Thursday, December 31, 2015

"We weren't ready for a black president:....."

Research has found that Barack Obama's skin appears to have been darkened in certain Republican attack advertisements screened during the 2008 campaign."When the question is asked near the beginning—”Is America ready for its first black president?”— it needs to be answered near the end. And as Barack Obama comes into the homestretch of his term in 2016 the answer, sadly, is no.
If nothing else, 2015 offered a rolling reminder of the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency with its numerous parallel events and template-setting episodes that have now come to a full head of hateful steam in the emergent American Serbia of the mind, if not deed. The embodiment is Donald Trump, presidential candidate, notorious birther, resident American fascist and bomb-thrower.

If hope and change were the Obama buzzwords in 2009, the lesson of 2015 is that a bunch of overstimulated, hopelessly right-wing pseudo statesmen haven’t changed, grown up, dropped the sub rosa race-bait narrative—even as Obama delivered on his fair share of what he promised way back when.

Don’t ask me why Obama’s race is still an issue; ask Lou Dobbs. The immigrant-bashing news anchor blabbed to the Fox masses about how Obama only became president because he played the “race card,” a curiously timed outburst given that Dobbs made it just two weeks ago.
One suspects the true motive for the race-card redux politics has to do with an inevitable pivot to the gender card embodied by Hillary Clinton. To beat Clinton, goes the takedown logic, you must first lynch Obama all over again.

Having failed its first black president, is America ready for its first woman president? Not if Trump has anything to do with it, as the GOP frontrunner’s sick and weird comments about Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate would indicate.

Trump’s obsession with genitals was one of the more telling developments as the year wound down and the GOP establishment continued to grapple with a Trump beast of its own unleashing. Trump’s fallback position when it comes to women is to be grossed out by simple bodily functions, and his emergence as a legitimate candidate for president in 2015, as party standard-bearer at 39 percent in the polls and rising, signals the arrival of an acceptably visceral politics of disgust, disgrace and demeaning language—with all the wink-nod whiffs of malice and conjecture about that Kenyan socialist dictator ever at the ready, because it’s all his fault.

The conflation of Islamophobia and Obamaphobia is the persistent backdrop that defines a reactionary and highly personalized politics around Obama, and that dynamic really took off this year in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks.

When Trump says that Hillary got “schlonged” by Obama as he did last week, he is invoking the racial slander of the Old South, in which accusations of black men raping white women were used to justify lynchings. Trump is not alone in vowing a phallocentric outburst of ISIS carpet-bombing to settle the score.

But why is that anything new?

The first year of Obama’s presidency was dominated by efforts to hold off the collapse of the American economy and undo the damage wrought by the smirking failure who previously occupied the White House. As he rolls into his last year as president, Obama appears to have largely succeeded on that front, but you’d never know it.

Then as now, Obama and his accomplishments are drowned out by the pugnacity, the sneers, the lies and the anger that regularly emits from so-called victims of Obama’s presidency and their enablers in the political-media establishment—blue-collar workers of the white persuasion left in a new-economy wilderness of shifting demographics. They are content to gloat about their anti-intellectualism as those voters continue to cling to the guns and religion that made them hate Obama in the first place.

The most recent outburst from the ramparts of dumbed-down America came in the form of a classroom lesson, a Virginia school and a teacher who had offered a lesson in calligraphy late in 2015 that utilized Arabic text. Parents were outraged, they were disgusted, and they were scared, and a compliant mainstream media gobbled up an all-too-familiar set piece that gives credence to the foolish vagaries of spittle politics.

In 2009, Obama thought it would be a good idea to tape a pep talk for kids headed back to school that September, and made available a speech for schools to show students if they chose to do so. Many did not, as fearful white parents freaked out at the idea and demanded that their children not be exposed to the half-white, non-legitimate menace. There’s a timeless quote from a Colorado parent that made the rounds back then that continues to resonate, six years later: “Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me,” Shanneen Barron told CNN. “I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now.”

That all sounds familiar, and the subtext was obvious: Maybe those people’s kids need to hear that garbage from Obama, but not mine. And when the feared socialist-indoctrination speech turned out to be some pretty wholesome stuff about staying in school and doing your homework, the fear-lovers and schlong-mongers of the right just blew it off and moved to the next available outrage—over whether the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting was an act of terrorism and why didn’t Obama say as much, even though he did say as much.

This obsession over that word, and its deployment, was in full force late this year, which found some of the media at its absolute desperate worst following the San Bernardino shootings. The Los Angeles Times flagrantly champed at the “Is it terrorism?” bit for days as it reported on San Bernardino, until such time as it was able to offer fear-jacking teasers like this: “Follow the Times‘ latest coverage of the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.”

The implication was obvious, even if the fact patterns couldn’t have been more starkly different. In one attack, a coordinated group of fanatical Saudi Arabians hijacked four jet airplanes, killed 2,996 people and brought down some of the most iconic buildings in the world. In the other, 14 people were murdered at a holiday party. If that’s the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11, then someone’s doing a pretty good job at limiting these sorts of things.

But no, the shrieking narrative that followed was that Obama has totally failed to keep Americans safe for the past seven years. And yet when last spotted on Twitter in 2013, Barron was selling Napa wines in her home state of Colorado and appeared to have survived Obama and his regime of terror.
Twenty fifteen was also the year that Black Lives Matter emerged as a much-needed movement against a segregationist criminal-justice system. It was no surprise that the reaction to BLM was furiously reactive.

The blacks are getting militant, Bill O’Reilly just wet his pants in fear, and don’t you know it but all lives matter. My favorite Internet meme of 2015 addressed this idiocy by noting that just because you want to save the rainforest doesn’t mean to hell with all those other trees.

But the sort of over-Tweeted, table-turning, first-thought, worst-thought reactions that met the BLM movement served only to distract from the real menace: the mean-season undertone held Black Lives Matter as a bunch of thugs, possibly of the Muslim persuasion, who should shut up and get back to work at McDonald’s. Therefore, Obama was consorting with Muslim thugs and he hates cops. If you don’t want to get shot, comply.

That particular cake was also baked in 2009, during the infamous Henry Louis Gates arrest, and its aftermath. Gates, an esteemed and elderly Harvard professor, who happens to be black, was arrested on disorderly conduct charges after getting uppity with a white police officer who had detained him, or tried to, in Gates’ own home—the officer had followed up on a call that someone had broken into the house.

Obama tried to diffuse the situation and leverage the “teachable moment” by calling for a beer summit with the men at the White House, which sounded like a good idea. But everybody made fun of his meaningless good-will gesture, and six years later, the right still can’t get past the fact that Obama used the word “stupid” in connection with the officer’s actions—as it repeatedly offered apologia after apologia for cop-on-black crimes in 2015, while citing the Gates incident as all the evidence you need that Obama is no friend of the police.

A committee convened to study the Gates incident recommended that moving forward, police forces around the country should offer training to their officers in de-escalation techniques, when the officers are not at risk of injury. Six years later, a white police officer in South Carolina de-escalated a nonthreatening situation by shooting a fleeing black man in the back—and then casually planted evidence to cover up his crime. That was just one of numerous videotaped encounters between (mostly) white police and black citizens that characterized 2015 as the year of the damning video.
Those videos had the moral authority of authenticity, whereas another set of videos—those infamously altered Planned Parenthood sting videos that made headlines in 2015—also harked back to anti-choice rhetorical excesses from 2009.

That year, physician George Tiller was executed by an anti-abortion extremist in his office. Tiller was killed after having been ritualistically eviscerated by Bill O’Reilly, who effectively issued a media fatwa on him through over two-dozen TV segments devoted to “Tiller the Baby Killer.”
What did you expect, went the post-execution narrative, when this country has just elected a “hardcore abortionist president,” as one group put it. The reproductive-rights narrative got even more explicitly racist in later years as right-wingers warned “the community” that Obama was coming for their babies.

And here we are again. Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado in November after being driven nuts by, as he put it, all those “body parts” that anti-abortion extremists had toted out in their years-long quest to drive Planned Parenthood out of existence.

Around the same time Tiller was murdered in 2009, a nutty old anti-Semitic white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in all likelihood because Obama had just visited Buchenwald, and this Jew-hating Holocaust denier couldn’t deal with it.

Fast-forward to 2015, and those people are now at the core of Trump’s support base, while the candidate himself has said or done exactly nothing to try and address the rampant anti-Semitism among his legions of Stormfront supporters.

Indeed, Trump instead played into cheap-Jew stereotypes when, during a December talk he gave to a Republican Jewish organization, he observed that “I’m a negotiator, like you folks.” That speech was widely panned for its barely concealed anti-Semitic chutzpah, but Trump quickly pivoted to a Yiddishism focused on Obama’s schlong, which didn’t so much address the issue of Jew-hating, but did highlight Trump’s obsessive need to be the biggest swinging dick in the room.

Which brings us to Sean Hannity, one of the more ferociously pathetic Obama-haters of the conservative entertainment establishment. Hannity was at the center of the first serious scandal of the Obama Administration, when he exposed, in May 2009, what has come to be known as the Great Dijon Mustard, Emasculate-Obama Scandal.

Hannity thought it was disgraceful that the president, who had just taken his first out-of-office lunch break at a popular Washington, D.C., burger joint, would dress his burger with an un-American, and definitely French, smear of mustard. The good Catholic commentator Laura Ingraham chimed in that it wasn’t manly to eschew ketchup—it was weak!
 
The segment was supposed to be kind of funny, and libtards who took offense were told to lighten up and get over their so-called political correctness. But it was a joke dressed in menace, and here we see a direct corollary in some of Trump’s outbursts, which his supporters would also like everyone to believe are just jokes.

Like that one joke Trump told a crowd recently, about how he “hates” some of the reporters covering him but doesn’t think they should be murdered—or maybe he does—but not really. The context was a sort-of endorsement from Vladimir Putin that Trump willfully misinterpreted as an outright endorsement. A reporter subsequently asked him if, like Putin, Trump supported the execution of journalists. Instead of just saying, “No, that’s ridiculous,” Trump had to go there, before a crowd of eager supplicants whose heads spun in unison as the crass candidate finger-pointed at the hated journalists at the back of a meeting hall. “Well, maybe. . .”

Threats delivered as jokes highlight a metastasized set of “politically correct” right-wing viewpoints, even as the candidate’s supporters think dick jokes and pee-pee humor are Trump’s way of addressing a PC left that has run rampant over their right to hate Obama, Mexicans, Muslims, reporters and Hillary Clinton’s vagina.

There’s an old joke about how “politically correct” is so overused that it doesn’t mean anything except “I don’t agree with you, so therefore you are PC”—but there is a baseline definition of the phenomenon where legitimate points of view are stifled through social shaming. A politically correct right-wing maintains to the bitter end that any attempt to talk about race, especially in relation to Obama, has to turn the tables back on the person doing the talking, because it’s probably a liberal.
So when Dylann Roof clutched a Confederate flag and then shot up a black church in Charleston in 2015, the right-wing political correctness police insisted that the only orthodox way to talk about Roof’s racist shooting spree was to note that if the low-information voters of this country didn’t elect Obama in the first place, none of this would have happened." [More]


*Pic from the canberratimes.com


Wednesday, December 30, 2015

This New York Times oped is on point, and Cos goes down.

"Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year-old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.

  • But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and asks questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your humanity and conspire to kill you.
    Those forces hovered over the proceedings on Monday when a grand jury declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing and Timothy McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, explained why he had asked the grand jurors to not bring charges. Mr. McGinty described the events leading up to Tamir’s death as tragic series of errors and “miscommunications” that began when a 911 caller said a male who was “probably a juvenile” was waving a “probably fake” gun at people in a park.
    The fact that those caveats never reached Officer Loehmann — who shot the child within seconds of arriving on the scene — was more than just an administrative misstep. It reflects an utter disregard for the lives of the city’s black residents. That disregard pervades every aspect of this case and begins with the fact that the department failed to even review Officer Loehmann’s work history before giving him the power of life and death over the citizens of Cleveland. Had the department done so, it would have found that Officer Loehmann had quit a suburban police department where he had showed a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was found to be emotionally unfit for the stress of the job.
    Officer Loehmann joined a police department that itself had acquired a well-documented reputation for wanton violence and for shooting at people who posed no threat to the police or others. In a particularly striking event, documented by the Justice Department last year, officers mistook the sound of a car backfiring for a gunshot. They chased down and fired at the vehicle 137 times, killing two occupants who turned out to be unarmed.

    The lengthy Justice Department report shows clearly why the black community viewed the Cleveland police as dangerous and profoundly out of control. In May, the Police Department entered an agreement with the Justice Department, enforceable by the courts, under which it is to adopt sweeping reforms.

    The Police Department’s disregard for life was fully evident in the way the officers behaved after shooting Tamir. A surveillance video shows them standing by the child for four minutes without giving medical assistance, which was finally provided by an F.B.I. agent who happened to be in the neighborhood. Officer Frank Garmback, Officer Loehmann’s partner, nonetheless tackled the wounded boy’s 14-year-old sister as she tried to rush to his side. One can only imagine her suffering as she watched in handcuffs from the back seat of the squad car while her brother lay bleeding on the ground.

    In addition to portraying the killing as a result of a tragic misunderstanding, prosecutors have also suggested the officer’s decision to kill Tamir was shaped by the fact that the surrounding neighborhood had a history of violence and that the boy appeared to be older than 12 because he was big for his age.
    These arguments sidestep the history of violent, discriminatory police actions that led up to this boy’s death. They also have the reprehensible effect of shifting the responsibility for this death onto the shoulders of this very young victim." [Source]
    The New York Times.
    Finally, I won't be commenting too much on the case of Bill Cosby, but a local DA followed through with his threat and filed charges against the Cos today for his actions with a Temple University basketball assistant ten years ago.
    Oh how the mighty has fallen.
    It seems like only yesterday that "America's dad" was telling black boys to pull their pants up and moralizing to poor black folks about their behavior and the perception of them by white America.
    Like so many others before him, the Cos, it seems, is somewhat of a hypocrite. Do as I say, not as I do. 
    It is unimaginable that something like this would have happened 25 years ago, but this just goes to show you that you never know. The world we live in is a very unpredictable place.   

    Tuesday, December 29, 2015

    No shield for Tamir.

    Tamir Rice family photo.jpgThe loved ones of Tamir Rice suffered unspeakable pain yesterday when the grand jury empaneled to decide the fate of the officers who killed the 12 year old decided that they acted properly.

    I could get into numerous reasons why this case was handled improperly by prosecutor Tim McGinty,  (11 months?!)but what is done is done, and all the "Monday morning quarterbacking" in the world won't bring this child to life or bring justice for his family.

    Every time I watch the video of that child being executed I think of the reckless disregard the officers showed for his life and the way they came out with guns blazing. (Here is an analysis I found quite interesting: "A caller to 911 told the police operator that Rice was pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it a people, but also said the gun was “probably fake,” and that Rice was “probably a juvenile,” although it appears the dispatcher did not pass this information on to the officers. In dispatch audio released by police, the officers call in the shooting, and identify Tamir as a “black male, maybe 20” years old.

    All of this has led people like Moms Demand Action’s Shannon Watts to ask why Rice was shot when it is legal to openly carry firearms, including handguns, in Cleveland. It has also led blogs like Wonkette to wonder why the usually-vocal open carry movement hasn’t been loudly proclaiming the injustice in this case. In a press conference following the shooting, Deputy Chief Edward Tomba said that Rice made no “verbal threats,” and there was no “physical confrontation.” If the police really believed that Tamir Rice was 20 years old, and the pellet gun was really in plain view, then the open carry law would seem to complicate their justification for killing him." )

    "The Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association said it was pleased by what it called the grand jury's "thoughtful decision." But Steve Loomis, the union's president, said the decision not to indict the officers was no cause for celebration.
     
    "While there is absolutely no upside to this issue," he said in a statement, "there are lessons that should and will be learned by all."
     
    There are lessons that "should" be learned; whether it will or not is a different story.
     
    Contrast what happened to Tamir Rice to what happened to Elaine Rothenberg.
     
    "Ahead of the non-indictment of the officers involved in the death of Tamir Rice, a woman in Connecticut was reprimanded for a similar offense – only she was not killed. Elaine Rothenberg, 66, was outside of a Torrington police station with a faux weapon, attempting to provoke civilians and officers on Christmas Eve. She later stood near an employee-only entrance and ordered officers, NBC Miami reports.
     
    “What are you doing? Shoot me!” Rothenberg told the Torrington police. “Boom, boom, boom.”
    A 911 call was placed at about 7:30 p.m. on the night of the incident. Rothenberg reportedly purchased the BB gun with the intent to pass it off as a real weapon."
     
    Ms. Rothenberg, if you are trying to commit suicide by cop you are going to have to work a lot harder. Your white privilege shield is just that strong.
     
    *Pic from Wikipedia.
     
      
     
     






    Monday, December 28, 2015

    Holiday cheer.

    Image result for chicago shooting police betty jones imagesThere were more weather related deaths over the weekend in the South than the amount of people killed in the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

    That said, I have to wonder if right-wingnuts now still believe that it's a joke to think about climate change as a serious threat to the country.

    Something else happened over the weekend that has me wondering why Rham Emanuel still has a job.

    "Family members of two people killed by Chicago police during a weekend shooting joined activists Sunday to call for sweeping changes in the way officers interact with the city’s black residents.
    “Police are supposed to serve us and protect us, and instead they kill us,” said Janet Cooksey, whose 19-year-old son, Quintonio LeGrier, was shot and killed early Saturday when police were called to his house for a domestic disturbance. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

    Bettie Jones, 55, who lived downstairs from LeGrier, also was shot and killed. The officers were responding to a report of a man carrying a bat, and opened fire after LeGrier became combative, Chicago police said in a statement. Jones was shot by accident, authorities said.
    The deaths were the first fatal police-involved shootings in Chicago since the release last month of a video showing the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The video’s release led to a series of demonstrations in the city, including Christmas Eve protests on Michigan Avenue.  
    City and church leaders responded to the latest shootings at a news conference and vigil Sunday. They criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s response to police shootings and pushed for changes to the way officers treat residents and are trained to respond to volatile situations." [Source]

    The good Mayor has been ignoring  his police department for years and he has failed to take steps to correct their behavior on prior occasions. Frankly, I am surprised that the people of Chicago allowed the problem to fester for this long.

    And, with all due respect to Dr. Ben, race does play a role in these poor police decisions.

    Finally, another incident over the holidays has me wondering how our Christian brothers and sisters can celebrate the spirit of Christmas by burning the house of worship of members of another  religion.

    "A fire caused major damage at a Texas mosque on Friday afternoon, and authorities are calling it somewhat suspicious.

    Firefighters shortly arrived on the scene, followed by arson investigators. There was major damage to the inside of the mosque and there were apparently multiple points of origin, suggesting it was arson and not an accident."

    I am still waiting on some of the GOP front runners to condemn this act of hate. Because, let's be honest, if this was a Christian church (the exception being a black Christian church of course) burned by people who we suspect to be Muslims, the pontification and condemnation would be endless.

    I hope you all will enjoy what's left of your holidays.


    *Pic from wnem.com





      




     







    Saturday, December 26, 2015

    TEN REASONS.....

    10 Reasons Donald Trump Should Be Our Next President


    "It’s become a common theme online recently to make fun of Donald Trump, the current front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. I wondered if we could look past the socially acceptable thing of criticizing him to look at every legitimate reason he would make a great President. In order to do this, I created 10 list items and then filled them in with reasons to support Trump.
    1.
    2.
    3.
    4.
    5.
    6.
    7.
    8.
    9.
    10.

    Let me know if you agree!! I filled them in with as many reasons as possible!
    Thanks all and please click here to follow my blog on Facebook!

    Cheers,

    Jacob"

    I agree, Jacob, I have the very same ones.

    Shout out to  Jacob Genoa for this witty post

    Thursday, December 24, 2015

    Holiday questions.

    MORE DISCLAIMERS I am still in traveling mode so it's hard to post like I want to.

    But still, there are always interesting stories for us to consider.

    Like the followiing, for instance.

    Should the authorities have kicked this Muslim family off the plane?

    Should a white co-worker get five years in prison for putting a confederate flag image on her black co-worker's desk? 

    Finally, should the black lives matter (BLM) protesters been allowed to protest at the Mall Of America?

    Have a happy holiday field hands.

    Wednesday, December 23, 2015

    In transit.

    I'm traveling field hands, so I can't post tonight.

    However, I am curious to hear your  thoughts on Mr. trump's latest crass outbursts against the fairer sex.

    Monday, December 21, 2015

    Show me your company....

     Hillary Clinton might have gone too far when she said that a major terrorist group uses videos of Donald trump as a major recruiting tool, but another terrorist group is certainly glad he is running.

    He wants an apology, but Hillary basically told him to go f**k himself. Good for her.  The nerve of the orange one to demand someone apologizes to him for doing what he himself has been doing from the very start of his campaign: lying.  

    But back to that other terrorist group showing him love.

    "Donald Trump's presidential campaign has become an outreach tool for the Ku Klux Klan, a leader of the Knights Party, a branch of the KKK, told the Washington Post.

    They like the overall momentum of his rallies and his campaign," Rachel Pendergraft, a spokeswoman for the Knights Party, told the Washington Post. "They like that he’s not willing to back down. He says what he believes and he stands on that."

    Pendergraft added that Trump's campaign has become a conversation starter for a movement that's seen its ranks diminish after the country elected its first black president, and Americans have moved to the left on social issues such as same-sex marriage.

    The Washington Post report is just the latest to focus in on how Trump's campaign has mobilized supporters around long-simmering racial bitterness that has been ignored by most mainstream politicians.

    Trump has also drawn praise from former KKK leader David Duke who recently called Trump the "best of the lot" and the founder of the white supremacist website Stormfront said earlier this year that Trump's campaign had given the website a traffic spike.

    Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Mashable. He does not belong to and has not endorsed any white supremacist groups.

    But Trump's rhetoric about Muslims and immigrants has created some tense moments at his campaign rallies across the country.

    At a November rally in Birmingham, Alabama, a Black Lives Matter protester was shoved and tackled, and says attendees shouted derogatory comments at him.

    And during a recent Trump event in Las Vegas, an attendee yelled "sieg heil," a Nazi-era salute. "[Source]

    Ok, so we know that some of trump's supporters are racist, but does that make trump himself a racist? No, not necessarily, but we are talking about trump here. He is the guy, after all, who went to great lengths to show the country that the first black president wasn't even an American.



    *Pic from mexican-american.org.

    Sunday, December 20, 2015

    "A bigot and a racist"?

    Image result for trump image          Tonight I will leave you with a cut and paste worthy post from Dana Milbank.

    "Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.

    Some will think this an outrageous label to apply to the frontrunner for a major party’s presidential nomination. Ordinarily, I would agree that name-calling is part of what’s wrong with our politics.

    But there is a greater imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled. His pattern brings to mind the famous words of Martin Neimoller, the pastor and concentration camp survivor (“First they came for the socialists…”) that Ohio Gov. John Kasich adroitly used in a video last week attacking Trump’s hateful broadsides.

    It might be possible to explain away any one of Trump’s outrages as a mistake or a misunderstanding. But at some point you’re not merely saying things that could be construed as bigoted: You are a bigot.

    It has been more than a quarter century since Trump took out ads in New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for “criminals of every age” after five black and Latino teens were implicated in the Central Park jogger case. The young men, convicted and imprisoned, were later cleared by DNA evidence and the confession of a serial rapist – and Trump called their wrongful-conviction settlement a “disgrace.”

    Since then, Trump led the “birther” movement challenging President Obama’s standing as a natural-born American; used various vulgar expressions to refer to women; spoke of Mexico sending rapists and other criminals across the border; called for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants; had high-profile spats with prominent Latino journalists and news outlets; mocked Asian accents; let stand a charge made in his presence that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are a “problem” in America; embraced the notion of forcing Muslims to register in a database; falsely claimed thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey; tweeted bogus statistics asserting that most killings of whites are done by blacks; approved of the roughing up of a black demonstrator at one of his events; and publicly mocked the movements of New York Times (and former Washington Post) journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a chronic condition limiting mobility.

    He hasn’t gone after Jews recently, but his backers have, and Trump was uncharacteristically silent when prominent booster Ann Coulter, responding to Republican candidates’ support for Israel in a debate, tweeted: “How many f---ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”

    Though all Trump supporters surely aren’t racists or bigots, even a cursory examination of social media reveals that many are.  Those supporting Trump tend to be white, less-educated and middle-aged and older – those who are anxious and angry because they are losing ground as the American economy changes. An analysis of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll by my colleague Scott Clement found that Trump, who has the support of 14 percent of registered voters overall, does particularly well among white men who aren’t college-educated (24 percent) and white, non-evangelical Protestants (27 percent), but gets only 3 percent of non-whites and 5 percent of those under 30 years old." [More]
     
    I had almost forgotten about trump calling for the death penalty for those young men in the Central Park  jogger case. Young men, I might add, who have since been vindicated.
     
    It's sad that it took a journalist who writes for the Washington Post to do what the republican establishment and candidates should have been doing this election cycle: Call out Donald trump for the racist and bigot that he is.    
     
    One of the sad things about the trump phenomenon is that people are always willing to make excuses for him. 
     
    "..he defended the treatment of the black man at Trump’s rally (“he was obviously being disruptive and he was a big burly guy”), Trump’s tweet falsely blaming African Americans for most killings of white people (“he just fell for some bad data”) and Trump’s embrace of a Muslim database (“that was brought up by a reporter”)."
     
    Whether Donald trump wins the election or not, his rise to prominence has been bad for America. Even if his supporters don't realize it yet.
     
    *Pic from thinkprogress.org
     
     
     





    Saturday, December 19, 2015

    CAPTION SATURDAY.

    Our new post-Obama "Star Wars": Race, the Force and the dark side in modern America

    *Pic courtesy of Lucas Films.

    I need a caption for this pic.

    For example: Come back, I was just kidding; I do think O.J. did it.

    Friday, December 18, 2015

    Friday night open thread.


    MORE DISCLAIMERSTell me what's on your mind.

    I know what's on mine:

    Wednesday, December 16, 2015

    Postmortem.

    Image result for GOP debate images   There is so much to take away from the GOP debate last night that I don't even know where to start.

    First, let me say congrats to Jeb for finally growing a pair. Unfortunately for him, though, it might be too little too late. The orange colored one seems to have his number. Yes Jeb, if you are running as a right wing republican demagogue, you can "insult your way to the presidency".

    Then there was Chris Christie. He actually said that he would shoot down Russian jets if they violated the no fly zone. What's another World War among friends?  Then, to top it off, he actually called Obama a "weakling".

    "“My first phone call would be to Vladimir, and I’d say, ‘Listen, we’re enforcing this no-fly zone,'” Mr. Christie said on MSNBC. “And I mean we’re enforcing it against anyone, including you. So don’t try me. Don’t try me. Because I’ll do it.”
     
    Mr. Christie went on to say that Mr. Putin was “punching above his weight” and called Mr. Obama “this weakling in the White House.”' [Source] 
     
    I got news for you Chris, anyone who goes against you is "punching up above his weight". (Sorry I couldn't resist.) But you might want t ease up on all the bluster just a little bit. Leave all the crazy talk for trump. No one is buying your tough guy I'm from Jersey, act. That little bridge issue you had has pretty much doomed all chances  you ever had of becoming president.
     
    Carly was ....well... Carly. As is always the case she told a story that wasn't quite connected to reality.
     
    "Carly Fiorina today stood by her debate claim about a general she said was pushed out by President Obama, even though that general did not serve in this administration.
     
    She railed against how the current president has ignored advice from top generals, saying she would “bring back the warrior class.”

    Fiorina said, “Petraeus, McCrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn, every single one of these generals I know, every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear.”
    Now, General David Petraeus left for other reasons, but another issue in what she said was with the mention of Jack Keane, a former Army general and current Fox News analyst.
     
    On Fox Business this morning, Keane told Stu Varney what Fiorina said was inaccurate since he served under George W. Bush, not Obama." [Source]

    But I saved the best for last. My man Ted Cruz was in rare form as he went back and forth with Marco Rubio. (When my grandfather came to America) Unfortunately Ted forgot that he was talking to millions of Americans and some of the stuff he was saying was not for public consumption.

    "Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman, told reporters on Wednesday that he had asked his staff to explore whether Cruz's comments about the National Security Agency's surveillance program constitute disclosing classified data, The Hill reported.

    "I'm having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now," Burr told reporters, according to The Hill. "Any time you deal with numbers ... the question is, 'Is that classified or not?' Or is there an open source reference to it?"

    Wait, I was wrong. What Ted Cruz did was not the best from the debate. The orange one saying that he is going to create a wall around the internet by closing it up to Isis was. "I don't want them using our Internet". He wants to "penetrate" the Internet and find out exactly where Isis is hiding in it. Ok then Donald.

    "Donald Trump has said many things that make no sense. But at Tuesday night’s CNN debate, he outdid even himself.

    For a man with such a remarkable social media presence, he appears to have literally no idea what the Internet is or how it works."

    For his next trick Donald Trump will insult the Washington Post in 5..4..3..2..

    *Pic from slate.com







     
     

    Tuesday, December 15, 2015

    Debate night.

    MORE DISCLAIMERSI just watched the GOP debate and I am speechless.

    All I can do tonight by way of a post is ask you who you thought won it.

    Monday, December 14, 2015

    Political lies and offensive covers.

    Image result for cruz images     * Tomorrow is the GOP debate, and all of us political junkies are curious to see how the GOP small timers in the field will go after the two frontrunners,  trump and cruz. It should be interesting.

    One thing is for sure, we will hear declarations by all the candidates that will have us scratching our heads. Why? Well let's just say that the leaders of the GOP race for president have been known to stretch the truth a little bit.

    "In a recent New York Times article, statistics from PolitiFact are conveniently organized to help us visualize two things that are already well known: First, that reality has a liberal bias. And second, that the more bullshit GOP candidates spew, the more successful they become.
     
    The three biggest liars on the list are — surprise — Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx). A whopping 84 percent of Carson’s fact-checked statements were ruled false (from “mostly false” to“pants on fire”), as were 76 percent of Trump’s and 66 percent of Cruz’s. On the other hand, only 4 percent of Carson’s and 7 percent of Trump’s statements were ruled “mostly true” (none of their statements were ruled “true”). This incredible degree of dishonesty shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been following the campaign season; indeed, by now it is clear that the more deceitful these candidates become, and the more they get called out for this deception, the more enthusiastic their supporters grow. " [More]

    OK, so we know that GOP politricksters lie, but all politicians lie. So this is nothing new. What's scary is what they lie about these days, and how often they get away with it. It's gotten so bad that the press doesn't even bother to report about the lies anymore. (Dog bites man. Nothing to see here folks; move along.) 

    Let's see what happens after tomorrow night.

    Finally, congrats to Serena for winning the SI Sportsperson of the Year award. I think that it was well deserved.

    As a 4.0 tennis player who understands how difficult the game is, let me say for the record that what Serena Williams did this year on the tennis court at her age was incredible.

    **
                                             And while I congratulate Serena, I would like to say shame on the Los Angeles Times for their offensive cover featuring Serena and a horse, and then comparing the two. (They have since taken down the original picture due to the backlash they got from social media)

    I must confess that I admire Serena even more because I know much she is hated by certain folks in the majority population. They have hated her for years, and she has been the greatest female tennis player in the world for everyone of those years. That, to me, is just awesome.

    Excelling in spite of the hateration. That's true field Negro behavior as far as I am concerned.  

    So now, today, she is being compared to a horse for top honors for Sportsperson of the Year. (P.E.R.S.O.N.)

    "
    Nina Perez @AuthorNinaPerez
    @hellresidentNY I can't believe someone at @latimes thought it was a good idea to pit a black woman against a horse for "Sportsperson."
    ProfB @AntheaButler
    What that @latimes poll is really saying.. a horse is more of a person than Serena Williams. Always remember American history folks

    Los Angeles Times

    @latimes
    @latimes We’ve changed the headline and photo on this story to treat it with greater sensitivity. Thank you for your feedback.
     





    Sunday, December 13, 2015

    When terrorists become "loners".

    Image result for coachella mosque burned images*So the terrorist who set fire to that mosque (Islamic Society of Coachella Valley) in California has been arrested. And, as is to be expected, he is being called a loner by his parents and others.

    This would be incorrect of course, because the young terrorist had lots of company and encouragement to carry out his act of terror. (There were actually four people in the mosque when he tried to burn it, but fortunately they were not hurt.) He was not acting in a vacuum. He had the words of people like Donald trump ringing in his ear, and he has been living in a climate of  bigotry and xenophobia brought on by fear over the past few months.  (BTW, this might be a good time to remind you racists xenophobes out there that Sikhs are not Muslims.)

    Imagine for a second if young Mr. Dial's name was Aalil and not James, and if he had set fire to a  
    Christian church. There would be more wall to wall coverage on all the cable news shows, and pundits would be doing their best to remind Americans why we should be living in fear because of yet another terrorist attack from those evil Muslims..  

    Anyway, good for the parents of  the terrorist  for refusing to post bail for him.

    "We will supply him with money for the commissary. We have no plans to bail him out. He's an adult," Dial's father, John Dial, told NBC News Saturday. "We both said right there, we said to him, I hope you like reading books, because you're in it for the long haul. He's a man."

    John Dial said his son is innocent until proven guilty, but, "If he's charged with this, he's going to be responsible, as an adult," he said. "

    Mr. and Mrs. Dial, the first thing you should do when your son comes home is to take him to right wingers anonymous. Hopefully they will be able to cure him of  that very sick disease known as racism.

    *Pic from nbcnews.com