U2: Pride (In The Name Of Love) and Martin Luther King – I Have A Dream Speech – August 28, 1963

I am now on a third tour of Occupy camps and will be making my first stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I will be covering an action against the Michigan emergency manager law later this afternoon. Live blog continues below the fold.

Another American cliche bites the dust, thanks to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (who hasn’t done a lot I like until this). Faced with overwhelming outrage, voiced eloquently and led by poet Maya Angelou, over a misleading and truncated quote of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr carved into his national memorial on the Mall, Secretary Salazar decided that “carved in stone” needn’t mean irrevocably permanent, when a wrong has been done.

Alone in the walnut-paneled music room, his favorite of Fair Lane Mansion’s 56 rooms, automobile tycoon Henry Ford picks up one of his two Stradivarius violins. It is 1920 or so and Henry, cocooned in his woolen three-piece suit despite the summer heat, stretches his bow arm for a little elbow and shoulder room.

Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

Mike Huckabee thinks groups that urge boycotts of companies that fund anti-LGBT organizations are engaged in un-American economic terrorism. By that definition there are lots of economic terrorists out there . . . on the right.

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, my thoughts turn to peace. It’s hard to keep them there, though, because of the chorus of voices that scream for violence and war.

I grieve for those who died ten years ago in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania, as well as all who have died — and continue to die — in the wars spawned out of that attack. I long for the day when military fly-overs at football games become a thing of the past, and our cities have more statues to teachers than generals.

But the cheers for executions, and the willingness to spend billions of dollars on weapons to dole out death but mere pennies on social services that preserve life in one way or another for the most needy among us tell me that the day I long for is quite a ways off.

One distinctive thing about Zimmerman’s personal story is the fact that he chose to live his life as a full time ‘troublemaker’ (committed leftwing activist), abandoning his extremely promising career as a creative and recognized scientist. He got his PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago in 1967, based on path breaking research on brain function in sleep, and gave up his academic career even though he had every expectation of continuing achievement. Why and how he made this life change reveals a lot about the society of that time—and now—so I hope we can delve into this dimension of his experience.

Way back in January 2008, a certain presidential candidate gave a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the “essential deficit that exists in this country.” It’s a good speech. On Wednesday, President Obama is slated to give a speech on deficit reduction. I hope he check out what that other guy had to say a couple of years ago before he steps in front of the cameras.

With Thursday’s news that the Egyptian military has said that it will support the anti-Mubarak protesters and the movement of the military to stand between the anti-Mubarak protesters and the pro-Mubarak thugs who attacked them on Wednesday, we see once again what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the “powerful moral force” of nonviolence in achieving social and political change, in direct contrast to the neocons’ blather that democracy could be imposed from outside a society at the end of a gun.

This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. I carry a badge. My name’s Friday. The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I grew up watching Dragnet, which began its run in 1967 and lasted three and a half seasons. I thought it was a pretty weird, but I learned lots of things about my hometown, and about life in general–like how to judge the quality of a fur, from the episode where Joe Friday’s partner’s Frank Gannon went undercover to bust a burglary ring; and it was always fun to to try and guess the what the sentences for crimes would be.