Why There Are So Few Black Conservatives

Zandar deconstructs one with a hand tied behind their back.

Let's understand that the entire point of being a black conservative pundit is saying whatever President Obama does or does not do is "downright offensive" to blacks, because all the grim statistics backing up the notion of centuries of struggle by black families in America only became a problem on January 20, 2009.

I might support the idea of the "level playing field" if such existed (in the same way I support the Kingdom of God on Earth), but it doesn't, and pretending that it does just gets people hurt and/or killed.  Plus the conservatives/reactionaries are in fact doing their utmost to un-level the playing field.

Watch This Space

Requested reading:

• Healing and disinformation about cannabidiol, from AlterNet.
• The Prodigal Son analogy, from Spocko's Brain.
• Work…and work, from Lance Mannion.

I'll wait over here.

OK.

ETA, 3/8/14:  Apparently I am not going to write this because the thoughts these essays sparked seem to have escaped and taken up residence in an ancient oak.  Very annoying.  And I have been slacking except for comments.  (I won't promise more frequent writing because that leads to semiannual posts.)

Meanwhile, Bartcop, who had a blog before the word was invented, died.  Skippy had the news and a link;  Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has a meditation on grief and loss.  If any of you could spare some help for Bartcop's widow there's a Paypal button at the site.

Also, I see that some folks on my blogroll haven't updated in over a year (Metsgrrl has, actually, but either Blogger isn't picking it up or her blogging software isn't laying it down).  Archiving is on the agenda.  As is deletion (Santa Claus, alas, is gone and so when I get a Round Tuit, he will be delinked).  Spring cleaning is coming.

"The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York"

• Via Mercury Rising, "Republican IRS Witch Hunt Cost $14 Million and Counting" (at Politicus USA) has shall we say a familiar name attached:

  We only know because Representatives Sander Levin and Elijah Cummings, the Ranking Members of the House Ways and Means Committee and Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the IRS on February 7 in a letter. Today they released a letter from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen regarding the money and resources spent on the Republican witch hunt.
  
  The costs, which are explained as the “conservative approach”, detailed in Koskinen’s letter are $8 million in direct costs like salaries, benefits, and travel, plus an additional $6 million to $8 million to “add capacity to information technology systems to process materials to investigators.”
  
  All of this was spent when Darrell Issa knew from the beginning that there was nothing to see.

  Mmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
• Mills River Progressive reposts from OpEd News an article by Alan Grayson on China and the Keystone XL pipeline.    

  There are plenty of reasons to be against the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalists recognize it as the ultimate "bonfire of the vanities" - planet-wide carbon bonfires. The pipeline passes through an active earthquake zone. One bad spill could permanently poison the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions of people, and 30% of our irrigation.
  
  Here is another reason, perhaps the best reason of all: It doesn't do us any good. China, yes. The Koch Brothers (who own the refining capacity that would be used), yes. Us, no.

• Also via Mills River Progressive from OpEd News:  Roundup is not good for you or the food chain.  

Warning: Pop-up ads.

In Memoriam

Harold Ramis, director/writer/actor (see also Chicago Tribune's 's summary of his career [warning: video plays]).

Because I'm Avoiding Writing an Essay With Footnotes Links

Many "conservatives" are not frauds, but an awful lot seem to be.

Take Brent Bozell.  Please.  "Uncredited underling" = "ghostwriter."   Underpaid ghostwriter.

"Oh scribbler, change your ways today, or with us you'll engage,
A-tryin' to catch the devil's words across an endless page!
Yippee-ki-yay,
Yippee-ki-yo,
Ghost writers in the sky!"

Sorry.  Fortunately, baseball season is almost close enough to smell the grass.

In Memoriam

Jim Fregosi, ballplayer and manager and what the Mets got for Nolan Ryan.

In Memoriam

Shirley Temple Black, actress and diplomat.  (Link via Avedon)

ETA:  Sid Caesar, tower of comedy.  Via skippy, who includes a video.

Over at Sadly, No!, A Simple, Non-Desultory, Non-Verbal Philippic

With interpolated "Shorter" translations.

Cerberus on systemic oppressions in the United States. A short excerpt:

But more seriously. On the moocher point… the right wing is actually on to something. This nation has genuinely been hit by an epidemic of moochers, people who have stolen great big chunks out of the economy and production in order to serve no real purpose or make any real difference in their lives other than to compete in a game of randomly increasing numbers with other asshole moochers.

All over the country, the hard-work of millions of Americans is stolen and abused by fear of unemployment and death in order for all the production that it creates to go to a handful of assholes who sit in a chair and pretend like they fucking matter. And those same people are in turn are marks for a group of even bigger moochers who just convince everyone to put their money in a great big casino they have rigged in their favor, when they aren’t straight up bribing congresscritters to make them richer.

These moochers steal the bread out of the mouths of children and do not even remotely give back an equivalent amount of value.

Which is the real reason why the right-wing is so loud about various forms of moochers, including literally everyone else.

Read the whole thing.  It's well written and takes to task corporations, conservatives, and the system.

Hat tip to Simon & Garfunkel for the idea for the title.

In Memoriam

Ralph Kiner, ballplayer and broadcaster.

Radio and television games, from April to October, doubleheaders, really long games, losses and wins, there those three were, describing the game, weaving statistics with baseball lore.  George* Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, and Ralph Kiner, the announcing team for the New York Mets for many years.

(His days with the Pirates were before I was born.)




* My mistake.  I blame old age and having missed the obituary.

In Case You Wondered

"Why Republicans Keep Calling Women Sluts." By Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, via The Slacktivist.

The simple answer is that they can't help themselves, but more specifically, it's a combination of ignorance, contempt, and Puritan morality that inevitably leads to these eruptions. And it's going to keep happening.

And

This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they're talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they're talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be.

Apparently conservative Republican women don't slap Republican men silly correct them for getting basic biology wrong.

In Memoriam

I am now down to 6 articles in the NYTimes.  Fortunately February is a short month.

• Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor.  No, I didn't know any of that, but the details will come pouring out now.
• Maximilian Schell, actor.
• Leslie Lee, playwright.

In Memoriam

Pete Seeger, singer, songwriter, environmental and peace activist.

One of my neighbors has a bumper sticker promoting Pete Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Not gonna happen now.

ETA:  Jurassicpork bites Grover Norquist on the incivility leg:

The next time one of the sons or daughters of Ronald Reagan accuses the left of incivility when one of their own war-mongering, tax-dodging icons shits the bed, think of asswipes like Grover Norquist jiggling his pudgy body in a spastic jig over the undug grave of progressive heroes like Pete Seeger, who died at 94.

There's a reason why folk singers are invariably progressive and are never Republican. When did Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan ever sing songs glorifying Exxon or any multibillion dollar multi-national corporation? It would never occur to a Republican to become a folk singer because that would mean having to, you know, actually embrace and take up the causes concerning common folk since time immemorial.

Bonus: Comrade Misfit has a video playlist up.

Supplemental Reading

Because frankly, I didn't get why Spider-Man's costume became Venom, either.

• Installation of obedience in children and where that leads:  Arthur Silber calls out the government and its representatives.
• The high conical headdress for medieval/Renaissance women was not a European invention.
• Yeah, he said "Class war." Bill Moyers on, well, class war. 

  We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

• Americans are being cheated out of their retirement money, and no, privatization is as usual not the answer.
• Dumbing us down?
• s. e. smith has an interesting essay on "sex strikes"--ie, Lysistrata et al.

And now I can close all those tabs.  Phew.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, 2014

• Via Shakesville, the I Have A Dream video, in case you need a reminder of the power that speech contained.  (Shakesville has a transcript.)  I'm playing it right now.
• Jesse Curtis looks at Dr. King's words and the present.

  Dr. King spoke of the interrelated problems of racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism--problems that were so embedded in the fabric of American life that they compromised the very structure of society. We modern Americans, appropriately colorblind and tolerant, believe that we've fulfilled the promise of the Black freedom struggle by...wait for it...being nice to each other.

[crossposted]

You Thought I Was Kidding

Via Zandar Versus The Stupid:  Wisconsin Republicans propose 7 day work week.  (Raw Story.)

You didn't believe me when I said conservatives want to steal your weekends.

Weekends are not, apparently, sacrosanct.  You want to keep having them, you're going to have to fight.  Now.

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

Hall of Fame Honorees, 2014

Messrs. Glavine, Maddux and Thomas.

Pitchers and Catchers Report is before Ash Wednesday this year!  36 days!

Letter and Spirit

1. Jesse Curtis on what the Bible actually says about poverty, with quotes from The Big Guy:

   It is not hard to see that such practices are rampant in our culture. Just think of the schemes of the banks, mortgage companies, and payday lenders. But the more subtle practices the Bible so wisely notes are present here too, and we are implicated in them. The norm in American culture is to live in the best community one can afford, putting as much distance between us and the poor as money will provide. The rich do indeed have many friends, while the poor suffer for want of connections. The Bible speaks of such states of affairs not as age-old ways of the world that we must resign ourselves to, but as expressions of cultures nearing the extreme limits of depravity. When God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah to decry extreme evil he focused on treatment of the most marginal members of the society[.]

2. Having, eating, and complaining about one's cake.

   “Ma’am, if we were closed today, how would you get these things you’re buying right now?”

Probably not a Journey to God post.

In Memoriam

Phil Everly.

I grew up with the Everly Brothers in my ears.  It was always easy to understand the lyrics, even when I didn't understand the lyrics (I didn't get why little Susie couldn't just sleep for the longest time).  They were pretty much the standard for two-part harmony.

COPD.  "Lifetime of cigarette smoking."  Yeah.

[News first seen at Making Light.]

Let's Get Meta

If you think of "sin" as a sidewalk peppered with bird droppings, it becomes clear that:

• You can try to avoid stepping in it, but sooner or later you will;
• You will look funny while you are contorting yourself trying to avoid the droppings;
• While it is natural and organic and fertilizing and not deliberate on the part of the bird, excrement still stinks up your shoes.

Happy New Year. Time to crash.

A Look at Libertarian Utopia

R. J. Eskow at AlterNet on "What America Would Look Like If Libertarians Got Their Way."  With examples.

It's not just about legalizing drugs.

From the "What Did I Tell You?" File

Voting restriction bills have racial causes.  From Talking Points Memo (TPM)

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics -- Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O'Brien, an associate professor of Political Science -- recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled "Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies," the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

[…]

What about the great Republican specter of voter fraud?

"If you want to be extraordinarily generous, you could say allegations of voter fraud may have been a very, very small contributing factor," Bentele said, speaking more generally about voter restriction efforts. "But in general, these partisan and racial effects seem to be really, really strongly associated with this outcome."

Abstract of the paper.

Have I mentioned that I'm reading Albion's Seed?  Because *gobsmack city*.

Chicken. Yes, Chicken.

Drug-resistant bacteria on chickens.  What, where, why.

(No, food poisoning is not a new way to get high.  Au contraire.  But if you enjoy vomiting and diarrhea and you can't afford booze or catching the flu, here's a way to get really sick.)

In Memoriam

• Joan Fontaine, actress
• Tom Laughlin, actor/writer/director

(Also, the last post was 2301.  I just can't keep up.  And Zandar is taking a break.)

Breakfast Links

Procrastination, mostly.  Shall we begin?

• Spocko on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Getting his Perot on for a good cause.
• Apparently conservatives gave in to their urge to exhibit their tushes on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's death:  Republic of T has examples.  Especially when misapprehending normal behavior.   Jesse Curtis riffs off Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on the uses of violence and non-violence.
• And by the way, racism is not "over."
• As for Santa and Jesus…let me see…St. Nicholas was an Anatolian Greek; not too many blond blue-eyed guys in that group; someone posted a possible reconstruction of the saint's face, and I will post the link later. here we go. He would have been "dark for purposes of whiteness," as Avedon used to say.  Jesus, of course, was Jewish, and Jews have only been considered "white" since the middle of the last century.  Ms. Kelly probably also went to Casablanca for the waters.  (Depictions of Santa have tended to pink him up; depictions of Jesus tend to both lighten his skin and hair.  Depictions are not accurate.  Got that?)

In Memoriam

Peter O'Toole, actor.





(has it really been a week and a half?)

In Memoriam

 Nelson Mandela.  Statesman.  Prisoner, liberator, president of South Africa, worker for peace and justice.  In a nutshell, one of the Great Ones.

And More Again

It's a Love song.

• World News Connection to be shut down New Year's Eve.  Via Mercury Rising, which also said:

   "Open source news/intel, like open source computer code, is far less susceptible to manipulation and corruption. Guess that’s why the Open Source Center has to be done away with."

  Uh-huh.
  

• Just three stitches cost $2,229.11? Sealing a wound with skin glue, for $1,696? This is a national disgrace. In all of the haranguing about healthcare, little attention has been paid to the actual cost of simple procedures like this. When Republicans go on TV and tell everyone that we do have universal healthcare — at emergency rooms — and you see hospitals turning their ERs into “profit centers,” you’ve gotta wonder what the hell is going on. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: where there’s shit there’s always flies.

  Southern Beale. Yes, it is now cheaper to check into the Ritz and have the doctor come to you.
• Mills River Progressive links to a .pdf of how corporate espionage, um, interacts with non-profits, activists, and an AlterNet summary of tactics used.  And tracking "authentication" has still not been derailed.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid flushes Peggy Noonan and remarks:

  A president who stakes his entire reputation on a complex scheme gone awry? And who never rides herd on the people who were supposed to make sure it went right?
  
  Hmmm, let me think....
  
  That 8-year selective amnesia about the guy before Obama is a funny thing.

• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan deconstructs a conservative's inability to understand choice and society (no, I shouldn't say that.  They understand choice if it's what they think everyone should choose, and they understand society as something where they make the rules.  They also seem to think [I use the term "think* advisedly] that tax money is supposed to support private schools, apparently having missed the word "private.").
  
  Why do I think that none of the conservatives who write that kind of swill have ever been in the armed forces or even served on a jury?

Wooooooooooooo-Hoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

 Chip's a Grand Master!  Chip's a Grand Master!!

Oh, By the Way...

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, at the one-or-is-it-two-month mark, seems to be working. Via Republic of T.

As in California, Obamacare is working in Kentucky for precisely the people it was intended to help. In places like Breathitt County, with a per-capita income of about $15,000 per year, it’s working for Americans who were unable to afford private health insurance and were previously ineligible for Medicaid.

Health care reform is working as envisioned in Kentucky for two reasons. The state opted to set up its own health insurance exchange, and Gov. Steve Beshear (D) stood alone among Southern governors when he signed on to the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. Kentuckians who apply for health insurance under the new law simply have to choose from a wide array of plans available either through the state’s exchange or its expanded Medicaid program.

If, as Republicans continue to claim, Obamacare “doesn’t work,” then it shouldn’t work anywhere. If it can work in states as different as California [and Kentucky], then it can work anywhere.

Apparently the Republican reaction in California is to run a fake website.  They still got nuthin'.