A day or so ago before this column appeared, I commented on Eades' blog about Newt Gingrich. Maureen, in her New York Times Op-Ed piece, tells Newt exactly where he can go. She says pretty much what I was thinking and expanded upon it. Obama's policies are grounded in 'socialism' and are un-American, according to Gingrich. Gingrich is appealing the Nativist fever that seems to be sweeping the nation. He is also snatching a few quotes from  Dinesh D'Sousa's upcoming book on the 'age of Obama."

The Devil is on Fire.

 ""The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

1.Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

2. Half An Acre by Hem

3. Small Song by Lhasa

4. Soon this space..by Lhasa

5.  Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack.

6. Hymn of the Big Wheel by Massive Attack

7.  Interia Creeps by Massive Attack

8. I Love You Porgy, Nina Simone's version

9. I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone

anything on After Hours by Nina Simone

First I would like to thank Ramona for broaching this subject. I hope she doesn't mind if I use part of the headline from her blog. This past May I was really getting great information on my family through historical records. One of the records I came across was a newspaper account of a family member who was a solider that committed suicide.

This story begins with me reading Toni Morrison's Sula. I read the book about 15 years ago and I thought she was pulling my extra long thigh. One of the first human characters she introduced in the book  was a World War I Veteran named Shadrack. He wanted to set aside one day of the year for suicide. The first few years everyone in this small Midwestern town thought he lost his mind in the war. He was a one man parade. He paraded up and down the middle of town campaigning for a National Suicide Day. He just wanted on day set aside to contemplate suicide. I threw the book down because that, to say the least, was an unsettling idea. It took me 15 years and some family research to come close or closer--maybe the closest-- to excepting the possibility that soldiers need time and space to think about what happened to them in war.

Again, I wanted to talk about this subject because there seems to be an increasing number of stories about soldiers committing suicide; or I am just more aware of the incidents of suicide by soldiers. Reading that article lead me to a relative who fought in the Spanish-American or the Philippine-American War. He also happened to committ suicide and the newspaper account of the tragedy was gripping.. The newspaper article was a rare find. I never heard (or learned) that African Americans were in this (or these) conflict(s).

According to military records, my relative was enlisted by "a certain Captain Brewster in Canton, Ohio 5 September 1900." He mustered out at Fort Harrison, Montana 4, September 1904 with an honorable discharge.

He went back to Ohio and started his own dye an cleaning business. He married and few years later. For some strange reason he tried to set his wife and his business on fire. The sheriff in that town arrested him put in the town jail on Saturday night. According to the newspaper report, a deputy was talking to him through the night. He was asking my relative why he  tried to set his wife and store on fire. My relative and the deputy talked for a long time. They must have talked until the wee hours of Sunday morning. The deputy began to get worried because my relative started to remain silent when the he asked him more questions. The cell must have been around the corner from the office of sheriff because they carried on a conversation.

The deputy went to the cell and found my relative had taken his belt off and put around his neck. The newspaper says he had not eaten and he died looking out the window with a cigarette in his mouth.

This is one the most tragic stories I think I have ever read. I think the experience of combat caused this tragedy. I think I understand Shadrack in Toni Morrison's novel Sula now.

It is a cautionary tale about the unseen and mostly un-reported (under
reported ) effects of war on human beings.

P.S. Just for the record, I finished the book twice

Wikipedia defines this fallacy as: "....[a] type of argument is known by several names,[1]appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people, argument by consensus, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin by the names including argumentum ad populum ("appeal to the people"), argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect, the spreading of various religious beliefs, and of the Chinese proverb "three men make a tiger".

Rachel not only took Bill to school, she managed to teach me something new. I wish I had spent more time in my philosophy class. Maybe the  semester went so fast because my instructor was great. 

Dear Rachel, as soon as I had given up hope on television, you shatter everything I was taught and everything I thought that I knew about broadcast media. I promise to keep watching as long you keep this sane level of argument alive.

I just hope Meg get's a good return on her money. It would be a shame for her to flush that much money down the political hole.

"The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868, and granted citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States," which included former slaves recently freed. In addition, it forbids states from denying any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The leadership of the GOP wants to repeal the 14th Amendment. Hell, why don't the GOP just go whole hog and repeal the 13th and 15th Amendments while they are at it.

I dare the Republicans to get any were near the 14th Amendment.

It was October 1989. The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants were about start a World Series game at Candlestick Park. At 5:04 p.m. the Earth shook with a mighty force and  canceled the game.  A little known place called Loma Prieta was on the tip of everyone's tongues because that was the epicenter. If the epicenter had been a few more miles north, east (on the Hayward Fault ) or west( on the San Andres Fault ) , the destruction would have dwarfed what actually happened.

The Bay Bridge--on the Oakland side-collapsed onto itself. There were cars crushed under the asphalt and steel. They resembled pancakes; with people still in them. The double decked Cypress Freeway in Oakland  fell and more people lost their lives on that freeway. The double decked Embarcadero Freeway fell. The Marina District in San Francisco liquefied--because it sits on landfill-- and several home and apartment buildings buckled under the weight of the upper floors and whatever and whomever was below them was crushed.  Gas lines ruptured and it seemed like the whole of San Francisco was going to burn. The fire hydrants were disrupted so the fire department had to stretch its' hoses from the streets of San Francisco to Marina east of the Golden Gate Bridge. Thank goodness the Bay was close.

We didn't know what to believe. We had no idea what was happening in the city. We had no access to media because all electricity had gone down (the U.S. Mint had power for a day or so more). No lights, no stores, no kidding. The only thing to do was to remain calm. I remember walking a friend home before the October night sky covered the city. He lived on Telegraph Hill and I had to walk back--west-- up Market Street to get home. It was strange place. The earthquake tore down those walls we put and kept up against each other.

The Cypress Freeway in Oakland is now Mandela Parkway. The Embarcadero Freeway is gone and now San Franciscans have a better view of the East Bay. The Central Freeway in San Francisco was eventually torn down because if we had another earthquake, it would have probably collapsed. When the Central Freeway was torn down, the Hayes Valley neighborhood sprang to life. The apartment buildings and homes that collapsed in the Marina were finally rebuilt.

The only remaining piece of the puzzle created by Loma Prieta was the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge is a work-horse. It carries any where from 250,000 to 300,000 cars per day. So Cal-Trans made emergency repairs to the section that fell. We all crossed our fingers and toes that another Loma Prieta sized earthquake didn't strike. The fix to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was temporary. After twenty-one years--some of it caused by local politicians--we finally see the beginnings of the end of re-construction. For twenty-one years in the Bay Area, we have been praying for Mother Earth to stay still. Sometimes she honored our request and sometimes she sent a little reminder that we were wasting time fighting fights which put us all in danger.

The new section of the San Francisco-Oakland bridge will allow for bicycles to cross to Yerba Buena or Treasure Island. I hope that they allow some sort of the transport for bicycles across the rest of the bridge--the part between Yerba Buena Island and San Francisco. Twenty-one years!

P.S. I hope our politicians learned a lesson insofar as that they don't let critical infrastructure go past time for renewal or repair. They are working on Doyle Drive. Doyle Drive is a parkway which leads up to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Dear Rachel,

You said exactly what I've been wanting to tell that clown on Fox News for years. That was an awesome smack down. Imagine if the politicians responded just as you did.? Just imagine.

Thank you forever more Rachel Maddow.

I believe Prop.19 will be on the ballot in California this November. If I have half a chance to vote, I will vote in the affirmative.

Sometimes when I walk past the (correction was Viper Room) Vapor Room on the Lower Haight, I am intrigued. I, like most black men haven't smoked marijuana but I am always asked if I have some to sell. This is why I don't make a living from it.

 I got so high just walking by, I forgot the name.

This is my Cannes and Sundance rolled up into one: P.O.V. The Kunstler documentary is excellent. 

This is a story that recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times . It is a story about the history of United States and more particularly Virginia. I will stop typing and let the author explain this story written in three parts. There is an multimedia presentation that shows what happened on a time line.

Part 2
Part 3

This story makes perfect sense after reading this essay

It was on this day, the seventeenth of May, 1835 that my great great great grandparents were pronounced man and wife by the Justice of the Peace. I have been admiring them since the first time I found them in the U.S. Census. They were part of a migration from Virginia to Ohio during a time it wasn't safe to be a person of color in what was then the United States. They moved themselves away from the possibility of being snatched into slavery and sold down river. They moved themselves temporarily away from the potential battle line during the Civil War but returned to the place they knew as a their second home. They sacrificed two sons in that bloody battle and they lived with the grief that of one their sons would not return from the blood soaked ground. They lived until the 1880s and died within a few months of each other. It is because of them that my family had a chance to be whatever we wanted to be; and most of all it allowed us to be free.

Thank you great great great grandparents!

Jon Stewart is f#&king genius; or at least his writers are. He condensed a semester of Media Analysis into a clip saltier than a can of  tomato soup. His comparison of the coverage of the British Prime Minister elections (which I just can't get enough of) to the United States Presidential election is like a pissing match across the big pond.

I think this piece about Meet The Press is the exclamation mark to The Daily Show's poke on how Infotainment is just another name for what passes as News!

Just f%&^king genius!