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Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.
This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.
On A Current Affair Magda Szubanski said it was ok for her to criticize Jenny Morrison because of the growing influence of the Christian Right in Australian politics.
But just like an expose on a dodgy car salesman who left his stash in the Lamborghini of the unnamed wife of a minor MAFS celebrity who may be cheating (no-judgment); just because someone said it on A Current Affair doesn’t mean its true.
The Christian Right meme gets tossed around a lot on social and regular passive-aggressive media. Having a church-going Christian Prime Minister like Scott Morrison probably doesn’t help those who are easily triggered by such things, though they seemed less concerned when Kevin Rudd was doing the media conferences outside his church. Just saying.
by David Penner / April 11th, 2021
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. Gore Vidal,
Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, 2004
As Americans drown in debt and atomization, the liberal class applauds the arrival of a post-nation-state neo-feudal order which is devoid of checks and balances, integration, national cohesion, or collective memory, rendering any working class resistance to fascism a Herculean task. This has been made possible because of the demise of traditional American liberalism, rooted in the values of the civil rights movement and the New Deal, and its usurpation by the cult of neoliberalism which is anchored in unrestricted immigration, multiculturalism, identity politics, and the nakedly imperialistic policies embraced by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. This growing collaboration between neoliberals and the oligarchy has fomented an unprecedented degree of both tribalism and unfett
Eagle Scout Michael Carlson raised funding to make and install this memorial. Courtesy MRFF
The town of Monument sold five grave plots in city-owned Monument Cemetery to a Boy Scoutâs family in an apparent effort to dodge a First Amendment lawsuit threatened by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
The plots, which cost $800 each, were sold on March 19, Monument Town Manager Mike Foreman says. That was weeks after the MRFF raised objections to a stone memorial monument installed there, with the cityâs help, as the Eagle Scout project of Michael Carlson.
The memorial has this inscription: âOnly two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ and the American soldier. One died for your soul, the other died for your freedom. We honor those who made freedom a reality.â