INDIANA

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Re: INDIANA

Postby 82_28 » Wed Apr 01, 2015 1:01 pm

iamwhoiam wrote:

Just a reminder that things could get much worse.


Just to underscore, that was my exact point.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: INDIANA

Postby km artlu » Wed Apr 01, 2015 7:20 pm

That was a fine piece of writing Elvis; that tribute to your personal Indiana.

I once helped a friend hand dig a well in South Dakota. The land went generations back in his family and had never been plowed, only mowed or grazed. It was pre-European conquest topsoil, dark and fragrant, which I remember as being at least ten feet deep.

A few days later I was poking around a fence line across the road, scavenging for the wild hemp growing along the roadsides. Beyond the fence was corn and soybean acreage that had succumbed to agrochemical farming for many years.

It had no topsoil at all, only a hard and chunky conglomeration of whatever mineral components remained after the topsoil had been raped. This was forty years ago and the memory remains vivid, making any mention of environmental degradation immediate and real to me.

What happened to that land seems even more sad and horrible because it wasn't caused by some catastrophic single event. It was caused by rapacious greed and short-sightedness, and by the vulnerability of simple folk to being conned.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby 82_28 » Thu Apr 02, 2015 3:33 am

Fuck, I hate doing this, but just saw this on FB:

"Dear Democratic Party friends, of which I'm sure I have many,
A couple of questions:
1) How did Bobby Kennedy win the discriminating tastes of the Indiana electorate, AND win almost unanimous support in minority blocs in California and Washington DC, in the '68 Democratic primary?
2) Why can’t we talk about Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war leadership and the changes within the Democratic Party between ’64 and ’68?
3) How do political leaders build anti-militarism, anti-poverty, and anti-discrimination political coalitions and not suffer major health problems, such as high velocity projections lodged in vital organs?
Sincerely,
J. Askin" aka Scott Fulmer in a No Fly Zone previously claimed by The Hess Truck, 1957.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: INDIANA

Postby Nordic » Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:35 am

82_28 » Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:33 am wrote:Fuck, I hate doing this, but just saw this on FB:

"Dear Democratic Party friends, of which I'm sure I have many,
A couple of questions:
1) How did Bobby Kennedy win the discriminating tastes of the Indiana electorate, AND win almost unanimous support in minority blocs in California and Washington DC, in the '68 Democratic primary?
2) Why can’t we talk about Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war leadership and the changes within the Democratic Party between ’64 and ’68?
3) How do political leaders build anti-militarism, anti-poverty, and anti-discrimination political coalitions and not suffer major health problems, such as high velocity projections lodged in vital organs?
Sincerely,
J. Askin" aka Scott Fulmer in a No Fly Zone previously claimed by The Hess Truck, 1957.



What does this have to do with the thread?
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: INDIANA

Postby 82_28 » Thu Apr 02, 2015 7:58 am

I don't geve a shit that you're dogging me on this, Nordic. Dog away.

It has everything to "do with it". I did name the thread "INDIANA". So it clearly is about the recent news.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: INDIANA

Postby Elvis » Thu Apr 02, 2015 3:51 pm

If I may venture a guess, it was to point out that even Indiana had the good sense to vote for Bobby Kennedy:

1) How did Bobby Kennedy win the discriminating tastes of the Indiana electorate
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Re: INDIANA

Postby The Consul » Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:15 pm

Nordic » Wed Apr 01, 2015 3:31 am wrote:I've recently become a huge fan of writer Phil Rockstroh. Here's what he wrote on Facebook about this and I have to agree:

Indiana's recently enacted law alleged to insure religious liberties is, of course, little more than a state issued Bigotry License.

Yet: State capitalism itself is, by its inherently exclusive nature, prohibitive to the point of punitive in regard to those devoid of privilege due to racial and class status. Capitalism's most sacrosanct right, private property, is, all and all, a troll's bridge; one cannot cross without proffering an exorbitant toll. Withal, the poor and the economically buffeted laboring class are all but born excluded from crossing over into the guarded precincts of privilege and power.

Under stop-and-frisk harassment and driving-while-Black, police state tyrannies, minorities are excluded from their right of freedom of movement. Moreover, the US's poor and the nation's racial minorities are excluded from equal treatment under the law from the US criminal justice system. Under state capitalism, freedom, in general, is the exclusive right of the economic elite.

Conversely, the areas in which the economic elite are excluded include: Fighting and dying in US wars and freedom from the consequences of their social transgressions and economic predations.

Of course, the actions of the poe dunk political class of the state of Indiana are reprehensible, but the situation also falls into the category of the kind of pat and context-narrowed controversies permitted under neoliberal/corporate oligarchy. The umbrage directed at the petty minded bigots of the state of Indiana is a safe fight, of the sort liberals evince endless avidity, because it does not challenge entrenched economic power.


To me the most interesting point poised by this thread (via Nordic/Rocstroh) is the concept that the whole boycottIndiana splash is a "safe fight." I refer to what I now call Ideology Media (left and right), how they dance together to the same music to enrage, enflame, deny, accuse and defame each other...like jackass drunks in some shithole tavern having a puking contest in the men's restroom.

We are fed nearly everything we hear. I found it bizarrely fascinating the the Post reported the "47 Traitors" (certainly Mort Zuckerman greenlighted this) which seems to suggest the long standing Israeli Lobby will hold firm for HRC. 47 Traitors is a safe fight, too, though it is not easy to determine for whom that fight is being waged.

In quick succession there have been two very high profile media splashes that by any calculation can be nothing but embarrasment for gop prospects. Both of these unloaded almost immediately after HRC had her presser at the UN Women's Conference.

Think about it. A political party that controls both houses of congress, an entire news media franchise. They have her in their crosshairs over the email scandal. And then. BOOM! and shortly after BOOM! again. Controversy erased. Now officiallly yesterday's news.

TPTB behind HRC are massive. Imagine Rod Serling making Wag The Dog and we might get an idea of what her presidency would look like. Indiana probably isn't any shittier than any other red state depends on your perpective. If you separate people from politics, religion and idealogy what your'e left with is someone looking for a plumber or an orthadontist, even if they are jamming a 9mm down their pants as they walk into Walmart as a patriotic statement for the benefit of everyone else who thinks they're fucking nuts.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:22 pm

oh no

This is on Mike Pence and his bigots

Mike Pence Surrounded By Bigots When He Signed SB101 Into Law

Image
and the people who voted for him and the people who did not vote at all


This is all on the religious right wing wacko racist sons of bitches ..no one else is to blame for this crap


btw ..I love Indiana ..I love the people of Indiana...just not the bigots



and The Rude Pundit was just being rude....hence the name ...he is just rude that's the way he writes.....he's rude to everyone




http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/mike-pe ... us-freedom

Pence took the Indiana governor's mansion in 2013, following his time in the House of Representatives, where he made opposition to gay rights in general, and gay marriage in particular, his standard practice.

In 2010, Pence signed an open letter by the anti-gay marriage Family Research Council that ran in Politico and the Washington Examiner expressing support for organizations that oppose same-sex marriage and "protect and promote natural marriage and family." (A year earlier, the FRC's Tony Perkins praised Pence for joining a private briefing with local pastors on efforts to pass a traditional "marriage protection amendment." Perkins praised Pence as a "solid ally on this issue in the U.S. House.")

In December 2010, Pence appeared on CNN and argued against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the official U.S. military policy that governed service by gays and lesbians. He said that repealing the act would be using the American military "as a backdrop for social experimentation."

"So I don't believe the time has come to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Pence said. "I really believe our soldiers that are at the tip of the spear know that. We ought to put their interests and the interests of our national security first."

Not surprisingly, during his time in the House, Pence voted "yes" on legislation defining marriage as only between one man and one woman, and he opposed legislation that prohibited workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In 2011, an opinion piece by Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic quoted Pence arguing that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act "wages war on freedom of religion in the workplace."



RIGHT WING WATCH - MIKE PENCE
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby Lord Balto » Fri Apr 03, 2015 12:02 pm

I just heard on NPR that the Indiana fascists have "clarified" their bill with another one that specifically excludes discrimination against gays from the bill. Apparently the good Indiana fathers have realized that a boycott by 1/30 of the entire population of the U.S. and their supporters would cripple the state, and, as usual, money trumped "conservative" values. And as for how wonderful somebody's Indiana relatives may have been, I have to ask the question: Did they vote for these same homophobic idiots and their bible thumping supporters? After all, Hitler loved dogs and little children, but that didn't make him any less of a monster. The fact that somebody was a wonderful person within a particular narrow context doesn't mean that they were wonderful people within a broader context. I'm sure a lot of those folks that showed up for lynchings in the deep south were "good" hard-working farmers and shopkeepers.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 03, 2015 12:34 pm

29% of Indiana citizens voted in the last election

1 out of 5 people in the U.S. believe Obama was born in Kenya

again I blame the people who voted in the last election and the people who did not
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 03, 2015 12:53 pm




A Brutal Christianity: We'll See More Cruel Laws like Indiana's Until the Christian Right Is Defeated
Religious believers have won a cascading array of rights, privileges and exemptions from laws and duties.
By Valerie Tarico / AlterNet April 2, 2015

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act is so obviously structured to enable discrimination against LGBTQ people that quotes from the Onion and the governor’s office are almost indistinguishable.

Much has been made of the fact that Indiana’s law pushes beyond the bounds set by the federal law of the same name. It explicitly grants religious personhood to for-profit businesses. It also expands religious immunity to disputes between private individuals. The combination should make it difficult for those who are harmed by discrimination or other “religiously motivated” behavior to obtain redress in civil court.

But while Indiana’s law pushes farther than earlier statutes, Christian conservatives had good reason to think they could get away with it, namely the fact that religious “conscience creep” has been trending ever since the Supreme Court passed a federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993.


Not Just About Bigotry and Homophobia

In recent years, religious believers have sought and largely won a cascading array of rights, privileges and exemptions from laws and duties that otherwise apply to all Americans.

The right to discriminate in public accommodations and hiring practices.
The right to interfere with a religious outsider’s family formation, sexual intimacy, and childbearing decisions.
The right to interfere in a religious outsider’s dying process.
The right to exemption from humane animal slaughter regulations.
The right to use public funds and other assets to propagate the values and priorities of the religion.
The right to freeload on shared infrastructure without contributing to it.
The right to refuse medical care to women and children.
The right to engage in religiously motivated child abuse (psychological abuse, physical abuse, neglect or medical neglect) with impunity.
The right to exemption from labor practice standards.
When Religion Teaches Bigotry

Liberal people of faith who don’t share the dominionist goals or moral priorities of fundamentalists often are appalled by these objectives and many insist that laws like the one recently passed in Indiana aren’t about religious freedom but rather bigotry itself, or misogyny, or some other morally tainted and self-serving mindset. They are both right and wrong.

Yes, these laws do condone bigotry, and misogyny, and other ugly prejudices. But the photo of those present at the signing of Indiana’s bill—its major proponents—is telling. It mixes white male politicians in suits with a proud array of Catholic nuns in habits, monks in cassocks and an orthodox Jew in a top hat. Like many of those advocating segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, the advocates of this bill are genuinely motivated by devout religious beliefs.

Bible Texts Bind Believers to Harmful Priorities

In an ideal world, civil laws that seek to promote the general welfare and religious codes might be aligned, and even in our imperfect world religion often promotes generosity, kindness, service, and conscience-driven behavior. But the world’s major religions all have ancient roots, and thanks to the rise of literacy during the Iron Age, they all have sacred texts that anchor believers to an Iron Age set of social scripts and moral priorities including some truly horrific ideas.

The Christian Bible endorses slavery, racism, tribal warfare, torture, the concept of women and children as chattel, and the death penalty for over 30 offenses. (You likely qualify.) It offers an exclusive alternative to eternal damnation, driving believers to seek converts when and where they can. It teaches that infidels have no moral core and advocates separation from religious outsiders. It elevates sexual purity to the level of moral purity. It makes a virtue out of certitude. Small wonder, then, that sincere believers seeking to do the will of God sometimes end up seeking the right to do harm.

Per SCOTUS, Sincere Belief Needn’t be Mainstream or Factual

Modernist Christians may claim that biblical literalism is a flawed form of faith. But in the absence of some external standard, fundamentalists have as much right as anyone to claim that theirs are religious values, and the Supreme Court has said as much.


In the Hobby Lobby case, the Catholic majority ruled that “sincerely held” belief was sufficient to merit protection under the umbrella of religious freedom, even if the sincerely held belief in question was factually inaccurate and not mainstream or required by the person’s sect. Religious belief, in other words, is whatever the believer says it is, and until we repair the gaping crack in our secular democracy, it confers a powerful set of privileges, which means that the limits of credible belief are bound to be tested.

Almost universally, the religious freedom claims pursued in the U.S. over the last two decades seek the freedom to do harm, most often the freedom to harm queers, women, children or religious outsiders or our secular government institutions.

Belief, Assembly and Worship Already Protected

Ironically, one reason that modern religious freedom claims so often seek the right to do harm is that other kinds of religious belief and practice are so well established. For over 200 years, core religious freedoms have been protected by law in the United States. America’s founders carefully secured the right of citizens to believe, think, and assemble for worship as they chose—or to publically deny that they belonged to the religious majority without being excluded from the power and privilege of public office.

Like all of America’s founding ideals, these protections at first applied almost exclusively to white males of European origin, and it would take two centuries of struggle before Blacks, Native Americans, and practitioners of other religions would fully secure the full rights of personhood and citizenship, including freedom to think and worship as they saw best. In the intervening years, some religious minorities, and Native Americans in particular suffered horrendous religious persecution by the Christian majority.

But today, for the most part Americans have an almost unprecedented levels of freedom to believe and worship as we see fit. An American citizen or resident can hold a spiritual worldview that is shared by a community or deeply idiosyncratic. We are free to adhere to all manner of wild and wacky superstitions, and we do. Alternately, we can use a dozen or more labels to identify ourselves as non-religious. We are free legally to renounce our childhood religion and try a new one. We can teach our beliefs to our children and recruit converts on street corners. We can do all of this without fear of being imprisoned, lashed, tortured, stoned, drowned, beheaded, or burned at the stake.

In contrast to people living in Christian Europe during past centuries, Americans take these rights for granted, so much so that we forget that these freedoms were precious and new to many who immigrated here to escape religious persecution.

By contrast with enduring protections for religious belief and assembly; religiously motivated behavior historically has been constrained by U.S. law for compelling reasons including the following:

To establish civil society. To create a civil society, one that can in any measure live up to the words that have been America’s motto since 1795, E Pluribus Unum, the rule of law must trump the rule of religion. The Supreme Court long defended this position. Law trumping religion is not just the only way to build a functioning pluralistic society, it is the only way to create a government that can protect the religious freedom of citizens.
To promote the general welfare. American civic agreements when functioning as intended, aim topromote the general welfare and avert harms. To this end our civil and criminal codes set limits on religiously motivated behavior and establish civic duties and responsibilities that apply to citizens regardless of religious status.
To prevent dictatorial theocracy. To prevent theocracy akin to that which many early immigrants fled in Europe, religious institutions and practitioners are blocked from leveraging the apparatus of the state to fund and promote religion itself.
It is these restrictions that are now being challenged by religious adherents, and the second of these makes it clear why so many religious freedom claims seek the freedom for a religious individual or organization to cause harm with impunity.

By definition, since civic agreements are an attempt to promote the general welfare, the exemptions sought by religious individuals and institutions generally do the opposite, meaning they allow those who are exempted to violate legal agreements intended to promote broad wellbeing. Secondarily, those claiming religious freedom often seek to coopt the power of the state for religious ends so that civic agreements can be modified to reflect religious theology. One might say that the goal is to use the tool of government to promote the general religion rather than promote the general welfare.


Civic Safeguards vs. Religious Persistence

During most of American history, boundaries around religious freedom were upheld by the courts so long as the rules applied equally to all, and Jefferson’s “wall of separation” worked to insulate government from control by a church hierarchy. But a successful religion, like rain on the roof, seeks any crack through which it can penetrate into our public structures and private homes.

In 1993, the misnamed Religious Freedom ‘Restoration’ Act, subtly changed a long time standard, allowing religious practitioners to violate laws that otherwise apply to all; and a cavernous crack appeared. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy,

[RFRA’s] sweeping coverage ensures its intrusion at every level of government, displacing laws and prohibiting official actions of almost every description and regardless of subject matter. . . . Any law is subject to challenge at any time by any individual who claims a substantial burden on his or her free exercise of religion. Such a claim will often be difficult to contest….All told, RFRA is a considerable congressional intrusion into the States’ traditional prerogatives and general authority to regulate for the health and welfare of their citizens.

Although RFRA was ruled unconstitutional as it applies to the states in 1997, it continues to be applied to federal statutes, and modified versions of the bill have been introduced in most states. Since 1993, devout believers have been doing all in their power to pry the crack wider, using tools including federal and state legislative processes, courts, control of public accommodations like hospitals and schools, and investments in sophisticated legal advocacy infrastructure.

Christianity Offers Little Basis for Dismissing Bogus Claims

Some Eastern religions teach an overarching principle against which religious conscience claims might be weighed. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, this principle is compassion. In the Jain religion, it is ahimsa, meaning non-harm.

Christianity, on the other hand, has always been torn between those who insist that the overarching principle is love, as articulated in the Great Commandment, and those who insist it is right belief, as expressed in the “Sinner’s Prayer.” Many Evangelicals feel a non-negotiable responsibility to seek converts, as instructed in the Great Commission, which advises followers of Jesus to “make disciples of every creature.” Some perceive a God-given mandate to seize the reins of power, ruling according to biblical principles, a view called dominionism.

Christians are divided also, in their view of the Bible. Some understand the Bible as a human document, one that records the struggle of our ancestors as they sought to grasp timeless truths through a lens darkened by fallibility and culture. Others see it as the literally perfect Word of God, essentially dictated by God to the authors.

The Bible’s contradictory prescriptions, together with differences in how Christians understand biblical authority mean that almost anything can be claimed as a religiously motivated behavior. But even if Christianity’s more than 30,000 denominations could reach consensus about how to assess the merit of religious conscience claims—which they can’t--the problem would remain. The U.S. is home to people of all faiths and none at all, each of whom has his or her own deeply held values and a constitutional right to whatever spiritual worldview he or she may hold.


Time for Honest Conversation

Around the world, through most of human history, societies have so feared offending supernatural powers that they forbade and punished religious deviance, even by death, lest divine wrath befall the community as a whole. By contrast, the United States Constitution and related documents were products of the Enlightenment, created by a coalition of nontheists, deists, and Christians. While it is true that some populations such as pagans and Native Americans have suffered shameful persecution and oppression at the hands of the Christian majority, in principle, religious freedom has long been broadly protected by law in the U.S. except where it infringes human wellbeing or harms civil society itself.

But some religiously motivated behavior does harm human wellbeing or civil society. In fact, some forms of belief obligate adherents to infringe the rights or wellbeing of others. They are fundamentally incompatible with the radical idea that each person is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Religious conservatives aren’t simply inventing their appeal to religious conscience; unfettered religious freedom really does mean the right to discriminate, the right to deny medical care, the right to interfere in an outsider’s dying process, the right to beat children, and more.

We may want to believe it is possible to grant boundless freedom of religion to some without impinging on the corresponding freedoms of others, but this simply isn’t the case. Those who love this country, and those who lead, have some tough choices to make.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby Elvis » Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:10 pm

Lord Balto wrote: as for how wonderful somebody's Indiana relatives may have been, I have to ask the question: Did they vote for these same homophobic idiots and their bible thumping supporters? After all, Hitler loved dogs and little children, but that didn't make him any less of a monster. The fact that somebody was a wonderful person within a particular narrow context doesn't mean that they were wonderful people within a broader context. I'm sure a lot of those folks that showed up for lynchings in the deep south were "good" hard-working farmers and shopkeepers.


None of this was lost on me as I wrote my response to RudePundit's screed, and I don't think I wrote with nearly the broad brush that he did. His post called for a response, a clarification, a tempering, and I wrote one. I think I addressed your point, which is valid too.

I'm not in touch with my remaining relatives, so I don't know how they vote; they joined some creepy cult called "Amway" or something, and the rest of the family found it necessary to disengage. (But I'm pretty sure they're not monsters.)


Image
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Re: INDIANA

Postby Elvis » Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:57 pm

Not to belabor this Indiana thing too much, but let's imagine a world without Indiana -- without these people:

Johnny Appleseed
Fort Wayne 1774-1845

Hoagy Carmichael
Bloomington 1899-1981

Jim Davis ("Garfield" cartoonist)
Marion 1945-

Eugene V. Debs
Terre Haute 1855-1926

Theodore Dreiser
Terre Haute 1871-1945

Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom
Mitchell 1926-1967

Phil Harris
(singer, songwriter, jazz musician, actor, and comedian)
Linton 1904-1995

George D. Hay (founder Grand Ole Opry)
Attica 1895-1968

The Jackson 5
Gary

Colonel Eli Lilly
Indianapolis 1838-1898

Abraham Lincoln
("spent 14 years in what is now Spencer County...It was in Indiana that Abraham Lincoln formed his early ideas about character and honesty and developed a love of learning that stayed with him the rest of his life.")
Spencer County
1809-1865

Carole Lombard
Fort Wayne 1908-1942

Strother Martin
Kokomo 1919-1980

Steve McQueen
Beech Grove 1930-1980

John Mellencamp
(personally, I can't stand his music)
Seymour 1951-

Wes Montgomery
(makes up for Mellencamp 1000x)
Indianapolis 1923-1968

Cole Porter
Peru 1891-1964

Ernie Pyle
Dana 1900-1945

ummmm errrr Dan Quayle
Indianapolis 1947-


James Whitcomb Riley
Greenfield 1849-1916

John Schnatter (Papa John Pizza)
Jeffersonville 1961-

Richard Bernard “Red” Skelton
Vincennes 1913-1997

T.C. Steele (painter)
Owen County 1847-1926

Booth Tarkington
(novels explored middle-class America, romantic illusions and the power and corruption of wealth)
Indianapolis 1869-1946

Kurt Vonnegut
Indianapolis 1922-2007

Clifton Webb
Indianapolis 1889-1966

Robert Wise
Winchester 1914-2005


I'm omitting the Nobel Prize winners from Indiana because there are too many.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby MinM » Sat Apr 04, 2015 9:16 am

Nordic » Thu Apr 02, 2015 4:35 am wrote:
82_28 » Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:33 am wrote:Fuck, I hate doing this, but just saw this on FB:

"Dear Democratic Party friends, of which I'm sure I have many,
A couple of questions:
1) How did Bobby Kennedy win the discriminating tastes of the Indiana electorate, AND win almost unanimous support in minority blocs in California and Washington DC, in the '68 Democratic primary?
2) Why can’t we talk about Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war leadership and the changes within the Democratic Party between ’64 and ’68?
3) How do political leaders build anti-militarism, anti-poverty, and anti-discrimination political coalitions and not suffer major health problems, such as high velocity projections lodged in vital organs?
Sincerely,
J. Askin" aka Scott Fulmer in a No Fly Zone previously claimed by The Hess Truck, 1957.



What does this have to do with the thread?

*****

ImageIndyStar ‏@indystar: 47 years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy likely saved Indianapolis. http://indy.st/1BYiWi5
Image

After telling a black crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, Robert Kennedy urged calm and racial conciliation

Every April 4 several hundred residents of Indianapolis gather at 17th and Broadway streets to remember what happened there in 1968.

It was the day Robert F. Kennedy likely saved Indianapolis, a story less told.

Kennedy, who was running for president, was scheduled to make a campaign speech here in the days before the Indiana Democratic primary. He was popular among the black community, and in an effort to get more blacks registered to vote, he wanted to speak in the heart of Indianapolis' inner-city.

Shortly before his speech, as Kennedy's plane landed in Indianapolis, the senator from New York learned that Martin Luther King Jr. had died from an assassin's bullet.

Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, fearing a race riot, told Kennedy's staff that his police could not guarantee Kennedy's safety at 17th and Broadway. Racial violence indeed would later sweep the country, with riots in more than 100 cities, 39 people killed and more than 2,000 injured.

Lugar urged Kennedy to cancel his speech. But Kennedy insisted that he and his people go on and go alone, without police.

The audience in Indianapolis was estimated at only about 2,500 people, but they were influencers, members of young, somewhat radical black groups like the College Room, the Watoto Wa Simba, the Black Panthers and the Black Radical Action Project.

Mary Evans, a 16-year-old junior at North Central High School, was in the crowd. She was headstrong and political, and she insisted on seeing Kennedy. She and a friend attended the rally with the friend's nervous father.

Evans was white and from a tony Northside family, but she was progressive and inquisitive and was not uncomfortable in the mostly black crowd. At first.

But as she waited for Kennedy, who was more than an hour late, word suddenly spread that King had been shot. The word was that he had survived after a gunman had tried to kill him. The gunman was presumed to be white.

"The temperature changed," Evans recalls. "I felt people started looking at me. Someone would take a step away, like I was a symbol of racism.

"I felt really white. I was really scared."

She thought about bolting but was in unfamiliar territory and had no idea which way to run.


At about 9 p.m. Kennedy arrived. He knew more than his audience knew — he knew King was dead. He stood on a flat bed truck and faced the crowd and laid it out. The crowd gasped in shock.

With practically no time to prepare — he had come straight from the airport — and speaking off the cuff, Kennedy told the news with such compassion and empathy that when he finished many in the crowd departed sad though not hateful and in at least one notable case with renewed resolve to make the world better.

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling," Kennedy said. "I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times."

William Crawford, a member of the Black Radical Action Project, had stood about 20 feet from Kennedy. "Look at all those other cities," Crawford says today. "I believe it would have gone that way (in Indianapolis) had not Bobby Kennedy given those remarks."

"The sincerity of Bobby Kennedy's words just resonated," Crawford says, "especially when he talked about his brother."

Kennedy had not spoken publicly about President John F. Kennedy's assassination since Nov. 22, 1963, writes Ray E. Boomhower in his 2008 book "Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary."

Now he did, to maximum effect. The moment he started speaking the air cleared, the hostility evaporated.

Evans sensed it deep down.

"It was like the feeling some people get in church," she says. "I was scared, and as soon as Kennedy spoke, I wasn't scared. I no longer felt white and isolated. I felt united in sadness with everyone else."

Image
Joseph Reese of Indianapolis looks up at a statue depicting Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy at MLK Park. (Photo: Robert Scheer/The Star)

Today the greatness of Kennedy's speech seems obvious, but at the time it created little stir, even locally.

There were two key reasons for this:

■Eugene C. Pulliam, publisher of the state's two most powerful newspapers, the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News, was no fan of Kennedy and saw to it he received minimal coverage; Kennedy's remarks were buried inside a larger political story under the headline: "Young Hoosiers Back 'Favorite Son' Branigan."

■The speech was, after all, just a speech. As news, it was immediately buried by King's death, his funeral and the rioting that followed.

"Big news trumps smaller stories," says James Brown, the retired, longtime dean of the journalism school at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "But as time goes on and people look back and analyze, you'd think there'd be more discussion of (Kennedy's speech). I don't think the story has received the prominence it deserves."

Kennedy talked for just five minutes, yet people who study speeches list his remarks among history's great speeches (The website American Rhetoric ranks it 17th, above JFK's more famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.)

When he finished the crowd pressed near him and tried to touch him, and when he drove away they went away mournful, not vengeful. Some were changed.

Crawford had been working at the post office and studying computer data processing. Inside of two months he had quit both and was managing a bookstore at 23rd and Meridian streets that sold progressive and radical political publications as well as African art and clothing.

A year later he went to work as a community organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in 1972 was elected to the Indiana General Assembly. He served for 40 years. He's 79 and on April 4 will be at the commemoration, as he always is.

The day after the speech, Mary Evans flew to Chicago to visit her grandmother. She recalls looking at Chicago from the window of the plane and seeing plumes of smoke and fire, the aftermath of anger and heartbreak.

Robert Kennedy went on to win the Indiana Democratic primary. He was assassinated two months later in California.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.

Kennedy King Commemoration

■Noon April 4.

■Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park, 1701 Broadway. In bad weather, the event moves to the Charity Dye School at 5454 E. 19th St.

■Remarks by Deputy Mayor Olgen Williams, Congresswoman Susan Brooks, Congressman Andre Carson, Judge David J. Dreyer, Public Safety Director Troy Riggs

■A video of RFK's speech will be shown.

■"Trailblazer" awards to be presented to the 1955 Crispus Attucks boys basketball state champion team, former Colt Reggie Wayne, and the NCAA.

■More info at: http://www.kennedykingindy.org/

http://indy.st/1BYiWi5

When you think about it .. it all comes back to Bobby. His assassination was the final straw for the 'left' in this Country. JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and then RFK. Donald Gibson explains how Huey Long could be added to that group too.

Much the same way Israel took a hard right turn with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
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Re: INDIANA

Postby 82_28 » Sat Apr 04, 2015 12:21 pm

Just for the hey, I was just reading this about JFK yesterday:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... e-20131120

Then you got John Lennon, JFK Jr. and Paul Wellstone.

Ah, the right wing. Just warms your heart all the good they do.
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