Uncle Ben Gets Trashed

As one of the most disposable members of the Chumph Cartel, you know this day had to come for Uncle Ben Carson…The Journey from House Negro to pariah.

Conservatives target Ben Carson: Why is the HUD secretary, once a right-wing darling, under attack?

Is there a traitor in the Trump administration? Yes, say some hard-right conservatives — and it’s Ben Carson

Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development (a position that Carson initially claimed to be unqualified to hold), recently said he was “glad that Trump is drawing all the fire so I can get stuff done.” While few people may have noticed when he wandered off and got stuck in an elevator a couple of months ago, Carson shouldn’t be so quick to assume that he isn’t being watched amid the chaos that has consumed the Trump administration.

At one point during the Republican primary campaign, Trump implied his then rival might be a child molester. Then he appointed Carson to his Cabinet, and now the retired surgeon has come under increased criticism from conservative Republicans, who complain he has been too slow to roll back Obama-era policies on housing discrimination. The Conservative Review blasted Carson last week for failing to combat what senior editor Daniel Horowitz described as “Obama’s war on the suburbs.”

The regulation that Republicans want Carson to roll back is known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, finalized by Obama’s former HUD Secretary Julián Castro in 2015. This rule requires 1,200 cities and counties, which get $3 billion of annual community development block grants from the agency, to examine their local housing patterns for racial bias and to design a plan to address any measurable bias.

 Carson recently told the Washington Examiner that he plans to “reinterpret” the controversial fair housing rule — enraging conservatives. His explanation to the Examiner has only served to further upset right-wingers who have fought against the promulgation of the rule for years. Carson pointed to a recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the validity of disparate-impact claims under the Fair Housing Act, a notion conservatives have long opposed.

“I probably am not going to mess with something the Supreme Court has weighed in on,” Carson told the Examiner. “In terms of interpreting what it means — that’s where the concentration is going to be.”

Carson did not provide any detail how exactly the rule will be “interpreted,” but his statement came just days after nearly 20 congressional Republicans asked the secretary to repeal the rule entirely. These GOP lawmakers complained that the rule “would extend reach of the federal government beyond its authority and could take away state and local governments’ ability to make local zoning decisions.”

 HUD is easily one of the most vital federal government agencies, not just for people of color or the poor who need housing assistance in the form of direct subsidies, but for many Americans who want to own a home. The Obama administration didn’t pass any new housing laws. Still, conservatives saw that administration’s attempts to enforce the Fair Housing Act as radical overreach. Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona bemoaned the 2015 rule as an unconstitutional federal power grab over local zoning. Frustrated by what they perceived as the Trump administration’s sluggish response, they led a group of Republicans in petitioning Carson to reconsider the rule.

“If any aspect of a community’s housing and demographic patterns fails to meet HUD bureaucrats’ expansive definition of ‘fair housing,’ the local government must submit a plan to reorganize the community’s housing practices according to the preferences and priorities of the bureaucrats,” said Lee, who has been on a years-long crusade against the anti-discrimination effort, in a Senate floor speech last year.

 “This rule can’t be reinterpreted or rehabilitated. Rescission is the only sensible solution,” the conservative National Review recently argued. A Republican member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights also wrote a letter to Carson calling for the rescission of the rule.

In his own 2015 editorial, Carson also blasted HUD’s rule as a “government-engineered attempt to legislate racial equality.” He has not addressed the issue, however, since taking control of HUD. (Lynne Patton, a Trump family party planner turned HUD administrator, did please some Republicans when she acceptedWestchester County, New York’s analysis of its racial disparities –which had been rejected 10 times under the Obama administration.)

Some conservatives now view Carson as a traitor.

“With all the talk of Russian collaboration, I think we have finally found the smoking gun,” wrote Horowitz at the Conservative Review. “This administration is adopting the Stalinist social engineering of local communities. If this administration cannot categorically eliminate such an odious program overnight, it is perhaps a bigger scandal than anything Robert Mueller could ever uncover.”

 

Antifa/Alt-right – The Cyberwar

The alt-right’s latest attempt a cyber war with the left didn’t go well.

They did get a bunch of gun-toting white racists to show up at a park in Houston through, thoroughly duped into believing the statue of Sam Houston was about to be removed.

Somehow the white racists got confused by the fact that Sam Houston is honored in Texas for his pivotal role in establishing the State…And never had any part in supporting, or founding the confederacy of treason.Indeed, he was removed from office for refusing to support the traitors.

So as usual, the ill-educated, racist, confederate flag waving moronic assholes, got hoisted on their own Petard – defending a man, believing him to be a fellow confederate – when he opposed the confederacy in the first place. Not only did the antifas hoodwink the white supremacists to gathering in a park to oppose no one…But to protect a ststue that is at no risk of ever being removed in Texas.

“By any means necessary.”

Guffaws!

Texas Conservatives Fall for Anti-Antifa Hoax

The rally began, as so many armed conflicts do, with Facebook posts.

Older members of the crowd carried Confederate flags, while the younger, internet-driven masses wore patches with 4chan’s Kekistan banner. Rally-goers in homemade armor and semi-automatic rifles paced Houston’s Hermann Park, waiting for an enemy to appear.

The crowd, several hundred strong, gathered in the park on Saturday to defend a statue of Sam Houston, a slaveholder. They had gathered in response to reports that leftist protesters had planned a rally to remove the statue, despite Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner publicly stating that removing the statue wasn’t “even on my agenda.” But as sniper rifles and Infowars-branded jackets crowded the park, it became evident that the left protesters were not coming. They had never planned to come. The rumors of an antifa protest were actually a hoax, orchestrated by an anti-left group defending Confederate monuments.

The rally began, as so many armed conflicts do, with Facebook posts.

“We’re about to have a huge event in Houston June 10 with the combined forces of several large groups, perhaps our biggest ever,” the page Texas Antifa (short for anti-fascists) posted on May 18. “The Fascists better not show up with violence or they will be limping home bruised, broken, hurt, and crying with their tails tucked between their legs.”

The “Texas Antifa” is not a real group. The page is the latest in a growing genre of anti-antifa hoaxes, perpetrated by anonymous internet users on the right. Texas conservatives still fell for it.

Antifa have emerged as a perfect bogeyman for the alt-right, who have spent years online stoking fear about violence from imaginary enemies (usually people of color), or the perceived loss of their rights (usually at the hands of liberals, feminists, or family court). In antifa, the nebulous alt-right found an equally amorphous foe, one whose members openly boasted of punching the alt-right in the face. Alt-righters who go outside began planning armed counterprotests against antifa. And alt-righters on the internet began creating fake antifa accounts to discredit the largely anonymous movement.

One such parody account, @OfficialAntifa on Twitter, stirred outrage from the general public after it tweeted pictures of vandalized cemeteries on Memorial Day, purporting to have destroyed soldiers’ graves in an act of protest. The images, which actually contained images of years-old graffiti, were quickly picked up by alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and disseminated to thousands of enraged followers. (@OfficialAntifa currently tweets anti-trans and anti-Muslim jokes.) A page purporting to be “Boston Antifa” drew the ire of actual New England antifa after it was revealed to be run by trolls.

In Houston, where Saturday’s protests took place, multiple antifa pages claim legitimacy. The Houston Antifa appears to be the longest-running account, active since January 2016 with photos of its demonstrations dating back to that month. But there’s also Antifa Texas-Oklahoma, as well as Texas Antifa (a “public figure” profile run by an alt-right user), Texas Antifa (a community page created last month that first advertised the June 10 protest against the Sam Houston statue), and Houston Antifa (a community page created last month that also advertised the protest and attempted to delegitimize the old Houston Antifa page).

In a Facebook messenger conversation, the older Houston Antifa page described the confusing state of affairs.

“Ah the beauty and the horror of anonymous decentralized organizing,” Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast.

Shortly after the Texas Antifa posted their plans to rally in Houston’s Hermann Park, the Houston Antifa took to Facebook urging readers to “unlike and unfollow this fake ass Texas Antifa page. Do NOT attend the June 10th Rally! This account was started a month ago and is in NO way, shape, or form affiliated with any actual Antifa Organization, PERIOD. Nice try, #MAGA chuds, go fuck yourselves.”

The Houston Antifa told The Daily Beast that “we are 100% positive that this group are outside actors/provocateurs and not just liberal centrists who are mistakenly proclaiming themselves ‘Antifa.’”

But just three days after the brand-new Texas Antifa page advertised its rally, the much-larger conservative group This Is Texas announced a counterprotest in response.

“Antifa has come out saying they will be bringing several large (communist) groups together to host a rally around the Museum District in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2017,” This Is Texas organizers wrote in a post to their nearly 4,000 members. “This list includes Black Panther Party, Antifa & more. Their goal is to remove the Sam Houston statue.” (This Is Texas did not return The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)

But the so-called Texas Antifa’s goal was actually the opposite. The page was secretly run by a group claiming to be affiliated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. In a Facebook conversation with The Daily Beast, the group claimed to have 11 members, although it refused to offer proof that it was affiliated with a larger Anonymous group.

In a video uploaded to the Texas Antifa YouTube channel (not to an Anonymous account) on June 7, the group declared that they had actually created the page as a hoax to drive gun-toting conservatives to defend the Sam Houston statue, which Houston’s mayor has stated is not being considered for removal.

“It was always an Anonymous event to drive support and attention to an expired Texas law that protected its historical monuments,” the group said in its video. “It never made it to the floor because the Democrats used a filibuster to run out the time so it could not be voted on.”

“The right rarely has but 5-30 people at any given event,” the Texas Antifa page told The Daily Beast. “We gave them a well known enemy, a righteous cause, and an immediate threat.”

Some local media saw through the hoax. The Houston Press’ Craig Malisow debunked the Texas Antifa page as an alt-right prank on June 1, although the page’s moderators, still proclaiming their authenticity, took to Facebook to attack Malisow by name.

The other group only partially duped were alt-righters who were better acquainted with internet hoaxes.

“This is from a shitty satire page,” a 4chan user posted last week about the alleged antifa rally, “ignore it.”

“The normies are gethering [sic] in Houston,” another 4chan poster wrote the day of the event. “Proof that America can be trolled into being great again.”

The statue defenders stormed the park, ready to defend themselves against the antifa and Black Panthers they had been told would be rallying. One young attendee, who was wearing an undersized Roman-style chestplate over makeshift military fatigues with a 4chan arm patch told the Houston Chronicle’s Evan Mintz that he’d donned the armor out of fear that antifa would stab him.

But no leftists appeared. Outside the amplification chamber of the internet, the rally goers were just a crowd of people wearing ill-fitting armor to the park on a sweltering Texas day.

After the crowd ambled home, This Is Texas leaders returned to Facebook to address allegations that the whole event had been driven by a hoax.

“For those who didn’t know Antifa showed up and was putting on their mask in the bathroom by the amphitheater, once they turned the corner & saw the crowd they thought twice about it,” the group posted. “The [sic] did tag downtown up with posters on street signs & the metro rail area. So to those that said this is a hoax, maybe think twice before you speak next time.”

The Houston Antifa said it was possible that the rally goers had spotted some antifa on their way to counterprotest at a nearby anti-Islam event, though its members had agreed to skip the hoax-driven in the park.

At least one This Is Texas organizer realized the makeshift army had been tricked.

In a now-deleted post, a This Is Texas administrator named Dave confessed his disillusion to the page’s followers.

“People – you were duped,” he wrote. “The charges you have heard about this being based on a hoax are all true. Did you see ONE Antifa, Black Panther, Black Lives Matter, or street gang member there??? At all?? ANYWHERE???

“We were told Black Panthers were mobilized from Atlanta and we were told ‘buses and buses’ of anti’s were on their way – never saw them,” Dave wrote. “Oh yeah – I saw a black guy with an AR-15, dressed in black, near the restrooms and thought YES! I found them! Then he stood up and I saw a Texas flag sweat towel in his pocket.”

 

White Nationalist Kicked Out of CPAC

Seems that even conservative’s seemingly bottomless tolerance for racial innuendo and racists has reached its limit.Surprising – since conservatism has been virtually synonymous with racism for such a long time. Richard Spencer gets pimp slapped…Again. SO now we got the alt-right-whites, against the whiter-right-whites…Never ceases to amaze me.

Richard Spencer wants you to know that unlike fellow racist Milo Yiannopoulos who was dis-invited earlier this week …He’s not a pedophile. ind of interesting when someone starts denying something they haven’t been accused of by anyone yet…

White nationalist leader kicked out of CPAC

On his way out, Richard Spencer rebuked Milo Yiannopoulos, who was disinvited from the event earlier this week.

Richard Spencer, a leader of the white nationalist movement, said he was “glad” that disgraced Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference after he made controversial statements on pedophilia, while leaving the conservative conference Thursday after his own credentials had been revoked.

“I totally reject Milo and I’m glad that he was disinvited,” Spencer said about Yiannopoulos, who resigned from Breitbart this week after remarks surfaced in which he praised pedophilia. The right-wing journalist was slated to be keynote speaker at CPAC but was disinvited earlier this week because of the controversy.

“I was willing to tolerate him or maybe be ambivalent about him but after his video clips, there’s no way that I could support Milo in any way.”

Yiannopoulos, who has stirred up controversy in recent weeks with his appearances on college campuses, resigned from Breitbart and lost a major book deal after tapes emerged on which he advocated sexual relationships between “younger boys and older men.”

In his resignation statement, Yiannopoulos said he believed the tapes were selectively edited.

“To repeat: I do not support child abuse,” Yiannopoulos said at a news conference. “I am sorry to other abuse victims who may have interpreted my statements as flippant.”

Spencer, who purchased his own tickets to CPAC, was ejected after a CPAC staffer spotted him and revoked his credentials. Defiant, Spencer flashed his empty lanyard to reporters as he left the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just outside D.C., where the conservative confab is taking place over the next few days.

“They threw me out, it’s pathetic,” he said on his way out, saying that he wanted to have conversations inside on identity politics.

“I guess that they just discovered who I was, because the truth is that people want to talk to me, not to other conservatives.”

A CPAC spokesperson told NBC that the group ejected Spencer because it finds his views “repugnant.”

American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp told POLITICO that it was the group’s right to revoke Spencer’s credentials. “You are welcome to come down here, we will have civil conservation about things we disagree with but there are boundaries, one of those boundaries is having respect for people, people’s heritage, people’s race, and the alt-right is not a voice in the conservative movement,” Schlapp said.

But Spencer fired back: “CPAC cannot host a speech where they denounce the alt-right by name and then expect me not to come. They’re children. I mean, look, adults will engage in dialogue particularly when you’re going to denounce someone. They’re not even engaging in dialogue.”

Spencer, who is the president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, was unsparing in his criticism of Yiannopoulos, who is also considered an alt-right activist.

“He glorified and excused the sexual abuse of other people,” Spencer said. “That is absolutely out of bounds.”

Yiannopoulos brushed off Spencer’s criticisms. “Richard Spencer knows that for the rest of his life his best shot at getting attention is to talk about me,” Yiannopoulos told POLITICO. “I don’t begrudge him the scraps he craves.”

 

Conservatives Again Show Their Racist Behinds on Tubman Being Added to $20 Bill

The conservatives even trotted out their favorite Uncle Tom, Uncle Ben Carson…

Followed by his owner – Donald Trump

 

They only want to honor white men: The pathetic conservative meltdown over the Harriet Tubman $20 bill exposes the right’s petty identity politics

The only reason to be mad about the changes to the money is a belief that only white men should receive tribute

On Wednesday, the Treasury Department unveiled a plan to redesign the $20, $10, and $5 bills to better reflect American history, moving some of the (all white, all male) former presidents around on the bills and making room to put luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and Eleanor Roosevelt on various bills. The biggest shift will be Tubman, who helped create and run the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves, gracing the front of the $20 bill, kicking Andrew Jackson to the back.

(Why Jackson, the Donald Trump of his time — except more genocidal — needs to stay on the bill is another question altogether.)

The Treasury’s decision should be non-controversial. After all, we all agree that history is made by more than presidents (plus, the $100 bill has a non-president on it, which confirms this is a shared belief), and that people other than white men exist and matter. Don’t we? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees publicly with these contentions, except perhaps on some Twitter accounts that Trump keeps retweeting.

Yet, in a move that was entirely predictable, right wing pundits are in meltdown, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that, regardless of any surface claims to believe in equality, the reality is that they adhere to the belief that white men are the only ones who really matter and the rest of us are just the supporting cast.

The strategy that modern conservative propaganda uses, when called upon to rationalize overt racism and sexism, is to get conservative women and people of color to express the sentiments. It’s a cheap and obvious but unfortunately effective ploy, and one that was immediately employed by the folks at Fox News to appeal to their audience members who want to hear why they aren’t bigots, even though they revolt at women and black people on money.

Greta Van Susteren played her part to the hilt on Fox Wednesday night, even going so far as to say that she’s “a feminist”, before offering an opinion that disproved this contention.

“Rather than dividing the country between those who happen to like the tradition of our currency and want President Andrew Jackson to stay put and those who want to put a woman on a bill,” she argued.

Denying women the vote, keeping women from working, putting women in the stocks for having a sharp tongue, treating women as subhuman property of men are also “traditions,” you know. The whole point of being a feminist is refusing to accept that tradition trumps a woman’s right to equality. But beyond just that, appeals to tradition are considered a logical fallacy for a good reason. The idea that we should keep doing a stupid and harmful thing because we have done it that way in the past isn’t a grand and noble idea. It’s refusing to learn from experience.

Of course, no one actually buys this argument, not really. The folks waxing poetic about the impropriety of change when it comes to the currency probably aren’t writing their sentiments on parchment paper with quill pens. The only time they cling to tradition is if the tradition flatters their prejudices, in this case the prejudicial belief that only white men can be great Americans.

Van Susteren pretended to be open to compromise by arguing that Tubman should go on a new bill, recommending a $25 denomination. This gambit is quickly becoming a popular one for conservative pundits and politicians who are pandering to white men who think that having only white men on their money somehow makes them superior people by association.

Ben Carson, doing his duty of offering cover for racist opinions, argued on Fox News, “I love Harriet Tubman. I love what she did, but we can find another way to honor her. Maybe a $2 bill.”

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump picked up this argument.

“Maybe we need to do another denomination — maybe we do a $2 bill,” Trump told Matt Lauer. “Yes, I think it’s pure political correctness — [Jackson’s] been on the bill for many, many years, and really represented someone who was really important to this country.”

If it’s not obvious what they’re doing here, let me spell it out for you: They’re pretending to be generous by offering to put Tubman on money that either doesn’t exist or people don’t use. The implication is that it’s only okay to honor women of color as long as you simultaneously assert that white men are still better...More…

 

Why Conservative Racists Hate Political Correctness

How do you know when you have destroyed a right wing racist’s argument? They start squealing about PC. Right wing bigots are constantly trying to come up with replacements for the N-word. As each of these terms, words, or concepts is outed for what it is, the haters become more frustrated.

Welcome to The New Jim Crow racism…

Why Republicans Cry Political Correctness

Dressing up bigotry and authoritarianism as truth-telling is the right’s favorite talking point.

 

Black History Month

 

Racist conservatives and their Lawn Ornaments have a new argument – that Black History Month is no longer relevant because it has been absorbed into mainstream American History. That is yet another racist myth.

Proof?

The Texas School Board which is run by right wing racists…

Texas Makes Changes to History Textbooks: No Mention of KKK or Jim Crow, and the Civil War Was Fought Over States’ Rights, Not Slavery

A change is coming to public school education in Texas, a change that was voted for in 2010 and will take effect when students go back to school come fall.

It’s happening in history class—in the new social studies textbooks that students will be using to learn U.S. history. New state academic guidelines changed some of the black American history content that students typically learn. For instance, the new textbooks will “barely address racial segregation,” the Washington Post explains; nor will they make mention of the Ku Klux Klan or the Jim Crow laws put in place to continue what began with slavery.

Oh, and with regard to what got the Civil War going: Texas’ new academic standards mandate that students learn that the war was about a debate regarding states’ rights. Slavery will reportedly play second fiddle on the list of explanations used to teach why some states seceded from the Union. …

 Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

Why does it matter what some right wing racist redneck types do to their schools in Texas? Texas buys 48 million textbooks every year. No other state, except California, wields that sort of market clout. As such, the Texas KKK version of American History gets printed, and distributed to other states. Meaning, the Texas board gets to erase people like Caesar Chavez, and the existence of Jim Crow from not only their textbooks – but those bought by other states.

So…There is an active movement in America…Still…To erase Black History. The argument against Black History Month is based on CHarles Woodson – who believed black history would be absorbed into the context  of Amrican History – ergo American Historians, textbook publishers, and Schools –  “would willingly recognize the contributions of black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.”

Obviously…That isn’t happening.

Black History Month in Schools—Retire or Reboot?

Now in its 40th year, questions remain about the value of commemorating it in classrooms.

The seed of what is now known as Black History Month was planted in the doctoral thesis of Carter G. Woodson, a noted scholar, author, and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The son of former slaves, Woodson received a Ph.D. in 1912 from Harvard University, where he studied under renowned historians who minimized the importance and vitality of black history. But Woodson would not be deterred. He believed the heritage and contributions of black Americans was excluded from history, and he saw this knowledge as essential to social change.

Woodson’s dedication to the research and promotion of black history has been memorialized by his actions—in 1926 he declared the second week of February Negro History Week—and his words:

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

Today Woodson’s brainchild is the entire month of February. First celebrated in 1976, Black History Month was the result of a growing racial pride and consciousness of black Americans and Woodson’s association pushing to expand the weekly celebration. Now a well-entrenched, nationally recognized observance, Black History Month is a commemoration that might be short in days but is increasingly long on controversy. In the last month—in examples that cross racial boundaries—the black actress and conservative commentator Stacey Dashcalled to eliminate Black History Month, labeling it a vestige of segregation, while Republicans in the Kansas legislature questioned if an entire month dedicated to honoring black history was “too long.”

In one corner, advocates of Black History Month argue that a special month is needed to celebrate and recognize the achievements of black Americans in a country where European history dominates historical discourse. In the other corner, critics cast doubt that Black History Month is still relevant with the gains made in race relations—a black U.S. president the most visible sign—anddetractors charge it is detrimental in the long term to pigeonhole black history into a month-long observance. Somewhere caught in the middle are educators and schools.

A driving force behind Woodson setting aside time to study and reflect on black culture was his frustration that children—black and nonblack students—were deprived of learning in America’s schools about black achievements. Yetaccording to the NAACP, even the creator hoped the time would come when a black history week was unnecessary. Woodson was optimistic that America “would willingly recognize the contributions of black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.” But research shows this goal is far from complete.

Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2014 graded all 50 states and the District of Columbia on how well their public schools taught the civil-rights era to students. Twenty states received a failing grade, and in five states—Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, and Wyoming—civil-rights education was totally absent from state standards. Overall, the study found less teaching of the civil-rights movement in states outside the South and those with fewer black residents. The report paints an unfavorable picture of schools where a crucial event in black history is largely ignored…Read the Rest Here…

 

Queen Bey and Old White Republicans

Queen Bey’s Superbowl appearance and dropping a new song has apparently set off the conservative Viagra set… Mere mention of blackness, the original Black Panthers, police, and BLM will do that.

Rudy Giuliani rips Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime as an “outrageous … attack on police officers”

Beyoncé anticipated this. She knew the backlash was coming as she sings in her new single “Formation,” “You know you that b**ch when you cause all this conversation.” With her imagery of police officers lined in riot gear with their arms in the air in her music video and her background dancers dressed as Black Panthers during her halftime performance at Super Bowl 50, Beyoncé is undoubtedly making a bold political statement and as she surely expected, people are talking.

“I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive,” former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday on “Fox & Friends,” ripping the performance as “ridiculous.”

Michelle Malkin

✔@michellemalkin

Cuz nothing brings us all together better than angry @Beyonceshaking her ass & shouting “Negro” repeatedly. #sb50

8:43 PM – 7 Feb 2016

“The vast majority of police officers risk their lives to keep us safe,”Giuliani explained, taking issue with what he deemed an inappropriate “political position” at the Super Bowl. “What we should be doing in the African-American community, and all communities, is build up respect for police officers,” he offered. “You’re talking to middle America when you have the Super Bowl,” Giuliani reminded the co-hosts. “Let’s have, you know, decent wholesome entertainment, and not use it as a platform to attack the people who, you know, put their lives at risk to save us.”

Bobbye Bogart Orona

on Sunday

Why America is No Longer #1

The following from NRA President Pepe Le Pee-U…Fearmonger

This is part of the Speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt declaring war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Big difference between Great Men and cowards. America isn’t “exceptional” anymore. We have fallen from 1st to 17th in the world in terms of economic mobility and opportunity for our citizens. A large part of that has to do with the election of fear mongers and conservatives believing in the false siren call of neo-nazi Ayn Rand. And of course those paid and bought by the gun sellers.

More than 80% of the guns used in mass killings in America were bought “legally” – aided and abetted by the mechanizations of the NRA.

“The age of terror”: NRA’s new fearmongering ad campaign equates American exceptionalism to more guns

In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting on Wednesday, the second high-profile attack in less than a week, the usual cycle of debate over gun laws has included an increased scrutiny of the NRA’s political spending and now the gun lobbying group is using its moment back in the spotlight to tout America’s exceptionally horrid history of gun violence to promote the NRA. Shocker.

The ninth installment in the NRA’s “Freedom’s Safest Place” campaign features the group’s leader, Wayne LaPierre and is titled, “Demons At Our Door.” The ad was released just days after 56-year-old Robert Dear entered a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood and shot 12 people, killing three, and days before this latest shooting rampage in San Bernardino. In it, La Pierre makes specific reference to “the age of terror” and goes on to fear-monger over the threat of terror and violence to promote the NRA. The ad is currently running prominently on Fox News.

“Innocents like us,” LaPierre says, addressing his NRA members directly to camera, “will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes.”

“They will come to where we worship,” LaPierre warns as ominous music waves over blurred images of American everyday life, “where we educate and where we live.”

“But when evil knocks on our doors, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share,” LaPierre proudly proclaims, touting the Second Amendment. “Let fate decide if mercy is offered to the demons at our door.”

 

The “PC” War Against College Kids Waged By the Right

“PC” in conservative terms is an anathema to conservatives. It cuts off their use of the “N-Word” and other racial perjoratives as unacceptable in polite (or civilized for that matter) society. Which undermines the entire racist foundation of modern conservatism. Conservatives are so chickensh*t, try and post a liberal thought at a conservative screed… You will be bounced faster that Ronda Rousey’s last opponent, and banned from the site.

When you have a philosophy which won’t stand up to logic, criticism, or scrutiny…All you’ve got is a lie.

It’s been 50 years since the revolution of the 60’s, and 35 since the Raygun “revolution brought disastrous conservatism to destroy America. Thing are gathering to swing the other way.

25 years too early – but something to remember…

“PC” is another right-wing lie: Missouri proves reactionary forces really are waging war against college kids

Forget “political correctness”: The truth is young people are really suffering from conservative culture wars

It’s been trendy in the past few months for pundits to raise the alarm about the supposedly out-of-control culture of “political correctness” on campuses. Audiences are expected to be appalled at students asking for “trigger warnings” before viewing violent material in class or to tsk at young people for not enjoying the comedy stylings of Dennis Miller, which is surely because they are too “P.C.” and not because he’s not funny. We’re meant to see this as a one-sided war of overwrought lefty bullies attacking innocent victims, be it their elders or even peers who aren’t “social justice warriors.

No doubt there are some instances where young people, puffed up on self-righteousness and still sloppy about politics, go way too far with the P.C.-policing. ButMonday’s resignation of Tim Wolfe as the president of the University of Missouri system in the wake of a wave of racial ugliness on campus should be a reminder that while a few loudmouthed lefties who overplay their hands may be annoying, young people—particularly young women and people of color—are less victimizers than victimized. All this chatter about “trigger warnings” and the supposedly over-coddled young has served to cover up the real story: Young people are under assault from reactionary forces and most of their grievances are not about imagined slights, but about very serious problems they are facing, on and off campus.

As this timeline from the Maneater, the student newspaper at the University of Missouri shows, the revolt against Wolfe didn’t come out of nowhere. The accusations that Wolfe was indifferent to a handful of racist incidents on campus are only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that, for months now, the campus has been the staging ground for all manner of conservative attacks on the wellbeing of young people not just on campus, but across the state.

Over the summer, the school tried to take away health insurance subsidies for graduate students, blaming Obamacare. That didn’t last long, but it certainly put students on notice that their basic access to health care was under threat by conservative forces. Then the university got caught up in the state’s heightened anti-choice politics, after state legislators strong-armed the school into forcing a doctorwho worked at the school to quit providing abortions at a local Planned Parenthood. The school also canceled contracts with Planned Parenthood that allowed medical and nursing students to gain hours there, in response to the hoax videos that came out over the summer falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of selling body parts. Theyeventually came to their senses and renewed the contracts, but, as with the graduate student health program, the message was sent: The school was listening to and willing to interfere with the health care and educational access the students had, to pander to the whims of a bunch of delusional culture warriors.

While all this is happening, black students on campus are reporting a series of racist incidents. Campus protests were invigorated by the protests against police brutality in nearby Ferguson, but it also appears that all this tumult is invigorating racists, too, who are getting increasingly confrontational and provocative. While many news reports suggest that the main complaint against Wolfe was that he was insufficiently responsive to student concerns over this, it was actually much worse: Students report that a car driving Wolfe actually revved up the engine in the face of studentswho were blocking him in an anti-racism protest, and that one student was bumped by the car. It was likely unintentional, but still the result of treating the very real concerns of students at the center of this culture war whirlwind as if they are nothing but an annoyance.

Any one of these incidents, in isolation, doesn’t seem like a big deal, but taken together, it becomes easier to see why so many students feel under attack. Nor is this just about the University of Missouri. Young people in general have very real reasons to feel under attack in this country, and the shit show at Missouri is just a boiling over of pressures being felt from coast to coast by young people.

The culture war is usually discussed in this country in terms of religion, gender, or race, but it’s very rarely discussed in terms of age. But young people are definitely feeling the pain. Police violence is disproportionately dished out on young people of color. The attacks on Planned Parenthood are mostly about depriving teens and women in their early twenties access to contraception and STI services—services that women a little older usually can get through other means. Sexual assault on campus is endemic, but Republicans have responded by trying to make it harder for young women to get protection from their assailants.

Even the war over Obamacare has a generational aspect to it. Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most likely to be uninsured and therefore have the most to gain under the Medicaid expansion and federal subsidies available through Obamacare. Surprise surprise, these happen to be the aspects of the law getting attacked the most by conservatives. That, and contraception coverage, which again is needed the most by young women who are having sex but may struggle to pay full price for their preferred contraception methods.

Colleges are becoming a staging ground for this hostility towards young people, where students have to face soaring tuition rates and unmanageable levels of student debt, with elders too busy making fun of “trigger warnings” to worry about the economic destruction being dished out to young adults. Wolfe himself was hired not from the world of academia but from the business world, brought on for his skills at cutting costs more than his commitment to quality education. His hire was a demonstration that the state of Missouri prioritizes slashing education budgets to fund tax cuts over investing in young people’s futures.

So yes, young people sometimes do silly or nonsensical things in the name of social justice. But if young people in this country feel that they are under attack from reactionary forces, it’s because they are.

 

How Conservatives Plan to Stop Black Lives Matter

You’ve seen Faux News try part of this…

Here’s the Conservative Playbook for Tearing Down Black Lives Matter

In the wake of last Friday’s murder of a Harris County, Texas, police deputy, Fox News pundits have bent over backward to find a way to connect the killing to the Black Lives Matter movement. A guest on the Fox talk show The Five on Mondaycalled the movement a “criminal organization,” and several hosts, including Bill O’Reilly, described it as a “hate group.”

Harris County law enforcement officials have yet to determine a motive for the shooting, and suspect Shannon Miles had been found mentally incompetent to stand trial on a felony assault charge in 2012. But that hasn’t stopped Fox News from showing a recent clip of protesters at the Minnesota State Fair chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” as pundits discussed the Texas killing, or from running inflammatory on-screen banners that read “Murder Movement” and “Black Lives Matter Taunts Cop Killings.”

But this is not a new tactic from the right. Conservatives have long attempted to discredit black social movements by casting them as criminal. In fact, the law-and-order rhetoric they’ve espoused since the civil rights movement was invented to do just that.

In the 1950s, for example, Southern conservative lawmakers and law enforcement officials argued that acts of civil disobedience by black civil rights activists violated the law, and they criticized support for civil rights legislation as rewarding lawbreakers. Federal courts that struck down Jim Crow laws, they chided, were soft on crime.

This rhetoric went mainstream in the late 1960s following the major civil rights victories of the decade. Richard Nixon and avowed segregationist George Wallace both ran on law-and-order platforms in the 1968 presidential election. In his speeches andpolitical ads, Nixon appealed to the “non-shouters and non-demonstrators” who were “not racist” and “not guilty of the crime that plagued the land,” contrasting them with protesters who had “cities up in smoke,” a thinly veiled reference to the race riots of the decade. Nixon blamed the courts for “going too far in weakening the peace forces against the criminal forces.” He used this coded language to appeal to racist voters at a time when overt racism was becoming less socially acceptable.

Conservative politicians, pundits, and voters continued using this language to rail against the Black Power movement in the 1970s and tie organizations like the Black Panther Party to neighborhood crime and increased drug use. They pointed to the ongoing race riots and the increase in urban crime that accompanied the migration of black Southerners to Northern cities during that period, as evidence that the Panthers’ philosophy of armed self-defense was contributing to violence and criminal activity. Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971, prior to the explosion of the drug trade mid-decade, in a tough-on-crime move that functioned as a crackdown on the black people and communities that were supposedly “causing” crime, and the philosophy of racial equality that had contributed to it. (And similarly coded language was used to justify criminal-justice policies that targeted black communities and produced the nation’s mass incarceration crisis in the late 1980s and 1990s.)

Now Fox News has targeted the Black Lives Matter movement in the same way. The movement is calling for an end to violence, and its national voices have condemned violence against the police on numerous occasions. But the right insists it is to blame for murders of police officers. The number of peaceful protests dwarfs the number that have seen looting and property destruction, but conservative punditsinsist Black Lives Matter protesters are “thugs” and that the movement’s rhetoric encourages violence. Just as they sought to discredit the movement to upset the Jim Crow social order, these right-wing voices now seek to discredit the movement to upend the current system of racist policing.

Murders of police aren’t the fault of the Black Lives Matter movement. But don’t expect to hear that on Fox News anytime soon.

 

White Supremacists and Facts – Defeating the Racist Lies on the Internet

Said I was going to talk a bit about how to dissect the racist blathering by conservatives. This is Lesson #1

Actually have a picture of my Mom teaching in one of these old schools with a potbelly stove to heat the classroom… And that was in the early 50’s. This isn’t it.

The right absorbs racism from many of their right wing Internet sites. One of their favorite topics is black crime. The second is interracial crime claiming that white folks are under attack by black folks. All with numbers from seemingly unimpeachable sources such as the DOJ Annual Crime Reports.

Since about 1992, when Dinesh D’Souza and white supremacist Jared Taylor published their books – this (mis) information has been rattling around Internet, and taken as Gospel by many conservatives.

The National Review is one of the right wing publications with a less than sterling reputation in terms of it’s writers spewing racism. Manning the racism desk there are several folks, among them Heather McDonald, who spew virulent racist crap for a living.

Check out this article –

The Shameful Liberal Exploitation of the Charleston Massacre

Let’s look at those numbers which she got off one or the other white supremacist site….

In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population.

Now assuming she didn’t lie about the overall statistic (which is probable)…There are 6.2 white folks for every black person in this country.

Here is how it is done properly –

http://www.stats.indiana.edu/v…

The crime rate for white folks committing violent crimes against blacks is 100,000x 99,403/40,000,000 = 2485 per 100,000

The black on white violent crime rate is 100,000 X 560,600/248,000,000/ = 226 per 100,000

Ergo a black person is 11x  (2485/226 = 10.99) more likely to have a violent crime committed against them by a white person than vice versa.

And THAT is why the DOJ and FBI ALWAYS express their numbers in terms of rate per 100,000. What McDonald is done is standard white supremacist trickery, by lying about how the numbers actually work and ignoring the population differences.

Now – the white nationalist sites the author is quoting depend on existing white predilection to racism, poor intellect,  or pure stupidity to sell their tawdry racist wares.

And McDonald is a racist POS for repeating this crap, when if she had an IQ above table salt she would have known better. The National Review apparently supports this. And she repeats the various versions of the white racist song over and over in virtually every article she writes.

Dylann Root was recruited by the same sort of numerical trickery – which is the objective of promoting this sordid racist propaganda.

 

How Dylann Root Learned to Hate

Take a look at the video below which illustrates the soft pedalling of racism by Faux News …

Kirsten Powers destroy O’Reilly’s strawman arguments one after another. As usual, O’Reilly resorts to bluster. Other Faux News hosts are more direct…

Dylann Root the 21 Year old man who massacred 8 black churchgoers last week was introduced to the language, code, and basis of hate by people like O’Reilly, and the daily dose of racism from Sean Hannity on Faux News. Those of you who participate or read online boards on any subject having to do with race are familiar with the conservative and Republican memes on race…

They are the same as Dylann Roots.

Dylann Roof’s racist manifesto: A funhouse mirror reflection of right-wing American politics

…It gives the lie to the ruling conservative meme that Roof was just a loan wacko with no affinities with the white-militia movement that the respectable right has tried to keep offstage. It also shows how the accused killer of nine in a Charleston church has roots in weird ideas that are part of even the think-tank culture of the right: Roof’s manifesto is a kind of distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of Tea Party-era conservative white America’s core beliefs, and it shares the ahistorical way many conservatives deal with race…

1. Trayvon Martin was a dangerous thug and George Zimmerman was right to kill him.

Roof writes that from the Wikipedia entry on the shooting,“It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.”

2. Law and order in this country is threatened by dangerous, murderous blacks.

“The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.”

3. Blacks are obsessed with race; they won’t stop talking about it. 

“Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race.”

4. Slavery was not so bad. 

“I have read hundreds of slaves narratives from my state. And almost all of them were positive. One sticks out in my mind where an old ex-slave recounted how the day his mistress died was one of the saddest days of his life.”

5. Segregation was not so bad, either. 

“Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes.”

6. Black people are intellectually inferior. 

“Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional. How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same? This is the nonsense we are led to believe,” he writes. “Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job.”

Now, just about all of this stuff sounds pretty extreme when coming from Dylann Roof, who stands accused of heinous crimes to which he has reportedly confessed. But they’ve all, in some form or another, been heard in establishment or mainstream parts of the U.S. conservative movement. The George Zimmerman defense, which was supported by many conservative talking heads, has its roots in the larger “blacks threaten law and order” belief, an outgrowth of the GOP Southern strategy that dominated Republican politics for decades — the patrician George H.W. Bush (with Atwater’s help) struck gold there with his Willie Horton ad.

As an example, a few of the posts from the political section of the Magazine “National Review” and an article entitled “Step Aside, Reverend Al: The Next Generation of Race-Baiters Has Arrived”

MittyMo

• Keep imagining that. If they all became Republicans, Democrats wouldn’t have won another election.

  They’re still Democrats, but they’ve chained blacks to their political plantations by giving them entitlement crumbs & blaming their malaise on the GOP. KKK Grand Kleagle Robert Byrd must have thought the strategy up for Democrats.

  No need for Democrats to suppress the black vote as long as blacks are voting for them.

  JayWye piranha123 

  Black-“Americans” ought to be THANKFUL their ancestors were brought here,even as slaves. Otherwise,they would have been born in AFRICA,and never have the rights, education,economic prosperity,opportunity,or peaceful living that they enjoy in the US. No TV,and in many places,no electricity or clean water!!

  The worst-off black-“Americans” are FAR better off here than the average African.

  Dan Abbett • 2 days ago

  Militant black America is at a peak right now. They have been successful in getting “working whites” to cave to their demands to avoid protests, sit-ins, sit-downs and shut-ups; not to mention riots, looting and burning. As we learned from physics however, what goes up must come down and at some point, all this hot air is going to dissipate.

  What will be left will be black communities more shunned than ever as businesses turn away from blighted areas and police and fire personnel only show up to peak emergencies. The deepening despair will need a face and a name. DeRay McKesson fits both requirements.

  Just call me Joe 

  If he really cared about “black lives” then why isn’t he protesting in southside Chicago, or downtown East Saint Louis? He might want to wear a bullet proof vest himself in one of those places.

  Charleston is an aberration, a nutcase. McKinney wasn’t racial at all, it was trespassing, a cat fight, and some shouting and pushing. Baltimore has questions, but race wasn’t part of it. Ferguson wasn’t racial either; it was a thug who happened to be black.

  If “black lives mattered” then stop chasing ghosts and straighten up the failed black family.

  JayWye HV3 

  Jim Crow hasn’t been around for centuries,not even one century.

  Slavery actually BENEFITED the blacks;

  the slaves children and descendants got to be born in the US instead of Africa,and their descendants got to be American citizens,and FAR better off than if they had been born and lived in Africa.

  All in all,it was a pretty fair trade for their labors and suffering. The poorest black in America lives far better than the average African. And has a lot longer life expectancy,too.(until they start murdering each other…) Access to education,healthcare,decent medicine,etc.

  Slavery has always existed in many civilizations, from Pre-Columbian Americas to Africa, Europe, the Middle East, even China. It is not a 400 year old invention of whites to own blacks to grow sugar cane and cotton.

  And for the record, you may wish to look up Anthony Johnson, a free black man who was one of the first slave owners in the North American colonies. He also owned whites.

  Your quoting of slavery and Jim Crow is a cop-out. You want an easy excuse for bad character and misbehavior. Prior to Lyndon Johnson, the majority of black families were intact. The part of my city where I live has a median household income of about $145,000 per year. About 5% of the households are black. Every single one of them is headed by a married couple. Go a few cities away to the housing projects, and about 80% of the population is black and very few households are headed by a married couple. Let’s see if there is a correlation…. wealthy blacks – 100% married; poor blacks – practically no one married.

  And to answer your question, at least three thousand years.

  Bill Francis

  The liberals are responsible for much of the current mess. They wanted welfare and affirmative action that IMO have caused the destruction of black societies and culture in cities.

  tonyloaf 

  I’ll start believing that black lives matter when blacks start believing that black lives matter. DeRay, take your show to the hood, where you might actually save some black lives from your murderous black brothers.

 

Tired of Obama Caving…

Been saying this for a long time. Obama’s fixation with bringing Rethuglys on board is a failure.

 

 

The Destruction of America

This is America on  conservatism.

They gave tax cuts to millionaires…

They gave tax cuts to billionaires…

They gave tax cuts to companies shipping American jobs overseas…

And then they “deregulated” Wall Street and the banks to steal.

Home of the Brave, Land of the Free, Land of Opportunity?

Not anymore.

A steady fall since Raygun economics.

The myth of the American Dream

The American Dream is supposed to mean that through hard work and perseverance, even the poorest people can make it to middle class or above. But it’s actually harder to move up in America than it is in most other advanced nations.

It’s easier to rise above the class you’re born into in countries like Japan, Germany, Australia, and the Scandinavian nations, according to research from University of Ottawa economist and current Russell Sage Foundation Fellow Miles Corak.

Among the major developed countries, only in Italy and the United Kingdom is there less economic mobility, according to Corak.

The research measures “intergenerational earnings elasticity” — a type of economic mobility that measures the correlation between what your parents make and what you make one generation later — in a number of different countries around the world.

Economists aren’t certain exactly why some countries have a greater degree of mobility than others, but they do point to certain similarities.

Greater current inequality: The more unequal a society is currently, the greater the chance that the children will be stuck in the same sphere. This is because wealthy families are able to provide things like tutors and extracurricular activities — and the time to pursue them — that poorer families often cannot.

Also, education matters a lot more now than it did 100 years ago in terms of getting a good job.

“The rich can pump a lot more money into their kids’ future,” said Corak.

This helps explain why counties like China, India and many South American nations also exhibit relatively little economic mobility.

Families: Having a stable home life is also associated with the ability to climb the economic ladder, said Corak. The United States tends to have higher rates of divorce, single-parent homes, and teenage pregnancy than many other industrialized counties.

Social policies: Counties that redistribute wealth — through, say, higher taxes on the richand more spending on the poor — tend to have greater social mobility, said Francisco Ferreira, an economist at the World Bank.

This is especially true when it comes to education spending. Critics have long contended that the U.S. system for funding education — where school funding is largely based on property taxes — perpetuates inequality far more so than a system that taxes the whole country for schools, then redistributes that money to the districts that are most needy.

If why Americans have a harder time making it into the middle class is a bit of a mystery to economists, why Americans cling to the belief that it’s still easy to do is even more baffling.

It could be because, during the late 1800s and early 1900, the United States was a much more mobile country than Britain, said Jason Long, an economist at Wheaton College in Illinois.

“It’s clear that Americans still believe that America has exceptional mobility, and that’s not true,” said Long. He calling it “vexing” that “lots of people could be systematically mistaken about verifiable, factual information.”

But no society has total mobility. Class is always going to be somewhat correlated to one’s upbringing, Corak noted.

 

Fear of a Brown Planet – Reverse Racism

Comedian Aamer Rahman gives an excellent explanation of “reverse racism:…