I Am The Greatest

by Dick Mac

"I Am The Greatest,"
     Cassius Clay, 1964

"I'm so mean I make medicine sick,"
     Muhammad Ali, RIP (1942 - 2016)

Stand By Me

by Dick Mac

No I won't be afraid
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

     Stand By Me, Cassius Clay (1964)

"I'm so mean I make medicine sick,"
     Muhammad Ali, RIP (1942 - 2016)

Lost?

by Dick Mac

I feel lost.

If teabaggers and their leaders like Rand Paul get their way, we will roll-back the clocks to an earlier time in American commerce and culture.

I've been thinking about the teabagger notion that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, for better or worse, spawned affirmative action) should apply only to the federal government and not to private industry.

What this means is that teabaggers think that only the Feds should be required to hire black people, and that private industry could remain all white (and Asian, of course).

They argue that this is not the case, that the marketplace will somehow magically eradicate racism; but, people who use their brains for more than analyzing television shows, and their knees for more than kneeling at the shrine of Reagan's genitalia, know that the marketplace is unable to control or regulate anything.

Teabaggers also believe in small government (whatever that is), which means that at the same time they think that American Blacks should only be protected in the workplace controlled by the Feds (that is, government employment), they are saying that the Federal government should be eliminated, effectively eliminating employment opportunities for Black Americans.

So, in this magic free-market world where racism is suddenly eradicated through the good-will and spiritual magnanimity of capitalism, where private industry is not required to employee anybody except Whites (and Asians), and the Federal government employs only elected officials and a military, where exactly are American Blacks supposed to earn a living?

The military?

Wow! Sounds like the draft-era practices of a racist military during the Vietnam War, where a greater percentage of American Blacks served on the front lines than did other Americans.

Shall all our elected officials be Black?

Let's take the Civil Rights Act to an absurd level (to match the absurdity of teabagging analyses) and say that all elected officials in the Federal government must be Black!

This way, every White district would need to ensure that one Black American lived there, so they'd have someone to elect. And it would be best if there were more than one Black American to run for public office, so each district would probably have to ensure that a handful of Black families lived in their districts.

But in Reagan's America we are eliminating the government, so I imagine we will reduce the number of seats in Congress and the Senate to say, 50 Representatives and 50 Senators. Because government is bad, and it should be small. So we will have one hundred jobs for Black Americans. Give each of them a staff of ten and we are up to eleven hundred Black Americans employed through the advances of the Civil Rights Act.

If the protections of the Civil Rights Act are not supposed to apply to private industry, and the government is not supposed to hire people, where will the rest of all the Black Americans work?

Why do teabaggers and Rand Paul hate America so much?

Should Private Industry Be Exempt From The Civil Rights Act?

by Dick Mac

I say no, of course; but many who worship at the crotch of capital, like it was Ronald Reagan's genitals, think that private industry should not be held to the same standard as our government.

Rand Paul, newly nominated Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show last night and I had the good fortune to be watching.

Paul has attracted attention because of his lack of clarity on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He'll tell you up and down, inside and out, that he abhors discrimination and racism. And he is believable. But, then he says that the laws that protect Americans from discrimination on the basis of race should only be applied to the federal government, not to private industry.

So, the host asked him point-blank if Woolworth's should have been allowed to keep their lunch counter segregated (that is for whites only).

For those of you unfamiliar with the history of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th Century, Woolworth's lunch counters became a focal-point of the struggle against segregation; and many people were beaten or arrested for being black at the lunch counter or aiding and abetting blacks who attempted to be served at the lunch counter.

It's a particularly ugly chapter in America's more recent history.

Now, conservatism has changed in the past thirty years, and even more rapidly in the past 18 months, so I don't know what the "conservative" position is anymore. I know that even the most heinous right-wingers of our times have expressed unwavering support for the Civil Rights Act, even politicians who are known racists see the benefits of that Act of Congress. It created a huge new market. Blacks would become consumers and that was good for industry.

Since the teabagger movement, though, "conservatism" has become something I can't quite wrap my mind around. (They are NOT racists, just ask them!) It's just not clear yet, what brand of conservatism teabaggers support. It's probably not conservatism at all.

Rand Paul is a teabagger, and he is unable to offer a clear answer to the question: "Should Woolworths have been allowed to keep their lunch counter segregated?"!

It's a pretty easy question. There isn't any hidden subtext. Either the federal government should enforce the notion that discrimination against American taxpayers on the basis of race is wrong; or the federal government should not be allowed to enforce the notion that discrimination against American taxpayers on the basis of race is wrong. There really isn't any in-between.

This clip is 20 minutes long, and I think it is worth the watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, which is it?

Should Woolworths have been allowed to remain segregated or not?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated by a single gunshot wound to the neck whle standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee; and he later died in St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Today we celebrate the birth of Dr. King, who was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia.

There are few men who have impacted Western Civilization to the same degree as Dr. King. His place in history is well-deserved and his veneration is underwhelming.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1964, and is considered a hero around the world. Possibly moer outside the United States than he is in his own country.

Those who choose to minimize his imoprtance, or denigrate his legacy, must do so out of ignorance, for he was truly a great man and an example to us all.

if you don't know his story, please read this chronolgy, from the King Center website.



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