“I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt, 2/23/36
Book Of The Day: Them: Adventures With Extremists
Movie Of The Day: October Sky
Today is election day, remember to vote. Especially if you’re a Democrat in Virginia (sigh) or New Jersey (fingers crossed). Folks in Maine remember to vote NO ON 1 to preserve marriage equality and civil rights for gay folks.
* Lieberman filibuster threat on ice?
* Fainting couch for Stuart Rothenberg, Alan Grayson has given him the vapors!
* PBS had a good special about the Civilian Conservation Corps on American Experience last night. Check out the trailer here.
* North Korea claims it has weapons grade plutonium
* Kim Kardashian as Princess Jasmine brings an entirely new context to Disney movies.
* The racist BNP put out a video lamenting the fact that there are a lot of non-whites in part of the UK. They don’t make any other point than that. The whole video is like OMG people are totally not white and are wearing Arabic gear. Just so you don’t think idiot slack jawed yokels are an exclusively American thing.
* Not only is he married to Paula Patton and can sing, but he’s the SON OF TV DAD ALAN THICKE.
* The drug industry, explained.
* Owen Wilson is going to be the voice of Marmaduke. Sometimes Hollywood would be better off getting engulfed by a volcano.
Voted for Corzine this AM before leaving for work.
It’s funny, I just saw part of that clip on the “American Experience” documentary series on the 1930s on PBS last night, in the second episode about the CCC. And watching that, it struck me how little things have changed. All the same charges were leveled against FDR – he’s behaving just like Hitler, Stalin & Mussolini, having these camps will bring “unsavory elements” into the community, etc. Yet they managed a bigger national mobilization than had ever been seen before, and built many great landmarks and replenished depleted forests. People today don’t pause to think how many of our scenic attractions were first put in place by the CCC. And by getting youth from different areas together, a lot of the old veterans interviewed told of their first experiences meeting an African- or Mexican-American, and how it helped clear the prejudices they’d picked up in their lily-white communities.
I also though of the screaming, gibbering lunacy we’d be subjected to if Obama tried to implement anything half so ambitious. Indeed, the very youtube you link to, Oliver, is really essentially trying to make the complaint that Obama is no different than that sumbitch FDR.
Makes me want to turn Limbaugh’s anti-FDR line around: “Reagan is dead! His policies live on but we’re going to do something about that as well!”
Watched the episode last night. American Experience is one of my favorite shows. Noted also that some things don’t change re the opposition. What was also notable was that, as pointed out in the show, FDR wanted programs for the able bodied that put people to work and didn’t just provide relief. Also, the speed with which the CCC was enacted – FDR took office in March 1933 and the first camps were in operation by September. Finally, there were the intgangibles you noted – teaching people took work and live with each other and gaining faith and confidence in themselves and the country.
Greatest president since Lincoln.
As a Democratic president, he won wars. Republican presidents are only capable of starting them.
Ahh yes, the “Youth Brigades”. What sweet little brainwashed bastards they were. If your business didn’t “Fly with the Blue Eagle”, you could expect a boycott that included these little hellions marching out in front of your store, yelling about how “unpatriotic” you were.
Did your sycophantic show mention any of that? No? Jeez, I wonder why?
I bet that when they get to the National Recovery Act, they will forget to mention why black folks called it the “Ni**er Run Around”.
You dupes want to believe everything FDR did was sweet and wonderful. All the while forgetting that FDR was the same tyrant who ordered small business owners thrown in jail for not overcharging people after giving the large corporations the power to set prices on goods and services, who stole middle class family savings by making owning gold illegal, and then for good measure, interned a few hundred thousand people solely because of their race after confiscating their property and giving it away to his supporters.
You are the same dupes who willfully forget the tyrannical things Lincoln did. It is people like yourselves who will empower the next American tyrant.
Are you for real? “Tyrannical things Lincoln did”?
Stay classy, Republicans. (Here’s a hint: he was actually a member of your dying, racist party. Well, before it was racist.)
Oooops, Jaim. You doused yourself in stupid! I’m not a Republican. But hey, why be factual when you can be like Oliver!
Jailing folks just simply stating disapproval of the war (like Sherman’s March to the Sea), including but not limited to jailing reporters and newspaper owners for printing less than glowing reports.
And you guys freaked out over Bush?
And Lincoln was a racist.
“I am not now, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races. I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarriages with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality. There must be a position of superior and inferior, and I am in favor of assigning the superior position to the white man.”
But like I said, why be factual, when you can be like Oliver?
As supposedly intelligent as President Obama is, you’d think he knew all this. But he used the Lincoln bible to get sworn in on.
Or maybe he does know all this and believes the average American to be stupid enough to believe that Lincoln was wise and fair? Apparently, you fall into the latter, Jaim.