The Last Stand
Comments by kielyj
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On Conservative commentary: Grit, guts and determination
September 14, 2008 at 2:46 p.m.
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Let’s parse this drivel.
The first few paragraphs are standard fare for the right. Our policies are bankrupt but hey isn’t America great. Don’t look at what we’ve done look at our lapel pins.
America is great; when and where did Obama ever say it isn’t. What Obama has said is that the country has serious issues that need to be addressed; that the policies of the last eight years have failed and we need to do things differently. 80% of those polled agree that the country is on the wrong path. For the love of Mike, McCain is running on change. Obama is running on his hope and faith in the essential fairness and perfectibility of America. Republicans don’t get a monopoly on love of country because they say they enshroud themselves in the flag..
■ John McCain and Sarah Palin understand that lower taxes help ……………..Whose taxes is McCain going to cut? He plans to continue the Bush cuts for the top income brackets. Obama’s tax increases are proposed on those with incomes greater than $250,000. I don’t want to pay taxes any more than anyone else does but at some point you have to pay for all this glorious Americanism you tout above. We cannot continue to run the deficits we are running..
■ John McCain and Sarah Palin will keep us on offense against the terrorists …………..What are you talking about? McCain and Obama both are talking about restricting torture as a policy of the US. A salient theme at the Republican convention was the undoubted courage McCain showed under torture in Hanoi. And yet Ms. Palin’s wise crack was roundly applauded. McCain understands that we are now the torturers and McCain as well as Obama want it controlled.
■ John McCain and Sarah Palin believe that the American people are a better steward of your money and your family than big government ever could be………. Palin wanted the bridge before she did not want it. Ok who can disagree that ear marks should be stopped. No one needs a Lawrence Welk Museum or an infamous bridge. This issue is a red herring. Ear marks are less than half on one percent of Federal expenditures. Double them, take them all away; it will have no appreciable effect on the dysfunctional budget and tax situation. What on budget programs is McCain going to cut?
On Our View: New fields aren’t needed
July 23, 2008 at 7:15 a.m.
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Finally after all these years the Pilot tells the truth about Triple Crown. After all the editorials and op-ed masquerading as news stories it turns out that Triple Crown is not so important after all. In the end its presence is not vital enough to spend significant money in order to keep the tournament in Steamboat. It is important enough, nonetheless, to take the Emerald Park fields and turn them into commercial venues..
The paper told the truth but not the whole truth. Emerald Park was built to provide a sanctuary from Triple Crown. The paper implies that there is no documented agreement that Triple Crown and other commercial activities were banned from the park. There is a document that designates the fields for youth activities. I helped write that document and I admit that it is faulty. At the time the document was written it should have read that only local youth activities are permitted. However, we did not want to preclude locally sponsored tournaments for soccer and baseball; specifically the summer soccer tournament, potential little league tournament games or weekend round robins for the older baseball players which would have out of town kids involved. OK, let’s fix it. I propose that a new ordnance be drafted that rectifies any lack of clarity over the use of the park.. Emerald Park needs to be for the use of local kids and tournaments sponsored by local youth sports organizations under rules established by the city.
The paper proposes that the Council investigate secondary access to Emerald. This issue was investigated many times before the fields were built and many times since. Unless the geometry of the area has changed there is no good solution. Another access requires making the current access to Pamela Lane a cul de sac, moving the railroad crossing, putting in a new light with accel/decel lanes as well as acquiring property. A new access can certainly be built but the cost would be prohibitive I believe. The new configuration would have its own logistical problems.. This is a red herring in any event. A secondary access is not a solution to Triple Crown’s problems; the paper begs the question of whether Triple Crown should be allowed into the Park in the first place.
On Paul Potyen: Time for a change
July 19, 2008 at 8:09 a.m.
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Not trying to hide my affiliations. Sowell is more coherent than Medved but I still disagree. Given the situation in the Atlantic world in the 17th and 18th centuries it is difficult to imagine a plantation economy not using African chattel slavery. The US did end slavery. It is a little more complicated than Sowell lets on; but the Civil War and the emancipation are to the nation’s undying credit The implication Sowell makes is that acknowledgement of the horrific nature of slavery, its ambiguous aftermath and the effect that both have had on this country is somehow anti-American. It was what it was. Wishing it were not or creating bogus reasons why it was not important won’t make it so.
On Paul Potyen: Time for a change
July 17, 2008 at 11:21 a.m.
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. there is no reason to believe that today’s african-americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in africa. Cannot believe even a right wing dweeb would say this..
So what does this all mean? The sordid legacy of slavery is with us and will be with us for a long time. The hope I see is in the progress that has been made in the last 50 years. Jim Crow is dead. Black people have made great strides. As a nation we have made great strides. A black man may well be elected president. Racism is slowly receding. My children have fewer racist assumptions than I by orders of magnitude. I think this is generally true throughout the country.
I agree with Obama on race
“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - …— is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation.”
Lincoln and Dr. King both saw America as a work in progress; that we are constantly challenged to live up to the words in the declaration. We may never get there. Both of them were willing to die trying. It is a dishonor to their memory and to this country to try to soft pedal slavery or its effects.
On Paul Potyen: Time for a change
July 17, 2008 at 11:20 a.m.
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There is no reason to suspect that slavery was a dying economic system; slavery could have been adapted to industrial applications as it was during and after the war in the mines and steel mills in Alabama and Georgia. Participation in the slave economy was not limited to the South. Northern bankers loaned money to the planters and bought their crops. Northern manufacturers made tools and cheap clothes for plantation workers. Northern ships transported cotton and slaves. Northern doughfaces conspired with southern politicians to promote slavery and its expansion. Lincoln understood that the nation as a whole was culpable for the wrongs of slavery. In the Second Inaugural he said….He (God) gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
5. while america deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the united states merits special credit for its rapid abolition. in the course of scarcely more than a century following the emergence of the american republic, men of conscience, principle and unflagging energy succeeded in abolishing slavery not just in the new world but in all nations of the west
Where to go with someone this confused? America does deserve credit for fighting the Civil War (the victors anyway), the abolition of slavery and the Civil war amendments. These are jewels in the Republic’s crown. However, “in scarcely more than a century” is scarcely a short period of time to have had slavery in the city on a hill. Long enough to scar any institution or person associated with it. After 1877 Reconstruction ended and a dark night of oppression settled over the Freedmen and their descendants. The freedom promised by the Proclamation and Civil War Amendments were denied to black people for another 100 years. Jim Crow, Plessy Ferguson, mob violence and a systemically lawless legal system in the South denied basic rights to black citizens for generations. Fifty years ago lynching was an acceptable form of behavior. Ask Emmett Till. The North was better but not by much.
On Paul Potyen: Time for a change
July 17, 2008 at 11:19 a.m.
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3. though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit
. OK the slave trade was not genocide by the Geneva Convention definition. It was mass murder. I feel better now. Medved does have sympathy for some caught in the trade- the slave captains “Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean” That would not be my most horrifying aspect of the slave trade but then I suspect Medved always has the bottom line in mind. The losses were calculated before hand and considered part of the cost of doing business. The average life expectancy of an imported slave in the Indies was seven years. It was cheaper to work them to death and buy a replacement than to treat them decently and work them in a reasonable fashion. Medved is right about Davis’ comment that north American slavers did manage to breed a self producing stock of slaves (he apparently skimmed the book looking for quotes he could use, this certainly is not the thrust of the book). I suppose a slavery system that uses one area as a place to breed slaves for more economically viable areas gets some sort of dispensation from slavery’s apologists. Twisted I think.
4. it’s not true that the u.s. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves. The South was not a prosperous industrial region by the standards of the time. It was, however, a very prosperous plantation society. The planter class was a vibrant, expansionist, wealthy group, particularly in the Old Southwest. The planters were able to set the parameters for law, custom and commerce in the South and to dominate the society. Their power came from their control of slave based commercial agriculture. There were endemic problems in the Upper South prior to the war due to the poverty of the soil and internal competition from other Southern areas. They turned to breeding slaves for the cotton frontier.
On Paul Potyen: Time for a change
July 17, 2008 at 11:16 a.m.
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Can't not comment on Medved. His comments in capitals
1) slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively american innovation.
This is certainly true. The Atlantic slave trade was a vast enterprise that encompassed many people; Africans, Muslims and Europeans from various countries all participated. Liverpool and Nantes grew into great ports from participation in the slave trade. Medved’s statement is also not relevant. North America, constituted as colonies and later as a republic, was an avid participant in the slave trade and the exploitation of slave labor. The United States, founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, prolonged legal chattel slavery and its accompanying brutalities for 87 years after its inception. It took a vicious war to end the hypocrisy. The objective fact is that the US existed as a slaveholding republic for many decades and that fact has ramifications down to today. It is our political original sin and all the specious bombast of Mr. Medved can’t change the past.
2. slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic – involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s americans.
Slavery existed in British North America from 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Jamestown. Before the Mayflower. At one time or another it existed in all the colonies that became the US. Slavery was legal in 15 states at the time of the civil war (which Medved calls the War between the States-using the Klan favorite; his robe is showing). Because of the 3/5 clause the slaveholding areas of the South had disproportionate power in the Congress and in general elections during the entire ante-bellum period. Chattel Slavery ended with The Thirteenth Amendment. Enforced servile labor of black people did not. Douglas Blackmon’s recently published Slavery by Another Name details the re-enslavement of black southerners from the end of the War to the beginning of WWII. He describes a southern convict slavery system involving unfathomable brutality and great longevity, untouchable by the legal system. The Share cropping system, backed by racist laws that made being black illegal, and enforced by random racist violence resulted in perpetual serfdom for the vast majority of Southern blacks. Jim Crow was more than separate lunch counters; it was lynchings, night riders and a legal system of bottomless unfairness. We cannot pretend that one system of servile labor had nothing to do with the other or that there are no consequences today from the existence of that system. The point that today’s Americans have no dog in the slavery argument is bizarre. An infinitesimally small number of Americans are descended from the Founders; yet we claim their legacy. As citizens we get the whole legacy and slavery is part of it.
On Charlie Vogel: Forgotten history
May 21, 2008 at 7:14 a.m.
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I have always been against literacy tests as a test for voting. After reading this nonsense i am reconsidering
On Rob Douglas: Is business a dirty word?
April 11, 2008 at 11:41 a.m.
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Rob,
You are right. Emerald Park is a hot button ;it represents more than just the park for a lot of people. The argument that the rancor over the City Council proposal is related to middle class fears or cosmic changes in the world economy is bizarre. This is not a question of being anti-business. The issue is whether a particular park built for specific reasons with certain restrictions on its use is to be turned into a commercial venue. I can only speak for myself. My opposition to TC in the park and the machinations of the Chamber to make that happen is based on my understanding of what the town’s kids’ sports need. I say this from long experience with local kids’ sports. There must be a balance between commercial uses of city property and local use; a balance between the town as a tourist attraction and as a place to live. The park was built to help achieve that balance.
It is also a question of fairness. I was on the Parks and Rec Comm. when the fields were built. Words were spoken and promises were made to Pamela Lane as well as those that worked on the park. There is no compelling reason to back down on those promises.
Certainly I agree that SBS is a tourist driven economy and that facilities need to be made available for use by tourists. The town needs to make a decision about whether to continue to target TC as the driver of the summer economy. If the decision is made to do so then the need for facilities needs to be defined and constructed to accommodate an agreed upon level of activity. TC to my mind is as good a group as any. I am not in the tourist business so I have no real opinion about rudeness, destruction of rooms and miserly tips. My suspicion is that vast majority of TC participants are fine people and that there are, as always, rotten apples.
Emerald Park is a different animal. The park was built specifically so the commercial activities associated with the tourist economy would not drive the kids in town to the fringes of the calendar for their sports. Once Emerald Park was built the city and the Chamber could schedule whatever they wanted on Howelsen and the tennis center fields; the little league and the soccer association could schedule whatever they wanted on Emerald. Things have worked out more or less as planned.
TC attempted to get access to the Emerald fields before they were finished; they continued he effort each time their Contract comes up for renewal- aided and abetted by the Chamber. TC in the Park advocates say that access is to be granted on an interim basis only; history belies that notion. Once in they will always be there and protestations to the contrary ring hollow.
My strong conviction is that allowing TC into Emerald is breach of faith with the people who worked so hard to build the fields, the kids they built them for and with the people who live on Pamela Lane.. You speak of insulting our fellows. What about lost integrity?
Jack Kiely
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On Conservative commentary: Grit, guts and determination
September 14, 2008 at 2:47 p.m.
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■ John McCain and Sarah Palin actually have an action plan for achieving energy independence. And, guess what? It includes drilling to develop our own natural resources, which we have in abundance. What a concept … actual drilling vs. endless talking. Again a red herring. Certainly we should exploit our resources. However the US has 3% of the world’s fossil fuels resources and uses 25 %. US oil production peaked in 1973.We can drill everywhere the creative imagination of the Republicans can think of and it will not change the situation we are in; we are dependent on foreign oil sources with the concomitant political and military idangers. America needs to take the lead in the development of a new energy paradigm as we did in the development of the old one.
The bottom line is this: I have a 12-year-old niece growing up in the heartland……………..
What I wish for little Dorothy is that she won’t have to go 40k into debt to go to college. I hope when she gets ready to retire she won’t be one illness away from the poor house. I hope her phones won’t be bugged. I hope she will get the right to choose whether she wants to have a baby or not. I hope the dollar is worth more than a peso because the debt we’ve managed to generate destroys the economy. I hope that the US is not still at war because we refuse to negotiate or have a coherent foreign policy or that a chucklehead like Sarah Palin is president.