My father- in- law is a humble and hard working man, who built a pretty good life for himself and his family. He did it by working hard and persevering in South Louisiana at a time when racism and ignorance was rampant.
He likes to tell me the story of when he bought his first home. He was working on a very large pecan farm as a manager, and he was the person charged with keeping the tractors running. He went to the owner of the farm (a man who he thought he had a good relationship with and who he had worked with for years ) and told him of his plans to buy his first home, because he had saved a substantial amount of money. He went to the man, he said, because back then in the small Louisiana town were he lived, just having money to put down on your home and a history paying your bills on time was not enough; you needed someone of a certain hue and stature to co-sign for you. He said his boss changed after he expressed his plans to him, and soon after that the man fired him.
The moral of his story to me was this: Never let certain folks know how successful you are. Because, if you do, they will try to take it from you. Never show your wealth or be too boastful about the things you acquire in your life. He lives by that credo.
Anyway, I have been thinking about my father- in -law a lot lately. And I have been thinking about him because of all the hand-wringing and consternation over the former president getting $400,000.00 to speak to a Wall Street firm. And, to be honest, most of the chirping has been coming from the left. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were both expressing their displeasure of president Obama getting such a large amount of money from Wall Street.
Go figure.
Since when does someone who served as president does not get to go into private industry and profit from his time as president? Every previous president has done it. George W. Bush has been quietly making millions from speaking fees, and yet no outcry. Why do you think that's the case? It's a rhetorical question. I know why. (I see you father-in- law)
Mr. Orange Hair has been president for 100 days, and he and his family has been already profiting in numerous ways because he holds the office, and yet no outcry from those on the left or the right.
Let's not forget that former president Obama is now a private citizen, and the last time I checked this is America, and he should be free to earn as much money as he can. It's what every president before him has done.
I heard Van Jones on CNN today talking about how America needs a Bobby Kennedy like poverty tour to places like Appalachia and South Central. "Poor white people in West Virginia and Kentucky are suffering from a serious crisis of opiate addiction" he moaned, "who is going to speak to them?" He later said. "President Obama should do a poverty tour for them before he starts collecting speaking fees."
This debate, of course, is laughable. As president Mr. Obama did a lot to try to help some of those very same "poor white people", but they voted against their interest and put a guy in office who, as of this date, has kept zero of his promises to them.
I read a funny tweet today, and it's worth repeating: "If you are a middle aged blue collar white guy and you have not yet been interviewed by the New York Times, you are doing something wrong in your life."
It seems like everyone wants to reach out to the poor blue collar white guy, including people like Bernie Sanders and other folks from the progressive left. They think that the dems lost the election by ignoring them and their concerns. Forgetting, of course, an organized voter suppression effort of minorities by those on the right.
"Elizabeth Warren isn't too keen about former President Barack Obama's $400,000 fee to address a Wall Street conference on healthcare this fall.
''I was troubled by that,' the Massachusetts senator said Thursday during an interview with the SiriusXM show "Alter Family Politics" on Radio Andy.
She then proceeded to discuss her disdain for "the influence of money" in the nation's capital.
"One of the things I talk about in the book ["This Fight is Our Fight"] is the influence of money," she said. "I describe it as a snake that slithers through Washington. And that it shows up in so many different ways here in Washington. People understand the money that goes into campaign contributions. And when I say 'understand.' I don't mean they think it's okay, but at least people see it.
The money that goes into hiring lobbyists, but it's also the money that goes into bought-and-paid-for experts, the money that goes into think tanks that have these shadowy funders."'
Ms. Warren said all of that, but then this happened:
"Also in the interview, Warren was informed that her new book reached No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. This pleased the Senator. But she was far more excited to hear that the person she replaced in the top spot was none other than Bill O’Reilly.
“Oh! Sweet!” Warren said, clearly overjoyed. “Sweet! Oh, you just made my morning!” [Source]
Of course he "made your morning", Elizabeth, you will be making even more money now. See how that works?
Congrats to Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders for winning their primaries in cheesehead country tonight.
It has been a tough week for Donald trump, the orange one has made more than a few missteps, and now the cracks are starting to show. (Five different positions on abortion in three days?)
Ted Cruz, who always sounds like he is auditioning for a Shakespearean play, was downright giddy tonight. I tried listening to Ted's victory speech but it was hard. That face. Dude was quoting JFK and taking about a safe and "sane" future for the country. He was calling for "unity" for crying out loud. Yes, this Ted Cruz.
On the dem side Hillary is obviously going to have to get used to Bernie and his peeps "feeling the Bern." The old man is not going away, and neither, apparently, is the FBI.
Finally, one of America's finest institutions of higher learning has decided to keep their monuments to a racist.
"Princeton University's board of trustees has decided that it will not remove Woodrow Wilson's name from its School of Public and International Affairs and from a residential college, despite student protests over the former president's segregationist views.
At the same time, the trustee committee weighing the issue said the university "needs to be honest and forthcoming about its history." It adds: "This requires transparency in recognizing Wilson's failings and shortcomings as well as the visions and achievements that led to the naming of the school and the college in the first place."
I hear ya Princeton, but being a devoted segregationist and blocking African American students from entering your university is more than just a matter of "failings".
But this is what happens when you are on the wrong side of history, it always comes back to bite you.
Tonight's cut and paste job has to do with diversity in America, and how some people in the majority population fear it.
Imagine, if you will, America being one big California. The thought of it just terrifies some folks.
"America's ongoing diversity explosion should be greeted with optimism because of the opportunities it presents for revitalizing our country, energizing our labor force and providing greater connectivity to the global economy. But there is a hidden danger lurking in the form of an emerging generation gap with strong racial overtones that, left unchecked, could become a significant obstacle to progress. This gap has been greatly inflamed by the rhetoric of the presidential primaries. Its potential harm was illustrated in the canceled Donald Trump event earlier this month in Chicago, which saw young people of mixed races protesting against the views of what one of them called "white suburbanites" who embrace, often angrily, a vision of America that would shut them out.
With more than a subtle focus on race, each party's candidates have also been talking to different generations.
Hillary Clinton emphasizes concern for children in Flint, Michigan, ending child poverty and deportation and reforming the criminal justice system. Bernie Sanders reaches out to young people concerned about student debt and jobs. In contrast, Trump continues to talk tough on immigration and keeping out Muslims, on maintaining traditional American values, backing strong policing and protecting the middle class from tax increases.
These stances mirror generationally different attitudes revealed in a 2012 Pew Survey that showed that more than half of white baby boomers and seniors view the rise of newcomers from other countries as a threat to traditional American values and customs, a view that was held by a minority of the millennial generation born in the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Generations are also divided on the role of government, with older people eschewing more services and higher taxes, and younger ones embracing the programs those services support.
The demographic reality is that America's youth -- and more specifically its racial minority youth -- is its future. The white population in this country is rapidly graying with a median age of 43 (compared with 37 for the whole population and 28 for Hispanics) -- and it is growing very slowly. According to census estimates, there is an absolute decline in the number of white youth younger than 20 that is projected to continue over the foreseeable future.
However, the nation's young minority population, now more important than ever to its future, has a long way to go. Underresourced and effectively segregated schools are still the norm in many urban areas, leading to Hispanic and black high school dropout rates still well above those of whites. And the range of campus protests last fall in both large public and elite private schools signals future difficulties in assimilating generations to come." [More]
Honestly, I don't know what to make of all of that. I guess it's just yet another story explaining the angst among white voters in this political seasons, which caused the rise of men like trump ad Cruz.
Some in America didn't think that they could survive Obama, but it would seems that they did.
Still, just the thought of a black man having lead them for the past seven years keeps them up at night, and creates terror in their minds about an uncertain future.
Fortunately, we will know a little bit more about that future come November, 2016. It should be fun watch.
The dems will be debating tonight. I swear, it's as if these guys don't want folks watching their debate. They have these democratic debates at the strangest times.
The general consensus is that Bernie is a Socialist and therefore cannot be elected president of these divided states of America. Not! Let me say, as someone who should know, Bernie Sanders is not a Socialist. But I get it, he might be the closest thing to that particular political ideology on the American political scene these days.
Hillary, of course, is far from a Socialist. Hillary, I think it's safe to say, is someone who is a center/right politician when it comes to foreign policy and economics.
She is hated by the right, not really loved by the left, but is Bill's wife and has been in the public eye long enough for most of us to conclude that she is competent enough to hold the job as president.
I have some advice for Bernie, though, if you really want to beat Hillary you are going to have to find a way to get a large percentage of the black vote. Hillary, for now, has the Negro vote on lock, but that could change. Quite a few black folks feel like Katt did in this skit. "Wait a minute, b****, we don't know you like that; we liked your husband"
For now, though, it's still Hillary's race to lose. She is a professional politician so I don't expect her to self-destruct. Unless the FBI comes knocking on her door before the democratic primary vote, Hillary should come out on top.
Here is hoping that unlike those other folks we will get some answers tonight from the dems about how to solve some of the problems we have in this country, and that they will not just demagogue the other guys and their politics. I swear that when I listened to the republicans I thought Barack Obama was going to be on the ballot again in 2016.
It's less than 20 minutes before the start of the democratic debate. I am going to try and watch, but I am guessing that I will be sleeping before the second commercial break.
As I was with the republicans, I will keep an open mind. Hopefully between Martin, Bernie, and Hillary, there will be enough there to keep me up long enough to give me something to think about.
I told myself that I wouldn't be doing too much cut and pasting this new year, but every now and then I come across an article that is so on point and so in sync with my own thoughts that I just have to share it with you.
This one is from the fine Canadian writer, Stephen Marche:
"The border.
You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.
Not at the border.
My son’s Guyanese-Canadian teacher and the Muslim Milton scholar I went to high school with and the Sikh writer I squabble about Harold Innis with and my Ishmaeli accountant, we can all be good little Torontonians of the middle class, deflecting the differences we have been trained to respect. But in a car in the carbon monoxide-infused queue waiting to enter Detroit, their beings diverge drastically from mine.
I am white. They are not. They are vulnerable. I am not.
Here’s the thing: I like the guards at the American border. They’re always friendly with me, decent, even enjoyable company. At the booth in between the never-was of Windsor and the has-been of Detroit, the officer I happened to draw had a gruff belly and the mysterious air of intentional inscrutability, like a troll under a bridge in a fairytale.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“Why would anyone ever choose to go to Burlington, Iowa?” he asked philosophically.
“I’m going to see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.” Then, because it did seem to require an explanation: “They’re giving rallies within a couple of days of each other.”
“Why would anyone ever choose to go see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?”
I didn’t argue, because it was the border, but I could have said that the police chief of Birmingham estimated that 30,000 people showed up in Alabama to see Donald Trump in August and that in Dallas, he had filled the American Airlines Center, and that his counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has generated equally unprecedented numbers – vastly more than Barack Obama drew at comparable moments in the 2008 campaign.
“I’m curious,” I said instead.
At this point he asked me to roll down my window. But it was all fine. Like I said, I’m white.
I drove through the outskirts of the ruins of Detroit, across the I-94, one of the ugliest highways in the United States, the old familiar lightness fluttered to my heart. I love America. America is not my mother. Canada is my mother. But America is an unbelievably gorgeous, surprisingly sweet rich lady who lives next door and appears to be falling apart. I cannot help myself from loving it.
For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers.
The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites “comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic”. This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans – not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.
In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death – “drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis”, according to the report. It was not so easy to account for the accounting. Why were middle-aged white Americans drinking and drugging and shooting themselves to death? The explanations on offer were pre-prepared, fully plugged into confirmation bias: it was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs.
Case and Deaton call it “an epidemic of pain”. Fine. What does that mean?
On the I-94, you do find yourself asking: what the fuck is wrong with these people? I mean, aside from the rapid decline of the middle class obviously. And the rise of precarious work and the fact that the basic way of life requires so much sedation that nearly a quarter of all Americans are on psychiatric drugs, and somewhere between 26.4 and 36 million Americans abuse opioids every day. Oh yes, and the mass shootings. There was more than one mass shooting a day. And the white terrorists targeting black churches again. And the regularly released videos showing the police assassinating black people. And the police in question never being indicted, let alone being sent to jail.
And you know what Americans were worried about while all this shit was raining down on them? While all this insanity was wounding their beloved country? You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll?
Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it.
‘The American dream is dead but I’m going to make it stronger!’
My body is white and it is male. It is six foot tall and weighs 190lb. It is 39 years old and it has had to start running. It has had to start counting calories. There is a tingle in the joint of my right thigh, so I try not to think about my body. The tingling comes and goes. I know my body is going to kill me.
“A man who fears suffering already suffer what he fears,” as Montaigne said. That’s one of the reasons why men die so much younger than women – six years younger on average in America.
Ninety-two percent of men say they wait at least a few days to see if they feel better before they go to a doctor, but I know what they mean by a few days. They mean a few more days than makes sense. It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness. In the same breath, my body cannot bring itself to believe it is the personification of power, though it evidently is in any rational accountancy of social status. It feels like a mere body. It feels mortal.
I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa. That’s the honest truth. Whenever I go to America it’s New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Florida. In Burlington, at Jerry’s Main Lunch, the signature dish is “the hot mess, eggs and bacon cooked right into the hash browns. The sugar shakers all have white crackers in them, to prevent clumping – a classic bit of commonsense American know-how. The hot mess is delicious. Why don’t they make these everywhere? Why isn’t there a chain of Jerry’s Main Lunches serving hot messes all across the midwest?
The answer is in the rest of the town: everything that’s going to leave has already left Burlington. The beautiful brick buildings downtown are mostly vacant. The most interesting street is the road out of town.
The Memorial Arena, on the banks of the Mississippi, filled up early. Trump wasn’t speaking until 6pm but by 4.45 the parking situation was grim. Outside the building, the hawkers who follow Trump on the road, event to event, sold T-shirts and buttons, three for $10. “We shall overcomb.” “Cats for Trump, the time is Meow.” “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
Inside, every seat had been taken and the floor filled quickly with a standing room only crowd. Burlington is 10% black. The rally was 99.99% white.
The people who attend political rallies in America are a specific genre of humanity, like the people who stand outside in lines for nightclubs. They know where they’re supposed to go and how they’re supposed to behave when they get there. They have gear.
An elderly lady sat beside me wearing a sequined stars-and-stripes-hat she clearly takes out for just these occasions. “Y’all from Illinois?” she asked. I’m not but I can pass. She goes to all the rallies, she explained. She’s been a Republican her whole life, an active Republican, an Iowa Republican. For 30 years, she’s been in crowds like this one. She plans to go, one time in her life, to the national convention. Like going to see the Stones. When the organizers passed around hand signs reading “The Silent Majority”, she grabbed a dozen so she could pass them around to others.
Cheerful helpful women were half the crowd. Angry and absurd men were the other. They wore T-shirts with whole paragraphs written on them: “I am a United States Military Veteran. I once took a SOLEMN OATH to defend the CONSTITUTION against ALL enemies, foreign and Domestic. Be advised No one has ever relieved me of my duties under this Oath!”
There were cars in the parking lot slathered with bumper stickers. “We the people are 100% FED UP!” “So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.” “I’m straight, conservative, Christian, and I own a gun. Is there anything else I can do to piss you off?” A picture of Obama with “Does this ass make my car look big?” The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor. Behind comedy, absurd rage: America is the greatest country in the world but America is falling apart, government is the problem which is why government must solve it.
This was a Trump production so naturally there was a VIP section. A door guarded by bald, unsmiling men, the bouncers who stand forever as the bored sentinels of indifferent celebrity. A swinging door at the side of the stage received and dispensed the best-looking people, the ones with the buffed neutrality of political professionals, the women whose faces have been tautened to a perma pout, the men who get their hair cut before every event.
The woman beside me – Stars ’n’ Stripes Hat – was wearing a pewter elephant pendant. A young girl in a bright orange dress passed out of the VIP entrance wearing an elephant pendant encrusted with diamonds. Elephant pendants were a theme, I noticed, and elephant brooches and elephant rings and elephant T-shirts. They came in all different price points and in all different styles: round elephants reminiscent of French cartoons from the 1960s, and strange pseudo-sexual shimmies, and with 1920s straw boater hats leading parades. There was one kind of elephant you couldn’t find. An elephant that actually looked like an elephant. A realistic elephant might serve as a memento to the hundred elephants killed for their ivory every day. A naturalistic elephant would be inherently environmentalist. The elephants must all be fabulous.
Like any good show, there was a warm-up act. In fact, there are two – three if you count the recitation
of the pledge of allegiance. The first was Tana Goertz, an Iowa woman who had been runner-up on the third season of The Apprentice. “What a good-looking crowd,” she pandered. She vouched for Trump as a woman (“He loves women!”) and as someone who had returned to Iowa (“How could you live in New York City if you didn’t love people?”). She promoted the idea which is at the core of every last thing that Trump does, that simple contact with the man brings prosperity. “When you’re in the Trump train you’re going places!” She walked off to polite Iowan applause. The crowd would probably, all things considered, rather have listened to the Elton John music playing on the speakers instead, but at least she made the effort.....
....The title of Between the World and Me comes from a Richard Wright poem called White Man, Listen! and it was never going to get much whiter or more male than me in the Motel 8 sipping bourbon and beer, on my iPhone, with the Jays and Royals highlights flickering in the background and the thud of the satellite dish factory in the background.
The urgency of the book, the vitality of the historical imagination at play, rose like waves into crests of anger tumbling over their own force. It was all of a piece. And it all made very ferocious sense. Between the World and Me is one of those books that possess the powerful inevitability of a natural phenomenon – as if it accrued out of the ether that surrounds us, a crystalline formation of the outrage that defines the moment. To criticize is beside the point. It’s just there.
To me, the key passage in Between the World and Me, comes after Coates has been on television explaining to the host the desperate consequences of yet another police assassination of a black boy.
I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
Right then, reading that passage, I knew that white people were going to love this book. What white people crave – more, they require it, they require it to live – is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence. There are various alibis available depending on how much stupidity you can tolerate. You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you don’t see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows you’re not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.
Because that Dream of Whiteness, the dream of treehouses and cub scouts that tastes like peppermint and smells like strawberry shortcake, is a perfect alibi. Who lives that dream? Somebody else may live it but not me, not anyone I know, no one I could see in Burlington. That’s a dream that belongs to somebody else. Always to somebody else.
It certainly didn’t belong to the Winegard factory workers who were drifting to their cars at the end of their shift. The whiteness of my existence was my iPhone and the fumes of bourbon and beer, and the game from last night and the tingling in my thigh. The tingling in my thigh was my body – the reality I can’t look at because I’m too afraid of my mortality.
To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he said. “If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.” The obsession of intellectuals over the question of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr active or passive resistance – was moot; the pressing matter was why white people were blowing up churches filled with children." [Read the entire article here]
No, decent people just believe that it's racist and ignorant to disparage an entire race of people by implying that they all eat dogs.
Then there was this guy:
"While Randy Pullen has since returned to his role in the private sector as the Chairman and CEO of WageWatch.com after losing the primary race for State Treasurer in 2014, he still lists himself as the Arizona Republican Party State Chairman in his Linkedin profile. Someone should let him know about keeping his resume up to date, just in case.
It seems that even though Randy Pullen is no longer the State Chairman for Arizona Republicans, he must still think he is some sort of spokesman for the party. Last night during the Democratic Debate, Mr. Pullen took to Twitter to let everyone know how he felt about the debate, and it was pretty ugly.
"Randy Pullen@RPullen
Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers.
Let's just forget the facts on this subject and let our racism flag fly.
Kind of like it does with Donald Trump's buddy, Craig Cobb.
"While recently doing a story about known White SupremacistCraig Cobb, ABC producer Jasmine Brown and anchor Byron Pitts were subject to hateful tirades and now the story has been brought to life through a produced video by timesXtwo.
The source of the rhetoric is hardly a surprise once you dig deeper into the man himself; after all, the video shows Cobb saying, “I’m one of the most famous racists in the world you son of a bitch.” Brown, who is African American, notes that Cobb seemed “incredibly gracious” when they first spoke on the phone, presumably before he knew her race.
“He is very much in love with Donald Trump,” adds Brown. She continues to describe a line of Cobb’s saying, “I would almost rather talk to a Jew, because then at least they would be intelligent.” The video reveals the emotional toll on Brown, a twenty-something Millennial, experiencing this level of overt racism for the first time.
But when anchor Byron Pitts gets Cobb on the phone, the heated rhetoric really takes a turn.
You’re not a person of color N*****! You’re a N*****! You got it? You’re a N*****!… Listen there’s an unbridled race war going on in this country Ann Coutler said there’s at least 30 million Mexicans in this country, Byron, and they don’t have any business here.
Well if he hadn’t won the argument with his n-word references, he certainly did it by invoking Ann Coulter."
One day, in the not too distant future, a main stream candidate from one of the major political parties will drop the N-word freely while on the campaign trail, and he will lead his opponents by double digits in the polls because of it. Wait.....
Holy crap! An honest to goodness republican actually made sense when referring to the "Black Lives Matter " movement.
"Republican presidential candidate John Kasich took up the cry of a movement drawing attention to the deaths of young black men at the hands of the police, saying in a CNN interview that “black lives matter.”
CNN’s Dana Bash began by listing some of the Democratic candidates’ forays into the Black Lives Matter movement. “Hillary Clinton met here in New Hampshire yesterday with some Black Lives Matter protesters. I don’t know if you saw, Bernie Sanders had a disruption at one of his events because of protesters.”
“Martin O’Malley apologized for saying ‘all lives matter.’ Do you think that it’s appropriate to apologize for that?” she said the Ohio Governor. “What’s your view on all this?”
“I’ve been very involved in Ohio,” Kasich said. “We have a collaborative effort with community leaders, African-Americans, law enforcement, and they came up with 23 recommendations.” “Should a public official apologize for saying all lives matter?” she repeated.
“I don’t know about that issue…” he responded. “And all lives do matter. Black lives matter, especially now, because there’s a fear in these communities that, you know, justice isn’t working for them.”
“But it’s about balance,” he added. “I’m not going to get myself caught in some sort of a wedge. The community has to understand the challenges of police, and the police have to understand the challenges of the community.”
If I didn't know better I would say that the poor guy doesn't want to win the republican primary. I mean how can he expect to win with statements like the one that he made above?
Mr. Kasich, you can move to the head of the republican class for now. (Is it me, or does he always look like he had a little too much to drink?) It's a shame that you are so far down in the polls, because you seem like you are actually willing to step back for a minute, view the landscape, and not demagogue every issue just to grab headlines.
Anyway, I bet your supporters aren't taunting the Black Lives Matter protesters.
"Wednesday night, Black Lives Matter protesters made good on their promise to keep the heat on presidential candidates, turning their sights on Jeb Bush (R). At a rally in North Las Vegas, Nevada, protesters called on Bush to speak out about racial injustice. At the end of the event, the protesters chanted “black lives matter,” which was quickly met with “white lives matter” and “all lives matter” chants.
Black Lives Matter advocates asked the presidential hopeful how he personally connects to matters of race in justice, after he said, “we have serious problems and these problems have gotten worse in the last few years. Communities, people no longer trust the basic institutions in our society that they need to trust to create, to make things work.” [Source]
Jeb's people are just mad because folks can't stay awake long enough when they try listening to him to actually hear what he has to say. Dude is getting his clock cleaned by the likes of Donald Trump and Ben Carson for crying out loud! If I supported this guy I would be pretty angry as well.
Did you happen to see his foreign policy proposal? Yes it's bad. But what else did you expect? The guy's name is, after all, Bush.
"You don't know me but I'm your brother I was raised here in this living Hell You don't know my kind in your world Fairly soon, the time will tell You, telling me the things you're gonna do for me I ain't blind and I don't like what I think I see...."~Taken It To The Streets by the The Doobie Brothers~
The Black Lives Matter folks crashed yet another Bernie Sanders gathering this weekend, and it has white liberals quite upset with some of you Negroes. "Why are they protesting poor Bernie Sanders? The man marched with Dr. King for crying out loud."(So did Charlton Heston, but we get the point.) And you are hearing a lot of this as well: "They should be out protesting republican and conservative gatherings, not the people who are actually supporting black causes".
I can't say that I disagree with that sentiment, but I also understand the anger and frustration with professional politicians like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Like the great Doobie Brothers say in their song, they are always telling us what they are goingto do for us, but they can never quite deliver.
I have heard that this particular group is fronted by George Soros, and that he (Soros) is with Hillary all the way, so he is the person behind all those protests against Sanders. I am not sure if that's true or not, but if it turns out to be the case, the protesters might want to do some soul searching. It's cool to make Bernie Sanders accountable, but Hillary Clinton needs to be accountable as well. These people are supposed to be our political soul- mates. They are the ones who are supposed to look out for us when those other people are taking away our voting rights, locking up our sons and daughters, supporting an out of control law enforcement establishment, gutting public education, and sending our jobs to who knows where.
But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, we have to admit that most of the time we can't tell one politician from the other. Once they get our votes, it's off to Washington and business as usual: More money from lobbyist to pass laws to help rich people who bought and paid for said lobbyist in the first place.
What a racket.
And speaking of those other people, it looks like their front runner, Donald Trump, has finally done the unthinkable in their eyes: attack a FOX VIEWS host.
Nothing Donald Trump did leading up to his ignorant and misogynistic rant about Megyn (White Santa) Kelly seemed to affect his lead on the GOP field. He said racist, xenophobic, and misogynist things before , but all that just seemed to make him even more popular among the faithful. "Oh that's Donald just speaking his mind and saying what they rest of us are thinking but are too afraid to say. We are sick of political correctness." So now that he has been politically incorrect with one of their own, will their views suddenly change?
I think we are already starting to see the answer to that question.
"But [Ben]Carson thinks there’s a line you can cross when you’re being politically incorrect, and talked to CBS’ John Dickerson about it on Face the Nation this morning.
“I think there may be a difference,” Carson said, “between political correctness and, you know, courteous speech.”
He made it clear that political correctness makes it difficult for people to honestly speak to one another, but “in no way to I advocate saying mean things about people.”
So Dr. Ben, which is it? I think a brain surgeon should show more clarity of thought on this one.
And then there was Rand Paul.
"[Rand]Paul was the first of Donald Trump‘s rivals to go on the attack against him at last week’s Republican debate, right after Trump got booed for refusing to commit to the GOP. Paul said, “This is what’s wrong. He buys and sells politicians of all stripes.”
On Fox News Sunday today, Paul elaborated to Chris Wallace, saying, “I don’t think we should reward vulgarity. And I don’t think vulgarity equates with insight.”'
Now that's a case of the pot and the kettle if I have ever seen one. Mr. Paul must have forgotten what network he was on. The folks at FOX VIEWS have spent the last seven years being vulgar to the man who makes his home at 1600 Pennsylvania, Avenue.
What Donald Trump is now finding out (and I think that the polls will soon reflect it), is that it's not only those nasty Democrats who have strict political correctness standards; the party he is running to represent in the presidential race has them as well. They just happen to be standards of convenience.
Given the "Black Lives Matter'' protest that jumped off at the Netroots Nation convention, recently, I believe that the following article is apropos.
"We are now in the midst of the 2016 presidential election, which means both parties are pandering to their bases as well as to unlikely voters who may be swayed to their respective sides. Although it’s early, this election cycle has already been dominated by questions of which candidate will garner “the black vote,” as if black people are monolithic. Given that thousands of black people are currently leading a social justice movement across the nation that the media has dubbed the “Black Lives Matter" movement, the black electorate appears to be at the forefront of politicians’ minds.
There is a history of black communities voting Democrat — that is, when we are actually allowed to vote, as we were historically targeted for explicitly racist disenfranchisement in the 20th century and felon disenfranchisement in the 21st century. During the 20th century, the Democratic Party was well known for instituting anti-black policies in the South such as Jim Crow, poll taxes and literacy tests. Since then, the Democratic Party has shifted its image to racial indifference, while the Republican Party picked up its racially hostile characteristics.
Today black communities continue to be betrayed by both sides of the aisle in this toxic political system, which prioritizes exuberant campaign spending over protecting human rights. Both Ferguson and Baltimore saw uprisings in the face of police terror in the last year. And each city watched Democratic city and state politicians lead violent militarized occupation in response to protests, including the National Guard, tear gas, rubber bullets and riot police. The fact is that neither political party is “for black people,” but white liberal and moderate voters continually impose upon black communities the candidates they feel are most sympathetic to black experiences.
A bizarre phenomenon has developed out of this — Bernie Sanders supporters lurking in the dark trolling shadows of Twitter to condescendingly tell black people what’s best for us inside a system designed to crush us. One person even went to so far as to call Sanders “one of the first Black Lives Matter Activists.” Others juxtapose his image with captions of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes, and thrust such egregious depictions at black Twitter users. Sanders supporters list his involvement with the civil rights movement as though they have now come to collect on his debt — black people must repay Sanders for his service by voting him into office.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton supporters practice the “it’s time we’ve had a woman president” method with black women, as if Hillary’s supposed feminism has ever been intersectional or inclusive between supporting her husband Bill Clinton’s mass incarceration policies and spewing the blasphemous “All Lives Matter” phrase in Ferguson, Missouri.
White supporters of both candidates appear to share one common fear: losing the black vote. Above all, these supporters seem to be most concerned about black voters not supporting whoever ends up the Democratic nominee, thus ceding the White House to a Republican candidate. Bernie’s and Hillary’s rabid bases shake in their boots at the idea that black people could vote Republican, or for a third party — or simply not vote at all. “Do you really want the clown car in the White House?” they warn of the Republican candidates, as if they are unable to view life outside of the liberal-vs.-conservative political dichotomy. Black people don’t have such a privilege — we have been fighting simply to be treated as humans for centuries.
advertisement
This entire culture of white people feeling as though they know what’s best for blacks is rooted in paternalism. It is pervasive throughout history and founded in slave-master ideologies, it ignores the autonomy of black people and continuously disrespects our intelligence. When blacks were organizing around the 15th Amendment, some white peers believed black people weren’t educated enough for enfranchisement and feared they would potentially offset liberal power. The truth is that the left has always used black communities to fuel their political power, without ever truly prioritizing black issues. The right remains blatantly racist, but while the left has chosen not to ascribe to outright racial hostility, it still continues to practice racial indifference while stepping on the backs of blacks to protect its privilege and political influence.
White liberals generally do not want to be racist, although not many truly understand systemic racism, but they fear how they will protect their white and class privilege in the event that the blatantly racist political party takes power. How will they sustain policies that benefit the white middle class without the black voting base? Will they need to shift their racial attitudes to align with the repugnant right in an attempt to infiltrate the Republican Party? Either way, they are surely not concerned with the opinions or experiences of black people, as they chastise and attempt to bully us into supporting their candidates. Black people are lambasted for daring to vocalize our disillusionment with the political system — and it doesn’t take long for the white liberal who once posed as an ally to employ the “black people don’t vote” negative stereotype to back us into the corner of choosing to either refute the trope or investing time into invalidating it." {More}
For the record, I welcome the idea of making progressives accountable when it comes to their positions as it relates to black issues. I despise the paternalistic politics of some of those on the left as much as I despise the racist and exclusionary politics of those on the right. I blogged about this years ago, and my position has not changed.
There is nothing wrong with making liberal politicians accountable for their positions on certain issues as it relates to black folks. They have long been able to rely on our votes, it is long past time that we make them stop taking it for granted.
*COMMENTS, LINKS, AND CUT AND PASTE ARTICLES, ARE NOT ALL ENDORSED BY THE PUBLISHER.
THIS BLOG claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyright to its respectful owners. If there is an image appearing on this blog that belongs to you and do not wish for it appear on this site, please E-mail with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed.
MORE DISCLAIMERS
***The views expressed on this site are the field's and the field's alone. They do not reflect the views of his employer, or any professional or legal organization with which he is affiliated.***
This is a commercial free blog.
Money is nice, but being able to speak my mind is better.
"Real talk: Daniel Rubin has a great little piece up wherein he chats with The Field Negro, the Philly-based blogger who sharply ponders all things black on a daily basis. (Seriously, if you’ve never checked in with TFN, you should: Its author, Wayne Bennett, is a fantastic read who can cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter, which is a far grosser analogy than I wanted to make, but there you have it.)" ~Philebrity~
"One of the most precocious and hilarious Black political minds on the net. Ive been a long-time fan!" ~Asad Malik~
"..While most of what he writes is tongue-in-cheek, his space is a safe house for candid discussions about race, especially in the comments section, where people of all colors meet." ~~Daniel Rubin, "The Philadelphia Inquirer"~~
"To white people, Bennett's musings are like kitchen-table talk from a kitchen they may otherwise never set foot in. To African Americans, he is part of a growing army of black Internet amateurs who have taken up the work once reserved for ministers and professional activists: the work of setting a black agenda, shaping black opinion and calling attention to the state of the nation's racial affairs."
~~Richard Fausset, "L.A. Times"~~~
"That's why I love the blog "Field Negro" so much. Field, as he's known to his fans, has the sense of reality that it takes to call out the (CowPuckey) of blame beating by those who are in positions of power and their lackeys. Because of his handle and his unabashed way of writing about racial issues, Field is often cited as a "Black blogger." What he is, however, is a first-class detector of blame deflection and an excellent student of history. If you want to write about the past and future of repression there's really no other perspective to take - which is why everyone should read Field."
"Half a century after Little Rock, the Montgomery bus boycott and the tumultuous dawn of the modern civil rights era, the new face of the movement is Facebook, MySpace and some 150 black blogs united in an Internet alliance they call the AfroSpear.
Older, familiar leaders such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, are under challenge by a younger generation of bloggers known by such provocative screen names as Field Negro, thefreeslave and African American Political Pundit. And many of the newest struggles are being waged online." ~Howard Witt-The Chicago Tribune~
"I had no idea, for example, of the extent of the African-American blogging world out there and its collective powers of dissemination.But now, after reading thousands of anguished, thoughtful comments posted on these blogs reflecting on issues of persistent racial discrimination in the nation's schools and courtrooms, what's clear to me is that there's a new, "virtual" civil rights movement out there on the Internet that can reach more people in a few hours than all the protest marches, sit-ins and boycotts of the 1950s and 60s put together." ~Chicago Tribune Reporter, Howard Witt~
My father- in- law is a humble and hard working man, who built a pretty good life for himself and his family. He did it by working hard and persevering in South Louisiana at a time when racism and ignorance was rampant.
The dems will be debating tonight. I swear, it's as if these guys don't want folks watching their debate. They have these democratic debates at the strangest times. 
Given the "Black Lives Matter'' protest that jumped off at the Netroots Nation 
