President Bush monument erected in Dinkytown front yard

By Emily Kaiser in Notable accomplishments by Minnesotans

Monday, Feb. 16 2009 @ 5:10PM

Photos provided by Broc Blegen

If you had to honor one former commander-in-chief on President's Day, who would you pick? Perhaps our old buddy George W. Bush. We miss him already.

Apparently there's one guy in Minnesota, Broc Blegen, who thought it was appropriate. He's got a giant inflatable G. Dub monument in his front yard. The monument will be on display near the University of Minnesota until midnight, so don't miss out on a chance to honor our country's biggest mistake. You can even throw a shoe at it.

Blegen is an art student at the University of Minnesota and decided to honor Bush as a sort of experiment into the creation and respect of monuments. He debuted the monument in Washington, D.C. on the last day of Bush's presidency, Jan. 20, as Barack Obama was sworn in.

Here is how Blegen describes it: The inflatable monument is more than 20 feet tall and depicts President Bush, complete with a flag-pin on the lapel, atop a faux-marble base. The monument has a respectful inscription that describes Bush matter-of-factly, with no punch-line, allowing viewers to project their own feelings onto the work.

How did people react to the inflated doofus? Check it out:

Blegen says he decided to create the inflatable figure as a way to start thinking about how Bush will be remembered in history and eventually honored in some sort of monument.

"I thought about Presidential monuments, and how almost every President has one, and thought that surely someone will make one for President Bush eventually. This thought was very completely strange yet interesting to me, since Bush was one of our most controversial presidents. A traditional monument would portray him in an overly positive light, glossing over his many faults or shortcomings. I thought this wouldn't be acceptable, so I wanted to make my own monument for President Bush that tried to respect him yet acknowledge his shortcomings, and allow people to reflect on his presidency."

Blegen says he wants to take the monument on a road trip this summer to some of the important places in the life of Bush. Stops could include his former homes, schools, Yale fraternity house, and New Orleans (in honor of his work during Hurricane Katrina).

To catch a glimpse of the giant punching bag, you can see it today until midnight. It's located at 946 15th Ave SE in Minneapolis just off Dinkytown's main stretch.

Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

(CNN) -- President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Less than nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

The first African-American to win the White House, Obama was praised by the Norweigan Nobel Committee for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

The committee also said Obama has "created a new climate in international politics."

In his short time in office, Obama has acted on a wide range of issues from the economy to terrorism and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama is the fourth U.S. president to receive the award, joining presidents Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

This year's peace prize nominees included 172 people and 33 organizations. The committee does not release the names of the nominees.

President Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his calls to reduce the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons and working for world peace.

The first African American to hold the country's highest office, Obama has called for disarmament and worked to restart the stalled Middle East peace process since taking office in January.

The prize worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) will be handed over in Oslo on December 10.

(Reporting by Oslo newsroom)

Fabulous Picture Show - Trip of Dreams - 8 Oct 09

Trip of Dreams, written, produced and directed by Mohamed al-Daradji, documents his emotional journey back to Baghdad and his determination to go ahead with the screening of his film in his homeland despite his family's resistance - on a day which turned out to be one of the bloodiest in Iraq's recent history.

Republicans Have Decided to Call Anything a Democrat Ever Does or Says "Nazi"

By Allison Kilkenny, Smirking Chimp. Posted October 1, 2009.

The cause du jour for the Republican Party is to make as many rapid-fire comparisons between the Democrats and the Nazis as humanly possible.

The cause du jour for the Republican Party is to make as many rapid-fire comparisons between the Democrats and the Nazis as humanly possible. There're the posters altered to make the President look like Hitler, Glenn Beck's use of Nazi imagery, and the GOP's tendency to parade around pliant Holocaust survivors, who are willing to lie and convince hapless boobs that they're seconds away from being loaded onto the trains headed to New Auschwitz, located... somewhere -- probably in those FEMA camps Beck has been trying to warn us about.

Crazy, crazy stuff. Insulting and dangerous, too. Such propaganda is insulting to Holocaust survivors, some of whom are rightfully upset by the Obama-Hitler contrasting. "I saw Hitler's soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal -- OK, that's politics. But Hitler? It's hurting to anyone no matter who is president," a Holocaust survivor told Times of the Internet.

Beyond being insulting, the comparisons are also dangerous. The Washington Independent's David Wiegel reports on this rising fear of fascism as demonstrated at the “How to Take Back America” conference in St. Louis that took place this past weekend. I highly recommend taking the whole bizarre journey yourself, but here are a few choice nuggets to wet your appetite for lunacy.

The article's protagonist is Kitty Werthmann, an 84-year-old native Austrian survivor of the Third Reich. Kitty was one of the keynote speakers at the conference.

“What would you suggest we do,” asked one activist, “if we are asked to give up our guns?”
“Don’t you dare give up your guns!” thundered Werthmann. “Never, never, never!”
“Give them back one bullet at a time!” called out another activist. The tense atmosphere melted a little bit; the room broke up with laughter.
Call the doctor. You see, Republicans are always very quick to say that liberals also altered posters of former President Bush to look like Hitler, and that liberals also drew comparisons between the Republicans and Nazis. Except, liberals were also called treasonous and threatened with arrest for doing harmless things like showing up to Bush's speeches dressed in anti-war t-shirts, or sporting anti-war bumper stickers on their cars. There were many of these kinds of stories. Meanwhile, those who show up to President Obama's rallies with loaded guns are called patriots.

For eight years, liberals protested the tyrannical actions of the Bush administration with relative restraint. I would actually argue that they did so with too much restraint. Liberals could have been more passionate and more organized. They could have walked out of school, and their jobs, and not come back until the wars ended. But they didn't. It has been said that organizing liberals is a bit like herding cats. The Democratic Party is an all-inclusive organization, which is a wonderful thing, but sometimes it leads to in fighting between the various factions and distracts from the ultimate goal.

Republicans have never had this problem. They're unified under the banner of beating "them," and the "them" this time around is President Obama. The media has criticized the tea bagger protests for being disorganized and scattered-brained, and while there are certainly a wide range of causes represented at these things, they all fall under the parent concern that Obama is a dangerous other, who wants to change America, and he must be stopped.

Back at the "How to Take Back America" conference, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who gave the conference's opening speech said, “If you look at the classic model for moving to Marxism, you look at what every Marxist organization has done, they nationalize. They redistribute wealth. They restrict gun ownership. They then go out and suppress the opposition. And then, finally, they censor the media.” So we're actually dealing with Nazi Marxists, the rarest of beasts. Nevermind that Hitler actually hated Marxism and Communism because, coincidentally, he feared them -- those Jews who came up with the whole Marxist angle.

Stoking this irrational hatred for an amorphous enemy, the Marxist Communist Socialist Nazi President Obama, in an already frenzied, heavily armed mob, is obviously not a good thing. First, it eliminates the possibility of rational conversation about some critical issues like health care and the environment. Second, it's extremely dangerous and irresponsible. If people like Kitty and Beck keep telling people Obama wants to take their guns, and he's Hitler, and he's changing America, and also there may be FEMA camps, and his health care plan is actually death panels, one of their unstable listeners is going to snap.

Of course, then Kitty and Beck will hide behind the same First Amendment rights many Republicans didn't grant liberals when they tried to protest Bush's illegal wars. This is the current state of things: Republicans protest health care for all. Democrats protest illegal wars. C'est la vie.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/143010/republicans_have_decided_to_call_anything_a_democrat_ever_does_or_says_%22nazi%22_?page=entire

Tea Party Movement Returns Christian Right to Its Racist Past

By Michelle Goldberg, The American Prospect. Posted October 2, 2009.

For years, the religious right tried to lose its racist image, reverting to homophobia as its hatred of choice. As it joins the Tea Party fray, it may once again have to own both.

Now that popular conservatism has given itself over so avidly to racial resentment, it's curious to remember how hard the right once tried to scrub itself of the lingering taint of prejudice. Indeed, for a decade and a half the Christian right -- until recently the most powerful and visible grassroots conservative movement -- struggled mightily to escape its own bigoted history. In his 1996 book Active Faith, Ralph Reed acknowledged that Christian conservatives had been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. "The white evangelical church carries a shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to the most central struggle for social justice in this century, a legacy that is only now being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance and racial reconciliation," wrote Reed.

"Racial reconciliation" became a kind of buzz phrase. The idea animated Promise Keepers meetings. "Racism is an insidious monster," Bill McCartney, the group's founder, said at a 39,000-man Atlanta rally. "You can't say you love God and not love your brother." The Traditional Values Coalition distributed a video called "Gay Rights, Special Rights" to black churches; it criticized the gay rights movement for co-opting the noble legacy of the civil rights struggle.

Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening, several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council. "Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner city poverty.

What a difference an election makes. Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself.

Today's grassroots right is by all appearances as socially conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety. By all accounts, there were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.

To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like -- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the government they control.

Producerism has often been a trope of right-wing movements, especially during times of economic distress, when many people sense they're getting screwed. Its racist (and often anti-Semitic) potential is obvious, so it gels well with the climate of Dixiecrat racial angst occasioned by the election of our first black president. The result is the return of the repressed.

It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right -- rather, as Reed acknowledged all those years ago, they were initially deeply intertwined. The Columbia historian Randall Balmer has shown that Christian conservatives were not, contrary to their own mythology, initially mobilized by their outrage at Roe vs. Wade. Rather, what spurred them into action was the IRS's attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of whites only Christian schools, schools that had been created specifically to evade desegregation.

The Christian right was always rooted in an older style of reactionary politics. Before he became a political organizer himself, Falwell -- who ran one of those Christian segregation academies -- attacked Martin Luther King Jr. for his political activism. ("Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners," he said.) Before Tony Perkins was basking in homophobic interracial amity, he paid Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. In 2004, David Barton, then the vice president of the Texas GOP, spoke at an event featuring white preachers and ministry workers dropping to their knees before their black brethren to plead for forgiveness. Thirteen years earlier, Barton had twice been a featured speaker at meetings of the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that blacks are sub-human "mud people." One could go on and on.

As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a Kulterkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and lesbians. The movement borrowed heavily from Catholic theology and convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off. One wonders if fifteen years from now, they'll bother apologizing all over again.

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/142988/tea_party_movement_returns_christian_right_to_its_racist_past/?page=entire

Hate Talkers

HATE QUOTES 1. "We need segregated buses... In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yah, right on, right on, right on, right on,'" 2. "... monkeys came running out of the jungle, and they grabbed the golf balls ...and the rule was, you have to play the ball where the monkey throws it." 3. Obama "is most certainly creating a climate of hate against" Jews. 4. Obama has... a "deep-seated hatred for white people… and white culture." 5. "Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate." 6. "The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans." This talk goes on every day, hour after hour. It's appalling, and at AlterNet, we push back.... hard. But we need your help to constantly fight back against these hate talkers. When we read that threats to President Obama's life, likely fueled by the heated rhetoric, were up 400%, compared to Bush, we kicked off a petition drive, signed by more than 25,000 people to make sure the Secret Service beefs up protection. When we went after the vicious Michael Savage, his family threatened to sue us. But we didn't stop writing about him, and his business connections. We've published hundreds of exposes and articles, read by millions of Americans to make sure the radical right's rotten racial rhetoric does not go unanswered. ~ Alternet.com