Understanding conservatives.

Before I drop tonight's cut and paste job, I have to mention a couple of stories that had me scratching my very bald head today.

They really make me question the sanity of some people.

The first one has to do with Donald Trump Jr. accusing Barack Obama of plagiarizing some of his speech. Think about that for a minute. The young Trump actually lifted the same lines from the president who used them long before his daddy decided to run for president, and yet he has the audacity to accuse the president of lifting his lines. Unbelievable!

"Melania Trump, the elder Trump’s wife, came under fire last week when it was revealed that she had plagiarized from a speech first lady Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. 

Inexplicably, Trump Jr. appears to be trying to spark similar outrage by claiming the president stole material from him. 

He has failed, largely because the line he’s claiming to have coined wasn’t even his ― elected officials, including Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush, have been using it for years." 

Then there is Bill O'Reilly, a popular conservative talk show host who actually had the nerve to declare on his popular talk show that slaves were well fed, and had proper  lodging while they built the White House.

It's nothing new, of course, conservatives have a long history of trying to delegitimize  the stain and pain of slavery. But to see one of them do it so openly and without hesitation was shocking.

Now, of course, after all the backlash, he is trying to clean up his statement.

 "As any honest historian knows, in order to keep slaves and free laborers strong, the Washington administration provided meat, bread and other staples, also decent lodging on the grounds of the new presidential building. That is a fact. Not a justification, not a defense of slavery. Just a fact. Anyone who implies a soft-on-slavery message is beneath contempt."'

Bill, that is a "soft on slavery message", and you are beneath contempt. But we all already knew that; your history, both professionally and personally, proves it.  

So on to the must read article of the day:

"It is not Barack Obama’s fault that Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, any more than the proverbial hurricane is the fault of the proverbial butterfly. But just like the butterfly and the hurricane, the fact that Trump’s ascension comes at the end of the Obama era is hardly a coincidence — and it’s hard to imagine one without the other.

More specifically, Obama’s election helped pave the way for Trumpism: not the idiosyncratic and often incomprehensible campaign that Donald Trump himself is running, but the anti-immigration, anti-trade, "law and order" populist sentiment that he’s brought back into the American mainstream and that will probably outlast his (probable) loss in November.

One of the reasons Trumpism has surprised political and media elites with its passion and strength is that it draws from a deep well of anxiety about America losing its culture and values in the face of (among other things) multiculturalism.

The idea that America is being both overrun and taken over by people with different values is partly inspired by reminders of difference in everyday life: seeing people in the streets who "look like" unauthorized immigrants; having to press 1 for English. But it’s also reinforced by the media, and by who represents America on the world stage.

And for the past eight years, that’s been a man of Kenyan ancestry — with, as Obama himself said during his 2004 convention speech, "a funny name."

Obama’s election was the result of the underlying demographic changes that have provoked so much anxiety that something’s being lost in America. But it was also a symbol of it.

More importantly, it offered a way for people to express those anxieties under the banner of disagreement about politics — which is acceptable in polite company — instead of under the banner of "complaining about nonwhite people," which is generally considered racist and frowned upon discussing openly.

Accusing African Americans or immigrants of being un-American or disloyal is a longstanding theme, but it’s not a polite thing to say. But asking whether President Obama was really born in America anyway, or saying he has a "Kenyan anti-colonialist" outlook because of his father, or darkly hinting that he is more sympathetic to America’s Islamist enemies than its allies because he has something in common with them? All of those are pretty strong and ugly criticisms, but they’re criticisms of a politician — of the most powerful man in the world, in fact. That makes them more acceptable than if they were about someone else.

Birtherism, of course, is the issue that made Donald Trump a conservative hero in 2011. The swell of support he felt then was almost enough to tempt him into a run in 2012, and it was definitely enough to tempt him into a run in 2016.

Trump had been toying with a run for president for decades. And while some of his policy stances have definitely shifted (to say the least) since then, his history as a racial provocateur goes back decades.

But Trump is a good marketer. He understood, when he ran this time, that his ability to make controversial statements was a close relative of the conservative resentment of "political correctness," and the yearning to more openly express certain people’s fears without courting offense or censorship. He saw his time had come." [Source]

They didn't "acquit" him because they thought that the glove didn't fit.

      I, like quite a few other people, caught the first part of that O.J. Simpson mini series on FX. And I have to say that it was rather good. A little campy, but good. Cuba Gooding, Jr., in my opinion, is a very underrated actor.

Anyway, I know that the series will bring back some bad memories for my white brothers and sisters. Seeing a black man go free for killing a white woman in America (and yes, he did kill her) could not have been easy. I know you all wish that those black jurors could have found another way to make whitey pay for all the racial  injustice in Los Angeles at the time, but that was not to be. All those black college students cheering at Howard  University weren't cheering because they loved O.J.; (most black folks at the time knew that "Juice" was firmly in the house) they were cheering because they felt that black folks finally got a chance to flip the script on the criminal justice system.

I rarely agree with John McWhorter (although we both agree that O.J. was guilty) but his take on the Simpson trial and its aftermath was on point:

"It is easy to forget how beloved a celebrity O. J. Simpson was in his time — Heisman Trophy winner, N.F.L. superstar, Hollywood actor and pitchman supreme. Until he was arrested in the brutal slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman, after a televised police chase that transfixed the nation, he seemed to have transcended his roots in San Francisco housing projects.

 

Yet if Mr. Simpson’s guilt seemed clear to much of America, African-Americans were disinclined to see it that way. Over months of lurid televised court testimony — now being dramatized in a series that started this week on FX — Mr. Simpson became a symbol, to many blacks, of endemic racism in the justice system. And when a jury with nine black members declared him not guilty on Oct. 3, 1995, black people across the country cheered.

 

I wasn’t one of them.                                

•         

I must admit I was as disappointed as many whites that black college students gleefully applauded the verdict as if Mr. Simpson were one of the Scottsboro Boys. While the police and prosecutors had been far from brilliant, and reasonable doubt was, well, reasonable, Mr. Simpson’s innocence seemed decidedly unlikely.

 

At the time, what I saw was people ignoring the facts in favor of a kind of tribalism. A black journalism professor asked me, as a linguist, to lecture on language and the trial. I’d be glad to, I told him, but I thought Mr. Simpson was guilty. I never heard from him again.

Meanwhile, black friends and family continued coming up with ways that damning evidence could have been planted and obsessing over the use of a racial epithet by a police detective in the case. I felt alienated, angry, disappointed.

 

But I was missing something. The case was about much more than bloody gloves and bloody footprints. It was about the centrality of police brutality to black Americans’ very sense of self.

I came to realize this when, disgusted with the verdict and the response to it, I began to investigate — at first informally — why so many of my fellow blacks’ takes on racism seemed to me to be more fitting to 1935 than 1995.

After a while I realized that the rub was that my life had spared me from experiencing or even seeing police abuse. I had seen the video images of the vicious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles officers four years earlier but had lived too fortunate a life to spontaneously see it as something that could happen to me.

 

To this day I am bemused by the occasional white person who assumes that I have a “story” to tell about triumphing over racism, that I was raised by working-class parents just getting by. I grew up solidly middle class in quiet, leafy suburbs — one integrated, one all black — where the police were the last thing on anyone’s mind. Racism had brushed my life now and then, but not at the hands of the police. This was what kept me from processing the O. J. Simpson business “blackly,” as it were.

What I found when I spoke with people after the Simpson verdict, though, and have found since with numbing regularity, is that what prevents real racial conciliation and understanding in America is the poisonous relations between blacks and the police.  I asked a black office worker what made him so sure Mr. Simpson had been framed, and he recounted just that kind of malfeasance by Oakland cops when he was growing up. And I learned not to assume that only men had such feelings. I asked a middle-class young black woman why she, too, felt that racism was the core of our experience. She instantly told me a story about her brother being senselessly harassed by cops for driving in “the wrong place.”

The conversations were what ultimately prompted my interest in writing about race. And while the positions I took in books and articles went against the leftist orthodoxy, when it came to cops, my feelings had become the same as those more politically correct than I, and that won’t change.

 

Thanks God for Apple. Black college students celebrated OJ's not guilty verdict not because they didn't think he did it. They celebrated...

 

I can think of nothing more damaging to the Black Community’s quest to address those cases where the police actually murder or mistreat...

 

[[But I was missing something. The case was about much more than bloody gloves and bloody footprints. It was about the centrality of police...

Racism is experienced in many ways, but as Ellis Cose has put it, “Rage does not flow from dry numerical analyses of discrimination or from professional prospects projected on a statistician’s screen.” Talk to most black people about racism and you need only count the seconds before the cops come up.

 

Amid the round-the-clock cable coverage of the Simpson case, America learned the difference between what the cops mean to black people versus what they mean to most others.

 

Too few got the message at the time.

 

But after the killings of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and other unarmed blacks by the police over the past two years, the conversation has changed. Many non-black Americans who were disgusted by the Simpson verdict have become more aware of the ubiquity of police brutality in black lives.

 

I suspect that the black response to the verdict, if it happened today, would surprise far fewer whites than it did 20 years ago." [Source]

 

It wouldn't surprise them, and it wouldn't make them any less mad.

 

*Pic from people.com

Southern discomfort.

Folks are going crazy in the South these days.


I don't ever remember reading about so many killers taking out their own family members and loved ones in such large numbers in one part of the country.


I wonder what is responsible for this phenomenon.


We all know the story by now of Timothy Ray Jones Jr., the animal who allegedly killed his five children and dumped their bodies in a trash bag. (I think he was from Alabama.)


And now we have Don Spirit. This animal who was masquerading as a human being allegedly killed his adult daughter, five grandchildren, and one other child.


 "A man in Bell shot and killed his daughter and six grandchildren before turning the gun on himself Thursday afternoon in a small town about an hour west of Gainesville.


The Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office confirmed the gruesome details in a press conference Thursday night.


Gilchrist County Sheriff Robert Schulz said Don Spirit is the man responsible for the slayings.


Schulz said deputies were called to the rural home on around 4 p.m. after Spirit called 911 and threatened to harm himself and others. When deputies arrived, Spirit committed suicide, Schulz said. GCSO believes the victims were already dead when officers arrived." [Source]


I am against the death penalty when it is carried out by the state. But if someone like this wants to go ahead and sentence himself to death and then carry out the sentence, well...


Sadly, this kind of stuff happens in places like Florida far too often. It's a dog bites man story down there.


And before my white friends accuse me of being a "racialist"; please note that I am mentioning the story a depraved Negro named George Mason III as well.


This Negro killed three family members and tried to kill a fourth before being taken out by a truck.


"A Florida man killed three relatives Friday and tried to gun down a fourth when a passing truck ran over the murderer, halting his rampage, police said.


George Mason III, 42, is clinging to life after being struck in the middle of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in the town of Brooksville as he chased after his half-brother, Gabriel Taylor, 33.


Taylor was shot several times, including once in the head, and is in critical condition, police said." [Source]


Florida again.


There must be something in the water.

A sad anniversary.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.


Folks forget why Dr. King was in Memphis in the first place. It was to march with sanitation workers who were catching hell down in the land of Elvis from the powers that be.


"During a heavy rainstorm in Memphis on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the trash truck was accidentally triggered. On the same day in a separate incident also related to the inclement weather, 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white supervisors were retained for the day with pay. About two weeks later, on February 12, more than 1,100 of a possible 1,300 black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. Mayor Henry Loeb, unsympathetic to most of the workers' demands, was especially opposed to the union. Black and white civic groups in Memphis tried to resolve the conflict, but the mayor held fast to his position.


As the strike lengthened, support for the strikers within the black community of Memphis grew. Organizations such as COME (Community on the Move for Equality) established food and clothing banks in churches, took up collections for strikers to meet rent and mortgages, and recruited marchers for frequent demonstrations. King's participation in forming a city-wide boycott to support the striking workers was invited by the Reverend James Lawson, pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis and an adviser to the strikers. Lawson was a seasoned veteran of the civil rights movement and an experienced trainer of activists in the philosophy and methods of nonviolent resistance."


It was in this environment that King found himself ready to march for economic justice in Memphis before losing his life to a sniper's bullet.


In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, and the growing wealth inequality  in this country, Americans would do well to remember what folks like Dr. King fought for. It wasn't only about civil rights and social justice; it was about economic justice as well.


There are quite a few poor Americans in this country who still don't get it. They really believe that the haves will look out for them, and that somehow, if they align themselves with the 1%, their wealth will miraculously find itself into their pockets. It will not. Wealthy people are greedy; it's how they became wealthy in the first place.


There is a political party in this country whose job it is to protect the wealthy and to maintain the status quo of wealth inequality. If you want to know the name of that party look at the budget being proposed by one Paul Ryan. That will tell you all you need to know about who is being protected by certain people in Washington. "Raise the minimum wage? Why should we? That's bad for business." "Let's cut food stamps and unemployment benefits. All that stuff just encourages laziness."


If MLK was around today he wouldn't be happy with what is going on in America. He would feel that all the hard work and organizing he did was for nothing. Because while people of color have achieved civil rights, poor people ---of all colors--- have gained little economic rights. We have moved backwards as a country when it comes to the issue of economic justice.


Sadly, this is just how some people want it.

Police shootings, and shooting off at the mouth.

Every now and then I have to remind you Negroes in America that it's not a good idea to put yourselves in a dangerous situation with the po po.

Here in Philly our Commissioner actually asked the feds to step in because of all the police involved shootings taking place of late.

"With shootings by Philadelphia police rising to the highest level in over a decade, Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has asked the Department of Justice to review the department's use of deadly force.

The request follows a Philly.com story published May 14 documenting a 50-percent increase in the number of police shootings in 2012.
Police in Philadelphia shot 52 suspects last year. Of those, 15 people died. In 2011, police wounded or killed 35 people.

"When you have as many as we've had, it gets people wondering if they were all justified," Ramsey said. "We've been looking at this issue since December. The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ knows and agrees this is a good course of action." [Source]

Well at least Philly's finest is being proactive, which is more than we can say for other police departments.

Take, for instance, the city of St. Louis.

"Protesters rallied in St. Louis, MO on Wednesday over the death of 25-year-old Cary Ball Jr, who was shot 25 times by police officers last month. Police say Ball refused to pull over for a traffic stop, eventually crashed into a parked car, and started running. According to police, Ball pointed a semi-automatic handgun at the officers, prompting them to open fire.

Several witnesses who spoke to the family, however, say Ball threw his gun on the ground and was walking toward police with his hands up to surrender when he was shot. Some unverified reports say 7 of the 25 shots hit him in the back. Police say there was no surveillance video in the area to verify exactly what happened.

Ball was an honor student with a 3.86 GPA, majoring in human services at Forest Park Community College, where he had been celebrated as an “emerging scholar.” According to family and friends, Ball was working to reform his life after being convicted of armed robbery when he was 17. His older brother, Carlos Ball, said Cary probably ran from the police because, as an ex-convict, it was illegal for him to possess a gun.

The two officers have been placed on administrative leave as homicide detectives investigate the shooting, but this is hardly the first time questions have been raised over the St. Louis Police Department’s conduct. In February, a city cop was accused of choking a man in a wheelchair, who was then arrested immediately after testifying at the officer’s disciplinary hearing. A video showing a cop beating and pepper-spraying a man went viral in 2011, revealing that the cop had stayed on the force despite multiple lawsuits alleging brutality." [Source]

I know what some of you are thinking, so let me say it for you: What was he doing with a gun? It's a fair question. But is it a crime punishable by death to be in possession of an illegal firearm?

Well, it might be, if you are poor or a Negro in America.

How about a knife?

"STERLING, Va. (AP) — A female worker at a northern Virginia Costco store who authorities say went at two sheriff’s deputies with a knife and scissors has been fatally shot.

The shooting occurred about 3 p.m. Wednesday. Two Loudoun County deputies had been called to respond to a disorderly conduct complaint at the Sterling-area Costco. Police said the woman was threatening store employees.
Officials say the deputies ordered the woman to drop the weapons, but she advanced on them. Authorities say one deputy used a stun gun on the woman, but it was ineffective.

Police say the second deputy fired several shots, killing the woman. She was identified as 38-year-old Mhai Scott of Sterling.

Authorities say Scott worked for Club Demonstration Services, which provides services to Costco. The Washington Post reports Scott had been serving pizza.
One deputy was injured. He was treated and released at a local hospital." [Source]

Injured? From what? Slipping on a loose pepperoni?

Finally, it seems as if male wingnuts really don't like women that much.

Let's start with that loud mouth and mentally challenged FOX News host, Eric Bolling.

"Following the release of a Pew study that states 40% of women are now the sole breadwinner for their family, and Fox contributor Erick Erickson‘s subsequent controversial comments on the matter, another Fox personality named Eric said something on The Five today that may raise some eyebrows among those who view more women in the workplace as a good thing.

During a discussion about the study and its implications for American society, Eric Bolling said that if you dig into the research done by Pew, you find out that the reason 4 out of 10 women are the primary provider for their families is “the breakdown of the American family.” He continued, saying, “Women are forced to go out and be the breadwinners for the families and that is why the numbers are higher now — single moms.”

But it was the question Bolling asked next that really made a leap to new territory. “If you are a single mom, breadwinner of the family, and you get pregnant, aren’t we pushing towards more abortions? It seems like we are.”

Ok Mr. Bolling, I am sure that your barefoot wife who spends all of her days in the kitchen will appreciate those comments.

And then there is the other Erick.

"Fox News contributor Erick Erickson must be feeling the heat today over comments his made last night on Fox Business Network as he took to his Red State blog this afternoon to defend himself against the “feminist and emo lefties” who “have their panties in a wad over my statements.”

The conservative commentator was reacting to a recent Pew study that claims mothers are now the primary source of income in 40 percent of American households, when he went off on a tangent, suggesting it’s “anti-science” for liberals to reject the idea that men should take on the “dominant” role in the household.

In his defiant response today, titled “The Truth May Hurt, But Is Not Mean,” Erickson reiterated his point that “more women being the primary or sole breadwinners in families is harmful to raising children.” He also used the opportunity to express his disapproval of gay parents..." [Source]

It got so bad that their fellow FOX colleague had to chastise the wingnut boys club.

She wanted to know if they have "lost their minds". Yes Greta, they have. But they are winguts; their minds were not all there to begin with.