Day: February 26, 2010

The Summit! Theater Of The Absurd! (Again)

There was a build up to yesterday’s health summit….the Prez and Dems and Repubs were to meet and discuss the possibility of finding ways to have a bi-partisan bill on health reform….did the adults take over the health reform conversation?

HA!  Not a chance!  This was a prime opportunity for the Repubs and Dems to find common ground and they bombed badly….I am sorry to pick on the Repubs so much but in this case they deserve all the credit for looking like 4 year old on a play ground….

Americans were led to believe that the goal was finding common ground on getting health insurance to tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it and containing skyrocketing costs that threaten the nation’s fiscal well-being.

Obama dominated the conversation, barely contained his impatience with GOP statements and at times mocked them for trotting out visual effects (thick stacks of Democratic health care legislation) and talking points. Republicans complained about the time disparity and lectured the president about his policies.

Stagecraft trumped statesmanship.

Obama hoped to convince gridlock-weary voters who might be watching at home that he was sincere in seeking common ground with Republicans. He repeatedly asked GOP lawmakers to focus on fixes that both parties might agree upon.

(Thanx to the AP for above account)

The Repubs were well rehearsed they got their talking points in “start over”, was the most used….nowhere did these guys and gals ever act like a group of people concerned with the plight of the American people……sad that once again, politics triumph over the people….and you wonder why the US is the laughing stock of the world…the health summit was a prime example of the stupidity in Washington….

OKay…here is an idea….F*CK THE REPUBS!…….do whatever it takes to get American people health care…I am sorry to my conserv friends, but the people have been waiting for 70+ years for these dinks to do something constructive and so far all we have got is a playground brawl….it is time for us voters to flip off these people and replace them with apes….at least they could do NO worse…..

“The Slavery Clause” (Black History Month)

Professor’s Classroom

Subject:  American History/Declaration of Independence/Black History

Come my children and you shall hear…

The BS that is fed to your ear……

Sorry, had to get a little poem in there….

We are in Black History Month and I would like to help everyone understand the work that went into dismantling the institution of slavery….and that not all that is being taught is the whole history of the lives and contributions of African-Americans……

During the first draft of the Declaration of Independence there was a clause, known as the anti-slavery clause, and when the first draft was presented to the membership, it was opposed by the Southern colonies, go figure and has been said it was deleted from the final draft to get the Southern colonies to approve of the DoI.

This is the wording of the slavery clause in the first draft of the DoI:

He [King George III] has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most Sacred Right of Life & Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable Commerce, determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, and that this Assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die, he is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase that Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former Crimes committed against the Liberties of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Now the common belief and the history that is taught would have us believe that Jefferson wrote the first and final draft…..I am sorry but it would seem that if this idea was truly one of Jefferson’s he would have fought harder to keep it in the document….he did not!

It has been said and taught that Jefferson cursed the institution of slavery and that he did not like the fact that it existed…….historians would have us believe that he hated it so much that he freed his slaves later in life……..a slight exaggeration……he did free slaves…he had 22 and on his death bed freed 3….one of whom was a slave named Hemmings…..(wink wink)…that means that 19 we still slaves when Jefferson died…does not sound like someone who hated the institution…..Many of the founding fathers are said to have hated slavery, while still keeping slaves to do their bidding.

But I have a hard time believing that these guys were all that anti-slavery when comments like these were said:

“I have supposed the black man in his present state might not be [equal to the white man]; but it would be hazardous to affirm that equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” –Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux, 1785.

“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [blacks] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” –Thomas Jefferson:

“The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia

Sorry people but it does not sound like Jefferson believes that ALL MEN are created equal….to me……

If Jefferson did not write the slavery clause then who?

The first person that comes to mind is the forgotten father of independence…Thomas Paine…….I know no one is being taught this information….so ask why…..

Paine arrived in the colonies on November of 1774 and by early 1775 had written and published, African Slavery In America” which was a harsh condemnation of the institution.  And shortly after that the first anti-slavery association was established in Philadelphia.  If anyone can say that they either wrote or influenced the slavery clause of the DoI it would be Paine.

Thomas Paine can accurately be called the Father of the Abolitionist Movement in America….of all the founding fathers he alone can say that he was opposed to slavery from his first sight of it in America and that he was the FIRST to openly condemn enslavement of a people.

Paine deserves better than the treatment history has given him…he deserves the acknowledgment that he was truly an American patriot and a Founding Father…..to deny him in dissertation of American history is to deny the principles and and beliefs that make this a great country.  Academia has done all in its power to eliminate or marginalize Paine and his contributions to the cause of independence….and so far they have been successful and Americans are the worse for not knowing his story.