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Tweets of the Master Class: Ten Dollars Extra For Every Hundred Lashes

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Trump’s Revisionist History on Andrew Jackson

By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

“Stop the Runaway” begins an 1804 ad placed in the Tennessee Gazette urging civic-minded souls to capture a “Mulatto Man Slave” escaped from one Andrew Jackson, “unrepentant” owner of 161 slaves, soon-to-be 7th president, and role model for our dizzyingly ignorant 45th, who with rabid encouragement from Bannon likes to glowingly compare himself to the prosperous slave trader and infamous Indian killer who precipitated the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears.

The latest summoning of his bestie’s racist ghost came in an interview with the Washington Examiner in which “the most fact-challenged president ever” stunningly suggested Jackson was “really angry that he saw what was happening, with regard to the Civil War” and might have stopped it even though he’d been dead 16 years. After babbling, “People don’t realize, the Civil War – you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question” – though to date over 30 million people have Googled that very question – Trump blankly asked, “But why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

So many facepalms, so little time.   [Read more…]

The Science of San Diego Mastodon Bones, Time and Human Habitation

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Who knew that the Cerutti Mastodon site along SR54 in San Diego may be “the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas”? And what does that actually mean?

San Diego has been a rich source of paleontological discoveries. A 300,000 year old mammoth was excavated during the construction of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in downtown San Diego. Additional excavation ten feet below the skull and tusks of the mammoth revealed the 500,000 year old skeleton of a California Gray Whale.

The significance of these two sites are quite different. The mastodon site is about much more than the animal life in the region one hundred and thirty thousand years ago.   [Read more…]

Bridges and Walls

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“While some are thinking of walls, we will continue building bridges of understanding.”

By Nat Krieger

Even though the American Society of Civil Engineers has rated 60,000 U.S. bridges structurally deficient, Donald Trump’s top infrastructure priority is building a wall.

Bridges and walls. Both learned from nature. The walls of the Alps that have protected and/or isolated Switzerland for millennia. The now flooded earthen bridge linking Asia to the Americas that brought the first immigrants to these lands.

When it comes to the imitations built by humans it may be surprising to discover that the most ancient surviving bridges are over a thousand years older than the oldest still above ground frontier walls. Surprising because Homo sapiens sapiens—the species so wise we have to say it twice—have raised a genetic propensity for group raiding that we share with chimpanzees, to the heights of planned, civilized slaughter. If the great walls that gird cities and frontiers are built on assumptions of endless war, bridges are bets on peace, exposed connective tissue born from the confidence that there other people and places worth checking out.   [Read more…]

How Republican Candidate Ronald Reagan Colluded with a Foreign Government to Manipulate the 1980 Presidential Election

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The Story of the “October Surprise”and How Reagan Got Away with It

With all the scandals bursting around Trump and the White House these days, with FBI and Congressional investigations into possible crimes committed by the President’s men, many pundits and commentators are making the obvious comparisons with Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal.

Yet, besides Watergate, there’s another very striking historical parallel in our not-to-distance past, and it’s another comparison that it would be good for us to review as well.   [Read more…]

The Man Who Skipped Breakfast and Found a World of Love

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Charlie Chatman woke up one morning saying to himself, as he had for so many mornings, for eternities: “Lord, give me the strength to put up with these damn peckerwoods one more day.”

The only thing he cared about in his godforsaken life, on a Hawkinsville, Georgia sharecropping plantation, was breakfast, whatever it happened to be, cornbread and scraps of pork, a potato or two, a cup of milk (maybe) – or some stolen boiled corn that the pigs were fed.

Anything to sustain his body and spirit to stand up against the insults to his humanity he had to put up with each day. What kept him alive each day were his daydreams, simple imaginings: sleeping in a nice bed, walking leisurely down a country road, meeting Gabriel on Judgment Day.   [Read more…]

OB Rag Editorial in 1973 During the Days of Nixon and Watergate

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The following is an OB Rag staff editorial from October 1973. It was published during the time of the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal. As Nixon didn’t resign until August 1974, there were fears of what he would do in the months prior to the resolution of the Constitutional crisis. In reading this editorial written 44 years ago, many of the themes resonate with us today.

tyranny at home …

We of the OB Rag staff are appalled at Richard Nixon’s latest moves at establishing one-man rule n America. Nixon has stepped outside the bounds of his constituted authority … again. He has usurped the powers of the courts by refusing to comply with a court order to release the tapes. More, he has fired the one man, Archibald Cox, who had the legal authority to investigate the White House’s involvement in Watergate.   [Read more…]

The MOXIE Theatre production of Blue Door

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Exploring Self-Identity through Conversations with Ancestors 

By Yuko Kurahashi

The MOXIE Theatre production of Blue Door by Tanya Barfield, directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, portrays a middle-aged African-American mathematics professor Lewis’s search for his identity and history by bearing witness to the paths of his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.

Set in the bedroom of his apartment in 1995, Lewis opens the play with a monolog about his wife of 25 years (she never appears on stage) who has just left him, asking for a divorce. According to Lewis, his wife, who is white, is divorcing him because he would not participate in the Million Man March. This historical march held on October 16, 1995, was led by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan who called for black men to gather in Washington, D.C. to reflect and change their roles both in the private and public spheres. Lewis explains his unwillingness to participate in this historical event disappointed his wife.     [Read more…]

How Black Women Helped Shape History And Today’s Democratic Party

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By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

If you are not aware that in recent decades black women have been the most reliable and solid voting bloc for Democrats, you should be. We proved it, once again, in the recent presidential election. That stance and practice has a history, rooted in the time when many black Americans had been Republicans and the Democratic Party was the home of racist, anti-black Dixiecrats who took extraordinary measures to restrict black voting rights.

Of course the political party that currently represents and practices racism with a capital ‘R’ calls itself ‘Republican’—and is now occupying the White House. The popular vote loser and liar-in-chief (aka Birther Trump) has placed slimy white supremacist Steve Bannon in a key position to aid, abet and undermine the Constitution. The R’s in the House and Senate are doing nothing to stop the turning back of the clock to pre-civil rights days, and are participating in the deconstruction of our rights while embracing an openly racist, sexist, xenophobic agenda—which they advanced for the eight years they blocked President Obama.

This is our first Black History Month under the new, illegitimate regime, and since voting rights are on the table and more voter suppression and gerrymandering loom large in the near future, I’d like to honor some of the women of our recent past who we should adopt as shining examples to emulate and inspire us as we fight for our future.   [Read more…]

Thank You UC Berkeley Students and Community for Confronting Racist

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This Is Not an Issue of “Free Speech” for a White Nationalist with Connections to the White House

Risking becoming the lone voice in today’s wilderness, we say today that somebody has to say “thank you” to the UC Berkeley students and community members who demonstrated against the white nationalist Breitbart News senior editor back on Wednesday, February 1st, and helped cause the campus to cancel the talk by Milo Yiannopoulos.

So, thank you.

The whole incident has now blown up, with claims the protesters violated free speech, with Trump threatening to cut off funds to UC Berkeley – which he cannot do unilaterally – and the subsequent push-back against him from school and California officials.   [Read more…]

Gov. Brown: ‘California is Not Turning Back. Not Now, Not Ever.’

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State of the State Address / Office of the Governor

This is California, the sixth most powerful economy in the world. One out of every eight Americans lives right here and 27 percent – almost eleven million – were born in a foreign land.

When California does well, America does well. And when California hurts, America hurts.

As the English poet, John Donne, said almost 400 years ago: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

A few moments ago, I swore into office our new attorney general. Like so many others, he is the son of immigrants who saw California as a place where, through grit and determination, they could realize their dreams. And they are not alone, millions of Californians have come here from Mexico and a hundred other countries, making our state what it is today: vibrant, even turbulent, and a beacon of hope to the rest of the world.

We don’t have a Statue of Liberty with its inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” But we do have the Golden Gate and a spirit of adventure and openness that has welcomed – since the Gold Rush of 1848 – one wave of immigration after another.   [Read more…]

Janet and George Gastil: San Diego Locals Contributing to our Communities

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In her 80 years, Janet Gastil has worn many hats and is a true renaissance woman. She has been a wife and mother, teacher, musician, realtor, and politician to name the most important ones…

Janet Manly Gastil was born in 1936 in Long Island, but moved to San Diego in 1946 when she was ten years old. Like her mother, Gastil suffered from asthma, so going west improved their health. Both of her parents were attorneys and active in social causes which helped to shape their only child.

A student prodigy, Gastil received her BA in English from SDSU [back then known as San Diego State College] at 19. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Duke University where she got her MA at 20.   [Read more…]

‘I Am Not Your Negro’ Will Introduce James Baldwin to a New Generation

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By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

There are voices we all need to hear. At a time when the United States is once again faced with our chilling legacy of racism and other ills including sexism, homophobia, and economic inequality, one of the most powerful voices from our recent past is speaking out again through the medium of documentary film.

It is the voice of James Baldwin. The film, I Am Not Your Negro, will be opening in movie theaters on Feb. 3.   [Read more…]

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