Das Williams victorious in Santa Barbara Assembly race
Although Stoker led early Tuesday night after the vote-by-mail ballots came in, Williams rallied and surged ahead as the night went on.
Read more on Santa Barbara Daily Sound
Sometimes it crawls out from beneath the bridge 0531091827
Image by accent on eclectic
Late Sunday afternoon of May 31 was gorgeous, and the sun beautifully lit the railroad bridge over the San Jacinto River, just north of I-10. I took these photos of the graffiti that covered the undersides of the bridge supports at its west end. That evening I posted photos of the bridge, but not of the graffiti.
I see a lot of graffiti when I am photographing old bridges and buildings, some of it really good from an artistic standpoint, the bulk of it harmless, if one ignores the vandalism, criminality, and defacing of property thing, but I can’t ignore that, so I post very little.
This was the first time that I’d encountered this sort of graffiti, though. Sure, there have been the occasional isolated swastika, racist epithet, that sort of thing, but never such an amount of concentrated neo-nazi white power scribbliings as I saw at this bridge, the product of sad little minds more truly challenged in adequacy than in superiority, but history shows what hell that insecurity can breed.
It disturbed me and I considered making a post about it at the time, but decided it was best left in the darkness, beneath the bridge.
Several of my ancestors fought for that sad treasonous institution, the Confederacy. My mother’s father had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties, left it. He was, for many years, a Civil War buff and came to understand how far from noble the southern states’ cause was.
Two of my uncles fought across Europe in World War II, and, out of respect for that sacrifice, I, too often, bit my tongue, or simply left the room, when they would begin one of their racist rants, after seeing some news item, back in the sixties, about a man named King, whom, they occasionally proclaimed, someone should shoot.
I grew up in Pasadena, Texas, which was, at the time, a predominately white community, unashamed that some members of its police department and city government were Klan members. There was, for some years, a Klan bookstore a few blocks from the house in which I grew up. Some teachers and schoolbus drivers never had second thoughts about telling racist jokes to their charges. At the time that I was in school there, there was not a Black student in the Pasadena public schools and Hispanic students could be suspended if they spoke a word of Spanish on campus, even during breaks, even before and after school.
Much has changed, in Pasadena, in the United States, and in the world. When Texas Governor Perry spouts his stupid nonsense about states’ rights and the possibility of secession, I sometimes wonder if very much has changed in the state of Texas, but…
It appears that James W. Von Brunn, the accused murderer of the security guard at the Holocaust Museum in DC had some considerable notoriety before today’s tragedy. It is a reminder not to bite tongues or simply walk out of rooms when we are confronted by evil, even if the evil is an attitude of someone we otherwise may hold dear.
Limbaugh and some others are finding that their core (not to be confused with their audience) has shrunk to angry people who share a few superficial traits and a few beliefs with them. Instead of bemoaning that the number of their true believers has shrunk to that core, they, instead, have recognized that that shrunken core makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in numbers, so they feed it, feed its hate, feed its fear, feed its ignorance, feeding, at the same time, their own egos, and wallets. I really urge concerned people to listen to Limbaugh, and Beck, hear the stuff that contributes to incidents like the murder at the Holocaust Museum.
It is clear these days that racism, hatred, ignorance, evil, are not limited to a single race or group. All of us need to speak up when someone assumes that, because we share with them some trait or belief, that we also share some belief that that trait or that that belief lends us superiority.
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it" – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We can’t assume that evil will always remain beneath the bridge.
Clear Channel
Image by jrbrubaker
Here’s a blurb about Clear Channel I wrote for TANGENT! awhile back:
What is Clear Channel?
In the last decade Clear Channel Communications Inc. has acquired over 1,200 radio stations, 700,000 billboards and 200 concert venues, making it into a global telecommunications giant. This was impossible under FCC ten years ago, until The 1996 Telecommunications Act lifted limits on the number of radio stations a company can own. But now, it owns complete tours of artists like Madonna and Pearl Jam, and even the advertising space at the train station in the small university town in Belgium where I live. As companies like Clear Channel (and it’s competitors, CC is hardly alone in this trend) begin to buy up local broadcasters around the world, the temptation to take advantage of media consolidation seems to be getting hard to ignore. Cutting the air time of groups not interested in their tour-management services is only one of many accusations levied against CC in recent years.
What I find a creepy example of something, I don’t know exactly what yet, is CC’s sponsorship of pro-war demonstrations and Dixie Chicks CD destroying parties, due mostly to their widely syndicated radio personality, Glenn Beck. His "Rally for America" demonstrations were sponsored by local stations but then covered on the radio as if they were news. This is the company that owns the syndication of Rush Limbaugh, so I had to wonder, what does CC have to gain by pushing such a right-wing agenda?
A few quick tidbits to help point us towards some understanding;
1. Shortly after 9/11, Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards were flooded with claims of radio censorship. Bands like Rage Against the Machine, and anti-war sentiments like John Lennon’s "Imagine" were supposedly being banned from radio in America. Turns out this was simply a strong suggestion on the part of Clear Channel headquarters. Claims of government censorship turned out to be false, but with CC owning 60+% of the rock stations in the country, the effect was a large scale removal of anti-war or anti-establishment sentiment from the airwaves.
2. In 1998 Tom Hicks, Vice-Chair of Clear Channel purchased the Texas Rangers. Due largely to their new tax-payer subsidized stadium, the sale made millions of dollars for one of their prominent Texan investors, George W. Bush.
3. Michael (son of Colin) Powell, the head of the FCC, is considering further deregulation of the telecommunications industry, a step that would allow Clear Channel to further its radio business model into the television industry.
Pink Triangle Rush
Image by jonathanpberger
There may not be many Gays for Rush Limbaugh, but they make up for it in enthusiasm.
RT @ArrestRoveNow: Sarah Palin's racial rant against the Obamas is almost word for word what Rush Limbaugh says every day. Coincidence? – by Twitlertwit (S.)
RT @ArrestRoveNow: Sarah Palin's racial rant against the Obamas is almost word for word what Rush Limbaugh says every day. Coincidence? – by Foranony (Vicky)
What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh & the Hindenberg? One's a flaming Nazi gasbag, and one's a dirigible. #tcot #p2 #teaparty #scum – by markmarp (TheGhostOfGladstone)
Rush Limbaugh Trivia!
I’m just curious what the people that support him think. Do you think that Rush Limbaugh helps bring people into your party? Listen… I understand liking him, but you do understand that people like Rush Limbaugh are driving people away from the Republican party. You can say you don’t care and all that, but if you truly want Republicans to be back in power you better start caring because as long as Rush Limbaugh is a voice in the Republican party the more people going to stear clear.
Answer by Ali
He’s a taint. I hope his kidneys fail.
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