Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

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

White supremacy is terrorism.

Let’s finish the job.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

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

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Let me file that under fuck it.

This really is a full service blog.

The revolution will be supervised.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

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Obama Derangement Syndrome, Incorporated

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Obama Derangement Syndrome is actually good for the economy it turns out as employment in the firearms industry has gone up up up because insane people think Scary President Black Man is coming for their guns nubile daughters.  Of course, there’s fierce debate about whether or not all the additional societal damage from all those extra guns outweighs the jobs (and I stand firmly on the hell no side), but it’s literally the only thing I’ve found to indicate there’s anything close to a positive benefit to anyone over the massive, deranged hate grudges carried by the bitter clingers.  Still leaves it 99.66% negative, if you ask me.

There’s noticeable economic impact in Kansas at least according to the Wichita Eagle via McClatchy:

A report released earlier this month by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for gun and ammunition manufacturers and retailers, said nationally that the firearms industry increased jobs by more than 30 percent and improved its economic impact by more than 66 percent between 2008 and 2011.

In that same period, the report said the industry added 1,202 jobs in Kansas and had an economic impact of more than $177 million.

The local firearms retail business has seen the addition of a new retailer to the market, Cabela’s, and the expansion of more established retailers. Gander Mountain, the St. Paul, Minn.-based outdoor specialty retailer, added a Gander Mountain Academy indoor shooting and simulation range and expanded its floor space for broader selection of firearms, ammunition and accessories – which it calls Gun World – at its WaterWalk store in downtown Wichita.

I’m sure the NRA is just bawling its eyes out at the thought of a second term for President Obama, and if Wichita gun range owner Mike Relihan is any example, these small businesses are just crushed by imaginary new regulations on their industry that of course could never pass Congress.

Retailers and industry officials say there are a number of external factors that have been driving sales, not the least of which is who is occupying the White House.

“I think it’s this last Democrat said some things, had a background that had some people worried … whether it’s real or not,” Relihan said, referring to President Obama.

Retailers said it’s not always just the party of the candidate that affects sales of firearms, but more the perception that a presidential candidate could propose legislation restricting sales of firearms or ammunition.

“That underlying fear is always there,” Holman said.

He said he thinks that’s part of the reason why firearms sales were so strong for the Bullet Stop in 2008, a presidential election year.

“It was definitely a big year,” Holman said.

2012 will be another “big year” for paranoid assholes to buy more guns, more bullets, more “protection” from the Kenyan Soshulist Usurper, more objects specifically designed to kill things. It’ll be awesome fun for everyone when these devices get used as intended, but at least they’re job creators!

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We Can Read That, You Know

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Dear winger nutjob public officials writing stupid bigoted stuff on social media:  Hi there!

The Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue Department opened an investigation into a racist post on one of its captains’ Facebook page. According to The Grio, Brian Beckmann, a captain in the Miami-Dade fire department, posted a rant on his Facebook page suggesting that Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman was unjustly accused and that Martin’s killing can be blamed upon poor parenting by “urban” parents who are “welfare dependent”.

Naah, people don’t read Facebook or anything. Your lousy racist screed? Nobody will see it. You know, except for possibly anyone on Facebook. Or on the internet. But what are the odds of that, right?

So, we’ll be in the “public apology” phase by the end of the day, followed by the “suspension pending investigation” phase, the “close-minded PC Libtards are afraid of the truth!” phase and eventually the “hope people have forgotten about it/quietly reinstated” phase, when it will all be repeated by the next bigoted slimebucket who wants to “tell the truth” about those people, just like it’s been going on for the last four years now in the spotlight and long since before out of it.

But what do I know, I’m just a ghetto hoodie hood rat with shitbag parents. Bonus points for packing in misogyny, class warfare and the media too, and it’s even spelled correctly. Hey, that’s why he made Captain, right?

[UPDATE]  Via Southern Beale in the comments, I see Charles Pierce goes Level 3 Super Combo on this one and crushes it out of the park.

The hell of it all is, I am not surprised by anything anymore, except for the stubborn stupidity of people who believe that anything they post on Facebook, or tweet around the Twitterverse, is in anyway private. It’s like those politicians who affect shock when they discover that the camera’s on, or that the tape recorder actually works.

One might be forgiven for thinking after the 4067th time or so, that they feel confident enough in the “It pisses off the libtards!/You’ll fail upwards!” outcome probability that they’re doing it on purpose now.

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Steal This Bike

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Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white.  His bike was stolen last week.  This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”.  Handy!

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

And the shattered shards of Mark Judge’s broken soul go flying around in his own personal blame-nado, shredding whatever decency he had left.  It gets worse from there.

I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.

It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.

Sure.  It’s cool to ignore, belittle, and denigrate the black experience because you’re tired of black people basically being black in your life, and if we would just stop being black, right?  Like Trayvon Martin?  Like those five shooting victims in Tulsa?  Like President Obama and the Obama family?

See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”

So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”.  Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.

Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one.  But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right?  And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?

Jesus wept.

[UPDATE]  And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.

There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.

It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.

Really?  I mean I know Lionel Richie’s new country album is pretty bad, but…

(Cross-posted at ZVTS)

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Southern Cuisine?

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John’s post about the resignation of a blogger who can’t see the racism in dressing up the President of the United States in drag and sitting him down with a bucket of fried chicken is enough to trip the last of my rage+sorrow circuits.  We’re back in Carthage Must Be Destroyed territory with our wingnut friends — and with the party Lincoln would no longer recognize, that G.O.P which has staked its hold on power for four decades with the nod-and-a-wink racism of the “southern stategy.”

Enough.

I’m sick past endurance with the casual viciousness of our opponents.  Yesterday I blogged about Question Bridge, a project in which Black men get to investigate and reframe what it means to be male and African American in the U.S. today.  As I wrote then, that work performs the remarkable feat of allowing everyone, Black guys and anyone else, to listen in on conversations, feelings, experiences that are not routinely available to most of us in the ordinary business of living in the world.

One of the insights to be gained in doing so comes from direct testimony about a fact we all know, but don’t necessarily nor always feel in our bones if we aren’t ourselves in the midst of it:  that being Black and male and in public is to be constantly under scrutiny.  Not necessarily or even mostly in the horrifying deadly circumstances that Trayvon Martin found himself in, but just in the sense that there’s attention being paid, and that the burden of representing, and not just being, is always there.

And here’s where that bucket of chicken comes in.  That was no joke, not merely “southern cuisine” as the blogger put it.*  And the men of Question Bridge know it:

<div align=”center”><iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/27225452?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0″ width=”400″ height=”225″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div>

When I go out to eat dinner, I don’t worry about what the folks at the next table think of my order.  Never occurs to me.  This clip reminds me that this is my privilege, and a measure — an oblique one maybe, but still — of the work we’ve yet to do get over race in this country.

Which, by shoots and roundabouts, is another reason that the “I’m not racist in my heart” nonsense just can’t fly.  I don’t care if you love your kids or even (sacrilege here, I know) are kind to dogs.  If you put the kind of trash John referenced out into the world, you own it; that’s who you are.

*Funny how a Black guy from Chicago eating chicken is just enjoying in southern cuisine.  The first rule of racist club is never to talk about racist club.

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Eavesdropping for Effect

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I haven’t written anything about the Trayvon Martin murder, because I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said.  TNC’s been powerful on this, and I found James Fallows‘ take exactly on point, and what’s been said here speaks for me as well.  If I have any thought it is that if this isn’t our Emmet Till moment, we’re even more desolate as a society than I had feared on my worst nights. (And yes, Charlie Pierce went there, but I was thinking along this line before reading him. It’s hardly an unlikely remembrance.)

Yesterday, though, I couldn’t help but think about Martin’s death after one session of  a conference on the future of documentary.  There, I got the chance to hear, and later to talk to two of the collaborators behind Question Bridge — co-founder Chris Johnson and one of his colleagues, Bayeté Ross Smith.

That project turns on a deceptively simple idea:* find Black men with a question they want another Black man to answer, someone they may not know, someone of a different age, class, location, experience. Have them ask whatever it is while staring straight into a video camera.  The film makers then bring those questions to other men — strangers turned into confidants, who answer.  Again, they speak straight into the lens — or rather, through the camera directly to both the questioner and any eavesdroppers, you, me, whoever decides to click “play.”

Here’s a sample:

<div align=”center”><iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/24180658?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0″ width=”400″ height=”225″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div>

There are a couple of things to note about the project from in the context of a new media conference. 

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GOP Still Pretending Abortion is ‘Black Genocide’

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Give it a rest already.

 I’ve written before about PRENDA (Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act) and the nonsense “abortion is black genocide” narrative (here).  As you may recall, it’s the basis for Operation Spite Babies.

I don’t have much to add on the matter, but I do want to point out this quote about which I have been laughing all morning:

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