Interesting to note:
Vladimir Putin once reportedly praised the sexual prowess of Israeli president Moshe Katsav, while Katsav was under investigation for rape and sexual assault.
Today, Katsav is serving a 7-year term in an Israeli prison. He is due out in 2018.
This reminds me of Trump.
I disagree a bit with the Republican “line” being drawn at white women (see Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis). His base is not abandoning him over this insult to White female autonomy, only the other party members with clout outside of his campaign.
No, this has to go deeper for a nuclear apocalypse to happen within his base. He has to be shown smearing some unforgivable crap over the wrong Anglo-American, able-bodied male, the avatar in which most of his base perceive and vaunt themselves. Whatever will destroy him will have to show him, “the Donald”, to be the Emmanuel Goldstein-like “cuck” which they train themselves to most grievously despise.
According to Trump insiders like Hugh Hewett, another shoe is to drop momentarily. It’s supposed to be worse than the “grab them by the pussy” tape.
So this is huge: in the UK, Diane Abbott MP has been selected by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary.
She’s only the fourth woman and the first black British person to hold this position in a shadow cabinet. If Corbyn were to win the next parliamentary election and bring in this shadow cabinet as his frontbench, Abbott as Home Secretary would have powers over immigration, citizenship, national security, intelligence (including MI-5), and criminal justice. It is one of the four most powerful cabinet positions in the UK, including the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Abbott would also be the fourth woman and first black British person to be Home Secretary. Former Home Secretary Theresa May is the current Prime Minister.
EDIT: So I got a *lot* of Facebook comments from pissed-off British commenters in my earlier post about #DianeAbbott. Apparently, she’s had a lot of gaffes since taking office as MP in 1987.
Folks, I wasn’t praising her. I was only *stating* that she’s *the first* black British (or, in British terms, BAME) person and *fourth* woman to serve as Shadow Home Secretary, and that this position is of critical importance to British politics.
And yes, I’m a USian. Hi!
Does this make any sense?
“I’m going to vote for Trump! I think he’s a destabilizing force. I’m skeptical of him, too, and who exactly is behind Trump. But given that there’s eternal dissent in the Republican Party, that leads me to believe that whatever he represents might be a destabilizing force. And he’s made a lot of overtures to Russia and China, which in some ways could be thought of as an encouraging thing. I don’t support or endorse any of Trump’s policies. I just think it’ll escalate the problem, which is the best we can hope for. I hope at the very least he’d turn the White House into a reality show. America would tune in, right? And then he could do something nice, like give the money to the National Park Service, because they’re trying to defund it.”
Source: American History XXX – Office Magazine
This is heightening the contradictions. Does he want to heighten the contradictions?
Reading about Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race oldest daughter of Strom Thurmond who he never publicly recognized in his 100-year life. I noticed that she tried unsuccessfully to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy through her father’s descent from Confederate soldiers, but emphasized the need for African-Americans to join more lineage-based fraternal societies in order to forge closer ties to the earlier United States. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has also joined the Sons of the American Revolution by way of a free man of color who fought for Continental forces in the Revolutionary War.
This led me to the list of lineage-based fraternal societies in the United States, most of which are either based on participation in war, settlement of a state or region at a particular time, ethnicity, service in some military branch.
Most of these tend to be of the accidental, circumstantial type that would involve some catechism of honor to esteem the “honorable ancestors”, the sort of unchangeable accident of history involving some distant soldier guy (or nurse woman) who, if you were not reminded of it or cognizant of research, you would totally forget or ignore. Similar to this practice is the war or period reenactment culture (like RenFaire and Civil War reenactment).
The only African-American-oriented genealogical [NOT lineage] society which I can find right now is the AAHGS-Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc. and their state chapters, which exist to “share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research” and “to trace the historical ties that bind us one to another, mold the present, and shape the future.”
So it’s not exactly “Sons/Daughters of [whatever]”.
It seems to predominantly be a Euro-American thing. It’s hard for us to squeeze into most of these organizations.
It makes sense that these law-and-order unions would endorse Trump. It makes sense that they’re the ONLY union endorsements for Trump, at any level.
Seriously. Go search for “union endorses Trump”. National or local.
Just these 3.
#1u
If police kill twice as many unarmed European-Americans as they do African-Americans, isn’t that a problem with police, too? Shouldn’t the police be fixed to stop killing so many people across the country?
Why do you think there are so many White sovereign citizens who proclaim themselves to not be subject to American law? Why do you think that anarchist/libertarian White guys run Cop Block and Photography Is Not A Crime! in direct and sustained critique of police behavior?
Don’t be so cluelessly self-absorbed as to think that only Black, or only liberal, or only “SJW” people are raging against law enforcement abuse.
It’s not just #BlackLivesMatter. It’s not just #Kaepernick.
It’s also #StopKillingUs.
René Préval, who served as President of Haiti from 1996-2001 and 2006-2011, is perhaps the greatest democratic survivor of Haitian politics. He managed to both receive and turn over presidential powers peacefully and democratically, twice over.
He weathered food riots, a dysfunctional government, frequent turnover of prime ministers, and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 where his own presidential residence was destroyed and left his family homeless. Yet, he never led or encountered a coup, unlike his democratic predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who suffered two coups. He did not have his own death squad, did not exceed his own presidential mandate.
Since independence in 1804, Préval is only the first elected Haitian president to serve his full term and voluntarily retire (and only the second overall after Nissage Saget, who had taken power by coup in 1867 but left office voluntarily after five years), and the first to be elected in non-consecutive terms. No other head of state in Haiti’s history can claim to have had a similar experience as René Préval.
“We are twice as likely to have a firearm in our homes as black Americans and Hispanics, yet significantly less of us die by gunshot. White people represent 65 percent of the population but just 25 percent of gun homicides. Black people represent 13 percent of the population yet a disturbing 55 percent of gun homicides.
Our gun obsession is simply fueled by the fact that the odds are in our favor. Black and brown kids in Chicago, Baltimore and Miami die by bullets at a much greater rate than our children in Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.
The color of our skin makes up most of the Republican Party, a party twice as likely to own guns at home than the Democratic Party.
People who look like me are ultimately responsible that a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34 percent of families with children younger than 12.
We make up 80 percent of Congress. The majority of white lawmakers refuse to make it legally harder to buy firearms, even AR-15 assault rifles that no respectable hunter would ever use to bag a 12-point buck.”
Source: America’s nostalgic gun culture defies logic and common sense – The Undefeated
He told the New Times that he had hopes of helping the Trump campaign avoid the mistakes that Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) made in his failed presidential run in 2012. Romney, said Jackson, waited until too late in his campaign to start outreach to nonwhite voters.
“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”
Thinking about it, I can understand an immigrant from Haiti like Rep. Mia Love of Utah becoming a GOP politician. Because she is an immigrant, she gains from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because we’re a nation of immigrants who sought a better life here” doctrine. I don’t find it strange that she follows through on that, first as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and later as a House rep from Utah. She doesn’t even need the Congressional Black Caucus because she rhetorically hates its very existence, despite joining it after joining Congress in 2015 (oops).
But what do African-Americans of antebellum slave descent gain from joining the GOP at this moment of political history? The prevailing consensus in the GOP is that our history is an inconvenience to be glossed over (even glamorized) and not “focused upon”; that our contributions are to be honored but not the trauma which produced those contributions; that our current plight, only 2 adult generations out from the end of Jim Crow, is a result of our “personal lifestyle choices” and not of systemic origin; that we should ditch the Mexicans in order to make more room for (everyone else but) us in the low-skill, high-labor jobs of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even service industries (which may or may even not be “real jobs worthy of a living minimum wage”); that we should ditch LGBT people and Planned Parenthood clinics in order to make our divorce rate drop, men return to their wives, children have more children, and women stop being so liberated as to make informed choices for their bodies; and other insults to our intelligence.
None of that is appealing to me. None of this makes sense. Maybe if I got into a car accident, got a bad case of amnesia, adopted a new name and identity as a Nigerian immigrant from Lagos, integrated myself into the Nigerian American community like Rachel Dolezal did with African-Americans in Spokane, became religious, set up a business and then decided to go into politics as a moderate Republican Congressperson from Atlanta, this message would be a bit more appealing for me to campaign on and live by. A bit.
Then I would be lauded by those who don’t know any better as another rare Black politician who “never slaved on the Democratic plantation” and joined the party of Lincoln “bcuz freedom.” And Fox News, Breitbart and the National Review would love me for every word I publicly utter.
But that ain’t happening in this timeline of reality. I’d have to shut part of my brain off to join the present GOP even if I were a descendant of antebellum slaves who was anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-welfare or at least just pro-free-market. I’d have to shut off part of my brain to vote for the real estate developer or anyone who endorses him. And most Black Republican descended from antebellum slaves, except for Rep. Mia Love, don’t even sound original to me in their adoption of GOP talking points, especially when those talking points emanate from some angle of gratuitous anti-Blackness and class bigotry. Maybe they’re honest, but not original or nuanced.
We’re looking for empowerment for our families’ and neighbors’ lives that we didn’t have when “things were simpler” and “Black businesses were better” under Jim Crow. The GOP’s austerity and anti-civil rights policies simply don’t provide empowerment for most African-Americans, and they seem to be harming the Euro-American community across the country, too (see Kansas under Brownback, Indiana under Pence, Wisconsin under Walker, Michigan under Snyder and North Carolina under McCrory). The latter may get tired of it soon enough, if they can jump off the nativist train first.
MLK’s description of the 1964 Republican campaign of Barry Goldwater applies just as much to this year and the subsequent landslide that is about to happen against the GOP nominee.
Again.
