Saturday Open Thread

Posted on February 13, 2016 by rikyrah

Good Morning. I hope you enjoy this weekend with family and friends.

This entry was posted in Open Thread, Politics and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

48 Responses to Saturday Open Thread

  2. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 9:16 pm

    The Simply Breathtaking Consequences Of Justice Scalia’s Death
    BY IAN MILLHISER
    FEB 13, 2016 6:27 PM

    Twenty-four hours ago, Republicans were headed into what remains of the current Supreme Court term with a solid majority and a docket strewn with some of the most consequential cases in decades. Affirmative action, abortion, birth control, immigration, an effort to shift congressional power to Republicans — all of these issues are before the justices this term.

    The issues remain before the Court, but the balance of power just changed. Justice Antonin Scalia, the longest-serving member of the Court and one of its most outspoken conservatives, is dead. When the sun rose this morning, Republicans enjoyed a 5-4 majority on the nation’s highest Court. It sets on an evenly divided bench.

    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/13/3749464/the-simply-breathtaking-consequences-of-justice-scalias-death/

    Reply
  3. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 8:35 pm

    I never saw this show…not even in re-runs

    …………..

    Remembering ‘The Outcasts’ – Featuring Maybe Primetime TV’s “Angriest” Black Man

    By Sergio | Shadow and Act

    February 12, 2016 at 11:08AM

    Thinking about what TV shows I would like to bring back if I could, my immediate answer was: “The Outcasts.”

    This was THE SHOW! No “ifs” or “buts” about it. A good friend of mine and I still talk and reminisce about the show, and the impact it had on us as young kids.

    Once, I was speaking to another friend on the phone, when, somehow, “The Outcasts” came up. And when I hung up, a white guy sitting next to me who overheard what I was talking about, said to me: “You were talking about ‘The Outcasts’?? God, I LOVED that show!”

    When a program made over 40 years ago still has that kind of impact, then you know it was something really special.

    The western series aired on ABC starting in the fall of 1968, with a premise that was deadly simple and effective. It dealt with two bounty hunters; white Southerner and former slave owner, Earl Corey, played by Don Murray, who had lost everything during the Civil War and was reduced to being a bounty hunter for a living. And his partner, a former slave named Jamal David, played by Otis Young (who passed away in 2001), who worked as a bounty hunter with his newly won freedom. However this was no love-thy-brother, “why-can’t-we-all-get-along” sappy relationship. Suffice it to say, David and Corey despised each other, but they were forced to work together for survival, in a cold, brutal and unforgiving environment.

    http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/remembering-the-outcasts-featuring-maybe-primetime-tvs-angriest-black-man-20160212

    Reply
  4. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 8:17 pm

    Unca Clarence at the funeral for Fat Tony:

    Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 8:11 pm

    now, these are untold stories that I want to see:

    Taraji P. Henson Will Topline Film Based on Story of Black Women Mathematicians Who Worked for NASA During the Space Race

    By Tambay A. Obenson | Shadow and Act

    February 10, 2016 at 9:37PM

    This is the kind of wonderfully atypical Civil Rights-era story that gets me excited!

    Last fall, it was announced that author Margot Lee Shetterly’s book, “Hidden Figures,” which hasn’t actually been published yet (but will be this year via HarperCollins), was been optioned for Ted Melfi to direct (he’s the director of 2014’s acclaimed dramedy “St. Vincent,” which starred Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, and Naomi Watts. Terrence Howard played a supporting role in the film, which was Melfi’s feature directorial debut).

    Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures” tells the untold true story of the African American women mathematicians – Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith and Barbara Holley – who worked at NASA during the Civil Rights era. The book tells their story through the personal accounts of 4 specific women that then-NASA staffers referred to as “the colored computers.” Shetterly, whose father was one of the first African American engineers employed by NASA, is a journalist.

    Reply
  8. SouthernGirl2 says:
    February 13, 2016 at 7:44 pm

    My daughter is here making beef nachos. I could become spoiled.

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      February 13, 2016 at 5:18 pm

      You never know, you just never know. But it sounds like an easy death after a long life and that is as good as it gets, IMO.

      Reply
  13. SouthernGirl2 says:
    February 13, 2016 at 4:54 pm

    Ima have my say and leave it alone. The damage these ppl on the Supreme Court have done.

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      February 13, 2016 at 5:14 pm

      That’s beautiful. What a sweetheart he is.

      Reply
    • eliihass says:
      February 13, 2016 at 6:03 pm

      I continue to say that the way your children love you …and the many beautiful, caring and thoughtful ways they express their love for you SG, is a testament first and foremost, to you as their mother…

      You have done and continue to do such an amazing job in your devotion to and sacrifice for them as a caring and loving mother…and you deserve all the love and gratitude they shower you with not only on special occasions like this, but everyday …

      Reply
    • eliihass says:
      February 13, 2016 at 7:10 pm

      This article…much to say about it… but that will have to be left for some other day…

      “….McCray seemed to understand that she was being opaque if not impenetrable, that her answer had revealed nothing. ‘‘Think about campaigns and about first ladies and how you see them, what they can do. Jill Biden. Right? Michelle? Jill Biden in government is not as prominent, right? It is not as prominent a role, and you don’t expect her to have as prominent a role.’’ McCray shot quick, furtive glances at her plate and then her aides. ‘‘It’s very different from the campaign,’’ she said, before pausing to add, ‘‘When you become first lady, it’s like, ‘O.K., now what do you do?’ ’’

      I’d like to believe that as politically involved as Chirlane has been, that she does in fact understand that there aren’t two First Ladies…that there is indeed a huge difference between being the First Lady and being the V.P’s wife…Chirlane would at least be intimately familiar with that concept of First Lady and the usually unknown or not exactly significant V.P’s wife as it relates to Hillary and Tipper Gore in those same roles…

      And then there was this from the writer of the article – a young black essayist who also did the article/interview with Toni Morrison for the New York Times last year…

      “…Sharpton was born in Brownsville, but the offices of his Justice Network take up an entire floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan. The halls are lined with blown-up covers of Sharpton on Newsweek, Time and an image of him from The New York Observer. There is Sharpton with Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a rally for Trayvon Martin. Sharpton and Obama, Sharpton and James Brown. His assistant at the time, Jackie, a young white woman with long blond hair and exacting manners, offered me tea while I waited to see him…”

      LOL..

      My people, my people..

      Reply
  21. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 2:25 pm

    The Latino Flight to Whiteness

    WILLIAM DARITY JR. FEBRUARY 11, 2016
    Based upon trends in racial self-classification, one has to be skeptical about the emergence of “majority-minority” America.

    ………………………………………

    Moreover, the preference for whiteness predates recent Hispanic migration to the United States. It is a preference fostered in their countries of origin. For example, a much higher proportion of Puerto Ricans on the island identify as white, 80 percent, than Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, 53 percent, in the 2000 census, as Mara Loveman and Jeronimo Muniz show in a 2007 article, “How Puerto Rico Became White,” in the American Sociological Review.

    Based upon trends in racial self-classification, one has to be skeptical about the emergence of “majority-minority” America. But whether self-identification as white translates into social identification as white is another matter. A 2015 study by Nicholas Vargas in the DuBois Review indicates that only 6 percent of Hispanics who say they are white also say they believe that they are perceived by others as white. In “From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA” a 2004 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the shifting American racial boundaries are producing a provisional space for Hispanics collectively as “honorary whites.”

    All this clouds the political implications of America’s changing demography. Hispanics collectively are unlikely to share common cause with black Americans over a common racial identity. As Gabriel Arana has pointed out, white-identified Hispanics are more likely to support the Republican Party than those who choose a nonwhite racial identity. These patterns in Hispanic race classification will become harder to isolate if “Hispanic” is included as one of the race options in 2020, as the Census Bureau may do. Therefore, if a coalition ever forms of Americans “of color,” it will not be on the basis of linked fate or fictive kinship anchored on race. That coalition will have to develop on the basis of common cause around a core set of issues or an ideological move toward a belief in a common heritage of colonial subjugation by non-Hispanic whites.

    http://prospect.org/article/latino-flight-whiteness

    Reply
  22. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 2:17 pm

    Zandar sees the hustle too:

    …………………………..

    Friday, February 12, 2016

    Last Call For More And More

    The cottage industry of black intellectuals scolding President Obama for “not doing enough for the black community” will continue as long as they can make money off selling books, and the most recent entry in the genre is Michael Eric Dyson’s “The Black Presidency” and this Salon interview with David Daley is indicative of the game.

    You’re saying, for example, he hadn’t been pulled over in Ferguson time and again and given tickets that got him jailed and unable to get to work.

    That’s right. Some of that, but not a bunch of it. Enough to be sensitive to it, but not enough to be angered by it.

    Would he have been able to be angered by it, though? If he was the kind of person who was angered by it, would that have threatened the same kind of multiracial coalition that put him in office?

    You’re absolutely right. If Obama had been a different kind of black man, he never would have been a different kind of president, because he couldn’t have been president. In many ways, the things that he felt, saw and believed, permitted him a kind of racial innocence and racial optimism that many white Americans were able to tap into. This is somebody we know, this man is familiar with our mores and folkways, our intuitions, our rhythms, our timbre, our tone, the echo of our voice. This is a man who intuits it. As a result of that, Obama was put into office because he didn’t bring precisely, when we see him, this baggage. Obama did not guilt white America, and as a result of that, they repaid him with the benefit of becoming the president of the United States of America. And that’s an understandable exchange, but in that exchange there have been some costly negotiations, one of which is the assault upon black identity and being. Another of which is that Obama did not champion those people as citizens of the state that he ran. It’s not simply that because you’re black and they’re black you’ve got to hook them up. No, it’s because they are citizens of the state that you preside over.

    And if this sounds familiar, it’s the same damn argument that Cornel West and Tavis Smiley keep making: Obama wasn’t black enough to scare white people until after he decided to actually try to change things for the better. Once that happened, he was too black for Fox News and not black enough for people like West, Dyson, and the rest.

    Nobody sets up black America for failure like black America, I’m telling you.

    Reply
  23. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 2:13 pm

    elections have consequences.

    …………………………………….

    Gov. Matt Bevin signs new abortion bill at Capitol Rotunda

    UPDATED 6:16 PM EST Feb 11, 2016

    Hundreds gathered at the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday to see the signing of the new abortion bill by Gov. Matt Bevin.

    Of course those who attended were on both sides of the issue, showing this fight is far from over.

    “So God, we stand in solidarity for the least privileged: the unborn,” Father Charles Howell said.

    The signing of Bevin’s “Informed and Consent” abortion bill started with a five-minute-long prayer, which received a loud applause from supporters of the new legislation.

    The bill, signed last week, requires women seeking abortions to have a face-to-face consultation — in person or by live video chat — at least 24 hours before an abortion.

    The previous bill allowed women to listen to a recorded message about risks and benefits.

    http://www.wlky.com/news/gov-bevin-to-publicly-sign-new-abortion-bill-into-law/37938826

    Reply
  24. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 2:07 pm

    These people were terrorized in their own country.

    But..we’re not supposed to remember everything that happened to our community.

    https://twitter.com/jazziz2/status/698586371066355712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

    Reply
  26. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 2:02 pm

    uh huh
    uh huh

    Heidi Cruz says as president, her husband, Ted, will deliver ‘a combination of the law and religion’

    By Hunter

    Thursday Feb 11, 2016 · 12:25 PM CST

    This may or may not be why we don’t hear from Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi on the campaign trail very often.

    Heidi Cruz says her husband’s campaign, and, if elected, presidency, exist “to show this country the face of the God that we serve.

    …………………………….

    She went on to say that, “I think that’s something that this country really needs to be reminded of, is that Christians are loving people, are nonjudgmental people, but there is right and wrong, we have a country of law and order, there are consequences to actions and we must all live peaceably in our own faiths under the Constitution. And Ted is uniquely able to deliver on that combination of the law and religion.”

    Reply
  28. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 1:41 pm

    hat tip: BJ

    ……………….

    Peyton Manning’s squeaky-clean image was built on lies, as detailed in explosive court documents showing ugly smear campaign against his alleged sex assault victim

    NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
    Updated: Saturday, February 13, 2016, 1:46 PM

    On Feb. 29 of that year, Naughright, at that point the university’s director of health and wellness, was in a training room, examining what she thought might be a possible stress fracture in Manning’s foot. At 6 feet, 5 inches, his feet dangled off the edge of the table. Manning allegedly then proceeded to scoot down the training table while Naughright examined his foot. At that point, she said, he forcefully maneuvered his naked testicles and rectum directly on her face with his penis on top of her head. Shocked, disgusted, and offended, Naughright pushed Manning away, removing her head out from under him (see pages 14-15). Within hours, she reported the incident to the Sexual Assault Crisis Center in Knoxville (see page 18).

    According to the court records, Manning initially denied the incident ever took place. It was a calculated risk. He was the star quarterback, a Heisman trophy hopeful, and a likely No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft. While Naughright was now a respected member of the staff, Manning was the star, the savior of Tennessee football. It was his word against hers.

    When Rollo learned of the complaint, he allegedly concocted a story that Manning actually pulled down his pants to moon another student-athlete, Malcolm Saxon, who was nearby. According to Rollo, after mooning the student, Naughright just happened to move her head right into Manning’s pelvic region. Rollo acknowledged under oath that he was the first person to use the word “mooning.”

    One person, though, could settle all of this: Malcolm Saxon.

    And, in fact, he did settle it. In an affidavit, Saxon refuted Manning’s story and made it clear that Manning never mooned him. In a letter to Manning, Saxon, who stated that he lost his eligibility as a student-athlete over it, practically begged him to come forward and tell the truth (see page 20). Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

    “First, I have stuck to my same story throughout this drama. I told Mike Rollo the next day and Coach Fulmer a week or two afterwards. I had nothing to hide at that point and I have nothing to hide today. I have never been on Jamie’s side or on your side (contrary to what the athletic department was telling you and telling her). I stuck to the truth and I lost my eligibility for it. My redshirt request sat on Mike Rollo’s desk for months as the process was going forward. I’m not angry about it anymore, just getting a little tired of it!!

    “Peyton, you messed up. I still don’t know why you dropped your drawers. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not. But it was definitely inappropriate. Please take some personal responsibility here and own up to what you did. I never understood why you didn’t admit to it….”

    Saxon goes on to tell Peyton things like:

    “Coming clean is the right thing to do.

    You have shown no mercy or grace to this lady who was on her knees seeing if you had a stress fracture.

    You might as well maintain some dignity and admit to what happened.

    Your celebrity doesn’t mean that you can treat folks this way.”

    For anybody other than Peyton Manning, such damning statements from a fellow student who had no dog in the fight would have been the nail in their coffin. As a general rule, it’s not just gross to smash your testicles on a woman’s face, it’s a crime.

    Reply
  32. Ametia says:
    February 13, 2016 at 9:53 am
    Reply
  33. Ametia says:
    February 13, 2016 at 9:24 am

    In America, the art of doctoring is dying
    By Jerald Winakur February 12 at 7:55 PM

    Jerald Winakur practiced internal and geriatric medicine from 1976 to 2012 and is author of the memoir “Memory Lessons: A Doctor’s Story.”
    For almost 40 years, I practiced general internal medicine and geriatrics in my own office. I had tens of thousands of face-to-face interactions with a group of folks who, with time, grew to trust me. I respected them as well; many I came to love — a term that I hesitate to use in this hypersensitive age. Given how geographically dispersed families are today, for many of my older patients I functioned as a surrogate son.

    SNIP:

    My students want to know — in all the tumult of medical care today — how they can appear to patients as if they are “connecting” with them. “I think sitting down in the hospital room by the bed — even if it’s just a moment — is important,” says one. Another remarks, “Try to notice something special about them, maybe a book they might be reading or a piece of jewelry they are wearing.”

    I suggest examining their patients: listening to hearts and lungs, palpating abdomens, assessing extremities, pulses. This intimacy between a caring doctor and a trusting patient seems a time-honored, engaging and even useful way to cement the doctor-patient relationship. But, for many, this is a bridge too far. Students learn now on plastic dummies; their physical examination skills are poor to nonexistent. They are taught an almost slavish reliance on technology.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-dying-art-of-doctoring/2016/02/12/bb08a16a-cdd0-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines

    Reply
    • silentlyheardonce says:
      February 13, 2016 at 11:51 am

      I see a lot of doctors. When I was young and my health was better the doctors just dismissed me. Now the doctors I see I know about their families and vacations. A few have purchased my books. I feel relaxed with them. I think part of that is I understand my illnesses and I ask for clarification when I don’t. I think it’s important to know about your conditions when talking to doctors.

      Reply
  34. rikyrah says:
    February 13, 2016 at 7:47 am

    Good Morning, Everyone :)

    Colder than an mutha here.

    Reply

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