Tuesday Open Thread | Kool & The Gang Week

Posted on March 29, 2016 by rikyrah

More K & G!

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Fresh

Too Hot


Too_Hot_by_Kool_and_the_Gang_and_Lisa_Stansfield

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88 Responses to Tuesday Open Thread | Kool & The Gang Week

  2. eliihass says:
    March 29, 2016 at 7:27 pm

    The moment Americans are snookered into believing that Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, John Sununu, Mitt Romney, Tom Cotton, Paul Ryan, Kasich, The Bushes, Clintons, Meg Whitman, Jon Huntsman, and others aligned within and outside ‘No Labels’ – and only for their own dubious interests…are now the very ‘concerned’, ‘grown-up’ and ‘patriotic leaders’ and arbiters of ethics, morals, high-mindedness, good sense, elevating the discourse…defenders of women, the blacks and the oppressed…aghast at racism, xenophobia, coarse language, and win at any cost tactics…

    LOL…

    Don’t fall for the okey doke fam…

    These folks ain’t loyal…and they sure as hell ain’t decent, moral, patriotic or high-minded…

    Not the Clintons, not the Bushes, not Mitt Romney and please let’s not talk about Karl Rove or Bill Kristol..

    It’s all about money, power, influence and their own political and economic interests that have absolutely nothing to do with you, me or the general population…Trump is just the uncooperative fall guy and foil for this heist that’s long been in progress and continues to this day – even while Trump is the latest convenient shiny object used to distract Americans, while the real O.G’s and the veteran perpetrators are now doing double duty as pearl clutchers and sham ‘moral’ voices of ‘decency’, integrity and civil discourse…and only because Trump won’t play along and won’t commit to them and their modus operandi – and threatens *their* various hustles…

    The very same brazen culprits who together with their bought and paid for media, have in forever, and especially in the last 8 years – went out of their way to cultivate, elevate, protect and cheer on – and when it suited them, silently but very gleefully acquiesced to even worse than what Trump has going on now …

    None of what is going is what is seems fam…

    Don’t fall for the okey dokey..

    When Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger are attending ‘secret forums’ with Paul Ryan, Tom Cotton, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol…it ain’t about folks and things…and it sure as hell isn’t about racism, civil discourse …and it sure as hell isn’t about patriotism, ethics and morals…

    “…The most powerful people in the technology sector, along with other billionaires and top Republicans, flew to a small island off the coast of Georgia last weekend to attend a secretive forum, where they discussed, among other things, how to keep current Republican front-runner Donald Trump from winning the party’s presidential nomination…

    Among the cabal of tech C.E.O.s who met at the remote Sea Island Resort for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum were Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook, Tesla Motors and SpaceX C.E.O. Elon Musk, Napster C.E.O. Sean Parker, and Google co-founder Larry Page. Top Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Tom Cotton, and Karl Rove also attended the forum, as did billionaire G.O.P. donor Philip Anschutz and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger…”

    http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/tech-ceos-held-a-secret-meeting-with-top-republicans-to-stop-trump

    They ain’t loyal folks…They all drink from the same self-serving, megalomanic greed goblet…and they will sacrifice each other and anyone else who tries to get between them and the money, power, influence they feel so completely entitled to..

    Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 7:08 pm

    Malia & Sasha: The princesses we never thought we’d see

    Back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, there was a slang term we applied to the more refined, upper-class young ladies of our community — BAPS. The letters of this acronym stood for Black American Princesses.

    While sometimes a slight, the label also denoted pride and respect, applied on a more public level to the character Whitley from the ‘80s TV sitcom “A Different World” or to Halle Berry’s character in Robert Townsend’s 1997 film, “BAPS.”

    Today, we are fortunate enough to have real, live, Black American princesses. They are Malia and Sasha Obama.

    On television screens and social media time lines, we are treated to beautiful, professional pictures of our nation’s “first daughters” – Malia and Sasha in Cuba, Malia and Sasha in designer gowns at their first state dinner, Sasha and her classmates strolling across the tarmac with Air Force One in the background like, “Just me and my girlfriends!”

    We are seeing images we never thought we’d see – little brown girls internationally adored and adorned.

    When Barack Obama’s Black critics question, what has Obama done for us, specifically, this is what I sometimes point to. The Obamas have publicly provided us — and others — a social, cultural and political family model simply by them being them…

    Reply
    • eliihass says:
      March 29, 2016 at 11:04 pm

      My people, my people…

      “…They were picture-perfect from that moment that a pudgy-faced Natasha (Sasha) and pretty Malia Ann…

      They also exhibit a grounded-ness that is likely the result of having someone like Michelle Obama for a mother…”

      Ugh…

      Who writes likes this while trying to supposedly make powerful, positive arguments?

      You don’t describe kids in physical ways – and especially in ways that describe one little one as ‘pudgy-faced’ while the other sister is ‘pretty’…

      “…grounded-ness that is likely the result of having someone like Michelle Obama for a mother…”

      Likely…?…someone like Michelle Obama for a mother…?

      Really?

      Way to minimize their mother…

      A genuinely, fiercely and unapologetically protective and hands-on, fully-present Mama Bear who for all intents and purposes, practically set aside her career ambitions, dreams, aspirations – relinquishing much of herself, and long-held plans for herself, to safe-guard and ensure that these two girls not only turn out well, but come out unscarred from all of this…and remain whole and intact (her words), through what might seem an enviable and privileged existence… living and growing up in the White House in a historic presidency as offsprings – but in reality is a snake pit rife with incontrovertible pitfalls…A snake pit so venomous, hostile and dangerous, that if not very carefully and delicately navigated, could potentially, and just as likely and easily, wreak untold, irreversible and incredible damage and destruction on them and their lives – individually and as a family…

      This is not and has not been the fun, turmoil or stress free, glamorous cake-walk everyone wants to superficially try to project …or pretend or try to make this out to be…

      Not for these children – and especially not for their mother who’s had to heroically keep it together …Being not just loving, caring, hands-on, fully-focused mom – and the no-nonsense woman taking one for the team every time she has to throw the gauntlet and lay down the law and make the hard and sometimes unpopular calls necessary to keep things from going awry for her children and for her family …and more importantly, keeping her family together… whole and intact…

      Keeping things stable, holding down her family… and keeping dysfunction at bay…including fighting off and fiercely guarding against political opportunists and dubious others who have very little regard for family – especially her black family – beyond what cheap exploitable value it occasionally offers for their callous purposes…

      She accomplishes all of this all while having to show up as a darker skinned black woman in her historic role in a hostile world that still has no regard for black women, sees black women as undeserving, unworthy, and not valuable…and invariably consigns them to the bottom of the wrung… lower than every other race of women and men – no matter how accomplished, educated, upright and unassailable in character – and entirely based on the idea of white as the beauty standard – a standard that’s unilaterally and arbitrarily decided that black women aren’t beautiful or desirable – with few exceptions made if one happens to have or buy features typically associated with that acceptable ‘white beauty’ …A beauty standard that now has a grip and controls the mindset of even non-white people…one that consciously and unconsciously now dictates everything and how women are viewed and ‘rated’ in society …A beauty standard that determines the how and to what degree – and who is respected, valued, protected, elevated, honored, celebrated…A beauty standard which automatically conveys and assigns premium place to any and every dumb, mediocre, unremarkable non-black woman – with or without a high school diploma or college degree…surgically enhanced or not, with or without their own original body parts… with or without character, morals, talent, brains, decency …above and beyond every black woman…An arbitrary and unilateral physical standard of beauty devised and enforced by the same folks and those they’ve brainwashed along the way over the ages, who have wielded it to benefit and reward themselves and some others…but always used it to demean and degrade black women…

      This devoted mother and historic First Lady who has also had to fiercely guard against her 2 daughters being permanently harmed by the cruel and constant dehumanization and denigration she’s suffered as a black woman in a very public and historic role…and the attempts by adults of all stripes…complete strangers, consciously and unconsciously trying to pit her minor daughters against each other…trying to elevate one daughter against the other daughter based entirely upon their looks and that dubious beauty standard…how ‘fair-skinned’…how ‘pretty’…and who’s ‘prettier’ and more worthy…decidedly based upon the psychologically warped projection of which on any given day looks more like their racially more acceptable and ‘handsome and appealing father’…

      Our historic first black First Lady, wife and mother meanwhile continues to do what proud, phenomenal and stoic great black women have always done in the face of great disrespect, denigration, trivialization… and in the face of brazen and stealth attempts to take her down, she still stands tall and continues on…she holds her family down, while she magnificently plays her part as warm, gracious, fun, all-embracing First Lady…even as she’s relentlessly maligned, assaulted and insulted – and without so much as a peep or push back offered in defense of her…

      And especially not by those who loudly summon outrage over sexism and misogyny – and insist it’s unacceptable …but only when it’s perceived to be happening to white women…including white women so vile and despicable they willingly and enthusiastically work at an unabashedly racist outfit like Breitbart that has for years freely and consistently singled out America’s historic black First lady for their never-ending and baseless, gratuitous, vicious, contemptuous, vile, dehumanizing racist attacks…

      Reply
  7. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 1:35 pm

    LOL

    Published on Mar 22, 2016

    Larry talks to some of Donald Trump’s African-American supporters in an effort to answer the pressing question, “What the f**k are you thinking?”

    https://youtu.be/NysITFb_Wbs

    Reply
    • eliihass says:
      March 29, 2016 at 6:16 pm

      LOL…

      “…Everybody is trying to enslave you…important thing is how much are they paying while they enslave you…”

      At least he’s honest about things..

      Trump, Hillary and Bill, Kasich, Romney, Jeb, George H and W, Michael Bloomberg etc.

      Same Difference fam…

      Same Difference…

      Nothing new here even if some of the very worst perpetrators and brazen racist players of yore, are now the conveniently ‘appalled’ and ‘outraged’, pearl clutchers of the moment..

      Reply
  9. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 1:06 pm

    hat tip-POU

    Argentina Gifts President Obama Complete, Restored Copy of 1951 ‘Native Son’ Film Adaptation
    By Sergio | Shadow and Act
    March 29, 2016 at 1:16PM

    Richard Wright’s seminal novel “Native Son,” first published in 1940, is one of the most important books ever written about racism and the black experience in America. That can’t be argued. However, it has had the sad misfortune of also being extremely unlucky at the movies.

    There have been 2 film versions, and both of them were pretty lousy. There was the 1986 version made for PBS, which did get a brief theatrical run, with Victor Love as the lead troubled character, Bigger Thomas, and Oprah Winfrey, in one of her first film roles, as his downtrodden suffering mother (“My baby! My baby! Please suh my baby ain’t meant no harm!”… or lines to that effect).

    But the earlier 1951 film version, directed by French filmmaker Pierre Chenal, is the one that really needs to be seen to be believed.

    Though the novel is set in Chicago, and obviously well aware that it would be impossible to shoot the film there (with the exception of some travelogue footage that opens the film), as well as to raise the money to make it, the film was completely shot in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina.

    Reply
  11. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 1:03 pm

    McAuliffe vetoes bill he says threatens Planned Parenthood
    The Virginian-Pilot 3 hrs ago

    Gov. Terry McAuliffe visited the Planned Parenthood branch in Richmond on Tuesday to veto a bill that was aimed at stopping state contracts with abortion providers.

    “We’re here today to smack down the latest attack on women’s health care rights,” McAuliffe said, speaking to a group of Planned Parenthood patients, board members and staff. “I am very proud of my strong record on reproductive rights, and let me tell you this, I am very proud to veto this particular piece of legislation.”

    The legislation, HB1090 by Del. Ben Cline, R-Amherst County, passed the Republican-controlled General Assembly this year by votes of 64-35 in the House and 21-19 in the Senate.

    http://pilotonline.com/news/government/virginia/mcauliffe-vetoes-bill-he-says-threatens-planned-parenthood/article_c1a6ec24-53f1-5708-9309-4850d11cbe09.html

    Reply
  12. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 1:00 pm

    The rage of Trump fans isn’t new. I’ve dealt with it for years.

    As a Chicago Tribune columnist, I saw how angry white people became when the racial order was threatened.
    By Dawn M. Turner March 29 at 11:27 AM

    During the past six months, I’ve watched media outlets work themselves into a tizzy over the violence and hatred orchestrated by Donald Trump supporters. Commentators act like this is a relatively new phenomenon. But I know firsthand how any challenge to the nation’s established racial order makes some white folks lose their minds and their decorum.

    For more than a decade, I wrote a column in the Chicago Tribune that often focused on race. Before Trump gave his supporters license to give in to their lesser selves and convey their hatred in mixed company, they did so in my email box. They are part of a disaffected angry knot of Americans who feel as though they’ve been bruised by diversity.

    My experience isn’t unique. Any writer who has dared train a lens on race, women’s issues, social justice issues, immigration, abortion, sexuality, you name it, has faced some of the most vile backlash around.

    Once, my neighbor, a dear friend who happens to be a white Republican woman, said to me, “I don’t know how you read the comments at the end of your column.”

    I told her that they were nothing compared to my emails. It’s one thing to see these people on television or online, but to interact with them is quite another matter.

    Reply
  13. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:57 pm

    They helped created it.
    Coddle it.
    Humor it.

    Poo-pooed those of us who pointed it out.

    Phuck all of them…they created it, and the only reason that they are pointing it out is because it’s too damn obvious. They were quite content to hide behind the bullshyt all these years.

    Once again, I’ll point out that THIS is the reason they’re mad with Trump. Because he took away their camoflage an plausible deniability.

    https://twitter.com/EricBoehlert/status/714840953169833984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

    Reply
  14. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:51 pm

    LL at TOD has posted:

    on revolutionary fantasies

    By Liberal Librarian

    Let me tell you a bit about revolution.

    ……………………………………………………….

    I have pictures of my dad when he lived in Cuba. He was a big, strapping man, full of life and vigor. Within a year of arriving in New York City, he suffered a heart attack and stroke. I never knew the man in those pictures.

    People like Ms. Sarandon who speak cavalierly about “revolution” are the same type of people on the Right who speak about sending troops to every brush fire war across the globe. They have no knowledge on what they’re speaking about, but they think their fantasies accord them a special insight.

    Revolutions are brutish, violent things. Revolutions are more often like Petrograd 1918 than Berlin 1989. Unless you have no other choice, they’re not things to be wished for.

    The likes of Ms. Sarandon think that we’re like Paris in 1789, pushed to the brink, ready for revolt.

    We’re not. We’re the richest country in the world. Aside from the screeching on the fringes, most people are content with their lives. And the idea that a country which can’t muster above a 40% turnout in off-year elections would be ready to take to the streets to overthrow a Trump presidency is laughable in the extreme.

    If those of us on the left were more concerned with voting in every election rather than engaging in revolutionary fantasies, we wouldn’t be in the current parlous state. People like Ms. Sarandon prattle on about revolution; it won’t be their bodies on the front line.

    Reply
  15. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:49 pm

    I hope she gets help.

    R&B Singer Kehlani Recovering After Apparent Suicide Attempt

    By Dee Lockett

    Kehlani has revealed she was hospitalized Monday night following an apparent suicide attempt. In a since-deleted Instagram post, the 20-year-old Grammy-nominated singer notified fans of her condition last night with a photo of herself in which she appeared to be hooked up to an IV. She included a caption, explaining, “Today I wanted to leave this Earth … As of today, I had no single wish to see tomorrow. But God saved me for a reason, and for that … I must be grateful. Cuz I’m not in heaven right now for a reason.” On Tuesday morning, she updated fans with another since-deleted Instagram post of her recovering in the hospital.

    Reply
  16. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:47 pm

    UH HUH

    UH HUH

    This Little-Discussed Organizational Issue Could Create Total Chaos at the Republican Convention
    By Ed Kilgore

    In early June, several hundred paid professionals and a supporting army of volunteers will slowly begin to assemble near the banks of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, with the quadrennial mission of planning and executing a Republican National Convention, scheduled for July 18 to 21, at Quicken Loans Arena, in Cleveland. The event is convened by the RNC, but the ostensible managers actually play a subordinate role. Over the past four decades, their job has been only to build an apparatus for the conclave — a solid but mindless machine — and then turn it over to the “putative nominee” along with a long list of decisions that must be made to bring the event to life and then to fruition.

    In a normal election year, the RNC’s Committee on Arrangements gives the assumed general-election candidate and his staff a schedule of speakers with no names; the skeleton of a platform with few planks; some ideas for framing acceptance speeches with no actual speeches; and a process for total control of every word placed on a teleprompter, and for making sure nothing else gets said in the hall, but missing the vetters and enforcers who will crack the supplied whip.

    But this time around — if, say, neither Donald Trump nor (less likely) Ted Cruz manages to rack up 1,237 delegates — there may be no one to whom the keys to this turnkey operation can be handed. If there is a contested convention with any doubt about the identity of the nominee, a planning process that depends entirely on the arrival of a candidate-captain at least a couple of weeks before the first gavel drops will instead be rudderless. That in turn could immensely complicate the process of naming a nominee, and at the same time turn the convention from the highly choreographed infomercial we’ve seen in both parties for decades into a disorganized mess that undermines the show of unity these events are intended to produce.

    News-media interest in a contested convention so far has focused almost entirely on byzantine scenarios for the presidential balloting and what they might produce. But a better and more immediate question is whether chaos will break out long before the balloting begins, in the full view of cameras and with no one in particular in charge.

    Reply
  17. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:45 pm

    GOP Rips Hillary Clinton for Politicizing Hyperpolitical SCOTUS Fight
    By Claire Landsbaum

    Hillary Clinton isn’t the first to speak out against Senate Republicans’ unprecedented refusal to confirm — or, in many cases, to even meet with — President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. In a speech at the University of Wisconsin on Monday, Clinton echoed the sentiments of many Democratic lawmakers when she called on Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to “step up and do his job” and hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated in March. In response, Republicans criticized her for politicizing the already-political nomination process.

    In her speech, Clinton used Grassley’s own words against him: “He says we should wait for a new president because, and I quote, ‘The American people shouldn’t be denied a voice.’ “Well, as one of the more than 65 million Americans who voted to re-elect Barack Obama, I’d say my voice is being ignored.”

    She also linked GOP obstruction to the rise of candidates who suggest things like banning all Muslims from the United States. “The same obstructionism that we’ve seen from Republicans since the beginning of the Obama administration, the same disregard for the rule of law [has] given rise to the extremist candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz,” she said. “What the Republicans have sown with their extremist tactics, they are now reaping with Donald Trump’s candidacy.”

    Reply
  18. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:39 pm

    6 Years After Obamacare’s Passage, Haters Refuse to Accept Reality
    By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait

    During the Obama era, the keenest minds in the conservative movement have had to develop policy responses to the administration’s agenda. But those policies had to be crafted within bounds established by Republican politics — conservative ideas were useful only insofar as conservative politicians could plausibly advocate them. Republican politicians, in turn, had to operate within the bounds of what their voters considered acceptable. And Republican voters, as the 2016 election cycle has made abundantly clear to even those long committed to denying it, are bat-shit crazy.

    That frothing quality burst forth in its fullest form during the debate over health-care reform, in the summer of 2009. Angry Republicans flooded town hall meetings to denounce a law that they saw as redistributing resources from people like themselves to people who were not, identifying sources of grievance both real (cuts to Medicare) and imagined (death panels). The Republican Party’s stance on health-care reform took shape during those days of rage, and even six years after the law’s passage, its position on Obamacare has remained unaltered. The law is a failure and must be repealed, and no evidence can convince conservatives otherwise. A half-dozen years after its passage, none have dared revise that stance.

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/obamacare-haters-refuse-to-accept-reality.html#

    Reply
  20. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 12:23 pm

    A crusade to defeat the legacy of highways rammed through poor neighborhoods

    By Ashley Halsey III March 29 at 12:01 AM
    As a child, Anthony Foxx knew he couldn’t ride his bike far from home without being blocked by a freeway. By the time he became U.S. transportation secretary he understood why.

    “We now know — overwhelmingly — that our urban freeways were almost always routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods, creating disconnections from opportunity that exist to this day,” Foxx said.

    When the expressways that walled off his Charlotte neighborhood were designed, black residents of North Carolina still were denied voting rights. That highways routinely were routed through poor neighborhoods — Robert Moses, a polarizing urban planner of the era, called them “blighted” — is well known to those who suffered the consequences.

    That a member of President Obama’s Cabinet intends to lob that fact into a larger public discussion about race and opportunity, and encourage steps to rectify it, appears unprecedented.

    “I really believe that this is an issue that has been on the shelf collecting dust for a long time,” Foxx said.

    Foxx will launch his crusade in a speech Tuesday to the Rotary Club in Charlotte — “It’s probably not the speech they’re expecting to hear,” he said — and repeat it Wednesday in Washington before the Center for American Progress.

    “It became clear to me only later on that those freeways were there to carry people through my neighborhood, but never to my neighborhood,” said Foxx, who grew up in Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood walled in by three highways. “Businesses didn’t invest there. Grocery stores and pharmacies didn’t take the risk. I could not even get a pizza delivered to my house.”

    Reply
  31. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 10:43 am

    Top Kasich aide: Romney tried to help broker backchannel with Cruz campaign
    Updated 9:59 PM ET, Mon March 28, 2016

    (CNN) In a storyline that could be ripped from a House of Cards script, John Kasich’s campaign is looking to coordinate behind the scenes with Ted Cruz’s in a mutual effort to deny Donald Trump enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination. They even tried to get 2012 nominee Mitt Romney to help broker it.

    The only problem for team Kasich is that Team Cruz is not interested.

    Kasich adviser John Weaver told CNN that Romney urged Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe to contact the Kasich campaign, but Roe has yet to do so.

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/28/politics/john-kasich-mitt-romney-ted-cruz-2016-election/index.html

    Reply
    • Ametia says:
      March 29, 2016 at 12:00 pm

      I keep repeating this: LOOK @ALL THE LIGHT IN THESE PEOPLE’S FACES.

      They’re literally snuffing out the LIGHT OF SPIRIT, OF GOD in these beautiful people.

      Reply
  37. Ametia says:
    March 29, 2016 at 9:57 am

    Charles Pierce: “You know who in the media really created He, Trump?”

    …you see, I also read the work of many scurvy bloggers, and they were on to the potential of He, Trump’s Big Con long before much of the elite political media tumbled to it, for reasons that will become obvious as we examine the other cilice that Kristof has tied around his career.

    … self-flagellating bollocks from Kristof …

    This is all my bollocks on a number of levels. First, there are people covering the plight of the disappearing middle class all over the place—in local papers, in academic studies, on the electric teevee machine, and even in Kristof’s own newspaper. There is a Democratic candidate for president whose entire damn campaign is based on the premise that the American middle class is going the way of the Anasazi. It’s a little late for the elite political media that boomed “free trade” and the miracles of the “globalized economy” in a “flat” world to suddenly look up and discover that a 55-year old steelworker in Indiana likely will not be getting a job writing code for the Next New Thing. It’s a little late for the elite political media to discover that de-unionization has not been altogether a boon in those few sectors of the industrial economy that haven’t been cored out or sent to Vietnam.

    But, in any case, as far as Kristof’s main point goes, that’s not the story that that “we in the media” missed. For four decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980, hitching his party to the snake-oil of supply-side economics and to the sad remnants of white supremacy, often as expressed through an extremist splinter of American Protestantism, the Republican Party has been afflicted with the prion disease that now has blossomed into utter public madness. That’s the story everyone was too blind, stupid, or afraid to tell. You know who in the media really created He, Trump? Anyone who laughed at Ronald Reagan’s casual relationship with the truth and with empirical reality. Anyone who blew off Iran-Contra. Anyone who draped C-Plus Augustus in a toga after 9/11. Anyone who cast Newt Gingrich as a serious man of ideas. Anyone who cast Paul Ryan as an economic savant, that’s who. Anyone who wrote admiring profiles of how shrewd Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were. Anyone who put Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck on the cover of national magazines based simply on their ratings. Anyone who put Matt Drudge on a public-affairs program. Anyone who watched the conservative movement, the only animating force the Republican party has, drive the party further and deeper into madness, they are the ones who share the blame. He, Trump merely has taken the bark off ideas that were treated as legitimate for far too long by far too many people, most of whom don’t really give a damn about the plight of the vanishing middle class except for its use as fuel for rage-based, self-destructive politics.

    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43374/media-created-donald-trump/

    Reply
  41. Ametia says:
    March 29, 2016 at 9:48 am

    Supreme Court deadlocks, 4-4; unable to reach decision on key labor union case
    The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it was unable to resolve a major challenge to organized labor. The result was a defeat for a group of California teachers who claim their free speech rights are violated when they are forced to pay dues to the state’s teachers union.

    Read more »
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-deadlocks-over-public-employee-union-case-calif-teachers-must-pay-dues/2016/03/29/b99faa30-f5b7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html

    Reply
  42. Ametia says:
    March 29, 2016 at 9:47 am

    Look who the WaPo sends out to deny their COMPLICITITY in creating the PETRI DISH for this MONSTER.

    JUST STOP IT, Eugene Robinson. STOP.IT
    No, the media didn’t create Trump

    By Eugene Robinson Opinion writer March 28 at 8:40 PM

    One of the more absurd things being said about the Donald Trump phenomenon is that the media created it. For the record, we didn’t.

    First of all, there is no “we.” The news media operate in what should be every conservative ideologue’s dream environment: an unfettered free market. Outlets compete every day — actually, in the Internet age, every hour — to provide consumers with information they need and want. Every editor and news director strives to beat the competition, and the fact is that audiences have decided they need and want to know about Trump.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-the-media-didnt-create-trump-covering-him-is-their-job/2016/03/28/11ffc554-f516-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_opinions

    Reply
  44. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 9:19 am

    We can’t vote him out soon enough.

    Facing long odds, Mark Kirk’s desperation ploy gets ugly
    03/29/16 09:28 AM
    By Steve Benen
    Last year, when Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) appeared likely to lose the gubernatorial race he expected to win, the Republican’s desperation led to an ugly move. With just a couple of weeks remaining, Vitter overhauled his campaign message and presented himself as the anti-Muslim-refugee candidate. In the end, it didn’t work – Louisiana rejected the senator by double digits.

    But the outcome of the race hasn’t dissuaded other Republicans from trying a similar strategy. Take Sen. Mark Kirk, for example.

    By most measures, the Illinois Republican, who’s seeking a second term, is the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbent, running in a state that’s very likely to go “blue” in November. Kirk and his campaign appear to believe, however, that it’s still possible to scare voters into supporting him.

    In recent weeks, Kirk has launched attack ads telling Illinois voters that they should be terrified of ISIS, and Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D) is a fool for supporting a policy that welcomes Syrian refugees who are fleeing ISIS. Yesterday, the Republican senator directed the public to his latest op-ed in which Kirk argued that we should also be terrified of Guantanamo detainees.

    Reply
  45. Ametia says:
    March 29, 2016 at 9:02 am

    We’re worried about you. And need to be PROTECTED FROM YOU. FOR OUR FREEDOM & SECURTIY

    YOU ARE THE ENEMY, TEDDIE CRUZ

    Reply
  46. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 8:43 am

    MAVYNEE “BEACH LADY” BETSCH
    BIOGRAPHY
    INTERVIEW DATE: 9/20/2004
    Singer, environmentalist, activist and survivor MaVynne Betsch was born on January 13, 1935 in Jacksonville, Florida. She was raised in one of the most preeminent black families in the South. Betsch is the daughter of Mary and John Betsch, and the great-granddaughter Abraham Lincoln Lewis, who founded Florida’s oldest African-American beach, and Anne Kingsley, the African American wife of plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley. Betsch was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Upon completion of her bachelors’ degree in 1955, she moved to Europe where she was an opera singer for ten years.

    Since 1975, Betsch has made it her full-time mission to preserve and protect American Beach, her great-grandfather’s investment, from development and destruction. She has been famously named “Beach Lady,” for her many efforts and dedication to the beach and its’ inhabitants. ‘Beach Lady’ has given her life savings, some $750,000, to sixty environmental organizations and causes, ten of which she is a lifetime member, and most of them involve animals. ‘Beach Lady’ has been featured on CBS and CNN and in such publications as Coastal Living, Essence, Southern Living, Smithsonian and over twenty-five others. Betsch has also dedicated part of her life in convincing others that nature and natural things are fine. ‘Beach Lady,’ who has natural hair that she has grown for over twenty years and is seven feet long in some areas, also has one foot long finger nails on one of her hands is trying to prove that things can grow naturally without protein from meat.

    Reply
  48. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 8:38 am

    Georgia’s GOP governor vetoes ‘religious liberty’ bill
    03/28/16 12:30 PM
    By Steve Benen
    Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) had a decision to make. His allies in the Republican-led Georgia legislature recently passed a “religious liberty” bill intended to curtail LGBT rights in the state, and the measure was backed by Deal’s social-conservative friends. At the same time, however, business leaders throughout Georgia balked and pressured the governor to veto the legislation.

    Which ally would Deal disappoint? The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported this morning on the governor’s decision.
    Gov. Nathan Deal said he will veto the “religious liberty” bill that triggered a wave of criticism from gay rights groups and business leaders and presented him with one of the most consequential challenges he’s faced since his election to Georgia’s top office.

    The measure “doesn’t reflect the character of our state or the character of its people,” the governor said Monday in prepared remarks. He said state legislators should leave freedom of religion and freedom of speech to the U.S. Constitution.
    In the same remarks, the governor urged his fellow Republicans to take a deep breath and “recognize that the world is changing around us.”

    Deal was re-elected to a second term in 2014, is prevented by term limits from seeking a third, and has said he has no interest in running for any other office. I mention this because, while the religious right is furious this morning, these far-right activists won’t be able to impose any kind of electoral punishments on Georgia’s GOP governor.

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/georgias-gop-governor-vetoes-religious-liberty-bill

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      March 29, 2016 at 9:56 am

      Yes, Hillary, the Clinton Administration showed us how easily progress can be demolished. But, yes, it is a make-or-break moment which is why YOU SHOULD NOT BE PRESIDENT, ma’am.

      Reply
  56. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 8:31 am

    SHOW YOUR WORK?” OK…Healthcare Coverage Breakout for the Entire U.S. Population in 1 Chart!
    Posted on Mon, 03/28/2016 – 12:53pm
    Over the past few days, I’ve been fine-tuning an ambitious attempt to boil down the entire U.S. population into a single pie chart broken out by type of healthcare coverage (or lack thereof).

    While I’ve spent an absurd amount of time on this, I originally wasn’t planning on linking to specific data sources because a) this is supposed to be more of a general overview, with many “composite” numbers blended from various sources and b) frankly, it’s taken up too much time already.

    http://acasignups.net/16/03/28/show-your-work-okhealthcare-coverage-breakout-entire-us-population-1-chart

    Reply
    • Ametia says:
      March 29, 2016 at 9:00 am

      GOP literally want AMERICANS to shoot & kill each other, but not at RNC where they’re congregating to get elected to further ERODE our democracy.

      SEE THE INSANITY OF IT ALL, FOLKS?!

      Reply
  58. Ametia says:
    March 29, 2016 at 8:12 am

    Chelsea Clinton’s bungled answer on her mother’s college affordability plan
    By Michelle Ye Hee Lee March 29 at 3:00 AM

    “What matters to me as a voter is that my mom is not only the only candidate on either side of the aisle who tells you exactly how she is going to pay for everything, but she doesn’t expect to rely on things that are unlikely, like that [Sanders’s plan]. So she says, going forward, she believes that anyone should be able to graduate from school debt-free, public universities or private universities, debt-free. And for public universities that students who come from working-class, middle-class families, should be able to go tuition-free. But families who come from wealthier backgrounds should pay into the system.”

    — Chelsea Clinton, campaign event in Milwaukee, March 24, 2016

    Chelsea Clinton was asked by a University of Wisconsin-Madison student about her mother’s plan to make college affordable — one of the major domestic issues in the Democratic presidential race. But the former first daughter oversimplified two components in her answer and failed to capture the nuances. We fact-checked how much of Hillary Clinton’s college affordability plan offers “debt-free” and “tuition-free” colleges.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/29/chelsea-clintons-bungled-answer-on-her-mothers-college-affordability-plan/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_politics

    Reply
  63. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 8:05 am

    Soledad O’Brien: #Blacklivesfade on 2016 trail

    The Justice Department issued a scathing report on Ferguson, Mo. a year ago, confirming to the broader public what many blacks and Latinos had been saying for years: that the criminal justice system is rigged against them, sometimes with deadly results. The rage of the #blacklivesmatter movement seemed sure to dominate the coming election campaign.

    Yet now in the midst of that campaign, an important national conversation about police brutality and discrimination has faded into the background. Instead, an angry white working class is center stage voicing, subtly perhaps, that this election is about recapturing a nation now led by its first ever African-American president.

    …Bernie Sanders faced early protests for his lack of understanding of the movement. And while Hillary Clinton was able to capitalize on her strong support among blacks, police brutality has hardly been the centerpiece of her campaign. That’s even more true on the Republican side, despite a once huge field and months of debates and interviews.

    It’s perhaps ironic that a conversation about police brutality and discrimination has been overshadowed in an election year in which the candidates have included an African American, two Latinos, a Jew and a woman. Not even the two Latinos, running as historic firsts, have talked much about discrimination.

    The presence of the #blacklivesmatter movement is mostly felt these days in protests that some candidates are trying to hijack for their own purposes. Trump has had protesters forcibly ejected from his rallies. He sometimes counters them by saying that all lives matter, an attempt to reclaim the conversation about race from blacks and make it about whites. He really doesn’t need to do that. In this first election after our first black president, it has already happened.

    Reply
  68. rikyrah says:
    March 29, 2016 at 7:40 am

    Good Morning, Everyone :)

    Reply

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