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Americans Need To Look At The Pictures Of The Dead Children Of Newtown To See What the NRA Really Supports
The year was 1955. Emmett Till was a young African American boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. One day Emmett was seen “flirting” with a white woman in town, and for that he was mutilated and murdered at the age of fourteen. He was found with part of a cotton gin tied around his neck with a string of barbed wire. His killers, two white men, had shot him in the head before they dumped him in the river.
Emmett Till’s body was found and returned to Chicago. To the shock of many, his mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral so that the public could see what happens to a little boy’s body when bigots decide he is less than human. She wanted photographers to take pictures of her mutilated son and freely publish them. More than 10,000 mourners came to the funeral home, and the photo of Emmett Till appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation.
“I just wanted the world to see,” she said. “I just wanted the world to see.”
The world did see, and nothing was ever the same again for the white supremacists of the United States of America. Because of Emmett Till, because of that shocking photograph of this little dead boy, just a few months later, “the revolt officially began on December 1, 1955″ (from Eyes on the Prize) when Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The historic bus boycott began and, with the images of Emmett Till still fresh in the minds of many Americans, there was no turning back.
In March of 1965, the police of Selma, Alabama, brutally beat, hosed and tear-gassed a group of African Americans for simply trying to cross a bridge during a protest march. The nation was shocked by images of blacks viciously maimed and injured. So, too, was the President. Just one week later, Lyndon Johnson called for a gathering of the U.S. Congress and he went and stood before them in joint session and told them to pass a bill he was introducing that night – the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And, just five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
In March, 1968, U.S. soldiers massacred 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam. A year and a half later, the world finally saw the photographs – of mounds of dead peasants covered in blood, a terrified toddler seconds before he was gunned down, and a woman with her brains literally blown out of her head. (These photos would join other Vietnam War photos, including a naked girl burned by napalm running down the road, and a South Vietnamese general walking up to a handcuffed suspect, taking out his handgun, and blowing the guy’s brains out on the NBC Nightly News.)
With this avalanche of horrid images, the American public turned against the Vietnam War. Our realization of what we were capable of rattled us so deeply it became very hard for future presidents (until George W. Bush) to outright invade a sovereign nation and go to war there for a decade.
Bush was able to pull it off because his handlers, Misters Cheney and Rumsfeld, knew that the most important thing to do from the get-go was to control the images of the war, to guarantee that nothing like a My Lai-style photograph ever appeared in the U.S. press.
And that is why you never see a picture any more of the kind of death and destruction that might make you get up off your couch and run out of the house screaming bloody murder at those responsible for these atrocities.
raw story
Report: Man behind Romney ’47 percent’ video will reveal himself on MSNBC tonight
The Florida bartender responsible for capturing former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remarks will reveal his identity in an interview with MSNBC host Ed Schultz that will air Wednesday.
Both Schultz and Mother Jones, which released the video in September 2012, announced the interview on Tuesday, with Schultz playing clips from the interview.
“I debated for a little while, but in the end I really felt it had to be put out,” the bartender said of his decision to leak the video, secretly filmed at a May 2012 fundraiser for Romney. “I felt I owed it to the people who couldn’t afford to be there themselves to hear what he really thought.”
In the video, the former Massachusetts governor tells his audience that he believed 47 percent of the American public would vote for President Barack Obama “no matter what.” because they were
“There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” Romney said at the time. “That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”
The Huffington Post released portions early Wednesday morning of an interview it conducted with the bartender in late 2012 in which he said he was scared by a lack of empathy in Romney’s voice while making his remarks, and that it he was conflicted as to what to do with the footage after shooting it.
“It was literally weeks of just, you know, ‘Well, hey don’t lose your job, just let it sit there,’” the bartender said. “And, ‘Times are tight, jobs are tough and, you know, don’t rock the boat, you’re happy doing what you’re doing and you’re about to go into the busy season of work — you can’t afford to fuck this up at all. Don’t fuck it up.’ But then … I would wake up and just, it was just that thing that’s in your mind that you just can’t get out of your mind, you know?”
He also told Schultz that he feared for his life.
“I was up against the most powerful, the richest people in the country and the stakes were pretty high,” the bartender said. “You never know what could happen. There’s nuts out there. You just don’t know. I’ve certainly had threats.”
Obama In Wide-Ranging Interview With ABC: ‘We Don’t Have An Immediate Crisis In Terms Of Debt’
On Wednesday, Good Morning America aired more of George Stephanopoulos‘ interview with President Obama — during which they talked addressed topics ranging from a budget deal and GOP opposition to North Korea and the cancelled White House tours.
Asked about his insistence that new revenue be included in a deal, and Republican opposition to the idea, Obama said he’s not looking “to break them or to go around them” — but to find those members of Congress who are through with having the same argument over and over again. As he’s argued before, he made his case for “common sense” deficit reduction, through a combination approaches like some entitlement reform, closing loopholes.
Some Republicans will want to see significant entitlement reform, Stephanopoulos noted, asking whether raising the Medicare age is back on the table. Obama argued that many people don’t actually know what he’s proposed, but Stephanopoulos added that even those who have seen his plan say it’s not enough.
“Which is why, at some point, I think I take myself out of this,” Obama replied. “Right now, what I’m trying to do is create an atmosphere where Democrats and Republicans can go ahead, get together, and try to get something done. But ultimately, it may be that the differences are just too wide.”
“And, so, we don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” he told Stephanopoulos — a point he reiterated elsewhere in the interview. “In fact, for the next ten years, it’s gonna be in a sustainable place.”
The pair also discussed the cancelled White House tours that have elicited a great deal of criticism. Asked if they’re reconsidering, Obama replied, “Well, what I’m asking them is are there ways, for example, for us to accommodate school groups, you know, who may have traveled here with some bake sales. Can we make sure that, kids, potentially, can still come to tour?”
But he’s “amused,” he added, by those who’ve said the sequester’s effects are exaggerated and then, upon seeing the effects, “yell and scream and say, ‘Why are you doin’ that?’”
The transcript of the interview is available here.
Take a look at a portion of the interview below, via ABC (the rest will air on Nightline):
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