Four Seven dead in Venezuela

As today’s DemocracyNow interview reminds us, the murderous violence inflicted on innocents in Boston is an everyday occurrence in places like Mogadishu.

In Venezuela, four have died in street violence over the election. These murders were committed by the right, according to Telesur. Other people were wounded.

Update Now seven dead, 61 wounded.

Dave Zirin asks, Is this the world we want to live in? If not, it’s time to stop the violence emanating from the heart of the Empire.
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More on this story now at Daily Kos.

The unbearable lightness of being Obama/updated/corrected

Perhaps I am alone in feeling that Obama’s speech in Tucson was an insult to the dead and wounded, and a cop-out on his duty the American people.

I believe Barack Obama owed us some truth. The violent rhetoric on the right–and some on the left– has been building because our presidents have not given us truth.

Reagan needed to tell us the truth that America was in relative economic decline… not because we had failed, but because we had succeeded in reviving Europe and Japan from the devastation of World War II. He needed to tell us the truth that we were too reliant on warfare and not reliant enough on getting our allies to defend themselves. Instead, he got us deep in debt while creating the illusion of prosperity. The losers– blue collar workers and farmers– were made to feel like human garbage. He revived the culture wars: from partially criminalizing abortion to the claiming that AIDS was God’s judgment on gays, the embers of modern-day right-wing radicalism were stoked into an open flame then.

Bush the Slightly Greater needed to tell us the truth that Reagan’s tax cuts had been reckless and that the culture wars were wrong. As an member of the ultra-wealthy, he needed to tell his fellow aristocrats that their selfishness was sapping America’s strength. As a traditional Republican, it was his duty to stand against the racial hatred that the Willie Horton ad represented. The hapless Bush reaped the consequences of the debt and anger that had been Reagan’s gift to the nation in a recession that ravaged New England and California and in violent explosions like those at Waco and Ruby Ridge. It was on Bush’s watch that the first mainstreamed demagogue since Father Coughlin, Rush Limbaugh, came into his own. From his success, demagogues multiplied.