Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

No one could have predicted…

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Come on, man.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

This really is a full service blog.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

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Open Thread: While We’re Rejecting Racist Politicians…

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  3. 3.

    sukabi

    Not sure if Ari Berman was being snarky or serious, but I’d be fine with McConnell resigning, at this point his posing with the Confederate flag is the least of the offensive things he’s done.

  6. 6.

    Mnemosyne

    Someone posted a Tweet eariler today from VA Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s personal Twitter account about his decision to sit outside the chamber when the VA state senate decided to honor Confederates on Martin Luther King Day.

    In the tweet, Fairfax referenced his ancestor Simon Fairfax’s 1798 manumission papers, and I got curious. Turns out that WaPo did a little feature story about that when Fairfax was inaugurated last year:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/poised-to-make-history-justin-fairfax-got-a-powerful-reminder-of-his-own-heritage/2018/01/27/825fe454-0217-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html?utm_term=.5dbbab28211a

  10. 10.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @sukabi:
    You’re right. However, you’d need 2/3 of the House to vote on a resolution to expel King. 2/3= 66%. 66% of 435 reps is 287. Dems only make up 235 reps. You’d need to find 52 more repukes. Good luck with that.

  11. 11.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sukabi: That’s the Confederate Naval Jack. It is always nice to see people take an interest in the history of largely unsuccessful navies.

  15. 15.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Apparently McConnell parted ways with Reagan on South Africa back in the 80s and supported sanctions on the apartheid regime of the National Party. WTF happened to him?

  18. 18.

    Millard Filmore

    @Adam L Silverman: A totally irrelevant question that nobody needs to answer: why didn’t the Merrimack ignore the Monitor? After a day of battle, it was obvious they had a very hard time hurting each other. Why not simply go have fun with the wooden ships?

  19. 19.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Millard Filmore: Wikipedia tells me that Monitor was *sent* to engage the Merrimac, which at the time had sunk two warships, run a third aground, and was basically unstoppable. I suppose Merrimac could have ignored Monitor, but one supposes that at the time, the captain couldn’t be sure that his opponent was incapable of sinking him, so he had to take the attack seriously.

  21. 21.

    Aleta

    @Mnemosyne: Here’s something I came across when I was reading about the Union Hill community, just a bit about records.

    In March 1865, as the Civil War approached its fiery end, Congress created the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. “The Bureau was empowered to distribute clothing, food, and fuel to destitute freedmen and oversee ‘all subjects’ relating to their condition in the South.” The Bureau also was authorized “to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental to freedmen and loyal refugees and eventual sale” and to create Freedmen’s schools to provide education to the newly freed population. ― Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (31, 43).

    Freedmen’s Bureau offices were established across the south. One of those field offices was in Buckingham County, Virginia. Buckingham was a majority Black county before, during and after the Civil War and it was home to many freedmen who had purchased their freedom even before the end of slavery. The Bureau took up residence at the Buckingham County Courthouse, an historic building designed by Thomas Jefferson and it established a Freedmen’s school there, known as the Lincoln School.

    In February 1869, an arsonist burned the Buckingham County courthouse to the ground. As Dr. Lakshmi Fjord, a cultural anthropologist and Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia has written, the fire “destroyed all records of enslavement, wills [and] slave purchases of their freedom…that might be used by the 2:1 majority former slaves to sue former masters for restitution.”

    Part of a longer article in the Huffpo in 2017 about Dominion Energy and its pipeline.

  22. 22.

    Plato

    Iokiyar goes for racism, bigotry, treason, collusion, corruption, witness intimidation, witness tampering, tax evasion and all other crimes under the law.

  23. 23.

    Aleta

    Rhae Lynn Barnes The troubling history behind Ralph Northam’s blackface Klan photo, WaPo

    Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and author of the forthcoming book “Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface.”

    …
    I spent a decade poring over blackface composites from yearbooks and fraternal orders, watching cracked film footage and cataloguing more than 10,000 blackface plays at Harvard University. Those plays and Northam’s racist photo show us the centrality of amateur blackface minstrelsy to American cultural life and universities. They show how upwardly mobile white men concentrated white-supremacist political power in the century after the Civil War, using the profits of amateur blackface to build white-only institutions and using blackface performances to articulate to voters their legislative commitment to white supremacy.

    They also show how persistent those power structures remain.

    Though blackface was the No. 1 entertainment form throughout the United States in the 19th century, it has a particularly notable legacy in Virginia.

    When slavery disappeared, fundraising with amateur blackface minstrel shows and city minstrel parades emerged. They featured fictionalized blackface slaves and their Klansman counterparts — a pairing on display in the Northam photo — to sustain Virginia’s infrastructure and segregated economy, as well as to inculcate new generations into a form of white supremacy associated with collegiality, school spirit and patriotism.
    …
    The era we now call Jim Crow America was named after a famous blackface minstrel character. His signature debut song “Jumpin’ Jim Crow” reached global fame in 1832, but it wasn’t until the 1860s that everyday Americans bought commercially packaged how-to minstrel blackface plays to perfect these racial stereotypes. A new era of segregation, mass culture and blackface emerged, where blackface-imitating pro-Klan movies such as “Birth of a Nation” were the go-to entertainment form for young men.

    In Jim Crow’s century-long reign, a strange, visible and highly pervasive world of blackface minstrel shows took hold in nearly every city and town in the United States. Amateur blackface minstrel shows and parades were so central to civic and campus life in 20th-century America that it’s hard to find a university yearbook without a blackface image or a town that didn’t hold such a parade.
    …
    U-Va.’s love affair with — and financial reliance on — amateur blackface grew during Reconstruction. A rumor circulated throughout U-Va. that “some of the students are forming themselves into a negro minstrel troupe” to perform on campus and in the local towns in Virginia. In 1886, the official University Minstrel Troupe donated the proceeds of its minstrel show to the construction of the University of Virginia Chapel, where hundreds of couples continue to marry each year. The show, which included a “stump speech” — a stand-up comedy routine lampooning black politicians — also featured a “Berlesque of Mikado,” likely in yellowface.

    Blackface was a fundraising and socialization tool for white, all-male, Christian civic organizations such as the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks. The Ku Klux Klan and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Virginia used blackface in raids to confuse victims and in comedy shows to recruit members. In 1924, as Charlottesville erected its infamous Robert E. Lee statue, the Charlottesville Elks Minstrel show ran ads ridiculing black American soldiers. They all solidified the relationship between slavery, blackface, white-supremacist political power, segregation, business and university life.
    …
    When white supremacists set U-Va.’ s lawn aglow on Aug. 11, 2017, the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that stretched between the governorships of Jefferson and Northam materialized in the plume of tiki-torch smoke. The photographs of the rally mirrored the magic-lantern slides I studied in U-Va.’s library, which depicted amateur blackface minstrel shows that were hosted by Charlottesville firefighters, and Confederate veteran parades between 1900 and 1910.

    The young men who encircled counterprotesters and the statue of Jefferson in 2017 were part of an exceptionally long history of clean-cut, suburban, civic-minded, young white-supremacist groups on American college campuses celebrated for their patriotism and public service in the 20th century. Northam’s blackface yearbook spread is a small shard of an expansive and ever-present national story, one that shows how racism defined what it means to be a patriotic, successful and civically oriented white man in modern America.

  25. 25.

    Jay

    @Aleta:

    Thank you for that.

    Told you that this weekend would be Northam “time” because he blew it Friday, blew it today,

    He’ll probably be gone by Wednesday, but there’s a swack of hurt, infighting and anger he’s responsible for.

  27. 27.

    Millard Filmore

    @Chetan Murthy: One could say that the Merrimack captain wimped out. Similar to the way that in WW2 little Taffy-3 shooed away Admiral Takeo Kurita’s Center Force on October 25, 1944.

  29. 29.

    sukabi

    @Aleta: I think we can expect a few other politicians from both parties having to explain their involvement in college minstrel shows.

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    @Aleta:

    Yes, many records have been lost or destroyed, but people should know that genealogical resources for Black families are more accessible now than they have ever been before thanks to digitization. People — including slaves — were usually documented multiple times in their lives, so the destruction of one set of records doesn’t mean that there’s no record left of that person’s life even if a particular record or set of records was lost or destroyed.

    Anyone who has an incomplete genealogy that a family member started in the 1970s or 1980s should look into the newly available resources to see what databases they can access that their relative might not have been able to.

    ETA: There was kind of a longstanding myth that slave records were all destroyed after the war, or that no one preserved them, but it turns out that wasn’t true. It’s more that they were squirreled away in so many different places that they were hard to assemble in the pre-computer days.

  31. 31.

    NobodySpecial

    @Major Major Major Major: @Major Major Major Major: Actually, quite a bit of damage was done. IIRC, the spotter and XO (or whatever the Navy equivalent is) on the Monitor was injured when he got pieces of steel in his eye from a shot, one stack in Merrimack was holed, and the main reason they finally broke off was because they were starting to expose the non armored parts below the waterline as the ship got lighter. After the battle, neither ship fought again.

  32. 32.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: He was just starting out. He had only been in office 1½ years and had only been elected by the skin of his teeth (5,000 votes out of 1.3 million) riding Reagoon’s landslide. The state was still blueish so he couldn’t fully display his black heart.

  35. 35.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    Don’t leave Maryland out, when talking about Switzerlands of the Civil War era. I live here, and while it is a progressive bastion now, it has not always been so. Consider the State Anthem – Maryland, My Maryland – sung to the tune of Oh Tannenbaum, which has definitively secessionist lyrics. The State adopted it as the State song in…1939, more than 7 decades after the shooting stopped. How courageous! Wait until the war is definitively over, then wait another generation or two, then decide you picked the wrong side. Brave Sir Robin had nothing on these guys.

  36. 36.

    NobodySpecial

    Also, everyone should remember that while Lincoln was born in KY, so were Jeff Davis and Stephen Douglas.

  37. 37.

    Miss Bianca

    @Aleta: shit, I thought I knew a lot about the history of blackface, having been a theater scholar and all. Turns out I didn’t know the half of it.

  38. 38.

    kindness

    Wrt Northam, he’s been a really good Democratic member. I’d be OK if he just served out his term. Yea the photo was a terrible thing to put in a yearbook but his adult life hasn’t been that at all. His adult life has been good. Yea, he should support the Lt. Governor for election. But far too often Democrats seem to demand blood from their own when Republicans won’t. I agree, we are different from them and I’m glad we are. Doesn’t mean we need to demand blood sacrifices. Especially when Northam has been a force for moderate good in his political life.

    Remember the Al Franken episode? I love Al. He did some very distasteful stuff. I think he would have ended up having to go but I think he deserved an investigation rather than just being tarred, feathered and rode out of town on a rail. Democrats eat their own faster than they should. I know, to some it’s declaring their purity to the world. Still……

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