“The traffickers — these aren’t people who take drugs. They are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.,” “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave. Which is the real sad thing, because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.”
from WaPo
#PaulLepage #GotEm #Maine
I’ve seen some crap. Few things are as much of a travesty as how the #HERO vote went in Houston. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.
Some from the campaign were saying “Let’s not engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking”. Yet how can you not when the vote was so lopsided? How can you not when the turnout for the Houston vote was the highest in a city election since 2003? How can you not when the anti-HERO campaign was, and continues to be, particularly vicious toward transgender people?
Dan Patrick, Gary Abbott, the “Campaign for Houston”, “Texas Values” and the right-wing in Houston are pretty damn unbelievable in their “win” against transgender women.
They demand grace from Annise Parker, but are very ungracious, snidely and spiteful in their reaction to the result. The transgender people who were targeted explicitly by Patrick and Abbott as “men in women’s restrooms” in the campaign are nowhere to be found in their reactions. I wonder if, thanks to this vote, it will now be acceptable to assault, attack and harm transgender women in Houston. They were targeted hard by cartoons and vicious rhetoric throughout the state by the Christian right-wing, called “perverts” and “confused men” who would harm “6 year old girls”. This was statewide, and this was scary.
The target wasn’t even L, G or B people. None of them. It was the T. I will not be surprised when a transgender woman trying to use the restroom is violently attacked in Texas, and the Christian right clucks its tongue at the transwoman saying “That confused ‘man’ was wrong to go into the wrong bathroom and look like that, ‘he’ had it coming. No sympathy from me, he deserved it!” That rhetoric won last night. Those who spoke it are effluent in their gloating.
This is a bad way for Mayor Parker to leave office. This next year in Houston will be particularly bad for transgender women. In the name of getting a similar ordinance passed in Houston, any mention of “gender identity” may even be stripped out of the ordinance for expediency’s sake a la ENDA.
The optics of this are hard to overcome, and must be fought for years to come. But the lives of transgender people in Houston must be watched out for as the next few years unfold. I remain proud to have done what I did for HERO. I am ashamed of this tragedy. I am afraid for trans lives in Houston and Texas. #TransLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter.
I find this speech poignant. But it reminds me of the NY Times article on White (affluent, non-Southern) families seeking a “gentler” war on drugs than the war we’ve been waging for most of the 20th century. This war is racist, it is classist, it is regionalist, and it has been all of that from the very beginning. But the elite of American society, the Southern landed gentry, the urban elite, had been using these drugs for the whole time, too, even after criminalizing it for Black and White working class people.
But now….NOW, because it has gotten out of hand among the upper class, now it is a problem to be solved non-violently, to be treated as a disease and epidemic and not as a criminal enterprise to be cracked over the head and shot through with bullets. Now, after the death and destruction of the war on drugs, we wonder what the fuck we are going to do.
Chris Christie is disturbed and confused by how his classmate of greater means ended up losing everything by getting strung out on percocet and xanax. But it has not hit him just how much destruction has befallen those of lesser means who end up dying on or over addictive drugs.
If Christie is running for president and really wants to understand why people say “they’re getting what they deserved”, the fact that we have cultivated and nursed our cultural anti-drug-user pathology over a century has to hit him with a force comparable to that of a roid-jacked drug-warrior policeman’s billy club.
We helped build this house of rage against the working class and their use of drugs, and now, because the affluent among us are dying from the malady, we’re no longer in love with this shit house that we’ve built. Oh noes. “#AllLivesMatter”, indeed. Hah. HAH! Not for the last century!
#LeelahAlcorn was right. Fix this society, please. #BlackLivesMatter #Occupy #EndMassIncarceration
After #DemDebate night and reflecting with Dominick on how the nomination contest has played out in both social media and real life, I don’t think I can take anymore of the presidential race. I’d rather work to get Democratic lawmakers into majorities, and let others work to get Sanders or Clinton into succeeding PBO.
News media is jostling over whether Clinton or Sanders won the first debate, while Democrats are hurting all over from the last two midterms. While Sanders expands his interactions with AAs and starts to affirm that #BlackLivesMatter (for which I am proud), his supporters have already burned bridges with many pro-BLM activists on social media while I looked on in horror. I’m really muted about Hillary because of the iconic symbolism of having a (first) woman president who at least tilts toward progressive ideals (“a progressive who gets things done”). I really do want her to do better intersectionally in her policies, as I do Sanders and, yes, (VP-in-waiting) O’Malley.
But again, Democrats are hurting. Progressives and liberals in general are hurting. Social cannibalism abounds in the GOP’s state-level and federal-level policies. Nothing is getting done with state or federal legislatures to fix the cracks left by negligent or abusive government in our society. The state-level Democrats in Georgia and the Old South are a lost brand, spoiled goods which make little sense for progressives and liberals in the South to support.
So I’m just tired of presidential election news, because the presidency has only so much that it can get done. I tire of waiting on pins-and-needles to see the candidates become everything that America needs. I’d rather help get more progressives and liberals into legislative and statewide office. Next year will be an opportunity for that, so I will ask around.
I’m thinking of backing away from most of my active involvement with the regional Sanders grassroots campaign. I have not been too actively involved for months.
I’m reading about the upcoming Taiwanese presidential election, pitting two women against each other from the two largest parties in the Republic of China and ensuring that Taiwan’s next president will be a woman. Given that we have two presidential candidates running for their respective parties’ nomination (Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina), I’m trying to build a list of women who have ran against each other in U.S. elections. The list is in its early stages:
Another thing about Alabama: they suffer from a slightly-worse case of Southern Political Apartheid than Georgia does. Alabama, like the rest of the South (save, maybe, for Florida) has one of the most racially-stratified political systems in the country. When the Dems had ran the South like Alabama during Jim Crow, they built the South to become a one-party state. When the pro-apartheid base was lost, the GOP claimed that base with a vengeance.
The goal in the South is to take everything. Electorally, we’re a very greedy, jealous, spiteful region.
Just thought about this. Here in the United States, we don’t have a shared sense of the government-sponsored commons as is understood in countries where the majority of a population belong to a shared religious sect (i.e., a Catholic country). I think a few economists have tied this to why so many of us have an allergic reaction to government-promoted commons such as the Affordable Care Act.
“Not only are such commons being used by people who don’t look like us, but they are being used by people who don’t share the same ethical or religious cosmology as us.”
Religion plays a large socio-economic role in the lives of so many Americans because the government, by being nonsectarian and agnostic in a country populated by a multitude of religious allegiances, does not speak entirely in the language which so many of us are taught by our intimate such-and-such religion.
But what’s so undermining about our approach to religious diversity and its impact on the separation of religion and state is that our sense of religious diversity inherits the exclusivity of Abrahamic religions from the Middle East and Europe. “You can only be one sect of Christianity/Islam/Judaism”, according to their gatekeepers. “Nevermind those sinners in Latin America who practice Yoruba/Ife traditions and venerate the orisha while also venerating Catholic saints. They’re going to Hell for not following the exclusivity clause.”
Meanwhile, in East Asia, Buddhists can also practice folk religion, Confucianism, Daoism, all at the same time, in the same lifetime, and not think of them as contradictory but as complimentary. They have no problem with practicing more than one religion, and are still supportive of government-promoted commons.
So why do Americans have a problem with practicing more than one religion? And if we were more acknowledging of multi-religious practice, could that allow us to better support secular, government-sponsored common resources?
That “All Lives Matter” protest was led by *drum roll please* Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris. Auntie Alveda King tagged along.
I also noticed the pictures of Frederick Douglass. None of these individuals have the fortitude to read his 4th of July speech without putting revision to it, I’m pretty sure. But why only pictures of Douglass and Lincoln? Could someone have had a Malcolm X picture somewhere? Does he leave a sour taste in some mouths when he damned the fundamentals of this system? “Justice” “Courage” What about “Reparations”? What about “Human Rights”? And does their “Justice” come at the barrel of a police’s firearm?
This is very Christian. An assertion that everyone can only come together if they only complied to this “(Judeo-)Christian” framework of society. Not even race, #BlackLivesMatter. Not even class, #Sanders2016.
Religion, or should I say “FAITH” as the religious tribalists who run most local governments would assert and unconstitutionally mollify. And of course, the proceeds of this march didn’t go to any communities affected by police excess or to community institutions, but the current real-life cause celebre of the Christian victims of ISIS’ genocide in Syria and Iraq. Not the Yazidi victims, not the Shia victims, not the moderate Sunni victims, not the Kurdish victims, JUST SPECIFICALLY the Christian victims. Not even, arguably, the Christian minority affected by displacement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who rank low in the hierarchy of Middle Eastern “save the Christians” needs. Just those a cozy distance away from the “rapture practice” zone of Israel/Palestine.
Everything about this march says a lot more about the inconsistencies of reactionary Christian U.S. politics toward ethnicity, foreign affairs, undermined populations, and their own comfort zones.
This is a funny march. Obtuse as shit, but funny. The fact that Glenn Beck organized it is just eyeroll-worthy. It doesn’t show the love that “All Lives Matter” asserts to high heaven.
(x-post from my Facebook)
Look at it from the perspective of the protesters. The proper placement of protest tactics and targets are mattering less and less as #YetWeAreStillDyingInTheStreets. We’ve used a variety of tactics before, only to get little product from it.
In Christianese, people like Bernie, Martin and Hillary are barely reachable, so they get these pearls, while all the GOP candidates are the proverbial swine. Yet, Bernie speaks at safer grassroots areas like Iowa, Colorado and Washington State, where he can expect a large turnout from his message’s resonance.
To date, AFAIK, he has not spoken in campaign mode in Chicago, or Atlanta, or New Orleans, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or Houston, or Birmingham, or Jacksonville. Meanwhile, we can get Sen. Ted [#GrandpaMunster] Cruz coming to a church here in COLUMBUS, GEORGIA with the help of State Sen. Josh #RFRA McKoon.
But yet, it’s in these areas where PoC are heavy, and their issues intersect largely with “urban” crises.
This is why #nn15 and #Seattle happened. Bernie, Hillary, Martin and the pitiful number of Dems running this season (and their pitiful number of debates) are going where it’s safe, not where their ears and eyes are needed. They’re not going where their vulnerability can be lent, without the expectation of a large crowd, but with the expectation that they will find recourse for our greatest domestic concerns.
Like Usher said: “Where are you now, when I need you around?”
Be here now. Don’t have us come to you.
