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



  

Donald Trump's imaginary cheering Jersey Muslims.

"Donald Trump claims that "thousands" of people in New Jersey were "cheering" amid the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil.

In an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his assertion that he saw people in New Jersey — where the real-estate mogul claims there are "large Arab populations" — cheering as the World Trade Center came down.

"There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down," Trump said on Sunday. "I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well-covered at the time."

Trump first made the claim at a Birmingham, Alabama, rally on Saturday.

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he said.

As The New York Times reported, it's unclear to what Trump was referring. Images were broadcast of cheering in Middle Eastern countries, but local officials had to dispute a prevalent internet rumor that Muslims were cheering in Paterson, New Jersey." [Source]

So how can a leading candidate to be the president of these divided state of America just tell a bold face lie on national television and think that he can get away with it?

Because he is Donald Trump, and Americans, in this political season, do not care about the truth. Just look at some of the whoppers that the other leading republican candidate for president has told.

And yes, what Trump said was a lie. And the sad thing is he knew it was a lie.

This is what fact checkers, Politifact, had to say said about Trump's claim:

"Trump said he "watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering" as the World Trade Center collapsed.

This defies basic logic. If thousands and thousands of people were celebrating the 9/11 attacks on American soil, many people beyond Trump would remember it. And in the 21st century, there would be video or visual evidence.

Instead, all we found were a couple of news articles that described rumors of celebrations that were either debunked or unproven.Trump’s recollection of events in New Jersey in the hours after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks flies in the face of all the evidence we could find. We rate this statement Pants on Fire." [Source]

His pants might be on fire, but his supporters are right by his side to put it out.

Pic from npr.org.











 

Hail to the bully.

Chris Christie will win the New Jersey governor's race comfortably tomorrow. Why? Because people in New Jersey, like the rest of the country, value perception over reality.

I don't live in New Jersey, but I really need someone who supports the good governor to tell me what he has done for that state that earns him rock star status. (Sorry Shaq. Stick to dunking basketballs. You don't know  anything about politics.)I know he is good at bullying people, (he would get Richie Incognito's vote)but can he really govern?

I mean the facts tell me that he hasn't been all that.

Here is what Catherine Haig writes:

"Republican Chris Christie, current Gov of NJ, will be throwing his big pants into the 3 ring circus that promises to be another fiasco in the ruining of America – the 2016 race for the White House.

But be aware, the people in NJ were LIED TO BY THEN ATTORNEY GENERAL OF NJ, CHRIS CHRISTIE who became NJ Gov. on a list of lies like no other candidate before him.

Talk about corruption – Chris Christie embodies “THE BIG BULLY” Theory as if he wrote the theory himself.

These are what Chris Christie promised NJ: He promised not to raise taxes or allow property taxes to go over a 2% cap however it was a SOFT CAP which allowed Municipalities to skirt the percent and ours went up to 8% giving us a whopping $6000 dollars a year to pay for what exactly? We don’t have kids, we are gay, we have two dogs and a house that is valued $65 thousand dollars lower than what we paid for and now we have to pay $6000 a year in property taxes?

How is that not raising taxes, GOV Christie?
 
....New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie largely avoided factual claims in a Republican convention keynote address that was heavy on generalities, opinion and platitudes. The pugnacious former prosecutor exaggerated a bit, though, when he bragged about his accomplishments as governor, and he repeated the common but false claim that the president’s health care law interferes with the doctor-patient relationship.

• Christie said he delivered “three balanced budgets with lower taxes.” Actually, he cut the state Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income residents and the popular property-tax rebate program for renters and homeowners. It’s a matter of interpretation whether those are tax hikes or spending reductions. A proposed 10 percent income tax cut hasn’t been enacted.
• He said he took on public-sector unions to reform a pension system “headed to bankruptcy” and “saved retirees their pension.” That’s accurate as far as it goes. But the state is not fully funding the revamped system, and the pension liabilities gap will begin to grow again.
• Regarding teachers, Christie said he ended “the guarantee of a job for life regardless of performance.” That’s correct. Christie worked with a Democratic Legislature to make significant changes to the tenure system — even providing a path to fire tenured teachers with negative evaluations.

On state taxes, Christie said “we have three balanced budgets with lower taxes.” First of all, New Jersey, like many states, requires a balanced budget. But did he balance the budget “with lower taxes”? He did sign into law some business tax incentives, but broad-based income and sales taxes have not changed. He has proposed lowering income taxes by 10 percent across the board, but that measure has yet to pass." [More]

Throw in the fact that he is against things such as proper gun control and same sex marriages, and I think that he would be right at home with the Tea Party wing of his party.

 “What do you want? I’m tired of you people,”

Governor, I truly wish that they were tired of you.

Maybe the "times they are a changin".

Well, it seems like black folks aren't the only ones who are being profiled these days. If you are an aging rock legend it might help to always keep ID on you.

Now I am no Bob Dylan fan, other than "Blowin in the Wind", and The Times They Are a Changing", I couldn't tell you two of his songs. --And apparently he has had a few---. But I sure as hell know what he looks like, and if I saw him on the street and he told me that his name was Bob Dylan, then yeah, I would pretty much take his word for it.

I know Jersey can be like another planet sometimes, but do you mean to tell me that cops in Jersey shore towns don't know what Bob Dylan looks like? Wow!

And apparently Cambridge, Massachusetts isn't the only place with nosy neighbors. They are in Long Branch, New Jersey as well. Bob was checking out some shore digs (Are you sure that's all you were looking for Bob? Aren't you on tour with Willie Nelson?) and Ms. Kravtiz number two called the po po on him. "Sir, do you have any ID on you? Ahh, no officer, but I could sing a bar or two of Blowin in the Wind for you.... Now, to be fair, the poor officer was only 22 years old, so she can probably be excused for not recognizing the aging troubadour. Kids!

Still, this looks like a case of reverse profiling to me. Dylan was in the Latin part of town, and they say he "didn't fit in". Hey, I am trying to be consistent here. If I am going to get pissed when nosey neighbors profile a black man, why not call out nosey neighbors when they profile aging rockers? It just ain't right. And on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock to boot. Is nothing sacred in A-merry-ca anymore?

See field , this is how you act when the police approach you. Not like you black people and make national headlines out of the whole deal. The man took the police to his tour bus and showed proper ID. That's all. No "do you know who I am?" "Why are you profiling the black man?"None of that crap! This is how you act civil in A-merry-ca. You Negroes can be so angry all the time.

Of course, as it is with damn near everything these days, the loonies are calling this another example of a vast left wing plot. Yep, the wingnuts are saying that the main stream media intentionally buried this story right after the Gates incident because it was a case of the white man being profiled. I think that's a stretch, but I am sure the troops are buying it.

What a country. Can you imagine if Jimi Hendrix was still alive?