Forum Replies Created
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You do not have deer, apparently.
w
vYeah we do, though. And I mean the big “last of the mohicans”
style white tailed deer. In the neighborhood in fact.
You have to look at deer resistant plants when planning
a garden.When it’s a dry summer the deer will target big
asiatic lily buds, and eat them just before they
bloom. It happened in the garden a couple of summers
ago. Fortunately–or, fortunately if you want to see
the lilies–it hasn’t been dry the last couple of summers.I see deer on the roads probably 3, 4 times a year.
I ran over a baby spotted deer the other day.
Very bad day, that was.
It just shot out into the road,
and that was that.w
vI talked to a guy in jail the other day. He was
denied a lawyer. Court wont appoint him a public-defender.
Why?
Because the crime he committed carries no jail sentence.
He wrote some worthless checks. Worthless check charges
only carry a FINE but no jail time.
The law in WV sez, you are only entitled to a court-appointed lawyer
if the crime you are charged with — carries a possible JAIL sentence.So…he’s in jail because he cant MAKE BAIL — but the charge itself
carries no JAIL sentence — so…he cant get a Lawyer, to help him
…get…out of jail.I could go on
It’s insane.
I caught bit of “…And Justice For All” last night—the old Al Pacino film. That also touches on the insanity of the system Good film.
I can’t imagine your level of frustration having to deal with it all the time. Maybe you just get numb after awhile–I don’t know. All you can do is do whatever little good you can do in this bizarre system. I have to believe when you get victories it feels pretty good, knowing what you’re up against.
Nah, it doesn’t get to me, Pa. Its not just
the ‘criminal justice system’ — its the same
story in all the corporotacracy’s “sub-systems.”
Health care, Education, Media,
Legal System…etc, etc, etc — same story: crush the poor.Meanwhile, the poor continue to vote for
duplicats and replicants.Ah well.
w
v“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.”Percy Bysshe Shelley
— from his poem “The Mask of Anarchy”:“Our picture of the world is provided by those that profit from our ignorance.”
Gavin GeeIt was set in Hawaii and involved Giant talking pigs,
and a half-shark-half-man demigod, and a Volcano goddess, and
some Japanese billionaires who wanted to buy a resort and turn
it into a golf-utopia. Oh, and a ghost-hunting, naked, Mark Twain is one of the
main characters. Yes.That sounds awful.
I may try ” The Abominable” at some point but I need a break from him right now.
I’m still reading “Divide” by Matt Taibbi, “Flashpoints” by George Friedman, “The Emperor of all Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee(I’ve been working through that well over a year and I’m about halfway through it) and a paperback novel called “Influx” by Danial Suarez(labeled the Crichton of his time according to the book blurb). Hopefully I won’t start anything new until I finish these. I should set my limit at five at a time–period. I always have a hard time quitting a book when I should. I just keep going most of the time. So they can add up when I get bored.
Not that all of these are boring. “Divide” is fantastic, actually.
Well yeah doesnt surprise me that Taibbi’s book is great.
The best book I’ve read this year (and I’m still reading it) is “Democracy’s Prisoner”.
Its a biography of Eugene V Debbs. Debbs was a tall, charismatic Socialist back in the World War I era.
He ran for President from a Jail cell in Moundsville WV. President Woodrow Wilson tossed him in prison,
for speaking out against Wilson’s War. Back then numerous Socialists were jailed for being anti-war. Some were lynched. Many were beaten in police-riots and riots lead by the American Legion and American soldiers and rightwing vigilantes.Helen Keller was a socialist and was one of his biggest supporters, along with Upton Sinclair, btw.
The book is well-written. Its not a leftist screed by any means. Just lays out the facts, nicely.
Definitely my favorite book of the last few years.
w
v
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Dissent/Democracy%27sPrisoner_Debs.htmla book review
Democracy’s Prisoner
Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent
by Ernest Freeberg
a book review by Peter Richardson
http://www.latimes.com/fe, June 15, 2008It all sounds so familiar: a foreign war, an unpopular president, high-minded vows to spread democracy abroad and a dubious law to restrict liberties at home. Add to that scenario vast inequalities in wealth, high immigration rates, scant regard for working families and festering resentment about the ravages of global capital. The conclusion seems inescapable: the first decades of the 20th century sound weirdly like the present.
But the differences are also notable. Before World War I, a radical journal could reach 700,000 American households, and socialism was what William James might call “a live hypothesis.” The impassioned speeches of labor organizer, Socialist leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs were nothing short of evangelical in tone and effect. (He once called socialism “merely Christianity in action.”) Debs inspired groups large and small, and his remarkable charisma is what most concerned the powers that were. For the historical parallel to hold, we must imagine a third-party presidential candidate today who could receive 1 million votes without leaving his prison cell — and a roaring ovation from his fellow inmates when he finally did.
According to historian Ernest Freeberg, it was precisely Debs’ virtuosity that forced America to grapple with the limits of dissent. In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America’s entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs’ popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government’s power to jail dissidents. The legal justifications came later, after Debs walked out of an Atlanta prison and caught a train to meet his unlikely Republican pardoner, President Warren G. Harding. Ailing, distracted by foreign affairs and stung by criticism from progressives and conservatives alike for his policy failures, Democrat Woodrow Wilson had refused to pardon Debs despite rising public pressure to do so after the war. When it seemed safe, his successor made the call, shrewdly connecting it to his pledge to return the nation to normalcy.
Throughout this time, many civic groups and public officials defended the Espionage Act. One leader of the American Defense Society declared, “Those who are not for us, must be against us.” A congressman advised: “People should go ahead and obey the law, keep their mouths shut, and let the government run the war.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dismissed criticism of the court’s unanimous rulingagainst Debs as “a lot of jaw about free speech.” But Holmes reconsidered his position and later offered his “clear and present danger” test to adjudicate such cases. By that standard, Debs never would have been convicted.
Freeberg’s narrative unfolds at a stately pace. He patiently introduces the main characters and many minor ones. Debs’ main advocate, Lucy Robins, leaves her vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco to take up the fight. She receives strong backstage support from Debs’ labor rival, the AFL’s Samuel Gompers, and equally strong resistance from her more radical husband. Upton Sinclair weighs in, overconfident in his ability to reason with Wilson. We also hear from John Reed, Helen Keller, Clarence Darrow and U.S. Postmaster General Will Hays, who would later lay down the law for the Hollywood studios. (His nemesis, Mae West, appears briefly to lobby Harding for Debs’ release.) Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launches raids on radical groups and thereby scotches his political future. But Palmer’s loss is J. Edgar Hoover’s gain; the young bureaucrat fills his files with the names of subversives — and eventually carries the imprint of those years into the Nixon era.
The middle section of the book, which describes the various pressures and counter-pressures brought to bear on the amnesty question, slows to a crawl. Debs moves through two prisons and three wardens, whom he invariably impresses with his integrity and affability. His freedom looms on the horizon like a mirage as two administrations ponder the politics of his release. One delegation after another makes its pitch in Washington, and the decision-makers dispense blandishments until the battle for popular opinion is all but settled. Freeberg’s reader languishes along with Debs, waiting for some definitive outcome.
When it finally arrives, the relief is palpable. Some readers may be moved, as I was, by the photograph of a black-suited Debs standing on the road outside the penitentiary. With his back to the camera and black hat raised high in his right hand, Debs acknowledges the ovation of his fellow inmates. For American radical history, this is Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium. Debs wasn’t the victim of a bad break; he was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
Debs served less than three years, but he returned to a different world. He had always mediated the tension between his party’s two major factions, the democratic Socialists and the communists, but the party splintered while he was serving his sentence. After his release in 1921, he sided with the democrats, whose numbers were dwindling, partly because many of the party’s causes — including women’s suffrage, food and drug laws, a minimum wage and a ban on child labor — had become mainstream issues.Moreover, Wilson’s war had squandered much of the nation’s idealism. As Freeberg notes, “The administration had lied about the causes and likely consequences of the war, big business had fattened itself while families sacrificed, and much of the patriotic fervor that gripped the country in the war years had only been froth churned by the government’s propaganda machine.” Fortunately, this would never happen again.
Soon after his release, Debs had seen enough of Lenin’s methods to deplore them. When he shared his concern with radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, he received a Rumsfeld-esque reply that “some things happen that we don’t expect.” Debs broke with the Bolsheviks, but despite strenuous efforts by Lucy Robins, he never healed the breach with Gompers before dying in 1926. Many of Debs’ comrades drifted off into other pursuits, including mainstream journalism, real estate sales and the development of solar greenhouses in Vermont. Ironically, Clyde Miller, an Ohio journalist and the man most responsible for Debs’ conviction, lobbied Harding to pardon him, helped found an institute for propaganda analysis and was later grilled by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
If history is what the present wants to know about the past, “Democracy’s Prisoner” is teeming with lessons. But above all, it’s the story of one extraordinary man’s showdown with the establishment — and how that confrontation turned into a complex political struggle whose outcome was up for grabs. Carefully researched and expertly told, Debs’ story also brings a fascinating era into sharp, vivid focus.
Peter Richardson is the author of “American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.” His book on the history and influence of Ramparts magazine will be published next year.
