Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.


*Pic from usatoday.com

Freudian slips and blackface.

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Now this is what I call a Freudian slip.

"WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Thursday outlined the importance of faith in American society in a speech that at times mirrored his State of the Union address from earlier this week.

"I will never let you down, I can say that," Trump told the crowd at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. 

The president proceeded to list his administration's accomplishments and goals. 
But those words were quickly overshadowed on social media when, in the midst of praising religion's role in U.S. history, Trump made an apparent gaffe and celebrated the "abolition of civil rights." 

"Since the founding of our nation, many of our greatest strides – from gaining our independence to abolition of civil rights to extending the vote for women – have been led by people of faith," Trump said."

I am still amazed that America elected this man to lead the country. The thing is, if you ask him about his "ironic misspeak" he will say that it's fake news, and he never spoke those words. He would say it, and his cult like followers would believe him.

I wouldn't mind the fact that the guy can't read a full sentence, or that he has the attention span of a two year old, if he would just practice a little intellectual curiosity. Is that too much to ask from  the president of the United States? We recently heard about all the "executive time" and the constant television watching, and we are all left to wonder who is running the country.

Finally, what the hell is going on in Virginia?!  I mean was black face just the norm among white folks of a certain age back in the day? Now it turns out that the number three man in charge of that state did a little black- facing himself in years gone by. This is crazy. The three top democrats in the state are all engulfed in their own personal scandals. 

Of course a scandal about race wouldn't be complete without a republican involved. And, sure enough, the powerful state senate majority leader in Virginia was editor of a VMI  yearbook that was full of racist images and blackface back in the day. 

"Norment added that he is "not surprised that those wanting to engulf Republican leaders in the current situations involving the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general would highlight the yearbook from my graduation a half-century ago."'

I wish I could say that black face is now heading for the garbage heap of history, but we all know that isn't true. Just look at all the young college kids still dressing up in blackface. It's seems like the more things change is the more they stay the same.

Let's face it folks, Americans just can't leave their blackface alone.
 

    

 

"Some of our best friends were racists."

I am trying to stay up to watch this state of the union address, but it's hard. I mean between the crooked red tie, the sniffing, the lies, and the I have some black friends segment, I would rather organize my garage or watch paint dry.

Anywhoo, trump is still going on  (I lost count of all the lies) as I write this post, but there is an interesting article that I want you to read in light of all the goings on down in Virginia. 

"A photo on a governor's old yearbook page surfaces showing a person in blackface and another wearing a white Ku Klux Klan hood.

The photo can't be written off as a "youthful indiscretion" because the people in it are adults.

The governor first apologizes for the photo then denies he's either of the people in the photo, while admitting he once darkened his face for a Michael Jackson dance contest.

What more do you need to know? The damage to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's credibility is so beyond repair that some critics say he has to go.

But here's an uncomfortable truth that photo won't reveal:

Some of the biggest champions for black people in America's past have been white politicians who were racists. 

Some of our best friends were racist

A pop history quiz:

Who was the white Southerner who used the N-word almost like a "connoisseur" and routinely called a landmark civil rights law "the n----- bill."

That was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the greatest civil rights champion of any modern-day president.

Who was the white judge who joined the KKK, marched in their parades and spoke at nearly 150 Klan meetings in his white-hooded uniform?

That was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who incurred the wrath of his fellow Southerners when he voted to abolish Jim Crow segregation in the court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

And who was the white politician who also used the N-word freely, told racist jokes and said African-Americans were biologically inferior to whites?

 That's Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator" and arguably the nation's greatest president.

The point of these examples is not to offer a historical loophole for any leader caught being blatantly racist. What happens to Northam is ultimately up to the people he serves and to his conscience.

But what I'm saying is that what matters to some black people -- not all, maybe not even most -- is not what a white politician did 30 years ago.

It's what he's doing for them today.

Who would pass the racist abstinence pledge?

I'm wary of those commentators who say they speak for an entire race of people. When a white friend sometimes asks what black people think of an issue, I sometimes tell them, "I don't know, I missed the Weekly Meeting for All Black People in America."

Yet I feel confident in saying this: Most are not shocked to hear that a white politician who is a purported ally is accused of doing something racist.

We expect racism from many white people. Even among liberals.

It's buried so deep that many white liberals don't see it, George Sachs said in a recent essay, "10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism."

"It's automatic and hidden. Binding and resistant to change," the psychologist wrote. "No matter how well-meaning we are, no matter how open-minded. Like the 'root kit' on a computer, racism is hidden and operating without our knowledge."

That's why we're sometimes able to accept a political leader caught being racist. And I'm not just talking an abstract acceptance of politicians from another era like Lincoln or Johnson.

I'm talking about contemporary politics. 

President Bill Clinton infuriated plenty of black people in 1992 with his "Sister Souljah" moment. The then-Arkansas governor was running for president when he compared the rapper Sister Souljah's angry comments about recent riots in Los Angeles to David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK.

But the black community still largely accepted Clinton because they didn't define him by that one remark. He was so beloved at one point that he was called the nation's first black president.

And then there's former Vice President Joe Biden.

Remember when he and Obama were competing for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2007? Biden called Obama "articulate and bright and clean," as if that was a rarity for a black leader.

But Obama went on to choose Biden as his running mate, and Biden is still so popular in the black community that he is considering another run for the presidency.

Even Obama learned to accept such flaws from a white person who was more than a political ally.

It was his white grandmother.

In the famous "race" speech he gave in 2008 when his candidacy was threatened by the release of his former pastor's angry condemnation of America, Obama invoked her.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me ... but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that make me cringe."

If black people only worked with white allies free of any racism, bias or past mistakes, we would be alone.

Before the yearbook incident, Northam won the support of Virginia's black community. He forcefully denounced the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that took the life of a young woman. He successfully pushed for the expansion of Obamacare in Virginia. Former President Barack Obama campaigned for him. He won almost 90% of the black vote in his successful run for governor in 2017.

That might help him, or it may not be enough.

What matters for some is not one act from a person's life but the entire play. Do they push for equality in the end?

What matters, too, is how they respond when they're caught in the act. Do they try to deny it, rationalize it with lines like, "That's not who I am today?" Or do they own up to their racism, make no excuses and vow to do better?

LBJ, the racist civil rights hero

President Lyndon Johnson is a prime example of someone who was able to rise above his racism.

In staff meetings, Johnson would routinely use the word "nigra" and "negra," according to the author Adam Serwer in an essay entitled, "Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist."

He shares a painful story from a biography on Johnson, when Johnson asked his chauffeur if he'd prefer to be called by his name instead of "boy" or the N-word.

When the chauffeur said he preferred to be called by his name, Johnson grew angry and told him, "No one's gonna call you by your goddamn name. ... So no matter what you are called, n-----, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you'll make it."

But Johnson was the same man who smashed Jim Crow by championing the landmark civil rights bill that formally ended American apartheid, Serwer notes.

Johnson's passion for civil rights was so heartfelt that the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells a remarkable story in a recent book. It took place when Johnson confronted a Southern senator who was leading the opposition against what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Sen. Richard Russell told Johnson that if he pushed the bill, he would lose the upcoming presidential election, and the Democratic Party would lose the South forever.

"Dick, you may be right. But if that's the price I've gotta pay, I'm going to gladly do it," Johnson says, according to Goodwin's book, "Leadership: In Turbulent Times." 

No room for redemption

But could Johnson even survive as a leader today?

In the church of the modern-day media, there is no room for redemption. We have a zero-tolerance policy against anyone caught being a racist. They can apologize profusely without any denials or rationalizations, but they will most likely be banished from public life.

And no doubt this policy is good. We can't return to the days when politicians freely used the N-word in public. But I think we lose something when we don't allow any politicians to grow past their mistakes.

One of the reasons Johnson was such an effective champion for blacks is that he understood the Southern mind better than most. He was fighting against the same demons that he grappled with. He knew what buttons to push against the racist politicians who stood in his way.

Yet there is not much room for a politician to evolve in today's environment. There is a "rage industrial complex" that fixates on the latest racial flashpoint: an outrageous video, remark or image that's passed around social media like a viral grenade.

Meanwhile those banal acts of racism that don't get caught in a photo or a tweet go by unremarked.

Here's when I know there's genuine racial progress.

It's not when a white politician is caught being racist and people demand his or her head. It's when people show the same amount of public outrage over the everyday acts of racism -- voter suppression, racial profiling, redlining -- that define so much of our everyday lives.

Now that would be shocking." [Source]

Interesting. But my take is this as well: Johnson and Lincoln were racists, and in spite of their racism they did some good things to advance the cause of civil rights. Now, in 2019, politicians and those in positions of influence should not be shackled by the ignorance of racism. They should know better.

When the ghosts of racism past comes calling.

I am always amused at some folks who are surprised when a democratic politician gets caught with his or her pants down and their racism undies get exposed. Here is a newsflash for some of you: racism is not exclusive to the republican party or folks with conservative or right-wing political leanings. Just ask Bill Maher. (Really dude? Fried chicken jokes?) I am still not sure why that dude thinks he has a black card. But I digress.

Anyway, the curious case of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam  had us all scratching our collective heads. There he was (or now he says he wasn't) in a college yearbook in the year of our Lord 1984, posing in a klan outfit or in black face (he wasn't sure which one) for all the world to see. I swear you can't make this stuff up. His nickname in school was "coonman" for crying out loud.

But it get's crazier. The governor actually said that he put on his black face so that he could play Michael Jackson in a dance contest, and that he had a lot of black friends. Yes, he really said that. This was 1984, before Michael became white, so I guess that it's possible. But why do it in the first place? 

Honestly, I actually feel sorry for this guy, because he represents what is wrong with so many folks of his ilk in this country. He is a casual racist, who still doesn't understand the historical significance of his actions. The problem for him is that he is a democrat, and democrats, unlike their republican pals, will not embrace such an individual in their party. Had he been a republican they would have rallied around him and told the liberal snowflakes to get over it. (Still crickets from trump on Mr Nazi himself, Steve King.)The democrats can't afford to do that, because there are too many people of color under their tent.

Governor Ralph now says that he is not stepping down, and that it was not him in any of those pictures that have been floating around from his college days. I wonder what made him decide to change his mind. First he said that he was in the picture, now he says that he isn't. Clearly he did something similar because he would not have though that it was him in the first place.

If someone told me that there is a sex tape floating around out there with me and Emayatzy Corinealdi, I would be like no way, because I know that I never had sex with Emayatzy Corinealdi. But if I had sex with Emayatzy Corinealdi and someone said there was a sex tape out there, I would probably do what Governor Ralph did when he first heard of the racist pictures: admit that it was me getting my business on with the Nubian beauty. Clearly he did something similar to what is being alleged, and he is now trying his best to do damage control.

Over the weekend the usual suspects piled on, and folks on the right feigned outrage for political reasons. The chorus has grown louder and louder for the Governor to step down. 

My two cents: Governor Ralph should step down. Not because he is any different than the thousands of racists in similar positions, but sadly for him, because he was caught. 

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from socialnewsdaily.com

"The chosen one."

You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe that God wanted trump to be president. But don't laugh, that is exactly what Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a Christian broadcasting station recently. 

If God really planned to give us trump as president, God really has a sick way of showing love for the people she created. Atheist all over the world must be saying, I told you so. 

Still, I never understand when folks say God wanted a particular outcome and not another. I mean some white Christian conservatives hated Obama, and yet he was president for eight years.Did God give us Obama as well? Did God put democrats in the House these past mid-terms by helping them to take so many seats from republicans? I mean all this God love from right-wingnuts just doesn't make sense when she has been throwing them so much shade recently.

The funny thing is that trump himself has embraced this farcical mantra that he is some kind of religious man of God. So much so that he is doing dangerous things such as speaking out for  bible literacy tests in public schools. This from a man who couldn't even quote his favorite bible verse when asked. (He literally made up his own passage in the bible.)

 I am quite sure the last time Mr. trump touched a bible was when he accidentally touched one on a night stand while in a hotel room with one of his jump-offs.  It's kind of ironic that a man who has cheated on numerous wives, and has been accused of rape, is the religious leader that Christian conservatives choose to embrace.

But hey, to each his or her  own.

 "I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president," Sanders said, according to CBN News. "That's why he's there and I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about."

I have a verse for Sarah. It's from the book of John: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 

The truth part is going to be a little tough for the flock . 

American heresy.

The following essay is must read for those of us living in trump's America.

The Field Negro education series continues.

"God doesn’t bless America.

That’s not how this works.

I’m sorry to break it to you, Bible Belt Christians—but that’s just how it is.

I know this kinda wrecks the convenient narrative you’ve been working for the past 60 or so years (and hitting especially hard the past eighteen months), but honestly that nasty bit of heresy has done enough damage already and it needs to go. It’s straight-up of the devil.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your taglines and hat slogans from, but I know it isn’t from the Bible. I know it isn’t from your coveted and regularly trotted out John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God loved the world.

God is in the world-loving business—not the America-blessing business.

You remember the world, don’t you; that massive, spinning sphere of 7.6 billion disparate human beings: brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ folks, Atheists, shithole countries—and lots and lots of non-English speaking, non-Americans?

Check out the Old and New Testaments again.

Read through the Gospels a few times.

Use any translation you’d like:

No America First.
No Making America Great Again (or at all.)
No flags or national anthems to pledge allegiance to.
A few other bits of news from the Scriptures:
Jesus was born in the Middle East.
He didn’t speak English.
He wasn’t white.
He wasn’t Evangelical.
He wasn’t a Republican.
He wasn’t American.
Heck, he wasn’t even Christian.

Jesus was a Rabbi who spent his days as an itinerant street preacher, living off the generosity of strangers and speaking in parables about a new “Kingdom of God:'” a radical way of living where the poor were cared for, the oppressed freed, and the outcasts welcomed in.

Jesus came to usher in a countercultural kind of interdependent community, in direct opposition to the power-wielding Roman Empire he stepped into. It was a diverse, barrier-breaking, border-transcending, nation-defying movement of generosity and mutual affection. It had nothing to do with blessing a Government or building an army—or creating a gated community of white folks in North America two thousand years in the future.

To claim that America was at all the point of the Gospels is flat-out heresy.

To assume any God-ordained supremacy based on religion, nation of origin, pigmentation, orientation, or native tongue—is a perversion of the work of Jesus and idolatry of the worst kind.

I’m sorry to break all this bad news to you. I understand the actual words of the Gospel are problematic, given the story you’re selling to those whose fear you’re leveraging in America right now.

It’s impossible to be devoted to the Jesus of the Scriptures, while refusing refugees, expelling immigrants, vilifying brown people, worshiping political power, guarding borders, and neglecting the poor—which is exactly the point.

As long as you continue to conflate God and America, you’re going to be whitewashing the Good News, shrinking God into your own image, and bastardizing the message of Jesus in ways that can only be described as fully and violently heretical.

If your God is America—you need a bigger God." [Source]

Go ahead and pass the offering plate for John Pavlovitz. 

Did he get a Whopper from Burger King?

I am glad that they finally caught the little monster who murdered five people in Louisiana. Apparently he was on his way to see his grandmother and to murder her as well.

Most of us were not surprised to see that he was taken alive. Because, well , he was white.
Let's face it, had Dakota Theriot looked like Treyvon Martin, we would be celebrating how law enforcement officials in Virginia saved taxpayers money by putting down the little monster.

Picture this. Theriot approached the scene where he was captured with his gun drawn and pointed at law enforcement officials, and he was still taken alive. Keep in mind that they already knew that he had already killed five people, was "extremely dangerous", and still they couldn't kill the monster who looked like the boy next door. I mean he could be one of their sons for crying out loud.
 
This of course is nothing new. The most recent example is that of Zephen Xaver.  All he did was slaughter five innocent human beings in a Florida bank before calling 911 to come and take him peacefully. (A wall wouldn't have kept him out, either. He was one of "us".) Of course, as was expected, law enforcement officials did just that.

The running joke in the black online community is that whenever we hear about one of these shootings, we can tell the race of the perp depending on whether he was taken alive or not. This has always been the case, but we really started to pay attention after Dylann Roof murdered those nine innocent church goers in South Carolina. After his horrific crime, he was incredibly brought a Whopper from Burger King by law enforcement officials before being arrested.

Imagine if you are the parents of Tamir Rice and have to watch all of this kind of stuff go down. He was only 12 years old when he was shot and killed by law enforcement officials for playing with a toy gun in a park. Contrast his treatment with that of the animals mentioned above. 

His only crime was being born black in America. There will be no trip to Burger King and a Whopper for him. 

*Pic from npr.org.

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: I swear she moved on me like a bitch

Pic from newsweek.com

The Marie Antoinette crew.

             These are tough times in America for a lot of people. I really feel for those poor federal workers who are about to lose a second paycheck because Mr. trump is holding them hostage for his vanity wall.

Of course we know that Mr. trump and his out of touch aides have no clue what ordinary working class people are going through. They have been having one let them eat cake moment after another.

They have claimed that this shutdown should be like a "paid vacation", and that all working class families who are struggling to put food on their table need to do is to make "adjustments." Go figure.

Today, Wilbur Ross, who is worth almost a billion dollars, suggested that all those federal workers who are working should just go to the bank or a credit union and tell their local banker to break them off. Poor Wilbur said that he didn't understand why these people are going to food banks to get food.
His leader was not better. While trying to back up Ross, Mr. trump declared that local banks and vendors would work with the unpaid workers.

I am not sure what universe these people live in. But here in the real world you just can't walk into the local bank and tell the banker to float you a few thousand dollars and you are good for it. You can't go to  the landlord and tell him that you will take care of your past-due rent as soon as the government opens. The landlord has bills too.

Today, a trump spokesperson was asked if the president was concerned about a terrorist attack or a plane going down because of trump's vanity wall project. She wouldn't answer the question. Instead, she chose to give us the usual deflection.

And the trump family members are still throwing us cake scraps from their 18k gold-plated table.

"Lara Trump’s comments came during an interview this week with digital news network Bold TV, after she was asked what she’d say to people missing paychecks.

She said, 'Listen, this is, it’s not fair to you, and we all get that, but this is so much bigger than any one person,...”' 

This stupid useless border wall isn't bigger than anything. The president told us that Mexico would pay for it, and that it would be a great  concrete walled structure across the Southern border. He lied! And the scary thing is that when he told his gullible supporters that lie, he knew that he was lying and they fell for it. Some of those same supporters are now struggling and trying to keep food on the table. They are having second thoughts about voting for the New York con man, because their stomachs are growling and their bills are piling up.

I feel their pain.

Sadly, the man they voted for and his aides can't say that. 

*Pic from businessinsider.com





   

The Covington Catholic spin, and America's willingness to buy into it.

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I am not sure who little Ted Cruz and his friends hired for their PR campaign and damage control tour, but whoever it is deserves a bonus.

There he was on NBC with Samantha Guthrie, trying to play the hero, and looking just like the boy next door. His MAGA hat no doubt tucked away with all his baseball cards and Boy Scout awards.

Now, because of a video showing four crazed Black Israelites (more on them in a minute) shouting at these school boys, we are supposed to believe that THEY were threatened, and that THEY were the ones who had to stand their ground against racism and intimidation. Poor little Ted Cruz was taunting that Native American, but he was merely standing HIS ground.   And America is buying it. Folks have deleted tweets, news outlets have retracted stories, and talking heads are saying that we owe the boys an apology for "jumping to conclusions".  I beg to differ.

We all saw the video, and every person of color who has lived on this earth longer than 24 hours knows what was going on. We know now who those kids were. We have seen them all before. Just look at some of those old Jim Crow era pictures of racists taunting and harassing civil rights workers and freedom riders, and you will see them again.

It's not like these kids and this school didn't have a history. Listen to some of the things they were saying on the tape, watch their behavior again as they circled around those Native Americans and mocked their tribal dance. Tell me again if you think that they were just poor little kids being heckled by those evil Black Israelites. And as for those Black Israelites; they are in every major city in America, and they hassle and harass  black folks and damn near everyone else on a regular basis. I have been harassed by them for simply walking by with a white co-worker. I was called a Tom and a Coon along with some other choice words. It's par for the course with those folks. They might yell and scream, but they are harmless. Most white and black folks who have lived in places with more than one stoplight would know this.  For the Covington Catholic kids to say that they turned on this group of Native Americans because they were being harassed by four Black Israelites is ludicrous. And what's sad is that a lot of folks have bought into the spin. (I see you CNN.)

Now, not surprisingly, they are being invited to the White House for a sit down with their grand leader. This is America in 2019. Act like a racist ignorant boor in the nation's capital, and you get invited to meet the Boor In Chief. Mr. trump says that the kids were treated "unfairly" by the media. But the media was simply reporting (before all the spin) what actually happened.

Of course, if you believe David French, this is what's happening as well:

"Last year, conservative wives looked at the furious attack on Kavanaugh and thought, "That could be my husband." Now conservative moms look at the wild attempt to destroy the Covington kids and think, "That could be my son.". 

Well mother, maybe if you didn't raise your son to be a bigot and a misogynistic asshole, things like this wouldn't be happening to him. 

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com