John F. Kelly would have "compromised" with slave holders.

  It has been an interesting 24 hours here in America.

A terrorist just struck New York City killing at least eight people. His weapon of choice was the thing Americans love even more than their guns: An automobile.

We will be hearing a lot about this latest terrorist and his disgusting act for the next few days, and the usual suspects will give us their speech about Islam and all those evil Muslims that are trying to kill us.

Americans will learn about a country they never knew existed (Uzbekistan), and they will be scrambling to find it on the map.

It should be interesting.

Also, we know by now that one of the president's men has pled guilty to lying to the feds, and  that he is cooperating with their investigation.  (Be very afraid, trumpbots.)

What we didn't know, and now we do, is the the president's chief of staff just might be a bigger racist than he is.

"If, by appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show on Monday night, John F. Kelly was trying to do damage control after the indictments of Trump associates earlier in the day, it did not work.

Instead, Mr. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, resurrected the debate over Confederate monuments — previously fueled by his boss, President Trump, over the summer — and the Confederacy itself. He called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” said that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” and argued that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” [Source]

This man actually believes that slavery was something that we could find a "compromise" about. Slavery! 

I guess if folks like me would have accepted being 4/5 of a human being we wouldn't have had to deal with that pesky little war. Why not compromise? You can keep your slaves as long as you don't whip them and let them go to church on Sundays. Unbelievable! 

I always wondered what Donald trump had in common with John Kelly, and now I know.  Kelly spoke like his boss did when he spoke about the Nazis in Charlottesville,   when he said that there are two sides to this slavery debate.  

I won't even get into the part where he said that Robert E. Lee was an "honorable man". Can you imagine Angela Merkel's chief of staff saying that Adolf Hitler was an "honorable man"? I can't. But that is in essence what just happened here. Robert E. Lee was a traitor and a holder of slaves. There was nothing honorable about him. 

Of course, as is to be expected, the White House doubled down on Kelly's racist and ignorant comments. They made no apologies for his incredible remarks, and they tried to treat the rest of is like we were the crazy ones.  Wait, y'all didn't know that it was cool to compromise on slavery?    

Folks  like John Allen previously called John Kelly the "moral voice of Trump's White House." We know now that nothing could be further from the truth. John Kelly seems to be morally joined at the hip with his boss. And all the medals in the world will not change that fact. 

Robert E. Lee was not an honorable man, and neither is John F. Kelly.  

*Pic from npr.org

   

Hillary will not be the one that is locked up.

Everyone waited with bated breath today yo see if  Mr. Mueller's ongoing investigation would nab someone in trump's inner circle. Or, stop the presses,  maybe even the orange one himself.

As it turns out, someone halfway up the food chain, as well as trump's former campaign manager,  had to turn themselves in and face numerous federal charges. This was not a good day for Paul Manafort.  Needless to say that it was not a good day for his former boss, either.

Still, as bad as this all was for team trump, it was not the worst news from the day for them. Not by a long shot. The worst news of the day for team trump is that a former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, pled guilty to lying to FBI agents a few weeks ago, and he might be singing like Chaka Khan to the guys in the dark suits.

I think it's safe to say that Mr. Mueller is not done, and that has to be the scariest part about all of this to trump's inner circle. I will give them credit, though, they are lying spinning harder than ever, but only the most ardent trump supporter (and FOX NEWS hosts) believes that there is no fire to go with all this smoke. 

Poor Mr. trump is begging us to look at Hillary Clinton and any other shiny object to distract us from the matter at hand: His campaign's collusion with the Russian government to win an American election. It. Will. Not. Work.

"Trump told the packed crowd that if “Crooked Hillary” had won the election, they “would not have a Second Amendment.”

“You'd be handing in your rifles,” Trump said. “You'd be turning over your rifles.”
Trump’s comments were met with instant chants of “lock her up” from the crowd — the same chants that were routine at his campaign rallies during the 2016 election.

Trump replied to the chants by saying, “You got to speak to Jeff Sessions about that.”

Fortunately Mr. trump, we will not be speaking to anyone other than Bob Mueller when it comes to making arrests.

Sadly for you, the main topic of discussion will be collusion.   

*Pic from capitolhillblue.com

American patriots?

The following essay was posted just before our first 9/11 anniversary under president trump.

The Field Negro education series continues:

"After the attacks of September 11, 2001, patriotism took on many masks and many faces. For some it meant planting flags in their front yards and cherishing the rights we enjoy in this country. For others it took on a flawed and dangerous form. Violence against South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Arab Americans skyrocketed in the weeks and months after 9/11. New government policies painted our communities with suspicion and guilt. The notion that patriotism and racism are synonymous was used against us after 9/11, and the horror has lasted 16 years, flowing and ebbing under Presidents Bush and Obama. That notion has only increased in fury under the Trump administration.

I was in New York on 9/11, working downtown not too far from the attacks. In the days that followed I feared for my safety for the first time in my life: not from planes nose-diving from the sky, but from assaults on the subway or on the street. These fears were not misplaced. The first shots fired after the attacks were on September 15 in Mesa, Arizona, when Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, was killed by Frank Silva Roque, a racist gunman who wanted to “go out and shoot some towel-heads.” During his arrest Roque screamed, “I am a patriot! I stand for America all the way!” This is how he pledged allegiance to our flag.

Our communities experienced many ensuing acts of hate. In the first week after 9/11, 645 bias incidents nationwide were reported by media organizations. In the months that followed, our houses of worship were surveilled by the NYPD and other law-enforcement agencies, our rights were violated and our dignity stripped at airports, and our children were bullied in school and harassed on the Internet. Government policies such as the Patriot Act and the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System were implemented, the latter of which opened cases against 83,000 Muslims entering or living in the United States. The result of this vast ethnic profiling? Zero terrorism-related convictions.

Meanwhile, the body count in our communities has mounted. In 2012, a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was attacked by a gunman who killed six people and wounded four others before taking his own life. In 2015, three young Arab students in North Carolina were murdered in their homes by their white-supremacist neighbor. In 2016, a Lebanese-American man was shot and killed on his own porch by a racist neighbor who had a documented history of anti-Arab hate.

 In 2017, our communities are facing hate violence at levels that rival the aftermath of 9/11. The Trump administration—which is now implementing policies that mirror his bigoted rhetoric on the campaign trail—continues to roll out anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies that embolden hate groups to attack our communities. President Trump has test-fired several versions of the “Muslim ban,” rescinded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and strongly supported the RAISE Act that seeks to slash immigration by 50 percent in a decade, as well as implementing other destructive policies. Since the presidential election, South Asian Americans Leading Together has documented over 150 incidents of violence against those who identify or are perceived as Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, South Asian, Middle Eastern, or Arab American, already surpassing totals from the year leading up to the 2016 election. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, anti-Muslim hate groups grew by 197 percent in 2016, and, according to the FBI, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 67 percent in 2015.

In February two Indian-Americans were shot by a gunman screaming, “Get out of my country.” Days later a Sikh man was shot on his driveway in Washington State by an assailant screaming, “Go back to your country.” In August a Minnesota mosque was firebombed in what the governor rightly declared an “act of terrorism.” In May, Jeremy Joseph Christian, a known white supremacist, harassed a Muslim passenger on a commuter train in Portland. When three men tried to intervene, Christian stabbed two of them to death. Reminiscent of Roque’s racism in 2001, Christian proclaimed at his arraignment, “You call it terrorism; I call it patriotism!”After these attacks, the president remains silent. His silence is a cler signal to the Roques and the Christians of the world that white supremacy and Islamophobia are not only admirable, they are patriotic.

Our communities know that the highest form of patriotism is dissent: We have lived it for 16 years. We’ve spoken out when we’ve seen injustice, and we’ve crowded airports to protest an unlawful “Muslim ban.” We’ve stood united with those from all faiths, colors, and backgrounds, against racism and division in Charlottesville, Boston, Berkeley, and beyondWe’ve stared down ACT for America—the nation’s largest anti-Muslim hate group—and forced them to cancel nationwide Islamophobic rallies originally scheduled for September 9.

The toxic patriotism that hate groups have practiced for 16 years has brought our diverse communities together, anchored in a patriotism of love, not fear. This September 11, I will remember that this is the true patriotism—working with our communities to protect each other, and in doing so, to form a more perfect union." [Source] 

I am sure that NFL players can relate to the sentiments of Mr. Raghunathan, they are experiencing first hand the outrage from faux patriots. Most of the people who yell and scream at them for not standing for the anthem are the same people who engage in racist practices on a day to day basis. They forget that not viewing all men as equals is the antithesis of the American Constitution. 

*Pic from MOSTResource.org 

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.


*Pic from talkingpointsmemo.com

Another one bites the dust.

We can add Mark Halperin to the list of men who have a problem when it comes to how to treat women in the workplace. Apparently he has been guilty of behavior similar to that of his buddy, Donald trump.

For the record, I never liked Halperin, I always thought that he was a trump supporter no matter how much he tried to hide it with objectivity. I watched him on Morning Joe during the elections, and whenever trump had a bad day it seemed to pain him to acknowledge it.

Now we know why. Deep down he probably with the "pussy grabber", knowing that his milk wasn't clean, either.

And speaking of the pussy grabber, his people have now declared that all twelve (I think it's twelve, I lost count) of the women who accused him of sexual assault are lying. Yes, they really said that.

"During a press conference alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Rose Garden, Trump said the accusations leveled against him by roughly a dozen women following the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape last fall were "fake news."

"All I can say is it's totally fake news," Trump said. "It's just fake. It's fake. It's made-up stuff, and it's disgraceful what happens. But that happens in the world of politics."

A reporter asked Sanders if the official White House position was that "all of these women are lying?"

"Yeah, we've been clear on that from the beginning and the president's spoken on it," Sanders said."[Source]

Now if you want to believe Mr. trump ( a man who lies about EVERYTHING) over twelve women, well then go ahead. But I suggest you check your health plan to see if it provides for mental counseling before you do.

Finally, Halloween is almost here, and Mr. trump had some children over at the White House today, Sadly,  I am quite sure that the little ones had a bigger scare than they will ever get during any Halloween for the rest of their lives. They got to see the orange monster up close and personal, and he had some interesting things to say.

"The president made some pretty out of line comments to the trick-or-treaters, according to a transcript posted by NBC Capitol Hill reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell on Twitter. The president stated that he couldn't believe members of the media "produced such beautiful children" and told one child that he is going to be in Japan in two weeks after asking if she was Japanese. But perhaps his worst one was made towards one kid who he handed out candy to. "You have no weight problems," Trump said, according to the transcript. "That's the good news, right?"' [Source]

The little girl might not have a "weight problem", but we clearly have a presidential one. 

The Corn Pops janitor, and Kellogg's race problem.

• 

Ya'll know me, I can chase racism with the best of them. And if I happen to see an instance of racism or something I consider racially insensitive, I have no problem with calling out the perpetrator. 

Sometimes, though, we might cry racism and it's a false alarm.

Let's take the case of the Kellogg's corporation and their Corn Pops problem.

 "Kellogg's has agreed to redesign the artwork on its Corn Pops cereal boxes after a complaint on Twitter slammed it as racially insensitive imagery.

The cereal box's artwork shows the corn pop cartoon characters inhabiting a shopping mall and taking part in various activities. Some corn pops are shopping, while others are playing arcade games or jump rope.

Amid the bustle is one brown-colored corn pop dressed as a janitor pushing a floor waxer.
Writer Saladin Ahmed used Twitter on Tuesday to express dismay that the only brown-colored corn pop was a janitor and said the illustration was teaching racism. " [Source]

 I gotta tell you, I am looking at the artwork, and I don't see the racism.

Maybe it's because I don't think being a janitor is necessarily a bad thing. There are janitors in this town who have raised families and sent their children to college with the help of their salaries as janitors. I have a friend who owns a janitorial company and his net worth is far more than most of the lawyers that I know. Honestly, I have a bigger problem with the fact that the janitor is wearing headphones while working, but nothing about the artwork jumped out at me. It passed my racism smell test. Besides, the other characters are more yellow than white, so I am not even seeing where stereotyping could be problematic.

Having said that, when are major companies like Kellogg's  going to realize that you need people of color in the room when you make these types of advertising decisions? This could save them so much in bad PR and money.

Think of what happened to the folks over at Dove recently (which I did think was kind of racist), or the infamous Nivea civilized ad (also racist). 

The one that really set me off ---for obvious reasons was the white man with the Jamaican accent spreading "good vibes" around the office to reggae music after buying a Volkswagen.

The advertising graveyard is littered with these  types of  clueless tone-deaf spots, which ultimately leave the company responsible for them having to apologize for their lack of sensitivity.

Kellogg's did.

Although they didn't have to. Fortunately for Kellogg's that was not the case with their Corn Pops. At least I didn't see it that way.

I can take off my racism track shoes. There will be no chase with this one. 

Thoughts? 

Open thread Wednesday.

It's open thread Wednesday field hands, and there is much to muse about.

For instance, just a day after his "profiles in courage" speech, Jeff Flake votes with the rest of his republican buddies to give banks and financial institutions power over consumers.

Mr. trump says that he is very smart and that he went to an Ivy League school. But if you have to keep reminding us how smart you are there might be a problem.

 America is now going to be deploying lethal drones in the Motherland.

Bill O'Reilly blames god for all of his sexual harassment problems. God!

Some of the JFK assassination files will be released tomorrow. Will we learn anything new? I doubt it. No trumpbots, Ted Cruz's dad will not be implicated in the assassination plot.

Thoughts?

How we lost our moral authority.

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I am trying to remember exactly when conservatism turned to nativism. There was a time, in the not too distant past, when conservatives were people of principles. Regardless of what you thought of their politics, you had to respect them for having a set of core beliefs and sticking to them. They still, for the most part, were people of basic human decency.

There are no longer men and women of principle in positions of power in the republican party. It has been hijacked by the alt-right and white nationalist; people who have no intellectual core or sound beliefs other than white is good and the others are bad.

Donald trump epitomizes everything that is wrong with American politics on the right these days. He is a crude shameful bigot, whose only goal in life is to praise himself. Along with his loyal minions, he thinks that he will shape America in his own image. ----Picture America in the nineteen fifties when  people of color had no rights,  and they had no stake or input in their own country.

Today, republican Jeff Flake decided that he had enough, and he spoke in no uncertain terms on the senate floor about where the current president is taking the nation.

" It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership.

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Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal.  

That we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set up at the top. We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals, we must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country. The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institution, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency.

The reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve. None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal...."[Source] 

If only other politicians (republicans and democrats) had the courage to speak of their convictions in the age of trump. 

"And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength because our strength comes from our values. It instead projects a corruption of the spirit and weakness. It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?

Mr. President, I rise today to say: enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it."

As Americans we like to talk about American "values", but what are they, really? These American "values". In the age of trump, maybe most Americans aren't as decent and upstanding as we would like to believe. Maybe those "values" that we like to boast about aren't as pure and morally above board as we think they are. Maybe these so called "values" are all just a sham. 

Sorry Mr. Flake, we have no moral authority. We gave that up when we elected Donald trump. 

  

    

The coward vs. The widow.

•  

Well it's about time. I am glad John McCain is stating the obvious and calling out the elephant in the room: Mr. trump took the cowards way out rather than serve his country in Vietnam. It must be nice to have a little money and be able to get out of service by saying you have foot issues.

Meanwhile, the children of people of color and poor people were giving their livs to protect our freedoms here at home.

It has to be sickening to those who actually served to have to call Donald trump their commander in chief. This is a man who cares about as much for the soldiers as I do for the Dallas Cowboys. And yet he has the audacity to tell NFL players to kneel and show their patriotism for their country and their  flag. It's laughable. He had a chance to show his patriotism fifty years ago and was too afraid to serve.

Now, many years later, he is the president and leader of our troops. One of our sons died on African soil, and it took days for the white house to even acknowledge La David Johnson's death.  He made a mockery of his phone call to the grieving widow, and just today he was on twitter calling her a liar.

I believe Mrs. Johnson, not the president. He has told one lie after another since becoming president. He doesn't get the benefit of the doubt with this one. Let's just say that he doesn't have the best track record when it comes to the truth. 

"Donald Trump has repeatedly labeled his political opponents liars. He dubbed Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Lyin' Ted when it became clear that Cruz was a serious rival for his nomination; he called Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) an "even bigger liar" than Cruz. He dubbed Dr. Ben Carson a "pathological liar" and said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's lies were almost as bad as Cruz's. Trump has termed virtually every mildly adversarial media member a liar, too.

But there's only one truly massive liar in this race: Donald Trump. When Politico attempted to measure how many lies Trump told over the course of 4.6 hours of speeches, they found that he lied, on average, once every five minutes. When Huffington Post catalogued his lies over the course of just one town hall event, they came up with 71 lies.

Which made it relatively easy to come up with this not-even-close-to-complete list of 101 lies from Donald Trump." [List]

When bigots are "emboldened".

"Police in Florida arrested three men who allegedly made Nazi salutes, repeated Hitler chants and then shot at a group of protesters after white supremacist leader Richard Spencer’s speech at the University of Florida on Thursday.

The gunshot narrowly missed the group of six to eight protesters, striking a business behind them, police said.

Tyler Tenbrink, 28, William Fears, 30, and Colt Fears, 28, had driven from Texas to Gainesville, Florida, for Spencer’s speech at the Phillips Center.

The Fears, who are brothers, spoke to CNN on Thursday prior to the incident about their support for Spencer, the white supremacist leader of the “alt-right.” In one interview, William Fears said protesters did not need to be afraid of them.

“They don’t have to fear us. It’s always the left that brings the violence,” he said.

Colt Fears said he agreed with about 75% of what Spencer says. And in an interview with The Washington Post on Thursday, Tenbrink said he came to Gainesville to support Spencer.

Gainesville police spokesman Ben Tobias said Friday that he thought it was “reasonable to believe they came here to bring some hatred.”

Spencer, who advocates for a white-ethno state, arrived in Gainesville on Thursday to deliver a speech on his views at the university. The controversial event brought out a large number of students and community members protesting against the speech, as well as a much smaller number of Spencer supporters.

The three men were all charged with attempted homicide, and Tenbrink was also charged with possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.

Attorneys for the defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘Kill them’

The incident began shortly before 5:30 p.m. Thursday, about an hour after Spencer’s speech ended, when the three men allegedly drove up to a nearby bus stop in a silver Jeep, according to police. They began threatening and yelling what the police report described as “Hail Hitler,” and other chants at a group of protesters..

An argument ensued, and one person in the group of protesters used a baton to hit the rear window of the vehicle. At that point, Tenbrink left the vehicle and pulled out a handgun, the police report said. Both Colt Fears and Williams Fears yelled at the victims “I’m going to f***ing kill you” and were also yelling “kill them” and “shoot them,” according to the police report.

Tenbrink allegedly fired at the group of protesters, police said. The three men then got back in the vehicle and fled the scene, police said.

One victim called police and “amazingly” recited to them the license plate number, police said. An off-duty deputy with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office who was heading home after the event located the suspects’ vehicle shortly before 9 p.m. about 20 miles north of Gainesville, according to authorities. Units from two police departments and the Florida Highway Patrol conducted what was described in a police press release as “a high-risk Felony stop” on the suspects’ vehicle.

Police recovered “at least two” handguns from the vehicle, according to Gainesville police spokesman Ben Tobias.

Tenbrink admitted that he was in the vehicle at the time and was the shooter, according to a police report.

The community had taken considerable steps to prevent violence at the Spencer event.

On Monday, Florida’s governor declared a state of emergency to provide resources to law enforcement, and an extensive police presence was on campus for the event. University of Florida Pesident W. Kent Fuchs estimated that security costs were upward of $600,000.

“Yesterday, people from outside of our community came to create violence and disruption,” police spokesman Tobias said Friday. “They came to bring hate to our city, yet the people of Gainesville showed them exactly what our town is all about.”

The Fears brothers were in Alachua County jail Friday under $1 million bond each, and Tenbrink is in jail under a $3 million bond, police said.

Spencer previously helped organize the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which heavily armed white nationalists fought with counterprotesters in a bloody day of violence.

There, a man described as a Nazi sympathizer drove a vehicle into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one woman, according to police." [Source]

So this is where we are in America. And according to George W. Bush, it's cool to be a bigot these days. They have been "emboldened". Gee, I wonder who is responsible for that? Again, this is not The Field Negro talking, this is a former republican president, George Bush. He can see some of the things that we have all been seeing. For instance, it seems that there is another hate march damn near every weekend.  These folks are no longer wearing hoods. They don't have to, not when they have so much support from powerful people. 

trump and his supporters would like nothing more than to get rid of black folks and the black vote. (I guess when your popularity is in the single digits with a particular group it's time to consider marginalizing them.) 

This is why trump has no problem feuding with congresswoman Wilson. His supporters enjoy seeing him beat up on a black female elected official. The fact that she is defending a constituent whose husband gave his life for this country means nothing to them. It was never about America; it was always about control and power, and trump has tapped into that energy with 30% of the American people that make up his base.

“Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” ...We've seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together." [Source]

I never thought I would say this: But I actually miss George Bush. I hated his politics, but at his core he was not an evil narcissistic simpleton.  He was not the smartest guy in the world, but unlike the current occupant in the White House, he seemed to know his limitations, and he was intellectually curios enough to pick up a book from time to time. I doubt seriously if Mr. trump has ever read an entire book. But then, neither have most of his supporters, so I guess we can say that they are a match made in racist heaven.  

*Pic from blacksportsonline.com