The Limits of Free Speech

As a "Good Democrat" I want an experienced, tested, moderate candidate....

BULLSHIT I WANT A CANDIDATE WHO CAN WIN

This is too important. I see Hillary buried in dark money. Campaign ads worse than we've seen before, and we think we've seen it all. What this will do, in my opinion, is what it did last year; discourage voting. It's not enough to fuck with the voting machines and enact voter restrictions. it's important for voters to be disgusted enough to stay home.

And, while Hillary may not be a first choice, ok she's not mine, try to imagine a Republican government in an era of global climate change and extreme weather disruptions the likes of which we've never seen. OK, got that picture in your mind?

Hillary's far ahead in the polls, so what. Do you think that scares the billionaires who plan on buying this election? They couldn't succeed with Obama because his skills at speaking and reaching out to people cut through the noise. I don't think Hillary can do that with the same success as Obama and, I'm sorry to say, neither can Bernie Sanders. In America, it's not the qualifications that matter, it's the star power. In Senator Warren we have both, and we need her badly.

In my very humble opinion, on this day, March 12, 2015, with no links provided, I think Elizabeth Warren is the best hope for the Democratic party to keep the White House in 2016, and she just might have the strength to carry the House and Senate. We need a winner in 2016. People listen to her, people believe her, people like her, and people won't like the dark money ads against her.

Being the eternal optimist, I think something will happen to get Warren into the race. It really has to. Losing the White House in 2016 cannot be an option.

Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet The Russians believed in exceptionalism, too.

I love Matt Taibbi's take on this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rudy-giuliani-american-soviet-20150221

American education fails to teach us anything about American history.

We are taught to read and write and it's up to us to learn the rest.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson and published in 2010, is about the great migration of millions of African Americans from the South to the North.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/04/1353063/--The-Warmth-of-Other-Suns-a-review?showAll=yes

It is a huge story, taking place over great distances, large groups of people and decades of time. And that is perhaps why it is not usually told as a single narrative. Wilkerson uses the journeys of three individuals, from different decades, traveling from different origins to different destinations, to examine this largest of all internal migrations that the country had ever seen.
It was a leaderless movement of people who were tired of endless restrictions on their right to vote, to own and farm their own land; people who were tired of poor education and even poorer futures for their children. Surely, they must have been tired of their own vulnerability to Jim Crow laws that put the distance between the rest of their lives and the end of a rope in the hands of a white man who took offense at a few words spoken to a white woman.

Just as it was a war that ended the slave labor camps, it was another war that allowed so many to escape from what had become a virtual slavery in the South. World War I cut off the flow of immigrant labor from Europe upon which the industrial cities of the North relied. Word trickled down to the sharecroppers and the migrant agricultural workers and the domestics of the South and some of them left behind all they knew for a chance in the new world.

The fact that they would be facing much of the same racism and hate that they were leaving was probably unknown to many. They would at least be living in a place that did not require them to step off a sidewalk to let a white pass by, or to use a designated doorway, stairwell, or water fountain.

Isabel Wilkerson does not ignore the broader historic picture that she is painting:

The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing in material assets from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be all but impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. Multiplied over the generations, it would mean a wealth deficit between the races that would require a miracle windfall or near asceticism on the part of colored families if they were to have any chance of catching up or amassing anything of value. Otherwise, the chasm would continue, as it did for blacks as a group even into the succeeding century. The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/04/1353063/--The-Warmth-of-Other-Suns-a-review?showAll=yes

We will never fix America until we recognize and acknowledge how we got here.

Except for the passage of the Civil Rights laws and Medicare, I would agree..

but, actually, when I think of it, we have progressed a lot, especially women and the LBGT community and the election of an African American president. It's politically that we've suffered. After the enormously popular JFK was gone, and then MLK, and then RFK, the Democratic party started to move more to the right. Liberal bashing became the cause of the day. People forgot the hope and inspiration the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King gave us. Liberals were strong and proud with these popular voices. No one since has come close..

I think as a wonderful example of an American family, you can't top our current First Family. I couldn't be more proud to have the Obama's in the White House. President Obama isn't the fiery liberal JFK was, but he's the right man for the times. I honestly believe that if America survives the current political mess, we will owe it all to the man we elected twice for our President.