Some thoughts.

I just have a few thoughts before I let you get back to you regularly scheduled life.

Remember when riht-wingnuts were trying to tell us all that climate change wasn't a thing and it's all a hoax?

"Record-breaking temperatures have soared well past 100 degrees across the Pacific Northwest, where the area is trapped beneath a blistering "heat dome."

In a region where average temperatures are closer to the 70s this time of year, houses can be seen with blacked-out windows covered with blankets to help with the heat. The area's normally mild summers mean many households don't have air conditioning."

The historic heatwave is bringing with it fears about what could follow over the rest of this summer. "

It's not only the Northwest, the entire country is gripped in a serious heatwave. It's hot as hell (no pun intended) in damn near every state in America right now, and we're still in June. 

Isn't it funny how republicans are outraged about Gwen Berry, but were totally cool with the January 6th insurrectionists? 

"Sen. Tom Cotton is calling for Olympic hammer thrower Gwen Berry to be removed from the Olympic roster for turning her back on the U.S. flag during the national anthem over the weekend.

“I don’t think it’s too much, when athletes are competing to wear the Stars and Stripes, to compete under the Stars and Stripes in the Olympics, for them to simply honor that flag and our anthem on the medal stand,” the Arkansas Republican and former Army infantry officer told Fox News. “If Ms. Berry is so embarrassed by America, then there’s no reason she needs to compete for our country. She should be removed from the Olympic team.” 

These are the same folks who were down with MAGA rioters beating police officers with the American flag, and storming the capitol of the United States. The former guy's supporters are threatening to start a civil war and this clown is worried about an Olympic hammer thrower exercising her Constitutional right. 

Finally, there is a new imaginary threat to America, and it's called critical race theory. It's funny, because I'm pretty sure that ninety percent of the people crying a river about it have no idea what it is. It's just the latest tool in the right- wing arsenal to create a wedge between the American people and throw red meat to their base. And, as it turns out,  this isn't new. 

"By Talia Lavin, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

In the mid-1960s, in Orange County, California, a consortium of right-wing groups went to war against a textbook. Their ranks included concerned parents, right-wing members of educational societies, and members of the John Birch Society, a far-right extremist group that had risen in prominence by fearmongering about an internal Communist threat in the United States. The textbook in question — "Land of the Free: A History of the United States" — was the work of three progressive historians in response to a 1963 call from the Congress of Racial Equality’s Berkeley chapter to teach more inclusive history in elementary schools. It was a time when the Civil War was almost exclusively taught as a “states' rights” issue, a framing that elided or whitewashed the realities of slavery.

According to historian Elaine Lewinnek, who memorialized the controversy in a 2015 Pacific Historical Review article, "Land of the Free" sought to integrate the struggles and triumphs of minorities throughout U.S. history. Critically, it opened with an admission that the United States had not lived up to its purported ideals from the very beginning, excluding Black people, Native Americans and women from the franchise, and from representation in office for the vast majority of its existence.

Once the book became a mandatory part of the California state public school curriculum, the backlash from right-wing groups was swift and fierce. One John Birch society representative told The New York Times that the book would give white schoolchildren “a guilt complex.” Hundreds of parents aired their grievances to California’s educational authorities, Lewinnek found, protesting at school board meetings. They denounced the book for “stirring up past injustices,” “overrepresenting” Black contributions to American history, and being “unpatriotic” and “communist.” A shadowy extremist group funded a filmstrip attacking the textbook’s lead author, and called their work Education or Indoctrination?

Fifty-four years later, that exact title would be reflected in a headline for the right-wing website The Daily Signal: “Education or Indoctrination? ‘Anti-Racist’ Teaching Sweeps K-12 Schools Targeting ‘Whiteness,'” the site blared in December of 2020." [Link]

Whenever you tell the truth about American history you risk pissing off some folks who would like us to forget the ugly side of it. It's not un-American to tell the truth. It's un-American to run away from it and pretend that aspects of our history that we don't like didn't happen.  

That's all folks. 

 

Rudy has his ticket punched, and Matt gets schooled.

 

Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in the state of New York today. Let's add him to the list of sycophants, lap-dogs, and lackeys who worked for the former guy, and who either lost their physical freedom, or their freedom to earn a living because of their slavish devotion to him and what he stands for. 

I'm not sure how these individuals can live with themselves. Especially when the former guy continues to get away with all his illegal actions and misdeeds while they all continue to take the fall. People keep saying that  the former guy will get his, and it's just a matter of time before he has to face the music. My position is simple: Wake me when he is in handcuffs and doing a perp-walk. For the record, I don't think that anything will come of all these potential legal minefields facing him. He will continue to get away with all of it just like he has always done. Being the first modern day white supremacist president does have its privileges.

And speaking of the former guy, can you imagine what type of authoritarian state we would be living in if he had been reelected? We are now finding out that dude wanted the DOJ to go after a television show and comedians for making fun of him. (He denies it of course, but we all know that when he denies something it means that it really happened.) And, if that wasn't enough, he wanted the military to "shoot" George Floyd protestors this past summer. Let that sink in for a minute.

Finally, shout out to Mark Milley,  the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for putting a verbal beat down on potential sexual predator, Matt Gaetz. The politician from Florida was trying to grandstand and show off for the former guy when Milley let him have it.   

'"First of all, on the issue of critical race theory, et cetera. I'll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is, but I do think it's important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.

"And in the United States Military Academy is a university and it is important that we train and we understand."

“I want to understand ‘white rage,’ and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” he said, per NPR. “So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”' 

Good for him. And you know he touched a nerve with the white supremacist crowd because Tucker Carlson (who is becoming more unhinged with each passing day) called him a pig on his show tonight.

When you 've lost Tucker, you just know that you're on the right side of history.   

Caption Saturday.

 

I need a caption for this picture. 

Ocean City police under scrutiny, and Mitch is at it again.

Tonight I need all of you field hands to help me out with something. 

Please watch this video ,and this, and tell me why you think that police officers would act out in this manner when they know that they are being filmed. And, not to mention, given all that has been going on with citizen interaction and the police over the past few months. 

Who knew that vaping was such a serious offense?  

Finally, I also need you all to tell me what it is that makes democrats so useless and afraid of their shadows in Washington. 

A day doesn't seem to go by without Mitch and his boys running all over them. Now Mitch has straight up told them that if he becomes majority leader in 2024 they (the dems) will not get a supreme court nominee if Biden tries to fill a vacancy.  

All those people who voted to get the former guy out of office must be now wondering if it was all worth it. 

Apparently it wasn't, because as I write this post, Matt Gaetz, the former guy, and Bill Barr , have not been charged with a crime.  

  

Pantsgate.

 

I have a confession to make: I am somewhat of a fashion snob. I believe in the old adage that "clothes make the man", and that one's appearance is very important. Especially someone who is in a position of power and who is often in the public spotlight. 

Which brings me to the former guy. Here is a man who claims to be a billionaire, who wears Brioni suits, and yet, when he appears in public, we are left to speculate whether he was wearing his pants backwards for crying out loud. 

For the record, I personally don't believe that the former guy was having a Kris Kross moment, but damn it, why would he put himself in a position to have have social media and late night hosts speculating about his attire ? His loved ones and advisors must not care much for him to have him leave the house with those pants to give a major speech. 

Look, I know that there are more important things going on in the world than the ugly fitting pants of the former guy. But damn it, if conservatives can obsess for weeks over a tan suit Obama wore, it's fair game to play fashion police when it comes to this guy as well. 

MAGA, if you really love your boy, you might want to pitch in for a good tailor. 

"RAW, ROCKY, and RUTHLESS". Tulsa, and America's racial legacy.

I'm glad that the rest of America is finally learning about the horrors of the Tulsa Massacre (Formally known as the Tulsa race riots to spin the cruelty of the event). It's about time. And it's a great example of no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel, history has to be told as it happened.  

The following article about Tulsa from Elwood Watson is one of my favorites on the subject.  

"CNN, PBS, The History Channel, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and the Washington Post were among the sizable number of media outlets that devoted considerable attention to the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre. The Tulsa race massacre was a racially directed American pogrom that claimed the lives of more than 300 people and annihilated the laboriously amassed wealth of an entire community and that, save for sporadic mentions, had gone largely ignored for 100 years.

From May 31 to June 1, 1921, supporters of local and prominent Tulsa political figures stormed into Tulsa’s Greenwood District, better known to its admirers as Black Wall Street, burning, looting, and destroying the entire neighborhood. This inhumane atrocity, for which no one was held accountable, was one of the most horrific acts of racial violence committed in the United States, and it is finally being candidly discussed after more than a century of being largely ignored.

The truth is that the sadistic carnage that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma was not an aberration. Similar acts of racial barbarism took place in New York in 1863, Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, Atlanta in 1906, Springfield, Illinois in 1908, St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Rosewood, Florida in 1922, just to name a few. If we are being honest, there were plenty of other places in America where armed mobs of unhinged Whites unleashed searing amounts of unprovoked and unjustified violence on Black citizens without suffering any consequences.

Mind you, these were all mass acts of violence where White mobs terrorized Black people. Add the number of deeply racially abominable practice of lynching to the equation, and the number goes up by thousands.

It was heartening to see President Biden visit Tulsa and acknowledge and commemorate what was, without a doubt, one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history. Such a gesture deserves applause.

Not surprisingly, many right-wing political, social, and cultural journalists, radio hosts, politicians and others of similar persuasion are doing everything in their power to eradicate, or at the very least, marginalize discussions on our nation’s history as it relates to race. The truth is that race, particularly as it pertains to aspects of the American history, is RAW, ROCKY, and RUTHLESS. The American legacy, as it relates to race, is not one of blue skies and apple pies.

All the sentiments like “We should let bygones be bygones,” “Let’s talk about the things that unite us, not divide us,” “We need to discuss examples of American exceptionalism,” and so on… Please! These are examples of conservative, snowflake ideology at its most pathetic!

Everybody knows the standard right-wing narrative that if Black people worked harder, did not do so many drugs, did not have children out of wedlock, went to church more often and refrained from indulging in their habitual levels of hedonism, then they, too, could partake in the fruits and rewards of the American dream like anybody else. Such fabricated, false rhetoric drips with denial at best and willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty at worst. It is a perverse “blame the victim” sort of argument that has little, if any, basis in reality.

The irrefutable reality is that systemic and systematic racism have deeply affected Black America (and other indigenous populations) in the areas of finance, education, health, and every measurable social index available. These social ills have plagued and tortured Black America long before 1921 and have been doing so ever since. To pretend otherwise is to reside in a perverted fantasy devoid of reality. It is due to these factors that it is imperative that the Biden administration support reparations.

There have been many individuals, me included, who have written on the topic of reparations; thus, anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with the multiple debates surrounding the topic can do so with relative ease (https://link.medium.com/qNU9M8Z4Ngb). I think the most deft, succinct, and precise argument in support of the policy to date has been written by sociologists Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BigIdeas_Ray_Perry_Reparations-1.pdf).

'“In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in US states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages. (…) To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification. Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage.”'

Spot-on analysis! While Tulsa and the similar tragedies may be part of the past, the residual effects of such atrocities are still reverberating within us more than a century later. Thus, President Biden must move with dogged speed to unabashedly support reparations, critical race theory, student loan forgiveness, and criminal justice reform and tackle voter suppression, chronic health care disparities, discriminatory housing laws, and other mounting injustices that plague far too many communities of color. He must do so with unalloyed aggression and without apology. The feelings and opinions of White bigots and other forms of White fragility be damned!" [Source]

*Historian, public speaker, and cultural critic Elwood Watson, PhD, is a professor at East Tennessee State University and the author of the recent book Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press) that is available in paperback and Kindle via Amazon and other major book retailers