The laughter has stopped for "America's dad".

This post is going to be tough for me, because the person I am going to post about in a less than positive light has done some good things for his community and his race in the past. I know, because I have met the man and seen some of the good things that he has done first hand.




Having said that, it has been painful to watch the slow decline of "America's Dad".




If what is being alleged about the Cos is true, he deserves to be taken down, because no one, no matter how rich and famous, is above the law.




We have all heard the whispers for years, and for those of us who live in his hometown the whispers have been louder. It took a comedian putting him on blast on a national stage and one of his accusers going public on CNN (and penning an op-ed for the Washington Post) for us to start getting a peek at the alleged skeletons in Bill Cosby's closet again. 




Some folks have been saying that the man is a hypocrite all along. This is the same guy, they argue, who has been telling black folks to get their family life right and telling young black men to pull their pants up and get their stuff together. And yet there he was allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting multiple women. "Do as I say not what I do."  




For the record, I agree with a lot of what Cosby was preaching about. When he talked about personal responsibility and taking back our neighborhoods and homes, he was on point. When he was going from city to city and facing down black men with a message of responsibility, I was with him as well.
Sadly, his message will be lost now, because the messenger might be flawed.




The shunning has already begun. Letterman canceled his appearance and so did Queen Latifah. NPR confronted him about the rape allegations as well, and he remained silent. (In Bill Cosby's case silence is most definitely not golden.) The only person coming to Cosby's defense these days is Rush Limbaugh. Which, given his disdain for the fairer sex, is not at all surprising. "It's not like he did it yesterday".  Oh the mind of a wingnut.


Anyway, here is my advice to Cos: Book an hour on Oprah's couch and have a heart to heart in prime time.


If he really did what he is being accused of he needs to come clean. The statute of limitations is 12 years in Pennsylvania (not sure what it is in New York) for crimes such as this so he would be out of the legal woods. At least as far as the alleged crimes committed in Pennsylvania is concerned.


If what is being alleged is true, he needs to look into the camera and apologize to each and every woman he assaulted and beg for their forgiveness. He needs to ask America to forgive him as well. Especially black America. ----All those speeches and all that finger pointing.   


He should also vow to spend the rest of his life giving to causes that support women in abusive relationships and supporting them with his money and his time.


If what is alleged is not true, he should say so. And he should cry real tears to Oprah and tell her and the country why he thinks the women that he was involved with might all feel this way.


"Comedian Bill Cosby will not comment on "discredited" accusations of sexual assault that have resurfaced in recent weeks against him, his lawyer said on Sunday.

Allegations that Cosby, 77, drugged and sexually assaulted several young women decades ago gained renewed attention after comedian Hannibal Buress called him a rapist during a stand-up comedy routine last month.

"Over the last several weeks, decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced," said John P. Schmitt, Cosby's attorney, in a statement. "The fact that they are being repeated does not make them true."

Neither Cosby nor his representatives will comment further on the allegations, Schmitt added."

Mr. Schmitt, I am sorry to hear that.










           







 
























 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.


For instance:


Who is YOUR tailor?

Watch it Betsy, his fingers might be loaded.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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

Looking for new recruits, and the return of the I word.

Now that the KKK is trying to diversify their ranks, I think that some of you Negroes might finally find work.


I am thinking of this guy, and this one, and this one, and this lady. You all will be welcome to join the KKK, and I am sure tat you would have no problem doing just that.


You Negroes who want to sign up for the KKK can thank a man named John Abarr for your chance.

"The Ku Klux Klan is not a singular entity, but instead consists of a number of smaller organizations around the country. Abarr’s attempt at embracing racial diversity is an attempt to refocus on the Klan’s core goal of keeping the federal government from enacting a “new world order.”


While one of Abarr’s summits last summer was actually attended by an NAACP delegation, many are still skeptical that the group plans to give up its white supremacist ideology. The Montana Human Rights Network’s Rachel Carroll-Rivas said, “They know that their beliefs aren’t popular, so they try to appear moderate. I think it’s just a farce.”


The Imperial Wizard of the KKK also isn’t pleased. Bradley Jenkins said, “That man’s going against everything the bylaws of the constitution of the KKK say. He’s trying to hide behind the KKK to further his political career.”


One of the most famous members of the KKK, David Duke, enacted reforms when he founded the Knights of the KKK in 1974, which allowed women to become equal members, as well as accepting Catholic members."


No thanks John, I think I will pass.


Finally, some words from my favorite conservative, Thomas Sowell, on Barack Obama.


"Just what happened last week on Election Day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?


The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet.
Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.


Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of "we the people" only a distant memory and a painful mockery.


We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama's term? Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame-duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country, Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue executive orders changing the country's immigration laws unilaterally.
Does that sound like a lame-duck president?


On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic's dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.


The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering.But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.


People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama's competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.


You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric." [Source]


My lord! And this man is considered a deep thinker and intellectual among those on the right.


A "banana republic dictator" ? The man was elected twice by the American people for crying out loud. And yet Sowell tries to makes the argument that Obama is some kind of out of control renegade who is trampling all over the Constitution.   


The tone of Mr. Sowell's article suggests that the man who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is intentionally trying to transform America as we know it, and he is planning on doing it (if he hasn't already) illegally.


OK, so this is where all the impeachment talk comes from.


At first I didn't think that it would be possible to go down this road again, but the more I listen to people like Mr. Sowell the more convinced I am that this is now in the republican playbook.  And when I look at the comments following his article I see that the folks on the right have a real appetite for it and want nothing more than to remove Barack Obama from office before the next election.


Sadly, maybe Rep. Jim Clyburn is right, although for the sake of the republic I certainly hope that he is not.    













 

Creating unhealthy perceptions, and celebrating a hero.

If you figured out right away what is wrong with this picture good for you. If not, well, you are reading the right blog, because you have a lot of learning to do when it comes to America's problem with racial perceptions.


Now I am sure that the person who is responsible for creating the Baby K'Tan ad isn't necessarily a racist, but it just goes to show you the level of cluelessness and ignorance that is prevalent in yet another industry that has a tremendous influence over popular culture and thought.


It's all about the narrative, people, and in America, more than anywhere else, perception is reality.


You Negroes were understandably upset, and given our history with these types of issues I can't say that I blame you.


Finally, in honor of Veteran's Day, a little history lesson.


"The one life that U.S. Marine Dan Bullock had to give for his country lasted just 15 years, five months and 17 days.


The Brooklyn teen, after using a doctored birth certificate to enlist, became the youngest U.S. casualty of the Vietnam War when he was gunned down on June 7, 1969.


 It wasn’t until reporters visited the Marine’s family in Williamsburg that the nation learned the young man had been born on Dec. 21, 1953.


Forty-five years later, Bullock’s legacy is largely as a trivia answer in a fight that America would rather forget.


His old boot camp buddy Franklin McArthur says it shouldn’t be that way.
“He’s the youngest kid killed, and hardly anybody knows his name,” McArthur said from his Florida home. “It bothers me because he’s an historical figure, and everybody should know who he was.


“And hardly anybody does.”


A picture of Bullock’s boyish face adorns a wall at the city’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Lower Manhattan.


The slain teen looks forever east — frozen in time beneath his white dress hat, his lips pursed and his eyes fixed straight ahead.


His name adorns a street in his old Brooklyn neighborhood and a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Honolulu. His grave in North Carolina bears a stone paid for years ago by talk show host Sally Jesse Raphael.


Much of that attention was generated by McArthur, who says he remains haunted by the 15-year-old’s sudden and violent death.


Bullock was just 14 when he appeared with his bogus proof of age at the Albee Square Marine recruiting station in downtown Brooklyn.


He was a bright kid and big for his age — standing about 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. But the rigors of boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., were too much for the recruit, who was still just 14.


“He had already kind of washed out when he got to my platoon,” McArthur recounted. “He had trouble keeping up.”


McArthur made it his mission to aid the young Marine, at times carrying the exhausted teen through the rigorous training. He made the commitment because he knew what put a rifle in Bullock’s hands.


“Dan joined the Marine Corps to help his family out,” McArthur recalled. “His father was a lumber worker and a sharecropper. He didn’t have any skills to get work in New York.”


The two men said farewell after boot camp. Bullock left behind his dad, his stepmom and his 13-year-old sister, Gloria, and wound up about 8,500 miles from Brooklyn.


The rifleman with the Second Platoon of Company F was at the An Hoa Combat Base in Quang Nam Province when a 1 a.m. firefight began on June 7, 1969.
The heroic teen, realizing his fellow Marines guarding the base perimeter were outgunned, began running back and forth to deliver much-needed ammunition for the better part of an hour.


Bullock’s commander, unaware of the dead Marine’s tender age, provided the details in a June 11 letter to his parents on Lee Ave. in Brooklyn." [More]


Come on Hollywood, give us a movie. Start working on it now so that you can release it in time for next Veteran's Day.