One of Mr. trump's "good people" takes a fall.

• 

Poor Roseanne Barr seemed to have miscalculated the trump racism wave cascading over America, and as a result she came out of her shell a bit too early. 

Unfortunately for her it is still not cool to be a racist publicly in America. Yeah I know that there are all those trump rallies and FOX NEWS pundits acting like writers for Der Angriff every night, but overall most Americans like to treat their racism like their jump-off:  Hidden. Not Roseanne, she was emboldened by trump's praise and her big ratings, and she just lost her mind on twitter decided to tell us her true feelings.

One could argue that Roseanne didn't do a very good job of hiding hers over the past few years, which I guess this is why she was embraced by so many folks in red state America. It will cost her dearly. ABC pulled the plug on her money making show, and declared that there is no place for this kind of bigotry when someone is employed by their company.

Of course, as is to be expected, folks on the right are defending her. Free speech and all of that. Keep in mind that these are the same people bashing NFL players for exercising their right not to stand for an anthem. But I digress.

All Roseanne had to do was not call black folks apes or n*****s in a public forum and I am sure that she could have kept her job. But she couldn't do it, she misread the tea leaves and her racism itch needed to be scratched.

Now she is out of a show, and she will lose millions of dollars before embarking on the I am Not A Racist Apology Tour. She will be calling all of her black "friends" and asking them to publicly support her (Kanye, your phone is ringing.), sadly some of them will oblige her. 

trump called Roseanne personally after her ratings success, and he praised her and called her one of "us" at one of his rallies. 

That might be one of the very few true things that trump has said since taking office.

*Pic from today.com

Terror in Sweden?

   * I am not sure how many of you ever had the pleasure of shopping at one of those IKEA stores. It can be a very pleasurable experience. They actually have a nice little cafe with some good things to eat, and if you happen to have a small child, they will provide free day- care while you shop.

The furniture they sell, for the most part, looks pretty good as well. The problem is, though, that you don't but them already assembled, and you have to assemble them when you get home. That is when the nightmare begins. Believe me people, putting IKEA furniture together can be a terrifying experience.

I wonder if this is what was on the president's mind when he  was referring  to a terror attack in Sweden, yesterday. I say that because no one (including the Swedish authorities) knows just what the hell president trump was talking about when he made reference to that attack.    

"We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden," Trump told the crowd at his campaign-like rally in Florida on Saturday, critiquing Europe's refugee policies and complaining that his travel ban had been temporarily blocked by the courts. "Sweden, who would believe this?"

Of course there were no attacks or terror coming out of Sweden. (Well, there was the group *ABBA; they were kind of terrifying, but they are no longer a thing.) Just another lie told by the liar in chief.

And, of course, as is always the case, his supporters will try to minimize the lie by saying that the poor guy is just misunderstood, or that we are taking him too literally. I swear, there will soon come a time in this country when trump supporters will believe that two plus twp equals five, and that the main stream media and those on the left are only saying it equals four to distract from the good work that president trump is doing.

But this lie was too large and obvious to go unchecked, and trump did his best to address it today.

"Trump took to his Twitter account Sunday evening to explain that he was referring to a Tucker Carlson segment that appeared on Fox News Friday. In the segment, Carlson interviewed right-wing filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who had recently made a documentary about Sweden's refugee policy. The segment did not contain breaking news.

'My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.'

A White House spokesperson had attempted to explain what Trump had been referring to prior to Trump's tweet.

"He was talking about rising crime and recent incidents in general — not referring to a specific incident," White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.
The country had spent the day baffled, however, because the president had said "last night" and nothing appeared to have happened." [Source]

Of course nothing happened, But thousands of his loyal and faithful fans went home thinking that something did.

I can hear them now.

"We have got to do something about those Muslims coming into our country. They just attacked Sweden.

 I sure hope  that they put extra guards around them IKEA stores and Volvo dealerships. These Muslims  mean war."  

*Pic from en.wikipedia.org

Gretchen takes down Roger.

     So Roger Ailes, the Jabba the Hutt look alike who created FOX NEWS into a money making right-wingnut echo-chamber, is stepping down.  The alleged serial sexual harasser was, in the end, brought down by one of the blondes that he liked to trot out (skirt raised) for his melanin challenged  AARP and octogenarian viewers to see.

I hate to give Gretchen Carlson a profile in courage award, because for years she went along to get along while she cashed the checks. That is, of course, until FOX ( and Roger) thought that it was time for her to move on.

But it takes all kinds. I guess it's better late than never. I suspect that the only people who will miss Ailes are the men and the blondes with no talent over at FOX.

The irony in all this, of course, is that Aisles is stepping down on the night that the FOX NEWS created candidate- who leads what was formerly the republican party (now known as the American Nationalist Party) is going to give his coronation speech and reintroduce himself to the American people.

The Donald has had quite a ride, and he has FOX (and the FOX light folks in the main stream media) to thank for it. Ailes figured it was best to blow up the republican party and give the FOX viewers what they really want: Someone who shares their fears and their prejudices and who is unapologetic about his bigotry. The republicans were better than the democrats, but the "establishment republicans" just didn't get it. These new republicans  wanted a revolution in Washington and they wanted the bums thrown out. It was a revolution, by the way, that took hold in their minds after the election of the first president of color.

Now they can see a little light at the end of the tunnel, the orange haired one just might win this thing. A trump presidency with a sympathetic FOX News working their propaganda magic on the American people. Wet dreams all around.

Sadly for Roger, he might not be around to enjoy it.  

*Pic from salon.com  

Haters gonna hate, and goodbye Ted.

"The Fox News page running an AP story on Malia Obama‘s recent acceptance into Harvard is missing its comment section after the story was met with an avalanche of vile, racist responses from the site’s readers.

The most anodyne comments simply accused Malia of only getting into Harvard because of Affirmative Action. Other Fox News readers just went right for the jugular — lobbing her with a host of racial and religious (specifically Muslim) epithets, as well as smearing her and her mother’s appearance and wishing openly that the president’s daughter would get afflicted with “cancer/aids or one of those colored diseases.”

Addicting Info has posted screengrabs of some of the more repugnant comments, a few of which are viewable below:








"

Wow! And I thought that the comments on TFN blog were bad.

Finally, congrats to Donald trump. It is looking like he will clean up in the Hoosier state. Now we can rest assured that there will be no fight at the republican convention in Cleveland. 

Poor Ted Cruz, or, as the former republican speaker calls him, Lucifer. That fall by Carly Fiorina  was a perfect metaphor for his entire campaign. It was just awful.

It might be time for Ted to take his act back to Texas and work on  his outsider shtick a little bit more. (Thankfully, we will be spared having to look at that face in the picture above.)

I will give him this much, he was one of the last men standing of the seventeen plus republicans who wanted to follow his Oness. 

But hey, he should look at the bright side, at least he can change his citizenship and run to become the Prime Minister of Canada.   

*Pic from abcnews.com

The Donald's America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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


*Pic from chicagotribune.com taken by Zbigniew Bzdak



  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Pic from AP and everydayfeminism.com

News or propaganda?

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we share a post from someone from the majority population who feels that he recently had a "eureka moment" about  one of the major news networks in this country.


"This is my first diary and its going to be long. I’ve been mulling over something that happened to me for almost a week now, I thought I’d become less angry and disappointed, but I just can’t get over it. Fox News is destroying my family. You think I’m exaggerating; I’m not. Watching their decline is like watching my own decline when I was an addict. Except this time the drug is propaganda and lies.
First, a little background is necessary. I come from a fairly typical, conservative, middle-class Protestant family. (How they got stuck with a progressive, pagan, recovering addict daughter is a mystery to us all!). My dad worked for the government for about 30 years, for everybody’s favorite big brother, the NSA. He took early retirement and has a pension for the rest of his life. My mom does real estate – still – and never worked a full-time job after the kids were born. Typical white, privileged family who don’t know how incredibly lucky they are.

My parents, nevertheless, were decent people. Typical conservatives: unintentionally selfish and unaware of their privilege, but not bad people at heart. They were casually racist in what I considered a passive, mostly harmless way – by which I mean they considered themselves superior to people of color, but in spite of that underlying belief, they treated others kindly. They still tended to meet each individual as an individual, regardless of the person’s race.

(As an aside, I don’t actually believe any racism is harmless. I only mean I considered the attitude just a vestige of their upbringing in the pre-civil rights era and it didn’t seem to prevent them from treating everyone fairly. They were never hateful to persons of color, they were just sort of semi-consciously "superior.”)

Sorry for the long back-story, but its important for context about what upset me so much.
The details of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night below the orange Fox-scrambled brain:

Last week, I went over to my parent's house for dinner. It was the day of the Oregon school shooting. Fox News was on – Fox News is ALWAYS on.

I generally NEVER discuss politics with them anymore, not since the 2008 election, if I can possibly avoid it, because they have become more and more strident and less and less anchored in reality. But the tragedy of the Oregon shooting seemed uncontroversial to me so I made the mistake of saying, “It's so sad. Another school shooting. I read today it's the 45th mass shooting this year.”
Obama was on-screen giving his response at the time. And my father starts complaining that “he’s getting ready to say something bad, something about gun control.” And I'm surprised, I kind of sarcastically reply, “Yeah, and that's a CRAZY idea.” (Not terribly diplomatic of me).
My dad starts screaming, actually screaming, that “gun control won’t work because the criminals won’t follow the rules and will steal guns or buy them illegally.” That really irritated me after the 45th senseless shooting, so I replied, “I’ll bet you money this shooter legally acquired the gun he used.”

Well, that REALLY set him off. He starts screaming at the TV that he “hates that fucking n***r, he can't stand that man, he'd like to take a gun and shoot him in the head RIGHT NOW.”
Our president. Spoken by a lifelong civil servant.

I was speechless. Angry, disturbed, and very disappointed.

First of all, he’s not a gun person. He actually does own a gun - an antique rifle from my granddad. I don’t think that he’s ever shot a gun recreationally in his life. Secondly, my dad was never a yeller. Lastly, he worked for our government for 30 years, so expressing the desire to murder our democratically elected president, even hypothetically, seemed beyond the pale.

My mother chimes in that HER problem with him is that he’s a Muslim. Beyond the obvious fact that if you say you’re not a Muslim, you’re not (and how else could you prove it anyway?), it wouldn't matter if he was. I said to her “You have problem with him because you think he’s a bad president. It wouldn’t matter if he was Muslim if he was a good president, right?” – vainly trying to get her to base her objections on some kind of factual basis, however misguided.

She agrees, “Well, he’s not a good president!” I think we're getting somewhere here. I say, “OK! Then its NOT because he’s Muslim, its because you think he’s a bad president, right??”
“No, it’s because he’s a Muslim.” Well, alrighty then. Case closed.

The point of this long-winded rant is that THESE ARE NOT MY PARENTS. These are pod people. Hate-filled, fearful, bigoted, willfully ignorant pod people.

Their level of discourse, their understanding of the issues of the day has declined steadily over the years as they have watched Fox's daily propaganda. And their belief that they are the only ones who know the "real truth" has increased proportionately. Obviously, this has been exacerbated by a more virulent racism than I was aware of, but the tone of Fox “News” encourages and blesses latent racism and acts as a hothouse for it grow larger.

These are people who I used to have spirited but intelligent political discussions with. That’s gone now. Those people are gone.

In all other ways, they remain competent, functioning adults. My mom still works, they both are very computer-literate and active. Yet they believed that Dearborn, Michigan was under Sharia law. They believe that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts for profit. They believe our President is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist.

Fox news IS propaganda, very dangerous propaganda. The harm it has done and continues to do cannot be overstated.

Thanks for listening. I just had to get this off my chest." [Source]

And I am glad that you did. I hope it helped.

*Pic from newscorpse.com

Rupert's "real black", and Emerge magazine is back.

"Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else."

Hmmm, a "real black President." This is what the founder and CEO of FOX NEWS is claiming that America needs. Forget the fact that his network is responsible for the "racial divide" here in America. It takes some serious cojones for a man in his position to make such a declaration.

Here is the obvious question, though: How does an old Australian white man know what a "real black man" should look or act like?

I am sure that Barack Obama not being a black man is news to Michele Obama. Personally, I will take Barack Obama in the race draft over Ben Carson. Ben has done some great things, and we would have taken him about 20 years ago, but he is a free agent now, he has cleared waivers and you white folks are free to pick him up anytime you want.

But back to the head man over at FOX. If I were Rupert Murdoch I would just leave black issues alone, especially given his network's history with us.

"African-American Fox News staffers find it “very difficult” to work at the network, former president of the National Association of Black Journalists Bob Butler told TheWrap on Thursday.

“I’ve talked to some folks who work there and it’s very difficult, especially when you have all the hit pieces that are done on Obama,” Butler said.

 

His comments come as Rupert Murdoch continues to face criticism over a controversial tweet on Wednesday that insinuated President Obama isn’t “a real black president.” Murdoch apologized on Thursday.

 

But those disillusioned staffers also told Butler, “Look, this is a job, I have to do it, and sometimes you have to just hold your nose and do what you have to do to collect a paycheck.” Butler, who served as president of the NABJ from 2013-2015, said those employees are good producers who pride themselves on covering news.

 

Regarding Murdoch’s comments suggesting the president isn’t an authentic black president, a dumbfounded Butler wondered “what does that even mean?”

 

 

He’s not surprised Murdoch isn’t a fan of Obama judging by the editorial policies of his properties, but wouldn’t call him a racist.

 

“I always stop short of saying someone is being blatantly racist,” Butler continued before saying it’s troubling for Murdoch, who isn’t black, to be deciding who is “black enough.” [Source]

 

Memo to Rupert: I heard Barack singing that Al Green tune, and I think I speak for every black person in America when I say that his black card is intact.  

 

Finally, speaking of black card cred. I am so glad that George Curry is back with his very fine magazine. I met him down in Washington a few months ago and he said that he was coming back.  I, for one, am glad that he did.

 

We will be forever grateful for this issue.

 

The online news world is now a much better place. 

 

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com

Fear of a black movement.

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight I cut and paste an excellent article from Huffington Post.

"Why has the Black Lives Matter movement not been classified as a hate group? Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox and Friends

Bill O'Reilly, in another conversation, answered this question in the affirmative and swore he would "shut them down." But how does one shut down the legitimate, organic forces of social change? In a modern democracy is the goal really silent, hands- folded conformity? Is this not a vision straight out of some futuristic, dystopian novel like Brave New World?

After all, racism in not a relic of the past to be found in a museum, gawked at and then largely forgotten in one's race to the cafeteria to enjoy a latte, as Fox news tries to peddle.
Racism still thrives. For example, between 2002 and 2014, consistently about 90% of people stopped and frisked in New York City by police were black or Latino, according to data by the New York Civil Liberties Union gleaned from police reports themselves.
 
Even white felons are more trusted by employers than blacks with no criminal record. According to a recent study that attempted to measure racial discrimination in hiring practices: "Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background."

Obviously, contemporary racism takes more insidious and subtler forms than its virulent predecessors. In the South in the 1950's, black people could not vote because of literacy tests, poll taxes, and threats of violence. Today Republicans cloak the denial of the right to vote in the subterfuge of countering voting fraud, even if it is so rare that it is virtually non-existent. For example, one can vote in Texas with a gun permit, but not with a college identification. A party that wants to deny people the right to vote is a moribund political party.

Therefore, movements, such as Black Lives Matter, besides being integral to developing the next generation of political leaders fighting for racial justice, are an extension of the civil right's struggle rooted in the 1960's. Now, today's activists may be angrier than the iconic civil rights leaders of the '60's, but this anger can not be dismissed as illegitimate; for doing so would be a direct denial of the black experience in America, as the data on "stop and frisk" patterns suggests.

In a recent march in St. Paul, Minnesota, Black Lives Matters leaders shouted in unison "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" one day after a policeman was gunned down in cold blood in Houston. Such demonstrations of questionable behavior will draw animus even from whites and others of good will. But shouting irresponsible, juvenile refrains is not the same as cold blooded murder of a police officer and trying to connect the two, like O'Reilly does, is largely the work of someone who has not looked in his own heart to pry himself free of racial bigotries.

If the realities Black Lives Matters activists did not exist or were imagined, then Eric Garner would still be alive and not killed by a police officer in Staten Island who put him in an illegal chokehold for the shocking crime of selling loose cigarettes. With his dying breath, he repeated "I can't breath" eleven times before succumbing.

When Fox news sycophants deny racism and condemn Black Live's Matters they are disrespecting the death of Eric Garner and many others who died in police custody for no apparent reason. They are throwing dirt on the grave of Trayvon Martin who was killed for walking down the street eating Skittles by a man-child who readily used as a defense the wide latitude given by Stand Your Ground laws to justify cold-blooded murder.
 
The white hegemony that conservatives are trying to protect no longer exists and they are the only ones who can't see it. No, the vision that O'Reilly and other conservatives have is largely one very reminiscent of a 1950's television drama where blacks were largely seen, but not heard. It is an anachronism as dated as any Norman Rockwell portrayal of Americana.

Whether it is Black Lives Matter who demand to be heard or others, Fox News will attempt to shout down the movement to protect their cherished vision of a monochrome America, instead of the messy, rigidly stratified America that so many face." [Source]

I am glad I am not the only one to see it.

*Pic from newscorpse.com

Where are the "Negrophobes" now?

If you get tired of hearing the history of the two main political parties and their history with black folks, imagine how tired I am of telling it to you.






Every time we have one of these debates republicans like to remind us that they are the "party of Lincoln" and that it was the democrats who were the party of the Southern racists and the KKK.






They have to do this, of course, because of the makeup of the modern day republican party and the perceptions that follow it.






I am so tired of repeating this particular part of history that I am going to allow Charles Blow to do it while responding to a racist who just  happens to be a republican.

"Last week, the economist and former Richard Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein went on Fox News and delivered a racial tirade completely detached from the anchor’s line of questioning.

When asked by the anchor about a Fox News poll showing the economy was the No.1 issue for voters, and how that poll result might work for or against Democrats in the midterms, Stein skirted the question altogether and instead spewed an extraordinary string of psychobabble about how “what the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics” by telling lies to African-Americans about how Republican policies would hurt them. He continued: “This president is the most racist president there has ever been in America. He is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans.”

Pat Buchanan, the two-time Republican presidential candidate, assistant to Richard Nixon and White House director of communications for Ronald Reagan, wrote a column this week accusing Democratic strategists of “pushing us to an America where the G.O.P. is predominantly white and the Democratic Party, especially in Dixie, is dominated by persons of color” in their last-minute get-out-the-vote appeals to African-Americans, by invoking Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jim Crow.

This glosses over a hundred years of history that will be tucked quietly away into some attic of amnesia.

Let’s review how we got to this point where African-Americans vote so overwhelmingly Democratic and are suspicious of Republican motives.

As NPR reported in July, “If you’d walked into a gathering of older black folks 100 years ago, you’d have found that most of them would have been Republican” because it was the “party of Lincoln. Party of the Emancipation. Party that pushed not only black votes but black politicians during that post-bellum period known as Reconstruction.”

As Buchanan, writing in American Conservative, pointed out, “The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman and the K.K.K. ‘Bull’ Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.”

But allegiances flipped.

The first wave of defections by African-Americans from Republican to Democrat came with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s. According to the Roosevelt Institute: “As Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented ‘the first time in their history’ that African-Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the ‘expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.'”

By the mid 1930s, most blacks were voting Democratic, although a sizable percentage remained Republican. Then came the signing of the Civil Rights Act by the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson — although he wasn’t perfect on the issue of race, and the bill passed partly because of Republican support.

In response to the bill, Barry Goldwater waged a disastrous campaign built in part on his opposition. As NPR put it: “Goldwater can be seen as the godfather (or maybe the midwife) of the current Tea Party. He wanted the federal government out of the states’ business. He believed the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional — although he said that once it had been enacted into law, it would be obeyed. But states, he said, should implement the law in their own time.” Whites were reassured by the message, but blacks were shaken by it.

Richard Nixon, for whom both Stein and Buchanan would work, helped to seal the deal. Nixon had got nearly a third of the African-American vote in his unsuccessful 1960 bid for the White House, but when he ran and won in 1968 he received only 15 percent. In 1972, he was re-elected with just 13 percent of the black vote. That was in part because the Republican brand was already tarnished among blacks and in part because the Nixon campaign used the “Southern strategy” to try to capitalize on racist white flight from the Democratic Party as more blacks moved into it.

As Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

That’s right: Republicans wanted the Democrats’ “Negrophobes.”

The history of party affiliations is obviously littered with racial issues. But now, there is considerable quarreling and consternation about the degree to which racial bias is still a party trait or motivating political factor for support of or opposition to particular politicians or policies.

This is a wonderful editorial, but hardly a revelation.It has been evident for decades that the Republican Party is a party without a soul. ...

1960 to '64 were my college years; they were also the years when the South flipped from solid Democratic to solid Republican. How do you...

For years the Republicans have been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done...

• It is clear that our politics were “racialized” long before this president came along — and that structure persists — but that’s not the same as saying the voters are racist.

To get more directly at the issue of racism in political parties, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Politics looked at “a variety of questions on racial attitudes in the General Social Survey” and specifically at “the numbers for white Democrats and white Republicans.”

This wasn’t a perfect or complete measure of racial bias, but more a measure of flagrant bias — the opinions of people aware of their biases and willing to confess them on a survey.

That said, they found that:

“So there’s a partisan gap, although not as large of one as some political commentators might assert. There are white racists in both parties. By most questions, they represent a minority of white voters in both parties. They probably represent a slightly larger minority of white Republicans than white Democrats.”

Still, the question is how much of this muck at the bottom of both barrels sullies what’s on top? The best measure many find for this is in the rhetoric and policies of party leaders.

The growing share of the Democratic Party composed of historically marginalized populations — minorities, women, Jews, L.G.B.T.-identified persons — pushes the party toward more inclusive language and stances.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, doesn’t have that benefit. They can’t seem to stop the slow drip of offensive remarks, like those of the Republican governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, who referred to the president’s policies last week as “tar babies” or the obsessive-compulsive need to culturally diagnose and condemn black people, like Stein’s saying this week that “the real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass.”

At that rate, Republicans will never attract more minorities, try as they may to skip over portions of the racial past or deny the fullness of the racial present. [Source]

Yes, so once again, we get the history lesson. And , once again, we understand that both political parties played racial ping pong with the black vote and for black support.

But now here we are in 2014, and it is people like Ben Stein who are demonizing black people and people like the entire FOX VIEWS crowd who are declaring that we are the racists in America.

It is no wonder then that the black vote (at least for the foreseeable future) will continue to be very lopsided in favor of the donkey.

Pic from homebrewedtheology.com