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]

I do not wish I was in Dixie. Not now.

Don't you just love some of my white friends in the South?

Now comes the following from the great state of Alabama:

"Alabama is currently celebrating Confederate Heritage Month with a state-wide holiday and a series of public events aimed at remembering and honoring those who fought on the side of southern, slave-owning states during the Civil War. At one such event this week, organized by the Ladies’ Memorial Association, Alabama’s Secretary of State John Merrill lamented recent calls to remove Confederate symbols from government buildings.

“The next question that has to be asked is so what’s the next thing you are going to do,” he asked, “are you going to take a bulldozer to the monument and forget what people fought for to preserve a way of life that makes us special and unique?”

Civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, slammed the remark as “shameful.” But in a follow-up conversation with ThinkProgress, Merrill explained that the “way of life” he celebrates is based on Confederate soldiers’ independent spirit, not their advocacy for slavery.

When we have things happen in our state, we don’t rely on the federal government to come take care of us,” he said. “We take care of ourselves. For example, after the tornadoes in 2011, or after the massive flooding we had. That’s who we are. That’s who these people were. I’m proud of that.”
Alabama, however, is the ninth most reliant on federal aid out of the 50 states, taking far more in aid than the state pays back in taxes. As for the 2011 tornado damage Merrill mentioned, an auditor recently found that the state improperly received about $1.2 million in federal aid that it now must pay back. Antebellum Alabama’s “self-reliance,” meanwhile, depended from its founding on the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of slaves.

Merrill explained to ThinkProgress that he wanted to participate in a “celebration of the heritage of the south” because he believes young people need to “to be respectful of those historical traits we hold dear.” Those traits, he emphasized, are “not related to race, divisiveness, or a heritage of fighting.” Rather, they are “pride in our work and in our communities.”

He repeatedly assured ThinkProgress that he personally has no racial biases, noting that he owns a signed photo of Alabama civil rights icon John Lewis, and touting the diversity in his agency.
“We’ve got two African Americans that work in the lobby area of our office here,” he said. “None of them are working here because they’re black, but because they’re highly-qualified, trained professionals. I judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” [Source]

Wait....let me stop this right here. Did he really say  "We've got two African Americans that work in the lobby"? What do they do? Give directions to the offices? As the old church folks like to say: "Jesus take the wheel."

Think about that for a minute. One of the states in this great union is celebrating Confederate Heritage Month. Imagine if you will a Nazi History Month being celebrated in Germany. That is a fitting analogy to what is being done in Alabama.

Look, we get it, this is America, and you rejects from the 19th Century should be free to let your flag fly on your own personal property and for whatever protest you want to launch. But when you declare such a month as an official month of a state that has a huge population of African Americans ---many of whom had ancestors who were slaves--- it sends a chilling and shameful message.

Finally, did you hear the one about the GOP fundraiser who was busted for allegedly running a meth lab out of her home?

I am serious. You can't make this stuff up.

"A fundraiser for Arizona Republican Senator John McCain was arrested along with her boyfriend Tuesday in a major drug sting.

Emily Pitha, who also worked for former Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl, is accused of running a meth lab and a drug shipping operation out of her Phoenix home. Police were tipped off when a package containing a large quantity of ecstasy was shipped to her home from the Netherlands. Pitha and her boyfriend were arrested after he signed for the package." [Source]

If I were Emily I would have saved all that meth for the  republican convention in Cleveland.
Just a hunch, but I suspect that they will be wanting a lot of drugs to get through all the festivities.


*Pic from onlineathens.com

Is Mia Love a slave?

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,
None but ourselves can free our mind." ~Bob Marley~

Mia Love seems to be channeling her inner Bob Marley these days.

She thinks that black people who support the democrat party are trapped in a form of mental slavery.

In her mind black folks are slaves to the party that just so happens to have a different political ideology than she does. Go figure.

“We need to remove ourselves from a different kind of slavery,” Love said in her own speech on Wednesday. “What I’m talking about is a slavery that comes from being dependent on people in power.” 

This kind of rhetoric is ironic coming from a conservative . I mean who depends on people in power more than they do?

People with money, at least in America, are people with power. And in Washington it is the people with money who are crafting legislation and policy by buying off people like Mia Love and her conservative elected buddies.

I think my homie Bob was referring to sell-out Negroes who seem to have forgotten to speak for---- and advocate on behalf of  others who aren't in power. We shouldn't be "dependent" on people in power, so we shouldn't be taking orders from them.

Mia, let me hip you to something: Crafting legislation that only benefits the rich and powerful keeps them in power, and it makes you nothing more than a tool that they use to achieve their goals. 

Finally, the right wing is smearing those three dead students in North Carolina, and the rest of us normal human beings are left to wonder how they lost their sense of humanity. 

I don't care what their political views were, those students did not deserve to die in such a horrific manner.

If you don't believe that you are a slave to ignorance.

 









 

The Civil War spirit.

This is a bad time for race relations in America.


To be sure, it has been worse, but folks expected so much after the election of the second first black president.


Sadly, though, that has not been the case.


Here is a post from Andy Schmookler which explains one of the reasons why things are the way they are.


"It's like facial recognition technology: if the features match up, you conclude, "It's the same guy."


So it is with the match between the force that drove us to Civil War more than a century and a half ago, and the force that has taken over the Republican Party in our times.


In both cases, we see an elite insisting on their "liberty," by which they mean the freedom to dominate.


With Citizens United, in our times, the corporatists have declared that their "freedom of speech" gives them the right to buy our elections, unfettered by any concerns about the rights of the average citizen to have an equal say in their government.


Back in the 1850s, the slaveholders insisted that their "liberty" meant that they had the right to take their human "property" anywhere in American territory, an insistence that swept aside the previously respected concerns of millions of their countrymen that there be regions of the country free of slavery.


In both cases, the use of the structures of American democracy was combined with a contempt for the democratic values that inspired our founders.
Nowadays, the Republicans have made a national effort to pass voter ID laws to address a non-existent problem of voter fraud-- a campaign that is itself a fraud whose transparent intent is to disenfranchise the vulnerable whose champions are the Republicans' opponents.


Back in the years leading up to the Civil War, the slaveholders banned the distribution of anti-slavery writings, and sometimes suppressed anti-slavery talk by violence.


In both cases, the elites driving the polarization of the country justified their dominance by distorting, in belittling ways, the humanity of those they sought to exploit.


Today's Republicans talk about the 47 percent, the half of the country they characterize as "takers," even though many of those 47 percent work multiple jobs just to make ends meet; and these Republicans vote to strip them of unemployment benefits, at a time of massive joblessness, in the mistaken belief that only desperation will get these lazy people to work.


Back in the time of the Slave Power, the slaveholding class declared they were doing their black slaves a favor to discipline them into an ethic of work; freeing them would be cruel, the masters claimed, because those blacks were inherently too lazy and incompetent to survive on their own.


In both cases, the idea of compromise became a dirty word, as the inflamed insistence on getting everything one's own way took hold of the inflamed side.
Today's Republicans do not seek compromise, and the dynamics of the party are such that anyone who works toward compromise is demonized and run out of office by challenge from the more extreme, uncompromising wing of the party.
Back in the years leading up to the Civil War, the South's insistence on the unfettered expansion of their domain led to the overturning of the great Missouri Compromise, which had held the nation together for more than thirty yearsv--va fracturing of the peace that instigated the return to the political arena of Abraham Lincoln, and set the nation on course to a bloody civil war.


In both cases, the powerful elite in the grip of that destructive force refused to accept that in a democracy sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and sometimes you have to accept being governed by a duly-elected president you don't like.


Today's Republicans have done everything they could to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama, whom the American people duly elected twice. Like no other opposition party in American history, they have refused to accept the temporary minority status to which American voters have consigned them. Blocking the president from performing the function for which the people hired him has been their top priority.


Back on the eve of the Civil War, the Southerners -- who had disproportionately dominated the upper echelons of the national government from the time of its founding -- considered the election of Abraham Lincoln an intolerable insult, and promptly made a unilateral decision to break apart the Union; they then raised an army to defend that decision, rather than accept the outcome of the democratic process and regroup for the next election.


As with facial recognition, the configuration of the features tells us, "This is the same ugly thing, come back again." [Source]


One little quibble with the author's premise: It's not only republicans; there are democrats among those "corporatist" as well. And even though they are in his party, their wimpy weak- kneed posture towards the president while trying to protect their own political necks has been glaring.

A change of heart about reparations.

Before I post the thought provoking and excellent post from Ta-Nehisi Coates, let me tell you what the racism apologist and trolls will say after reading it.


"My ancestors came over from Ireland and Italy and they were treated like second class citizens themselves."


"My ancestors never owned slaves, why should I be blamed for what happened to them?"


"Haven't we done enough for blacks in this country?"


"I am offended that I would be asked to give anything to blacks when my ancestors spilled their blood in the civil war."


"There are no slaves living today,"


Did I leave anything out?


Anyway, here is the article:


"The best thing about writing a blog is the presence of a live and dynamic journal of one's own thinking. Some portion of the reporter's notebook is out there for you to scrutinize and think about as the longer article develops. For me, this current article—an argument in support of reparations—began four years ago when I opposed reparations. A lot has happened since then. I've read a lot, talked to a lot of people, and spent a lot of time in Chicago where the history, somehow, feels especially present. I think I owe you a walk-through on how my thinking evolved. 


When I wrote opposing reparations I was about halfway through my deep-dive into the Civil War. I roughly understood then that the Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count.  The sheer value of enslaved African-Americans is just astounding. And looking at this recent piece by Chris Hayes, I'm wondering if my numbers are short (emphasis added):

In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.

 

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”

As with any economic institution of that size, enslavement grew from simply a question of money to a question of societal, even theological, importance.
I got that in 2011, from Jim McPherson (emphasis again added):

"The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death," a South Carolina commissioner told Virginians in February 1861. "The South cannot exist without African slavery." Mississippi's commissioner to Maryland insisted that "slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity." If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his party, "the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone."

If these warnings were not sufficient to frighten hesitating Southerners into secession, commissioners played the race card. A Mississippi commissioner told Georgians that Republicans intended not only to abolish slavery but also to "substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races." 

Georgia's commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, "we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything." 

An Alabamian born in Kentucky tried to persuade his native state to secede by portraying Lincoln's election as "nothing less than an open declaration of war" by Yankee fanatics who intended to force the "sons and daughters" of the South to associate "with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality," thus "consigning her [the South's] citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans..."
This argument appealed as powerfully to nonslaveholders as to slaveholders. Whites of both classes considered the bondage of blacks to be the basis of liberty for whites. Slavery, they declared, elevated all whites to an equality of status by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks. "If slaves are freed," maintained proslavery spokesmen, whites "will become menials. We will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen." 

Enslavement is kind of a big deal—so much so that it is impossible to imagine America without it. At the time I was reading this I was thinking about an essay (which I eventually wrote) arguing against the idea of the Civil War as tragedy. My argument was that the Civil War was basically the spectacular end of a much longer war extending back into the 17th century—a war against black people, their families, institutions and their labor. We call the war "slavery." John Locke helped me with that.


This was all swirling in my head about the time I saw this article in the Times:

On Saturday, more than 15,000 students are expected to file into classrooms to take a grueling 95-question test for admission to New York City’s elite public high schools. (The exam on Sunday, for about 14,000 students, was postponed until Nov. 18 because of Hurricane Sandy.) 

No one will be surprised if Asian students, who make up 14 percent of the city’s public school students, once again win most of the seats, and if black and Hispanic students win few. Last school year, of the 14,415 students enrolled in the eight specialized high schools that require a test for admissions, 8,549 were Asian.  

Because of the disparity, some have begun calling for an end to the policy of using the test as the sole basis of admission to the schools, and last month, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the federal government, contending that the policy discriminated against students, many of whom are black or Hispanic, who cannot afford the score-raising tutoring that other students can. The Shis, like other Asian families who spoke about the exam in interviews in the past month, did not deny engaging in extensive test preparation. To the contrary, they seemed to discuss their efforts with pride.

I was sort of horrified by this piece, because what the complaint seemed to be basically arguing for was punishing a group of people (Asian immigrants) who were working their asses off. It struck me that these were exactly the kind of people you want if you're building a country. Even though I am arguing for reparations, I actually believe in a playing field—a level playing field, no doubt—but one with actual competition. It struck me as wrong to punish people for working really hard to succeed in that competition.

This paragraph, in particular, got me:

Others take issue with the exam on philosophical grounds. “You shouldn’t have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school,” said Melissa Santana, a legal secretary whose daughter Dejanellie Falette has been prepping this fall for the exam. “That’s extreme.”

I was stewing reading this. It offended some of my latent nationalism—the basic sense that you want everyone on your "team" to go out there and fight. But as I thought about it I felt that there was something underneath the mother's point. In fact there are people who don't "have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school." But they tend to live in neighborhoods that have historically excluded children with names like Dejanellie. Why is that? Housing policy. What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement.

 

A few days later I sent the following rambling memo to my editor, Scott Stossel:

> Hey Scott. I have an essay that's starting to brew in me that I've been thinking a lot about. Are you at all interested in a piece that makes the case for reparations? This is totally pie in the sky, but it's my take on the Atlantic as a journal of "Big Ideas." There's this great piece in the Times a few weeks back about selective schools in New York and how Asian immigrants are dominating the process. I found myself really compelled by a lot of the stories and actually in more sympathy with the Asians (now Asian-Americans) than with the blacks who were protesting. A lot of what they were saying reminded me of the sort of stuff my own parents said.
>
> And then something occurred to me. The reason why a lot of these black parents are upset is because the schools are basically credentialing machines for the corridors of power. By not going to a Stuyvesant you miss out on that corridor, so the thinking goes. And moreso the feeling is (though never explicitly said) that black people deserve special consideration, given our history in this country. The result is that you have black parents basically lobbying for Asian-American kids to be punished because the country at large has never given much remedy for what it did to black people.
>
> I've thought the same before in reference to gentrification. The notion that DC should remain "black" has always struck me as really bizarre. Very little in America ever stays anything. Change is the nature of things. It only makes sense if you buy that black people are "owed" something. I.E. Since we never got anything for slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, block-busting, segregation, housing and job discrimination, we at least deserve the stability of neighborhoods and cities we can call home.
>
> I'm thinking about it with the Supreme Court set to dismantle Affirmative Action. Isn't the "diversity" argument actually kind of weak? Isn't the recompensation argument actually much more compelling? Except this was outlawed with Bakke. What I am thinking is right now, at this moment, American institutions (especially its schools) are being asked to answer for the fact that country lacked the courage to do the right thing. In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision coming down, in the wake of (what looks like) a second Obama term, we could make a really strong case that now is the time renew a serious discussion about Reparations.
>
> And we could move it beyond "Check in hand" discussion to something more sophisticated. Does this interest you? I actually could see us arguing that Obama has nothing to lose, and should explicitly support such a policy. He ain't gonna do it. But we might--might--be able to make a good faith argument for it.
>
> Any interest?

All of this did not stick. (I don't, for instance, think it would be a good idea for Obama to support reparations. That would actually be a horrible idea.) But by then I had it fully established in my head that we are asking other institutions to answer for something major in our history and culture.


The final piece of this was the uptick in cultural pathology critiques extending from the White House on down. There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people.


There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what's wrong with black people. But we don't really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence.


The final thing that happened was I became convinced that an unfortunate swath of  popular writers/pundits/intellectuals are deeply ignorant of American history. For the past two years, I've been lucky enough to directly interact with a number of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in the academy. The debates I've encountered at Brandeis, Virginia Commonwealth, Yale, Northwestern, Rhodes, and Duke have been some of the most challenging and enlightening since I left Howard University. The difference in tenor between those conversations and the ones I have in the broader world, are disturbing. What is considered to be a "blue period" on this blog, is considered to be a survey course among academics. Which is not to say everyone, or even mostly everyone, agrees with me in the academy. It is to say that I've yet to engage a historian or sociologist who's requested that I not be such a downer. 


This process was not as linear as I'm making it out to be. But it all combined to make me feel that mainstream liberal discourse was getting it wrong. The relentless focus on explanations which are hard to quantify, while ignoring those which are not, the subsequent need to believe that America triumphs in the end, led me to believe that we were hiding something, that there was something about ourselves which were loath to say out in public. Perhaps the answer was somewhere else, out there on the ostensibly radical fringes, something dismissed by people who should know better.


People like me. " [Source]


*Pic from The Atlantic

             

Close

 

The right has a slavery problem.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known." ~Pat Buchanan~


What is with these clowns on the right and all the slavery references? They seem fascinated with the institution of slavery these days. There is no doubt in my mind that they long for those good old days when slavery was all the rage. (Yes, even the Negro conservatives, because they were in the house with Massa.)


Is it any wonder that given this type of rhetoric, our welfare cowboy friend, Cliven Bundy, felt so comfortable declaring that under slavery black folks had it better? The right was even angry at the movie, 12 Years A Slave; because they thought that it portrayed slavery in a negative light. Think about that for a minute. I mean how else are you going to portray slavery?


Anyway, the latest idiotic and ignorant pronouncement comes from none other than my old friend, Angela McGlowan, the former "beauty queen" who is probably even more clueless than Sarah Palin.


“Dealing with Lincoln and Barack Obama, you do have a slave mentality today,” she said. “Even though we had the LBJ Great Society, we have a people enslaved on the government dole, where we have people paying for people to have more kids out of wedlock, paying for more people to go to prison instead of getting a job.”


“So we do have a problem with slavery today, as Lincoln did back in the day, even with LBJ’s policies,” McGlowan continued. “Because you have certain people that want Obama phones, free phones, free food stamps, and the whole nine yards!” [Source]


Did you get that? She said "free food stamps", as opposed to the ones you have to pay for. What an idiot! And "a problem with slavery today"? The only problem we have with slavery today is that some folks believe that it should come back.


Angela, I honestly can't wait for those "slaves" to storm the big-house on the plantation that you are living on.

Is there a Doctor in the HOUSE?

As someone who was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, it pains my heart to rip Dr. Ben Carson- a man I admire for his surgical skills- tonight.

The good doctor likened Obamacare to slavery. Imagine that for a minute. A health plan that makes it easier for people-even those who have a pre-existing medical condition-  to get coverage, is the same as an institution that brutalized an entire race of people in unspeakable ways.

But this is what happens when you rub elbows and share the same air-space with "values voters". You have to wonder about a bunch of people who call themselves "values voters" but have a flawed value system, themselves.

I bet Dr. Ben will be on FOX News next. Wait.....

Anyway, I think that they are supposed to be all Christians, but I heard nothing but unchristlike things coming out of their "summit".

"Towards the end of a sprawling, fiery speech at the Values Voter Summit, outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) predicted that in the near future, the Affordable Care Act will no longer be referred to as “Obamacare,” as conservatives originally intended, but rather as “Deathcare.”

“This egregious system, that will ultimately be known as ‘Deathcare’ must be defeated,” Bachmann declared. During the speech she set up a dichotomy of “police state,” symbolized by the shuttered World War II memorial during the government shutdown vs. “Constitutional republic,” represented by conservatives like her who fought to reopen it, only after directly causing the shutdown in the first place."

Nice. This woman of "values" accuses her government of promoting a plan to purposely kill people. Because nothing says Christian like an angry mean spirited political loser.

Still another one of Dr. Carson's palls accused the White House of wanting to take him hostage.

Ted Cruz, as you might have noticed, has a high opinion of himself.

Trust me, the last thing the White House would want to do is to get rid of Ted Cruz. Ted is the best thing to happen to this White House since Mitt Romney ran for president.

"None of us know what’s going to happen on this Obamacare fight right now,”..... “In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s been doing, which is standing strong.”

Don't believe it, if you keep doing what you are doing, the values summit will have to feature a lot more praying in the  future. 

Finally, if you want to see what's causing the fear and angst among those folks down at the values summit read this article. These people truly believe that they are losing their country, and that Barack Obama represents the type of people that they are losing it to.

The Democracy Corps study might be surprising to folks like James Carville, but not to me; I saw this coming from a mile away.


"What they found is downright frightening. The study, titled “Inside the GOP: Report on Focus Groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and Moderate Republicans” and written by Greenberg, Carville, and Erica Seifert, opens with an apocalyptic scenario:

If you want to understand the government shutdown and crisis in Washington, you need to get inside the base of the Republican Party. …
Understand that the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country—and their starting reaction is “worried,” “discouraged,” “scared,” and “concerned” about the direction of the country—and a little powerless to change course. They think [President Barack] Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in DC let him get away with it.

From there, it gets worse:

While many voters, even some Democrats, question whether Obama is succeeding and getting his agenda done, [core] Republicans think he has won. The country may think gridlock has won, particularly during a Republican-led government shut down, but Republicans see a president who has fooled and manipulated the public, lied, and gotten his secret socialist-Marxist agenda done. Republicans and their kind of Americans are losing.

Admittedly, the Democracy Corps report is impressionistic and based on focus groups; therefore, it can’t be exaggerated into a scientific study. Still, as pundit-blogger Andrew Sullivan accurately notes, “It’s a sobering read … and definitely helps explain the primal scream now threatening to take down the entire American system of elective government.”

The report is at its discouraging best—or should I say worst?—in the way that it illuminates the thinking of the focus-group participants’ fears surrounding the changing demography of the country. Nobody made crude racial references or spoke in the offensive language of bigots, according to the reports’ writers. Yet a fear of racial change lies at the core of the GOP base’s concerns. The report states:

They have an acute sense that they are white in a country that is becoming increasingly “minority,” [that] their party is getting whooped by a Democratic Party that uses big government programs that benefit mostly minorities, creat[ing] dependency and a new electoral majority.

Or, as one evangelical man in Roanoke put it—apparently blind to the irony of the government shutdown by a small number of Tea Party activists in the U.S. House of Representatives—“The government’s giving in to a [racial] minority, to push an agenda, as far as getting the votes for the next time.”

Paging Dr Carson, paging Dr. Carson.













 

Just a "flaw" in our history, Washington's real scandal, and hide your peacocks in Illinois.

It is always interesting to hear how some people in the majority population want to whitewash (pun intended) history when they talk about slavery.

 

Take for instance the conservative gentleman on Bill Maher's HBO program on Friday. He dismissed Joy Reid calling out the imperfections of the America Revolution because slavery was just "a flaw" in a grand experiment.

 

Now if you happen to be black or a descendant of one of these slaves, I dare say that you think that the atrocities committed against slaves was a bit more than just "a flaw". It was a crime against humanity, and it should never be forgotten, or white washed and minimized by 21^st Century talking heads and pseudo historians.

 

"Republicans love talking about slavery if they can somehow accuse President Obama of being worse than it, but when it comes to recognizing the historical significance of actual slavery… well, not so much. On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, a great example of this was on display when MSNBC contributor and Managing Editor for TheGrio.com Joy Reid mentioned slavery to refute the argument that the American Revolution was somehow exemplary, in comparison to the Arab Spring, and National Review writer Charles Cooke called the reference a “cheap shot,” opining that slavery was a “flaw” that rendered the Revolution “imperfect.”

 

Host Bill Maher was arguing that the Middle-Eastern dictatorships that have been overthrown during the Arab Spring are being replaced by Muslim theocracies, which, he argued, “are dictatorships themselves, aren’t they?”
Cooke responded that Americans “have a problem thinking about this” because “the revolution that happened here was great, and very rarely is that the case in the world.” 

Cooke responded that Americans “have a problem thinking about this” because “the revolution that happened here was great, and very rarely is that the case in the world.”

He explained, “You have this revolution in America in which the British fight the British, and then they codify classical liberal values in a constitution, and it’s great,” adding that in “normal” revolutions, “there’s bloodshed, and it’s horrible.”

Joy Reid countered that “The revolution in the U.S. was great, unless you were a slave, and there was a war in which 600,000 Americans had to die to make it better.”

“So, revolution isn’t always great,” Joy continued, “in the French Revolution, you had beheadings. Revolutions are messy, so if you want people to have democracy, it can be messy, right?”

“The slavery point, I think, is cheap,” Cooke responded.

“You mean the revolution in the United States that produced a government that included slaves, that included enslaved Africans, its a cheap shot, to include that in the narrative?” Reid asked. “Í mean, that is part of the narrative.”

“No,” Cooke replied, “the point is that of you’re looking for perfection in the 18th Century, you’re not going to find it. What the Americans did was a massive step forward, it wasn’t perfect, it was resolved in a civil war that was bloody and awful, but if we’re going to write off the greatest revolution, the greatest constitution in world history because it was imperfect and it was flawed.." [Source] 

Come on now Ms. Reid. That's only a part of the "narrative" if you happen to be one of those black racist troublemakers. Remember, as my twitter fam Jaru said, here in America "we never use historical facts in an argument".

Speaking of facts, that is something that is not too popular in Washington these days. But there are a lot of so called "scandals" swirling around that town. We all know about Benghazi, and the Tea Party IRS beef (I am still trying to figure out why the lamestream media didn't jump on the IRS when W and his crew were targeting the NAACP), but sadly,the biggest scandal of all in Washington has been ignored by the willfully blind and ignorant here in America.

"Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.

Don’t think it’s a scandal? It’s pretty basic: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.

The New York Times yesterday highlighted two of the more recent ways that Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy. It’s worth stepping back and realizing: what’s happening here is that Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters. 

That’s just two examples. There are numerous others; again, with virtually all nominees required to have 60 votes, one can accurately say that Republicans are filibustering every nomination. But perhaps the worst are the “nullification” filibusters, in which Republicans simply refuse to approve any nominee at all for some positions — the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because they don’t want those agencies to carry out their statutory obligations.

In doing so, Republicans are not breaking the rules of the Senate. They are, however, breaking the Senate itself, and harming the government." [Source]

Yes, but nobody cares about "harming the government" if the Socialist with the Kenyan father is in charge of it.

Finally, there are some truly sick people in the world. As a social Libertarian I strongly believe that folks should be able to do whatever they want to do in the privacy of their own homes. Especially if they are two consenting adults. But a bird????!!!!

I mean I agree that a peacock is a beautiful animal, but I am not looking at a peacock and thinking I want to get my freak on.

   

" A Roselle, Ill., man was charged with animal cruelty after police investigating another crime discovered that he had sexually abused his pet peacock.

 

David Beckmann, 64, was booked at DuPage County jail on Wednesday on separate charges of battery and attempted indecent solicitation of a child, the Daily Herald reported."

 

Lord have mercy! Not even our Peacocks are safe in society from these sickos. [Story]

 

 

 

  

 

Fifty Shades of Oprah, and a call for segregation at CPAC.

That boy Terrence Howard done lost his mind. I know he is supposed to be a big shot actor and all, but you don't go around messing with black royalty like Oprah.

"It appears that billionaire Oprah Winfrey has a sense of humor as large as her bank account. After actor Terrence Howard turned heads earlier this month mentioning Winfrey’s bosom while filming a love scene, the media mogul responded to Howard’s comments in an interview with Steve Harvey.
RELATED: The Strangest Chat With Terrence Howard Reveals His Cure For Cancer & Lust For Oprah

Last week, in an interview with Movie Fanatic on his upcoming film “The Butler,” which is directed by Lee Daniels, Howard said:
“To be able to make out with Oprah, to have love scenes with her and those tig ol’ bitties — she’s such a lovely and voluptuous woman. … She’s very, very, very beautiful, and that was wonderful.”

Keptman...I mean, Stedman is going to get with you boy. Leave that man's money....I mean woman alone.

"In an clip posted Friday morning, Harvey got straight to the point and asked Oprah about Howard’s questionable comments, with Oprah responding:

“It was supposed to be a little scene, and because Terrence Howard misbehaved, it turned into a bigger scene and then a bigger scene,” said Oprah.
Harvey comically interjected to which Winfrey said, “Oh, he’s a misbehaving kind of boy. I saw him on Twitter the other day talking about my breasteses.”
Harvey said he checked Howard on his statements, echoing a sentiment that many found his public adoration of Winfrey a bit inappropriate. After saying Winfrey could buy Howard’s next film, Winfrey said she wasn’t offended as many of her fans may have been.

“I wasn’t…you know what, some people called me saying they were all offended by it. I go, ‘Well, I do have big breasteses,” said Winfrey with a laid-back shrug."

Oprah, you shouldn't be talking like that. You must have been reading "Fifty Shades of Grey with all those white women.

Finally, they have been having fun down at CPAC. Why these republican blacks would even try to have a panel discussion on anything having to do with black folks is beyond me. I mean we are talking about CPAC attendees here.

So anyway, some loser named Scott Terry was looking for his 15 minutes and it looks like he got it.

"NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said 'For what? For feeding him and housing him?' Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, 'why can’t we just have segregation?'” [Source]

Mr. Terry, when I hear people like you I wonder the same thing.

*Top pic from NewsOne.com

Family feud, and two slaves plus two slaves equals....

I am no fan of wrestling, and with all due respect to Hulk Hogan, Andre The Giant, and Eddie Guerrero, I have never been one. But this feud between Glenn Beck and the WWE is getting really interesting.

"The WWE’s Jack Swagger® and Zeb Colter® have hit back hard at Glenn Beck after Beck referred to them as “stupid wrestling people” on his show. In a video posted online Friday, the two men perform a promo as their over-the-top Tea Party-inspired personae, before breaking character to address Beck’s comments directly.

Beck had taken offense to the WWE characters, who he said were out to “demonize” the Tea Party. “Maybe that’s the way WWE people view the Tea Party,” Beck said on his show. “Maybe they love to hate the Tea Party.”
Pulling back to reveal the green-screen artifice of what they do, Wayne Keown (Colter) and Jake Hager (Swagger) explained to Beck that they are merely entertainers, with no larger political agenda.

“We aren’t in the political business, or the immigration business. We are in the entertainment business,” Keown said. He went on to attack Beck directly for failing to give his audience credit when it comes to the general understanding that pro-wrestling is fake. “Many of your followers are WWE fans and they understand the difference between reality and entertainment,” he added. “Are you out of touch with your audience Glenn? Or are you just a ‘stupid political commentator?’”

Keown once again extended the invitation for Beck to appear on Monday Night RAW this coming week, offering him five minutes of unedited air-time to offer a rebuttal. Beck has already rejected the offer once, saying, “Unfortunately I am currently booked doing anything else.” Will Beck’s desire for self-promotion over-take his reluctance to degrade himself by appearing with the “stupid” WWE? We’ll have to wait until Monday to find out."

Folks, this is ironic, since many would argue that Beck's schtick is the political equivalent to the WWE. Maybe this is why he finds what they do so offensive. Too close to home. There is only room for one Ringmaster in the circus.

Finally, the people of New York are outraged at two Manhattan public school teachers who used slavery to teach math. The fact that the teachers were white and that they were teaching mostly white kids had folks even more upset. (Get on your Air R track shoes Field, I feel a racism chase coming.) Tonight there will be no chase, because I have no problem with these teachers using slavery to teach math in the way that they did.

The problem with some folks here in America is that they want to pretend that slavery never existed. And when children are forced to deal with the horrors of slavery in a teachable way they become outraged.

 "School statistics show the student body at the E. 56th St. school is 60% white — higher than the city average — while just 5% of students are African-American.

Parents at the well-off school were shocked by the flap. “I don’t think that’s reflective at all of what the school is about,” said one parent who asked not be named.

Principal Adele Schroeter said she was “appalled” by the incident and ordered sensitivity training for the entire staff.

Youn and Vitucci will face disciplinary action, said schools spokeswoman Connie Pankratz. She would not provide details or say whether the teachers will remain in their classrooms." [Source]

Slavery was shocking; teaching it to children is not. The sensitivity training is being offered to the wrong people; it's the parents of those children and the Principal who should be forced to go to sensitivity training, not the teachers who tried to remind the students about their country's history.









 

Onward Christian Slave owners.

I will be the first to admit that even though I am the son of a preacher I am not too up on my religious teachings. Still, even a theological neophyte like myself knows that we had to be farther from God during slavery than we are now. At least I thought we were.

"We strayed away different times. Andrew Jackson's time was not a great time; different times slavery was a blot on our existence," Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said this week, adding, "But the trouble is we have never as an entire nation overall been so far away from God’s teaching." Speaking on a conference call with far-right pastor Rick Scarborough, he warned that the much-worse-than slavery sins going on today could lead the nation "toward the end of [its] existence." [Source]

"Much worse than slavery sins"? Hmmm, let's see now, slaves were murdered, raped, and forced to work for free; what could be worse than that?

But this kind of rhetoric barely gets noticed in our country these days.  Americans are either too embarrassed or too willfully ignorant to let these reminders of just how backwards we are get into our collective psyche.
Poor Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter can't even shock us anymore with their verbal antics. When elected politicians are telling us that we are more sinful now than when we held human beings as our animals, what could those two (and others like them) possibly say to get our outrage meters up?

Finally, I know that my wingnut friends are trying very hard to suppress the vote of...ahem ahem....certain people, but I sure hope that the rest of the country is keeping their eyes on people like Colin Small. [That's Colin in the pic. Doesn't he just look like a little angel?Not! ] It seems that Colin and his peeps have been busy trying to make sure that we don't have a close election this year.
 

The Rockingham County Sheriff’s office arrested Colin Small, a 31-year-old resident of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, after receiving a report from a Harrisonburg store manager who says he saw Small throwing eight voter registration forms into a nearby dumpster, just before the Monday filing deadline.

Investigators say Small works for Pinpoint, a company hired by the Virginia GOP to register voters. The Sheriff’s office said there doesn’t seem to be a widespread case of voter form destruction and that the incident may not have been politically motivated.

Chairman Pat Mullins, of the Republican Party of Virginia, called Small’s actions “a direct contradiction of both his training and explicit instructions given to him.”
“The Republican Party of Virginia will not tolerate any action by any person that could threaten the integrity of our electoral process,” Mullins said. “The individual in question was fired immediately after we learned of his alleged actions.” [Source]

Mr. Mullins, I think your nose is growing.

Maybe Joe was right. And the campaign of the dead.

*

I have to give it to republicans, at least they are consistent. Take, for instance, Arkansas state senator, John Hubbard. My man doesn't think that slavery was such a bad thing. In fact, he believes that slavery was a "blessing in disguise" for you Negroes. (Joe Biden is looking like a prophet right about now.)

"A Republican member of the Arkansas state senate’s self-published memoir claims that for black people in America, slavery was a “blessing in disguise,” that, if they were physically hardy enough to survive it, “someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.” According to the Arkansas Times, Rep. Jon Hubbard, of Jonesboro, included these thought and others in his book, Letters to the Editor, Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, which was initially written about and excerpted by writer Michael Cook at Talk Business.

“(T)he institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise,” Hubbard wrote. “The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.” [Source]

Yes, because nothing says great nation like enslaving your own citizens.

Anyway, this too will pass. Just another Southern wingnut politrickster who is making the rest of us in these divided states of America believe that having them secede wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Mr. Hubbard is from Arkansas, Mr. Broun is from Georgia. --We will miss you Atlanta--. Sorry, but the thought of Paul Broun being an elected leader and policy maker in Washington is scary.

Speaking of scary politricksters, I see that Mr. Romney has been showing his more human side lately on the election trail. Well, his human side as it relates to dead people.

"Trying to convince voters that he is human. (Ann can't do all the work herself.) Of course, Romney's not super experienced when it comes to this sort of thing, so his efforts have been a little awkward. Mostly, he's been talking about dead people.

Romney spent the weekend in Florida where he debuted a new version of his stump speech containing three "revealing and personal" stories about deaths that impacted his life. The first was about an old friend from graduate school — Bill Hulse, a quadriplegic as a result of an accident — who recently attended a campaign event:

"It's not easy for Billy to get around. Quadriplegic…he can't move, of course, his arms and his legs, and he can barely speak," Romney said. "I reached down and I put my hand on Billy's shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said 'Billy, God bless you, I love ya.' And he whispered right back to me – and I couldn't quite hear what he said. He tried to speak loud enough for me to hear."
 

Hulse died the day after the encounter. "It’s rare that you get the chance to tell someone how much you love them while you still can," Romney added.

Next up was a tribute to a 14-year-old Mormon church member who Romney counseled during the boy's battle with leukemia. At one point, he asked "Brother Romney" to help him draft his will: "So I went to the hospital and got my legal pad to make it look official," Romney recalled. "[David] said, ‘I want my fishing rod to go to one friend, and I want my skateboard to go to another friend, and I want my rifle to go to my brother.'" For extra human appeal, he concluded the story with a Friday Night Lights reference: “I thought of that wonderful slogan some years later: clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose. David passed away, but I’ll always remember — never forget — his courage, his clear eyes, full heart. He won’t lose."

Finally, he talked about meeting a woman at the Republican National Convention whose husband had been killed in Afghanistan. Anti-war protesters had picketed the funeral. When asked "What do you think of these people?" she told Romney: "Chris died for them to be able to protest." The lesson? "This is quite a nation we live in." [Source]

Hey, at least he didn't tell any stories about bringing anyone back from the dead. I bet if he did my GOP friends in the South would believe it. After all, God does "move in mysterious ways". 

*Pic from rawstory.com