American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
The Washington Post reports that
NASA said Sunday that it will not launch space shuttle Endeavour on Monday.
The original launch, scheduled for Friday, had to be scrubbed when part of a power system for the shuttle’s hydraulics malfunctioned.
No new date has been set for Endeavour’s final mission. It is the second-to-last for the shuttle program and will be led by Mark Kelly, husband of wounded Ariz. Rep. Gabriel Giffords.
The WaPo sent a breaking news email. Links to follow later.
Judi McLeod has the answer,
Theme of “Together We Thrive” T-shirt came from Obama’s Organizing for America
In the controversy of the pep rally/rock concert style Memorial for those who lost their lives in Saturday’s Arizona tragedy, the mainstream media reported that the “Together We Thrive: Tucson & America” T-shirt given to mourners as they entered McKate Center was the idea of University of Arizona brass, not the Obama administration.
Yet the “Together We Thrive” slogan dates back to a post to Obama’s own Organizing for America in a Feb. 11, 2008 post by self-described “globalist” John Berry IV.
More than passing strange that the Obama campaign message of civility was the same on Feb. 11, 2008 as it was in his Wednesday Memorial speech, and the same one, too carried by the mainstream media in coverage of the Memorial.
“For too long Americans have been set one against the other. It is a side affect of a free market society,” Berry IV posted. “How can profits be maximized, how can I get the work down for the lowest possible costs. This continually sets one group against the other, especially in the blue collar sectors of America. It has become part of the American Business model, whether it was indentured servants, slaves picking cotton, sharecroppers, the industrious people that built the railroads or today’s migrant workers. As long as we remain divided, fighting for the scraps that America has to offer it will be one group against the other.
“What I see in Obama is a chance for revolution. (Italics CFP’s). A chance for every group to be heard; A chance to live the American dream that has been denied to so many…
“In a previous career, I was the global leader of Diversity for a global fortune 500 corporation. I have studied the affects of diverse groups working together and the results can not be denied. Together we Thrive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
University of Arizona brass did not originate the “Together We Thrive” T-shirt. They merely recycled it for Obama—and recycled it in time for what should have been a dignified Memorial for the dead.
If you were a mourner who took home a “Together We Thrive” T-shirt have a look at the bottom of your shirt. “Rocking America and Rocking the Vote” is a common theme of the DNC, and it’s right there on your Memorial T-shirt memento.
Check out the screen cap here.
Again, was that a memorial, or a campaign rally?
(h/t Joe Lima)
I watched the so-called memorial for the victims of the deranged man last night.
It was an embarrassing and shameful spectacle.
For starters, no memorial or commemoration of a tragedy is the occasion to hand out t-shirts.
What is wrong with a simple, non-denominational prayer? There are thousands of those. However, no one could be bothered to find one; instead we had an invocation.
The invocation was downright bizarre, with mumbo-jumbo about female and male energy. Paul Mirengoff calls it “ugly“,
It was apparently was some sort of Yaqui Indian tribal thing, with lots of references to “the creator” but no mention of God. Several of the victims were, as I understand it, quite religious in that quaint Christian kind of way (none, to my knowledge, was a Yaqui). They (and their families) likely would have appreciated a prayer more closely aligned with their religious beliefs.
But it wasn’t just Gonzales’s prayer that was “ugly” under the circumstances. Before he ever got to the prayer, Gonzales provided us with a mini-auto biography and made several references to Mexico, the country from which (he informed us) his family came to Arizona in the mid 19th century. I’m not sure why Gonzales felt that Mexico needed to intrude into this service, but I have an idea.
The audience, and I don’t care how young they are, reacted abhorrently throughout. Cheers? Catcalls? Laughter? Whoops? After the Secretary of Homeland Security reads Isaiah 40?
The First Lady shows up in a skirt and a too-small sweater. Can’t someone find her a somber suit that she could deign herself to wear in such occasions?
The President’s speech used muddled terms, such as “moral imaginations”,
Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.
And couldn’t spare the miracle that was timed to coincide with his presence,
And I want to tell you — her husband Mark is here and he allows me to share this with you — right after we went to visit, a few minutes after we left her room and some of her colleagues in Congress were in the room, Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.) Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.)
Gabby opened her eyes. Gabby opened her eyes, so I can tell you she knows we are here.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” as he once said.
The President also couldn’t resist dipping into maudlin sentimentality and exploiting the image of a dead child,
If there are rain puddles in Heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.
Rain puddles in heaven. What a contemptible, exploitive use of a child whose life was bracketed by tragedy.
The President posed a question
It raises a question of what, beyond prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?
And where will we be wearing our t-shirts?
A a shameful charade, inappropriate from the get-go.
UPDATE
Follow-up post, Where did that “Together we thrive” slogan come from?
The murder of six people, the shooting of twelve more, including Congresswoman Giffords, and the politization of the incident:
Andrew Klavan writes about The Hateful Left
Where incendiary political rhetoric truly resides in America
Indeed, the Left’s hysterical response to all who disagree with it—that they are racist or sexist or “phobic” or somehow reminiscent of Hitler—has become so predictable that satirists, from the libertarian Greg Gutfeld to the liberal Jon Stewart, have made fun of it in routines.
But never mind that, because the Left’s sudden talk about incendiary political rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting isn’t really about political rhetoric at all. It’s about the real-world failure of leftist policies everywhere—the bankrupting of nations and states by greedy unions and unfundable social programs, the destruction of inner cities by identity politics, and the appeasement of Muslim extremists in the face of worldwide jihad, not to mention the frequently fatal effects of delirious environmentalism. Europe is in debt and on fire. American citizens are in political revolt. Even the most left-wing president ever is making desperate overtures to his right.
But all that might be tolerable to leftists if they weren’t starting to lose control of the one weapon in which they have the most faith: the narrative. The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.
That’s the hateful rhetoric they’re talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts. As for leftists’ reaction to the Arizona shooting, call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil. Shame on them.
The fact remains that Jared Loughner’s sickness is not the product of politics.
Anything else is demagoguery.
I haven’t posted on the shooting in Arizona by a crazed young man that killed Judge John Roll ,63; Dorthy Murray, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; Christina Greene, 9; Phyllis Scheck, 79; and Gabriel Zimmerman, 30, and has Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded in intensive care.
I find the story profoundly depressing.
Depressing not only because of the victims, but particularly because of the politization that has ensued, where even faded celebrities with exercise videos to sell have jumped into the fray.
Let’s lift Congresswoman Gifford, the other victims, and all their loved ones in our prayers.
For full roundup of the news and blog stories, go to Memeorandum.
UPDATE
Roger Kimball has more on How to turn a tragedy into an emetic, and John Hinderaker deplores The Contemptible Krugman.
