These have been open in my tabs for a couple of days, so obviously I'm not going to manage a full post on each of them, though I perhaps should:
- Why does TBogg still blog at FDL? I stopped reading him immediately upon his move because of the horrible, horrible format. I never know if any of his posts are actually continued or if I'm going to click on the dumb-looking button just to find some comments - as a rule, the only comments I read are here at Cogitamus. Frankly, I think I've been spoiled by the quality of commenter here, and yes, I'm quite serious.
- The party of small, less-intrusive government strikes again. Florida State Representative Jason Brodeur has introduced a bill making it a criminal offense for a doctor to ask his or her patient if they own a gun. This is because he, being a member of the Conspiracy-Theories-R-Us Party, thinks that doctors are compiling lists of gun owners to turn over to the state. Never mind that laws already make such activity on the part of doctors or any state illegal. While it may be true that, as the columnist says, Florida does "stupid like Nebraska does corn," this thinking is found wherever a member of the Republican party goes.
- Remember, racism is and always has been much worse in the North:
Martin Luther King Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut.
"On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see," he wrote his father in June 1944. "After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to."
- I may have mentioned before that while I lived in South Korea, I met an American soldier stationed at a small base in the country. He was a fairly senior enlisted man and could certainly have arranged travel back to the US, but was spending Christmas in country, not even coming to a Christmas party that a bunch of us foreigners were having. He explained that Christmas is a hard time for soldiers, espeically those far from family, so he was staying on base to take care of his men. That's the way to help soldiers who might otherwise try to harm themselves. You don't make them take some bullshit test and then send them to a uniformed revival preacher who tries to force them to recite the Sinner's Prayer and 'get saved.'
- Protests like these are bad. They are counter-productive, bad politics, bad strategy, and just plain mean. While I agree that too few individuals end up in prison for the crimes they commit on behalf of corporations, we also need to quit focusing on individuals as the only ones that can commit crimes. It's a shame that we give corporations so many of the same rights as individuals but that the only way to punish a corporation for its criminal wrongdoing is with civil suits. This means that even if the protestors managed to make Greg Baer (the target) change his ways completely, it would have no impact whatsoever on Bank of America's practices. This country desperately needs to find a way to hold corporations and the individuals who run them accountable for the crimes they commit against this society. I'd rather see SEIU draw attention to that problem rather than harass a teenaged kid at home.
- Speaking of corporations not being held accountable for the crimes it commits, a letter from the Vatican has been found which instructs Ireland's bishops "not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to the police." This is sickening. There are a lot of good Catholics in this world; in a church of over one billion people, there are bound to be. But the leadership of this church - the worldwide leadership, from the Pope through the layers of the Vatican to the bishops, have repeatedly not only failed the basic test of trust and integrity, but have also become accomplices to so many cases of child abuse, rape, sexual assault, molestation and exploitation that we will never know the true extent. Anyone with a shred of common human decency, let alone a similarity to Jesus Christ, would resign their posts immediately and turn themselves over to their local police authorities. Therefore, we can be confident that none of these bishops, including the one over Rome, will do so.