Motley Moose – Archive

It is emblematic of the hyperpartisanship which has our country in a stranglehold that the president has to remind people that the humanitarian crisis on the border is not theater. But apparently, no crisis or incident (BENGHAZIII!), can be addressed without first dousing the follicles set ablaze by the media and their need to fill air time and print to satisfy the 10-minute news cycle.

From NBC News

President Barack Obama on Wednesday said he is not visiting the U.S. border while in Texas because he is “not interested in photo-ops” and urged Congress to approve funding to deal with the surge of minors illegally streaming into the country.

“There is nothing that is taking place down there that I am not intimately aware of and briefed on,” Obama said. “This isn’t theater, this is a problem. I’m not interested in photo ops.”

Obama met with local politicians and religious leaders in Dallas, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to discuss the influx of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border. The White House has asked for $3.7 billion to deal with the crisis, a request that has been panned by some Republicans who say the president’s policies are to blame for migrant children believing they can stay in the country illegally.

Pardon me, the president’s policies??? The Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill that reflected the president’s policies and which would have helped mitigate this crisis, including some of the money that is now part of an emergency request. But the Republican House of Representatives would not take up the bill because they knew it would pass and that would enrage the nativist wing of the increasingly wingnutty Republican Party. And it is more important to keep their base frothing for the mid-term elections than to solve problems.

Seriously, we should be pissed and in the streets.  Have we just decided to accept whatever crumbs are handed to us?  Have we become so fearful that we take whatever our employers decide to give us?  The 99% by definition outnumbers the 1%; they may have more money and, as a consequence, more power but we have the numbers.  We do have the ability to affect how the we are treated if we’d just get UP!

As we celebrate 150 years of protecting Yosemite National Park, we have to look closer at how it became ours in the first place.

The name itself — Yosemite — is a slur. It is a Miwok word that means “Those Who Kill.” Sometimes it’s translated as “Some of Them Are Killers,” and it refers to the Ahwanhee people who’d lived in the valley for centuries before the US government ordered its evacuation and later created a national recreation area under the Yosemite Grant Act. But the people who lived there weren’t killers. They just lived in a valley that our government wanted to use for entertaining dignitaries.

That is the untold story of Yosemite National Park.  

One of the things that for me is disheartening is the lack of national attention being focused on the Moral Mondays grass-roots fusion movement that is growing throughout the south.

We cannot depend on the Traditional Media (TM) to carry the message. While TM sources are willing to pay tribute to civil rights history events, and commemorations for fallen martyrs, they are far less apt to give headlines to, and follow the groundswell of support for the pushback against Republican repression of voting rights and civil rights.

We have the responsibility to do the work carrying the message, using our social media – email, facebook, twitter, tumblr, you tube and on blogs.

It is not a matter of the information being unavailable.  

I can’t begin to tell you how many political people I know who failed to learn about the 80,000 plus people who went to Raleigh and marched back in February.

At that time, the Freedom Summer 2014 organizing was announced.  Well – that time is here – Now.  

In trying to make sense of The Way Things Are in a post-Hobby Lobby world, it is important to peel away the layers and understand what the Hobby Lobby ruling is and, more importantly, what it isn’t.

The Supreme Court ruled that a closely-held corporation can avoid paying for health insurance that covers contraceptive options if the belief about how those methods work offends the religious feelings of the majority stockholders.

Yes, the ruling is a direct assault on common sense in its attempt to assign freedom of religious expression to a corporation.

Yes, the ruling is science-denialism writ large.

Yes, it is a poke in the eye to the separation of powers: where a law passed by Congress and signed by the president can be, not merely ruled unconstitutional, but hacked up and rewritten by a court.

And, it is likely a specific poke in the eye to President Barack Obama who the right wing has become completely unhinged over to the point that they want to nullify the results of two presidential elections and three congressional elections.

What it really is: complete and utter disrespect for women.

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in “Cheers & Jeers”.

OK, you’ve been warned – here is this week’s tomfoolery material that I posted.

Six Jews in custody and two Palestinians on the lam are child murderers. They committed their actions with the intent to inflame and incite and destroy. They knew the responses that would come from their actions. They knew that others would fight and die. They knew that children in Sderot and Gaza would find themselves ducking for cover. They knew that the consequences of their actions would be far beyond the four innocent lives taken by their own hands.

I am a passionate Zionist. 2,000 years of the history of my people have taught me one thing: We cannot trust our safety to others. The only way that we can be safe is to have our own country. Exiles and expulsions and forced conversions and blood libels and claims of deicide and pogroms and finally the Holocaust have taught us this lesson. A world without Israel is one that is not safe for the Jewish People.

It is folly to say that because of the actions of the six people an entire nation is to be condemned. It is folly to say that because certain current leaders are not ideal an entire nation is to be condemned. By that measure each and every nation in this world is to be condemned. The United States for what happened here during the Civil Rights Era; Israel for the murder of an innocent teen; the Palestinians never to have a state for the murder of three boys. The application of such logic is absolute madness.

The only logical solution is two states for two peoples. That, however, is a discussion for another day. Right now, I want to keep focus on the immediate issue – the child murderers that have started and sustained the current violence.

I do not care what their nationality or their ethnicity or their religion is. They have deliberately murdered children and they have done so with the absolute worst of intentions for they see these murders as a beginning. They wish to provoke exactly what has occurred. They have the blood of all those innocents that will be killed and injured on their hands. It does not matter who started it, for they all share in continuing the cycle of violence.

We all breathe the same air and we all bleed the same red blood. In the cases of these murders they have the same necks that will break and the same spinal cords that will sever. Yes, it is harsh, but this is exactly the punishment that all these child murderers deserve. Let them hang from the same gallows at the same time. Their crimes are the same side of the same coin and they deserve the same punishment. The world will be a much better place without the presence of such monsters (And for those of you that are anti-death penalty, I would be okay with a sentence of life without parole and a promise that they would never be released, including as part of any kind of prisoner exchange).

Welcome to The Moose Pond, where seldom is heard a discouraging word … wait … that’s The Range. Sometimes a discouraging word is heard at the pond but it is mostly words about the weather. 🙂

The morning herd check-in has been a daily open thread posted to give the moose a place to visit with each other and to build community.

This series has been running non-stop since January 5, 2013 and I am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to meet new people, reconnect with old friends, and chatter about odd bits of news. I hope others feel the same way.

The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama commemorated Independence Day by noting the contributions and sacrifices from individuals throughout the history of this country — from our Founding Fathers, to the men and women in our military serving at home and abroad.