Fighting off the dark clouds.

 

I spent some time in Jamaica recently, and even with all of its challenges as a Third World country, I felt an incredible amount of peace. My mind felt rested, and the love I felt from the people around me was genuine and heartfelt. 

Then I came back home to America, and my spirit and my soul instantly felt restless. I can't put my finger on it, but I am sure that a lot of you reading this feel it as well. There is a dark cloud hanging over this great country of ours, and it has been for some time now. Maybe it's the extreme anger and Fascism creeping into our politics, maybe it's a justice system that doesn't seem so just anymore, and maybe it's just the madness and depravity that has taken hold of our citizenry that has them committing one senseless and unspeakable crime after another. Whatever it is, that cloud is chasing us, and it seems to be just a matter of time before it engulfs us all. 

Then what? How will we react collectively when the country we thought was the "shiny city on a hill"--- meant to be an example for the rest of the world of how a true democracy functions, starts falling apart at the seams? It feels like it already is, but the worse, I suspect, is yet to come. 

Some of you will notice that I have been blogging less these days. There is still a lot to write about, but sadly, my heart just isn't in. It doesn't seem like enough. There has to be more we can do than just write. I have been trying, but nothing changes. I am sure that a lot of you have as well. Hopefully you won't get discouraged, and you will keep fighting the good fight to preserve what's left of our democracy and this great experiment we call America.

Today, while walking in Center City, Philadelphia, I saw a gentleman who was clearly down on his luck and was asking folks passing by for some change. I stopped and gave him a few bucks and before I moved on, something told me to just ask him how he was doing. "I'm good. You sharp. You a lawyer?" I told him yes, and asked him how he knew. " You got that lawyer look about you. Like you don't give a f*** abut nothing but winning. I like that look."  I know I don't look it, but I'm winning, too." He meant it. I looked at him, and he sure as hell didn't look like he was winning. But winning or losing in the game of life can be such a subjective thing. Winning can mean different things to different people. He was alive an he seemed to have all of his mental faculties together. That might be all the win he needs or wants.

Sadly, in America, we all just don't feel like we are winning these days. The thing is, though, whether it's some guy down on his luck in Center City, Philadelphia, or a lawyer going about his daily grind and trying to make ends- meet, we are all in the same boat together. Where we get from here in that boat will depend on all of us doing what we can to make sure the boat doesn't go down and drown us all. We all have to play our part, because dark clouds are out there, and they aren't going away any time soon.    

Caption Wednesday.

 

I need a caption for this picture. 

Back soon.

 Hi field hands, I am out of pocket doing some business in the Southern regions of our great country.  

Holla at you soon.

Keep pushing, and stay safe.

Election thoughts.

 I'm going to write a few words about the two governor's races that everyone seemed to be watching yesterday. 

In Virginia, the republican candidate, Glen Youngkin, beat a man who is- let's just go on and say it- not the most likeable guy in the world, and he did it by distancing himself just enough from the former guy, and utilizing what I am calling the new Sothern Strategy to his advantage. Yes folks, in case you haven't been paying attention, critical race theory has become the Willie Horton of 2021 and beyond for right wing politicians. Let's just forget the fact that it's not even taught in high schools -or any other schools besides law schools and some advance college courses- but it is such a convenient tool to scare the right people if you know what I mean. And it worked.  Youngkin  styled himself as an approachable suburban dad.  He is worth 300 million, and this is his first political office. We will be watching where this goes. 

Meanwhile, across the bridge in New Jersey, it's still too close to call. Although the Democratic candidate, Phil Murphy, is looking more and more like he might squeak out a victory. National pundits will try to say that the fact that this race is this close is a big blow for democrats. But just remember this: The last time a democrat won back to back terms as governor of New Jersey was 1977. 

Finally, there were Judicial races here in  Pennsylvania, and Republican candidates won up and down the ballots for all the statewide Judicial seats. They did it because republican voters were motivated and came out to vote, and Democratic voters were not.  These races are important, too, because the courts will determine whether a lot of these new laws being pushed by Republican state legislatures are constitutional.  

On a personal note, a good friend of mine ran for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and she lost because her opponent went negative with false misleading ads leading up to the election. It's a shame, too, because Marie McLaughlin, when I practiced with her in the same division, was an excellent lawyer, and she has been a terrific Superior Court Judge during her tenure as well. She did not deserve the sleazy way her opponent dispatched her by way of negative and misleading ads. That's just not me saying this, the Pennsylvania Bar Association agrees with me.  But such is politics in modern day America. It's scorched earth, and it's tribal, and if you you take the "high road" you will be crushed. Even in a race for the highest judicial office in a great American state.

Movie night.

 

What is the name of this movie? 

Hey, it's almost Halloween.  

A culture of "casual bigotry" comes back to bite "Chucky".

 

I guess you all heard about John Gruden by now. Or Chucky as he has been affectionately known as throughout the years. He was exposed as a fraud when some of the e-mails  that he sent to another "good ole boy" disparaging blacks, women, and just about everyone else who doesn't look like they do surfaced recently. 

Folks on the right say that he was canceled. I say, on the other hand, that he was held accountable for his actions. That's how this works. The guy coaches in a league where almost 60% of the players are black, and like so many others in the billion dollar cash cow called the National Football League, he holds a reprehensible and Neanderthal world view of others.

The NFL now wants us to believe that they have looked into the some 650,000 e-mails and given them the the Captain Renault business: There is nothing to see here. Give me a break!

This article from Shalise Young is all of use right now.

"The NFL got what it needed: Sunday.

After a week in which the public started to really see what the league is, to get a glimpse of just how slimy its underbelly truly is, it needed Sunday.

Because once Sunday arrived, enough fans who may have been mildly appalled at the racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, exploitation, and the NFL's lead counsel doing favors for the president of at least one team, turned their attention to the games.

They may have even gotten an early start consuming the league's product, those who were masochistic enough to endure Jaguars-Dolphins from London. There were fantasy teams to follow and wagers to make, and just the seemingly insatiable desire so many have to tune in. 

Some of those people might not have been appalled at all, so they wanted Sunday to arrive so they could have their games, have their respite. There were fans last year hollering that NFL players and other athletes had to play games to entertain them during COVID lockdowns; it's highly unlikely the contents of the emails we've seen even moved them.

Reality tells us the NFL's power brokers are among them.

Individuals in the highest reaches of the country's most profitable sports league being racist isn't really news, not to anyone paying attention. This country is so accepting of anti-Black sentiment that Jon Gruden was still allowed to coach last Sunday after the report of his racist email to then-Washington executive Bruce Allen disparaging NFLPA head DeMaurice Smith's intelligence and appearance in truly 1920s fashion. 

It wasn't until more of Gruden's emails were made public — the ones where he circulated semi-nude photos of Washington cheerleaders, expressed disgust with the NFL hiring the first female official in its history as well as the drafting of an openly gay player, and went after commissioner Roger Goodell using an anti-gay slur for the crime of trying to protect players from traumatic brain injury — that he got to resign, once again showing the privilege of being a white man in the NFL, getting to dictate his own departure.

Then things got worse, or at least should have, for the league and its vaunted shield. On Thursday night, the New York Times published emails between Allen, the Washington Football Team president, and Jeff Pash, NFL lead counsel, in which Pash made a nominal fine handed down to Allen's team for lying on the injury report disappear, waved off the growing allegations of workplace toxicity in Washington, expressed anger over the NFL hiring a Black woman to be a league lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and yukked it up over Allen trying to cut a player's salary.

Pash, one of the most powerful people in league offices, still has a job as of this writing. The NFL has even defended Pash's interactions with Allen.

On Friday, the Associated Press published a story citing a source "familiar with the investigation" who claimed none of the other 650,000 emails under review as an extension of that deep dive into Washington's workplace culture contain the kind of bigotry expressed by Gruden and Allen.

To which we say: Bull. Crap.

Writ large, given the emails we have seen and the other things we know, there is no doubt that there are more emails showing how the league's decision makers really feel.

It is their — meaning white men of means — league, and they are loathe to let anyone who isn't into their league. Bringing even one person into the fold that isn't one of them is unacceptable. Allen groused about having to even interview non-white candidates for head coaching positions.

But Sunday came, which is all the NFL needed. Too many media outlets, some of them in bed with the league and profiting off the games, will do just what it hopes and by Sunday night won't mention the week where the league was revealed for what it truly is, will spend Monday happily rehashing highlights from Week 6 games.

Some of us are still appalled. Some of us hope whoever is slowly leaking these emails keeps going. Some of us are still angered by what's happened, the league's cowardice in continuing to protect men of ill will, disgusted that it is 2021 and in too many corners, including a league that would not be the multi-billion juggernaut that it is without the talents of Black athletes, the buffet of bigotry we saw still exists and in some ways is celebrated. 

Some of us skipped this Sunday's games." [Source]

No lies detected. 

 

"Catastrophic failure" in Rutherford County, Tennessee.

For those of you wondering why it's important to teach critical race theory in higher institutions of learning (notice I wrote in higher institutions of learning), please read this article about what has been taking place in the state of Tennessee with mostly poor juveniles  of color.

It's mind-boggling and scary that this could be happening in our country. And yet, given what has been taking place over the past few years, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. For instance, if someone had told me 20 years ago that America is ripe for a coup, and that one was almost carried out, I would have told them that they're crazy. 

But sadly, here we are. And things that seemed crazy in the past, have us all afraid for our future.  

*Image from MSNBC

Caption Sunday.

 

 

I need a caption for this picture.  

No one left to fight for democracy.

 Make no mistake field hands, democracy is dying. And if it is in fact dying, why is the democratic party " so complicit in its demise? 

This is the exact question writer Luke Savage asked in a recent piece in The Atlantic. 

"If you’ve followed recent Democratic messaging, you’ll have heard that American democracy is under serious attack by the Republican Party, representing an existential threat to the country. If you’ve followed Democratic lawmaking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the threat is actually a rather piddling one. The disconnect, in this case, isn’t attributable to Democratic embellishment, but to inexcusable complacency.

In his first address to Congress, last month, President Joe Biden established three basic themes—each one invoked in a language of crisis and political urgency: “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” When it came to the third, Biden was both pointed and emphatic, tying the events of January 6 and the broader effort to delegitimize November’s election to a wider crisis of democracy. “Congress,” he declared, “should pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and send them to my desk right away.”

Biden is far from the only Democratic leader to have made the connection. In urging the Senate to pass H.R. 1, which would improve voter access and election security, Senator Chuck Schumer (hardly anyone’s idea of a firebrand) said in March that state voter-restriction laws “smack of Jim Crow rearing its ugly head once again.” He went as far as warning that “if we don’t stop these vicious and often racist actions, Third World autocracy will be on its way.” Schumer hasn’t been shy about naming an antagonist, either, citing a “concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote” and even declaring that “we won’t let [Republican-controlled legislatures] create a dictatorship in America.”

Granting some room for hyperbole, these dire pronouncements aren’t entirely misplaced. As of March 24, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice had logged some 361 bills containing provisions that seek to restrict voting—a 43 percent increase from about the same time in February. Many involve the usual suite of suppression methods introduced under the auspices of fairness and transparency (expanded ID requirements, banning same-day voter registration, limiting the use of mail-in ballots, etc.), and one in Arizona even aspires to give the state legislature the authority to override the certification of future presidential-election results by simple majority vote. A recording recently released by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, meanwhile, makes more or less explicit that Republican operatives plan to use every tool at their disposal to defeat the renewed push for expanded voting rights, despite its widespread popularity.

Suffice it to say, a concerted right-wing effort really is under way to limit popular democracy and suppress votes. So what are Democrats doing about it? In a legislative sense at least, a cogent and comprehensive response is already in the works, in the form of the two bills cited by Biden in his congressional address. If realized, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and H.R. 1 (also known as the For the People Act) would constitute the most sweeping acts of democratic reform undertaken in decades. The latter alone would establish automatic national voter registration, independent redistricting commissions for House seats to prevent gerrymandering, expanded mail-in voting, and a number of new measures to reduce the overbearing influence of organized money.

Neither currently seems likely to become law, however. Rhetoric about autocracy notwithstanding, some liberal lawmakers are quietly threatened by aspects of the legislation. A few Black representatives in the South, for example, worry that independent redistricting commissions may cost them their seat. And some establishment figures reportedly fear that more democratically structured contribution rules will embolden left-wing primary challengers propelled by small donations. Senator Joe Manchin, meanwhile, has reiterated his opposition to H.R 1 on the deeply spurious grounds that any prospective voting-rights legislation ought to pass with bipartisan support—a DOA line of reasoning even when it comes to the watered-down version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Manchin himself is proposing.

The single greatest obstacle, though, has to do with the rules governing the Senate, and whether Democrats are ultimately willing to match their language of urgency with a strategy even remotely proportional to it. Due to the chamber’s filibuster rules, most legislation requires 60 votes to pass—an impediment that effectively empowers lawmakers representing only a tiny sliver of the electorate to block policies they dislike at will, including those designed to make American democracy fairer and more inclusive. (Especially frustrating, as the voting-rights expert Ari Berman has pointed out, is that Republican-controlled legislatures face no such supermajority requirement when passing legislation designed to restrict the vote—a kind of “asymmetric warfare” in which those working to preserve minority rule have a majoritarian advantage.)

Although Biden has mused about the idea of reforming the filibuster, he has ruled out its elimination. Manchin, predictably enough, is resoundingly allergic to the idea of change, while his fellow conservative Democrat Kyrsten Sinema ironically stated her emphatic support for H.R. 1 within days of dismissing filibuster reform in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Schumer, for his part, says that “everything is on the table” when it comes to passing voting-rights legislation, and he has, like Biden, made some noise about at least modifying the filibuster." [More of article here] 

But "noise" is not action. Schumer and other democrats always seem to make a lot of "noise" (they love the cable news cameras) but there is never any action. Just talk. 

One of the reasons that Joe Biden's poll numbers has been tanking is because a lot of progressive and young democratic voters are getting tired of all the talk.  That, and the so-called spirit of bipartisanship that Biden et al are always talking about. Biden's numbers were way up when he became president because a lot of Americans thought that he was going to correct some of the wrongs of the past four years, and put a leash on Mitch McConnell and his extreme right-wing agenda. 

I'm sad to have to announce that it has not happened. And what has transpired over the past year is more of the same: A radical power move by the minority to control the majority. 

Sadly, with the help of a weakened and delusional democratic party, it seems to be working.   

Testiclesgate.

 America has a huge testicles problem,  and I mean this in the most respectful way possible. 

You know that you have regressed as a society and a culture, when a semi washed up rapper's clueless words concerning the most serious pandemic of our lifetime is being tossed around and represents perfectly the zeitgeist of our era. 

May heaven help us all. Nicki Minaj was being mentioned more by "serious journalists" and cable and news pundits than the leaders of countries such as North Korea and France. (Both  of these countries, by the way, were in the news for far more serious reasons than those dumb misinformed statements by the rapper.) And she has the nerve to be pissed off. If you ask me this has done wonders for her career. It's PR gold. 

The poor leaders of Trinidad had to issue an official statement about the rapper's cousin's declarations. (No reports of swollen balls.) And the White House had to deny a claim that she was invited to the White House to talk about the vaccine. Nicki, of course, is hitting back. She is saying that they did in fact reach out to her, and it is the White House that is misinforming the public. Folks, trust me, I did not have a Nicki Minaj Joe Biden feud on my 2021 bingo card.  This is just nuts! Pun intended. 

We shouldn't be surprised that this is where we are in America, and that the race to the bottom continues. We elected a washed up game show host with zero shame and serious mental issues to be our president. Why should anything else surprise us?  

Now, incredibly, some folks actually found time out of their daily lives to march on the CDC on behalf of Nicki and her outlandish claims. 

"A group of anti-vaccine protesters recently rallied outside the Centre for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, shouting slogans referencing Nicki Minaj‘s recent controversial tweets about the coronavirus vaccine.

“Nicki Minaj told the truth to me. Fauci lied to me,” protesters were filmed chanting outside the CDC. Local television station CBS46 reported one of the protesters saying, “We are here because the CDC has been lying to us for so long”.

Initial coverage of the rally suggested that those protesting were Nicki Minaj fans encouraged by her misinformation-laden comments. But Insider reported earlier today (September 17) that the protesters are part of a fringe political group called the Black Hammer, capitalising on the media attention surrounding Minaj’s tweets. The group is a self-described “anti-colonial organisation that exists to take the land back for all Colonised people”.

Black Hammer also took responsibility for organising the protest on their Twitter, telling followers they would be outside the CDC as they were “fed up with the way the media is portraying Nicki Minaj”.' 

Hold on America, we are almost there. Just brace yourselves for the fall.  

   

  

Caption Monday.

 

 

This took place on 9/11, when the president and other former presidents were doing more dignified things to acknowledge that solemn day.  

Give me a caption for this picture.