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All posts for the month September, 2012
Today’s word of the week is “Easy” mainly because I plan to take it easy this weekend.
Don’t even think about me doing any posts over the weekend……..I NEED A BREAK!
Let start things off with the best “Easy” song of all time, and what I hope is my theme song for the weekend.
Don’t let the wheels of your own mind drive you crazy
Great video of some very young Eagles.
Next up….Ringo Starr. This one is supposedly written by Ringo and George but it is George through and through. Great song….
Here is one of my all time favorite performers, Ricky Nelson. We lost him way too soon….enjoy this live performance.
Easy Living….I am all for that! Here is some great footage of Uriah Heep….
Let’s end this post with something pure and easy.
The note IS eternal!
Have a wonderful weekend…..
I heard that Andy Williams died today. Lots of fond memories of watching his variety TV Show in the 1960s. The man had a great voice. Here was my favorite….
When I was in Junior High school, we sang the hell out of that song.
Andy’s show featured a lot of great music. Here is a great clip of the Jackson 5 on the show in 1970. Even at this age you could tell that young Michael was destined for bigger things. Enjoy…..
Here is one more from the show. An amazing, funky, performance by Sly and the Family Stone!
We will miss you Andy!
Green Day’s new album, Uno, was released this Tuesday. I picked up the MP3 album as soon as it was released and have been listening to it ever since. Oh Love is my favorite song at this point. Let’s listen….
If you like the song you might want to check out the album on Amazon. For this week it is available for download at $5.00 US. Uno is the first of three Green Day albums to be released over the next next few months. I am already looking forward to the other two. Here was Green Day’s announcement of the trilogy.
Let’s listen to one more from Uno….here is my second favorite song so far, Kill The DJ.
As always, let me know what you think.
A rare moment of candor from the Mittster (aka Mittens). Thanks to the Huffington Post for this article.
WESTERVILLE, Ohio — In a line that event attendees found a bit puzzling, Mitt Romney warned a crowd of mostly middle-class onlookers on Wednesday not to expect too much tax relief under his administration.
“We have got to reform our tax system,” Romney said at a morning event here. “Small businesses most typically pay taxes at the individual tax rate. And so our individual income taxes are the ones I want to reform. Make them simpler. I want to bring the rates down. By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions. But by bringing rates down we will be able to let small businesses keep more of their money so they can hire more people.”
The comments were either a flub on Romney’s part or an admission that many of the deductions and exemptions that he will have to target in order to make his tax plan deficit neutral will end up affecting the middle class.
I have been preparing a post about black pastors telling their congregations not to vote because of President Obama’s support for gay rights and same sex marriage. As I was getting ready to write that post tonight, I found a post on Huffington Post that tells the story better than I ever could because it was written by a black woman, Irene Monroe. Here is her post…
Will Obama’s Support of Marriage
EqualityKeep Some Blacks Home on
Election Day?
African Americans have worked hard to get the vote and to get a man of African descent in the White House. In 2008 we came out in unprecedented numbers, with Obama taking 95 percent of the black vote, thanks to the help of his biggest support base: American-American ministers and their parishioners. But in this 2012 presidential election Obama’s biggest support base will have dropped precipitously. And it will be because of both the Democratic Party’s and Obama’s pronouncement on marriage equality.
Before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party released its 2012 platform. Its theme: “Moving America Forward.” One of the major party planks in the platform is its full-throated support of marriage equality: “We support the right of all families to have equal respect, responsibilities, and protections under the law. We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples.” Many Obama supporters embrace the platform’s theme of “Moving America Forward” but feel that the party’s support of same-sex marriage is risky, if not outright political suicide, in such a tight and contentions race for the White House.
(“We also support the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference,” the platform states.)
With one of Obama’s largest and most loyal voting blocs being African Americans, who are largely Democrats but also largely conservative Christians, the big worry is not that African Americans would overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Mitt Romney, but that they might not come out to the polls in large numbers in November.
“This is the first time in Black church history that I am aware of, that Black pastors have encouraged their parishioners not to vote, ” Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant of Baltimore told The Washington Informer. Bryant has formed the Empowerment Network, a national coalition of about 30 denominations working to register African-American parishioners. Bryant, too, opposes same-sex marriage and stated that Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality is “at the heart” of the problem for black Christians.
Although approximately 95 percent of the African-American populace cast their ballots for Obama in 2008, only 26 percent were in favor of same-sex marriage, according to the Pew Research Center. Just before Obama publicly announced his support for marriage equality in May, according to Pew results in April, 49 percent of African Americans opposed same-sex marriage, while only 39 percent were in favor of it. And since Obama’s announcement the numbers of those in opposition to same-sex marriage have not declined significantly among the black church populace. As a matter of fact, some African-American ministers have come out more forcefully against Obama.
For example, the Rev. William Owens, president and founder of the Memphis-based Coalition of African Americans Pastors, is one of them. He carries influence and clout among black clerics in the area, and he feels that the president has gone too far in extending his hand toward securing civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) Americans. Owens told the Associated Press in late July that he “would lead a national effort to rally black Americans to rethink their overwhelming support of the president over the same-sex issue and ‘save the family.'”
Owens is outraged and feels that the president is taking the African-American vote for granted. Although I would like to dismiss Owens as just another homophobic minister and an outlier in what I believe will be a huge turnout of black voters for Obama, sadly, Owens has parlayed his outrage into a small but growing movement. He claims he has over 3,742 African-Americans ministers and their churches on board with his anti-Obama vote campaign.
“The time has come for a broad-based assault against the powers that be that want to change our culture to one of men marrying men and women marrying women,” Owens told CNN after he launched his anti-Obama vote campaign event at the National Press Club. “I am ashamed that the first black president chose this road, a disgraceful road.”
Why are African Americans, especially conservative Christians, still stuck on this issue? One reason is that church doctrine throughout African-American denominations hasn’t changed on the topic of homosexuality, keeping the church tethered to an outdated notion of human sexuality and a wrongheaded notion of what constitutes civil rights. Another reason is that many African-American ministers still believe the institution of marriage, at least within the black family, is under assault, and that LGBTQ people further exacerbate the problem. For these ministers, some of whom support LGBTQ civil rights broadly but draw the line at same-sex marriage, espousing their opposition to same-sex marriage is a prophylactic measure to combat the epidemic of fatherlessness in black families. In scapegoating the LGBTQ community, these clerics are ignoring the social ills behind black fatherlessness, such as the systematic disenfranchisement of both African-American men and women, high unemployment, high incarceration, and poor education, to name a few.
Meanwhile, many African-American ministers have come out in support of Obama’s stance on marriage equality. For these African-American ministers, the liability of Obama losing his 2012 reelection bid seems far greater than being publicly castigated for not being in lockstep with their homophobic brethren. But their efforts to get their conservative parishioners to the ballot box must far exceed the efforts of those in opposition to same-sex marriage.
If the first African-American president loses his reelection bid because of certain black pastors’ homophobic views on marriage equality, that would be tragic, and history would not look kindly on their actions. Obama is the president of the United States, not the pastor of the United States. He’s the president of all the people, not some of the people. As African Americans, who have battled for centuries against racial discrimination, we have always relied on our president and his administration to fight for and uphold our civil rights, because too many pastors across the country and throughout centuries wouldn’t “move America forward.”
Since Irene was nice enough to write the majority of this post for me let me summarize the key point in my own words:
- Black pastors are telling their congregations not to exercise their voting rights that many people gave their lives to secure because they don’t recognize that other people have civil rights as well as black people.
- Let me say it yet another way…black pastors are telling their congregations not to vote, which will increase the Republican’s chances of winning the election, and they are doing this knowing full well that these same Republicans will just accelerate their on-going efforts to suppress the votes of all minority voters in the future.
You are have to be fucking kidding me! Let me put a very fine point on this….any black pastor that is part of this effort is a hypocrite and a coward. What they are saying is that was OK for people to fight and die to get them equal rights but, having gotten those rights, they are not willing to step forward to help other minorities get similar rights. Shame on you!
My weekend post about Voter ID got me thinking about the civil rights fight for voting rights in the 60s. For those of you that don’t know the story of that fight, you might want to watch the movie Freedom Song that is posted in parts below.
Educate yourself……I want to come back to this topic in my upcoming post, “Hypocrisy and Cowardice”.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 4.5
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 9.5
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12 (this part ends in the middle….proceed to Final when that happens)
Final Part
I have always loved Al Stewart’s song, Nostradamus, which is about the prophecies of the famous French seer. I don’t put a lot of stock in prophetic visions but the song kicks ass. Let’s listen…….
As always, let me know what you think.
Great minds truly think alike….if only I was as funny as her!