Month: June 2016

NYTimes: The Changing Face of Urban Power

Here’s a story from The New York Times I thought you’d find interesting:

Demographic shifts in the nation’s capital show us how the Democratic and Republican coalitions are taking shape.

Read More: nyti.ms/29hbbjl

The Changing Face of Urban Power

Thomas B. Edsall 

Black political power is declining in cities across the country, including Oakland, St. Louis, Cleveland and Atlanta — even as African-Americans are gaining majority status in an increasing number of suburbs.

At the same time, African-American emigration to the South has started to weaken Republican control of some deep red states.

Let’s start with Washington, D.C. The shift there (as elsewhere) is drivenboth by gentrification and by a black movement away from urban centers.

In 1957, Washington became the first large city in the United States to become majority African-American. In 1973, Congress gave home rule to the District. The first mayoral election was held in 1974, and Walter Washington, who had been appointed to the position in 1967, won it. He was the first of a series of black mayors that has continued to this day.

One area of Washington’s politics — campaign money — is already dominated by whites and has been for a long time. “D.C.’s White Donor Class,” a new study by Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think-tank, found that among contributors of $1,000 or more to the 2014 campaign for mayor and city council campaign, “62 percent of mayoral donors and 67 percent of City Council donors are white.”

Forty five years ago I was asked by United States of America to fight for freedom in

Tom Lehmann facebook 
Forty five years ago I was asked by United States of America to fight for freedom in Viet Nam.  I was given an assault rifle that was designed to fire 20 bullets every 3 seconds (400 bullets per minute with a large enough clip) to kill as many of the enemy as possible in a shortest period of time.  Let’s be real, this type of destruction has no place in our peacetime civilized society.  Please be honest, ask yourself if you have the right to carry rocket propelled grenades (rpg) or a m60 machine gun? Of course not. Someone please tell me why you should be allowed to own an assault rifle.  Please don’t embarrass yourself by saying that it’s your right to bear arms or you need it for hunting.  Listen, I’m not professing to take our guns away, I am just saying that we need to have some sanity to the argument.  In today’s world we will always be confronted with emotionally disturbed people, terrorist, and criminals. Let’s just agree that we need to make it difficult to arm them with weapons designed to achieve mass slaughter of large number of human beings.
The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort – chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG’s, improvised explosive devices (IED’s), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons — should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.
Can our elected officials be counted on to reinstate the assault weapons ban? Or does the blood stain of man’s inhumanity to man live within all of us?