OPEN THREAD FRIDAY.

It's open thread Friday. Let me know what's on your mind.

I am thinking that this has been a very tempestuous week for Herr trump and his men, and I honestly don't know how much more of this clown the country can take.

Should the press just "shut up" and not report on the lies? Stephen Bannon thinks so.

"Negative motivation" is a tool used by preachers, politicians, and even us lawyers at times.

It's motivating by fear. "If you don't repent you will burn in hell". Or, "If you don't vote for me the other guy is going to make your life miserable".

Donald trump uses this tactic brilliantly to keep his minions and followers in line: "America is going to hell in a hand basket. It's in terrible shape, and if you don't let me do what I want, things are only going to get worse." 

He was at it again today while visiting us here in Philly.

" President Trump said Thursday that Philadelphia's murder rate has been "steady, I mean, just terribly increasing.

 By almost any interpretation, he's wrong.

First, let's look at his full quote:

'"Right now, too many families don’t feel secure. Just look at the 30 largest cities. In the last year alone, the murder rate has increased by an estimated 14 percent. Here in Philadelphia, the murder rate has been steady, I mean, just terribly increasing.”'

The most accurate interpretation of his remarks about Philadelphia would be to say the murder rate last year was steady. That is correct: In 2015, the murder rate was about 17.86 per 100,000 residents, according to a calculation using police statistics and census data. In 2016, it was about 17.41 per 100,000 residents.

But after saying "steady" Trump added, "I mean, just terribly increasing," which is incorrect. It's true that 2015 and 2016 had higher murder rates than 2013 and 2014. But the earlier two years had the lowest murder rates the city had seen in decades: " [Source]

The Philadelphia Inquirer is being kind. He knows that he is "wrong"; he flat out lied.

But that's how trump rolls, he just lies for lying sake. He can't help himself. It's one lie after another. Lying has become the new normal for an American president. Facts be dammed, we have "alternative facts" to give you.

Today trump was in Philly, and there were thousands and thousands of protesters in the streets. He can't lie to me about that, I saw it with my own eyes. But we all now how obsessed he is with crowds. (Ordering a government agency to find proof to back up a  lie is beyond the pale.) Soon he will go on some national cable show and try to convince us that there were no protests in Philly today. And the scary thing is that some people will believe him.

Is it any wonder, then, that his number two guy does not want the press to report anything and just "keep its mouth shut".  

Hopefully no one in the Fifth Estate is listening, and everyone will just keep writing and talking.

Lies and weather reports.

I tweeted about this earlier. Do you remember the days when we called George W. Bush a Nazi and we were speaking metaphorically? It was just hyperbole to drive home a point: That the man was surrounded by Neocons who had no problems acting out and playing deadly war games.

Of course, looking back, we didn't think that W was really a Nazi, or, for that matter, that he had the heart of one.

How times have changed. This guy....*shakes head*

Anyway, I bet a lot of you progressives would take W these days over what we currently have in the White House.

I know that  W and his band of Neocons had a lot of issues, but I don't remember them being blatant liars like the crew that we have in charge now.

For instance, Baghdad Sean recently came to the defense of Kellyanne Goebbels  by declaring that "alternative facts" are kind of like conflicting weather reports.  (Let that sink in for a minute.)

" Sean Spicer has shed some light on the concept of "alternative facts," a widely panned concept introduced by his colleague Kellyanne Conway to defend his seemingly inaccurate inauguration attendance numbers.

According to the White House press secretary, his use of "alternative facts" is much ado about nothing. He says it's similar to a meteorologist who incorrectly predicts the weather.

"The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts," Spicer told Fox News' Sean Hannity during an interview that aired Tuesday night. "The facts are, sometimes when you look at a situation, in the same way that you can look at a weather report. One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy, and another says it's going to be light rain. No one lied to you. It just means you interpreted the data in a way that you felt got you to a conclusion." 

Ahhhm, no it doesn't, Sean To stay with the weatherman analogy, "alternative facts" is like the weatherman telling you that it's Sunday when you know it's Monday. It's just a lie.

But this is kind of how this president gets down: he lies a lot.

Check out this little anecdote: 

"On Monday, President Trump gathered House and Senate leaders in the State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you reception, served them tiny meatballs and pigs-in-a-blanket, and quickly launched into a story meant to illustrate what he believes to be rampant, unchecked voter fraud.

Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.

When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.

In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word.

The three witnesses recall the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.

But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting." [Source]

In other words, he lied again.  

*Pic from thedailybeast.com

Lie merchants.

I think that we can all agree by now that the current American president is clinically insane.

To tell falsehoods one after another without even giving it a second thought cannot be normal.

The man has told one lie after another since becoming president, much to the shock and surprise of the American news media. And many of them are having a hard time believing how incredibly thin his skin is.   That. my friends, is not a good trait for an American president to have, because if he thinks things are bad now, just wait until he is faced with a real crisis.

Anyway, I say serve them (the press) right. When this man was lying about president Obama for the last seven years, where were they? When he told lie after lie on the campaign trail they acted as if it was normal, and that it was just Donald being Donald. Now that he is president they expect this seventy year old man to all of a sudden change who he is? Not. Going. To. Happen.

Donald's latest whopper (because he just can't help himself) is the one he told a bunch of lawmakers who were visiting him in his newly gold minted digs in the white house. (The man's office decor is gold; he wears neckties that are way too long; and he treats his wife like she is there to serve him. Proof positive that he represents the very worst of us males.) He just can't let this whole popular vote thing go, so he had to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that millions of American voters committed voter fraud, and this is why he lost the popular vote by over three million people. He keeps blatantly lying about this, in spite of the fact that it has been proven over and over again to be false.

The scary thing about trump and his "alternative facts" crew, is that many of their supporters still choose to believe the bull s**t that they peddle on a daily basis.  They have all bought in, and to jump off the trump train now would be too much for them to handle.

The white house has now "doubled down" on this voter fraud nonsense, and now that they have the power to feed into the lies created by their alternative universe, they actually have the power to investigate this non-issue. And they have actually declared that they might in fact have an investigation regarding this issue.

 “He’s stated his concerns about voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign, and he continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him,” Spicer said.

No credible study supports Trump’s claim, and the only study Spicer cited does not support the president on the issue. " 

What no one is talking about is the possible nefarious method to the president's madness: Push this false narrative long and hard enough, and justify more voter suppression of the folks who have traditionally been disenfranchised.

Maybe the man is not as insane as I first thought. Maybe he is just an evil person. Or, sadly, maybe he is a little bit of both.

*Pic from thedailybeast.com

Day three.

I'm off tonight, field hands.

No folks, Mr. Thin Skin did not have me arrested. Yet. 


I suspect, though,  that if he does start rounding up bloggers, writers, and activists; "Baghdad Sean Spicer" will be out in front of the American people to tell us yet another lie.

"Nasty women" versus the " liar- in- chief. "

I suppose that if I happened to be standing in Comrade trump's shoes I would be upset as well. I mean the day after his coronation  he had to watch over 4 million people (mostly women) all over the world take to the streets to denounce his presidency and what it stood for.

Of course it didn't not take long for Mr. Thin Skin to bite. In what was an unprecedented move, he sent out his press secretary to denounce a tweet from a New York Times reporter which was retweeted by some news outlets. His problem with it wasn't that it undermined national security, or that it might trouble our economic standing in the world, his problem with it was that it dd not put him in a better light. To him, it diminished the size of the crowds of his inauguration and thus put a little shade on what should have been his shining moment.  By showing actual pictures to prove that there were less people at his inauguration than Obama's in 2009,  the reporter drew the ire of Herr trump, who spent the rest of the day pouting and using the bully pulpit to put down the apparent diss.

There he was at the CIA headquarters, standing in front of a wall that serves as a memorial to all the people who died while serving their country in covert operations all over the world, and all he could do was speak about himself in the third person, and brag, once again, about how popular he was and how evil the press was being to him. That was a sickening display of self-aggrandizement. Throw in the fact that he told not one, but two blatant lies in doing so, and you can see why all those people took to the streets yesterday to protest his presidency.  

If you were living in Germany in 1933,  this has to all seem so familiar to you. Hitler promised not to threaten the Reichstag,  the German President, the Churches and the States, and, as a result, he was granted emergency powers via the enabling act. We all see now how that turned out.

He did it all by de-legitimizing the press, and mobilizing the German people into a nationalistic fervor, And he did it with slick propaganda  (I see you Kellyanne Goebbels) , and well meaning Germans who sat on the sidelines until it was too late.  

“I can only say that I am with you 1,000 percent. And the reason you’re my first stop—” Trump said before dramatically changing direction, “— is that as you know I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community.” 

That's a lie! 

"Trump drew laughs from the crowd when he described reporters as "the most dishonest human beings" and claimed he'd drawn as many as 1.5 million people to his inauguration despite official estimates closer to 200,000 and repeated images of empty standing spaces. A few miles away, at the White House, Trump aides were soon setting up pictures of the crowd inside the press briefing room."

Another lie!

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” ~Hitler~

At least he has the "frequency" part down pat.

Who says that trump doesn't read? I bet he has a copy of Mein Kampf on that big gold desk of his.


*Pic from theatlanctic.com


 

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

For example: "Where is everybody?" 

*Pic from usatoday.com

OPEN THREAD THURSDAY.

This is open thread Thursday y'all, tell me what's on your mind.

Oh, and don't forget to set your clock back 50 years tonight.

Holla.

More problems for the swamp people.

      Tonight my racism chase takes me to Trump Tower in New York, where the president-elect has shown his true colors (pun intended) once again.

I mean just when we thought that the president-elect couldn't get any more clueless on matters of race he does something like this:

"Donald Trump’s newest staff pick is a lot like the rest of them. According to news reports and lawsuits, Reed Cordish, Trump’s incoming White House adviser, hired white men to start trouble with black patrons of his family’s properties so that they could kick them out.

According to a scathing report in the Daily Beast, Cordish, who was picked to be an assistant to the president for intergovernmental and technology initiatives, “is an executive of the Cordish Companies, his family’s Baltimore, Md.-based real estate business, and the president of Entertainment Concepts Investors, a subsidiary that owns and manages bars, restaurants, and clubs throughout the country.”

Lawsuits viewed by the Daily Beast claim that ECI’s biggest holdings are clubs and bars in Kansas City, Mo.’s “Power and Light District,” which black residents have nicknamed “Power and White District.”' [Source]

Of course he will fit right in with team trump, because the president-elect did something similar to black folks back in the day.

"Dante Combs and Adam Williams sued Cordish in 2014 in a $5 million class-action racial-discrimination case, claiming that Cordish-run establishments harassed and beat them in an effort to keep their clubs free of blacks. Cordish’s business won an initial ruling in a federal district court, but Combs and Williams are appealing the decision, the Daily Beast reports.

Christina Martinez, a floor manager at one of Cordish’s clubs, testified in the 2014 case that Reed Cordish used “urbans” or “Canadians” as code words for black patrons.

She also claimed that the club’s manager, Jake Miller, grabbed the DJ’s microphone and yelled, “Get that fucking nigger music off here.”'

Meanwhile, down in Washington today, trump's cabinet picks were making fools of themselves for all the world to see.

We can all laugh at Betsy DeVos and her grizzly bear gun speak, but for those of us who were paying attention to what these people was saying, it was actually all quite scary.

They all, for instance, admitted that they have not spoken to their leader, Comrade trump, about policies and issues concerning their areas of expertise -----and the direction that they plan to take ---once they assume their positions.

Just imagine that for a minute. How can we expect team trump to move forward with a cohesive and effective policy if they are not communicating with each other?  Does trump even know what these people believe? And if he doesn't,  how can he select them to serve in his cabinet?

Sadly, they will all be confirmed; every clueless one of them.

 And, as far as I am concerned, it is as poor a reflection on us as it is on them.

*Pic from thedailybeast.com                          

Explaining Toni Morrison as she explains Donald trump.

The Field Negro education series continues.

The following article was written by Brianna Cox for Atlanta Black Star :

"Pulitzer prize-winning and prolific author Toni Morrison has penned an important essay in response to Donald Trump being elected president — as well as to the vile beliefs and violent actions of his supporters — in an effort to explain exactly why he won in the first place.

In her essay, “Mourning for Whiteness,” which was published in The New Yorker, Morrison’s central thesis is simple: Trump won because privileged white people, white men especially, feel threatened by a “rapidly” diversifying United States of America.

“Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color,” she begins.

She continues: “Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are ‘people of color’ everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

Morrison goes on to explain that white people, whether consciously or subconsciously, fear Black people and otherwise non-white people fighting for and obtaining equality, as this ultimately means losing their superiority. Equality for all is a loss for white people.

Because of this fear, white Americans, “[i]n order to limit the possibility of this untenable change and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing,” Morrison writes. “[T]hey are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice.”

The cowardice that Morrison writes of is specifically the racism that white Americans allow — and commit — every day: “Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.”

In this particular paragraph Toni Morrison alternates between racially motivated happenings both old and new, from the church bombing in 1963 that killed four young Black girls to Dylann Roof‘s slaughter of nine Black church goers in 2015. Morrison articulates easily just how eerie it is that things have not changed in that time frame.

Morrison continues, saying, “These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.”

And it is for these reasons — the imminent “collapse of white privilege,” as Morrison calls it — “that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”

Morrison skillfully illustrates that all white Americans did this, not just rich, not just poor, not just men and not just women — ALL of them:

“On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters, both the poorly educated and the well educated, embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.”

She concludes her essay by recalling an old novel by William Faulkner titled “Absalom, Absalom!” and how even in 1936, there were people who understood how serious whiteness was to white Americans: “William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” [once again], the family chooses murder.”' [Source]

As of this post, there are over 50 lawmakers (mostly people of color) who have decided to boycott the trump inauguration.  

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"~ Martin Luther King Jr

 It's MLK Day here in America, but I would like to remind you Negroes (I see you Steve Harvey) who believe that we are now "post-racial",  that three states (Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi) celebrated Robert E. Lee Day, today. And in some towns across America, folks are upset because they have to give up their Lee parade for that King fellow.

Anywhoo, the following incident took place in October of 2015, but the police department involved is just releasing the video because of a previous lawsuit that was filed by the victim.

"Pinned to the ground by officers who kneed and struck him, Lawrence Crosby screamed whatever he could think of to convince them that he was a law-abiding PhD student, not a violent car thief.

“This is my vehicle, sir,” he said, his voice captured by the dashboard-camera video. “I have evidence. . . . I purchased this vehicle Jan. 23, 2015, from Libertyville Chevrolet.”

ADVERTISING

inRead invented by Teads

ADVERTISING

inRead invented by Teads

It wasn’t enough. The officers placed him in handcuffs in the driveway of a church, two blocks from the police station in Evanston, Ill.

Police released the dash-cam video earlier this week, detailing the half-hour encounter that sparked a civil lawsuit from Crosby and a discussion about race and policing in this city of 75,000, just north of Chicago.

The video includes footage from the dash cam of one of the officers involved in the altercation. But it’s also synced with video of a personal dash cam Crosby kept running in his car.

On that night in October 2015, Crosby was headed to Northwestern University, where he was studying for his doctoral degree in civil engineering.

But something was wrong with the molding on his car, so he pulled out a metal bar to try to fix the strip on the roof, he says on the video.

A woman passing by saw him — a black man, wearing a hoodie, with some kind of bar pressed up against a car.

[Yesterday’s Ku Klux Klan members are today’s police officers, councilwoman says]

She picked up the phone and called 911, telling the dispatcher she thought she was witnessing a car break-in.

“He had a bar in his hand, and it looked like he was jimmying the door open,” she told the dispatcher.
When Crosby drove off, the woman followed his Chevrolet and relayed information about his location to police.

Crosby was on the phone as he drove, and communicated his growing unease. He realized the situation could look suspicious to a passerby and hoped it didn’t escalate.

“It was a little bit dark,” he says to someone while on the phone, captured on video. “You know how it is with black people — they think we’re always trying to do something wrong.”

He noticed the car following him, and told the person on the other end of the phone that he’s going to head to a place where he’ll be safe.

“I think this person is still following me,” he says. “I think they’re trying to play some games. I’m about to go to the police station now.”

He never makes it. Two blocks from the police station, an officer pulls behind his car and puts on his blue lights.

Crosby stops the car in the driveway of a church, and slowly gets out facing the officers, hands in the air.

He begins to explain, but the officers order him to keep his hands up. Others scream at him to get on the ground.

He turns and, in an instant, five officers sprint toward him. They drive him back several feet, kneeing him to force him to the ground and striking him with open hands to make him comply, a police spokesman said later.

“Stop resisting,” an officer yells as another strikes Crosby’s thigh.
“I’m cooperating. I’m cooperating,” Crosby replies.

He continues to explain that the car is his, where he got it from and when. He attends Northwestern and is a civil engineering PhD, he says. He was just trying to fix his car.

He asks the officers why he’s being handcuffed; they say they have to figure out
 who the car belongs to.

They determine it’s his, but he was still arrested and charged with disobeying officers and resisting arrest. A judge later threw out the charges, Crosby’s attorney Tim Touhy, told the Chicago Tribune.

The officers were never charged or disciplined. The Evanston Police Department has defended their actions.

Crosby, who couldn’t be reached for comment Saturday, filed a civil lawsuit in 2016.

Evanston Alderman Brian Miller, who is running for mayor, told The Washington Post he’s been outraged about the incident ever since he saw the video months ago with the rest of the city council.

“There’s underlying problems in our town that we’re not admitting,” he said. “There’s a true desire that people have — they want to want to address these problems and actually solve them. But we don’t want to necessarily admit that we have these problems.” [Source]

Nope, because we are "post-racial" now, and having a day dedicated to MLK proves it, right?