Make America "beautiful" again.

So did you hear the one about Donald trump hitting on that Washington Post reporter?

Girlfriend wanted some answers to some policy questions,  but  Donald being Donald was thinking of her as just another contestant for one of his beauty pageants.

Wingnuts, of course, thought that it was perfectly fine: "What's wrong with you liberals? Can't your women take a compliment? This is political correctness gone wild."

Liberals, and normal people, thought that Donald was being sexist and crass, and that the editorial boardroom was no place to try and get your Mack on.

I suspect that even if Donald trump could be mistaken for Idris  Elba the reporter would have been offended. It is not cool to try and pull up on a woman who is trying to do her job. Donald should know that. Should.

Here is the story as told by Mediaite:

"

        

      

        

      

Washington Post‘s Karen Attiah sounded the alarms of sorts this afternoon when she Tweeted out the following cryptic message after a meeting with Donald Trump and the WaPo Editorial Board:

"So I got hit on today by Donald Trump."


As you can see from the user engagement on the Tweet, people were quick to follow up on Attiah’s commentary, asking for any clarification on this newly-emerging behavior from the Republican frontrunner.

Hayes Brown

✔ ‎@HayesBrown

@KarenAttiah KEEP TALKING AND/OR WRITE A STORY

Follow

Karen Attiah

✔ ‎@KarenAttiah

@HayesBrown writing now

1:36 PM - 21 Mar 2016 · Washington, DC, United States

 
Then Monday night, Attiah — who serves as the Deputy Opinions Editor for the Post — released her story with the headline “I asked Trump a policy question. Then he called me ‘beautiful.’”

Attiah mentioned, and transcribed, some of the policy-related conversation that they had with the Republican frontrunner (“But do you feel that your messages, your rhetoric, are dangerous and divisive for this country?”, seemingly commonplace topics for Trump questioning these days), before detailing the after-meeting exchange she shared with Trump personally:

As the meeting ended and we were walking out of the room, I thanked Trump for taking my question. He turned to me and said, “I really hope I answered your question,” and added casually with a smile, “Beautiful.” I was stunned. I didn’t say thank you, and I don’t think I smiled. He then walked out to meet with my Post colleagues briefly before heading to the elevator. I stayed in the conference room for a few minutes as it sunk in that the potential GOP nominee for president thought it was okay to comment on my appearance. Did he just say that?
…
Perhaps he thought that calling me beautiful would make me ignore the fact that he brazenly lied about his polling numbers among Hispanic voters. Or make me believe that he wasn’t really a racist. Who knows? At least now I know, firsthand, that the sexism that Trump puts on display against Megyn Kelly under the lights of national TV is not that much different from how he is in real life toward female journalists.
Sad." [Source]

Megyn, you might be in luck. Tear up the restraining order. I think that Donald is turning his attention to print media.

 

 

Viva La Cuba.

"I kill a communist for fun" ~Tony Montana, Scarface~

That was a classic quote from the movie, Scarface. Tony Montana's character was a criminal in Cuba, and he had no love for Fidel Castro or his government.  He called himself a "political prisoner", but as we all remember from the movie, he was nothing more than a drug dealer and a murderer.

Unfortunately too many leaders in our history have had a similar simplistic view of the Fidel Castro government like the fictional character from the Scarface movie.

Personally, I tend to disagree with Tony's assessment of the Cuban leader, and I am glad for the president's historic trip to Cuba today. I have never understood the trade embargo and sanctions against Cuba for all these years when we were trading with the Chinese and Russians for crying out loud.  

I remember as a kid in Jamaica, listening to one of Fidel Castro's speeches, I didn't know a word of Spanish, but even before the interpreter told us what he was saying, I remember cheering my ass off. He was that charismatic.

Maybe it's because the man who I consider one of the greatest leaders in history, Michael Manley, had to turn to Fidel at a time when the American government and the West turned their backs on the Jamaican people, as we tried to cope with the draconian benchmarks for the country's recovery set by the IMF.

It was Castro and the Cuban government that gave Jamaica micro- dams, adult literacy, trained physicians ,quality health care, and innovative teaching methods that merged education and sports.

And, if that wasn't enough, it was the Cuban government and Fidel Castro who helped to end Apartheid in South Africa . It was also Cuban soldiers who fought alongside the Angolan people in their fight for liberation. 

Throw in the fact that the people who were in Cuba ---who didn't have a pot to piss in before the revolution--- look more like I do than Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and you can see where I am coming from. Afro Cubans didn't flee to Miami with their riches, because they had no riches.

Barack Obama and is family going to Havana sends a powerful message to those Cubans living on the island and to the world.

It is a message that is long overdue.

Now if you will excuse me I have a  cigar to smoke.


*Pic from AP.





 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: Dear white people, I come in peace.

*Pic from washingtonpost.com

Revenge of the angry white males.

 I will give it to the elites in this country, they have done a wonderful job of convincing poor white folks that the brown bogeyman is going to get them. That somehow all of their misery and frustration with whatever sad fate life dealt them, is the black and brown man's fault.

Donald trump, instead of trying to enlighten the poor and working class, has chosen to exploit those fears instead of trying to educate his army of frustrated angry white males. 

One of the greatest tricks that the powerful was able to pull off was convincing all of these people that conservatism is their ticket out of trailer park and rowhomes.

Anyway, I read an interesting article this morning ( by someone named Ian Walsh, I think) from the white perspective about the rise of trump, and this might be a good time to share it.

"This is not hard to understand. Wages for working class white males peaked in 1968, fourty-eight [sic] years ago. Coincidentally, I was born 1968.

I am not young.

For their entire working lives, conditions for working class males have been getting worse.
“Free trade” has not worked for them. China joined the WTO in 2000. Here’s what happened.

Now, imagine that chart adjusted for population increases.

So, for damn near 48 years, poor whites have done terribly. For fourty-eight years, ordinary politicians have promised to do something about it, and nothing has improved.

Do not tell me, or them, that they are “privileged.” Yes, it is better to be poor and white than poor and black, and better to be a poor white man than a poor white woman, but people who are in pain do not react well to some smug, upper-middle-class jerk telling them they are privileged when their lives are clearly terrible.

It is a FACT that working class whites will not see any improvement worth mentioning under any normal politician, including Clinton. They may see an improvement under Trump, they certainly would under Sanders.

They are voting for what they see as their interests, and they are not necessarily wrong. Certainly, Trump is more likely to help than Clinton, as the chance of Clinton helping them is zero. Zip. Nada.
It is insanity to expect poor white males to accept 48 years of decline and not get angry. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to respond to a man who offers them a better life in a way that is different from all the politicians who have failed them in the past.

Trump does not feel or campaign like an ordinary politician. Poor whites read this as: “He might not betray us like all the normal politicians do.”

At the least, it is worth a try.

Now, when I say “poor whites,” smart people should hear “people who are willing to be violent.”
Who mans America’s actual fighting regiments? That’s right, poor whites.

Who are your police? Who are your prison guards?

Right. Even if they make decent money as a cop or guard, they’re poor whites by culture: Scots-Irish core.

These are bad people to alienate to the point where they are willing to turn, en-masse, to a demagogue.

Just saying.

You may not like this, but the cold reality is that you need to keep the people who enjoy violence under control and, ideally happy–wanting other things more than they want to crack skulls. At the least, you make sure that they spend all their time killing and hurting each other and poor brown people, not their “betters.”

You have to be real stupid to lose control of your society’s fighting class. You have to be real stupid to degrade them over a period of decades, to employ them en-masse in jobs where they beat up other people.

Demonizing poor white men as “trailer trash” has simply alienated them. Telling them they are all sexist, racist scum has not “raised their consciousness.” Strangely, they don’t think that all the people who tell them they’re bad are right. Instead, they think those people are assholes.

In many cases, they’d like to give a good beating to said assholes. For example, Kevin Williamson:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

You have treated these people like shit. You know how you get treated at bad jobs? Like disposable trash who can be ordered to do anything?

People become how they are treated. You have to feed the better parts of them if you want those parts to win. If half the “good jobs” available to these people jobs that involve violence, if the remaining non-violent jobs (manufacturing) are disappearing, and if the rest of their jobs are ass, you should not be surprised that they become mean.

You make them this way, then you demonize them for it.

Trump does not talk to these people like he despises them. (Neither does Bernie.)

Clinton does. She’s pandering, she knows it, and it comes through. The disdain drips.

The quality of life for the average “white male” peaked in 1968. Then, you call them trash, they have almost no good jobs, and you’re surprised they’re angry? You think they aren’t human? You think they are Jesus, and can be treated like crap for longer than most of them have been alive and that there won’t be consequences? You think that because other people are treated even worse, they will sublimate their own mistreatment?

Worse, you marginalized them and then used them as your primary violent enforcers?
That’s not just immoral, that’s crazy stupid.

Remember, they don’t just hate people who are brown. They hate most rich whites. And by rich, they mean a lot more people than the actual rich.

Treat people like trash, and don’t be surprised when they come back to bite you." [Source]

Ok, we get it, it  they will "come back to bite" us. But I am pretty sure that the people in the top ten percent will not be getting bit.

Instead, all of the barking will be at the people who look a little different than they do, but sadly, who are just as weak and as helpless as they are.

*Pic from fallingdownfilm.com

Night off.

 No post tonight, field hands.

I will holla at you tomorrow.

A sad state of affairs.

  "Jeffrey Bouley ‏@thedeaconblue 5m5 minutes ago

That moment you look out at your nation and realize: Not only is "Idiocracy" now a documentary, "The Walking Dead" has become a utopian tale."

 

That quote from twitter pretty much sums up the state of the American political scene in 2016.

 

A spokesperson for the leading candidate in the republican primary for president just declared that riots are not necessarily a bad thing, another one said that peaceful protesters had the violence that they experienced coming to them, and the candidate himself is threatening to riot with his peeps if things don't go his way at the republican convention. The same candidate promises to pay his supporters legal fees when they angrily assault people.  (He lied about saying it, but what else is new?)

 

There was supposed to be a debate on FOX VIEWS, but trump backed out, so without the show poor FOX had to cancel.  He (trump) thinks that we have had enough debating.  Honestly, I am surprised that he didn't do this sooner. I mean, let's face it, it's not like he has anything to say in the first place. ("It's gonna be huuge.") 

 

Finally, to get away from politics for a little bit. I would like to bring your attention to an article I read from my man David Love.

 

"Why is that when black people are killed, either the story is ignored, or at best, it gets only second or third-tier coverage?

 

The news last week coming out of Wilkinsburg, Pa. (Allegheny County adjacent to Pittsburgh) is heartbreaking and shocking to the conscience. A team of two gunmen gunned down and killed five people, including a pregnant woman, and seriously wounded two others at a backyard cookout. The death of the fetus was ruled as a homicide, which raised the death toll to six. One of the victims was shot 50 times, and one of the attackers even used an AK-47 rifle to shoot his victims in the head. By all accounts, this was a military-style operation.

Drugs were not ruled out as a possible motive. Although we might not know the whole story, this much is certain: The victims were black, no white folks were involved, and apparently this was not the work of ISIS. So, in other words, keep moving, nothing to see here.

And it is not that the ambush-style mass murder was not covered in the media but rather that it was covered in a manner that is customary when black lives are at stake — or should we say, when black deaths are involved.

Even in a nation that, far too often, is accustomed to mass shootings, these mass shootings still make front page news. However, no one seems to care about the murder of poor black people, and so the story is buried." [More here]

And let me preempt the racist argument that the shooters might have been black right now: That is beside the point. The  shooters could have been little green men from Mars; the point is that their victims were poor and black, and so no one cares. 

*Pic from abcnews.go.com

 

 

     

 

 

 

  

Election night.

   It's election night once again in these divided states of America.

From where I sit it looks like we are heading for a Hillary versus Donald showdown come November.

Donald, the xenophobic bully and head divider, vanquished "little Marco" in his own state. Poor Marco, the man recently touted as the future and "savior" of the GOP on the cover of Time Magazine , is now, like Mitt Romney before him, just another republican also ran.

Hillary bless her e-mailing heart, once again ran through the South like Sherman's army, and poor Bernie is left with a ton of money but not enough delegates to scare the pants suit wearing wonk who is probably- next to Ted Cruz- the most right leaning pol left in the race.

The night is still young, but it looks like Hillary Clinton and Donald trump (too little too late Governor Kasich) will be the big winners tonight.

Thoughts?

*Pic from cnn.com



 

Missing Chris, and the Chinese strike back

         I wonder if all the people who took issue with president Obama missing Nancy Reagan's funeral have an issue with Chris Christie missing the funeral of that New Jersey state trooper who tragically lost his life, recently?

"New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is skipping the funeral of 31-year-old New Jersey State Trooper Sean Cullen, who was killed in the line duty after being accidentally hit by a motorist last Monday. The governor, who recently became a surrogate for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, will instead be spending the day campaigning for Trump out-of-state. (Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno is scheduled to attend the funeral.)

Christie’s office and the Trump campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
"We are focused on honoring our fallen brother today, and quite frankly we did not expect someone who has consistently shown disdain for law enforcement to pay his respects to the Cullen & State Police family," Christopher Burgos, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey, told The Daily Beast in a statement. "May Sean rest in peace. A wonderful family, tragic. [The governor's] decision making is predicated on selfish political opportunism, that much is clear." [Source]

Poor Chris Christie, and to think that just a few years ago he was the rising star in the republican party and was measuring the drapes at 1600 Pennsylvania, Avenue.

I tried not to write about you know who tonight, I really did. And believe me, it's hard, because there is so much that I could be writing about.  But one story in particular is so scary and funny at the same time that I feel compelled to post it.

"An editorial published Monday in the China government-controlled Global Times argues even if Donald Trump isn’t elected president, his ascendance has “opened a Pandora’s Box” for America by exposing both alarming fissures in U.S. society and some of the inherent risks in democracy in general.

“Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for Western democracy,” the editorial says. “Now, most analysts believe the US election system will stop Trump from being president eventually. The process will be scary but not dangerous.” That is to say, one supposes, we may come close to the edge of a Trump presidency but will not necessarily fall.

Trump’s rise was not anticipated by most analysts and observers. At the beginning of the election, Trump, a rich, narcissist and inflammatory candidate, was only treated as an underdog. His job was basically to act as a clown to attract more voters’ attention to the GOP. However, knocking down most other promising candidates, the clown is now the biggest dark horse.

[…] Big-mouthed, anti-traditional, abusively forthright, he is a perfect populist that could easily provoke the public. Despite candidates’ promises, Americans know elections cannot really change their lives. Then, why not support Trump and vent their spleen?

The rise of a racist in the US political arena worries the whole world. Usually, the tempo of the evolution of US politics can be predicted, while Trump’s ascent indicates all possibilities and unpredictability.

Washington Post‘s Simone Denyer noted that the editorial argues that the unpredictability of democracy is to blame for many of America’s ills, such as income and racial inequality. Denyer writes:

The inherent instability of the democratic system is classic Communist Party propaganda and an argument that resonates with many people here: Indeed, it is one of the pillars of the party’s legitimacy in many people’s eyes.

Democracy is a mess – just look at India – and sometimes violent – viz. the Arab Spring. China’s history before the Communist Party came to power was equally messy. Only strong, purposeful and benevolent one-party rule can guarantee stability.

Of course, there are a couple of glaring lacunae in that argument: The most obvious being the tyranny and mass insanity unleashed by Mao Zedong, who killed tens of millions of his own people, (as indeed Stalin did in the Soviet Union). But hey, that bit of history is officially glossed over here.

The paper may have a point in that the rise of Trump — as well as that of Bernie Sanders — is arguably a reaction to the capture of American politics by big business and lobbyists, and the failure of globalization to deliver economic benefits to the middle class.

But it also ignores the fact that democratic “reactions” can often offer a (long and winding) path to democratic solutions, while dictatorships almost always end in chaos." [Source]

That's right, the Chinese state controlled paper is running editorials about the dangers of having a democracy because of.....you guessed it, Donald trump.

I told you it was both funny and scary at the same time.

*Pic from slate.com

                       

 

 

The Field Negro pop quiz.

  Yo  America, you do realize that Donald trump is leading a major party in this country to be their nominee for the presidency, right?

I just thought that I would remind you. 

Anyway, here is a little quiz for you that I got from the Telegraph of Britain.

Who said it: Donald trump, or AH? (As the paper said, "we are just comparing rhetoric here", not the men. One is a murderer and an evil human being; the other is simply a liar and a fraud, which hardly registers the same on the bad person meter.)  

"You will never learn what I am thinking"

"I want to be unpredictable"

"Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war"

"It is not truth that matters, but victory."

"People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country."

"All great movements are popular movements"

"I play to people’s fantasies...I call it truthful hyperbole"

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and ...they will believe it."

"Part of being a winner is knowing when to walk away"

"If you win, you need not have to explain. If you lose, you should be there to explain!"

Answers here. (I think I got 7 out of 10)

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: Dude, why are u pulling down my pants?

*Pic from motherjones.com 

Chaos in Chicago.

   In light of all the anger and violence in the country, like Donald trump did with his rally, I have decided to cancel my post tonight, as I am sure that the comment section after the post would have been full of racism, anger, and vitriol.

(In case you live under a rock, there has been a major disturbance at a trump rally in Chicago.)

Maybe we need to just chill for a minute.

I hope Mr. trump feels good about himself. I am pretty sure that this is the America he wanted.

"Can't we all just get along?"