Before the smoke settled from the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission to examine the outbreaks that had occurred with increasing frequency and to answer the following questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to keep it from happening again? Rather than providing the usual whitewashing … [Read more…]
This week is the 50th anniversary of the Detroit riots. At the time, the Detroit Police Department was viewed as a white occupying army. Accusations of racial profiling and police brutality were commonplace. In the early morning of July 23, 1967, Detroit police raided a blind pig, an illegal after-hours bar, and began to arrest … [Read more…]
In a period of less than 26 hours — from 6:31 p.m. on July 24 to 8:09 p.m. on July 25 — President Trump made two speeches, held a news conference, and tweeted wildly, leaving a trail of misinformation in his wake. An analysis by the Washington Post showed that in this short time he … [Read more…]
Following is my response to an editorial in the Roanoke Times. It was published on Sunday. In your editorial on July 7 (“This year’s Little Rock”), you mentioned an increasingly discussed option for our medical care insurance as “an enormously expensive single-payer system.” Yes, a single-payer system is costly, as there is no inexpensive option. … [Read more…]
As usual the radical right is trying to rewrite history to argue that school choice (vouchers, etc.) are a long-time part of our history. Following is a rebuke by Diane Ravitch, our most ardent opponent of this anti-democratic practice of taking public money for private purposes. “Rick Hess makes a valiant but unsuccessful effort to … [Read more…]
I was one of the speakers at our Chain-Chain-Chain event Sunday. Here is what I said. The health care situation in this Congressional District is horrible! It is so bad that last week the PBS News Hour featured our area to show how terrible it is that Virginia did not expand Medicaid to cover more … [Read more…]
One of the most exciting and positive things happening in the political world is “Indivisible,” the new progressive opposition initiative. Last December, after the election of Donald Trump, four former congressional staffers put a document on-line to help mobilize citizens to resist Trump’s agenda of racism, authoritarianism, and corruption. Just as importantly the document provided … [Read more…]
“The campaign to make people sick to make rich people wealthier never sleeps,” so says the profane journalist, Charles Pierce, as he writes about the current efforts of Republicans to make minor tweaks to their medical care plan. These tweaks, of course, are just that, tweaks. Changes are unlikely to be substantial, but just enough … [Read more…]
“Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth. There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity … [Read more…]