He said our highest calling is to engage in civil disobedience to oppose the forces of oppression. Rise up now.

If he had said that during the 1960s it would’ve made sense. What does it mean in the context of today?

I think he’s just spewing rhetoric those folk are known to respond to. He panders.

Actually, in the early 1960s the sense (in government at least) was that our highest calling was to national defense and continued Liberty by defeating the godless Soviet Union. After all, that’s how we got into that nasty mess in Vietnam.

I suppose one’s ‘highest calling’ depends upon the person.

Today John Edwards says we have a moral challenge to leave America better for our children than it was for us. Does Sen. Obama not recognize that this is a uniting message? What civil disobedience would he have us practice to oppose Bush and his ilk?

I prefer John Edwards message.

Note: I released the previous post before finishing editing. There is a logical contradiction in the first sentence second paragraph that I didn’t finish changing after looking up the history, and the letter and number thing in the last line of the next-to-last paragraph was meant to be “being”.

I don’t remember the exact year the holiday was established in Arizona, but it was passed by referendum 61% to 39% in 1992, so the 2002 figure reported above is 10 years off. (Source: http://findarticles.com/p/arti…..ai_1453879

The state MLK holiday was a requirement for Arizona to get the Super Bowl, which first happened in Arizona in January 1996 after being taken away for 1993 due to what I describe below. It was also a requirement for the NBA All-Star game, which was held in Phoenix in January 1995.

Various valid reasons for citing Arizona’s red-statedness and relative backwardness aside, Arizona deserves credit for ultimately passing the holiday by popular referendum. As far as I know no other state did it that way. There were a couple of false starts in the 1980s and the 1990 election, where it was first established by gubernatorial edict (courts said not legal) and then two failed referendums in 1990, where one added another state holiday (think we’re really cheap) and another replaces Columbus Day (think P.O.d Italian-Americans – even out here).

The winning formula added MLK day and consolidated the February Washington and Lincoln birthday holidays into Presidents Day, just like nearly everyone else, for a net push in number of state holidays and happy Italian-Americans, or perhaps Spanish-Americans, whose ancestors paid for it, or perhaps mournful Native Americans, whose ancestors and contemporaries paid for it in a different sense. No offense intended, just bvein=g snarky.

BTW, Phoenix and some other cities established MLK Day as a city holiday well ahead of the state, but that got little credit in the late 80s / early 90s controversy.

And Huckabee says he’ll do something with the flagpole to those who would take the Confederate flag away . . .

Can’t help but see that Huckabee, as a former Governor of Arkansas, certainly knows that the Confederate Battle Flag represents at least THREE racist periods that are very hurtful to the African Americans.

The first was the use of that flag as the banner under which the Confederacy defended slavery under the bogus assertion of “States Rights”. This was entirely bogus since their own Confederate Constitution embedded slavery into the Southern system and, as well, was a more centralized Constitutional Structure than the US Constitution at the time. As well, the South insisted on the expansion of slavery into other States and Territories, and pushed for laws that actually diminished Northern and Western States for treating people within their own borders as having Constitutional rights. The Civil War was about the retention of slavery PERIOD! All the other assertions are a smokescreen. The Stars and Bars was NEVER used as a symbol or banner in the South until the Civil War.

The second period was after the Civil War, when groups of white vigilantes used the Confederate Battle Flag to oppose Radical Reconstruction. Many White “Shooting Clubs” in the Carolinas and elsewhere flew the banner during “white riots” against the Reconstruction governments and established the flag as part of their “white coup” State Legislatures. These groups were often affiliated with the first KKK movements (although it’s true that the Klan often used other flags, such as some with more explicit Christian crosses). Thus these segregationist “Jim Crow” governments flew the flag of “resistance” to the Civil Rights laws “imposed” on them after the war. The flag at this time became almost a worshipped icon honoring Confederate War dead HEROES (Fallen in the defense of the “peculiar institution” of slavery). Instead of personal family or regimental effects and memorials, gravesites and battlefields were often resplendent is Confederate flags. In fact, they were symbolic of a continued resistance to the North’s victory. For many Southerners they continue to represent this racist past.

http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/south…..aurin.html

The third period of the usage of the flag as a racist symbol(and one of resistance to efforts to re-establish Civil Rights for blacks) was during the era of De-Segregation. Black school kids flanked by Federal Marshals often had to be escorted through mobs of Confederate Flag toting hooligans. The Klan canonized the flag as a common symbol…although often it was converted to Stars & Bars on a field of WHITE. The Segregationist governors of many States where the Stars and Bars were not part of the traditional State Flag incorporated the symbol into the official flag (as in Georgia) or began to fly the banner alongside State Flags. The bogus “States Rights” movement emerged once again, arguing that the 14th and 15th Amendments were inapplicable to discriminatory acts by State and Local Governments.

In all of these cases the Confederate Battle Flag was utilized as a symbol of oppression. That Huckabee continues to actually SUPPORT violent acts against those that want to legally eliminate this flag as a symbol of the States that are supposedly representative of us all, regardless of race and religion, is demonstrative of why this man is utterly unqualified to be the leader of the United States. For many Americans, and I write his as an individual who had several ancestors fighting for the Confederate cause and who owned slaves, that flag represents not simply “past history” but a living emblem of intentional “in your face” hate and ideology.

Like the Nazi flag, it deserves a place in museums and archives to document its role in our historical errors…but to actually encourage and champion those that continue to use it to intimidate others or to rewrite the history of the racism is downright malevolent.

I grew up in “the south,” although after the civil rights era. I was absolutely taught not to hate. It has nothing to do with the billboards you see. My family has been in the south for many generations, and we do not hate. … It is not about where you grew up. It is about the people you grew up with.

Same here, except *during* the era. And, amen, friend…….it IS all about those who reared you.

Hell, I even applaud Nixon for signing the bills creating the EPA. The fact that he did so kicking and screaming, he did sign them.
_______________________________

both were very flawed and complicated men. of the two, i would take Johnson. nobody forced him to do the good that he tried to bring about. he chose to do it and he banged heads to get it done.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man, one of the greatest Americans ever, but he never held elective office. although we will never know, and he would probably never have done so had he lived, if he had held a political office in America he might well have been put in the inevitable position of compromise that all politicians must face and consequently disappointed many of his followers.

no one running for president today measures up to the expectations of a large number of FDL’ers. that’s because they’re all politicians. Jesus isn’t running for president, nor is Yaweh, Mohammed or the Buddha.
we all need to remember this.

where in north Louisiana were you? i was in Ruston beginning in 1965 and i remember those billboards very well. i also remember that about ten years later the students at Louisiana Tech elected an African-American president of the student government.

“Black History Month with Rahsaan Roland Romney“

The comments are as good as the post.

Spew alert.