Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/category/opinion/things-people-say/page/8/)
The week of September 1-5 brought many passionate activists from near and far to St. Paul to speak about the policy issues they care deeply about. Here are some of their messages. Twin-City-area attorneys Marianne and John volunteered with the ACLU as ‘Liberty Guards’ to distribute “Know Your Rights” pamphlets for protesters at the Sept. 1 rally and march and to keep an eye out for civil rights abuses. Continue Reading
Zoe and her mother came to the big protest march on Labor Day. Zoe is five years old. She said she likes demonstrations, and made the sign that is attached to her stroller. She explained that the sign shows “Obama sitting in a chair on TV — saying I want war to stop and make money for schools and buildings.” The explosions of concussion grenades, pepper spray and tear gas drowned out the voices of some people who came to demonstrate. Continue Reading
“You anarchists never learn.”
“It’s always easy to sit and talk shit until it’s your house being raided.” Continue Reading
Solomon, age four, and little brother Isaac, age nine months, came to the Labor Day anti-war march with their parents, Mia Witheiser and Brian Fisher. “I feel they need to know this is their right as Americans … to come here,” said Witheiser. “We teach preschoolers to resolve conflict — it’s ridiculous that wars still exist in the 21st century.” The Maplewood couple talked about the importance of the rights of citizens, the right to assemble and the right of free speech. Continue Reading
Michele Bachmann recently told the Hometown Source, an online extension of ABC Newspapers in the northern suburbs, that Barack Obama “isn’t well-schooled and prepared to be President of the United States.”That’s an interesting observation, coming from a graduate of a law school that once lost its American Bar Association accreditation. Bachmann got her undergraduate degree from Winona State University in 1978. She graduated from O.W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., in 1986. The ABA yanked Coburn’s accreditation in 1981 over its Christian litmus tests for students and faculty but later reinstated it. However, the law school closed in 1986 and donated its library to Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia. Continue Reading
“If there was any deep division in the music scene in 1977, it wasn’t people scratching their heads at less than stellar releases from Kansas, Foreigner, Styx, or Steely Dan and Neil Young, it was the demise of live music as disco came to prominence. I could make the argument that Kansas, Nugent and other arena acts GAINED fans because people who hated disco REALLY hated disco (myself included).”-comment on “Sucking in ’77″”John Jansen’s comments made me think of some of the bad things white people have done. Timothy McVeigh! Terry Nichols! The Unabomber! Continue Reading
CALL AND ANSWER is a poem by Robert Bly in a video by Media Mike Hazard. Written by the poet laureate of Minnesota in 2002 at the beginning of the current Iraq War, it is the inspiration for a megagig at the Black Dog Café in St. Paul. Continue Reading
One of the salient policy “advocacy” developments of our time has been the far right’s enthusiastic adoption of tactics once associated with the radical left. For example, conservatives now dominate the field of agit-prop political theater and imagery, such as waving tire gauges to mock a part of Barack Obama’s energy conservation proposals. Still, it’s a surprise when the right resorts to the Big Lie, once the exclusive tool of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. But there it is in a recent email newsletter from the merry pranksters at the anti-tax, anti-government Minnesota Free Market Institute/Taxpayers League, headlined “Transit Costs More Than You Think.” It claims that Metro Transit riders pay only 20 percent of the cost of bus and light-rail service. Continue Reading
Ken Avidor, DumpBachmann’s indispensable unearther of video and audio clips highlighting Michele Bachmann’s greatest hits, has audio this morning of Michele’s latest corker from a Christian news site, quoted below.”This is their agenda,” Bachmann states bluntly. “I know it is hard to believe, it’s hard to fathom — but this is ‘mission accomplished’ for them,” she asserts. “They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America.” Continue Reading
