Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

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

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

A consequence of cucumbers

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

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

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Fight them, without becoming them!

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

The willow is too close to the house.

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

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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We’ll Have A Meeting About It

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President Obama will be meeting today with AG Eric Holder and community and civil rights leaders about Ferguson and the state of policing in black communities.

President Barack Obama will discuss the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, Monday with his Cabinet, civil rights leaders, law enforcement officials and others.

The White House says Obama’s Cabinet meeting will focus on his administration’s review of federal programs that provide military-style equipment to law enforcement agencies.

The White House says the president will also meet with young civil rights leaders to discuss the challenges posed by “mistrust between law enforcement and communities of color.” He’ll then meet with government and law enforcement officials, as well as other community leaders, to discuss how to strengthen neighborhoods.

The question for the assembled is “Will this actually accomplish anything?”  This is definitely an Obama-style response to the issue, but will a community organizer approach actually accomplish any of the stated goals?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Ta-Nehisi Coates or Jamelle Bouie or Jelani Cobb when it comes to eloquently defining the struggle over the last 400 years and how Ferguson is yet another chapter in our story, and I’m certainly far from somebody like Goldie Taylor  (who is crowdfunding a documentary on her hometown of East St. Louis called #89BLOCKS) when it comes to community activism.  I’m an IT guy who gets to grouse on the internets and occasionally somebody pays attention.

But it seems to me that the first thing we need to do is get the mindset out of our police departments that they are conducting counterterror operations in hostile, foreign territory.  Ferguson, Missouri is not Fallujah, The whole thing, the training, the surplus military gear given to police departments, the us vs them mentality where cops think the people they are sworn to protect and serve are The Enemy, that needs to be ripped out from these departments.

That brings us back to the President and today’s meetings.  It’s a good start and any solution to the completely valid mistrust of police by the black community must involve police and the black community, but what else can and must be done to stop the bad cops (and not all cops are the problem, mind you, but the ones that are constitute a deadly lethal issue)?

Where are we going on this?

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Late Night Open Thread: “What Shielded Bill Cosby?”

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The persons “we” choose to believe, the persons we don’t… Jelani Cobb, in the New Yorker:

Two weeks ago, Anita Hill, following an address that she delivered to a packed auditorium at the University of Connecticut, was asked how it made her feel to know that, despite her testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, a solid majority of African-Americans still supported his confirmation. She dodged for a moment and then pointed out what she saw as one of the most egregious elements of the entire affair: Thomas’s deployment of the language of lynching to discredit her claims. The debacle of Thomas’s hearing—already suffused with stereotypes of black male sexuality and with questioning that teetered among sexism, voyeurism, and the kind of disingenuous tokenism that led to Thomas’s nomination in the first place—did not reach its nadir until the embattled nominee declared the proceedings a “hi-tech lynching.” Twenty-three years later, we know better than to be bamboozled so willingly by a powerful black man claiming racism, or at least we believe we do. Yet nothing better illustrates the enduring morass in these matters than the case of Bill Cosby…

For the past decade, Cosby has operated less as a comedian or a product pitchman than as a freelance scold of the black poor. The vitriol he heaped upon the perceived moral failures of the black underclass meshed with his role as television’s iconic father figure… Cosby eventually came to be seen, and adored, as the embodiment of black dignity, a walking refutation of the worst ideas about us. The benefits were not merely symbolic. His twenty-million-dollar gift to Spelman College, still the largest sum any African-American has bestowed upon a historically black college, was an example of self-help on an epic scale. For the first ten years of my career as a professor, I taught at Spelman on the top floor of Cosby Hall, a building named for his wife, Camille…

… For nearly fifty years now, Cosby has been selling us a vision of America as a place where a man like him—ostensibly benign, successful, unencumbered by the shackles of history—could exist…

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Worth More Than 1000 Words, Worth Less Than Zero

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This iconic photo of Ferguson last night by Reuters is what is sticking with me this morning.

‘Murica.

We’re learning more about Wilson’s grand jury testimony as well.

Ferguson, Mo. police Officer Darren Wilson testified before a grand jury that Michael Brown looked like an angry “demon” during the Aug. 9 confrontation that ended in the teenager’s death.

St. Louis Public Radio published the full transcript of Wilson’s testimony Monday. The St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office released evidence from the grand jury proceedings after it was announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson.

From the outset, Wilson’s testimony painted Brown as an angry young man. The officer testified that when he first approached Brown and his friend to tell them to walk on the sidewalk instead of in the middle of the road, Brown responded “fuck what you have to say.”

And for that, Michael Brown was summarily executed, and without consequence.

This is the system that this morning I am being told I have to “trust” and “put my faith in”.  The one that was never meant to protect anyone who looks like me.  The system that allowed Darren Wilson to walk, and arranged a public shaming of the victim and his family in a strange tirade where the county prosecutor defended the officer accused of killing an unarmed black man and ripped into the eyewitnesses as being anything but credible.  The system that decided that 8 PM local time was the best time to announce the decision after supposedly sitting on that decision for a weekend. The system that took over 100 days to determine that there was no evidence worthy of even sending this case to trial.  The system in that photo above, I am being told, I have to “believe in”.

You will excuse me if I withhold that benefit of the doubt.  In his testimony, Wilson, a 6’4″ man, referred to Mike Brown as “it”, and “a demon”.  He wasn’t human.  He was a thing, and there’s no penalty for shooting a thing and so this thing was shot time and time again because it had to be put down, a monster, a beast, a nightmare made flesh.

And whatever actually took place on that street that day, it does not warrant a trial to investigate it. That is the lesson here. Did Brown deserve the ultimate sanction, the taking of his life?  We’ll never know.  There’s no trial to compare the evidence, to advocate one way or another in a court of law, nothing to weigh, no due process.  He wasn’t worth that. That’s what the system says.

A picture, they say, is worth 1000 words.  The life of a black person is worth less than nothing.  That’s what I’m being told I need to “believe in” this morning.

I believe I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

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Post-Racial America Update, Simple Minds Edition

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Remember kids, racism is a barbarous old relic of the past that is no longer applicable in American politics, therefore political remedies for racism like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act are equally as outdated.

Nevada Assemblyman Ira Hansen (R), who the assembly’s Republican caucus selected as their choice to be its next speaker earlier this month, has a long history of racist, sexist and homophobic statements chronicled in a long list published by the Reno News Review. Among other things, as part of a broader statement of support for school vouchers, Hansen claimed that “[t]he relationship of Negroes and Democrats is truly a master-slave relationship, with the benevolent master knowing what’s best for his simple minded darkies.” Indeed, according to the News Review, Hansen keeps a Confederate battle flag on his wall, which he says that he flies “proudly in honor and in memory of a great cause and my brave ancestors who fought for that cause.” He also “tends to use the term ‘Negro’ and often does not capitalize it.”

Hansen has also published several columns attacking Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including one where he claims that “King’s private life was trashy at best. … King Jr. is as low as it gets, a hypocrite, a liar, a phony, and a fraud.” In another piece, he wrote that “[t]he lack of gratitude and the deliberate ignoring of white history in relation to eliminating slavery is a disgrace that Negro leaders should own up to.”

Reminder: not only is this charming gentlemen an elected state Assemblyman, elected to represent people in Nevada, but his Republican colleagues believe his views are acceptable (Or non-controversial? Unknown even though he had a newspaper column? You choose!) enough to make him the Speaker of Nevada’s State Assembly.

Oh and there’s more.  Because with these aggregate colonies of fungus in people suits, there always is more.

Nor does Hansen reserve his condemnations for African Americans. He’s argued that “women do not belong in the Army or Navy or Marine Corps, except in certain limited fields.” He’s criticized the “sexual revolution” and the “women’s liberation movement” for encouraging women “to act as foolishly as men.” And he also claims to have a strange obsession with gay child molesters. He once wrote that he’s “been keeping a rough tally on homosexual/heterosexual molesters as reported locally” and that this inquiry revealed that “and roughly half of all molestations involve homosexual men preying on boys.” As the News Review notes, “Hansen gave no details, nor did he publish his list, nor did he explain how he knew the sexuality of the alleged molesters.”

I mean this guy is a walking caricature of Republican Racist Asshole, and the guy still ends up Speaker of Nevada’s Assembly.  The dean of Nevada politics, Jon Ralston, has more on how Hansen ended up winning that position.

I got some intel from some GOP insiders, who filled me in on exactly what happened during Friday’s marathon session:

It appears that Pat Hickey never had much of a chance to be elected as speaker after serving as minority leader. “It went downhill quick,” one source told me.

Most of the night was a negotiation, with Ira Hansen eventually agreeing to give the majority leader slot to southerner Paul Anderson.

Fact was Hansen started with, as one put it, “all the new members and the Fiore wing,” a reference to Michele Fiore, who does not like Hickey and whose best friend, Victoria Seaman, was just elected.

So, with a majority at the outset, “Hansen had the votes so it ended up more like a negotiation than an election,” one source told me.

Again, Nevada’s newly minted Republican majority in the State Assembly had no reservations whatsoever about putting a guy who used the word “darkies” as their Speaker.

Awesome.

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Long Read: “The Eternal Paternal: Bill Cosby’s never-ending tour”

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Throw Back Thursday special. (Do not let the Giant Chicken Heart inspire you to set fire to the couch.) Kelefa Sanneh, in the New Yorker:

A warm summer weekend was just beginning in Salisbury, Maryland, and cars were pulling into the parking lots that surround the Wicomico Civic Center. People had come to see Bill Cosby, who would remind them, that night, that he was “seventy-six and eleven-twelfths years old,” and who surely has neither the time nor the need to do anything he doesn’t want to do. What he does want to do, even now, is comedy: he performs about a hundred times a year, mainly on weekends, following an itinerary that often leads him into what promoters call tertiary markets, where fans are not just happy to be able to see him in person but surprised, too…

Cosby’s current tour is part of a long comeback. His most recent comedy special, “Bill Cosby: Far from Finished,” was broadcast on Comedy Central last year, and he is at work on a new NBC sitcom, tentatively scheduled for 2015, which would reunite him with Tom Werner, one of the executive producers behind “The Cosby Show.” At the same time, he is living through an extended retrospective celebration. In 2009, he collected the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and earlier this year Chris Rock presented him with a lifetime-achievement honor at the American Comedy Awards, calling him “the greatest comedian to ever live.” Now comes “Cosby: His Life and Times” (Simon & Schuster), a biography by Mark Whitaker, the former editor of Newsweek; the book, written with Cosby’s participation, is invaluable but not, of course, impartial. Unlike most of the lions of American comedy, Cosby is known for routines that aim to avoid giving offense, and yet he has proved surprisingly controversial: for decades, he was regularly criticized for being insufficiently attentive to issues affecting black communities; more recently, he has been passionately attentive, transforming into a culture warrior to deliver fierce indictments of what he diagnoses as an African-American social pathology. And, in the years since “The Cosby Show,” a series of revelations and accusations—including allegations of sexual assault—have jolted fans who had grown used to conflating his work and his life.

During Cosby’s nineteen-eighties heyday, though, he seemed untouchable, and younger rivals, especially African-American ones, bristled at his dominance. In the 1987 concert movie “Raw,” Eddie Murphy told a story about Cosby calling him up and urging him to use less profanity in his act, for the sake of his young fans, including Cosby’s own son. Murphy recalled being so offended that he telephoned Richard Pryor, who offered some defiantly un-Cosby-like advice:

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Juneteenth and History

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I’m ashamed I didn’t mention this yesterday, but Jamelle Bouie had an excellent explanatory post in Slate on “The Black American Holiday Everyone Should Celebrate“:

… News of emancipation would move slowly, which would be compounded by the mass migration of slave owners, who fled their holdings in Louisiana and Mississippi—slaves in tow—following the Union victories at New Orleans in 1862 and Vicksburg in the spring and summer of 1863. Tens of thousands of slaves arrived in Texas, joining the hundreds of thousands in the interior of the state, where they were isolated from most fighting and any news of the war.

As such, for the next two years, slaves and slave holders lived at a far remove from the events of the eastern United States, including the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865. Yes, it ended the war, but it didn’t end the conflict, as fighting continued on the far borders of the Confederacy. And so, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, on June 19 to lead the Union occupation force, he wasn’t just faced with Confederate remnants (the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, for example, had surrendered only a month prior); he had to deal with ongoing slavery in defiance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

To fix the situation, he issued an order…

The Atlantic‘s David A. Graham has a rather wonderful story about Dallas County officials’ accidental “celebration” of Juneteenth this year (yes, as inspired by Ta-nehisi Coates):

… The Dallas County Commissioners Court was voting on an item labeled in their agenda as the “Juneteenth Resolution,” referring to the annual commemoration of June 19, 1865, arrival of U.S. troops in Texas to free slaves after the Civil War. John Wiley Price, the only black member of the commission and evidently something of a character, submitted the resolution, which for some reason wasn’t sent around to commissioners ahead of time, nor was it posted on the commission website. Instead, Price read it aloud as his colleagues ignored him, perhaps playing tic-tac-toe or checking Twitter. Then the resolution came up for a voice vote and passed unanimously. (You can watch it here, starting around the 20-minute mark.)

It isn’t as if Price didn’t loudly declaim the resolution. Here’s the crucial closing:

Therefore, be it resolved in the Dallas County Commissioners Court that Juneteenth and its historical mimicking of freedom is just that, and that the United States of America is derelict in its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the African-American people. Be it further resolved that the dereliction that has caused 400 years of significant [inaudible] to millions and significant suffering to the descendants of those who have been enslaved Africans who built this country, should be satisfied with monetary and substantial reparations to same.…

Graham adds, “Since the resolution is nonbinding, don’t expect Dallas to start calculating formulas and cutting checks any time soon.” But still!

Jamelle Bouie, again:

… Thursday marks the 148th anniversary of the first Juneteenth. For now, it’s a niche holiday, celebrated by black Americans and a handful of others who know and understand the occasion. But it deserves wider reach. Indeed, I think we should add it to the calendar of official federal holidays…

Can this be done by executive order? Maybe “we” could get the paperwork done in time for the 150th anniversary…

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