Showing posts with label prejudice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prejudice. Show all posts

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Bigoted Fossil Judge Roy Moore Doubles Down on Gay Marriage

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Cartoon: J.D. Crowe on AL.com

Previous Related Posts:
Gay Marriage Comes to Alabama
"Godless Perverts" - Religious Right Upset by Supreme Court DOMA Ruling
Stacey "Don't Say Gay" Campfield Voted Out in Tennessee

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Judge Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of Alabama, has taken a stand on Gay Marriage in his state that is in opposition to the Federal Supreme Court, which is leaning towards striking down all state bans on same sex marriage in our country.

Moore is such an ancient bigoted fossil that he (A) Keeps doubling down on his untenable position and (B) doesn't realize what a fool he is making of himself. However, it's quite a satisfying spectacle to watch unfold. :)

Even in Alabama, Moore is considered an extremist. In 2003, he was removed from the same Chief Justice post for putting up a copy of the Ten Commandments in his office.

From CNN

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) -- Alabama's judicial ethics panel removed Chief Justice Roy Moore from office Thursday for defying a federal judge's order to move a Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building.
The nine-member Court of the Judiciary issued its unanimous decision after a one-day trial Wednesday.
The panel, which includes judges, lawyers and non-lawyers, could have reprimanded Moore, continued his suspension or cleared him.
The ethics panel said Moore put himself above the law by "willfully and publicly" flouting the order to remove the 2.6-ton monument from the state judicial building's rotunda in August.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled the granite carving was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. Moore refused to obey the order but was overruled by his eight colleagues on the state Supreme Court. (Full story)
On November 3, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Moore's appeal of Thompson's ruling. (Full story)
Moore "showed no signs of contrition for his actions," the Court of the Judiciary found.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party voters of Alabama returned him to his post:

From New York Times
He ran for governor twice, and failed, but in 2012, he shocked the political establishment with his re-election to the state’s high court, cashing in on name recognition and Alabama’s widespread Christian sentiment and skeptical stance toward federal government power.

“If you look at the professional class in Alabama, most of them would say they’d wish he’d just quit this foolishness and let Alabama move along with the rest of the country,” said Glen Browder, professor emeritus in American democracy at Jacksonville State University and a former Democratic congressman from Alabama. “But he’s popular in the church crowd.”

Chief Justice Moore’s office is decorated with a wooden plaque of the commandments, along with a portrait of George Washington and a photograph of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. (Chief Justice Moore said that he has never been a segregationist, but that has no qualms about making arguments in favor of states’ rights when they are warranted.)



Yesterday he pointed out that he has Gay Friends. Yes, he really said that, with no apparent irony. So yeah, if he has homosexual friends, then there's no problem that he tried to halt gay marriage in Alabama, right?



Via Talking Points Memo
"I've had many friends who are homosexual," Moore said during an interview with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics. "I've treated people just like other people. This is not about how I treat people, or how I go to a wedding or a marriage or anything. It's about the constitution of Alabama and the Constitution of the United States."

"You wouldn't be reluctant, personally, to go to a same-sex wedding, then?" Halperin prodded.

"I would not go to a same-sex wedding," Moore responded. "No."







Amazing showdown on CNN with Chris Cuomo today:




CNN Transcript 2-12-2015, Chris Cuomo and Judge Roy Moore
CUOMO: . . . I understand what you're trying to do here, you're trying to defeat the federal law. The question is, why?

MOORE: No, I'm not trying to defeat the federal law. There is no federal law and that's the point. No judge in the United States or federal district court has the right to invent the definition of marriage, which is not even contained in the United States Constitution. And that's the problem. We have people going in trying to mandate to the state of Alabama that the sanctity of marriage amendment in our Constitution is wrong, and that's simply not right to do.

CUOMO: Well -- well, it certainly is right. That's how this works, right, is that the federal law says that a state law is discriminatory and they change it. And certainly the distinction you're trying to draw with the district court, you don't have an independent case in front of you, your honor, about your own marriage law. This is about gay marriage in general and the equality in general and that's why the district court's able to say it. But again, you're right, we shouldn't get into the thickets.

I would suggest something else looking at your letter that you wrote to the governor of Alabama. For you, marriage is about the divine institution. It's as true as your words and as the pin on your lapel. You want to say that God says marriage is a certain thing and you don't want to hear anything else about what a definition of marriage could be. Is that a fair suggestion?

MOORE: No, that's not a fair suggestion. I go by the law. Of course I believe marriage was defined by God, but so does the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Murphy versus Ramsey, they said that marriage and family are the basis from the holy union of one man and one woman in the state of matrimony. That was clearly the United States Supreme Court opinion. It's been the court of opinions in state courts across this country. And especially in Alabama, we've recognized it as a divine institution in our law. Naturally it existed hundreds and even thousands of years before the United States even came into existence.

CUOMO: Right, but we are a nation of laws and not just God's law. And what your state did in 2006 was what many did, which was, you tried to define marriage to exclude. And what happened in U.S. v. Windsor, the case that is on everybody's lips now because it changed it, is that those laws that define marriage as only between a man and a woman are unfair and fail the test of equal protection. You know that. You know that when they meet this spring many people believe the Supreme Court will affirm this and say that state laws and constitutional provisions like your own are unfair. The question is, why won't you accept that definition of marriage?

MOORE: First, when the Supreme Court meets, I believe state's rights is going to be a big part of this. And I don't believe they have the right to push upon the state a definition which this state does not recognize, indeed, which the United States Constitution does not recognize. In fact, in Loving versus Virginia in 1967, when they declared that interracial marriages could not be prohibited, correctly so, they referenced marriage as the right of free men and women to enter into pursuit of happiness. They quoted basically out of the Declaration of Independence which said that God gave us these rights. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They're unalienable because they can't be taken away and they can't be mandated on the state in this instance.

CUOMO: Of course they can, though, your honor. That's what happens. It used to be legal to have slaves. Your state had a lot of laws on the books, like other states, where times changed and those laws had to change. And this is another example of that.

MOORE: You know slavery -- slavery was wrong and in 1857, when the Supreme Court of the United States declared in Dred Scott that black people could be property, one justice dissented. He said that when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws is abandoned, the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution. We're under a government of individual men who, for the time being, have the power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what they think it ought to mean. Those words by Benjamin Curtis are exactly what's going on in the United States Supreme Court and the federal courts of this state -- of this nation today.

CUOMO: And just as they were --

MOORE: And the United States Supreme Court hadn't ruled on this issue.

CUOMO: And they will. But they have ruled on what the substance of it is. And you've had a federal court tell you to marry people and you're not. And I would suggest that, based on what we're hearing right now, your refusal goes to what you believe marriage is about and not just to the law.

MOORE: No.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

. . . MOORE: Nobody's arguing about racial discrimination in this case. This is not about racial discrimination.

CUOMO: It's about discrimination.

MOORE: It's about sexual -- it's about sexual preference.

CUOMO: It's about discrimination.

MOORE: Being -- overcoming an institution which has existed in our state, in our United States, for centuries. And I think it's wrong.

CUOMO: But it's about discrimination. In 2006, you created a constitutional amendment that, by design, discriminated against gay people. And now you are being told by the federal law that is wrong.

MOORE: Again -- again -- again, that is a constitutional amendment to the Alabama constitution, and it's clearly within the bounds of state law and federal law. Again, there is nothing in the constitution about marriage. How can judges go in and define a word? They're doing exactly what they did in 1857 in Dred Scott.-

CUOMO: They just did it in U.S. v. Windsor. They just looked at the Defense of Marriage Act and said you cannot define marriage as just between a man and woman.

MOORE: That was between Congress. It did not affect the state, according to the ruling in Windsor.

CUOMO: But you can't say that the Court hasn't spoken about it. It was the exact same issue. It just wasn't a state law and that's why we're having the next case in June --

MOORE: I can say the Court -- I can say the Court spoke about it, because they said this does not apply to the state. It applies to the federal law passed by Congress.

CUOMO: That's right, because of the specific issue before them. And now they're meeting again in June. And if June comes and they hold the same way, then what will you do?

MOORE: Then I will do what the Court should -- or what the Court should have done under Dred Scott. If it's an unlawful mandate, you don't have to recognize it. You can recuse from the case.

CUOMO: So you still --

MOORE: You can dissent. You can dissent to the United States Supreme Court, just like you can dissent to anything else.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

. . . CUOMO: State by state, the rulings all going the same way. State by state, they're all going the same way

MOORE: You can't say the law -- you can't say what the law is with the United States Courts of Appeals differ on this very issue.

CUOMO: And you can't say that even if the Supreme Court rules against your personal position, you won't follow it because it offends your faith. You can't do that as Chief Justice.

MOORE: I said I would not -- I would not oppose the law except with an opinion or a dissent. That's what I said.

CUOMO; No, I asked you would you follow it.

MOORE: I did not say I would not recognize the law.

CUOMO: I asked you if you would follow it and you went into a word salad about whether I would follow it.

MOORE: And I asked you if you would follow Plessy versus Ferguson.

CUOMO: I am not the Chief Justice.

MOORE: Well, you can't answer the question either.

CUOMO: You answer it first. Will you follow it if they decide in June that gay marriage is equal protection.

MOORE: I will recognize -- I will recognize the United States Supreme Court opinion is binding over the state courts. Me, personally, I will make that decision when it comes, sir.



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Gay Marriage Comes to Alabama ~ Updated

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The Supreme Court allowed Gay Marriage to go forward in the state of Alabama this week, and the results were both exhilarating and at the same time a throwback to the equal-rights battles of the 60s. Some judges apparently forgot their learnin' and decided to forget that Federal Law trumps State Law.

Alabama Chief Justice, Roy Moore, tried to stop the whole process last week when he ordered Judges not to obey.

From Alabama.com
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore late Sunday ordered all probate judges and employees in Alabama to follow existing state law and not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples or recognize same-sex marriages.
. . . Moore wrote that if any probate judge defies the order, Governor Robert Bentley would have the responsibility of ensuring that state law is "faithfully executed."
He has also said that the judges are not bound by the orders issued in that case, Searcy v. Strange. Instead, he said, probate judges fall under the direct supervision and authority of the chief justice.

Well, let's just say he was wrong, and most Judges chose not to follow the order. Some stalled and hid in their offices or decided not to perform any marriages at all, like the Probate Judge of Mobile. Some just delayed a few hours, probably hoping the TV cameras would go away, or maybe to talk down some of the employees screaming that it was against their religion, etc.

But in most places on Monday morning, February 9, 2015, same-sex weddings began to occur all over the state of Alabama - a historic sight.

UPDATE: "Redneck Reporter" Jeremy Todd Addaway posted a hilarious spoof of the fear-mongering going on in Alabama (and other states) over Gay Marriage and how it effects everyone else.

“I read on the news today some information, that homosexuals will be getting married in Alabama today, so I wanted to give you a live report from Blount County,” he began.

. . . “This pile of brush is still here, and there are no homosexuals layin’ on top of it, doin’ homosexual things,” Addaway said.

“None in the shed either, but we need to check into this further,” he continued, delving ever deeper into his backyard.

“We’re back here by a pile of junk — and it’s still here — and there’s no homosexuals doin’ homosexual things here either, so it looks like we’re pretty safe here in Blount County, don’t think we’re gonna be subject to plagues of homosexuals fallin’ from the sky.”










And the Supreme Court gave a strong signal that Alabama is a bellwether state for the rest of the country, as well as Federal Law:






























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Saturday, June 28, 2014

Ann Coulter Hates Soccer and the Metric System because "Foreign"

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Previous Related Posts:
Twitter Punks Ann Coulter After She Mocks Michelle Obama
Ann Coulter Rants that Immigrants Will Finish GOP
Ann Coulter: Latinos are Lazy Underclass
Ann Coulter Defends "Retard" Slur

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From a Column entitled: AMERICA'S FAVORITE NATIONAL PASTIME: HATING SOCCER
June 25, 2014
Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay.

(1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.

 In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms."

 Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep.

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(2) Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.

. . . (6) I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating.

I note that we don't have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.

(7) It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.

(8) Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine.

. . . If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you:

No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.

More at Link, Unfortunately

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Excuse me, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
~ Chris Preovolos, SFGate

. . . according to Ann Coulter the only object of sports is to cause either great physical or psychological harm to those who participate. Ann Coulter has a real, disturbing obsession with wanting people to get hurt in sports. Who hurt you, Ann Coulter? Who hurt you?
. . . The metric system is more rational because it’s based on decimals. Everything happens in powers of 10. It’s a lot easier to know that there’s 1000 meters in 1 kilometer versus 5,280 feet in a mile. This is not arguable. By the way, what does Ann Coulter’s fear of logical measurements have to do with soccer again?
~ Matt Yoder on Awful Announcing

It has been fun Ann, but it’s time to give it a rest. The only thing decaying is you.
~ Ben Cohen on Daily Banter

(Trumpets blare ... fade away into sound of one single, broken kazoo).
In the midst of the world's World Cup joy, the conservative ripped the sport on her website, writing "any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay."
She probably meant tooth decay, from increased nacho-eating in all those sports bars.
~ Tony Hicks, Contra Costa Times

Well, so much for the idea that Americans don't care about soccer.
The U.S. National team made it out of the so-called "group of death" Thursday to advance to the knockout round of competition at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
Regardless of how much further the Stars and Stripes advance in the biggest sporting event on the planet, they already have revealed something that even casual observers can see.
Soccer is now woven inextricably into the fabric of American life.
Television viewership numbers continue to set new highs with each U.S. game.
~ Ed Foster Simeon, President/CEO at U.S. Soccer Foundation

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Wednesday, December 4, 2013

GOP Says Rosa Parks Ended Racism - Oh Wait

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The Republican National Committee (RNC) led by the intrepid Reince Priebus, got into a bit of trouble with the wording of a tweet last week on the 58th Anniversary of civil rights legend Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, AL. They declared she had "ended racism" on that day, but many on Twitter begged to differ especially because of all the GOP Confederate Flag-waving lately. The tweet set off what NPR called a "snark avalanche."

They tried to take it back in another tweet, but it was too late! :)






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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Don Lemon Logic ~ Shoe Shines, Litterbugs and Belts

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Previous Post:
CNN's Don Lemon Blames the Black Community for Trayvon Martin Racism

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CNN Transcripts Saturday July 27, 2013
DON LEMON: Michael Skolnik, I talked in that segment about the so-called thug culture that the hip-hop and rap community promotes, and you are a -- you are a proponent for hip-hop and rap. You don't believe that we should stop saying the n-word.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GLOBALGRIND.COM: Don, I think your comments sounded like a conservative preacher on a Sunday and certainly Bill O'Reilly should welcome you on his show. I'm disappointed in you --

LEMON: Yes, but -- go ahead, I'll let you finish.

SKOLNIK: Here's the thing. You are talking about sagging pants. I've heard the rap for years. Let's not talk about sagging pants and let us talk about why we incarcerate 2.2 million people in this country and why young kids look up to guys who come out of jail. We waged a war against black and brown people 40 years ago, the war on drugs and it failed miserably and now we are reaping the repercussions.

LEMON: But Michael, -- Michael --

SKOLNIK: Yes.

LEMON: Not every black kid is in jail and there are rules and people should know where that style comes from whether it's a black kid or a white kid whether it's Justin Bieber or any -- that is glorifying prison culture. Who wants to see someone's butt crack?

SKOLNIK: No. The community has been destroyed. Black men went to jail as diseased drug addicts and they came out as criminals because they taught them criminal behavior in prison. We destroyed the black community.

LEMON: Then why do you have to glorify that through rap and hip hop culture?

SKOLNIK: It's not glorifying it, it's a reflection of our society. Our society incarcerates 2.2 million people more than anyone else in the world. It's a reflection, it's a mirror. Don't break the mirror. Look at yourself.

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I have likened privilege to an intoxicant, one that will have you tripping so hard that you will think you don’t have it. Privilege, I have said, is one “helluva” drug. Inhale enough and you will start believing that you are among the oppressed. At its essence, however, privilege is simply the liberty not to know. I watched in horror this week as a colleague suffered a “contact high”.
A swift kick to the backside, or “tough love” as CNN anchor Don Lemon calls it, will not tear down the strictures of race, class and gender in this country. To say so gives rise to the aspersion that distressed communities are simply the manifestation of a collective moral failing.
. . . Despite his self-professed humble upbringing, Lemon betrayed a nascent understanding of the societal and political pathologies that left generations of devastation in their wake.
~ Goldie Taylor on The Grio

Whether you know it or not Don, when you jump on O’Reilly’s racist bandwagon, you come across as a clueless sock puppet…a sell-out, who has lost touch not only with the black community, but with your own soul, as well.
When you raised those five points you broad-brushed the entirety of my community just like O’Reilly does with his “fire-ready-aim” approach to ranting about how terrible and deserving of scorn black people are.
~ Kwik on Daily Kos

Don Lemon is a friend of mine, but on then score I think that Mr. Lemon has missed the boat. The reality is we can’t blame the victims. We can’t blame people who are victimized by a vicious attitude that profiles them.
Bill O’Reilly has advanced no profound commitment to or sympathy for African-American people. He’s constantly lecturing us from his bastardized podium where he condescendingly throws out nuggets of wisdom to us without understanding the existential and moral crisis that attend the kind of victimization of black people.
Are we going to say white culture is pathologized because it refuses to take care of its children? Its kids are going to hell in a hand basket because they are on meth and they don’t care about the fundamental structure of the family?
We can indict the white family. There’s a lot of negativity, there’s a lot of dismissiveness, there’s a lot of crass materialism that refuses to care for the other.
~ Michael Eric Dyson on MSNBC's Martin Bashir











































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Sunday, July 28, 2013

CNN's Don Lemon Blames Black Community for Trayvon Martin Incident



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DON LEMON, HOST: We're going to take a break from the headlines to talk about something I've had on my mind for quite some time now. So much so that I felt compelled to bring back our segment where we hold politicians, leaders, and pundits accountable for what comes out of their mouths. It's time now, again, for “No Talking Points."

The Trayvon Martin murder case got just about everybody talking about race, and not just specifically how it related to the case. It got some, many on the political right, wondering why the so-called liberal media wasn't talking about other problems in the black community.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
JUDITH MILLER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: Let's talk about race. Let's talk about black-on-black violence.

DAVID WEBB, TALK RADIO HOST: The outrage that I have is in the lack of really the national attention to what is an epidemic of crime in the black community committed largely by blacks.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)

LEMON: Why aren't we talking about it? Good question. Actually, that's not a good question. We talked about it many times on this show and on CNN. It's actually a good deflection as I've said a number of times to a number of guests here on CNN and also on the radio.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEMON: David, do not that false equivalent. That is not…

WEBB: No, I'm not trying to equivocate

LEMON: But, listen, crime happens all the time and because a crime happens, it does not mean that you should shift the focus from what happened here. Let's stick to this particular point so continue and let's talk about this case.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So, that's the reason I didn't want to discuss at length crime in the African-American community or how to fix other ills that seem to be plaguing the community in general. But now that the jury has reached its verdict, one that everyone must accept, it's time now for some tough love on the subject. Someone on another network got the chance to go first because I couldn't go during the week. I'm only here on the weekend, so listen to this.



(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS: The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: He's got a point. In fact, he's got more than a point. Bill?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
O’REILLY: Raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that, again, it is a personal decision.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: He is right about that, too. But in my estimation, he doesn't go far enough. Because black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing. Here's number five, and if this doesn't apply to you, if you're not doing this, then it doesn't apply to you, I'm not talking to you. Here's number five. Pull up your pants. Some people, a lot of them black, gave me flak for saying that recently on the “Wendy Williams Show."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEMON: If you're sagging, it means I think your self-esteem is sagging and who you are as a person it's sagging. Young people need to be taught respect and there are rules.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Sagging pants, whether it's Justin Bieber or no-name Derek around the way, walking around with your ass and your underwear showing is not okay. In fact, it comes from prison when they take away belts from the prisoners so that they can't make a weapon. And then it evolved into which role a prisoner would have during male-on-male prison sex. The one with the really low pants is the submissive one. You get my point?

Number four now is the N-word.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
RAPPER JAY Z: For our generation, what we did was we took the word and we took the power out of that word.

ACTOR/COMEDIAN CHRIS ROCK: We took this word, and we made it into poetry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)


 LEMON: I understand poetic license, but consider this: I hosted a special on the N-word, suggesting that black people stop using it and that entertainers stop deluding yourselves or themselves and others that you're somehow taking the word back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEMON: By promoting the use of that word when it's not germane to the conversation, have you ever considered that you may be just perpetuating the stereotype the massa intended acting like a nigger?
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: A lot of African-Americans took offense to that, too. And I wondered if I gave the right advice, I really did. But confirmation came the very next day on my way home when I exited the subway on 125th Street in Harlem. This little kid in a school uniform, no older than 7 years old, he was crying his eyes out as he walked down the sidewalk with his mother. I'm going to be honest here, she turned to him and she said, “I'm sick of you. You act like an old ass man. Stop all that crying, nigger.” Is that taking the word back? Think about that.

Now number three: respect where you live. Start small by not dropping trash, littering in your own communities. I've lived in several predominantly white neighborhoods in my life. I rarely, if ever, witnessed people littering. I live in Harlem now, it's an historically black neighborhood. Every single day I see adults and children dropping their trash on the ground when a garbage can is just feet away. Just being honest here.

Number two: finish school. You want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they're acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English. A high school dropout makes on average $19,000 a year. A high school graduate makes $28,000 a year. A college graduate makes $51,000 a year. Over the course of a career, a college grad will make nearly $1 million more than a high school graduate. That's a lot of money.

And number one, and probably the most important: just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should. Especially without planning for one or getting married first. More than 72 percent pf children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison and the cycle continues.

So, please, black folks, as I said if this doesn't apply to you, I'm not talking to you. Pay attention to and think about what has been presented in recent history as acceptable behavior. Pay close attention to the hip-hop and rap culture that many of you embrace, a culture that glorifies everything I just mentioned, thug and reprehensible behavior. A culture that is making a lot of people rich, just not you. And it's not going to. That said, though, the political right is not off the hook.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KIRSTEN POWERS, FOX NEWS: If conservatives are so concerned about black-on-black crime, it's a little concerning the only time I hear them talking about it is when they want to stick it to the black community.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: And that's today's "No Talking Points."













































































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Saturday, July 20, 2013

Obama Speech Brings Out Haters, Concern Trolls and Emotopians


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Previous Post:
The President's Amazing Impromptu Speech on Trayvon Martin




The Far Right Stampede!!!

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Now the President's saying Trayvon could've been me 35 years ago. This is a particularly helpful comment. Is that the president admitting that I guess because what, he was part of the Choom Gang and he smoked pot and he did a little blow — I'm not sure how to interpret because we know that Trayvon had been smoking pot that night.
~ Sean Hannity of Fox News
































Salon - It's Been Good to Know Ya


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From Salon.com

Obama’s safe, overrated and airy speech
The president's remarks gave us context to the episode, but not a single opinion on the issues that brought us here

By Rich Benjamin

When people hold their breadth for your imminent words, isn’t it exasperating when you open your mouth, but don’t say much?
Finally the president has spoken about George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Even as the country waited for his singular response – the nation’s leader and a law professor who once looked like Trayvon Martin – the president danced around the issues. And what a dramatic anti-climax, listening to the president refuse to say anything insightful or profound about the acquittal. In signature professorial style, the president gave us the “context” to the episode and to black people’s “pain.” But he didn’t offer a meaningful opinion on the episode’s hot molten core: racial profiling, vigilantism, and “Stand Your Ground” laws.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered trenchant thoughts on the acquittal, demanding action. Before an audience of supporters, Holder recently called for a full investigation of Martin’s death after Zimmerman’s acquittal. Holder vowed that the Justice Department will act “in a manner that is consistent with the facts and the law. We will not be afraid.”
“We must stand our ground,” he told supporters.

Some of us have an Inner Child. Others have an Inner Nigger. Is Holder the president’s conscience? Or his Inner Nigger?
Is Holder the president’s aggressive internal mind and voice — willing to speak truth to power, but unbothered with appearing like an angry black man?











































An Embarrassment of Concern Trolls

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