist troops not defending Canadian national interests in the least. One wonders how Canada has any national pride at all these days, when that country’s citizens allow their government to be led by the nose into these stupid imperial occupations of other countries, all directed by the Pentagon in Washington D.C. This Easter Day, the Canadians lost 7 of their young people there, while serving their US masters.
Similarly, the British government is secretly planning to stay in Iraq for 5 more years according to reports, and the European Union is being besmirched by having cooperated with US crimes against humanity now taking place in Mogadishu, Somalia, and in the hidden torture cells the US is running for prisoners taken captive in that country.
Shame on all you ‘poodle’ countries for letting Bush misguide you into being involved in our government’s war crimes and torture. Rebel, and we in America will certainly follow your example, though belatedly for sure. The whole world is involved in the US government’s terrorism at this point, and only the whole world together can stop it.
US out of Somalia! US out of Afghanistan! US out of Pakistan! US out of Iraq!
End the US government torture and its terrorism worldwide!
Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of what is often described as America’s royal family, built his fortune by bootlegging whiskey during the Prohibition and rose to power by mob control of the unions.
I approached my fellow board members at the ACLU to add their organization’s name to the list of cosponsors of the upcoming PPJPC social event: 
I was very heartened to catch sight in the Indy of a local protest against 
Poor Richard writes that his bookstore will neither carry the Ted Haggard expose nor host a book signing by its author Mike Jones, sex worker to reluctant habitue, Ted Haggard. Skorman can do what he wishes, but to say the reason is because the book is badly written is a cop out. Any bookseller in this city has to admit they carry a not inconsiderable mass of atrocious dreck. Bad books sell, and alas Richard’s stand for a higher literary standard is the first to my knowledge.