Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Epic (via).
@Bro_Pair I would if I had any knowledge of any music post Hendrix/Joplin.
— Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) June 25, 2014
@Bro_Pair Hendrix: "Hey joe..where you going with that gun in your hand." pro-family, pro-2nd amendment. Janis: anything. Everything.
— Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) June 26, 2014
I’m going way down south, way down where I can be freePost + Comments (244)
Via the Raw Story, we learn that the heavily armed Bundy ranch deadbeats continue to hold sovereign citizen circle jerks out in the desert. Enough with these militia clowns already.
If I appropriated a federal preserve to run my business and told the tax man to fuck off, the authorities would toss my ass in jail faster than you could say, “Orange is the new cracker.” And if they had to shoot my dogs and drop a flash grenade in my kid’s bed to take me in, they wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
I get that the feds are trying to avoid another Ruby Ridge or Waco by treading lightly, but the only reason these militia kooks are getting away with thumbing their nose at the feds is because they are strutting around with a lot of big guns. Failing to confront them validates their crackpot narrative that they need guns to intimidate the government.
We — and by “we,” I mean the citizens of the United States and the federal government we elected — cannot allow that shit to stand. It’s past time to drop the hammer on those assholes.
Shovel-Ready Federal Gun Control InitiativePost + Comments (130)
When I yell “Who wants a treat?” I am seriously the most fucking powerful man in America. Or so I feel.
Liz Cheney couldn’t get elected in Wyoming, but w 10th Circuit decision, now Mary Cheney can get married there
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 25, 2014
Wyoming. “Where men are men, and the sheep are nervous” (sit down, Sen. Cochran*).
*corrected
***********
Apart from wishing all the happy couples well, what’s on the agenda tonight?
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Good News…Post + Comments (75)
Alex MacGillis, at TNR, has a couple suggestions for the Senator from Mississippi:
… It is hard to overstate the significance and historical ironies of black Mississippians crossing party lines to rescue a senior member of the state’s Republican establishment. Voting patterns are more divided by race in Mississippi than anywhere else in the country, to a degree that is reminiscent of ethnically-based parties in the developing world. The state’s black voters are as reliably Democratic as anywhere, but there are also more of them than in any other state—more than 37 percent of the population—making their monolithic voting tendencies all the more conspicuous. Meanwhile, white voters in Mississippi have become nearly as monolithically Republican in national elections. (And yes, there is a correlation between the size of southern states’ African-American population and the extent to which their white voters flock to the Republican Party.) In 2008, Barack Obama won a mere 11 percent of white voters in Mississippi; John Kerry did barely better than that four years earlier…
In reaching out to black voters in recent days, Cochran touted his support for the farm bill, for federal education funding, for the food-stamp program. But the GOP establishment’s debt requires a grander statement of gratitude than that. There’s the John Conyers bill calling for a study of slavery reparations—what measure is more suitable than that to be linked to an election in the state that was the headquarters of King Cotton? But if that’s a bridge too far, here are two other possibilities. Mississippi has rejected the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, thus leaving uncovered 300,000 of its residents, most of them African-American—a classic example of the ways in which the state’s large racial minority has suffered at the hands of the state’s monolithically white and Republican power structure. Might Cochran and, more importantly, Haley Barbour call on their allies in Jackson to rethink that rejection of gobs of federal funds just waiting to be deployed in their impoverished state?
Or this: There is a movement afoot in Washington to pass new protections for the voting rights of minorities in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of key elements of the Voting Rights Act. Is there any more fitting way for Thad Cochran to express recognition of the role that African-American voters played in his survival—in the face of threats of voter intimidation from his Republican opponent—than to guarantee that black voters in Mississippi and elsewhere are unencumbered in their access to the polls? I don’t recall Cochran speaking up loudly in opposition when Mississippi passed a stringent voter ID law not long ago. Better late than never, Senator.
And in today’s edition of old white men that say ignorant things, we bring you actor Gary Oldman. In an interview with Playboy, he had these delightful gems of wisdom to impart:
The policeman who arrested [Mel Gibson] has never used the word n—-r or that f—–g Jew? I’m being brutally honest here. It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy. . . . We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me.
And then he went on to defend Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin. We’re not even surprised by this sort of thing anymore, but it sure doesn’t mean we don’t want to catapult Commissioner Gordon out of a cannon.
Team Blackness also discusses the water crisis in Detroit, a four year old who foils a racist home invasion plot, and the power of the black vote.
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One of the weirder byways of the Sixties, from Michael Daly at the Daily Beast:
Tupac Shakur was still in his mother’s womb when she served as her own lawyer against charges that she and a dozen fellow Black Panthers had conspired to conduct a series of bombings in New York.
And as she did so, nobody admired Afeni Shakur more than the supremely insightful and devoutly decent newspaper columnist Murray Kempton. “No man who saw Afeni Shakur in those days could fail to be half in love with her,” Kempton later wrote….
Kempton lost touch with her as she fell deep into drugs. Two decades had passed when he encountered her in another Manhattan courtroom, this time as the mother of a defendant. The son she had fought so gloriously to keep from being born in prison now faced being sent there. Tupac was charged with weapons possession as well as sodomizing and sexually abusing a 19-year-old fan who had come to his hotel room and ended up being set upon by some of his entourage.
The Mouse King had become a rap star. Kempton noted that Tupac had told another journalist, “My mother was a revolutionary Black Panther and all that. But I also saw my mother as a crack addict. So I answer to no one. I follow my heart.”
Kempton now suggested in purest Kempton-esque terms, “The child is well-advised to distrust any heart that instructs him to answer to no one.” Tupac, he went on to say, “has the privilege, if scarcely the right, to improve his image as one born to be a thug with the myth of a crack addict mother.”…
Kempton had proven so right in so many ways that he should not have been surprised when Afeni asked him to begin visiting her son in prison and assume a role that struck him as dauntingly improbable…