Memorial Day News.

 

Today is Memorial Day, and as I always do on this day, I would like to acknowledge Mrs. Field's brother-in-law who gave the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Miss you, bro.

Now on to the news: 

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, it's amazing to me how many Americans were not aware of this atrocity that took place in this country we hold out as the "shining city on a hill" when it comes to human rights. The truth is, the white mayor of Tulsa, who was born and raised there, and whose father was the head of the historical society, never heard of what happened on what was known as Black Wall Street in his own city. 

Tulsa, of course, is not the only city that suffered from the cruel acts of racial violence against its black citizens. It happened in Rosewood, Florida, in Wilmington, North Carolina, Elaine, Arkansas, and Opelousas, Louisiana.  I could go on, but I would encourage you to google Red Summer.

This is why when conservatives try to whitewash (pun intended) the ugly truths about our history, and pretend that these things never happened, it's all so offensive to me. And pay attention, folks, because they are doing it again. Just look at all the gaslighting going on now that we are just months removed from that terrorist attack on out seat of government. Imagine how poor Viola Fletcher felt having to watch those domestic terrorists rekindle the memories she has of those past horrors against her family and her people.

Finally, while republicans continue their efforts to restrict the voting rights of people of color, the democrats, at least in the state of Texas, seem to be fighting back against the "the big lie". Thankfully, they walked out at the last minute last night before republicans could pass their restrictive--and some would call racist-- voting laws. 

 "The sudden revolt torpedoed the sweeping measure known as Senate Bill 7, which would have reduced polling hours, empowered poll watchers and scaled back ways to vote in Texas, which already has some of the nation's strictest voting laws.

For Democrats, the victory may be fleeting: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who had declared new voting laws in Texas a priority, quickly announced that he would order lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session. He did not, however, say when that would happen.

"We've said for so many years that we want more people to participate in our democracy. And it just seems that's not the case," Democratic state Rep. Carl Sherman said." 

With the former national security advisor and trump acolyte calling for a Myanmar type coup in this country, they seem to want to do more than just pass laws at this point. They're getting desperate, and that's when bad things happen. Just ask Viola Fletcher.   

The cover of whiteness.

 

I was looking at the fascinating debate between Mark Lamont Hill and another gentleman from the majority population about critical race theory.  The part of the debate that I found particularly interesting was when Hill asked his guest to tell him what he liked most about being white. 

As to be expected, the guest went into a long declamation about being judged by his character and not the color of his skin, and the fact that he did not like stereotypes ascribed to whiteness. He explained that he wants to be judged as a human being and not someone who is "white per se. He just didn't want to be defined by his skin color. 

Hill, to his credit, wisely pointed out, that he, as a man of color, does not have such options. He knows, that as a black man in America (and in the world) he doesn't have the luxury of being able to say that he does not want to be judged by his skin color. 

As most of you know, I am a trial lawyer. It is my job to try cases in a court of law. I can't tell you how many times I have been mistaken for the Defendant I am representing by a Judge who has never seen me before in his or her courtroom. Yes, this usually happens in the more rural counties, but it's  fact of life that I have to deal with. I am sure my white colleagues in my profession do not have to suffer such indignities, because they are shielded from such slights by their privilege.

 It would be great if we didn't see color when we see another human being, but let's be real, that's just not realistic. Color is the first thing we see when we see someone. We don't know their names, what they do, their net worth, or what language they speak, but we sure as hell know what color they are. This is why when someone says that they don't see color, I immediately right them off as frauds in the racism discussion. How could you not see race? Honestly, it's what you do after you see the individual's race and how you choose to interact with them that defines your character in my book. 

Color is also what shields so many people in the majority population from day to day slights and instances of affronts that people of color have to endure. As Hill stated in his debate, it doesn't matter if you are Irish, Polish, or Italian, your skin color acts as a buffer and a ticket for you. The person of color, in the other hand, be they Jamaican, Haitian, Bahamian, or Bermudan, are going to be seen and treated as such, and we all know that in this society we are living in that's not a good thing. 

“That doesn’t answer the question though, name something that you believe is positive about being white.”

Rufo replied,“I don’t buy into the framework that the world can be reduced into these metaphysical categories of whiteness and Blackness, I think that’s wrong.”

Unless, of course, you happen to be white. 

Movie Monday.

 

What's the name of this movie? 

"Democratic trap"?

"Republicans in the House and Senate should not approve the Democrat trap of the January 6 Commission,

"It is just more partisan unfairness and unless the murders, riots, and fire bombings in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and New York are also going to be studied, this discussion should be ended immediately." ~ The former guy~

What's that saying old black folks like to say? "I'm sick and tired of being tired?" That's kind of how I am feeling right now. 

Let's face it, folks, America is a hot mess. I really should clarify that statement: Half of America is a hot mess, and I think you all know the half I am talking about.

If you would have told me a few weeks ago that the GOP would block the January 6th investigative commission, I would have told you that you were crazy. Of course I would have been  the crazy one, because I should know not to put anything past the current crew of republicans in Washington. These are the same folks who refuse to strip Mart Gaetz of his committee seats until we see where this whole sex with minors thing leads us. Not to mention the fact that one of their more prominent members and biggest fundraisers is...wait for it..... Marjorie Stalker Greene. Yes, the QAnon diva turned congresswoman is a pretty big deal in the grand old party. 

But back to this commission. These are the same folks who had one investigative commission after another when they were trying to nail Hillary Clinton for Benghazi. Now they want us to believe that this type of commission would be too political. Let's not forget the fact that a republican was a co-sponsor of the bill to get the damn thing off the ground, and that an equal number of republicans and democrats were to be on the commission. What they really mean, of course, is that it will make them look bad, because it was their former guy who whipped those people into a frenzy and encouraged them to head to the capitol that day. The truth is, some of these same politicians could be implicated in one way or another with what happened. 

There is another thing happening here as well. The white washing of the event. (Pun intended) The gaslighting and revisionist history around this event has been astonishing. They have said things such as "those poor trump supporters were just tourists", to "they didn't even have weapons with them." A commission would debunk all of that nonsense, and maybe get us some real answers about what really happened that day, and not to mention who knew what and when.

Sadly, I think Tim Ryan speaks for all of us. 

“We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol Police with lead pipes across the head, and we can’t get bipartisanship,.. ...What else has to happen in this country...this is a slap in the face to every rank-and-file cop in the United States.” The assault on the Capitol resulted in the deaths of five people, and 140 police officers were injured."

They don't care congressman Ryan. They will go to the lowest depths imaginable to protect the feelings of a certain guy. The one calling the commission a "Democratic trap".  

 

Movie Monday.

 

 

What's the name of this movie? 

It's the former guy's fault.

 So there seems to be war in the Middle East again. I guess Jared's brilliant negotiating didn't quite work out so well.

Sadly,  as is the case with everything the former guy's administration touched, the Abraham Accords is turning out to be a failure. 

Alex Ward's great article in Vox explains why: 

 " First-term Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who stocked his office with 13 former Trump administration staffers, thinks the eruption of violence between Israel and Hamas this week is partly President Joe Biden’s fault.

“Last fall we saw a watershed shift toward peace w/the Abraham Accords,” Haggerty tweeted on Wednesday. “The entire region was eager for more. Biden had 4 months to build on this ... Instead, Biden squandered those 4 months.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee member’s case is one that other Republicans and allies of former President Trump have been making in recent days.

They note Trump brokered normalization-of-relations deals between Israel and four Arab nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Those pacts, known as the Abraham Accords, served two main purposes.

The first was straightforward: They allowed Israel to engage openly and officially with countries that refused to recognize its existence for years. That historic development received bipartisan support in the US, and many today want Biden to build upon the foundation Trump left him.

The second was more nuanced. Many of those and other Arab nations, like Saudi Arabia, are key backers of Palestinians in their decades-long dispute with Israel. But by getting them to interact with Israel, the idea was that they might let their support for the Palestinians slip and side a little closer with the Israelis.

If that happened, the theory went, Palestinian leaders would have no choice but to negotiate a peace deal with Israel. Jared Kushner, the main architect of the accords during the Trump years, has remained confident this might happen. “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal two months ago.

It’s hard to overstate how bold this play was. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, now Biden’s top climate envoy, told a Washington, DC, audience in 2016 that there was no chance of striking normalization pacts before signing a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” he said. “That is a hard reality.”

So are Hagerty and his fellow conservatives right? Are we witnessing violence that’s seen over 80 people in Gaza and seven others in Israel killed because Biden “squandered” the momentum of Trump’s Abraham Accords? Experts I spoke to are unanimous in their answer: absolutely not.

“That’s nonsense on multiple levels, to be honest,” said H.A. Hellyer, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in DC. “I just don’t really buy that argument at all,” Guy Ziv, an assistant professor at American University, also in the capital, said of the growing conservative argument.

The reason, they and others say, is that the Abraham Accords weren’t struck to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They were designed, well, to help Israel normalize relations with Arab nations.

The plight of the Palestinians was an afterthought, if even that. Along with the US, “the Abraham Accords gave Israel the impression they could proceed without anything significant with the Palestinians,” Hellyer said.

And that was a problem, because instead of trying to strike some sort of deal with the Palestinians, the Israelis realized they could push for whatever they wanted with America’s full support. In effect, the Abraham Accords emboldened the Israelis while allowing them to disregard Palestinian demands or rights.

That, simply put, doesn’t resolve a conflict. It fuels it.

Hagerty and his ilk have a point. The Biden administration purposely aimed to stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to focus on other priorities like the coronavirus pandemic, the rise of China, and bolstering America’s democracy. To this day, the president has yet to name an ambassador to Israel or a special envoy for the crisis, and now his team is scrambling to push regional players to deescalate tensions.

That on its own would lend credence to the squandered-opportunity narrative. Such a case would ring truer, though, if the Abraham Accords had had any positive effect on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they didn’t, which means Biden’s hands-off approach and failure so far to strike another normalization deal isn’t why Israel and Gaza are warring.

What does explain the troubling fight is more local to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

 Last week, Israeli police in Jerusalem blocked off the Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place for Arabs during Ramadan, sparking protests. An attempt by Jewish settlers to evict longtime Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, inflamed tensions, leading to violent clashes with Israeli police. Arab youth attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city, and Jewish extremists assailed Arab residents.

All of this culminated in a violent Israeli police raid on the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem’s holiest site for Muslims, located on the Temple Mount (the holiest site in the world for Jews).

Then Hamas, the Islamist militant group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, fired rockets at Jerusalem. Ostensibly, this was a display of solidarity with the protesters on the ground. But it appears to have been a political calculation — Hamas attempting to capitalize on Palestinian anger over the violence in Jerusalem to expand its own influence, especially in the wake of recently canceled Palestinian elections that likely would have strengthened its political position.

Israel retaliated strongly, and now rockets from Gaza rip through civilians homes in Israel, and Israeli warplanes bomb Hamas and civilian targets in Gaza.

Little of that has anything to do with the Abraham Accords, at least not directly. In fact, the pacts deliberately sidelined the Palestinian issue in favor of other priorities.

“The Emiratis had their own impetus, the Bahrainis their own impetus. And then the Moroccans wanted their sovereignty over Western Sahara recognized in exchanged for very limited recognition of Israel. And the Sudanese were put in a terribly awful position due to the continuation of sanctions,” said Carnegie’s Hellyer. “But across the board, Palestinians were absent from the impetus.”

On the one hand, that’s understandable: Trump’s team certainly didn’t want to wait for progress on the peace process before helping Israel normalize relations with four former adversaries. But on the other hand, that decision was deeply problematic because it left the crisis to fester just as Biden was coming into office.

The eruption after Israeli police and Palestinian protesters clashed at the mosque is case in point. “You can’t just wish this issue away,” said American University’s Ziv. “The situation is getting out of control.”

It’s so out of control now that Kushner’s hope for closer Israeli-Arab ties to revive the peace process likely won’t come true anytime soon. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine any Palestinians would want to negotiate for peace imminently.

There’s still a role for Biden to play. After helping to calm tensions, Ziv said, the president should present his own vision for a peace plan and put pressure on the Israelis and Palestinians to start talking. “There’s no adult in the room, and that’s where the US could step in,” he told me.

What won’t work, though, is believing more side accords that don’t involve the Palestinians will somehow lead to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It hasn’t worked yet, and it likely won’t work in the future, either.' [Source]

Pull up this article and read it to the next person who tells you how great the former guy's Middle East policy was. 

Caption Saturday.

 

 

Please give me a caption for this picture. 

Liz vs. The Former Guy.

“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen....Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

 I'm quite sure that when I look up in the sky later tonight the moon will be blue, because I find myself rooting like hell for Liz Cheney in her battle with the QOP right now. Republicans might not realize it, because they are still in that slavish devotion to the former guy mode, but she might be the only thing saving the republican party from becoming a thing of the past in the next twenty years. And yet, they are trying to purge her from their ranks.   

The former guy has declared war on her, and unlike the other cowards in her party (I see you Kevin, Marco, Mitch, and Ted) she has been all but willing to stand up to him and tell the truth. No right-wingnuts, the election was NOT stolen. Don't buy into the "big lie" that the election was stolen from the former guy, because you make yourself look really stupid when you do that. Cheney, to her credit, is all too willing to tell anyone who will listen the truth: The former guy lost to Uncle Joe fair and square. He is just too embarrassed to admit it. This is the guy who said there is no way that he could lose to Biden, and if he did, he would leave the country. Well, he is still here. 

Speaking of republicans, is it me or does it seem like elected republican leaders are just are just tired of hiding their racism? Now, rather than just teaching history and telling the truth about our country's past, they are trying to white wash it. (Pun intended) 

"LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he doesn’t think 1619 is one of the most important points in U.S. history.

That's the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to and sold in the Virginia colony, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery.

“I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view — and I think most Americans think — dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” 

Sure Mitch, let's just forget that slavery ever happened.

 Part of the problem, of course, is that men like Mitch McConnell were on the wrong side of history, and he refuses to look in the mirror and acknowledge the reality of the cruel treatment that his ancestors and others like them meted out on people who look like I do. It's a tough pill to swallow, but America  will be never a truly great country until we do just that. 

Rather than face our history with all its warts head on, we get republican lawmakers making declarations like this:

"On Tuesday, during a debate on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly, state Rep. Justin Lafferty, a Republican claimed that the Three-Fifths Compromise was about "ending slavery."

"We ended up biting a bitter, bitter pill that haunts us today. And we did it to lay the foundation for all this that we enjoy in this country," Lafferty said, referencing the compromise.

He added, "The Three-Fifths Compromise was a direct effort to ensure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country."

Additionally, Lafferty argued that not counting enslaved Blacks as a whole person was a praiseworthy achievement.

"By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery," he said. "Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War." [Source] 

Lord help them! Liz Cheney, I wish you all the luck in the world.