Reconsidering "going high."

"I have to give it to the Obamas, they are full of nothing but class and grace. "When they go low we go high".

Still, with all due respect to the first lady, in the age of Breitbart, the alt-right, and Stormfront, going "high" will not get you much. These folks play dirty, and they always go low. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to go low with them. These types of people do not respect grace.  Believe me, they might praise you in public, but they laugh at you behind closed doors.

Anyway, now that trump has been elected to the most powerful office on earth, his lemmings and followers have been emboldened to do what deplorable people do.

Consider all that has been happening since election night.

"A female student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette was beaten, robbed and had her hijab ripped off by two men, one of them wearing a white "Trump" hat, police and university officials said.

Police say a Louisiana college student has acknowledged she fabricated her report that she was assaulted and robbed of her wallet and Muslim headscarf by two men, one of whom she described as wearing a white "Trump" hat.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, a Muslim student at San Diego State University was robbed and may have had her car stolen Wednesday by two men who made comments about President-elect Donald Trump and Muslims, according to police and university officials, who called the attack a hate crime.

The two attacks occurred within hours of each other on a day marked by widespread protests over the Republican nominee's surprising victory against Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's presidential election.

Around 11 a.m., a female UL-Lafayette student was walking down a residential street near campus when two white males jumped out of a gray four-door sedan and hit her with a metal object, knocking her to the ground, university police told the Advertiser. The men tore off the woman's head wrap, took her wallet and hit her while she was down, police said. The woman reported one of the suspects was wearing a white hat that had "Trump" on it." [Source]

And right here in Philly.

"Donald Trump's unexpected rise to the presidency coincided with the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht — and Nazis in Philadelphia appeared to revel in the fact as police there discovered the President-elect's name spray-painted alongside swastikas on a storefront window Wednesday morning.

Cops were alerted of the racist vandalism around 10:30 a.m. and quickly deployed power wash crews to remove the graffiti from the storefront on the city's south side." [Source]

That's just the tip of the very messy iceberg, there were other incidents all over the country to ponder as well.

Anyway, the president spent 90 minutes with the man who launched his political career by calling him a non-citizen ("When they go low"), and from all accounts it went as well as could be expected.

I have to give it to the president for being so gracious to trump. But sadly, that is not what all the people who are still hurting from trump's upset victory want to see. Not when his (trump's) people are still going low.

"A Minnesota-based Asian American woman was put in handcuffs on Wednesday after attempting to fight off a Trump supporter who grabbed her and shouted racial slurs at her. 

Kathy Mirah Tu wrote in a now-viral Facebook post that a white male screamed at her to “Go back to Asia,” and then chased after her when she tried to ignore him, saying “Don’t you know it’s disrespectful to walk away from someone when they are talking to you?”

After informing the man that she is an American citizen, the man told her that the only reason she was able to attend college was affirmative action and grabbed her by the wrist.

Refusing her requests to let go, the Trump supporter said “I don’t understand why you are walking away from me when I am trying to have a conversation with you. I told you that it’s rude and you should listen to me cause I know a lot more than you do.”

Still grabbing her wrist, the man tried to get her to fight him, laughing at how “small and shrimpy” she was. Tu punched him in the throat to get away, after which the Trump supporters called the police and accused her of assault.

Tu says she felt that the officers were more inclined to listen to the Trump supporter’s side of things, citing that his friends were “witnesses” and put her in handcuffs while they ran her information, which came up clean and prompted her release." [Source]

"When they go low we go high."

Tell that to Kathy Mirah Tu.

 

   

 

 

Your 45th president.

"Everything I believe in - kindness, goodwill, selflessness, honor - has all been soundly revoked by my country tonight. Cannot reconcile it." @jeffcannata

I remember my first visit to America as a child. My father moved the family to East Lansing, Michigan to pursue his doctoral studies at Michigan State University. As a wide- eyed kid I felt like I hit the jack pot. Snow. Baseball.Toys. Unlimited amounts of candy. America, to me was a beautiful place. So imagine my disappointment when my father told the family that we had to go back to Jamaica when his studies were over.

He had job offers from all over the country, but he just wouldn't stay. Jamaica was home, and that's where he was going. So he packed up the family and moved  back to the place he loved more than anywhere else on earth. 

To my father, America wasn't all that. He saw behind all the glitz and glamour, and all the false platitudes of exceptionalism. He had faced discrimination as a young college student years before, and (even though I didn't know it at the time) he was experiencing it then.

I was thinking about my father last night when the charade of American decency was finally exposed. Americans elected a man who questioned the legitimacy of the man he will be replacing, bragged about assaulting women, and refused to rent his properties to African Americans. He is also a man who refused to release his tax returns, and started his now successful campaign by branding Mexicans as rapists.

But this is where we are in this country. Honestly, his victory to those of us who are branded as "racism chasers" was not surprising. We saw this "whitelash" coming. We tried to warn you that this is what happens when you normalize hate. We always knew, that at its core, this movement was more about racism, xenophobia, sexism and just good old fashion self-preservation, than it was about economic angst and a dissatisfaction with Washington. Making America great again was a slogan meant for the good ole boys and gals in places like Pistolvania and Kentucky. It's what got them fired up to come out in record numbers and reject the more qualified candidate who would have actually made their lives better.

I was honestly going to stop blogging if Hillary Clinton won. The passion for making my thoughts known every night was waning, but Führer trump winning last night and becoming our 45th president made me realize that I have to stick around just a little longer.

After all, typing at times might be just as good as fighting.





   

As we head out to vote tomorrow, a burned out church stands in Mississippi.

   So his Oness just gave what might be his final speech to the country at a massive rally for Hillary at Independence Hall here in Philly. Michelle spoke as well, and as usual she was on point. I suspect that most of y'all are going to miss that family.

We will see if all that hype and those great speeches tonight worked for Hillary when folks go out to the polls in the 66 wards and all their divisions across Philly tomorrow. The mass transit strike is over and the weather should be nice, so that's a good sign for the candidate who wants to be the first to be called Madam President in our history.

Anyway, on the night before we all go to vote I want to do a cut and paste job of what I believe is a very important story.

"GREENVILLE, MIssissippi — The latest instance of the insanity this election has wrought took place on a dead-end street in a black neighborhood, where someone burned a 111-year-old baptist church and wrote “Vote Trump” on the side.

Hillary Clinton immediately took to Twitter to condemn the act, saying, “This kind of hate has no place in America.” It was signed “H” to show it was from Clinton herself. But when it came to the burning of a black church in his own name, Trump’s little fingers didn’t touch his favorite means of reaching millions of supporters, Twitter. Instead, his campaign issued a boilerplate statement.

So these are stakes of this election: a potential president who would not even condemn in his own words terrorism done in his own name.

The inside of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church looked like a deranged modern art exhibit when viewed on Friday afternoon. Pews, an organ, the podium for the Bible—all covered in what looked black paint. It was instead soot from the flames that licked up the walls and busted out the windows, burning so hot that firefighters at first had to watch it burn before finally being able to approach the building to try to save it.

They failed.

“We will rebuild,” said Marshall Wilson, a Greenville native and a deacon at the church for the last 38 years. The church will have the help of more than $200,000 raised online in the last few days.

“It’s overwhelming,” Wilson told The Daily Beast on Friday afternoon.

Whether the arsonist was a Trump supporter, someone hoping to throw off the authorities—although Wilson noted no one in the community that he knows of has every had a problem with church, especially not enough of one to spark flames—or someone else hoping to wreak some havoc of their own, is now up to authorities to find out.

“What the Devil do, whoever did this, his plan’s not gonna work,” Wilson said. “God’s got a plan for everything.”

So do a lot of other people.

They include the three men who are accused of planning to bomb a Somali mosque in Kansas, a crime that has federal authorities referring to the men as domestic terrorists. “The only way to turn around this country is a bloodbath,” one member of the group said in a phone call recorded by law enforcement.

The men were arrested in October after an eight-month long investigation.

Somali immigrants, a largely Muslim community, were targeted in North Dakota as well. Police eventually arrested a man for firebombing a Somali cafe there in December, writing “Go home” in spray paint on a window.

But the string of violence against minorities  this election season may have begun in August 2015, when two men in Boston beat and urinated on a homeless Hispanic man simply because of his race, allegedly invoking Trump in the attack.

“Donald Trump was right; all of these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men said after he was arrested, according to police.

The GOP presidential candidate, in characteristically spineless fashion, said then he “would never condone violence” from his supporters. Our possible next president did not say, unequivocally, that he did not condone this specific act, because that wouldn’t fit into the dog whistle nature of his candidacy. During a press conference following the attack, Trump took his non-condemnation a step further, saying his supporters are “very passionate,” and that they “just want this country to be great again.”

For some of those supporters, that greatness is best shown by beating the hell out of someone who is a different color than you.

But the Trump-related violence didn’t stop there. The Daily Beast in March compiled a list of violent confrontations between Trump supporters and protesters at the GOP candidate’s rallies. At that time, Trump’s mostly white gang of thugs had roughed up men and women in at least six incidents, including one that month in which a white man cold-cocked a black protester. Trump at the time pledged to pay the attacker’s defense fees.

Like virtually everything that Trump promises, that ended up not happening. Some protesters, however, have taken legal action and are seeking $1 million in damages for the violence inflicted on them at Trump rallies.

Finally, and most ironically for the “law and order candidate,” is the man who killed two Iowa police officers in early November. A Trump-Pence lawn sign was planted in the front yard of the home where Scott Greene lived and we know that he is angry enough at blacks to record himself waving a Confederate flag in the faces of African-Americans at a high school football game. Police escorted Greene out following the incident.

The Trump tweet came first, then one from Clinton, expressing condolences for the families of the two fallen officers.

Clinton’s tweet condemning the arson at the Greenville church compared to Trump’s silence on his chosen platform is an important distinction to make. Twitter is the place where Trump is at his most “unshackled” where he regularly berates and bullies opponents, reporters, citizens, foreign leaders and whomever else chooses to question his manhood, sanity, or bonafides as a presidential candidate or basic human being. It’s also where he pushes conspiracy theories and fake news, where he utilizes plagiarism as a campaign tactic, and where he occasionally blames interns of questionable existence for insulting the entire state of Iowa.

That Trump had nothing to say on his own about the church doesn’t bother Deacon Wilson.

“The church was still smoking when the firemen brought out the Bible,” he said as investigators continued to comb through the wreckage on Friday afternoon. “It hadn’t been touched. You can’t burn God’s word.”' [Source]

If you cant condemn the burning of a church in your name, are you really qualified to lead the "greatest country" on earth?

*Pic from nbcnews.com

 

The cowardly candidate.

For a guy who likes to tout open carry laws, candidate trump sure gets jumpy at the thought of a gun anywhere near him.

That protester that caused trump to go scurrying backstage with his secret service detail didn't have a gun, but trump's supporters sure thought he did, and they didn't realize that the poor guy only had a protest sign until they beat the crap out of him and yelled, "Gun!" 

This is the second time this campaign season that I saw coward trump running away from an imaginary threat. (Watch how the female candidate in the race reacts to the same kind of threat.) I just think that it's amazing how cowardly bullies can be when you expose them.

Of course trump was exposed as a coward a long time ago when he did everything in his power to get out of going to serve his country during the Vietnam War.  It's a past that the main stream media seems to have conveniently forgotten.

It's ironic, too, that all these militia groups have vowed to storm Washington if their guy loses. I just wonder if they realize that when the bullets start flying he will not be around to get their backs.

Finally, trump's other running mate. Jim Comey, declared tonight that there will be no more investigations into Hillary's e-mails, as most of the ones that they (the FBI) dug up from Weiner's laptop were duplicates. (That sound you hear is groans coming from camp trump.)  

Yes America, the Clinton e-mails investigation is over as far as the FBI is concerned. The folks in the Clinton camp are crying foul, because they believe that this entire episode might have cost them a countless number of votes.

Personally, I disagree. I said this when this story broke, and I think that it is worth repeating:This perception of the FBI backing trump might have energized Clinton's base, and it gave her campaign a boost that she never had prior to this entire sorry episode.

*Pic from rawstroy.com

 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: Sorry Mr. trump, we thought we saw a black guy.

*Pic from nbcnews.com  

George Wallace 2016.

The following editorial ---from a man I respect--- is very apropos, because it's just days before we vote for the next president of these divided states of America. 

"Some people get angry when I and others compare Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to George Wallace. What they’re forgetting, or perhaps never knew if they’re too young, is that Wallace didn’t run for president in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976 as a segregationist, though he was one; he ran as a populist defender of blue-collar workers against elitism and an intrusive federal government.

“I am in this race,” Wallace said in a Fourth of July speech in 1964, “because I believe the American people have been pushed around long enough and that they, like you and I, are fed up with the continuing trend toward a socialist state which now subjects the individual to the dictates of an all-powerful central government.”

What’s somewhat astonishing about Trump’s seemingly unwavering appeal to the same demographic that supported Wallace is that he has none of Wallace’s common-man bona fides. Trump was born into a rich family that gave him everything he needed to succeed, including millions of dollars to establish his own real estate business. Wallace was born dirt poor into a family of farmers in Clio, Ala., where he played with black kids as a child.

The first time I was supposed to meet Wallace, I didn’t. Or rather, I wouldn’t. It was 1972. I was home from my freshman year at a college in Kansas and had a summer job in the audiology lab at Spain Rehabilitation Center in Birmingham. Wallace was brought there for therapy after being paralyzed by a gunman in an assassination attempt in May in Laurel, Md.

Wallace was also fitted with a hearing aid in the audiology lab, but I didn’t see him there. As his stay at Spain neared an end, however, someone came up with the idea of holding a reception so all the hospital workers could meet the governor personally. I wasn’t the only black employee who had to do some soul-searching about being cordial to the man who had stood in the door of the University of Alabama in a vain attempt to keep it segregated.

I didn’t have to worry about any retribution from a boss who might not like my doing anything that reflected poorly on him. But I went to the reception area anyway, mostly out of curiosity to see what Wallace looked like. I got into the long line; but with only about a dozen people between me and Wallace, I stepped out. He kept shaking hands. I walked away.

It wasn’t too many years later that I did meet Wallace, more than once, as a reporter for United Press International in the 1980s covering events where he was the speaker. I remember him cupping a hand around his deaf ear when he was asked a question he didn’t want to answer. I don’t remember shaking his hand. With a notebook and a pen in mine, I probably never did.

Despite the two men’s different backgrounds, it’s easy to see why Trump appeals to the same type of voters as Wallace. Wallace had a knack for expressing the frustrations of white, mostly working-class men who saw themselves as victims of an intrusive government that they felt was forcing them to be more open-minded about people and ideas that they didn’t like. Trump’s midnight tweets may lack the bite of a Wallace stump speech, but they achieve the same goal.

Wallace rallies, like Trump’s, often became violent when demonstrators who didn’t drink his Kool-Aid showed up. Trump followers, like Wallace’s, praise him for being politically incorrect and telling it like it is, no matter who might be offended. Wallace enjoyed the support of church people, just as the religious right has jumped aboard the Trump bandwagon based on his claim to be pro-life.

Wallace never became president. But in 1968, like Trump today, he made a lot of people nervous. As an independent, Wallace won 10 million votes, 13 percent of all those cast, and carried Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. He ran as a Democrat in 1972 and won the Maryland and Michigan primaries, but his campaigning ended the day he was shot. With Wallace confined to a wheelchair, his 1976 campaign fizzled.

Trump is going to do better than Wallace, if the polls are right, and that is disturbing to me. Trump reminds me of Wallace. But at least Wallace, speaking at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, apologized in 1979 for his racist politics. “I have learned what suffering means,” he said. “In a way that was impossible, I think I can understand something of the pain. … I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.” [More here]

I agree with you Mr. Jackson, sorry is not a word that you will ever hear from Donald trump. As a result, George Wallace might have actually been a better man ---than trump is today--- when he died. 

OPEN THREAD THURSDAY.

Feel free to comment on any subject that you like.

Although I would like to hear your thoughts about Melania trump promising to take on the issue of cyber bullying and incivility on the Internet if she becomes First Lady.    

Yes, she really went there.

It's almost over, but what next?

        There are just a few days left before the election, and regardless of who wins the whole thing, the fact that Donald trump is going to get almost half the votes in this country speaks volumes about where (and who) we are as people..

This vile narcissist has hoodwinked at least half of the country into believing that he really cares about them and their needs. It's all a con. And if his basket full of deplorables weren't so blinded by hate and prejudice they would see it.

But hate and anger is what drives these people. How else do you explain this, and this, and this? 
Is it any wonder that Donald is being endorsed by the official KKK newspaper?    

If trump loses law enforcement officials are bracing for the worst. This, because trump told his supporters that the elections are "rigged", and from the looks of things they are going to pretty devastated if they lose.

Still, thanks to the help of GOP lawmakers in places like North Carolina, the African American vote is being deliberately suppressed, so they might have to consider the violent option if they lose in those places because GOP lawmakers are using the law to score political points.

Here in Philly the alt-right movement and their voter suppression effort is, quite frankly, laughable.  

'Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said Anglin and TheRightStuff.biz are “serial exaggerators,” so it is difficult to determine to what degree their apparent plans are being implemented. Those plans, Potok added, could likely backfire.

“If, on the morning of Election Day, it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger,” Potok told Politico. “People would vote just to prove they’re not being intimidated by these radical racists.”

Anglin, the editor of the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer, told Poltico he plans on “sending an army of alt-right nationalists to watch the polls” on Election Day. TheRightStuff’s anonymous spokesman, meanwhile, said that the site has hidden surveillance cameras at some polling places around the city.

We also will have stationary cameras hidden at polling locations in Philadelphia, to monitor anyone that comes in to vote and make sure that the same people are not voting at multiple locations,” the RightStuff spokesperson wrote in an email to Politico. “If we see people voting in multiple locations the footage will be submitted to the FEC as well as put out on social media.”

TheRightStuff spokesperson also added that in regards to the surveillance cameras, “pretty much any official-looking white person with a clipboard can gain access” to a polling place to install one. As a result, theRightStuff claims that “we already have a few set up.”

Roger Stone, an ally and adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump, told Politico that he plans to target about 7,000 precincts throughout the United States for exit-poll monitoring, of which, he said, 2,000 are in Philadelphia. Stone says he would consider fraud present should the precinct totals and his exit-poll totals be more than 2 percent off. The city, however, has only 1,686 election divisions."

You have a hell of a ground game there Donald. Good luck come Tuesday,

*Pic from rawstory.com

Treating racism like we treat terror.

The Field Negro education series continues.

The following essay was written by Michel Harriot for the Root.

 "As soon as America caught wind of the makeshift bombs that exploded in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota this weekend, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio quickly assembled the media and held a press conference, pleading for calm while authorities investigated the incidents. Along with the usual fear and outrage came calls from the conservative right side of the aisle for him and other politicians to immediately condemn the attacks on American citizens and brand the episodes with the infamous “ism” that pigeonholes every one of these occurrences as an act of hate.

I—on the other hand—wondered what the argument would sound like if this country were as sensitive to racism as it is to the country’s collective clutching of pearls about the horrific acts of terrorism that took place this weekend. Testing this argument does not require the stretching of false equivalencies or the bending of opinion. In fact, this might be the laziest piece of satire ever written, because all it requires is replacing the word “racism” with “terrorism,” and voilà! There you have it—a theoretical mad lib that answers the question, “What if we treated racism like we treat terrorism?

Maybe we should look at these apparent acts of terror with the sober objectivity the rest of America applies to police killings and other kinds of violent attacks. Shouldn’t we apply the same caution to the bombings, stabbings and mass shootings that we do to the videos of police shooting unarmed black men and women? When black people attribute state violence to prejudice, many citizens (pronounced “wyt pee-pull”) practice a subdued reluctance to say the word “racism.” Shouldn’t we apply this tactic across the board?

In short—why does everything have to be about terrorism?

Let me make this clear: It is tragic when innocent Minnesotans just trying to get home become victims of random acts of violence, whether walking through a mall or reaching for their license and registration. We should also be appalled when citizens who are minding their own business, standing on the corner in New York City, trying to catch a train or (and I’m just pulling this example out of thin air) selling a few loose cigarettes, find themselves suddenly on the ground unable to breathe because of the actions of a single person with hate in his heart and a history of violence.

But the larger question is, why are we so quick to brand this as terrorism? If we are a country of laws and procedures, shouldn’t we wait for a lengthy investigation, a grand jury and our 200-year-old justice system before we jump to conclusions? We should wait for the evidence to come in before we point fingers all willy-nilly at the accused. A protocol has been established, and the worst thing we can do is deny people their due process and convict them in the court of public opinion.

Why do you people always want to play the “terror card”?

Not everything is about terror. The grainy surveillance footage and cellphone videos don’t always tell the complete story. Perhaps there are other explanations. Maybe the perpetrators of these atrocities weren’t acting out of hate. Maybe they feared for their lives. After all, we weren’t there, so we really can’t say what happened. We can’t just accuse people of being terrorists until we have a thorough examination of the facts.

Before we talk about terrorism, maybe we should discuss the things that kill people randomly on street corners and at train stations. Why aren’t we having a conversation about New Yorker-on-New Yorker crime? If you look at the statistics, New Yorkers are far more likely to be killed by another New Yorker than a Muslim extremist. Why won’t the mainstream media talk about this?

Have you ever been to New Jersey? In 2015, 361 New Jerseyans fell victim to homicide. Almost all of them were killed by other people from New Jersey. We need to take a look at solving this epidemic before we approach terrorism in the state. That’s just logic. Maybe the people of New Jersey should focus on their own community before complaining about terrorist activity.

I hope the president doesn’t inject himself into this argument. The last thing we need is the leader of the free world uttering the phrase “radical Islamic extremism” from his bully pulpit. Using the same logic applied to Black Lives Matter and other organizations, it must mean he hates all Muslims. Even though white terrorists have killed more Americans than the Islamic State group and al-Qaida in the last 10 years. Even though the average American is 58 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist. So please cease the anti-Islamic rhetoric. Shame on you.

And for heaven’s sake (and by “heaven” we mean the one with the angelic Caucasian Christians, not the one with 77 virgins or Tupac ’n ’em), please don’t argue that there is a difference between the Muslims who commit violence against Americans and the others who practice a religion of peace and love. There is no room for nuance in a discussion about terror. According to the rules established by police unions, Fox News and Chick-fil-A, speaking out against terrorism automatically means you are anti-Islam. In fact, whenever there is a bombing or mass killing, there is a procedure that we should follow to ensure that these kinds of events don’t take place again:

1. Put the suspect on paid administrative leave.
2. Conduct an extensive investigation behind closed doors.
3. Make sure the suspect is defended by a system whose best interest is to exonerate him or her.
4. Announce that a top secret grand jury, or an internal investigation, found no evidence of wrongdoing.
5. Let the suspect go.
6. Pay the victims millions of dollars with taxpayers’ money.

We know this method—as practiced by law-enforcement agencies around the United States—works flawlessly. If all else fails, there is one sure way to put an end to these incidents. You don’t have to actually do anything. Simply make this announcement after every attack:

“We need to have a conversation about terrorism.”[More here]