In 2018, while he was running for Governor of Florida, DeSantis faced controversy over his use of the phrase “monkey this up” in reference to his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is Black. This led to accusations of racism and criticism from civil rights groups. In 2019, DeSantis signed a...
Segregation
If it were a perfect world, I would like to think that the most recent attacks on young black millionaires are just a coincidence. In a perfect world, the success of blacks would be applauded as a plus for the country. Unfortunately, American history is littered with incidents of racial...
Oklahoma’s right-wing politicians would like to erase history because that’s what they do, whether it’s the omission of facts or rewriting them to favor those in power. Historical guilt and its associated media effects cooties can’t be part of public school curricula. H.B. 1775 implies that the past prior to 1776...
Some historical terms should not be used lightly. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term Apartheid to describe the Israel/Palestine reality, this shocked some people. I hate the word Apartheid as it brings back to too many precise historical racial connotations with respect to South Africa. The term segregation holds similar memories...
Not about authoritarian horseshoes or even close hand grenades. The “environmental” claims of RWNjs or even wise use advocates is also about corporate land use, private property NIMBYism/sovereignty, and constraining minority populations via immigration. Even the New Zealand terrorist’s manifesto proclaimed a ecofascist threat was largely about fearing indigenous people because of...
Apparently Trump leaked the Raffensperger audio to WaPo — how clueless is that, even if the NY Times is reporting that it was taped and released by the GA SOS. Most of the call repeats his contrived logic and numbers ad nauseam, as if to flood the transcript with his disinformation stream. Trump is so delusional...
As with most faculty politics, there is a subtext to the story of a professor fired for specious reasons. Garrett Felber was fired for failing to “communicate face-to-face” with his department chair at University of MIssissippi, even as he was outspoken about a variety of university actions after the selection of...
Maybe we can now just wait for every vote to be counted. Fortunately we’re past the fail-safe point of the Comey email fiasco of 2016 and its associated manipulation by the NY Times. We may be out of October Surprises. Even Putin seems to have officially cut Trump loose. Then...
Reminding myself that during nearly two decades of my life, racial segregation dominated some states, and that in 2020 we are still battling some of the same issues preventing people from voting. As if we didn’t need more reminders of systemic racism. People are going to need to be “carefully taught”,...
The song written by Sonny Bono and was a hit for Sonny Cher had a song called The Beat Goes on. The song was released in 1967 but applies to every year it seems. I sat on my porch today thinking, “ This is one crazy year”. I never say...
In place of a nationwide policy of social distancing measures, it might be a tough sell to put in place “a risk-based ‘alternative public health approach’ to the COVID-19 pandemic that involves “focused protection” of those most at risk and seeks to avoid or minimize the “social harm” of lockdown”. That’s the goal...
Some good news today out for South Carolina courtesy of Data For Progress: x #SCsen:Harrison (D) 47% (+1)Graham (R-inc) 46%@DataProgress/@IndivisibleTeam (D) LV, 10/8-11https://t.co/TEi0L5YL4G— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) October 14, 2020 In South Carolina, Democrat Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, is going up against incumbent Republican...
It took credible evidence and the words of the self-identified victims of underage sexual advances, to allow Doug Jones to defeat Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions in 2017. Mr. Jones deserved to win the race on integrity alone. Confirmed in 1997 as the United...
I have the utmost respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and was beyond distraught at the news of her death yesterday. Nonetheless, the election is 44 days away and is the most consequential one ever for the soul of America. RBG would not want us to avoid thinking about how to...
Emma Green at The Atlantic has a great piece out profiling U.S. Senate candidate, Reverend Raphael Warnock (D. GA) and how Warnock being a major voice of the Religious Left can flip this Senate seat and win the Democrats a Senate Majority: Warnock wants to help Democrats remake the country....
You might think the really crazy tweet in this thread is the first one — in which an Alabama representative says his state is great because no one bows and scrapes before our ocher overlord as consistently and abjectly as his fellow ’Bamans. But you’d be wrong. Second tweet, if you...
It’s all about disclosing. And Trump showed us how unhinged he is on Monday in his HBO/Axios interview with Jonathan Swan. Because don’t you need another hat… or undercoating. x Trump interviewing himself may be the best thing to ever happen to the internet… pic.twitter.com/2xMDfg7PGFâ Rex ChapmanðÂÂÂð¼ (@RexChapman) August 5, 2020...
They’ve left Seattle, now it’s time for Portland. “Why can't we all just get along”, as the ACLU charges that law enforcement has targeted journalists at the Portland protests. Trump continues to hope for more atrocities to distract from his other failures. x Protesters walk and sit in silence in Chapman...
Asha Rangappa is right, we are now confronted by Frankenstein’s Monster-like amalgamation of Idi Amin, John Gotti, Bernie Madoff, and Nell (the jungle-child character played by Jodie Foster (see Truffault)). In that same vein, Rush Limbaugh says “Americans should “adapt” to coronavirus, like pioneers who “had to turn to cannibalism”...
Generational wealth is the key to familial long-term success. Currently, the three richest families in America are the Waltons of Walmart, the Mars Candy family, and the Koch Brothers. Those three families according to a Guardian article have ‘4 million times the median wealth’ of American families. That combined accumulation...
Up today in The New York Times Magazine. It is titled Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In. It is well worth your time to read. It is too long to summarize, and I will not try. Let me offer a few selections to interest you further. For example, when...
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, on the heels of the Colin Kaepernick kneeling episode, commented in 2018 on the opinions of basketball players, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. Both Durant and James commented harshly and profanely about the leadership of President Trump, to which Ingraham famously said, “ shut up and...
It was either three years prior to her birth, or when my great-grandmother (GG) was three years old, that the Wright Brothers flew for 12 seconds in a field just outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. My late great-granny was born at home in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, sometime between December...
I attended public school growing up in Oklahoma. After I graduated from the University of Houston, a public university where tuition cost only $50 a semester, my first job was as a special education teacher at a public school in New Jersey. I later attended a public law school. I...
To many, Omaha Nebraska is where you could buy insurance from the company that sponsored the Wild Kingdom TV show. Henry Fonda and Johny Carson were from Omaha. The liberal billionaire, “Oracle” Warren Buffet, lives in Omaha. Yet for 50 years, Omaha also became the most segregated city in the US,...
Former Trump body-man/adviser/enforcer Corey Lewandowski spent or wasted hours of the taxpayers and Congressional Democrats time and money yesterday, auditioning as the opening act for the Donald Trump troubadours. When he was not being openly disdainful for the process of American government, tossing out one-liners or admitting that lying is...
So Mike Pence went on Face The Nation this morning and compared Trump’d hateful campaign boilerplate about building a wall to MLK’s stirring oratory challenging this nation to fulfill Jefferson’s promissory note that “all men are created equal.” x Pence quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have A Dream” speech to...
The Jackson Free Press has published a blockbuster story about the Republicans’ too-racist-even-for-Mississippi Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith. Seems she comes by her antebellum attitudes about race at least in part via her secondary-school education. The paper reports that Hyde-Smith attended a “segregation academy” whose primary purpose was to allow students...
Jackson (Mississippi) Free Press “JACKSON, Miss. — U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith attended and graduated from a segregation academy that was set up so that white parents could avoid having to send their children to schools with black students, a yearbook reveals. #A group photo in the 1975 edition of The Rebel—the...
What if the South had won the Civil War? Hardly a new question, and it’s doubtless one of the most common counterfactual thought exercises in American history. It’s also already been recently asked—though not answered seriously—in the 2004 mockumentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America. Nevertheless, HBO is turning to some...
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those...
It has been longer than that if you include my school years [St George’s Edinburgh, it would be 26] but 20 years a full time expat split between the UK and France, so over half my life. The reason I bring this up? I think that it is really this...
This is the mantra of the right on both sides of the pond. It’s the xenophobics and racists mantra, without the inherent toxicity of their usual bile. Who is us? Who is them? Where do the rest of “us” fit into “their” country that they want to take back? Once...
Last week Gary Naeyaert of Great Lakes Education Project tweeted an image that sparked outrage with many people in the state and earned the organization dedicated to destroying public education much deserved notoriety. After three additional tweets trying to explain what he meant by the meme to compare Michigan State...