Every time you see this picture, remember: Kentucky was NEVER part of the Confederacy. Ever. https://t.co/DYb0bfEdBj
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
Ah, Kentucky. The Switzerland of the South. They send mercenaries in funny outfits to guard Franklin Graham.
— Amenophis Fikee (@Angrifon) February 2, 2019
you know who was from Kentucky? Abraham f***ing Lincoln.
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
Republicans used to be known for their strides in civil rights and Kevin Spacey used to be known for acting.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 2, 2019
Northam is going to come to his next press conference in blackface and a MAGA hat and announce he's switching parties and not resigning. Masterstroke.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) February 3, 2019
Meanwhile https://t.co/uchYpZb6wL
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
ALL the racist politicians must resign -starting at the top pic.twitter.com/Xi4x2hDPqR
— Mexican Judge (@laloalcaraz) February 2, 2019
debbie
Can Steve King be impeached?
Barbara
But Kentucky was a slave state. That’s supposedly why Lincoln’s father moved to Illinois.
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.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
So. Can Steve King be expelled from the House?
sukabi
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I think he can. If the House can refuse to seat a person, it seems like they can remove a seated person. The google says yes
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
Chetan Murthy
@Mnemosyne: Thank you for this pointer, Mnem. It’s poignant, and instructive.
John Revolta
Yeah, and he was smart enough to keep that shit on the downlow.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Technically yes. Not sure it is at the top of Nancy Pelosi’s to do list.
??? 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.
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.
sukabi
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: didn’t say it would happen, just said it’s possible.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
Now that I know this story, it would be awesome if Henry Louis Gates Jr. would collaborate on a book about the Fairfax family history, or at least get one of his graduate students to do it. It sounds fascinating.
This is the original Tweet that includes a photo of the actual papers at the archive where they’re stored:
https://mobile.twitter.com/FairfaxJustin/status/1086277281817911296
sukabi
@Adam L Silverman: Confederate is confederate. Land or sea a confederate is still a traitor. And a loser.
??? 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?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@sukabi:
Not according to a Delegate from Virginia. It’s a national origin, you dirty socialist.
@sukabi:
True.
Wag
@Adam L Silverman:
And Kentucky has so many historic harbors used by the CSA…
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?
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.
Jay
@sukabi:
And a Confederate Naval Jack is still just a participation trophy in Treason In Defence of Slavery.
Aleta
@Mnemosyne: Here’s something I came across when I was reading about the Union Hill community, just a bit about records.
Part of a longer article in the Huffpo in 2017 about Dominion Energy and its pipeline.
Plato
Iokiyar goes for racism, bigotry, treason, collusion, corruption, witness intimidation, witness tampering, tax evasion and all other crimes under the law.
Aleta
Rhae Lynn Barnes The troubling history behind Ralph Northam’s blackface Klan photo, WaPo
Martin
@debbie: It’s not called impeachment, but members can be expelled with a ⅔ vote.
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.
Major Major Major Major
@Millard Filmore: I also always wondered that!
@Chetan Murthy: wiki says they fought for three hours before disengaging. I feel like it doesn’t take three hours to realize that you aren’t hurting each other…
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.
Mnemosyne
@Aleta:
I haven’t read it, but a quick Google found this potentially interesting book about Jewish performers using blackface to make themselves more “white” for movie audiences, with mixed success:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-520-20407-2
sukabi
@Aleta: I think we can expect a few other politicians from both parties having to explain their involvement in college minstrel shows.
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.
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.
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.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
That was a nice article
Bostonian
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, but what’s on that plaque? Inside that little sort of medallion of stars? Just what kind of award is this?
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.
NobodySpecial
Also, everyone should remember that while Lincoln was born in KY, so were Jeff Davis and Stephen Douglas.
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.
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……