QUOTABLES

Yes, ‘I Am Legend,’ the 2007 movie about zombie vampires, is now a part of the vaccine conversation. 

As of Wednesday, more than 166 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. The zombie count, however, remains at zero. -- Washington Post

Stephen Collison, CNN

At the same time, Biden was doing exactly what most Americans, exhausted by long years of foreign quagmires and confused as to why US troops were still in Afghanistan 20 years after 9/11, wanted. There was no national support for escalating the war. -- Biden's botched Afghan exit  

Taliban Spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen 

...told the BBC Sunday that the militants want a "peaceful" transition. -- CNBC

‘Saigon on Steroids’: The Desperate Rush to Flee Afghanistan,” by WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov, Dion Nissenbaum, and Margherita Stancati 

"The lucky few were already inside, crowded onto the last patch of government territory that hadn’t fallen to the Taliban. Outside, as thousands of civilians surged to break through the perimeter of Hamid Karzai International Airport, security forces fired gunshots into the air to force them back." -- Wall Street Journal

“Corporate America grows impatient on Biden’s China trade review,” by Gavin Bade

“Nearly eight months into his presidency, America’s largest corporations are voicing frustration that Biden has not rolled back any of former President Donald Trump’s major tariffs, particularly the duties on $350 billion worth of Chinese imports." -- Politico

NYT’s Elizabeth Harris

“Blackout,” by the right-wing media personality Candace Owens, has sold 480,000 copies across formats since it was published last fall by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “American Marxism,” by the best-selling author Mark R. Levin, which devotes a chapter to critical race theory, sold 400,000 books in just its first week on the market last month. -- New York Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

 

John Fogerty: "Confounding" that Trump campaign played "Fortunate Son" at the rally.

CA Gov. Gavin Newsom

"The debate is over around climate change," Newsom said as he toured a burn area in Northern California. "Just come to the state of California. Observe it with your own eyes. It’s not an intellectual debate. It’s not even debatable any longer."  -- NBC Bay Area

Donald Trump

“I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody — what we have is incredible." -- Forbes

 Roger Stone to Trump: bring in martial law if you lose the election

...said Trump should seize total power and jail prominent figures including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg if he loses to Joe Biden in November. Stone said Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act and arresting the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity”. -- Guardian

John Fogerty

“It’s a song I could have written now, and so I find it confusing, I would say, that the president has chosen to use my song for his political rallies, when in fact it seems like he is probably the fortunate son." -- The Hill

Bill Russell, NBA Hall of Famer

"Racism is not a historical footnote." -- Players' Tribune 

IL Atty. General Kwame Raoul 

“How old were you when a cop 1st pulled a gun on you?”  “Seventeen,” he answered. It happened at the corner of 50th and Woodlawn avenues on Chicago’s South Side." -- Politico

 

I would like to thank my ancestors because everytime I remember their blood runs through my veins I am reminded that I cannot lose.

— NaomiOsaka大坂なおみ (@naomiosaka) September 13, 2020

QUOTABLES

Wow! Cool photo from Daytona 500, posted by Trump's campaign manager. Only problem is, it's from 16 years ago. 

Common at the All-Star Game

"If this city could talk..." -- NBA on TNT

James Taylor

"It’s like the Confederacy has won the civil war.” -- Guardian

1,143 former Justice Dept. officials

Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice...Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies. -- DOJ Alumni Statement

Bernie Sanders 

“It is unacceptable that we are closing public schools in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Together alongside Washington Teachers’ Union and teachers across the country, we will make transformative investments in our public schools, our teachers, and students.” -- Washington Post

Amy Klobuchar

Q: Do you even know the Mexican President's name?

 A: No -- Noticias

Kids now asking about the real Black Panthers

From Max S. Gordon's review of "Black Panther"

An article published this weekend in The Guardian suggests that “Black Panther” has already raised consciousness about black political prisoners. It’s exciting to imagine a generation of black children asking the question, “Who were the real Black Panthers?,” and learning that the party was created to monitor police brutality in Oakland, and expanded to include fights for healthcare, and provided free lunch programs for children; conversations that would ordinarily take place in African-American studies classes at major universities, now being taught to children in the fifth grade. 

Brother Fred and I will be doing a special edition of Hitting Left on March 21st as part of our year-long 1968 retrospective. In-studio guests will be Cha Cha Jimenez from the Young Lords Organization, Billy "Che"Brooks from the original IL Black Panther Party and former SDSer Susan Klonsky. We'll be talking about the old (original) Rainbow Coalition that turned the old Mayor Daley's Chicago upside-down in '68.

Lorraine Forte

Note to the Pearsons: Next time you're giving away $100M to help the cause of world peace, come talk to me first. U of C is the last place you should turn. They're much too busy promoting the likes of war-mongering racists like Bannon and Lewandowski.

Upcoming Friday on HL we'll be talking media/politics with Lorraine Forte, newly-hired member of the Sun-Times editorial board. Lorraine has served as the executive editor of The Chicago Reporter and editor-in-chief of the Reporter’s sister publication Catalyst Chicago.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Neo-nazis, white supremacists march again in Charlottesville.

Carl Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

“This president is the president of his base... We’ve never seen this kind of chaos in a presidency before. This is different because it goes to the character and competence — a feeling that the president of the United States, including among those on the White House staff, may be unfit to hold the office.” -- CNN

Republican senator Bob Corker 

“He’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were under way by tweeting things out. A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act under way, but that’s just not true.”  -- New York Times 

Erika Whitfield, St. Louis teacher

Issues of race and policing are not abstractions for my seventh-graders...I can’t ignore that my students are growing up amid high-profile police brutality. -- Washington Post 

Joshua Bitsko, Las Vegas police officer

"We were trippin' over guns. Trippin' over long guns inside. There was so many." - CBS News

Yasmin Tayag

Tom Petty is the joint they share in a starry backyard in Brooklyn the night they kiss. He’s the beer they drink brazenly on a crowded beach as cops amble by. He’s the band playing to a backwoods dive bar and the shrug when nobody stays to watch. He keeps playing anyway. -- Medium 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Glenn Greenwald

THE PHRASE “FAKE NEWS”... lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it. -- The Intercept

Bob Dylan

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?” So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer. -- Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Donald Trump

“The African American community was great to us. They came through big league. And frankly, if they had any doubt, they didn’t vote. And that was almost as good. Because a bunch of people didn’t show up, because they felt good about me.” -- Think Progress

Anti-pipeline activist Tabitha Tripp  

“I think it’s important for people to realize that … we don’t have to drive 17 hours to North Dakota to see the extraction issues that are causing so much pain to people in our communities. We don’t have to look far to find issues to work on locally that have to do with water rights and protecting our environment for the next generation, which is what the people at Standing Rock are doing.” -- Southern Illinoisian 

Bernie Sanders

In defeating the Dakota Access Pipeline, we had to take on the entire fossil fuel industry and, once again, a majority of Congress. When faced with a strong grassroots movement, led by the Native American community and environmentalists all across the country, President Obama did the right thing — and deserves credit for it. -- Blueprint for defeating Trump

Rev. Dr. William Barber II

Along with much of the rest of the country, North Carolina fell victim this year to the extremism we’ve not yet experienced in Donald Trump. But we could not be deceived by the extremism we have endured under Pat McCrory. Though we know too well that America faces some tough days ahead, this moral victory should give all Americans reason to hope that we can revive the heart of our democracy and move forward together to a more perfect union. -- The Nation

Author Steve Coll on Exxon

But when the question involves the human factor, building trust with your communities where you’re drilling, or convincing people that fracking is not going to ruin their water, or dealing with political environments in 150 different countries with lots of supply problems, or dealing with violence on the ground around your oil fields in Africa — in all of those areas, I think they have a habit of not really taking anybody’s advice. They keep the windows closed." -- New York Times

I suspect liberals who write we aren't empathetic enough w/Trump voters will eventually write we were too weak to resist U.S. neofascism.

— Rafael Yglesias (@rafaelyglesias) December 11, 2016

Spike Lee takes on Rahm and his puppy-dog alders

Flanked by parents holding photographs of the children they've lost to gun violence in Chicago, Lee defended his choice to make a movie about the city with the Iraq-inspired title "Chiraq." (Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media, via AP)

“Art must be courageous, and anybody who wants a more peaceful America will understand where the heart of this film is,” John Cusack said. The actor called Lee’s project a “film of conscience.” -- Sun-Times

 “It’s not a First Amendment issue, and I’m on the board of the ACLU." -- Ald. Burns

It's Friday afternoon and the shooting victims are already falling in the city's most isolated and blighted neighborhoods -- areas where Rahm Emanuel's school closings, joblessness and cuts in city services have had their greatest impact.

Spike's new film has the mayor and puppy-dog alders with undies in twist, even before it's made. Why? All because of the title, Chiraq. This while thousands of neighborhood folks lined up, hoping for jobs working on the film.

At St. Sabina's yesterday, mothers who’d lost loved ones to gun violence clustered around Lee. They held up framed photographs of the lost. One woman brought an urn containing her daughter’s ashes.

RAHM'S RESPONSE... "It's bad for tourism", cries the mayor.

"We'll take away your $3 million tax break" [for filming in Illinois] threatens faithful sidekick, Ald. Will Burns (4th). Burns, who spends most of his time fighting against community activists who are trying to save Dyett High School, apparently fancies himself the city's new cultural minister. 

Another Rahm city council pup, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) piles on. When asked about the film maker's First Amendment rights, Beale said he's okay with the Amendment so long as you're not saying anything important or critical.

"Freedom of expression still does not mean you can insult the people of this city,” says Beale.

Uh, yes it does Alderman.

It seems that whether these guys are trying to steal retiree pensions or censor a movie, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are just pieces of wall decorations. Denying that the attempt by politicians to leverage tax-payer dollars in an attempt to politically influence a film is a First Amendment issue, Burns even claims to be on the ACLU board of directors. Wow! I hope not. 

From DNAInfo:

Spike Lee came to Chicago Thursday to tell everyone who complained about the “so-called title” of his next film, "Chiraq" — and that means you, Ald. Will Burns — they’re going to “look stupid” when the film hits the big screen.

“People act like they've never seen my films, like I was grabbed off the streets. Everything I've done led up to this film,” the New York City filmmaker said, pointing out that people criticized arguably his best movie, “Do The Right Thing,” before its debut.  

“The same thing is going to happen in Chicago. They are going look stupid and end up on the wrong side of history,” Lee said.

Father Pfleger

Count on Father Pfleger to tell it like it is:

 Very disappointing to see Ald. Will Burns trying to block the tax break for Spike Lee's movie. He has not seen the script, nor know the story line but wants to ignore an iconic Director his First Amendment Right! Perhaps with 112 Killed and 607 Shot in Chicago in the first 4 months of 2015, we should be much more concerned with the reality of loss of life than a name of a movie we don't know anything about yet. Ask Brothers on the Street or Parents who have lost their children to violence, or children going to and from school each day in fear, or ask the IIT student who turned down a scholarship for college to get out of the city, what they're more concerned with

Burns was still shaking after his threat. Never in his life has he ever imagined taking away a tax break from a millionaire. Somehow, I think Spike will do OK either way.

Big Shout out to Spike Lee and his folks....Over 3500 people came thru the casting call today at St.... http://t.co/gtzE6rpDi1

— Fr. Michael Pfleger (@MichaelPfleger) May 9, 2015

California dist. bans Webster's Dictionary

It's too dirty

After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across "oral sex" in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster's 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week. School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the "sexually graphic" entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. (Press Enterprise)

The problem for the book-banning officials is, they have to be able to read through the dictionary themselves in order to find more sex-related words.

"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.

To help Betti and the other officials build their case against the dictionary, I'm asking readers to comb through their copies of Webster's and send in any words, via the comments section, that might be considered inappropriate for school age children to read. Then I will forward them on to the good people at Meniffee.

What would Paulo Freire do?

In the current issue of Rethinking Schools, Bob Peterson raises the question: "Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy?"and draws on the experience and wisdom of social-justice educator and former school supt. himself, Paulo Freire for answers.

Popular participation in the creation of culture and education breaks with the tradition that only the elite is competent and knows what the needs and interests of the society are. The school should also be a center for the [illumination] of popular culture, at the service of the community, not to consume it but to create it.

Telpochcalli in action

Charter schools and traditional neighborhood schools could learn something from this Chicago small school. Telpochcalli kids learn through the arts with support from CAPE. Check out this video on CPS Right Now:

So long Studs

Nice morning at the Old Town School

A few dozen of us stayed after class for what's called Second Session. We strummed, fiddled and sang the Woodie Guthrie dust bowl anthem, So Long, It's Been Good To Know You, to honor the passing of Studs Terkel.

This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home, And I got to be driftin' along."

We followed that up with Green Day's Good Riddance, sung to Bush in advance of the big celebration tomorrow. Somehow the party won't be as good without Studs.

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.

Where's Sarah?

You won’t see Sarah Palin on any of the network news shows this morning, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t keeping busy. My Republican insider friend Sid tells me that Schmidt/Davis are keeping her away from any more media interviews for obvious reasons. Her job for the next few weeks leading up to election day is playing attack dog on the phoney Ayers/Obama connection. With polling numbers plummeting like a stone, it appears that the Ayers card is Schmidt/Davis’ last hail-Mary gambit in an otherwise failed and erratic campaign. While the maverick war hero still tries looking presidential for Tuesday’s debate, he’s sent Palin off down the low road.

From Goebbels' film vault?

For those educators concerned about the rise of militarism and fascist social movements here at home, you have a right to be. If you’ve gone to the movies lately you’ve no doubt had to sit through a grueling two-and-a-half minutes of the latest Kid Rock/Dale Earnhardt Jr. production of Warrior, a National Guard promotional video that appears to come straight out of the Joseph Goebbels' film vault. Shame on the big theater chains for making this piece of trash ubiquitous.

The surge comes home

Another big reason for concern is the illegal redeployment by Bush/Cheney of an infantry division from Iraq back to the U.S. to train in curbing civil disorders that may arise out of the current economic collapse. The new mission, according to the Army Times, marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. Steve Fox Campaign Director of the American Freedom Campaign Action Fund, says the redeployment is in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.