Iceberg Slim would have been proud.

 * I am trying to think what me dear daddy would have done if some snake oil selling politician and mountebank had asked for a sit down meeting to improve his optics when it comes to minority voters.

Everyone of those pastors who met with Donald trump today should be met with an empty church this Sunday morning. Trump called the meeting "amazing"; I call it shameful. I am not quite sure who is the pimp and who is the whore in this one, so let's just call it a toss- up. A mutually beneficial trick session.

What on god's green earth (pun intended) would possess these folks to meet with trump? That was a rhetorical question. Of course we know what it is: Money. And this is why so many people (particularly young ones) are so cynical when it comes to the church. For them to even meet with this race- baiting demagogue who routinely blows his dog whistle to his crowd of bigoted devotees speaks volumes about them as preachers and as human beings.

I blame their congregations as well. I am not sure how they can sit and listen to a sermon about virtue and compassion from someone who breaks bread with folks likes Donald trump.

"We had a wonderful time in the meeting," said Darrell Scott, the senior pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who helped to organize the meeting. "We made a lot of progress. It's not the last one."

I am sure you did Darrell. And you will be especially pleased after that check clears.

"Some committed. I don't know the number," Scott said. "The rest are praying about it. They said, 'We have to go pray about it.' They'll come back and endorse at a future time."

I am sure that if they "pray" hard enough the good lord will show them the light. Or, even better, the billionaire will show them the checks.

With all due respect to Big Daddy Kane, pimping is easy.


*Pic from reuters.com

Black exhaustion.

The Field Negro education series continues:

The following is an essay that was written for the Los Angeles Times by Dexter Thomas:

"For many black Americans, watching black people die on camera feels like a job. 
It’s not something they’re paid for, unless they are a journalist. But it can still feel like an obligation, because every time a new video is released of a black person being shot by police, black people know that America’s response to that video will affect their lives.

This is why when a judge forced Chicago officials to release video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke, a group of young activists used the hashtag #BeforeYouWatch to encourage people to take a collective breath to brace themselves.
Support your friends, some wrote along with the hashtag. Remember that we all process pain differently, and this will be painful.

The video is disturbing, but in a more abstract way than, for example, the first-person view of the shooting of Sam Dubose in Cincinnati. It's taken from the dashboard camera of a police cruiser, which is too far away to show McDonald’s facial expressions, and the officer is out of frame.

Instead, we can see only the body of McDonald jerk, and puffs of smoke rising as the 16 shots are fired. The shooting is too far away to be able to see any wounds, and the only evidence that there is blood is the faint reflection of a shiny wet pool, glinting briefly in the lights of a police vehicle that arrives after the last shot has been fired.

A lot of people didn’t feel the need to watch the video. Some avoided it. Another common trend in the #BeforeYouWatch tweets was a reassurance: It's OK if you don't want to watch the video.
But for tens of thousands of people, black and otherwise, that decision was made for them when the Daily Beast posted an animated GIF image of the shooting on their Twitter account. Any one of their nearly 1 million followers who was scrolling through their own timeline saw a looped animation of a boy’s body tremoring in the dark.

A widely shared tweet from writer and novelist Brit Bennett needed only 135 characters to summarize the feelings of many: 

A GIF of a black boy's murder feels like a disgustingly accurate metaphor for black death: casually consumed, forever looping, endless.

The Daily Beast later deleted the image after a vigorous outcry and tweeted an apology.
But that didn’t put an end to the part of the “forever looping, endless” cycle that begins every time these videos are released: the backlash of an America that is still afraid to confront its own racism.
This where the exhaustion begins anew.

Each time a video of police brutality is released, a group of optimistic people holds out hope that perhaps, this time, a video will convince all of America that something is wrong.

But when those hopes are dashed, black people are subjected again and again to deflections of the reality of racism, sometimes framed as concern-trolling questions from columnists, co-workers and even family members: Why don’t black people stop focusing on police, and do something about black-on-black crime?

People with the patience to address this question may answer that they do. Too many people just aren't paying attention. They may be able to cite any one of a number of examples, such as the dozens of activists who marched 35 miles in sweltering heat in August to show a commitment to stop gun violence in their own communities.

But they’ll still have to deal with the bizarre racial gymnastics in which people dissect the videos and find something, anything, that could make a black person’s death his or her own fault – if he hadn’t resisted, if she had been more polite, if he hadn’t sold cigarettes. 

And then there’s the tactic of reducing the issue from racism to “a few bad cops” – or, as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, the officer who shot McDonald "doesn’t represent our department."
But as the Chicago Reporter notes, it appears that the entire department, along with city officials, conspired to cover up the shooting. The autopsy does not match the official police report, and according to an attorney that helped bring this case to national attention, the city government “spent a year stonewalling any calls for transparency.”

Perhaps the latest incident will convince some people that something is deeply wrong in this country. But that won’t be enough. For too many Americans, admitting that the U.S. has a race problem, and that black people bear the brunt of that race problem, is an insurmountable task.
In the protests that will occur during coming days, we enter another stage of the looping cycle: the waiting game.

Many black people will cross their fingers that nobody will "act out" at a protest. Even if everyone is calm, there’s still the fear of being shot by white supremacists, which is reportedly what happened in Minnesota on Monday. But if one person – black or not – throws a stone, the protests could be labeled “riots,” giving Americans an excuse to ignore the root causes.

That would only intensify the cycle of deflection.

Again, black people will have to answer insincere questions from co-workers and friends, and again combat memes of fake statistics on black crime, spread by the most popular GOP presidential candidate.

It’s exhausting.

The activists marching in Chicago don’t necessarily expect all of America, or even all black people, to join them in the streets. But they know that they will be a topic of conversation at millions of dinner tables this Thanksgiving. And they may wonder if the well-meaning folks all across America who “like” their Facebook posts will speak up this time when their uncle starts calling Black Lives Matter a “terrorist group.”

Being black in the digital age is exhausting for the same reason that being brown after 9/11 is exhausting, or being an immigrant, or a woman, or gay, can be exhausting: because whenever the weight of hundreds of years of injustice comes to light, you are told that it is your fault.
And you are left to shoulder the burden, again, alone." [Source]

It is all "exhausting", but we as black folks have to keep pushing and keep persevering like we have been doing for "hundreds of years" in this country. We have to understand the struggle, but we can't use it as an excuse to not maximize our potential. In fact, it should make us work harder. That's what field Negroes do.  

*Pic from chicagotribune.com   

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: Girl, where did you have your fingers?


*Pic from dailymail.co.uk/By North News & Pictures LTD.

The day after turkey day.

    I hope that this Black Friday finds you all in good spirits. (No more All Fridays Matter jokes, please.) I swear that free and cheaper stuff will do more to cause the downfall of America than any terrorist ever could. But I digress. 

Anyway, there has been a lot happening in these divided states of America since I have been out of pocket for the past few days.

As I type this post I am watching an "active shooter situation" on CNN from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Apparently some loon was in the Planned Parenthood building shooting at police officers and possibly worse. (More on that to come.)

Donald trump (He doesn't deserve caps for his name) has now expanded his campaign of hate to include the disabled. He actually made fun of a disabled man to the delight of his minions, and then had the nerve to say that our eyes were lying to us because he did no such thing.

Then, to make matters worse, he told even a bigger lie by saying that he doesn't even know the reporter who he made fun of.

"I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovalski is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence,” Trump said in a statement Thursday, misspelling the maligned reporter’s last name. “I don’t know if he is J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime — or somebody of less athletic or physical ability.”
Trump had gone after Kovaleski, who has a congenital condition called arthrogryposis that limits the movement of joints, at a campaign rally on Tuesday, flailing his arms in apparent mockery of the journalist’s movements.

“Now the poor guy, you ought to see the guy,” he said as he gestured."

I know that this will not  move his supporters to reconsider voting for this boorish ignoramus, but as I said above, he lied.

"The reporter Donald Trump claims he's never seen before says he spent a whole day with the bombastic billionaire while working for the Daily News — and he's drawn Trump's ire before.
Serge Kovaleski, now a New York Times reporter, said he closely covered Trump's launch of an airline in 1989.

"I spent the entire day with Trump, along with some other reporters, on the inaugural voyage of the Trump Shuttle, which Trump bought from Eastern Airlines in the late 1980s," Kovaleski told The News in an email on Friday.

“Flying out of La Guardia, we spent a big chunk of the day flying up and down the east coast with Trump chatting with me and the others on the plane." [Source]

I don't know about you, but I find the disable guy more credible than the guy who told me that he saw thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey from his apartment in Manhattan after 911. 

Then there are the marches going on in Chicago. Folks in that city are rightfully outraged over the actions of the police towards citizens of color over the years, and they are making their feelings known by taking to the streets.

And staying in Chicago, I am glad that the animal who allegedly executed the poor nine year old child in that city has been apprehended. He deserves everything he has coming to him. To take the life of a child in such a manner is truly baleful and malevolent.

Having said that, the timing of his arrest has me saying, hmmmm. I am guessing that they 9the authorities) knew who they wanted for this murder for some time, and that they knew where to go and get him. Holding that large press conference today to announce his arrest when they did just seems like the Chicago PD playing politics to minimize the backlash from the alleged murder of Laquan McDonald.

I hope you all enjoyed bonding with your family yesterday. I know that I did.

Thanks for al the kind words and your contribution to the blog while I was away.

*Pic from CNN







     

OFF AGAIN.

 Would love to post. But wifey says, "Stay off that damn blog!"

So......

I'll holla at y'all tomorrow. :(

TURKEY BREAK.

The Donald's America.

    I just watched  a video of yet another African American man being shot to death by someone who is supposed to be in a position of authority. This is becoming an all too familiar theme in our country. I bet you wouldn't have to tell the officer who executed Laquan McDonald that white lives matter.

Anyway, he is being charged with first degree murder, so it seems that we are making some progress, although it took over a year for us to be able to view the video tape. (TY Craig Futterman)

 This is the climate in which Donald Trump (and his handlers) have chosen to turn up his racist rhetoric and  let his minions loose on all those who disagree with him. So while some folks in the majority population continue to worry about Syrian refugees committing acts of terror, I will worry about the men and women who are sworn to protect us----- men and women who wear uniforms and bulletproof vests, catching a sudden case of "color arousal" at the wrong time.

Speaking of the aforementioned Mr. Trump, here is another cut and paste worthy article about his antics of late:

"We’re now on day two of the latest media controversy to engulf Donald Trump, namely his insistence that he personally saw footage that featured “thousands” of American Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. For a time, Dr. Ben Carson even backed up Trump’s delusion by claiming that he had also seen the footage, a claim that was subsequently retracted by his campaign. For two days now, the media has been parsing Trump’s claim, which he now supports with an unsourced paragraph in an old Washington Post article that describes “law enforcement authorities” questioning people who were “allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops.”

The controversy is obviously a big deal to the media, and even has some predicting that this could be the thing that finally puts a dent in Trump’s poll numbers. On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski predicted that this could really hurt Trump:

'This is what could really hurt Trump. I mean if — he’s got to be smart and strong and correct, and if he’s not correct, when push comes to shove people will coalesce around a different candidate.'

This is hilarious on so many levels, starting with the notion that being “correct” means anything to Republican voters, who lap up GOP candidates’ weird fantasies like kittens with a saucer of milk. In this case, though, the media is blinding itself to the fact that Trump’s claim has more then enough truthiness to give him the cover he needs.

That old WaPo report, it has to be said, is pure bullshit. The reporters who wrote it have since said that they were unable to verify the allegation, but no one has questioned them on where it came from in the first place. Based on the lack of attribution, the only possibilities are that it was from some law enforcement source who insisted on deep background attribution (not likely given the broad nature of the claim), or it was from residents and/or local political figures who claimed knowledge of the incidents.

 

In any case, in the weeks following the attacks, literally everyone I ran into in New Jersey had a story about how they had personally seen the FBI or the cops raid their local convenience store/gas station/other business that happened to be owned by brown people, and that they knew for a fact the people scooped up in the raid had been plotting against America. People were scared shitless, and talking out of their asses.

For some reason, though, none of the coverage of Trump’s remarks has included the footage that Trump was probably talking about, footage that every American either saw or heard about that day and was deeply traumatized by. While still reeling from the tragedy, Fox News viewers got to see this footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating the attacks:

Appearing when it did, this footage gave many Americans a distorted view of Muslim reaction to the attacks, which was, in fact, widespread condemnation. It is perhaps out of concern for this sort of distorted impression that media outlets are now reluctant to replay that footage, but it bears direct relevance to the political price Trump will pay for his current campaign of lies. To the Americans who matter to Trump, the resentful Republican base and low-information independents, Trump’s conflation of this footage with that unsourced WaPo report will be seen as a forgivable transgression at worst, and at best, something that feels true.

What I find even more bizarre about this current controversy is the immense gulf between coverage of Trump’s bogus 9/11 memories and the balls-out anti-black racism he displayed almost simultaneously. There may or may not have been people celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, but the racist tweet Trump sent out this weekend was definitively a lie, definitively racist, and yet became a one-day footnote to the 9/11 story.

 

Some have correctly expressed concern that Trump’s 9/11 story could lead to violence against Muslims, but his supporters’ anti-black sentiments have already led to violence against at least one black man. Tweeting that black people are doing all of the murdering would seem to be at least as problematic, and orders of magnitude more racist, yet it has been treated as a sideline. Only Bill O’Reilly has managed to press Trump about it, and even then, it was only to warn him that it might give people an excuse to falsely believe that racism is even a thing.

To her credit, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow became one of the very few media figures who has even been willing to use the word “racist” to describe Trump’s tweet on Monday night’s show, but even that was a small part of an 18-minute segment on the 9/11 story. The rest of the media is apparently allergic to calling Trump’s tweet “racist” and a “lie” in equal measure, instead often referring to the completely fabricated statistics from a made-up source “questionable.” No, people, “slugging percentage” and “QB rating” are questionable statistics, these are lies.

As outrageous as Trump’s lies are, I find the media’s treatment of them even more of an outrage, because Trump has no duty to serve the public. Apparently, the media doesn’t think it does, either, or at least not that segment of the public." [Article]


*Pic from chicagotribune.com taken by Zbigniew Bzdak



  

Mr. Trump needs a running mate.

I wonder what our friend David Duke is up to these days. The Donald could sure use him right about now. My man must be thinking that he will be needing a running mate soon since there is a very good chance that he could win the GOP nomination for president.

Lately Donald has been acting like Duke's soul-mate, and he has been doing his best to reach the same base that almost carried Duke to the Governor's mansion in Louisiana.

The latest sign that Donald is either a flat out racist or someone who is embracing the Lee Atwater school of political strategy is his ignorant and bigoted tweet about crime created by some American Nazis. Or, better stated, the tweet endorsed by his campaign.

Here is what Mother Jones had to say about it:

"The fascinating thing is that instead of a blaming the tweet on a subordinate—something they haven't been shy about doing in the past—the campaign has chosen to stay silent about it. They have apparently made the political calculation that it would be worse for Trump to acknowledge not sending the racist tweet than to endure a few days of stories about how racist he is. 
It's 2015, and if you're running for the Republican nomination for president, saying racist things doesn't hurt your poll numbers. "

Yep, that's kind of scary.

Now might be a good time for a little cut and pasting of Paul Waldman's article in the Washington Post:

"As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump had quite a weekend. First he claimed on Saturday that “I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as [the World Trade Center] was coming down.” Confronted with the fact that this is completely false, Trump insisted on Sunday, “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations…that tells you something.

Then on Sunday he (or someone from his campaign) tweeted out a graphic with phony statistics purporting to show how murderous black people are (and illustrated with a picture of a young black man with a bandana over his face, pointing a gun sideways, gangster-style).

Both of these happenings are receiving plenty of attention in the media today. The problem is that the media doesn’t know how to handle this kind of blatant race-baiting from a leading politician.
And just to be clear, it is race-baiting, and nothing else. In neither case is there even the remotest connection to some kind of legitimate policy question. When Trump says falsely that thousands of people in Jersey City (which has a large Muslim population) were celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center, he isn’t making an argument about Syrian refugees. He’s simply saying that you should hate and fear Muslim Americans. When he tries to convince people that most white murder victims are killed by black thugs (again, false), he isn’t arguing for some policy approach. He’s just trying to foment racism and convince racists that he’s their guy.

So how do the media deal with this? One thing they don’t do is call it by its name. The first approach is to report on it as just another campaign controversy (“Trump takes heat for tweet about black murder rates“). That kind of story sticks to the who-what-where-when approach: Trump tweeted this, he was criticized for it, here’s how it was inaccurate, here’s Trump’s response. Any value judgments that appear will be spoken by Trump’s critics (though not his primary opponents, who for the most part are dancing around any criticism of what Trump said).

The second approach the media takes is to address Trump’s comments through fact-checking, something we have gotten pretty good at. Interestingly enough, fact-checking as a formal genre of journalism can be traced to another campaign that prominently featured Republican race-baiting, the 1988 election. In the wake of that election, many news outlets felt they had been manipulated by George H.W. Bush’s campaign into not only focusing on distracting issues that had little or nothing to do with the presidency, but also into becoming a conduit for ugly attacks with little basis in fact. Over the following few years, many decided to institutionalize fact-checks, at first for television ads in particular, and later for all kinds of claims made in politics. Eventually sites like Politifact and FactCheck.org were created, and major news organizations like this one devoted staff solely to fact-checking.

In the process, journalists acquired both an understanding of how to separate the accurate from the inaccurate from the subjective, and a language to talk about different kinds of claims. While there’s plenty of slippage — you still see claims that have been proven false referred to as “controversial” or “questionable” — the existence of the fact-checking enterprise has allowed reporters to be clearer with their audiences about what is and isn’t true.

So if you want a fact-check of Trump’s claims, you’ll have no trouble finding it (here’s the Post’s). What you’ll have to look harder for is reporting that puts what Trump said in a context that goes much deeper than the campaign controversy of the week.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that there’s a simple template reporters should follow, one that will allow them to easily separate the merely “controversial” from the clearly racist (though wherever the line is, passing on phony statistics about murderous black people from neo-Nazis is definitely on the other side of it). But they wouldn’t violate any reasonable conception of objectivity by making the nature of Trump’s arguments clear.

When David Duke nearly won the governorship of Louisiana in 1991, it was reported in the national media as a story about racism, with a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan garnering a majority of the white vote as he lost a runoff election. Few in the media hesitated to call Duke a racist, in large part because even at the time he was perceived as representing yesterday’s racism,antiquated for its explicitness (even if Duke did try to clean up his views for the campaign).

Trump represents one face of today’s racism (though not by any means the only face). It simultaneously insists that Muslims can be good Americans, and accuses them of hating America and says their places of worship ought to be kept under government surveillance. It says that some Mexican-Americans are good people, and says most of them are rapists and drug dealers. It says “I think I’ll win the African-American vote” and then tries to convince voters that black people are murdering white people everywhere."[More]

That sums up Mr. Trump to a tee. If he becomes President Trump America Americans will get  just what they deserve.

Pic from salon.com/By Burt Steel of the Associated Press. 

Donald Trump's imaginary cheering Jersey Muslims.

"Donald Trump claims that "thousands" of people in New Jersey were "cheering" amid the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil.

In an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his assertion that he saw people in New Jersey — where the real-estate mogul claims there are "large Arab populations" — cheering as the World Trade Center came down.

"There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down," Trump said on Sunday. "I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well-covered at the time."

Trump first made the claim at a Birmingham, Alabama, rally on Saturday.

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he said.

As The New York Times reported, it's unclear to what Trump was referring. Images were broadcast of cheering in Middle Eastern countries, but local officials had to dispute a prevalent internet rumor that Muslims were cheering in Paterson, New Jersey." [Source]

So how can a leading candidate to be the president of these divided state of America just tell a bold face lie on national television and think that he can get away with it?

Because he is Donald Trump, and Americans, in this political season, do not care about the truth. Just look at some of the whoppers that the other leading republican candidate for president has told.

And yes, what Trump said was a lie. And the sad thing is he knew it was a lie.

This is what fact checkers, Politifact, had to say said about Trump's claim:

"Trump said he "watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering" as the World Trade Center collapsed.

This defies basic logic. If thousands and thousands of people were celebrating the 9/11 attacks on American soil, many people beyond Trump would remember it. And in the 21st century, there would be video or visual evidence.

Instead, all we found were a couple of news articles that described rumors of celebrations that were either debunked or unproven.Trump’s recollection of events in New Jersey in the hours after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks flies in the face of all the evidence we could find. We rate this statement Pants on Fire." [Source]

His pants might be on fire, but his supporters are right by his side to put it out.

Pic from npr.org.











 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: I changed my mind; I don't want to come to America anymore.

*Pic from twitter.com/posted by Ben Rhodes/ @rhodes44

Muslims on a plane.

     It's looking more and more like Muslim is the new black.

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A Philadelphia man says he is humiliated and upset after he was briefly stopped from boarding a flight from Chicago when another passenger overheard him speak Arabic, making him uncomfortable.

Pizza shop owner Maher Khalil emigrated from Palestine 15 years ago. He says he had never experienced discrimination before the incident Wednesday at Midway International Airport.

"We came to America to have a better life," Khalil explained on Friday. "Everybody in America is from different countries. I'm one of them. I'm an American citizen."

Khalil said he was chatting with a friend while waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight. When he approached the gate, he said, they were told they couldn't board because another passenger felt uncomfortable.

"We were just chatting, like everybody else," Khalil said in a telephone interview. "I'm

'Are you kidding me? Are you serious? Is this a prank or something?'"

Khalil called the police for help, but when they arrived, some passengers assumed it was because the officers were responding to a terrorist threat.

The two men were later allowed to board.

As Khalil walked to his seat at the back of the plane, some were suspicious of a white box he was carrying and asked to see what was inside, he said. To ease the tension, Khalil opened it and shared the baklava he'd bought with a few passengers."When we walked onto the airplane, I told my friend to smile so (other passengers) can think there's nothing wrong," Khalil said. "Everybody started giving us that look."

Southwest Airlines Co. said the flight departed 10 minutes late after a disagreement with two customers. The Dallas-based airline says its employees are trained to address "passenger situations" to ensure the safety of flights.

"I swear, I never had that feeling before," Khalil said. "I felt like we're not safe no more in this country. Because I'm Arab, I cannot ride the airplane? The person who complained is the one who should be kicked out, not me." [Source]

Get used to it Khalil, you are going to be feeling that way for some time.

This of course would not have happened if Donald Trump had his way. If it was up to the Donald there would be no need to profile Khalil on that plane, because he would have his own little Muslim chip implanted somewhere in his body.

The airline would have been able to determine that Khalil is one of the "good Muslims" right away. And after announcing that fact to the rest of the passengers, they would  all have been able to breathe just a little easier.  

*Pic from cbs.com
  

1942 or 2015?

I wish I could take credit for this, but I cant.

"


"

That's a classic piece of irony, because Americans are freaking out at the thought of 10,000 Syrian refugees coming to our very Christian land just weeks before Christmas.

Today, thanks to the help of 47 democrats, republicans in the house voted to restrict the "resettlement" of Syrian refugees to this country. Something about security concerns after all those Syrians attacked innocents in Paris. Oh wait....those weren't Syrians, they were Frenchmen and Belgians. Oh well, but they looked like those people. Close enough.

Hey, I am all for a little background checking of the refugees who come here. We would be doing that if they came here legally on visas. So there is no need for refugees not to be treated the same. But some of the measures that right-wingnuts are suggesting is just flat out insane, and, quite frankly, Un-American.

The wingnut governor of Indiana turned back a family of refugees and told them that they are not welcome in his state. (Good for Connecticut for taking them) Other states like Alabama and Michigan vowed not to take in any of the refugees as well. The republican mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, used the Japanese  internment camps to justify his bigotry. And Ben Carson compared the refugees to rabid dogs. Can you believe that? A man who swore to save lives, chooses to demonize and turn his back on women and children as they flee certain death in their own country.

These will be remembered as some of America's darkest days in American history. The terrorist must be dancing in their caves and in their flats in the ghettos of the Middle East and Europe.  They have won. They have exposed all of those American ideals as a lie.

"Defeating terrorism should not mean slamming the door in the faces of those fleeing the terrorists," said Rep Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York. "We might as well take down the Statue of Liberty".

Or just give it back to the French. I bet they are sorry that they gave it to us in the first place.















   

Pop Warner kills a dream.

  I like working with young people in and around Philly. I think it's important that those of us who have been fortunate to achieve some success in life reach back to help out our community when we can.

Here in Philly, there are a lot of people doing just that. They act as mentors, coaches, teachers, and volunteers in various parts of the city, putting in work and contributing to society in a positive way.

This is why the following story pisses me off so much.

"Ask the 9-year-old football players on the West Philly Tarheels what they think makes their team unique, and they sound like a pro football team.
"Our passing game."

"We improved our defense. We only gave up 12 points all year."
"We don't talk smack. We just show it on the field."

A pro team they're not. With almost no players over 100 pounds, the entire team of 17 barely out-weighs the five Eagles on the offensive line (about 300 pounds each).

However, the Tarheels, who wrapped up their season in the Pop Warner League's Mighty Mites division last weekend with a 18-0 win, leaving them undefeated with an 11-0 record, are feeling like they lost.

That's because a mid-season organizational change canceled their dream of playing the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Disney.

"Finding out we weren't going down to Disney, it really hurt in the inside of my body. I really wanted to make it down there," said player AJ Redmond, 9.

While the league had a playoffs system with winners heading to the bowl at Disney World in Florida last year, it was changed this year to an invitation-only bowl -- and the Tarheels didn't get the invite.

"The kids thought they were going to Florida. Florida was their incentive," said team mom Caiya Whitehead.

Some parents even said they only joined this league for the chance to play in Disney, which ended up being a mirage.

"Last year, we were in the Keystone League," said Danielle Tucker-Mills, a mother of another player. "We switched to go to Pop Warner League because we knew there was a chance, if the kids won, they could go to Disney."

The decision to change plans occurred in October due to problems involving numerous complaints from various teams, said Pop Warner spokesman Josh Spruce.

"The playoff structure just brought a lot of challenges when playing with kids who are 7, 8, and 9 years old," Pruce said. "We decided not to play anything that looks like a playoff game."
Somehow the decision, made in October, didn't trickle down from the Liberty League Athletic Association to the Tarheel parents until two weeks ago -- right after winning a game they believed would set them on the path to the playoffs.

"The day we found out, we couldn't even have practice. They all broke down crying," Whitehead said.

"It was conveyed to our children that if they actually won all their games, they would advance to Disney," said Tucker-Mills. "All of a sudden you change the rules and no, we're not going to Disney."

"I'm sorry if they were misinformed. It's unfortunate circumstances," Pruce said.
Now, the Tarheels are focusing on moving forward.

"This team is special. I've never seen nothing like this team," said Kareem Baylor Sr., one of the team coaches, whose son is on the team, during a recent practice. "Seventeen 9-year-olds changed my life."

Parents and coaches said the Tarheels' football skill is only continuing to grow.

"It's really instilled in them that 'This is what I want to do,'" Tucker-Mills said. "Even when they're not at practice, they practice. They will move on, they're resilient, they will bounce back." [Source]

I would love to ask Mr. Spruce what some of those "complaints" were. And people wonder why I am so cynical. Come on grown ups, lets make this happen for the little guys. It's not like they are linked to murders or any of those bad things that would sully Disney's "pristine" reputation.

When I read stories like this I can't help but feel the way I do about the adults who are supposed to be controlling things. No compassion for the poor kids who are going to have their hearts broken.

I have my own opinions as to why this team got snubbed ( I know some of the back story) but I am going to leave that to your imagination.

*Photo by Charles Mostoller for the Metro.us.

"Fear and loathing" from the right-wing media.

As the folks over at Bitefart and other right winngut outlets continue to demonize the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, you have to wonder what it is that they are so afraid of.

The latest is a scurrilous lie and false characterization of an entire movement by taking the actions of a few folks on twitter as something that is representative of the entire group. Personally, I take everything that these clowns report about with a grain of salt, but even if true, it is not a true representation of how black activist feel about the tragedy  that took place in Paris, France.

I have seen thousands of tweets and essays from black activists and bloggers showing support for the people of Paris and offering condolences to those who lost loved ones. Unfortunately you would never know this from reading right -wing blogs or watching FOX VIEWS.

Anyway, I saw a wonderful essay from a member of my twitter family that I think might be instructive for some of you who are on the outside looking in.

"What comes to mind when you think of the word “freedom?

Personally, I think of two different things: There’s freedom as liberation, the basic human right to be your authentic self and live your life without fear of violence or persecution.

Then there’s the idea of “freedom” as a tenet of the faulty “American Dream.” You know, the kind of rhetoric spewed on media outlets like Fox News, telling us that we’re lucky to live in the US, the land of the free. Telling us who to fear – namely, Arab Muslims whose “barbaric” traditions threaten our liberties. Telling us that “political correctness” has gone awry, trying to take away our freedom of speech

Right now, this very rhetoric is being used to ridicule activists fighting for freedom as liberation.

Here’s what’s happening. We’ve been rocked by two major events in our world.

On a global scale, the devastating attacks in Paris have left 140 people dead and many more injured and traumatized by unfathomable terror.

And here at home, activists of color on college campuses across the country are protesting having to live in fear with incidents like racist threats of violence at the University of Missouri.

It’s hard to know how to react in moments like these. I wish I could shut off the world around me and just be human. After all, it’s only human to grieve, to learn of the horrific things the people in Paris went through and mourn for the lost and shattered lives of the victims, their families, and communities.

And it’s only human to feel enraged for the students of color too afraid to step outside of their dorm rooms on a campus where the administration dismisses their fears.

I can hold both these feelings within me and know that one doesn’t diminish the validity of the other. But when it comes to expressing these emotions, every response feels heavy with implications." [More]

Well said Maisha, it is always nice to read the words of a young writer who can state their position in such an honest and heartfelt way.

Contrast this with the folks at Britefart, whose only goal in life  seems to be to divide and profit from the division that they create. So far, I am sad to say, their plan is working.  

*Pic from AP and everydayfeminism.com

Remembering ALL tragedies, and a religious test for some of the "huddled masses".

I am on twitter a lot, and I couldn't help but notice all the avatars of French flags and the French colors that went up after the terror attacks in Paris.

This, of course, is a good thing, as the people of France need to know that the world is behind them and standing with them in these troubled times.

It's just that.....

"The massacre that killed 147 people and wounded scores of others at a Kenyan university lasted for hours Thursday before the terror was over.

"It is a very sad day for Kenya," Interior Ministry Joseph Nkaissery said of the carnage at Garissa University College.

The death toll is the highest in a terror attack on Kenyan soil since the U.S. Embassy was bombed in 1998. More than 200 people died in the Nairobi blast.

 

A total of 147 people were killed Thursday, according to the official Twitter account of Kenya's National Disaster Operation Centre and Kenyan media reports. The agency also said 79 people were injured and 587 people were evacuated." [Source]

 

I remember that tragic day back in early April. I just don't remember all the avatars with the Kenyan colors and the Kenyan flags that went up on twitter and facebook back then. 

 

This is true for all you black folks on twitter and facebook as well. Especially you.

 

Carry on.

 

Speaking of the tragedy in Paris, another sad story is emerging from those events which, in my humble opinion, might do more to undermine who we are as a country and as a people than a terrorist bomb ever could.

 

It seems that the image of that poor dead Syrian child has long faded from our memories and Americans have changed their tone about allowing Syrian refugees to come here. I am not sure that the nationality of all the bombers have been confirmed, but I am quite sure that they were not Syrians. But hey, the 911 hijackers were Saudis and we invaded Iraq. By this logic the French should be invading Belgium. But  digress.

 

It seems that more and more states are declaring their space off limits to Syrian refugees because of what happened in Paris. Some GOP candidates for president are calling for a religious test of the refugees who we allow to come to here. I am not quite sure how that one would work. "Ok people, listen up. I need you to start trying to walk across this swimming pool. If you make it all the way to the other side, welcome to America." That was a joke. But seriously, I need  whoever is reading this to understand how antithetical this is to who we are supposed to be as a people. I mean we might as well shut down the Statue Of Liberty right now and send it back to the French. It obviously has no meaning here in this country.

 

" Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

 

Oh, and make sure that they are Christians.

 

*Pic from rightnow.io.com

    

 

 

 

When "freedom fries" come back to bite.

The field Negro education series continues.

The following essay was written by Joseph Palermo for Huffington Post:

"Republican myth-makers like Judith Miller, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, and other ideologues, along with the GOP presidential candidates from Donald Trump to Marco Rubio, couldn't wait for all the victims in Paris to be identified before they unleashed a stream of hateful statements about the Paris attacks that serve their dual objectives of trashing President Obama and calling for their own form of jihad against their perceived enemies around the globe.

They're incapable of seeing that by politically exploiting this most recent atrocity, as they do with every other jihadist attack, to push their authoritarian and militaristic agenda they are exposing themselves as being every bit as nihilistic as the terrorists themselves.

Not long ago, in the run up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, these same right-wing Republicans were screaming epithets at France because the country that today the corporate media remind us is "our oldest ally" tried to stop the war before it began.

The French case was that there was not a WMD threat, and that invading Iraq would lead to fragmentation of the country and trigger more terrorism.

Like a good friend who tried to take away the car keys from a power drunk U.S. administration before it got behind the wheel, France had the wisdom and forethought to try to stop the United States from its biggest foreign policy catastrophe since the Vietnam War.

And how did the Republican Right in the U.S. respond?

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives stopped selling French Fries in its cafeteria (which are from Belgium anyway) and changed their name to "Freedom Fries."

They vilified France because the French government had the good sense to try to block Bush and Cheney's war of aggression in Iraq through its United Nations veto power.

The United States had not seen such culinary propaganda since the World War One era, when the U.S. government's Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee) sought to enflame anti-German sentiment by changing bratwurst to "hotdogs," hamburgers to "Salisbury steak," and sauerkraut to "victory cabbage."

The Republicans displayed the same level of hostility toward the French for opposing their war of choice in Iraq as an earlier generation of American propagandists showed toward Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Right-wing talk radio hosts organized events where their fans poured French wine down gutters as a symbolic protest against the French who dared to question the infinite wisdom of their Commander-in-Chief.

During George W. Bush's vicious 2004 re-election campaign against John Kerry Bush's Secretary of Commerce, Donald Evans, repeatedly said that Kerry "looks French."

The Republican House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, began many of his Bush campaign speeches: "As John Kerry would say, bonjour."
  
At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City "Democratic" Senator Zell Miller of Georgia received thunderous applause when he trashed John Kerry in his keynote address saying, "Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending!"

The same right-wingers that today are using the Paris attacks to further their shrill Manichean worldview denigrated "our oldest ally" for showing the good sense of not going along with Bush's war in Iraq.

This phenomenon demonstrates the fact that since the Bush years the Republicans have dropped all pretense of wanting to build a "kinder and gentler" America or promising a new version of "compassionate conservatism."

They've chosen instead to follow the ignorant and mean-spirited script of their ideological soul mates on right-wing talk radio.

In the context of Bush's ongoing "War on Terror" their situational demagoguery has drifted into the realm of heartless neo-fascism.

They demagogue the Paris attacks while dismissing the idea that the United States could learn a thing or two from France's examples of universal health care and publicly financed elections.

They denounce all who disagree with their war-mongering agenda with the kind of cocky self-assurance that Joe McCarthy showed in the early 1950s.

Last summer when I visited the French city of Strasbourg, a region where the horrifying history of war rings loudly, I stood for a long time inside Our Lady of Strasbourg Cathedral admiring the large memorial inside the cathedral to the fallen American soldiers who died there helping to liberate the city during World War Two.
 
I thought about the intertwined recent histories of our two countries and how much the French really loved the Americans, which made me all the more ashamed of the Republicans under George W. Bush who ridiculed that country and its people. Their raw partisan statements so soon after the horror in Paris renews this shame and should remind us just how extreme and heartless the party has become in recent years." [Source]

Thoughts?

*Pic from noboodforhubris.BlogSpot.com

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: All that overtime during the Pope's visit is finally taking its toll on Philly's finest.

*Pic from twitter.

Terror in Paris.

Today is Friday the 13th, and for the folks in Paris, France it is a day that they will never forget.

Coordinated attacks all over the city killed at least 118 people in just one place, and the citizens of that beautiful city are in shock.

Welcome to the 21st Century. Where, thanks to technology, wars can be fought with just a few animals coming together and slaughtering innocent people. I suspect that there will be more of this to come. On a day when the Obama administration was celebrating the killing of a high profile Isis operative, and Kurd soldiers were taking back a city in Iraq, the terrorist were saying not so fast; we
still have the ability to terrorize you people in the West.

The scary thing is that happened while the French were supposedly on high alert. What would have happened if they weren't ready? These attacks obviously took a lot of planning, and apparently assault weapons are illegal in France, so these guys must have been deep in terrorist mode.

France has closed their borders, declared a state of emergency, and now they are going from neighborhood to neighborhood and trying to find out more about what could have caused this act of terror.

Witnesses on French television said the scene at the rock concert was a massacre.

The casualties eclipsed the deaths and mayhem that roiled Paris in the Charlie Hebdo massacre and related assaults around the French capital by Islamic militant extremists less than a year ago.

An explosion near the sports stadium, which French news services said may have been a suicide bombing, came as Germany and France were playing a soccer match, forcing a hasty evacuation of Mr. Hollande. As the scope of the assaults quickly became clear, he convened an emergency cabinet meeting and announced that France was closing its borders.

As I speak, terrorist attacks of an unprecedented scale are taking place in the Paris region,” he said in a nationally televised address. “There are several dozen dead, lots more wounded, it’s horrific.”

"Horrific" indeed.

"President Obama in Washington came to the White House Briefing room to express solidarity and offer aid and condolences. “Once again, we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians,” he said. “This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.”

It is an attack on "all of humanity" Mr. President, as were the attacks in Baghdad today. Let's not forget that those people are victims of these inhumane terrorists as well. These crazed fanatics who act out in horrific ways to justify their sick indoctrination.    

As was the case here in America after September 11, it will take some time for France to return to "normalcy" as they know it. Their country will be changed forever and it will be interesting to see what happens to the "war on terror" going forward. A war, unfortunately, to which there seems to be no end in sight.   

*Pic from slate.com/Photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images

 

White lies matter.

 Chris Christie and his friends running for the republican nomination to be president are doing their best to pander to the angry white male vote.

It's actually kind of pathetic to watch. These seemingly smart people choosing to be on the wrong side of history.

Chris Christie, who would do best to take the NYT editorial board's advice, told the Black Lives Matter (BLM) folks not to call and ask him for a meeting.  This man is clearly a legend in his own mind. Why would the BLM people want to meet with him? What's he going to do? Give them tips on how to shut down a bridge?

Donald Trump declared that if he was the president of the University of  Missouri he would put all those ungrateful Negroes benefiting from the white man's education in their place. I was paraphrasing but that was the gist of it. He called the protesters "disgusting" and, in true Trump fashion, talked about himself in the third person while telling us all how tough he would be on them.

"'I think the two people that resigned are weak, ineffective people...... referring to University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, who both announced on Monday that they would step aside under pressure. "I think that when they resigned, they set something in motion that's gonna be a disaster for the next long period of time."'

Or, maybe just maybe racial relations will get better on college campuses across the country and we will become a better country as a result of it.

Of course, not to be outdone, Ben Carson (Mr. Black Lie himself)jumped into the fray. Ben, in order to impress all the right- wing voters in the republican primary, had to jig harder than anyone in the house ever jigged before. True to form he declared that as a country we are actually becoming too tolerant and the behavior of the protesters--- who are putting their safety and college careers on the line---- is "infantile".

This all fits into a narrative being pushed by the republican candidates: White people, you need to vote for me, because I am the only one who will stand up to this attack on our way of life.

Jamelle Bouie writing for Slate magazine wrote about this phenomenon at length.  And, as is often the case with Mr. Bouie, he was spot on.

"~~~GOP presidential contenders blaming Black Lives Matter for crime a desperate attempt to frighten white voters into supporting them.~~~ "....Long-term trends can obscure short-term variations,however,and there’s contested evidence that we’re in the middle of a violent crime spike,sparked by a so-called Ferguson effect where less aggressive policing—fueled by “Black Lives Matter” protests—encourages criminals.“Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines,” [NYT] in a story on the rising murder rate in Milwaukee. Critics say this is overblown...Bruce Frederick—..at the Vera Institute of Justice—notes that of the 20 most populous U.S. cities for which there’s public data,only three experienced a “statistically reliable increase” in homicide rates. For the rest,“the observed increases could have occurred by chance alone.”If there is a new trend,we need more data.The same goes for the “Ferguson effect”;there’s no evidence that less policing has produced more violent crime...." But humans are built to see patterns in unrelated events,and the crime increase—plus a rash of high-profile shootings aimed at police officers—has brought new partisan attacks on Black Lives Matter,even while 2015 stands as an unusually safe year for police officers,so far.“In the last six years under President Obama,we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric,” wrote Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in an op-ed last week,citing “demonstrations and chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon.’” Walker was referring to a small group of protesters in Minnesota who by all accounts are unrepresentative of the larger movement.Still,their actions came in the wake of a brutal attack on a Texas police officer,Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth,who was shot 15 times at a gas station near Houston.And as such,it was fuel for Walker’s charge,as well as for claims from Fox News and other conservative outlets that Black Lives Matter is a “hate group.”...."

I don't think that Black Lives Matter is a "hate group". But I can think of another group that is very close to being one.

*Pic from blacklivesmatter.com