modest musings

mohandasgandhi:

latimes:

Sept. 12, 1953: Actress Lucille Ball laughs as her husband, Desi Arnaz, contemplates an answer during a news conference about Ball’s short association with the Communist Party in 1936.

“We’re lucky this happened to us in America, where newspapermen ask the questions,” Desi said. “In other countries they shoot first and ask the questions later.”

Continue reading about the news conference on Framework.

I laugh when people say the Red Scare/McCarthyism days are behind us. We’re experiencing a new form of McCarthyism that completely dwarfs the Red Scare. We’re experiencing J. Edgar Hoover’s ultimate fantasy and then some. Could you imagine what McCarthyism would have been like with The PATRIOT Act? The Department of Homeland Security? The ever-expanding NSA? A Department of Defense so vast that the U.S. government doesn’t even know how many individuals it employs? Foreign covert wars headed by the CIA set to hunt down unknown “subversives” under very broad and expanding definitions? Secret detention facilities? What about all of that with little to no oversight?

In the days of Lucille Ball, our media used to at least try to do its job. Now we’re lucky if a few brave journalists are willing to ask questions. There are other ways of making us shut up aside from showing us the barrel of a gun.

(Source: Los Angeles Times)