Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taro who wrote (358070)	11/12/2007 12:36:24 PM
From: SilentZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572507

And do you believe that crap? -Z

To: Taro who wrote (358070)	11/14/2007 12:11:17 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572507

RNC Protest Plans Already Under Way The Associated Press MINNEAPOLIS - Shrouded in black, with a bandanna masking her face, a self-proclaimed anarchist slips into her combat boots and dashes through town, tossing a Molotov cocktail here, launching a bowling ball there. The YouTube video is more parody than threat: The flaming cocktail ignites a charcoal grill, and the bowling ball knocks down pins instead of crashing through a Navy recruiting office window. But as the video fades to black, the message on-screen is clear: “We’re getting ready. What are you doing?” With less than 10 months to go before the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St.Paul, activists are already plotting to crash the party. On the drawing board: A mass march to protest Iraq; human roadblocks; schemes to disrupt public transportation; and talk of a temporary free state near the main convention site, St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. With tens of thousands of people expected to visit the Twin Cities during the convention Sept. 1-4, local and federal law enforcement are getting ready as well. Civil rights groups and attorneys are talking with police and demonstrators to ensure laws are followed during what will likely be the largest crush of people the state has seen in years. “It’s better to be planning early rather than late,” said Jordan Kushner, coordinator of the Legal Observer and Political Defense Committee, a committee within the National Lawyers Guild. “People have as much right to the streets as the Republicans who are coming here to engage in their activities.” St. Paul Police Commander Doug Holtz said the city is working out details on how to accommodate protesters, but declined to go into them. “The city of St. Paul is going to be well-prepared to have an excellent convention,” he said. The group behind the spoof video, the RNC Welcoming Committee, began organizing last fall and says it is helping other groups organize, too. Members of the group declined to meet with an Associated Press reporter or talk by phone, confining their exchanges to e-mail. The group says it will help protesters find food, housing and medical support during the convention. It also plans to provide maps of roads, bridges and sites to aid in planning. And it intends to create a family-friendly area for children of protesters. Protesters also are getting ready for the Democratic National Convention in Denver Aug. 25-28. The group “Recreate 68? - a reference to the troubled 1968 Democratic National Convention - seeks to serve the same umbrella function as the RNC Welcoming Committee in Minnesota, by supporting other protesters. Recreate 68 is anti-war and opposed to the two-party system, member-spokesman Glenn Spagnuolo said. The RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself as an anarchist/anti-authoritarian group. When asked about the use of violence, the group wrote in an e-mail: “We may choose to use pacifist tactics, but we will defend ourselves, our communities, and the Earth. We will not bring violence to the protests, but we will not back down and we will not be terrorized.” The group said it also would not apply for a permit to demonstrate, saying: “We will not allow the state to regulate our resistance.” Some groups who have applied have been frustrated to find the city of St. Paul won’t grant them until six months before the convention. Mick Kelly, a spokesman for the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War, said his group plans a massive anti-war march on the convention’s first day. It’s important to get a permit early so people can plan travel from around the country, he said. “The Republican National Convention - they’ve begun their preparations full-press,” Kelly said. “We in the anti-war movement need to do the same thing.” Teresa Nelson, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, said the ACLU wants to make sure protesters are close enough to the convention so they can be seen and heard. The ACLU and other observers will be on hand to ensure protesters’ civil rights aren’t violated and to avoid a repeat of the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, when more than 1,800 people were arrested. Some of those people said they weren’t protesters at all but were swept up by police. Some lawsuits are still pending. Associated Press writer George Merritt contributed to this report from Denver. chron.com

To: Taro who wrote (358070)	11/14/2007 12:15:50 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572507

Righting Reagan’s Wrongs? by Bob Herbert Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980. Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20. They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote. It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.” After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers. Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans. The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day. That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!” Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context. That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon. Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans - they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you. And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation. Congress overrode the veto. Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too. Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record. To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency. Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success. The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it. -Bob Herbert