Charlotte Front and Center

Hiroshima: Obama Should Not Attend Peace Ceremony

The New York Times published an opinion article by Issey MyaKe called "Flash of Memory".
Myake at age 7  witnessed the atomic bomb, and lost his mother 3 years later as a result of radiation sickness. Myake grew up to become a fashion designer due in part because he found the world of clothing a bright and cheerful world to live in as he tried to bury the ugly memories of August 6, 1945.

The 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is August 6th. Myake has invited Barack Obama to the peace ceremony in Hiroshima after hearing Obama make his speech on nuclear weapons in Prague last April. Myake believes Obama should attend and cross the Peace Bridge.

America is the only country who ever used the A-bomb.  It was a very inhuman act, but many agree Truman made the best decision at a time the world was still witnessing inexplicable human suffering.  There was no doubt that the U.S. would win the war in the Pacific, but the question was how many millions more would have to die being that Japan showed no signs of unconditional surrender.

Obama does not have to go Japan, and should not apologize. Japan has never apologized for beginning the war and making the initial attack at Pearl Harbor in which 2403 American soldiers and civilians perished.

Flannery O'Connor and Her Grotesque Southern Characters

I was looking through the news and blogs trying to find inspiration of some sort so I could continue my usual onslaught against Obama. Stuff that Obama would call "chattering", and the things Michelle would say was "chirping". Anyways,I was on-line at The National Review and hit the bonanza...at least for myself. It wasn't political, but the article got me agitated just the same. I didn't know, but today is the birthday of Flannery O'Connor, the woman writer many of us read in short-story form from our sophomore lit classes. I thought O'Connor was a man until I learned differently much, much later...or maybe I just didn't listen too well back then.

So here we have Ralph C. Wood writing about the awful, grotesque, and depressing figures of the south that O'Connor built her stories upon. I hate to argue with Woods, because he is a professor of theology and English and has written "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" . After I finished reading Wood's article, I knew he was fascinated by her. But Woods began his article by stating that we are all repulsed when trying to read O'Connor. He also poses the question: Why do southern writers immerse themselves with such revolting characters and violent death scenes in so much of its writing? My answer would be that it probably stems from habit going back to the days when agriculture was the South's leading industry and provided a lot of leisure-at times. It's not so really long ago it was that way.

Rural areas are thinly spread with people and little entertainment on top of it...especially years ago. Any story had to be colored with a fascinating input of gore or violence to entertain the crowd anyone was talking to..even if it was a group of three or four. Religion? Church was the main meeting place, the only place of salvation and socialization. Southerners demanded to be entertained in Church, and to have colorful visions of hell. So for O'Connor to be Catholic,Irish, and southern would explain her gift of story-telling.  When asked the question about her array of grotesque,immoral characters, she said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic".

To fully understand Flannery O'Connor, and how she was compelled to write about such unusual people or circumstances, demands that you have,as Woods points out,a clear understanding of what "normal" might be, in order to take the unsentimental view she had of her main characters. I do know she had a social awareness for she referred to the"Holocaust" and the racial issues of her time in her writings.

The proudest moment of O'Connors life is when she taught her pet chicken to walk backwards and appeared in the "Pathe News".  The paper filmed her with her chicken to be shown in movie houses around the country. That was her first moment of celebrity, and she said that everything after that in life was "anti-climax". So, no wonder is it that we have these rich stories from a southern girl that trained her chicken, and later read St.Thomas Aquinas in bed before going to sleep.

O'Connor suffered from Lupus,just like her father did. She was diagnosed in 1951 and was only supposed to live another five years, but lived until 1964. She lived those last 15 years in Milledgeville,Ga. with her mother, and she continued to write her stories. 

So to celebrate her birthday, I am going to pull out my collection of her short stories, and read from "A Good Man is Hard To Find, and Other Short Stories".

Happy Birthday,Ms. O'Connor. I wonder how you would write about Obama, and if you would have also been a Hillary supporter...... and please read Wood's article on O'Connor.

The (New) Hillary Problem,(NYT circa 1992)

In 1992, Anna Quindlen of The New York Times published an article on the new First Lady, Hillary Clinton. Interesting as it is to read it this morning (16 yrs. later) it is heart-wrenching at the same time if you view it from a woman's perspective of political progress. What were we talking about then? "We feel so strangely because she is one of us." This was a woman's comment to all the crticism Hillary was getting from the media...( wow, what was to come!). Quindlen also talked about the conversation,then as now, how we regard smart women, professional women, and of all things...the working mom. Just as a note, when reading this article, Sarah Palin was elected that year to the Wasilla City Council. Also, it was being considered having Hillary in the presidential cabinet (more dejavu!!) Even with the time passage, and change a few names, it could have been published this morning.

Public & Private;The (New) Hillary Problem

by Anna Quindlen Nov.8,1992

There's job talk in Little Rock, about who will be Secretary of the Treasury, chief of staff, Attorney General. And there's job talk across the country, too, among many women. Here's the question: Now that we have a First Woman as educated, intelligent, superachieving and policy-savvy as her husband, what do we do with her?

"Promise me she won't talk about cookies anymore," moaned a woman in Philadelphia.

"She did what she had to do to get him elected," said another in New York. "Now let's give her a real job."

And a circle of professional women in San Jose, Calif., erupted at a question about what Hillary Clinton should not do in the White House:

"I don't want her to keep her mouth shut."

"Forget the photo ops."

"I don't want her to make hospital visits -- I want her to make policy so that all sick kids will get good care."

"The thing is," said one finally, "we feel so strongly about it because she's one of us."

One of us. So much of the discussion about Hillary Clinton has not been about her at all. It has been about how we feel about smart women, professional women, new women. It's been about nurturing moms and working moms and what we do for love, including keeping our mouths shut. We want her to make the world safe, not only for education reform and preschool programs, but for opinionated women who want to be taken seriously. To do that, she has to do something.

A week before her husband was elected, riding to an airport in the back of a sedan, she said she was keenly aware of how many women saw her as a stand-in. " That feeling has been sweeping over me," she said. "I feel the responsibility so much."

When you read Hillary Clinton's clippings, the word "hard-edged" appears more than any other except "headbands." It's an interesting word, not only because it's code but because you rarely hear it applied to men. It's like "feisty," a word used only for women and short guys.

The woman I talked with was smart, intense and approachable, which is how many people describe her in Arkansas. She needlepoints, but like most women with a kid and a job, she's been working on the same project for years. She said she was collecting Eleanor Roosevelt lore, a heartening indication of how she sees her future.

"We talked, as I recall, about policy in Africa," she said of one of her first dates with Bill Clinton, a recollection so weird it must be true. He gave her advice about cases; she gave him advice about appointments. She traveled the state to study the Arkansas school system and made sweeping recommendations to reform it. Her husband proposed legislation to implement the reforms. Both of them were hissed afterward by teachers. A modern marriage to the max.

This is no Nancy Reagan, obsessed with the man. This is a woman who lives and breathes social welfare policy, who has a resume that would have put her on transition team lists had Bill Bradley just been elected President, who was a key player in her husband's campaign.

Some women think she should have a Cabinet-level position, pointing out that Jack Kennedy made his brother Attorney General. Others say she should try to create a more meaningful First Woman's role, cut to fit the tenor of the times.

I think the most important thing is that she fashion a meaningful job in her areas of expertise, that she ignore criticism of that job, and that we stop the criticism and focus on the benefits -- for our schools, for our kids, for all the issues she works on. If they want to give the job a name, that's fine -- just don't give it a fashion emphasis.

Breaking ground is never easy, and Hillary Clinton surely knows about the people who said they wanted to "get the pants off Eleanor and onto Franklin." (Gee, how times have not changed.) There will be people who complain that they didn't elect her. Get over it; you didn't elect James Baker either. There will be people who wanted an older Princess Di and are quick to cast her instead as a younger, left-wing Margaret Thatcher. Get over it.

If we put her in a little pink box of old expectations, truncate her contribution because of stereotypes, cut her down to size because we feel threatened, we lose. When he was running, President-elect Clinton liked to say we don't have a person to waste. Certainly not this one.

The 4th and Bill Ayers

I want to bring up Bill Ayers while the 4th is still fresh on our minds. Not that Ayers makes me feel like singing "Yankee Doodle", yet the flourishing career of Bill Ayers reminds me of all the freedom we do have in this country. Ask Bill Ayers, he has been one of the largest beneficiaries of our society's freedoms.

 

I do have memories from my college days of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Packed away at school in Tennessee, many states still had the feeling of being foreign and far away. Most information was gathered from Time and Newsweek if you lived in a dorm and both gave you weekly updates on student events across the country. So it was in this way I first learned of Ayers who was attending the University of Michigan and who became active in the SDS. Prior to Michigan, Ayers had first fought on the streets of Chicago during the "Days of Rage" in 1969. He and his comrades from the Weather Underground destroyed display windows of businesses along what is known as the "Magnificent Mile" in Chicago, Il. Ayers did not suffer repercussions for these antics mostly because his father, Tom Ayers, was a well respected CEO at Commonwealth Edison, and even Bill gives his Dad credit for standing by him during his fugitive days.

 

How ironic that "The Establishment" (as represented by Tom Ayers), that Bill hated, protected him as well . Tom was well known, and he would see that Bill was "looked out for".  Remember, it was also the time of Big Boss Richard M. Daly, and the threats of killing his own parents fell on deaf ears (bad boy).  After a few years passed, and Bill was in hiding from having planted bombs , it was increasingly clear that the SDS was fading and that the Weather Underground would never take over the government in a flaming revolt. So as Bill was ready to turn himself in, it was discovered there were too many prosecuting errors in his case to ever bring the case to trial. So Ayers was never convicted, and he and his girlfriend, Bernadine Dohrn, rejoined the family in Chicago where he lives a very affluent and prestigious American life as a distinguished Professor Of English at the University Of Illinois at Chicago.

 

So is the background of the man who introduced Barack Obama to liberal Chicago Politics. Bill Ayers continues to rage against America in his teaching and on his blog (billayers.org). It is interesting and telling of his radical nature. Read his latest post of the speech by Frederick Douglas written in 1852. Bill wants to remind you of American injustice the week of this 4th. I suppose he still considers his work unfinished:

 

From billayers.org

 

"The Fourth of July is Yours, Not mine"

Frederick Douglas, 1852.

 

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour." ....TR

 

~

Battle for Fort McHenry

This scene inspired Francis Scott Keyes to write our National Anthem

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Article on SuperDelegates and Corruption

Superdelegate power just breeds corruption; end it, Democrats

from "Asheville Citizen-times"

The smoked-filled room, a secret political gathering for stealth decision-making has long since gone, but the party bosses still weave their silent webs of deceit. It was President Andrew Jackson who headed the public call for the first national convention with delegates.

This year the National Democratic Convention will be held Aug. 25-28 in Denver, Colo., with the primary goals to nominate a candidate for president and vice president, adopt a comprehensive party platform and unite the party. Some previous conventions have been contentious. In 1924, there was a brawl between the “Wets” and the “Drys.” In 1968, there erupted a highly emotional battle between the conventioneers and the Vietnam war protesters.

Conventions’ purpose

In 2008, the division is between liberals and the more conservative wing of the party. In working for party unity, the goal is to shut down the fracas. The powerbrokers want a good show, like “American Idol.” They have long since forgotten that conventions are not to ratify nominees.
Conventions are to elect, through the people’s choice, their delegates. Delegates are chosen in a series of individual state caucuses and primary elections. They come from communities across the nation to carry out our constitutional mandate.

Superdelegates, anointed, are elected officials such as governors and congressmen and other party bigwigs. These honorables, vested with the responsibility of voting for a presidential candidate, can be bought with cash, donations to their PACs, contributions to an organization, a project dear to their hearts or commit to a backroom grand bargain. It might be unseemly for a candidate to hand out money to a voter, but almost a million dollars has been handed out by Obama and Clinton in political contributions over the past three years.

Tracking the money

At the state and local level, these contributions are difficult to trace. At the federal level, contributions are reported and traceable. There is a lengthy lag time. Recent figures may take weeks to be reported and analyzed; however, February records can be examined. Obama had donated to delegates more than $700,000; Clinton more than $236,000. Studies have found that a presidential candidate who gives the most money to superdelegates receives their endorsement 82 percent of the time.

The Weekly Standard commented “... if 82 percent of the superdelegates are endorsing the candidate who donated more to them, that’s indicative of something other than a belief in the ‘audacity of hope.’ It sounds like old-fashioned bribery.”

The new politics: candidates lobbying for votes.

Superdelegate power has created skullduggery in our political selection process. The system is an affront to voters, undemocratic and misconstrues the selection process. It thwarts the one- man, one-vote rule. Will we know by August the names of the bought delegates? Should they be seated? Should they acknowledge their 30 pieces of silver? Should they own up to their grand bargain? Should they vote their pockets or vote their convictions? The antiquated superdelegate system should go before the Rules and ByLaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee, be presented to the delegates at the convention and repealed.

The 2000 election was decided by judges acting as delegates. The 2008 election should be decided by delegates acting as judges in open convention. Contentious? A fracas? So what. It would film well.

Francella Poston has been active in community, civic and political affairs, and works actively on governmental fiscal policy. She lives in Asheville.

Why Women Should Vote

submitted by Carmina...

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote. The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women. Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why,exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek
to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'

HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order. It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote. History is being made.

> Author Unknown

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