"Descending into "Barbarism".

           I have a trial tomorrow, so I don't have time to drop a post. Instead, I will leave you with a cut and paste job of William Saletan's writing which was done for Slate magazine.

 "How does an enlightened nation descend into barbarism? That used to be a question for historians. Now it’s a process you can watch in real time. In recent days, Donald Trump has been casting aside moral constraints on torture and violence against civilians. At his campaign rallies, crowds have cheered him on. What kind of country would the United States become if Trump and his followers get their way? Just listen as Trump spells it out for you.

1. Torture. Since November, Trump has said he would approve not just waterboarding, but “a hell of a lot worse.” That’s a change from George W. Bush’s administration, which justified waterboarding on the grounds that it wasn’t torture. Trump dismisses the taboo against torture altogether. “Let’s assume it is” torture, he said of waterboarding at a campaign event in South Carolina on Feb. 17. It’s still “absolutely fine,” he concluded, and “we should go much stronger.”

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2. Retribution. Other Republicans, such as Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, argue that brutal interrogation methods are justified only to prevent an attack. Trump rejects that constraint. On Nov. 23, he told a crowd in Ohio that waterboarding extracts useful information from terrorists, but that even if it didn’t, he would approve it, and “more than that,” because “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway

3. Collective punishment. In a Trump administration, you don’t have to be a terrorist to be targeted for retaliation. You just have to be related to one. On Dec. 3, Trump said of terrorists, “You have to take out their families.” When Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked Trump to explain himself, Trump replied, falsely, that wives and children of the 9/11 hijackers had been sent home before the attack to “watch Daddy tonight on television knock down the World Trade Center.” He continued: “There has to be retribution. And if there is not going to be retribution, you are never going to stop terrorism.”

4. Hostage taking. Trump says he would target terrorists’ family members because they’re the
people terrorists care about. On Dec. 6, he said on Face the Nation that although terrorists “say they don’t mind dying ... I can tell you this: They want their families left alone.” At a Republican debate on Dec. 15, he added: “I would be very, very firm with families. Frankly, that will make people think, because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.” The audience applauded. The next day, Trump repeated that terrorists “care more about their families than they care about themselves” and that he “would do pretty severe stuff” to a terrorist’s wife. The crowd roared its approval.
 

5. Religious war. Trump routinely demands payback against ISIS for killing Christians. “The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed on Feb. 15. Often, Trump mentions that ISIS kills other people, too. But the only victim group he identifies by name is Christians.
 

6. Weakness. If you don’t accept torture or targeting civilians, Trump says you’re soft. In the Dec. 15 debate, Jeb Bush said these ideas were “crazy.” Trump replied that Bush was “a very nice person. But we need tough people.” In another debate on Feb. 6, Cruz rejected torture and waterboarding. Trump called Cruz’s answer “really weak.” At a rally in New Hampshire on Feb. 8, Trump gleefully told the crowd what a woman in the audience was calling Cruz for his answer: “She said he’s a pussy.” [Source]

*Pic from slate.com


 

(Continued from Page 1)

7. Level playing field. Trump views laws and scruples as foolish impediments. At a rally in Florida on Saturday, he complained that in the war on ISIS, “We’re playing with two sets of rules: their rules and our rules.” At a press conference that night, after winning two primaries, he went further: “It’s very hard to be successful in beating someone when your rules are very soft and their rules are unlimited.” He vowed to loosen American torture laws “so that we can better compete with a vicious group of animals.”

In an interview that aired Sunday on Face the Nation, Trump reinforced this point: “We are playing by rules, but they have no rules. It’s very hard to win when that’s the case.” He pledged to “strengthen the laws so that we can better compete.” Trump’s exchange with moderator John Dickerson continued:

Dickerson: Isn’t that separates us from the savages—rules?

Trump: No, I don’t think so. No. We have to beat the savages.

Dickerson: And therefore throw all the rules out?

Trump: We have to beat the savages.

Dickerson: By being savages?

Trump: No. We—well, look, you have to play the game the way they’re playing the game. You’re not going to win if we are soft, and they are—they have no rules. Now, I want to stay within the laws. I want to do all of that. But I think we have to increase the laws.  

You can see where this line of thinking would take us. To even the odds—to equalize the rules—we would have to behave like ISIS. Trump thinks about the laws of war the same way he thinks about trade barriers: The only way to get a level playing field is to do to others what they’ve done to you.

8. Imperial presidency. In Thursday’s debate, Trump was asked what he would do if the military, citing U.S. law, refused his orders to target the families of terrorists. He replied, “They’re not going to refuse me. ... If I say, ‘Do it,’ they're going to do it.” The next day, apparently after consultation with cooler heads, he issued a statement promising, “I will not order a military officer to disobey the law.” But by Saturday, at a rally in Florida, Trump was vowing to push back those laws: “We’re going to stay within the laws. But you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have those laws broadened.” On Face the Nation, he said he would “have the law expanded.” Trump has previously suggested that he could restore waterboarding without changing the law: “You reclassify [it], and you’ll see what happens.”

9. No limits. Trump rarely specifies what he would do to terrorists’ families. On Dec. 6, when Dickerson asked Trump what he meant by “going after the families,” Trump told him, “I’m going to leave that to your imagination.” In a Dec. 16 interview, O’Reilly asked Trump, “You’re not going to assassinate them, are you?” Trump replied, “I don’t know what I’d do.” Trump keeps his answers vague on the same grounds he uses to justify his vagueness about future military action: He wants to keep the enemy guessing. In both cases, the effect is that Americans have to guess, too.

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Why does Trump talk so poorly?  More...

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Fifteen years ago, in an address to Congress after 9/11, President George W. Bush described the moral pathology of terrorists. “We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety,” said Bush. “By abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it leads, in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

Some day, God willing, that’s where Trump’s ruthless ideology will end up, too.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.

 

 

    

"The power of fear."

*Congrats to Donald trump for  picking up an important endorsement from the New England police union. I guess that he has been speaking their language of late.

And congrats to him for leading the GOP field in places like South Carolina, even after his statement about Muslims entering America.

Anyway, now might be a good time for this editorial from the New York Times:

"Go ahead, deplore Donald Trump. Despise his message. Reject his appeals to exclusion and hatred. But do not make the mistake of treating him as a solitary phenomenon, a singular celebrity narcissist who has somehow, all alone, brought his party and its politics to the brink of fascism.

He is the leading Republican candidate for president. He has been for months. The things he says are outrageous, by design, but they were not spawned, nor have they flourished, in isolation.

 

The Republican rivals rushing to distance themselves from his latest inflammatory proposal — a faith-based wall around the country — have been peddling their own nativist policies for months or years. They have been harshening their campaign speeches and immigration proposals in response to the Trump effect. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to allow only Christian refugees from Syria to enter the country, and Mr. Cruz has introduced legislation to allow states to opt out of refugee resettlement.

 

And party officials around the country, attuned to the power of fear, have developed homegrown versions of the Trump approach. In 31 states, governors — most but not all Republicans — have formed an axis of ignorance, declaring their borders closed to refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Syria. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has sued the federal government and a nonprofit relief agency to keep refugees out. Indiana’s refusal forced one family to seek refuge in Connecticut. Georgia is seeking to deny displaced Syrians federal benefits, like food stamps, and keep their children out of school.

 

Civil rights organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center — are defending the displaced against blatant discrimination. That it is even necessary to protect the victims of Islamic extremism from being victimized again, in the United States, is a national disgrace.

 

This is the force that Mr. Trump feeds on and that propels him. It is bigger than he is, and toxic. Not a vote has been cast in the 2016 presidential race. But serious damage is already being done to the country, to its reputation overseas, by a man who is seen as speaking for America and twisting its message of tolerance and welcome, and by the candidates who trail him and are competing for his voters.

Mr. Trump has not deported anyone, nor locked up or otherwise brutalized any Muslims, immigrants or others. The danger next year, of course, is giving him the power to do so. And the danger right now is allowing him to legitimize the hatred that he so skillfully exploits, and to revive the old American tendency, in frightening times, toward vicious treatment of the weak and outsiders.

 

The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, as some Republicans have either forgotten or never understood, was a dark episode in American history. It is remembered today with regret, as something the nation struggled with, learned from, and moved beyond. But there are millions of Muslims who have good reason to fear that the darkness is falling again.

The time to renounce Mr. Trump’s views was the day he entered the race, calling Mexico an exporter of criminals and rapists. He played to the politics of nativism and fear that was evident last year, when a wave of Central American mothers and children, fleeing gang-and-drug warfare to the Texas border, presented themselves upon the mercy of the United States, and were met with derision and hysteria.

 

The racism behind the agenda of the right wing on immigrants and foreigners has long been plain as day. Mr. Trump makes it even plainer. After his remarks on Muslims, how many of Mr. Trump’s rivals have said they would reject his candidacy if he won the nomination? As of Wednesday, none." [Source]

 

*Pic courtesy of sandiegofreepress.org

 

 

Fear mongering in America.

   "A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational."

I just heard Donald trump's latest speech where he doubled down on his ludicrous and preposterous plan to ban all Muslims from entering the United States until we "can figure out just what the hell is going on." If  it wasn't for all the rabid fans of the turmpster cheering as if they were at a Saturday night lynching in Starkville, Mississippi, circa 1892, I would  have thought that I was watching a bad SNL skit. 

Of course the other republican candidates are now condemning trump with what the press is calling a "quick response".  The general consensus is that he has gone too far, and that what he is doing is not good for the country because it only serves to divide us. 

The irony is, of course, that it was these same republican candidates who took us down this slope in the first place. The most conservative of the bunch, Jeb Bush, was actually calling for some kind of religious test for folks coming into the country. That's a very trump like position.

This plan of Trump's opens up all kinds of doors. I am a Muslim American and I decide to take a vacay down to the beautiful town of Port Antonio, Jamaica. After my wonderful vacation I try to return to my stateside home only to be told that I cannot enter the country because of an edict from President trump. I have a job, a mortgage, an American wife, children.....Sorry kids, daddy is going to be at camp trump down in Cuba for awhile.  Anyway, you get the picture, this is not only inimical to our Constitution, it is just flat out stupid and unworkable on a practical level.

But hey, the snake oil salesman is selling a gullible and easily fooled American public something they are yearning for: safety, packaged in a nice little box of bigotry.  

"But if you doubt the marketability of bloodlust in a panicked America, look no further than Donald Trump, who leads the GOP field by a mile, and who literally wants to do unspeakable things to combat terrorism. That’s saying a lot, because there is very little that Donald Trump is unwilling to say. On several occasions recently, the things that Donald Trump has planned for fighting terrorism at home have been too awful for even him to say, and he’s on record supporting waterboarding.

On Friday, at a rally that was fraught with interruptions from protesters, Trump told an audience member who asked him how he would respond to the San Bernadino shooting that he couldn’t tell her, because he’d get into trouble with the press:" [Source]

 

I doubt it Donald, the press loves you. You have them eating out of your hand. 

 

The American people love you as well , at least the ones who are too scared to know better.

*Pic from cnn.com

 

 

 

"Black lives matter" to at least one Republican candidate.

     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.

Our monster.

So now that he has been caught, Americans will focus on their latest outcast and "monster".

Dylann Roof will be the face of evil for the next few weeks, and his vile actions in that church on Wednesday night will bring scornful howls of condemnation from a nation that wants to distance itself as far away as possible from his despicable act.

But can it?

I know that we are all outraged now, but let's remember this important fact: Dylann Roof was not created in a vacuum. And let's be honest with ourselves, there are a lot of Dylann Roofs living among us right now. We see their postings on the Internet, and we hear and see their angry rhetoric on talk radio programs and in chat rooms and websites where like minded people spew their hatred for the people who they perceive as a threat to their way of life.

It's hard to believe that Roof could have so much hatred in his heart after only 21 years of life, but I am sure that he has had a lot of practice and indoctrination.

The Judge in the case today called his family "victims". (In all my years in a courtroom, I have never heard a Judge refer to the defendant's family as victims in such a manner. But hey, we are in South Carolina, and I am digressing.) This was stunning. I guess it never occurred to the "good ole boy" sitting on the bench that maybe, just maybe, they were the ones who actually taught Dylann Roof to hate. (Oh, did I mention that this same Judge was reprimanded for using the n-word in open court?)

But it's not only his family, it's his country as well.

Roof made it clear that he wanted to kill black people , and yet some of the candidates for president of our country refuse to call what happened Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina what it really was: a hate crime. 

"It really is OK to say that the massacre of nine African Americans in their church was a racially motivated hate crime. How do we know? Because Dylann Roof, the confessed murderer, said so. There’s no need to speculate about what, besides race, might have motivated him to join a Bible study group for an hour, at the historical Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, and then shoot almost everyone dead, gladly leaving a survivor to tell the world what he’d done and why. Race is the answer, according to the guy who did it. Asked and answered, the end.

 

Unless you are Jeb Bush, and you are easily confused by super simple questions to which there is only one very obvious answer:

 

This was after Bush addressed the Faith and Freedom Coalition summit Friday morning, where he declared that Roof’s motivation remained a real mystery:

“I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” Bush said in his remarks. “But I do know what was in the heart of the victims.”

How Bush knows what was in the “heart” (the one shared heart, we guess?) of the victims, but not the heart of their murderer, is a real mystery to us. He told Huffington Post reporter Laura Bassett that he

“doesn’t know what the background of it is,” so obviously he cannot conclude that it’s a racially motivated hate crime. You gotta judge that for yourself, based on the flimsy circumstantial evidence that people who know him have said he is a fan of segregation, and his car has Confederate flag plates, and he wore the white supremacist flag of Rhodesia on his jacket — and oh yeah, he told law enforcement officials he wanted to kill black people to start a race war." [Source]

One of my twitter friends said this and it's apropos: "The new racism in America is denying that racism exists in the first place. "

 

 

 

 

   

Rewriting our history in Iraq .

"Only the dead have seen the end of war.” ~Plato~ 

Be careful America, I believe that there will soon be a war coming to a television near you.

"For the last week, liberals and conservatives have been arguing over the Iraq war. They agree that it was a mistake. But where liberals see lies and misinformation—“America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war,” writes Paul Krugman—conservatives see an honest error. “[C]learly there were mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the war and the lack of focus on security,” said Jeb Bush in one of his four follow-ups to a now-consequential question on the Iraq war last week. “The intelligence was clearly wrong,” said former CEO Carly Fiorina, “And so had we known that the intelligence was wrong, no, I would not have gone in.

Outside of the presidential race, conservative writers have tried to highlight the “honest” part of the mistake by emphasizing the national consensus around Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. “Though certainly not unanimous,” writes Matt Lewis for the Daily Caller, “the truth is that there was a strong bipartisan consensus that Iraq had WMDs. This included President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and even Nancy Pelosi.” Lewis ends there, but the intended argument is clear: You can’t accuse Bush of misleading the public when everyone, independent of the administration, also believed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Except that you can. As Jonathan Chait notes for New York, “misleading the public” into a war of choice isn’t mutually exclusive to having faulty intelligence, especially given the official conclusion that “the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” As Chait writes, “The Bush administration was the victim of bad intelligence, but also the perpetrator. Its defense lies in pretending that those two things cannot both be the case.” And at Mother Jones, David Corn points to the long trail of evidence showing the extent to which Bush officials exaggerated existing evidence and actively deceived the public about Iraq’s threat to the United States. Not only did Vice President Dick Cheney insist there was “very clear evidence” Hussein was developing nuclear weapons (there wasn’t), but he—along with President Bush and other members of the administration—worked to link Hussein to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “In November 2002,” notes Corn, “Bush said Saddam ‘is a threat because he’s dealing with Al Qaeda.’ ”

 

But there’s more to this dispute than the details of the run-up to the Iraq war. Conservatives don’t just want to avoid the extent to which the invasion was an active decision and not the passive result of “faulty intelligence.” They also want to enshrine the underlying logic of the war. The argument that the Iraq war was an honest mistake from bad assessments is also an argument that the invasion was the proper response to the potential threat of a WMD-equipped Saddam. It’s an endorsement of the Bush-Cheney strategy of “preventive war.”

To that point, Sen. Marco Rubio flatly states that Iraq “was not a mistake” because “the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.” Hussein’s brutality, in other words, was justification enough for the invasion. Likewise, in an interview with Bloomberg, Elliott Abrams—a former foreign policy adviser in the Bush administration and adviser to Rubio—said that “the proximate cause of the invasion was the intel about WMDs.”

The intelligence, in other words, compelled the invasion. Anyone else would have made the same choice.

But they wouldn’t have. In his speech against the Iraq war authorization bill, then-Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold agreed that Saddam posed “a genuine threat, especially in the form of weapons of mass destruction,” but didn’t think this required a new war:

Mr. President, I believe it is dangerous for the world, and especially dangerous for us, to take the tragedy of 9–11 and the word “terrorism” and all their powerful emotion and then too easily apply them to many other situations—situations that surely need our serious attention but are not necessarily, Mr. President, the same as individuals and organizations who have shown a willingness to fly planes into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon.

Other opponents, like Al Gore, made similar statements. “It is reasonable to conclude that we face a problem that is severe, chronic, and likely to become worse over time,” said the former vice president of international terrorism in a September 2002 speech, “But is a general doctrine of pre-emption necessary in order to deal with this problem? With respect to weapons of mass destruction, the answer is clearly not.” Millions of Americans—upward of 40 percent—agreed. And to this you can add the scores of analysts, journalists, and wonks who sharply disagreed that a war was needed to keep Iraq from distributing or using nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Writing in National Review, for example, one Cato Institute scholar made the sensible point that Hussein had no incentive to give away the fruits of a nuclear program: “Baghdad would be the immediate suspect and likely target of retaliation should any terrorist deploy nuclear weapons, and Saddam knows this.” His conclusion? “There’s certainly no hurry to go to war. Nothing is different today from September 10, 2001, or any time since Iraq was ousted from Kuwait.”' [More here]

History will not be kind to the architects of the Iraq war. And it shouldn't be.

The sad thing is, though, that there are still politricksters out there trying to convince the rest of us that going after the madman that ruled over Iraq was the right thing to do. It was not.

By shaking up the hornet's nest that is the Middle East, George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that there were putting their "preventive" war strategy to good use.

Sadly for them, their "preventive" war has only prevented peace in the Middle East.





 

A drunk driver kills your child and you face jail. If you are an immigrant you can have another child soon because you are "fertile".

Here in the land of only some are free, we have to constantly shake our heads at how certain people are treated by the justice system.

Take for instance the case of Raquel Nelson down in Georgia.

"Our friends at HLN are discussing a story out of Marietta, Georgia about a mother who is facing two years of jail time after her 4-year-old son was hit and killed by a drunk driver while she and her children were crossing the street. Now, hopefully you're asking yourself how it is that the mother of a boy slain after being hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street could be facing jail time at all, and the answer is because "she chose to cross the street at the bus stop, instead of the nearest crosswalk, three-tenths of a mile away.

 In July 2011, the mom in question, Raquel Nelson (pictured left with her now deceased son), "was convicted of … three misdemeanors: second-degree homicide by a vehicle, crossing roadway elsewhere than a crosswalk and reckless conduct." She received a sentence of one year probation and 40 hours of community service, but has chosen a retrial which begins today. According to HLN, "She now faces up to two years behind bars." 
The driver, Jerry Guy, "fled the scene after the accident but later admitted being involved, according to CNN affiliate WXIA-TV. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served only six months. He is serving the remainder of the sentence on probation," CNN noted in July of 2011. Nelson's son A.J. died in April 2010. This woman has been on trial for three years while grieving for the death of her son in what was an accident caused by a drunk driver. If Nelson were to be ticketed at all, to be made an example of (because she's a black single mother and American society loves to make an example of black single mothers), the only charge that seems reasonable in this case is "crossing roadway elsewhere than a crosswalk." There's no doubt that pedestrians need to obey rules and watch out for their own safety, but as Nelson's attorney, David Savoy, suggested, "the white stripes of a crosswalk are not impenetrable walls of steel that could have prevented a driver from striking someone crossing the street."

The idea that Nelson could be convicted of second-degree homicide by a vehicle makes me truly nauseous, because that is passing the buck from Guy to Nelson. Guy was driving the car, Guy was drunk, Guy struck the child and Guy fled. These charges are so, so sadly reflective of America's victim-blaming culture. A child runs out into the street while crossing from the bus stop and is struck by a car and killed. How does it possibly serve anyone to put his mother in jail? She has two other children to take care of. "

Then the author goes there:

"It's hard to imagine a white mother facing trial in the same circumstance. Then again, it's also hard for some to imagine a white mother in the same circumstance, unless she's poor, and then she too is to be made an example of. Because we're taught in America that if we're not wealthy and successful it's our "fault," and that everyone should want to be an over-scheduled, workaholic consumer, because to be otherwise is unpatriotic. It's un-American to stop feeding the machine. And if you're not feeding it, you're milking it, and that makes you scum. It's immature black-and-white thinking (in more than one sense), but that's what we're best at." [Source]

Personally, I blame Ronnie Reagan. He did such a "great" job of creating the "Welfare Queen" stereotype and making it stick. Poor people and people of color are bad. Rich people and all others are good.

Anyway, fortunately it has all ended well for Ms. Nelson. The vehicular homicide charges have been dropped. 

I guess it's better late than never.

Sometimes a little public scrutiny of an issue can be a good thing.

Finally, if you happen to be a young white person in America with no children I suggest that you start trying to have them. Jeb Bush and others in the republican party really need you to push one out for the home team.

If you don't, those "fertile" immigrants are going to have you in the minority before you can say apple pie.

Bush again!

I never thought that I would agree with a Bush, but Jeb was right about the press: They are a bunch of "crack" and "heroin addicts". But we all knew that. And we all know that the politricksters out here are their drug dealers.

Everyone is already getting in line for 2016, and from the looks of things America is going to have to deal with another Bush for another election cycle. (Memo to Jeb: Your name will weigh you down like checked bags on a commercial flight.) I am pretty sure that we are going to have a Clinton in the race as well. But 2016 is a long way away in politics.

And speaking of the press, there is some disturbing news coming from over at Essence Magazine. It seems that yet another strong sister [in pic] is being forced out by the corporate suits for not toeing the corporate line. I have said this before but it bears repeating: Until you Negroes in America start owning and controlling your own media outlets, you will always be a slave to Mr. Charlie's message.

Finally, tonight my racism chase takes me to the country state of Texas.

"A Texas mom is furious after middle school bullies handed her son a fake invitation to a KKK-themed birthday party 'with lots of fun and games.'
Tahiyyah Howard said that this wasn’t the first time her seventh grade son Justin has been the target of racial bullying. She told ABC News that several white classmates have repeatedly picked on the Tomball, Texas student just because he’s black.

"I'm just, really, you know, sick of it," Howard told KTRK.
In another incident, a female classmate wrote the words “Black Justin” on the board.

'My son was really upset,' Howard said.

Officials at Tomball Junior High School confirmed that the note was written, but said that a teacher picked the note up before Justin could see it. Administrators then contacted Howard and disciplined the two students responsible.

Just them being kids. Just human beings, Theresa Ellis told KTRK.
Falisha Tanner, another parent, wasn’t too surprised. 'That's the norm here,' she told KTRK. 'We are the minorities and we're treated as the minorities.”' [Source]

Ms. Howard, it might be time to consider relocating. Hopefully it's not too late and your son has not already been permanently scarred by the emotional trauma that accompanies experiencing racism and bullying at such an early age.