Archive for History
A Fundmental Right
Posted by: | CommentsTed Olson takes Fox News’ Chris Wallace to school. Watch. Learn.
August 6th, 1945
Posted by: | CommentsToday marks the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima which killed,
within the first 2 months after detonation, 160,000 people with nearly half that number dying within the first day. It marked the first time an atomic blast was used against human beings ; the second happening 3 days later on August 9th.
Catastrophe and Social Change*
Posted by: | CommentsSo now that the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is over and we are onto more important things like hot Russian spy on spy action I would like to take a few moments to reflect back on what we learned from this most recent spill. Other than the fact that most sea birds and fish are not, unfortunately, oil resistant not much. Sure it made great television for a few weeks, lots of attractive news correspondents furthered their careers (I am assuming this, I don’t actually have a TV), We all felt that special bond that only comes from ritually and communally tarring, feathering and then executing some BP executives. We had boycotts and vigils, people cutting their hair and mailing it to the Gulf. We had outrage and then more outrage, conspiracy theories and a glimpse into the corrupt world of our fabulous corporate suzerains government. But other than that what did we have? Oh, we also had suspension of 1st amendment rights, but really the 1st amendment is quaint, and was always a bit overrated.
California Celebrates Cesar Chavez Day
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March 31st marks Cesar Chavez Day in California. State offices are closed.
“When California in 2000 became the first of eight states to declare March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day, the goal was to connect the honor with a curriculum that would educate students about Chavez. Yet ten years later, it is clear that young Californians know little about Cesar Chavez, and that those raised outside the West Coast and Southwest know even less. Millions of Americans even think Barack Obama invented the ‘Yes We Can’ rallying cry, unaware of its roots in the UFW’s ‘Si Se Puede.’â€
Read more here from Randy Shaw, author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
Who Remembers George Santayana Anyway?
Posted by: | CommentsOr Reagan, Bush (I & II), Clinton, Heritage, Cato, Hudson, Manhattan, and Gramm–Leach–Bliley, for that matter?
From this morning’s Washington Post:
The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation’s growth.
It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism — there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
That pretty much sums it up. Nothing that WNC can’t solve by building a few more hotels and McMansions. That’s worked out pretty well so far, hasn’t it?
Top Thirteen Local Political Stories of 2009
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Pic lifted from Jason Sandford
With all these Top Ten lists floating around the internets, I thought I’d toss another reflective log on the fire. Add your own top stories in the comments, and you get bonus points if you put together a Top Ten Local Political Stories of the Decade.
Buncombe County Commissioners and Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce come out in support of I-26 Alternative 3. After the strong design work from the Asheville Design Center and unanimous support from the City Council, it looked like our community might move the mighty DOT to create something that actually works for Asheville. When the CoC and 3 of 5 County Commissioners swung in the direction of Alternative 3, further delay was guaranteed.
See the rest in ReadMoreLand…Â Â Â Read More→
The Anacreontic Song
Posted by: | Comments[Editor's Note: this entry originally appeared here on 7/4/2007, and was written by one of our former contributors who gave us permission to run it once again. It's one of my personal favorites - Admin Hooligan]
(This post has a soundtrack too – “Our National Anthem”, by Negativland, from 1993′s Free album. Click the player below to hear it.)
When someone says the word “America”, chances are that one of the things that comes to mind is The Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem. Its notoriously difficult melody has been known to bring even the most talented singers to their knees. There have been some very memorable and moving performances of it (Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, Whitney Houston at Super Bowl XXV in 1991, even Jimi Hendrix’ interpretation at Woodstock) and, well, some not so memorable (Roseanne Barr and Hillary Clinton certainly come to mind, not to mention every third-rate pop and R&B singer who have this strange tendency to perform it with ridiculous amounts of melisma, and if I can find a clip of Pat Buchanan singing “God Bless America” – “from the vountins, to the fairies” – from a few years ago, I’ll link to that too for good measure).
A lot of people don’t realize that it was originally written as a drinking song! More info below the jump.
Read More→
Liveblogging the Dawning of a New Era
Posted by: | CommentsMonday Stuff You’re About To Know
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{Picture taken by a cat. Story here.}
Happy Monday, Hooligans. I hope y’all had a wonderful weekend in this bracing weather. Mine was full of citrus, parties, Rock Band, disc golf, and more. The week’s back at us, and it’s a couple of weeks before we can go into Holiday Mode. Here are some fun links to keep you up to speed.
“Dollar Bill” Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who got busted with ninety grand in his freezer, was defeated by Republican Ahn “Joseph” Cao. Good riddance to that sleazy guy. Â Democrats still have a net gain of twenty seats because of Mary Jo Kilroy’s victory in Ohio. Â
Via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire comes this scathing interview by The Independent titled, “Mark Penn – The man who blew the presidency”.  Fun excerpt:
“Â So why did Penn say in a memo of March 2007 that Obama was unelectable? “Huh. No. It doesn’t say that at all.” Yes it does, if the facsimile published by Atlantic Monthly magazine is correct. The great communicator appears thrown. “Those memos, right, that came out, were really … er, were really, I think, show you, you know, just a piece, because … a small part, a piece of how we were looking to, I think, set up or solve the fact that he was a very strong candidate.”
Right. Now, you could say it is unfair to run every pause and splutter in a sentence like that, but it does give a sense of Mark Penn floundering. There is sweat on his top lip. The same memo shows how spectacularly he failed to see that Obama was in tune with the times: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050.”
Ouch.
