The confidence game begins.

It started already, folks. The trump con game is already in full effect.

President elect Orange Hair promised his rabid supporters on the campaign trail that he would repeal and destroy the ACA, but today he told the Wall Street Journal that there are parts of it that he will probably keep. 

Get used to it trumpsters, I suspect that after the first year under Führer trump you will be having buyer's remorse.

Let's face it, it already doesn't look like trump is being particularly loyal to some of his peeps. Poor Chris Christie must feel like the Theon Greyjoy  from Game Of Thrones. He thought that serving as trump's manservant and totally sucking up to him would at least get him a nice gig in his administration if he won. Well, he won, and what does trump do?

"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is no longer running Donald Trump’s transition team, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence now responsible for the smooth transfer of power in the White House.

Christie will continue to serve as one of the chairs of the transition team, along with Rudy Giuliani and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, but he will not be the leading man." [Source]

Chris, you and the rest of trump's followers will soon see what hundreds of folks who did business with him in the past already know: That there is not an honest or loyal bone in that man's body.

Anyway, I read an article written by Charles Blow that is getting a lot of retweets on twitter that I felt I should share.

"Donald J. Trump is president-elect of the United States. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Against all odds and against all forms of the establishment, he prevailed. He won, legitimately, including in many states that were thought to be safely blue. The pundits and the polls were wrong. There was more pent-up hunger for change — and also racial, ethnic and economic angst — than many models considered.

Mr. Trump will become this country’s 45th president. For me, it is a truly shocking fact, a bitter pill to swallow. I remain convinced that this is one of the worst possible people who could be elected president. I remain convinced that Trump has a fundamentally flawed character and is literally dangerous for world stability and injurious to America’s standing in that world.

There is so much that I can’t fully comprehend.

It is hard to know specifically how to position yourself in a country that can elect a man with such staggering ineptitude and open animus. It makes you doubt whatever faith you had in the country itself.

Also, let me be clear: Businessman Donald Trump was a bigot. Candidate Donald Trump was a bigot. Republican nominee Donald Trump was a bigot. And I can only assume that President Donald Trump will be a bigot.

It is absolutely possible that America didn’t elect him in spite of that, but because of it. Consider that for a second. Think about what that means. This is America right now: throwing its lot in with a man who named an alt-right sympathizer as his campaign chief.

How can I make sense of the fact that the president appeared in pornos?

How can I make sense of the fact that the man who will appoint the next attorney general has himself boasted of assaulting women? What will this president’s vaunted “law and order” program for “inner cities” look like in an age where minority communities are already leery of police aggression?

How do I make sense of the fact that a man who attacked a federal judge for his “Mexican heritage” will be the man who will nominate the next Supreme Court justice and scores of federal judges?

I can’t make it make sense because it doesn’t. I must sit with the absurdity of it.

I must settle this in myself in this way: I respect the presidency; I do not respect this president-elect. I cannot. Count me among the resistance.

I hope that there are areas where people in Washington can agree to actually advance America’s interests, but I’m doubtful. Trump has made multiple campaign promises, promises he will be obliged to keep, that would specifically do harm.

My thoughts are now with the immigrant families he has threatened to deport and the Muslims he has threatened to bar and the women he has demeaned and those he is accused of assaulting and the disabled whom he apparently has no problem mocking.

My thoughts are with the poor people afflicted by ill health who were finally able to receive medical insurance coverage, sometimes lifesaving coverage, and the fear they must feel now that there is a president committed to repealing and replacing it (with what, I don’t know), and who has a pliable Congress at his disposal." [Read more] 

Scary times.

Before I forget, Happy Veterans Day to all the Vets out there. Thank you for your service! (We still miss my wife's brother in law , who gave the ultimate sacrifice. )

It's a shame that you will be now led by a commander in chief who was too much of a coward to do what you so bravely did and continue to do. 

Demonizing a movement.

"  If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

~Desmond Tutu~

The debate is so silly. "Why do they say that only black lives matter? Don't all lives matter?"

Let's think about that for a minute. The name of the movement is not only black lives matter, or, white lives don't matter. It's not even something as intimidating to hear as say, Black Panthers, or Black Power. The name itself is tame: Black Lives Matter. All of us who identify with the movement in one way or another are still scratching our heads over the majority population's issue with what it represents.

To listen to people like Sarah Palin and other right- wing zealots, you would think that the black lives matter movement is right up there with Isis as a group that should be feared in this country.

It's why I am not sure of what to make of some of the platitudes coming from politicians in Washington. There is a disingenuous nature to all of it. Let's just strike the right tone. Even though deep down we feel just like Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly.

I listened to Charles Blow on CNN last night, and he made an excellent point to Don Lemon, who was doing his usual best to make his white listeners feel comfortable.

I am paraphrasing, but he said something to the effect that he should not be apologizing for his blackness, and the burden shouldn't be on him to have to teach folks in the majority not to be racist. He argued that he is the one being victimized. Why should the one doing the victimizing, he wanted to know, get a pass?

He is right. The debate about racism and injustice in this country has always been about blaming the oppressed. If you call out racism, you are the racist. If you see injustice and speak on it, you are rocking the boat. "Can't we all just get along?" 

We could. But the charlatans and hucksters who are profiting from making poor and marginalized white people believe that  black people are the root of all of their problems would never stand for it.

On a personal note I need folks to understand something: If we never come together as a country it will not effect my life one bit.

It won't make my home or wife any less beautiful; it won't take a dollar out of my bank account; and it wont raise my golf score or improve my second serve or the quality of my backhand in tennis. I will continue to enjoy the life I have now, and the memories of a wonderful life that I have lived to this point. 

This debate is about the people (black and white) who have been marginalized in this country, and the systematic and institutionalized racism that keeps tearing our country apart by denying people at the bottom of the social and economic ladder real opportunities.

To blame this on the black lives matter movement is just silly and wrong. It strikes me as people who need to look at themselves and their own short-comings, trying to find an excuse for something that they have failed to do.    

This struggle for social justice and equal rights is not about black versus white; it's about the survival of this country. The sooner we all realize that and stop trying to blame or situation on a movement formed around a hashtag, the better off we will be.

*Pic from wikipedia.org

Why are white men angry?

The Field Negro education series continues.

"Hillary Clinton’s entry into the race for the presidency has goosed the egos of some conservative ganders.

 

Wayne LaPierre, the C.E.O. and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, on the eve of Clinton’s announcement said of President Obama at the group’s annual meeting, “when he’s finished, he intends to go out with the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton.” There were boos. LaPierre continued: “Yeah, I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.” There were cheers.

 

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly ratcheted up the rhetoric on Monday. With the words “HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT” in yellow and all-caps next to his face, he bemoaned the idea that “our traditional American values are under siege nearly everywhere,” and then added: “If you’re a Christian or a white man in the U.S.A., it’s open season on you. Therefore, Hillary Clinton has an advantage.”

 

In a way, one would expect nothing more from these men. They are simply playing to their bases.

As U.S. News and World Report put it in 2013 when noting a Pew Research Center report: “White men represent just a third of the U.S. population, but about 60 percent of adults with guns in America today are white men.”

 

And as for Fox, the website Mediaite reported in December that just 1 percent of Fox News viewers are black.

 

And yet, this faux oppression makes a mockery of very real oppression. Aside from the hilarity of the incongruous spectacle of two incredibly powerful white men grousing about the lowly plight of white men in general is the utter ridiculousness of the idea itself.

 

And unfortunately, this isn’t a new idea, but the resurrection — or elongation — of an existing one.

In 2012, the conservative commentator Matt K. Lewis wrote an entry on The Daily Caller under the headline “The silent war on noncollege-educated white men.”

 

That same year, the conservative blog RedState.com published an essay under the headline, “The Democrat War on White Men.” It included lines like “Democrats hate White Men” (capitalization theirs), “White Men in unions are tolerated and helped by Democrats — but only if they fall in line to punish other White Men” and “White Men were politically neutered and forgotten about.”

 

Suzanne Venker wrote an opinion piece in 2013 on FoxNews.com under the headline “Men — the new second class citizens.” She included the following passage:

 

“Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.”

 

In August, Representative Mo Brooks, a Republican of Alabama, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show that there is a “war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party.”

 

One thing that makes this line of reasoning so grating is the degree to which money and power in this country continue to be dominated by white men. As The Guardian reported in 2013, the “U.S.’s top-paid executives in 2012 represent technology, coffee, and sporting goods companies — and all are white and male.”

 

ThinkProgress, expanding on the report, explained:

 

“A big part of the lack in diversity on the list is the lack of diversity among executives overall. Women hold few of the top jobs at major companies. There are now 22 at the helm of Fortune 500 companies with Lynn Good’s appointment as CEO of Duke Energy in July, which means less than 5 percent of those positions are filled by women.

 

“Top executives are also not racially diverse. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, six are black, making up just 1.2 percent. There are eight Latino and eight Asian CEOs, accounting for just 1.6 percent each.

“But even when they reach the highest rungs, women are still paid less than their peers.”

"...the new Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male and 92 percent Christian.”

So much for white Christian men being under attack."

 

So much indeed. [Read entire article]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Fitting the description" at Yale.

If you are a young Negro in America I can't imagine a better place for you to be than in a library at an Ivy League school.

If you are the parent of such a young Negro it must make you proud to have a child in such a position, and you must sleep pretty well at night knowing that your child will be safe and protected in the friendly confines of a very white, very elite, academic environment.

So imagine how shocked Charles Blow was to hear that his child almost got the Trayvon Martin treatment while walking out of the library on Yale's campus.

"As a noted memoirist and New York Times columnist who writes often about race, Charles Blow has spoken about the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, deaths that sparked a national debate over how police treat African-American men.

On Monday, Blow wrote about another young black man's encounter with police -- his son, who was allegedly held at gunpoint on the Yale University campus where he's a student.

 

Blow took to Twitter on Sunday, writing that he was "fuming" after his son called to tell him what happened Saturday -- that he was walking out of the library when university police "accosted" him and drew their weapons. Blow tweeted that his son was detained because he "fit the description" of a suspect.

 

Blow's son was released, and Yale has said that the real suspect was found and arrested later." [Source]

 

I feel your pain Mr. Blow. This is a little too close to home for you. Now when you write all those essays for the New York Times about racism in America you can truly write them from them from the heart. 

 

"Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!

This is how my son remembers it:

 

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book he had requested. The book hadn’t arrived yet, but since he was there he put in a request for some multimedia equipment for a project he was working on.

 

Then he left to walk back to his dorm room. He says he saw an officer “jogging” toward the entrance of another building across the grounds from the building he’d just left.

Then this:

 

“I did not pay him any mind, and continued to walk back towards my room. I looked behind me, and noticed that the police officer was following me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio and said, ‘I got him.’

 

“I faced forward again, presuming that the officer was not talking to me. I then heard him say, ‘Hey, turn around!’ — which I did.

“The officer raised his gun at me, and told me to get on the ground.

 

“At this point, I stopped looking directly at the officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised then laid down on my stomach.

 

“The officer asked me what my name was. I gave him my name.

 

“The officer asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale University.

“At this point, the officer told me to get up.”

 

The officer gave his name, then asked my son to “give him a call the next day.”

My son continued:

 

“I got up slowly, and continued to walk back to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said, ‘Hey, my  man. Can you step off to the side?’ I did.”

 

The officer asked him to turn around so he could see the back of his jacket. He asked his name again, then, finally, asked to see my son’s ID. My son produced his school ID from his wallet.

 

The officer asked more questions, and my son answered. All the while the officer was relaying this information to someone over his radio.

 

My son heard someone on the radio say back to the officer “something to the effect of: ‘Keep him there until we get this sorted out.’ ” The officer told my son that an incident report would be filed, and then he walked away."

 

Mr. Blow's son will be fine. He has a father who has a national platform to speak out against what happened to him. 

 

Think of the countless other black men who have been subjected to similar indignities because they "fit a description". 

 

Fortunately for young Mr. Blow he will not end up like this guy, or this one, but it's not because he doesn't "fit the description."   

 

 

Where are the "Negrophobes" now?

If you get tired of hearing the history of the two main political parties and their history with black folks, imagine how tired I am of telling it to you.






Every time we have one of these debates republicans like to remind us that they are the "party of Lincoln" and that it was the democrats who were the party of the Southern racists and the KKK.






They have to do this, of course, because of the makeup of the modern day republican party and the perceptions that follow it.






I am so tired of repeating this particular part of history that I am going to allow Charles Blow to do it while responding to a racist who just  happens to be a republican.

"Last week, the economist and former Richard Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein went on Fox News and delivered a racial tirade completely detached from the anchor’s line of questioning.

When asked by the anchor about a Fox News poll showing the economy was the No.1 issue for voters, and how that poll result might work for or against Democrats in the midterms, Stein skirted the question altogether and instead spewed an extraordinary string of psychobabble about how “what the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics” by telling lies to African-Americans about how Republican policies would hurt them. He continued: “This president is the most racist president there has ever been in America. He is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans.”

Pat Buchanan, the two-time Republican presidential candidate, assistant to Richard Nixon and White House director of communications for Ronald Reagan, wrote a column this week accusing Democratic strategists of “pushing us to an America where the G.O.P. is predominantly white and the Democratic Party, especially in Dixie, is dominated by persons of color” in their last-minute get-out-the-vote appeals to African-Americans, by invoking Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jim Crow.

This glosses over a hundred years of history that will be tucked quietly away into some attic of amnesia.

Let’s review how we got to this point where African-Americans vote so overwhelmingly Democratic and are suspicious of Republican motives.

As NPR reported in July, “If you’d walked into a gathering of older black folks 100 years ago, you’d have found that most of them would have been Republican” because it was the “party of Lincoln. Party of the Emancipation. Party that pushed not only black votes but black politicians during that post-bellum period known as Reconstruction.”

As Buchanan, writing in American Conservative, pointed out, “The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman and the K.K.K. ‘Bull’ Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.”

But allegiances flipped.

The first wave of defections by African-Americans from Republican to Democrat came with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s. According to the Roosevelt Institute: “As Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented ‘the first time in their history’ that African-Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the ‘expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.'”

By the mid 1930s, most blacks were voting Democratic, although a sizable percentage remained Republican. Then came the signing of the Civil Rights Act by the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson — although he wasn’t perfect on the issue of race, and the bill passed partly because of Republican support.

In response to the bill, Barry Goldwater waged a disastrous campaign built in part on his opposition. As NPR put it: “Goldwater can be seen as the godfather (or maybe the midwife) of the current Tea Party. He wanted the federal government out of the states’ business. He believed the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional — although he said that once it had been enacted into law, it would be obeyed. But states, he said, should implement the law in their own time.” Whites were reassured by the message, but blacks were shaken by it.

Richard Nixon, for whom both Stein and Buchanan would work, helped to seal the deal. Nixon had got nearly a third of the African-American vote in his unsuccessful 1960 bid for the White House, but when he ran and won in 1968 he received only 15 percent. In 1972, he was re-elected with just 13 percent of the black vote. That was in part because the Republican brand was already tarnished among blacks and in part because the Nixon campaign used the “Southern strategy” to try to capitalize on racist white flight from the Democratic Party as more blacks moved into it.

As Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

That’s right: Republicans wanted the Democrats’ “Negrophobes.”

The history of party affiliations is obviously littered with racial issues. But now, there is considerable quarreling and consternation about the degree to which racial bias is still a party trait or motivating political factor for support of or opposition to particular politicians or policies.

This is a wonderful editorial, but hardly a revelation.It has been evident for decades that the Republican Party is a party without a soul. ...

1960 to '64 were my college years; they were also the years when the South flipped from solid Democratic to solid Republican. How do you...

For years the Republicans have been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done...

• It is clear that our politics were “racialized” long before this president came along — and that structure persists — but that’s not the same as saying the voters are racist.

To get more directly at the issue of racism in political parties, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Politics looked at “a variety of questions on racial attitudes in the General Social Survey” and specifically at “the numbers for white Democrats and white Republicans.”

This wasn’t a perfect or complete measure of racial bias, but more a measure of flagrant bias — the opinions of people aware of their biases and willing to confess them on a survey.

That said, they found that:

“So there’s a partisan gap, although not as large of one as some political commentators might assert. There are white racists in both parties. By most questions, they represent a minority of white voters in both parties. They probably represent a slightly larger minority of white Republicans than white Democrats.”

Still, the question is how much of this muck at the bottom of both barrels sullies what’s on top? The best measure many find for this is in the rhetoric and policies of party leaders.

The growing share of the Democratic Party composed of historically marginalized populations — minorities, women, Jews, L.G.B.T.-identified persons — pushes the party toward more inclusive language and stances.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, doesn’t have that benefit. They can’t seem to stop the slow drip of offensive remarks, like those of the Republican governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, who referred to the president’s policies last week as “tar babies” or the obsessive-compulsive need to culturally diagnose and condemn black people, like Stein’s saying this week that “the real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass.”

At that rate, Republicans will never attract more minorities, try as they may to skip over portions of the racial past or deny the fullness of the racial present. [Source]

Yes, so once again, we get the history lesson. And , once again, we understand that both political parties played racial ping pong with the black vote and for black support.

But now here we are in 2014, and it is people like Ben Stein who are demonizing black people and people like the entire FOX VIEWS crowd who are declaring that we are the racists in America.

It is no wonder then that the black vote (at least for the foreseeable future) will continue to be very lopsided in favor of the donkey.

Pic from homebrewedtheology.com

"RACISM AND THE RACE"

I want to thank a regular reader of the field's blog, for sending me an e-mail with the link to an interesting article.

Thank you Vaughn, and you are right; I don't think I will be doing my Carl Lewis imitation down Broad Street in my birthday suit.

Here is the article from the "New York Times," which was written by a gentleman by the name of Charles Blow:

"This is supposed to be the Democrats’ year of destiny. Bush is hobbling out of office, the economy is in the toilet, voters are sick of the war and the party’s wunderkind candidate is raking in money hand over fist.

So why is the presidential race a statistical dead heat? The pundits have offered a host of reasons, but one in particular deserves more exploration: racism.
Barack Obama’s candidacy has shed some light on the extremes of racism in America — how much has dissipated (especially among younger people) and how much remains.

According to a July New York Times/CBS News poll, when whites were asked whether they would be willing to vote for a black candidate, 5 percent confessed that they would not. That’s not so bad, right? But wait. The pollsters then rephrased the question to get a more accurate portrait of the sentiment. They asked the same whites if most of the people they knew would vote for a black candidate. Nineteen percent said that those they knew would not. Depending on how many people they know and how well they know them, this universe of voters could be substantial. That’s bad.

Welcome to the murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure. As Obama gently put it in his race speech, today’s racial “resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.” However, they can be — and possibly will be — expressed in the privacy of the voting booth."

More here:

I think I will cut back my workouts now. And tomorrow, I think I will have a big fat cheese steak for lunch.