Brown Man Thinking Hard

Elizabeth And Hazel Story Humanizes Little Rock Nine Icon

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Elizabeth And Hazel Story Humanizes Little Rock Nine Icon | Resurgence | Big Think

“Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!” The black and white picture from the fifties of a teenaged white girl yelling racial epithets at a young black coed who marches through an angry white mob to desegregate a Deep South high school in 1957 is world famous.

"I walked South on Park Street toward 14th Street until I got in front of the school. I walked across the street and started to go up on the sidewalk. About 12 members of the National Guard stood in front of the school along the sidewalk on the West side of Park Street. As I stepped from the street to go toward the sidewalk the National Guardsmen stood in front of me and would not let me pass them.

They held their rifles in front of them but did not point them at me. I tried once to walk around them and as I did they moved to the side in front of me and would not let me pass. They did not say anything to me and I did not say anything. I then walked back across Park Street to the East side and walked South again to the corner of 16th and Park Streets where I sat down on a bench.

I want to say there were white people all along the East side of Park Street as I walked along, and they moved along with me as I walked. Some of them followed me closely also.”

Statement by Elizabeth Eckford to FBI Special Agents Gilbert Strickland and Robert Hickam September 4, 1957

Not much was known about Elizabeth Eckford, a member of the Little Rock Nine, as the pioneering African American students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas came to be known. Even less was known about Hazel Bryan, the young white girl who personified to the rest of the world all that was wrong with the South. Elizabeth And Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick attempts to fill in the blanks and tell us what has happened to these two women through the years.

The Help Elbows Accepted Historical Narrative Of The South Aside

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:37:00 +0000

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

The Help Elbows Accepted Historical Narrative Of The South Aside

For some strange reason, I ended up watching the new movie The Help yesterday, less than twenty four hours after viewing Driving Miss Daisy for the first time. The most enduring conclusion I could draw from the whole experience? General Sherman should have burned every god damned thing in the entire Confederacy down to the ground during the Civil War.

In my mind, Viola Davis had already earned the Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of maid Aibileen Clark as soon as I saw the look in her eyes, a soul numbed stare that America had invested over three hundred years of intense and unceasingly relentless physical and psychological terror to produce. The combination of outstanding cinematography and astonishingly precise dialogue in both films had me, a middle aged African American man who has lived in the South his whole life, short of breath and anxious, even though I knew it was all make believe. The brown skinned actors on the screen who so artfully brought these two scripts to life were not just actors, but people who looked and acted just like members of my own extended family. They are my great uncles and aunts, they are my grandparents, they are stand-ins for the stars of my family’s own sagas from this same era. Much of this family lore ends benignly, just like these two movies did, which has always led me to wonder about the unspoken stories with much, much worse endings.

President Obama Chumps Donald Trump and the Birthers

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:24:00 +0000

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

President Obama Chumps Donald Trump and the Birthers

Donald Trump has been running around the countryside, playing the CEO of Village Idiot, Inc. to the hilt these last few weeks, and our lazy, unprincipled national media corps has hung right with him, broadcasting every inane, bombastic utterance that explodes from his mouth. I figured President Obama was going to release his birth certificate at some point, although, for my money, I would have waited a little longer, just to keep Karl Rove from sleeping at night as this cancerous obsession with the legitimacy of our President’s citizenship ate away at any chances the GOP had to regain the White House.

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Collective Bargaining Helped Level Playing Field For Black Workers

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:58:00 +0000

I got this email from the guys at Color of Change a couple days ago - couldn't have said what they'vee written here better myself:

There was once a time in this country when Black folks would work 12-hour days for less money than their White co-workers who worked only eight. The key to leveling the playing field for Black workers was collective bargaining — and now Republicans around the country are attacking this basic right.

The right of workers to negotiate as a group for better wages, benefits and working conditions has been important for everyone, but it's been especially meaningful for Black Americans. Before we could collectively bargain, we had little control over our working conditions and no protection from racial discrimination in the workplace.

That's why it's critical that we stand with the workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, and everywhere else collective bargaining is coming under attack. Please join us in sending a message of support to all those fighting this battle on the front lines. It takes only a moment:

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/workers

In Memphis in 1968, Black sanitation workers worked in dangerous, inhumane conditions under abusive White supervisors for little pay. After two workers were crushed to death by a malfunctioning city garbage truck, the city's Black sanitation workers sought to unionize. They demanded better wages, safer working conditions, and the right to collectively bargain for these things. They took to the streets of Memphis bearing signs that read, "I am a man." During the strike, police attacked and jailed Black workers for peaceful protest. Months later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that "all labor has dignity," joined these workers on the front lines. He was assassinated while leading the effort to win collective bargaining rights for these workers.¹

Collective bargaining has helped Black workers vulnerable to workplace discrimination win needed on-the-job protections. “Black workers have an interest in unions as all workers do, because they give them power in the labor market to improve working conditions, and allow them due process and fairness on the job,” says labor scholar Stephen Pitts. “Any sort of institution that allows due process procedures and reduces arbitrary behavior in decision making is positive for black folks.”²

More than just protection from discrimination, collective bargaining has won Black workers fairness in pay and advancement, access to health insurance and retirement savings, and basic worker safety protections.³ This is especially true for Black public-sector workers. Twenty-five percent of all Black college graduates work in the public sector, and government work is second only to health and education services in concentration of Black workers.⁴ As scholar Michael Honey points out, "The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment.⁵

Now, Republicans in state legislatures around the country are attacking public employees' collective bargaining rights. The battle began in Wisconsin, when Republican Governor Scott Walker offered a bill that would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. In response, thousands of regular people filled the state capitol in protest — with many camping out there for days or even weeks. To stop the bill and force Republicans to negotiate, 14 Democratic state senators left Wisconsin, (preventing Republicans from voting on the bill). Despite the overwhelming public opposition to the bill, Republicans were eventually able to pass the law using procedural tricks late last week.⁶ But the protesters in Wisconsin drew the world's attention to this fight, and exposed the attack on collective bargaining rights as hugely unpopular and politically motivated. And right now they're working to hold Republicans accountable in powerful ways.

Wisconsin is one of many states where collective bargaining is under attack. Republicans in Ohio just passed a law similar to Wisconsin's, and states from Indiana to New jersey are prepared to follow suit.

Republicans say that their effort to roll back collective bargaining rights is necessary to curb spending in times of economic hardship, but that just doesn't square with the facts. In no state are public employees' salaries or pension benefits a major cause of their current financial problems.⁷ The Republican efforts are part of a strategy to attack public employees' unions, which overwhelmingly give money to Democratic interests. Without the strength of the unions, many expect that President Obama and other Democrats will have a tougher time raising funds for the 2012 election.⁸

DePaul University law professor Terry Smith says that, "Dismantling bargaining rights will disproportionately affect African Americans."⁹ This right has played a vitally important role in Black Americans' move into the middle class. For Republicans, the economic well-being of Black folks (and all workers) is only collateral damage in a political battle. It's shameful.

That's why it's important that we stand with the brave workers around the country fighting to preserve the right to collectively bargain in their states. They're on the front lines, and your message of support will help them keep going even as circumstances get tougher. Please join us in telling these workers that you stand with them, and then ask your friends and family to do the same.

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/workers

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Matt, Natasha and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
March 15th, 2011

Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU — your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don’t share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way. You can contribute here:

http://act.colorofchange.org/go/205?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=6

References:

1. “How Unions Helped Bring Economic Justice to Black Workers," AlterNet, 2-25-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/785?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=8

2. See Reference 1

3. "Gutting Unions Hurts the Black Middle Class,” The Root, 3-11-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/779?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=10

4. “Black Workers Central to National Union Battle,” ColorLines, 3-1-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/780?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=12

5. “It’s 1968 All Over Again and King’s Fight for Unions Is Still Essential,”
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/781?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=14

6. “Wisconsin Union Law to Take Effect on March 26,” Wall Street Journal, 3-14-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/782?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=16

7.“Unions aren’t to blame for Wisconsin’s budget,” The Washington Post, 2-18-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/783?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=18

8. “WI Senate GOP Leader Admits On-Air That His Goal Is To Defund Labor Unions, Hurt Obama’s Reelection Chances,” Think Progress, 3-9-2011
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/784?akid=1932.1020101.-S56jl&t=20

Having Andrew Breitbart On ABC Is Like Having A Child Molester In A Daycare

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:40:00 +0000

The Brown Man had a field day on Twitter yesterday with this Andrew Breitbart & ABC News thing:

TWEETS

With Andrew Breitbart on the payroll, I guess Disney now sells everything from cotton candy fantasy to race-based hate.

Andrew Morse of ABC, I know you don't want to hire too many minorities, but is Breitbart THE ONLY white man with a blog who can do this?

ABC's execs are so in love with Andrew "Blame-A-Black-Today" Breitbart they will let him send smoke signals from an undisclosed location.

I mean, what 500K a year ABC exec had the bright idea to say okay to Andrew "A Framed Negro Is A Good Negro" Breitbart?

ABC's hiring of Andrew Breitbart to comment of the election is like hiring Bernie Madoff to "do a little bookkeeping"

So long as ABC cuts Andrew Breitbart a check George Stephanopoulos can go fuck a duck - there is no open season on black women in MY America.

Andrew Morse @ABC, here's a thought - just got to Technorati, click on "Political Blogs", and pick one of the top 100 to replace Breitbart.

Andrew Breitbart shows over and over that his sole purpose in life is to fight for the right to distort the truth.

But yapping is just yapping unless you take some kind action. From my pals over at Color Of Change:

Below is the message we'll send to David Westin, President of ABC News; Anne Sweeney, President Disney/ABC Television Group; and Robert Iger, President/CEO of the Walt Disney Company. You can add your own personal comments in the box to the left.

Dear Mr. Westin, Ms. Sweeney, and Mr. Iger,

I find it appalling that ABC News would give Andrew Breitbart a platform on election night, given his history as a serial race-baiter who has shown no regard for the truth. Only months ago Mr. Breitbart was publicly disgraced for smearing Shirley Sherrod of the USDA, using selectively edited video and lies that he repeatedly uttered. After Breitbart was exposed, he refused to apologize, even as multiple news outlets had to themselves issue retractions and apologies.

I would expect ABC News and The Walt Disney Company to have some basic standard of integrity for those to whom it extends its media platform. Your present decision indicates otherwise and comes across as a slap in the face to Shirley Sherrod, to Black Americans, and to decent people of every background who believe in the basic value of truth-telling.

Andrew Breitbart has repeatedly shown he has no regard for the truth. By inviting him to participate in your Election Day programming, you are inviting your credibility to be called into question, while providing undeserved legitimacy to Andrew Breitbart.

I respectfully request that you rescind your offer inviting Andrew Breitbart to participate in your Election Day programming.

Sincerely,

[Your Name Here]

Reading my blog is great, but you need to sign up with Color Of Change, or send this letter to their email addresses or Twitter accounts, or call their front desk on Monday like your life depends on it.

DO IT TODAY! AND TOMORROW!

Do you get it, ABC? No Breitbart on ANYTHING, even if he's giving it away for free - not even if he shows up with an NAACP membership card.

My related story over at Big Think:

ABC Hires Hate Hustler Andrew Breitbart As Election Analyst

Juan Williams Takes The Buckwheat Seat At FOX

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

Juan Williams Takes The Buckwheat Seat At FOX

Maybe it was a good thing that I was headed out of town the day Juan Williams got whacked by the NPR head honchos. Because it probably wouldn’t have taken more than two or three hours before I would have had to write "take your handkerchief head wearing ass somewhere and sit the hell down."

By the time I got back from the great state of Kentucky earlier this week, where people in wheelchairs and on walkers come a dime a dozen and sorely neglected teeth are de rigueur, but the populace still hates the thought of getting any help from the federal government even though government money is the only thing propping their state up these days, all I could do was watch as Magic Bishop Don Juan Williams took his pimp game to FOX News for a full-time gig.

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You can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers, and, best of all, respond in kind. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or throw your own question or idea into the ring.

If Standing Up For Muslims Is Wrong, I Don't Want To Be Right

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:49:00 +0000

Somebody is going to be killed.

This somebody, named Ahmed H. Sharif, was almost killed by a man who asked "are you a Muslim?"

The ugliest thing about this whole incident, the thing that makes me understand even more why Emmett Till's mother wanted the world to see how her son had been savaged, is how little attention it is getting from the press, as if we are characters in a Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in that famous scene I have never liked, debating whether or not there is a "dead Muslim storage" sign on the lawn instead of the phrase "dead nigger storage" that was used in the movie.

Is the entire country just looking the other way?

I rummaged through the front pages and the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The L.A. Times, and found nothing, nothing at all, not a damn word on Ahmed H. Sharif and this human travesty, just thousands of words speculating on the outcome of the fall elections, as if knowing their outcome two months early really matters.

My man over at Alias Bruce put it about as good as it could be said:

72% of Americans don't think it's appropriate to build an Islamic Center and mosque
two blocks from Ground Zero, a CBS poll shows.

This is horrifying, and it naturally leads to such questions as, "Should Americans be allowed to reproduce without international supervision?"

The stabbing of a Muslim cabbie, allegedly by a white man who asked the man's religion before attacking him, underlines the atrocity. And understand me: this is not just about addle-brained white Americans. As an African American, I have heard downright wicked remarks about Muslims out of the mouths of black people, including one of my own late relatives.

alias Bruce

Michael Enright

I don't know if the perpetrator's background didn't fit into the narrative the media needs to sell, because he wasn't wearing Tea Party underwear or wasn't a member of a white supremacy group, or because that tuft of blond hair reminded many of our fair haired political pundits and social commentators of their own drunken frat boy days. Whether he had liberal leanings or associations, is a member of the Green Party, or an avowed atheist, none of which would matter, even if they were true, this is still wrong.

Killing a man who is driving a fucking taxi cab for being a Muslim, as much as it reflects the perverted reality of America's long history of racial atrocities against minority groups, is not what America and Americans need to stoop to accepting, not after the long way we have come these last fifty years.

Mr. Enright, consider THIS a checkpoint - a checkpoint for the kind of backwards assed thinking that has got your ass in handcuffs right now.

As for the media, what will it take to get their heads out of their asses and write about shit that matters? Do two Muslims have to be attacked at the same time? Three? Four?

Should the next victim be a pregnant Muslim woman?

A Muslim who is an Iraqi war veteran, who came back home alive only to die at the hands of a fellow citizen?

Or maybe I haven't hit upon the narrative that your editors have posted on their wall, the one determines how much blood and gore a story about minorities has to have to equal a story on Lindsay Lohan's latest whereabouts.

All I can say is, if standing up for Muslims, especially Muslims who are here in America, is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

The Miseducation Of Maureen Dowd

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:42:00 +0000

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

The Miseducation Of Maureen Dowd

Most white women in America work their asses off. I live smack dab in the middle of stay at home mommy land, complete with the high priced tennis outfits and Mercedes station wagons, but I know this is not reality for the vast majority of white women in America. Most of them work just as hard as their African American counterparts, and in many respects, deal with the exact same issues, concerns and problems.

What amazes me, whenever I read anything by Maureen Dowd, is how the stuff she ultimately gets printed at the New York Times, like last week’s Feliz Cumpleaños, and Adiós even passes editorial muster. It is as if she and her ilk are the new millennium’s equivalent of the 1940’s B-girls, paid to lure readers in off the streets or the web with shiny, showy prose that illuminates nothing so much as the lack of substance in their columns. Dowd has become nothing more than a classic guttersnipe, an op-ed columnist who writes pieces more suited to a Rupert Murdoch tabloid style paper than the New York Times. But the paper keeps paying her to churn out this kind of mindless drivel, as if she is their resident Elizabeth Hasselbeck, minus the perkiness and blonde hair.

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BigThink.com is a global forum connecting people and ideas.

You can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers, and, best of all, respond in kind. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or throw your own question or idea into the ring.

For Colored Bloggers Who Blame Obama When The Rainbow Is Not Enuf

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Some of my black blogging brethren have gotten so twisted up in knots about this Shirley Sherrod fiasco THAT SHE OBVIOUSLY BROUGHT ABOUT HERSELF that I believe the logic section of their brains have been deprived of oxygen.

Because in spite of the incontrovertible facts that surround the origin of this mess, which was birthed from the same template of social domination racially obsessed white men have been using since our black asses were dragged off of those slave ships, this has morphed into GOP Jedi Mind Trick #17,642, wherein the attacker and his cohorts succeed in getting the public to indict a third party for failing to properly address a controversy they have manufactured all by themselves in their dank right wing lairs.

However you feel about the president's response, or lack thereof, IS relevant, but it is not the main event. Not even close. Blaming Obama for this mess, or the NAACP for this mess, is like blaming Martin Luther King Jr. for getting in the way of that bullet that James Earl Ray’s rifle fired.

It is like blaming the slaves for not coming to their masters aid and helping them to win the Civil War.

It is like blaming the African captives who died on those slave ships - the ones that brought many of our ancestors here - for depriving the slave traders of their rightful profits.

To the silly rabbits out there, and you know who you are, TRICKS ARE FOR KIDS.

Shirley Sherrod has a platform this week that it looks like she is trying to take advantage of to advance OUR cause, but many of you are already afraid that she will talk too much.

That she will lose her moral authority, or her claim to victimhood, or some other such nonsense, because she is not willing to comport herself as if she is bucking for a promotion for the executive suite at the tight ass corporation YOU work for, instead of being what she is – a sixty something year old black woman who was probably only a couple of years away from retirement in her old job, a level headed woman of at least average intelligence who is availing herself of the chance to tell it like it is, unfiltered, unbought and unbossed.

Two days of one lone voice in the wilderness is too much?

Are you so ready to see Mr. Charlie back in charge, because that looks normal, because that feels RIGHT, that you are willing to trade Mrs. Sherrod's hearfelt, unpolished candor for the very same vitriol you got last week and the week before that from a TV station that should lose its FCC license, or at the very least, the ability to call itself a news channel?

Some of you are on my blogroll.

Some of you are my friends - at least the internet version of friends.

What I want to remind all of you of is something many of us used to say back in grade school, when we first began to learn about slavery, or watched Roots, or got to hold real live slave shackles in our hands.

“I couldn’t have been a slave” was a favorite. “I woulda had to kill me some white folks” was another. “You wouldn’ta caught me picking no damn cotton” was another.

But the ugly truth is, practically all of us with slave ancestry are descended from people who didn’t kill anybody. Dead black people don’t propagate, an equation white slave owners bent on quelling the hot blood of insurrectionists knew all too well.

And yet here we are, fighting against the exact same forces of evil, in a venue where we run no risk of being maimed or mauled or killed for taking it to our enemy electronically with each and every keystroke, and all I see is the same type of “woulda coulda shoulda” folks doing the same thing now that they would have done in the 1800’s – doing the master’s dirty work for him.

One other sentiment I started to see is the old “we don’t need to get these white folks riled up” meme.

Why not?

Even the slaves, in as inhuman a position of deference as they were, understood that there was only so far their masters were willing to go. That they were too valuable to lose in large masses, just like our black asses are too valuable to America today to have all 44 million of us vamoose into thin air.

Very few men, even race crazed white men and the puppets on their payrolls, are willing to burn down their own house while they are in it.

It doesn’t take much to put puppets like the FOX News goon squad and the Andrew Breitbart’s and Michelle Malkin’s and all the rest of the right wing tools who are willing to prostitute themselves unconditionally to satisfy the crazy race fetishes of very, very rich men on their heels. We have put them on their heels before, and we can do it again.

All I will say is, the last time we decided to make Mr. Charlie and HIS rich masters take two steps back, and grudgingly recognize in us African Americans another half-measure of humanity, we didn’t waste any time trying to convince each other that Martin Luther King was guilty for stepping in front of that bullet on purpose in 1968.

We kept our eyes squarely locked on our enemy, met him toe to toe, and let the unedited tapes of our enemy’s unchecked depravity speak the truth to the world.

Andrew Breitbart Should Fall On His Sword Before Sundown

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:16:00 +0000

I don't mean that this lowlife should fall on his sword in the way that the Japanese commit seppuku when they have brought dishonor to a noble cause, because there is absolutely nothing noble about the Tea Party or the more deranged elements of the conservative movement.

I mean that he should fall on his sword because any other way of seeing his rancid guts spill out would mean jail time for someone, since this isn't the 1960's anymore, and Breitbart isn't a black man fighting for justice, like Hosie Miller, Shirley Sherrod's father, who was shot in the back by a white farmer, but 2010, where Breitbart is a white man fighting for the right to oppress the truth about who he and those like really are at every turn.

Putting Breitbart on TV last night for his side of the story in this god awful mess that swirls around Mrs. Sherrod's inspirational speech at a NAACP affair that happened over 20 years ago as if he is a legitimate voice is like interviewing James Earl Ray after he was convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr. and refusing to hammer him with questions about why he pulled the trigger.

The question that Mrs. Sherrod asked last night when she appeared on CNN - "why? Why are they doing this?" - is the same question African Americans have been asking since the beginning of our days on this continent.

I could go on and on with this line of reasoning, but if you are reading this, you have a pretty good idea of where I am headed, and if you don't, you can click this link and "marinate on THIS for a minute", as my more ghetto slang inclined buddies would say, while I get back to the metaphorical flaying of some more of the flesh from our wannabe gangsta white supremacist channeling Mr. Breitbart's ass.

Extermination of the Tea Party is at the top of my Christmas list, but you already know that if you read this blog regularly. If I am lucky, when I finish writing this, I will have one of those nice, long, delicious dreams in which I am a giant wearing an exterminator's uniform, with an enormous can of poison spray that affects the central nervous system of those who insist on elevating human excrement like Breitbart and Glen Beck and even that fake apologizer Bill O'Reilly and the rest of their gang who can't hate straight the way commercial bug spray zaps those nasty critters that occasionally infest your house.

Although, being a realist, I am more inclined to believe what I can see - that if you bundled all of the white hate hustlers like Breitbart who get rich by driving the level of racial animosity among the fringes of white America into a frenzy together, hate hustlers like want-to-be-white Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity - if you bundled them all together and put them into a gigantic space shuttle and rammed it directly into the center of the sun, a thousand years later, when a random solar flare finally spit out the remnants, you could still see the hate these people have encasing molecules of their DNA like protective casings so they might spawn again.

I'll get somebody to sharpen that sword for you, Mr. Breitbart, if you think it will have trouble cleaving through your thick skin.

My buddy from Alabama is right - the Tea Party should move its headquarters to Montgomery, Alabama, the home of the First White House of the Confederacy. It would be a perfect match for their Confederate state of mind.

Make no mistake about, Mr. Breitbart - you and your cohorts clumsy and ham handed efforts to control the political narrative in this country are not going to work. There are too many voices out here this time, too many voices that aren't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or GE or whoever owns the other major networks this week. We see you. We know who you are. And we are willing to go toe to toe with you every day of the week and ten times on Sundays. We already have your place on the wall in the Hate Hustlers Hall of Fame reserved, right between Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh.

The NAACP, which seems to have found a new reason to live, should keep up the good fight. If Ben Jealous does nothing else for the next ten years but relentlessly antagonize bullshit race baiting organizations and those like the Tea Party, which obviously have no problem harboring hate hustlers and white supremacists he will have done yeoman's work at keeping the premier civil rights organization relevant in the new millennium.

Where is Kanye West when you need him? He could boil this whole thing down to one of those embarrassing catch phrases that radio stations across the country would play day and night the way they did the "George Bush don't like black people" song. Is there a rapper out there in need of a hit? A record producer out there who's got a dope beat that nobody has recorded over yet that he can donate to the cause? A lyricist who can work the name "Breitbart" into the hook?

Blaming the president for not responding to this properly is like blaming the fire department for not getting to your house fast enough after the neighbor's bad kid sets your house on fire. It would be nice to turn Obama into a black superhero, but he is just a president, doing his job one day at a time. And in case you are too slow to follow that metaphor that opens this paragraph, Andrew Breitbart is the bad kid - a racial arsonist hell bent on doing whatever he can to destroy the fleeting progress America has made towards racial equality.

Every once in awhile, though, these racial arsonists fuck up and set their own damn houses on fire.

The problem you've got, Breitbart, is that I will be the one answering your 911 call.

Two Chump Change Looking Negroes With A Nightstick Scare White America?

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:02:00 +0000

Two chump change looking negroes with a nightstick have the entire right wing of American politics in an uproar?

Is Bill O'Reilly serious?

Two ridiculous looking negroes who would be laughed off of a rap video set for looking like fake-ass black power advocates have got the FOX News "Bimbos With An Attitude"'s thongs all in a knot?

Is Sean Hannity stupid?

Watched FOX last night with a friend for some laughs - FOX is NUTS over this New Black Panther thing - but who the hell are they?

And why should I care?

The way Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly are acting, you would think there were 20 million black folks running amok amongst the rest of the 300 million plus people in the U.S, instead of a group so small 99.999999999% of all black people in the country can safely say that they have never seen a real live member in the flesh.

I guess I’ve been in my own fiction writing and rewriting bubble the past week or so, because I can’t believe how much press these punk looking black pantherites in PA are still getting. I mean, you would think Tweedle O'Reilly and Tweedle Hannity (tweedle dee and tweedle dum for those of you who are still caught in the glare of the FOX tractor beam that zaps your IQ 40 points) were talking about Timothy McVeigh types or something, AFTER he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma.

Fuck Malik Shabazz, better known as Paris Lewis to his momma, and the TV camera loving studio thugs he calls the New Black Panther Party. The only thing blowing up on these Nubian nincompoops are their cell phones. But the more important question, since I am sure there are emails circulating with a BOLO style warning amongst all the RedStaters and Michelle Malkin zombies, is this – just how many New Black Panthers are there?

Does anybody know?

Can I get a witness?

The New Black Panther website says they have 27 chapters. Other sources claim 35. Several of these are purported to be in foreign countries. And no where can I find a number of registered, dues paying members – not even an estimate. Not even an educated guess.

I jokingly said to my buddy last night that FOX gets its angry blonde newscasters from Hooters, but maybe its true, since they don’t seem to understand or care that their story is very, very light on verifiable facts. We all know that the Cracker Nation FOX caters to don't feel right unless black bogeymen are handy to blame.

So FOX delivers fresh negro madness daily.

You can't say they don't bend over backwards to please their audience.

It wasn't until two o'clock in the morning that I read something on the internet that made me want to call my buddy right then. But I though better of it, and waiting until morning to tell him that the black dude who proudly says he's running things at the New Black Panthers Party is a fellow Howard Law grad.

My buddy sounded so glum after I told him this, I started to feel sorry for ruining the start to his day.

"I heard their was some radical brother who was there after I left. That's him? Damn."

There must be a website somewhere, or a service like Rentboy.com where black people with apparent following, a convoluted personal and social philosophy that wasn't even relevant fifty years ago, and a burning need to be on TV every night can go and post their pictures and bio. Maybe its called BlackBogeyman.com

Anyway, I'm back in the land of the sane, although there is still a bit of that right wing demagogue taint on me. Watching FOX News is like getting sprayed by a skunk - three days later, you still have trouble getting rid of the stench.

As far as I'm concerned, FOX can keep these deranged black people they lift out of obscurity. Take 'em home with you, Sean. Adopt 'em, Bill, like Angelina Jolie. You make 'em famous, you have to live with 'em should be the rule.

A shalom alaikum

Quit Waving The Damn Flag And Get Real About Immigration

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Everybody is trying to make it to the weekend and the president is still grinding away, with a speech yesterday guaranteed to open up debates from coast to coast during this most patriotic of weekends.

But if we could quit getting caught up in all the god damn flag waving for a minute, we might really be able to see more clearly why this is a problem, and why doing more of what we are doing now is not possible.

Every house in my neighborhood was built in part by illegal immigrant labor. If you live in a house in just about any metro area in the country that was built in the last twenty years, yours was too. This labor allowed you to buy a bigger house for less money - whether it was ten percent less or twenty percent less or some number somewhere in between I don't know, but it should be obvious to anyone who knows how to operate a basic calculator that paying less than market wages translated into a benefit for the builder and the homeowner.

BY the time I return, illegal immigrants with leaf blowers will have cleared my neighborhoods streets of debris.

The golf courses I passed this morning all employ their own armies of illegal immigrants to keep their fairways and their greens cut.

The restaurant where I ate a bacon biscuit had several illigal immigrants working in the back prepping food orders and washing dishes.

Squadrons of illegal immigrants descend on the houses I pass everyday to clean them, or repair their roofs, or paint them, or lay sod, or any number of tasks that keep an oasis of Republican rectitude looking crisp and clean.

As Americans - not just Republicans, or Democrats, but AMERICANS - we will lie to ourselves so much it should be listed as an official pathological disease category by the Psychological Association.

We cannot and will not pay the hundreds of billions of dollars a year to completely secure the border and aggressively deport any and all illegal immigrants.

If we did, the people who depend on this cheap labor would squawk their heads off via their lobbyists, PR people and fake political action groups.

The good thing about not being the president is not having to deal with everything. I have done no research on the illegal immigrant problem, and I am heavily inclined to follow the rule of law.

But unless we want to leave this issue in the "permanent national complaint" category, we have got to quit bullshitting ourselves about our moral purity and get real - we are in a symbiotic relationship with 15 million to 20 million people who are an integral part of our daily lives.

And since all our principles seem to evaporate whenever we can get something we want cheaper, we need to act like real capitalists and come up with a capitalist solution, rather than one cooked up in a church pulpit or a political rally.

The president is right about making these people citizens, but he can't tell Americans the real reason why this is the only answer we are willing to pay for. He can't tell Americans that we are prone to say one thing and do another, because that's not what we elect our presidents to do.

Is this is an easy answer? No. Do I like it? No. But there are a lot of things in life I don't like that I deal with because it is the best that can be done under the circumstances.

Even in Arizona, where antipathy against illegal immigrants is high, and new laws seem to hit the books daily to eradicate them, I don't see any mass firings of illegal immigrants. Any groundswell of support AT ALL from those who even as I write this are preparing pay envelopes to hand out later this afternoon to their no documents required employees, employees they are counting on to return to work next week, and the week after, and the week after that so the rest of us can continue to get the stuff we want at as cheap a price as we possibly can.

But since I'm not the president, I can tell you why most of us, when it comes to immigration, are full of shit. Until you start tearing the sheetrock out of your house that was put up by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the paint off of your house that was painted on there by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the shingles off your roof that were nailed in place by illegal immigrant hands, until you stop eating at restaurants that use illegal immigrant labor, or refuse to eat food tended and picked by illegal immigrant hands...

...you need to put down that damn flag and start trying to learn some Spanish.

What A Real “Oilpocalypse” Looks Like

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:45:00 +0000

I talked to a buddy of mine last night, who is a personal injury attorney, about the 20 billion dollars the president got BP to agree to put in escrow. “Dude,” I said, “it’s as if the opposing counsel on one of your big cases called you up before the first motion was filed and said ‘here’s a few hundred grand to tide your client over until we figure out how much we’re going to be on the hook for.’”
My buddy actually rephrased my statement with the correct terminology, but he wholeheartedly agreed with my underlying sentiment. “Damn,” my buddy said. “That’s one hell of a settlement. Obama is really a personal injury lawyer.”

So we bantered back and forth for awhile about how ridiculous we thought the media mafia was for pretending this was any less than a stupendous accomplishment. Then my buddy said something that snapped me back to attack mode. “This kind of thing has never happened before.”

“Uh, actually this kind of thing has happened before. In fact, it's happening right now. In Nigeria.”

“Nigeria?”

“Yeah, Nigeria, the place where the U.S. gets almost 40% of the oil it uses, has had oil spills this bad practically every year for decades. The shit is ugly.”

“You know, I didn’t know that.”

“I know – because the weak ass son-of-a-bitches who waste time every night on your TV, yakking it up about bullshit instead of bring you some facts have never thought it was important. Those people in Nigeria who have looked at oily assesd water for years think Americans are spoiled to death.”

“You should write about this.”

“I will, just so I can send your ass a link.”

Over a 20-year period spanning 1976 and 1996, an average of 300 cases of oil spills per year were recorded in Nigeria's oil region. On the average, some 370,000 barrels of crude spilled into the environment each year, out of which only about 40 percent was recovered.

"The environmental effect of spilled oil is a function of time, type of oil spilled, its degree of weathering, the sedimentary characteristics of the receiving environment and the season of the year," said Chindah at a recent workshop. The immediate impact on vegetation are wilting, defoliation and loss of the productive cycle or outright death of affected plants.

On freshwater swamps, the studies showed, the effects are more devastating due to the longer water retention time. Lower plant forms, such as algae and lichens die off immediately. Animals, fish and other water organisms dependent on such ecosystems also die off sooner or later. In turn the communities in the affected areas suffer loss of livelihoods, poor health and other adverse consequences.

Science In Africa

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it

BP, Shell and other conglomerates and oil multinationals have engaged in these egregious disregard for human lives and pristine environments, in their hurry to make profits. And many nations such as Ecuador and Nigeria have dealt with this for decades and decades and were ignored by all, but now, because this current BP disaster and catastrophe occurred on American waters, BP and other oil companies are in trepidations and are gyrating speedily and rapidly, to avoid soiled sullied public image in America, and avoid a corporate black eye and bruises from the Gulf of Mexico disaster. But why? These same oil companies have for decades foisted pollution and deaths on the peoples of Nigeria, Ecuador and other nations without remorse or regret and remedial actions! So why now? Why the difference in attitudes and actions? It is good thing that this massive spill, this disaster and catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is actually a blessing and a wonderfully good thing in disguise, because, from now on, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will become a point of reference or benchmark for oil spills and remediation or remedial actions

It has to be assumed as well, that from now on, conversations about death and destruction caused by oil companies, are no longer seen as merely collateral damage in hydro carbons searches and as such, merely ancillaries and extraneous matters which should not bother Americans.

This is precisely what Niger Delta in Nigeria have experienced for fifty years and the world ignored it and considered it collateral damage, an ancillary and extraneous matter in the search for hydrocarbons to power the engines of the world’s economies. But now, the world knows, the chickens have come home to roost! American Oil Spills In Gulf of Mexico and Lessons for Nigerians and Ecuadorians.

American Oil Spill – Lessons for Nigeria; by Paul Adujie

Why are oil companies forever so willing to act voluntarily to compensate and act properly in response to disasters such as the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in Alaska or in the North Sea or currently in the Gulf of Mexico, but these same oil conglomerates are unwilling to similarly act voluntarily or even under compulsion through court judgments or orders when in the persisting environmental catastrophes in Ecuador and Nigeria, even as you read this?

American Oil Spill – Lessons for Nigeria; by Paul Adujie

What explains these selective attitudes to victims of toxic pollutions caused by the same American and European oil giants? What explains permanence in always selectively choosing to compensate Americans and Europeans; but quite unwilling to compensate Ecuadorians and Nigerians, as the oil companies remain adamant in denying their liabilities?

American Oil Spill – Lessons for Nigeria; by Paul Adujie

Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it

If this isn't the personal injury of all personal injuries, I don't know what is. THIS is why I can call the media monkeys who invade your TV every night chump change motherfuckers with impunity, because they deserve every skewering they get when we've got real life situations out here to compare and contrast corporate missions statements with their actual track record, and all they can do is carp about what idiot congressman A said about idiot congressman B in breathless wonder, or lionize one of their own brethren for squawking like a plucked chicken when they want the president to be their bitch and he refuses.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, brown skin continues to soak in oil that seems to never stop spilling.

The Key Word In "Unforseen Catastrophe" Is "Unforseen"

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:09:00 +0000

We have the ability to control and plan for so many little things that I think it has lulled us into a false sense of security and omnipotence. We can fix any problem. We can overcome any obstacle.

But there are some things that are bigger than us. We're mostly a nation of juveniles, though, so we need someone to blame, some one to be responsible, when there is often no way that is humanly possible to prevent death, disease, or destruction of property.

The only way to save all the lives in New Orleans was to have had them begin evacuating ten days ago. But that's not going to happen the next time down there, or for that matter in any other major city in the country.

Georgia is on a fault line. There hasn't been a real big earthquake in a long, long time here. But scientists are calling for another one to hit sometime soon. A year or so ago, we had a small tremor, which for people who live in earthquake land, usually signals that more are coming.

Have we dug up our natural gas pipelines and replaced them with flexible pipes? Have we buried all of our powerlines to prevent falling trees from interrupting power? Are our homes built to earthquake proof standards? What about our tall buildings? Have we stockpiled food and water as individuals?

Nope.

Are we stupid for not planning ahead for this?

How much can you spend to prevent a catastrophe before the expenditure itself becomes a financial disaster?

You could build the entire city on an elevated platform that raises it twenty feet above sealevel, in hurricane proof buildings with leakproof roofs and redundant emergency power systems today...

...if money was no object, time was not a factor, and there was no intrinsic sense of historical value to consider.

South Carolina was hit by Hurricane Hugo years ago. Wiped out a bunch of homes that were poorly built. Obliterated a legion of mobile homes from the coast up to the Lowcountry.

The trees are still gone in many areas, but the building codes haven't changed, and the mobile home dealers sell more units than ever.

When freedom of choice intersects with an overabundance of caution, the urge to remain unfettered usually wins out here in the US.

I would actually go so far as to posit that if you could guarantee someone a healthful, disease free, disaster free life, with a "do not return to maker until 75 years of age" stamp on their ass if they would confine themselves to the grounds of...let's say the buildings and grounds of the Pentagon, which is a pretty big place, for their entire lives, to work and live under a sort of military junta...I bet they would choose to take the risk of not making it, of not being healthful, of not being disease free, in order to do what they wanted to do.

Its in our blood. We'll do it our way if it kills us. And it frequently does.

I wrote the paragraphs above five years ago after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, back when the only people who read what I wrote were in my online writing group. We argued a lot about what should have happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back then the same way the nation's media is arguing over what should be happening during the BP oil spill every night on my TV.

I would imagine that I could repost the same piece five years from now, when the next unforseen catastrophe hits, and it would be just as relevant.

We are a nation of forensic experts, with an ability to assign blame and liability in small increments to a multitude of parties in multiple jurisdictions, but the past cannot be changed. What is is.

When I am in the middle of a self-made mess, I do not spend very much time worrying about how it happened - I spend 99% of my time trying to figure out what I am going to do going forward.

Our media wastrels, by contrast, are spending 99% of their time looking for someone to blame, even though the probability for any of the solutions proffered thus far have all come with caveats like "this is a highly risking maneuver" or "we've never done this before under these conditions."

Maybe we need to send our Know Everything, Do Nothing media stars to the Gulf and stick their asses in some clean-up suits for twelve hours a day for the next six months. Or put them in an operations center with a phone and a clipboard and put them to work coordinating response efforts until the last marsh has been flushed out with water from the Mississippi.

I have howled like a dog on this blog and the other venues where I write for the past few weeks about the things that were not being done, so it has been a pleasant surprise to see many of the things I suggested - an escrow account for damages and a measuring device at the leak to more accurately detect what flow rate is, among other things I've been adamant about - so I have to believe that they are listening to some of us here in the blogosphere.

I am glad the White House is trying to bypass the media as much as possible. The Fourth Estate squandered what little credibility it had long ago, and now have been reduced to playing cheerleader for their favorite causes.

Blacksheep Political Consulting Gives Alvin Greene Some Advice

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:36:00 +0000

Blacksheep Political Consulting is real busy right now running a whisper campaign against Rand Paul in the race to be the next senator from Kentucky, although we have been running out of ways to insinuate "this sum bitch is crazy", and our "before and after" Hair Club for Men style flyers depicting Paul without his toupe are running low.

But we can always make time for homeboys, especially when they are homeboys like my man Alvin Greene, who needs a political makeover in the worst way.

Alvin, my man, you can give us a call later this week - we are currently booked to go strip club hopping with Michael Steele for the next few days, since they've gotten some fresh donor cash over at the RNC, which means we probably won't be be all that interested in answering our phones unless its a 3G emergency. Your situation doesn't look good, but right now you are still at the 2G emergency level. So don't call us, we'll call you.

For now, I'll shoot you a list of a few things you can be working on until we get to town.

#1 - You seem to be overly nervous on TV, and extremely careful of what you say, probably because you are worried about saying the wrong thing, or being caught in a lie.

This is politics, buddy. Lying 101 is a prerequisite to Graft 202, Advanced Lobbyist Shakedown Technique 320, and Talking Big, Doing Nothing 345. In fact, saying the craziest shit you can think off (i.e., "I can see Russia from my house", You lie!, "The president is a Muslim communist socialist Marxist anti-christ") will get your more supporters and more contributions than any policy stance ever will.

#2 - This phrase "I'm running on the issues" wouldn't get you elected class clown. Nobody knows what "the issues" are, but everybody knows what their single "issue" is. You could pick one of the biggies - abortion, gun control, first amendment - but then you would have to deal with all the people who are crazier than even you are coming out of the woodwork to either kneel at your feet or spit at your back.

You don't need to worry about this so much. The easiest way to do it is to adopt the entire platform of the Democratic Party, since they've worked so hard on it, then come up with a phrase that gives it a personal twist. This unemployment thing seems to be a hot button issue with you - how about "Jobs For America"? Simple, can be printed in big letters on t-shirts, is hard to forget, in case you doze off during an interview or a debate, and can be spun to mean more education, more tax breaks for the rich, more tax credits for the middle class, more stimulus packages or less government waste, less outsourcing, less anti-union laws, and less loopholes for corporations to jump through - a perfect "be what you need it to be" platitude that can allow you to fill souls and empty pockets at the same time.

#3 Speaking of money - there are tens of thousands of people across the country who are still sad they quit selling Pet Rocks or Magic Seahorses. This is your base. They will send you money just because your campaign is the kind of crazy, against all odds kind of long shot that gets their juices flowing.

Take it. All of it. If you grew up in Manning, and were born in Florence, which is just up I-95, then you have got plenty of relatives there that you can put on the payroll. In fact, I've got plenty of relatives there myself - will be forwarding you a list of names who need to be put on the payroll. Stay away from those political consultants out of Columbia, or black preachers out of anywhere - as soon as they smell the cash coming into your campaign, they will be lined up outside your door.

One thing Blacksheep Political Consulting can do to help you out is make the amount of our retainer so high you won't have any money left to give anyone else after you pay us and your/our relatives.

#4 The infamous Green Family Reunion t-shirt needs to be retired permanently. If you can't bear to burn it, we will take a picture of you wearing it that you can keep in your wallet, while we lock the actual shirt in our "dirty secrets we will bribe our clients with later" vault.

If you are really committed to looking like you are "one of the people" we will supply you with a few dozen t-shirts with the American flag across the front.

#5 The sexual misconduct charge is frankly, a lightweight accusation that wouldn't even rate if you were a GOP candidate. If there are any Rentboy.com adventures you haven't told us about, though, all bets are off.

Don't look at this pending felony charge as a weaknesss to be avoided. This is a perfect pivot point for you to bring up all the GOP sex scandals in the past year or two. It doesn't matter if they don't have any connection to your opponent Jim DeMint - all you have to do is "mis-remember" that he lived in the C-Street manison in D.C. where all of the other GOP fruitcakes, sex fiends, adulterers and molesters who served in Congress camped out away while they were away from home.

#6 Don't lean on Jim Demint too hard - if it comes out that one of his fatcat donors put up the cash for your adventure, or that he is connected to the vast right wing conspiracy's techno geek squad in charge of electronically switching votes, a conspiracy that is now in danger of being uncovered because one of their fat fingers slipped and typed in "100,000 votes for Greene" into the stealth software program piggybacked on the mainframe where the votes are tabulated, instead of "10,000 votes for Greene", you will have to go back to wearing that that green t-shirt and watching cable TV.

Which is something I don't think you want to do, Alvin, because as painful as it is for us to watch, you look like you ENJOY this attention. Dime Demint's cronies out and all the cameras go away.

#7 Keep a diary. Do not update it once a week. Update it two or three times a day. Type the names, places, times, locations, what was said, what happened, how you feel about what is going on. Do not write this down - type it into the body of an email, and then email it to an account you have that nobody knows about. This will end up being the most valuable asset of your campaign, one that unscrupulous people will be willing to tear your house apart to get.

This diary will be your retirement plan, once you turn it into a "tell all" book. You will sell more copies than Sarah Palin. And with all those millions, you can take that "e" off of the end of your name and nobody will even recognize you. In fact, they will be so confused at why this black man doesn't have an "e" at the end of his name they probably won't even recognize you if you have on that damn green t-shirt.

Hey, the limo from the RNC called to say it was on the way...

...I gotta run.

Good luck, homeboy. We'll be calling you in a couple of days.

Today At The Grio: Is surprise SC senate candidate a 'plant' or just peculiar?

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:59:00 +0000

Today's topic at TheGrio.com:

Is surprise SC senate candidate a 'plant' or just peculiar?

"I got sixty percent of the vote is not luck. Sixty percent of the vote is not an accident."

-Alvin Greene, S.C. Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate

Eddie Murphy was in a movie years ago called The Distinguished Gentleman, where Murphy played a con man named Thomas Jefferson Johnson who won a seat in Congress because of the similarity between his name and that of a recently deceased congressman. The similarities between con men and politicians that the film showcased made for great comedy on the big screen.

Now we have real life imitating art in South Carolina, where an unknown, unemployed, 32-year-old ex-military man with pending felony charges who lives with his parents in his hometown garnered over 100,000 votes in the South Carolina Democratic primary to become the party's presumptive nominee for the U.S. Senate. Alvin Greene defeated opponent Vic Rawl, a former circuit court judge and four term state representative, which means, at least for now, that Greene will face current senator Jim DeMint in the fall. with no campaign staff, no campaign contributions, no campaign website, no campaign literature, and no communication with his state party organization.

How did Mr. Greene get elected by a margin of almost 20 percent with an invisible campaign?

Read More...

TheGrio.com is the first video-centric news community site devoted to providing African Americans with stories and perspectives that appeal to them but are underrepresented in existing national news outlets.

TheGrio.com features aggregated and original video packages, news articles, and blogs on topics from breaking news, politics, health, business, and entertainment, which concern its niche audience.is a global forum connecting people and ideas.

TheGrio.com is brought to you through the cooperation of NBC News and the production team that brought you the documentary film, Meeting David Wilson.

British Petroleum Oil Spill Cartoon Highlights

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:09:00 +0000

These cartoonists say more in these panels about the British Petroleum Oil Spill than I could write all week.

Plus my writing mojo is a little off since I haven't written anything in a few days. As funny and as sad as these cartoons are, I know BP is working its ass off to try and stop this. I know our government really isn't equipped to do more than watch as they work.

What gets me and millions upon millions of others hot as fire over this thing is the bullshit BP's PR machine has been trying to push to make it seem like it is a much smaller spill than it really is.

The parts of government that people should really want to see changed are agencies like the Minerals Management Service, but we seem to be stuck on the same old TV friendly controversies like race, or abortion, or religion.

Whether or not we have a live feed of the leak that is really a live feed or a loop of the same footage over and over is the latest debate, a debate that BP has brought on itself.

When you stonewall about flow rates, or try to scare away the media, or purposefully dissemble on TV day after day the way BP has, you actually increase the hysteria surrounding the whole mess.

There is no equivalent of Paul Revere in the animal kingdom. If there were, he would have been overwhelmed by the task of crying out warnings all along the Gulf Coast.

As far as our own government goes, Mr. Obama seems to have lost his affection for the TV cameras temporarily.

I'd like to say its the lawyer in him that makes him so reticent at a time when an anxious nation needs to see him on the job in oily hipwaders, peering out at the Gulf. Or maybe the pragmatist in him that realizes that his presence on the scene would disrupt some of the containment effort.

The talking points and buzzwords sound nice

until you realize that they are just words if you don't take any action to back them up.

What President Obama needs to think about, in this nation of symbols, is how strong an image it would be to the American people to watch him wrestle with something that mattered once in awhile instead of the political wrestling matches between him and Congress that are mostly staged for our benefit.

Gulf Geyser : A Quick Reference Sheet For Reporters

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:56:00 +0000

[Sometimes I run across original research, original analysis, or hard-to-get information that is exactly the kind of stuff I live for - well thought out, well written, well researched commentary, the kind that your media experts get by the pound but think is too much for you to understand. Mark Sumner is the author of "Gulf Geyser: A Quick Reference Sheet For Reporters", as well as the author of the nonfiction work "The Evolution of Everything" and several novels including "Devil's Tower." He has given me permission to publish his comments here. Enjoy]

Gulf Geyser: A Quick Reference Sheet For Reporters

Look, guys, I'm starting to worry about the environmental impact of this trash pile growing at my side -- the one made from shredded newspapers and crushed radios. It expands every time I hear impossibly silly and ill-prepared comments and questions in a story about the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf. Frankly, I might soon have to start measuring the size of the pile in states. The only way to reduce the flow may be for you to print this out (sorry trees) and keep it by your side when you're dealing with these issues. This will also help sustain the sanity of your audience and reduce our trade imbalance with Japan China whoever makes cheap radios these days.

It is possible to estimate how much oil is being lost into the Gulf.

The idea that it's impossible to make a good estimate of how much oil is pouring into the Gulf is straight up bullshit. Calculating the amount of oil is a simple matter of looking at the size of the openings and rate at which material is being ejected. Regular video footage of the flow sites would allow for highly accurate estimates of the loss. And BP has that video footage. They just aren't sharing enough to make good estmates. Why not? Because they are well aware that the rate of loss is much, much higher than the 5,000 barrels a day number that you keep repeating. The rate of flow was 5,000 BPD, but that was only a couple of days after the accident -- in other words, three weeks ago -- and the flow increased rapidly over the initial week. The current rate is somewhere between 30,000 and 80,000 barrels a day, based on what's been seen at the surface. Which number is more accurate? I'd know if you'd get BP to release those videos instead of meekly accepting "we don't know" as an answer.

If no one will give you an estimate of the loss, they can't give you an estimate of the capture.

In the same interviews where you're reporting that there's no estimate of how much oil is being lost, you're willing to report that BP is capturing "50%" or even "up to 90%" of the oil with the 4" soda straw they jabbed into the pipe. Um, no. No, they're not. BP is capturing (if we accept their numbers) around 1,000 barrels a day. That's only 20% of what was being lost three weeks ago, and it's 3% (or less) of what's been flowing out for the last two weeks. But the more important part of this is why in holy hell would you accept this number from a company that just told you they couldn't make an estimate of the loss? Look, I just poured this bag of M & Ms on the floor. How many? I don't know. I'm not even going to look, but I think this one I just picked up is half of them -- though I won't let you check me. Don't be that stupid, it's the number one cause of radio smashage.

We don't get 30% of our oil from the Gulf.

Gulf oil accounted for about one and a half million BPD last year. That's deep water, shallow water, old wells and those just brought on line. Sounds like a lot, huh? But the US consumed twenty million BPD. Gulf oil was less than 10% of our oil supply. Yes, it's around a 1/3 of our domestic oil supply, but our domestic number has been shrinking since 1970, and that's including pretty well the whole period of Gulf exploration. The idea that more drilling in the Gulf will have an impact on our oil imports is, what's that word again... yeah, bullshit. Please stop passively sitting there when someone tells you that expanded offshore drilling is needed to secure our oil supply, because it's simply not true. Our oil supply can't be secured because the majority comes from overseas, and it will stay that way as long as we need oil.

Shutting down deep water drilling, or even all offshore drilling, will have no immediate effect on the price of oil.

Not only is Gulf oil production only 10% of US consumption, that's production not drilling. It can take years for an area to go from exploration to producing wells. The impact of shutting down drilling on price of gas at the pump... hmm, let's see. Oil is $72 a barrel. Three weeks ago, when a blanket suspension of new drilling was announced oil was selling for over $80 a barrel. Looks like stopping drilling in the Gulf saved us $8 a barrel! No. The relationship between current drilling and the price of oil is neglible. Anyone telling you what oil would cost without offshore drilling is bullshitting you. Why not call them on it for once?
Not drilling in the Gulf would not result in $14 a gallon gasoline.
This is a Mitch McConnell special, one which so many programs seem happy to repeat without comment. The truth is (as we just saw) the immediate effect of decreased drilling on oil prices is unpredictable. The oil market has way, way, way too many variables for anyone to reach into their hat and predict the long term effects of any action. And for someone to give you an actual number, like $14 a gallon for gas, means that they have pulled this number completely out of their ass. Say, why not call them on it? For once.

Oil does not make electricity.

Oil is used for transportation. It doesn't compete with coal, or with wind, or with nuclear power. All those new windmills off the coast of MA are peachy, but they won't save one gallon of gas. If all the oil wells dried up today, it wouldn't affect the ability to run our iPads, or to air condition our homes into the subarctic, or listen to you blather. Oil is not electricity. Get it? I don't care if the person trying to add a rosy "we're building windmills!" into a conversation about oil is the president of BP or President Obama, the two things are unrelated. This disaster is not a reason we need to reevaluate our need for nuclear power, because nuclear power doesn't compete with oil. Coal, wind, solar, nukes = electricity. Oil = transportation. Get it? There's nothing at all wrong with adding more wind and solar to the mix, they just don't do a damn thing to decrease the need for oil. What would decrease that oil demand? More public transit, fewer long haul trucks and more trains, smaller cars that use less gas, and (finally) cars that get their go from electricity. When we have a significant number of the later on the roads, maybe oil and those other sources will actually overlap. Until then, stop talking about other sources of energy like they have anything to do with oil. Please. Special bonus nugget: the reason we don't make electricity from oil? Because oil is more expensive than coal or natural gas. This is also the reason that Iran wants nuclear plants. Asking Iran why they won't just burn their valuable export commodity to keep the lights on is like asking South Africa why it doesn't just build streets out of diamonds.

Your job is to find out these things.

You're not supposed to have on one person from the American Petroleum Institute and one guy who just wrote the "Why Green Energy Sucks Handbook" and repeat what they say. Your job is to learn the facts of the situation and relay them to the public. Adding someone from the American Wetlands Lovers Council to your conversation is not a substitute for doing some research. Believe it or not, there are facts. You're supposed to let your readers / listeners / viewers know the truth, not just smile and look back and forth like the referee at a ping pong tourney. Feel free to extend this tip to other situations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Sumner is the author of 32 novels, including one called "Devil's Tower" (and for the record, the book title and the screen name are from fond memories of visits to the national monument of that name. They do not show an inclination toward the "dark side."). He's a past winner of Writers of the Future, and has been nominated for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.

If Cable News Shows Treated Their Viewers Like Drug Dealers Treated Their Customers...

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:44:00 +0000

My buddy called me yesterday on his way home, which kind of put me in a bad mood immediately, since he sees this commute as time to kill, while I see time as an ever-ticking clock that is always threatening to close in on a deadline I have somewhere.

So I wasn't really paying attention when he first started talking, because I was gathering some quotes for a piece I was supposed to be submitting somewhere in a couple of hours. Maybe its the writer in me, or maybe its the fact that when I am thinking, which is most of the time, I am usually juggling ten or fifteen ideas about something important to the way we live in my mind, a state of intense pleasure to me that gets me testy as hell when it is interrupted by a comment about the weather, or some other totally meaningless minutia of life, minutia that my buddy insisted on talking about.

It wasn't until he casually asked my opinion about the speed with which law enforcement had apprehended the Times Square bomb scare suspect that became fully engaged in the conversation. In fact, I became more than fully engaged - it was a ten minute rant, a verbal beatdown of everybody from Campbell Brown to Anderson Cooper, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, from Wall Street to the White House that probably had my buddy wishing he had called somebody else instead.

But he hung in there long enough to understand why most of the time the enemy isn't the left or the right or the center or even the wacko fringe elements of our political universe here in America, but the brain dead and insufferable media who do a woeful job of shaping the political conversation.

I watched Anderson Cooper interview the mayor of Nashville last night, after apologizing for CNN and the rest of the media who seemed to be totally hypnotized by the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to the exclusion of practically all other newsworthy items. Which would have been fine if they didn't waste half of their airtime getting "reactions" from idiots, or politicians who pontificated forthrightly about a situation their non-engineering, non-oceanic expert asses knew absolutely nothing about.

Or if they had quit regurgitating British Petroleum press releases and did some god damn research on their own, research which would have confirmed the suspicions any high school physics student would have about the absurd estimate that pegged the rate of leakage at "5,000 barrels a day."

Maybe the journalism schools need to shut down, or at least rethink what they allow to be called "journalism", so we have a better handle on what is news, and what is fluff and PR.

Journalists - when your interview subjects start telling bald faced lies on camera, or begin to dissemble so badly they might as well be telling bald faced lies, the kind of untruths your pre-interview research can refute unequivocally, pull the plug on them and throw up a PowerPoint instead that gives us the salient facts and their sources, so we can verify them.

Talking point TV, CNN, is why you are going to have your anchors all trading around one shirt and tie between them soon, and going on air without makeup, in order to make payroll. Talking point TV, Fox News, is why Rupert Murdoch will be rolling up to the Goldman Sachs offices to get his company one of those sweet financing deals that Greece got so Glen Beck can hawk "subprime television derivatives" during all those stretches of empty commercial breaks he's got.

Heroin dealers treat their customers better than TV news shows treat their viewers.

I told my buddy, after I had calmed down a little, and he finally was willing to acknowledge that contrary to the media slant, our law enforcement agencies had done the job we asked them to do, providing enough layers of deterrence and surveillance to catch the suspect in record time, that what we have right now in our country is akin to kindergartners telling us what is going on.

But back to this drug dealer analogy - I am hooked on facts like a crack head is addicted to crack. I would make time for a rat-a-tat tat machine gun style delivery of a lead topic and three sentences, no emotional nuances required, the announcer taking a breath during commercial breaks.

I would like to see some Powerpoint style info flashing up with each topic, with five to seven bullet points to augment the three lines the announcer is reading, and two or three sources listed below them so I could dig deeper if I wanted.

And put the pathos and the dead baby pictures on another channel, for those who need to get a good cry in before dinner.

Do you think people who buy crack or heroin or cocaine choose their dealer because of his or her talking points? Because of a favorable "reaction" from someone who doesn't even do drugs? Or because the drug dealer swears "this is the real deal?"

Nope.

They choose the dealer who gets them the best dope out there. The dope has been cut the least. The dope that packs the biggest punch.

So cable news networks, quit screwing around and start sling the best facts out there. Start giving the facts up to us raw and uncut, instead of the Similac smelling shit you are peddling now.

Yardwork, Brown Man Style

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:06:00 +0000

There wasn’t much TV watching or newspaper reading or web surfing going on this weekend in our house. I didn't get to see the man who wanted Lindsay Graham come out of the closet, although I had no idea he was even in a damn closet, or watch the endless hours of billowing ash clouds shown over and over that obviously touched the inner child inside of the cable network news producers fascinated by the idea of a real live volcano, or catch the clip of El Dumbo Rusho blaming the volcano eruption on the black man who lives in the White House, or listen to the incessant chatter from political pundits about the Supreme Court nominees as if they were contestants on American Idol.

Nope, this was one of those weekends where instead of cobbling together an extended profane political polemic like “Goldman Sachs Got 99 Problems But Telling Lies Ain’t One”, S. and I were eagerly working in the yard, cleaning away dead leaves, pruning trees and bushes, and spreading a black velvet colored mulch around the yard. Okay, “eagerly” is probably the wrong word for the attitude I had. It was probably more like “why the hell am I, a well documented life-long allergy sufferer, outside in all this damn pollen?”

The yard does look a lot better, although I am still itching and sneezing. I guess “yard” is probably the wrong word too – there is no grass (hallelujah!!) at all, just a couple of narrow, mulch covered areas between the house and the street. The only topiary are bushes that ring the red brick colored pavers of the turnaround and the perimeter of the front, bushes that are now like old friends whose hair I cut every week with scissors-like shears.

A friend of mine from across town showed up Sunday afternoon with his two boys and their friend after attending a soccer game just around the corner. Two four year olds and a nine year old, they were the Three Musketeers – one mini afro, one mini fade, and one Mini Wheats colored shock of blonde hair that kept disappearing around corners and behind cars, at least until the kids from next door came outside.

The family next door are Russians, as in Russians from Russia, with heavy accents like they have in the movies and an insane obsession with cars. Their daughter is in the second or third grade, and their son, who speaks a totally unintelligible polyglot of Russian and English fragments, is three. In twenty minutes, I’d gone from being a lone field negro bagging dead leaves while breathing through a makeshift turban to starring in a cast of characters that included S. with the dog, a bowl of popcorn, three pre-testosterone boys following the Russian princesses every move, and a three year old I had to do sign language with who hollered every time he saw a bee.

Needless to say, a good bit of that pile of mulch remains right where the truck dropped it off. For in the midst of all this chaos, my buddy remembered the brace of cigars he’d brought over, and pulled them out of his pocket. A word to the wise - if you ever get to choose your friends, choose the kind that are apt to pull a handful of Romeo Y Julieta double coronas out of their pocket . They are even better than the occasional bottle of hooch when it comes to making a friend's flaws recede into nothingness.

By the time this was all over, I had been forced to pull out my Super Soaker to defend my manhood. The kids had dropped so much popcorn on the paving stones, the dog had simply given up trying to eat them all. The pink Barbie Escalade had run out of power after careening around the cul-de-sac loaded down with passengers. And young Master Mini Wheats surprised himself by yelling “I love you” to the Russian princess from the backseat of my friend’s truck as he pulled off.

As I write this, there is a Thank You note on the table from another pair of kids who live a few houses down. They are likely to be of Russian origin themselves, although their families have been mainstream Americans for a few generations. The note reads, “Dear Miss S. – Thank you so much for our candy filled pumpkins, We are so happy that you live in our neighborhood!”

I thought about all of these things later, while S. and I and that handy Romeo Y Julieta I was puffing on began to start spreading the mulch over the deweeded, deleafed areas. I thought about the disconnect in America between our brownskinned president of the United States and those Americans who feel so strongly that he does not belong in the White House, that he is not their president, that he cannot be trusted to talk to their kids. I thought about all of the people I live around, who most of whom are white, to whom S. and the dog or me and my cigars and my hedge clippers are as ubiquitous as the pine trees are in the subdivision we live in. Why can't the crazy folks across America I didn't get to see on my TV this weekend see what my neighbors see? I mean, S. is tall, and is a lawyer, like Michelle. And I like to talk a lot, and I'm biracial myself, just like the president...

...okay, maybe being half black and half Geechie isn't exactly the same as being half black and half white - more like half black and half rice - but you get where I'm going with the general theme. Smart, well educated, well behaved, well mannered black folks like us and practically every black person who reads this blog have been goodwill ambassadors before anybody even knew who the Obama's were, bridging the gap between the ignorance of stereotypes and the reality of our existence.

I thought about the disconnect between my neighbors, who expect to see me and know who I am, and the weekenders touring the neighborhood whose eyes often jump when they see me trimming hedges in my “Obama” t-shirt while puffing a trusty stogie. I think of the one weekender in particular who saw me coming out the garage a couple of years ago and slammed into reverse. It took three months for the paint he scraped away from the bumper of his brand new car when he hit the stone wall ringing the cul-de-sac to fade away.

Meanwhile, a stubborn subset of white America continues to embarrass their saner, more normal brethren on an almost hourly basis these days on my TV. It's almost enough to make me want grab one of those choice Romeo Y Julietas my buddy brought me and head outside to that slowly dwindling pile of mulch and get to spreading.

Then again, I could just smoke the cigar and think about doing some work.

Waka Flocka Flame And Other Insane Resurrection Day Inspirations

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:57:00 +0000

I never really thought of Easter as a holiday growing up. Back then, Easter meant interminable treks through department stores, looking for new clothes. A longer than usual church service, where you sat scrunched up next to people because all of the once-a-year Easter visitors who came that Sunday.

The only saving grace was the food.

I still don’t think of it as a holiday, but S. does. Which means we have a feast, the kind that requires us to pull out a hundred dishes that will take two hours to clean up afterwards. A variety of wine. Scrumptious desserts. And then we sit down to eat after church, where I am now one of those once-a-year Easter visitors who makes everybody sit closer to their neighbors than they really want to be, and eat and talk for hours.

There is something about the languorousness of it all, the slow progression from your first serving to your second, the settling effect that allows you to begin digging into dessert an hour or so after the main course, and the warm patina a few glasses of wine give to the whole thing, that makes it feel positively Italian, if real Italian family dinners are as decadent and baroque as the ones we see depicted in the movies. It felt even moreso this year when the Resident Diva dubbed my brother “Luigi” out of the blue, after the Super Mario Brothers video game character.

The conversation is, loosely speaking, a round robin affair, with stories and gossip and imaginatively recounted memories that are poignant and hilarious and heartfelt all at once.

Which is how I learned who Waka Flocka Flame is.

How my brother, isn’t much younger than me, knows who this rapper with no album is is beyond me. But the Resident Diva, who was as surprised as I was that my brother knew this, took the storytelling baton from my brother and kept running with the tale about the rapper with the crazy name.

The name was so funny I kept saying it over and over.

Waka Flocka Flame

Then I open up my USA TODAY yesterday(yeah, I know, its a schlocky excuse for a newspaper, but hey, I’m a writer – a social and political commentator, no less - you gotta look everywhere for ideas these days) and I see that Michael “Money Mike” Steele has got all his executive rats jumping ship.

Waka Flocka Flame

I turned on the TV last night to see slimy Republican hatchet man Alex Castellanos, who was an unpaid advisor to Steele just last month, stare into the camera and call for Steele to step down. Castellanos looked as if the big money boys in the GOP had a gun in his back. If you ran diagnostics on the video with some super sensitive recording analyzer you could probably pick up a faint “TELL THAT NEGRO TO WALK THE PLANK! NOW!” coming through the Castellanos earpiece.

Waka Flocka Flame

Steele, looks like you are on the ropes. The way “Luigi” and I and a few of my other brown-skinned consigliore’s see things, your boys have two choices. They can offer you a cushy landing pad at one of these fake ass think tanks they pay to print up propaganda and drop $30,000 or $40,000 a month in your direct deposit for a year or two, to keep you quiet…

…or jump into this dogfight to get you out of office with both feet and risk having you spill the beans on the whole operation.

If I were you, “Money Mike”, I’d call in Waka Flocka Flame. Tell the board you are working on a “resurrection” of your chairmanship, and Mr. Flame is your first new “disciple.” Keep it simple - make him your “fuck you” consultant. From what I’ve seen in the videos on youtube, he is very, very good at saying “fuck you” with meaning – not Samuel L. Jackson type good, but pretty damn good for a rookie who says he’s only been rapping for six months.

Could you imagine Brian Williams having to report on that shit? "In today’s political news, RNC political consultant Waka Flocka Flame dropped the 'F-bomb' 37 times…in one sentence during a fundraising call before exhorting large donors to 'help us get our stacks up, bitches' for the fall election season."

Think about it, Money Mike.

You’ve got nothing to lose. You would make history. Who knows? The RNC board might even kick in a NetJets lease for 12 months “to ease your transition” if you brought enough real flavor to the office to scare the shit out of them.

That’s W-A-K-A F-L-O-C-K-A F-L-A-M-E

Blacksheep Political Consulting won't even send you a bill for this hour, Mike...

...but we'll be happy to let you take us to the strip club the next time you're in the ATL.

GOP In Talks With Blacksheep Political Consulting To Revamp Message

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:17:00 +0000

It looks like Blacksheep Political Consulting will have to quit living off the money it defrauded its last paying clients out of by guaranteeing to deliver the Vietnamese immigrant vote for Congressman Roscoe P. Coltrane (RR-GA) and come out of semi-retirement to give the beleaguered Republican Party a hand.

Because whoever they are paying to advise them now needs to be brought up on crimninal charges.

This latest shenanigan - the Senate work slowdown - at a time when what's left of their tattered image is tottering over the edge of a cliff is beyond frat boy stupid, beyond redneck rowdy. These are the kinds of actions that make me think of an old dog that starts walking around in circles just before it lays down to die.

But don't worry, John Boehner and friends - Blacksheep Political Consulting is coming to the rescue, just as soon as we can set up the off-shore account where you're going to wire our fees.

There are no guarantees though - we've learned our lesson from the Vietnamese unregistered voter fiasco.

But I know I can do better than Frank Luntz, your messaging guru. As a matter of fact, I can turn your whole year around with just one change.

"Quit contradicting yourselves."

Well, okay, two changes - "quit contradicting yourselves" and "find somebody other than old fish faced Mitch McConnell to stand in front of the cameras with nasty-assed frown - he is scaring away every voter under 35."

And before you start getting all defensive, Mr. Agent Orange Orange Red, I just want you to look at the research/stuff we are "borrowing" from Russell King's blog so you can see what the public sees when they see the GOP:

You can't flip out -- and threaten impeachment - when Dems use a parlimentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that is centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You can't vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it's done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) -- 114 of your members (at last count) did just that -- and it's even worse when you secretly beg for more.

You can't fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.

You can't call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.

Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war" at Gitmo? You can't have it both ways.

You can't carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.

You can't refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn't meet with you.

You can't rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters. Repeatedly.

You can't rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening. (It was Bush who came up with that one.)

You can't be for immigration reform, then against it.

You can't enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.

You can't flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same. Bush. Ford.

You can't complain that the president hasn't closed Gitmo yet when you've campaigned to keep Gitmo open.

You can't flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Nixon. Ike. You didn't even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed (on the mouth) leaders of countries that are not on "kissing terms" with the US.

You can't complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent. (And, no, Newt -- the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)

You can't attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn't issue any condemnation). *Obama administration did the day of the event.

You can't throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when -- in fact -- only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.

You can't condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attemted terror attack on his.

You can't mount a boycott against singers who say they're ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he's ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Moaist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

You can't cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it's too short.

You can't support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.

You can't demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.

You can't praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it "treasonous" under a Dem president.

You can't propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.

You can't be both pro-choice and anti-choice.

You can't damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you've paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You can't condemn critizising the president when US troops are in harms way, then attack the president when US troops are in harms way, the only difference being the president's party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

You can't be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

You can't vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of 'open debate'.

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it's 2004 or 2010. This is true, too, if you're taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN. Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution. This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God's stand, too.

When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can't send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).

You can't criticize Dems for not doing something you didn't do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.

You can't decry "name calling" when you've been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile.

You can't spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare.

You can't praise the Congressional Budget Office when it's analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it's unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don't.

You can't vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don't. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

You can't call a reconcilliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.

You can't spend tax-payer money on ads against spending tax-payer money.

You can't condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the madates were your idea.

You can't demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don't.

You can't whine that it's unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party's former leader admits you've been doing it for decades.

You can't portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You can't complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you've routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain -- threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented -- and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You can't question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn't object when your own Republican president appointed them.

You can't preach and try to legislate "Family Values" when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer's wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coherce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife's mother. ***

You say you didn't catch how much Blacksheep's fee was, Agent Orange Orange Red? Well, since your RNC chairman Michael Steele insists that "a million dollars really isn't a lot of money" just add another zero to that bid we emailed to you.

You know how it is. Jet fuel is kinda high these days. And with Tiger screwing up the bimbo market, our "out of pocket" expenses could run to six or seven figures...

...easy.

***This list REALLY WAS compiled/created/crafted by Russell King of Street Prophets - if you go by his site to thank him, where he has a much, much longer list of GOP "can't do's", please let him know that his check from Blacksheep Political Consulting is "in the mail."

Final Round XIII Arcade Game Tourney Is "Old School" Video Game Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:55:00 +0000

I am going to a video game tournament today...

...despite the fact that I have never played a modern video game.

The first video game I remember playing regularly was on the campus of the then South Carolina State College. We lived two blocks from campus at the time. The student center was a short walk. Inside there were ping pong tables, a pool table or two, and a Pong machine off to one side. Pong was the electronic version of Ping Pong.

For a quarter, you bought the exquisite privilege of getting to turn a black knob to the left or to the right to control a small gray rectangle that served as your electronic paddle. There were only two trick shots you could make. One involved violently spinning your knob just when the "ball", a gray square, hit the surface of your paddle. The other trick shot required precise timing, and involved ramming the rectangular paddle into the "ball" from the side just before it sailed past the end line and off the court.

So why am I going to a video game tournament, if all I've mastered is turning a little black knob on a Pong machine?

Because S.'s son is in town for a video game tournament he and his buddies cooked up about fourteen years ago called Final Round. Even though they are now all in their thirties, they all head back to Atlanta every spring to put on the southeast's biggest fighting game tournament. At this year's Final Round XIII, the competitions are being live streamed. As I write this, they seem to be setting up stuff for today's events. The Twitter news feed for the hashtag "#FinalRound" is a drama in and of itself.

I understand the basic concept behind the genesis of the tournament -- as exquisite as it was to play Pong inside the AIR CONDITIONED student center at SCSC back in the early seventies, you would eventually begin to lose interest in feeding the machine quarters if you thought you were wasting them on someone who didn't provide any real competition.

But these guys are for real. They have all been serious gamers since grade school, when they played at the arcade against each other. And when we ride down to the hotel later today where the event is held, it will be hard to get a park. And unless things have changed a lot since last year, there will be lines of young African American, Asian and Caucasian men streaming into the building, toting their controller consoles under their arms as if they are Fender guitars.

I remember visiting some friends of our family in New Orleans a few years after my love affair with Pong. The father was a pharmacist who owned a couple of pharmacies, and his son, who was about my age, had reaped the benefits accordingly -- he had a room in the back of the house with three or four arcade games in it that he could play all day without putting a single quarter in them, or having to wait his turn. I was envious all the way back to South Carolina.

Nowadays, kids have more gaming capabilities in their pockets with the Nintendo portables than we used to have in an entire arcade in the seventies. The buddies who have put together this Final Round tournament have all the latest games, from PlayStation to Wii, with all the attendant accessories, and the latest hi-tech, high touch controllers, but they seem to revel in the old schoolness of the games they built the tourney around. And the participants seem to rejoice at the amount of money they win for outfighting everybody else.

As nice as some of those joysticks look, though, I don't think they will ever top my beloved black knob on the Pong machine.

Who knows where this might lead? Video games show no signs of losing their appeal. And if the "X" Generation or "Y" Generation or whatever name some advertising exec has dreamed up this week for this demographic is anything like us, they will long for the nostalgia of arcade video games the same way us post baby boomers gravitate towards old-school rap music these thirty years later.

Ralph Reed, Owner Of The Best Political Whorehouse In Georgia, Wants To Be A Congressman

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:04:00 +0000

I really didn't have anything to write about today, until I saw that Ralph Reed was planning to announce his candidacy for Congress tomorrow, Sarah Palin style - from his Facebook account.

I live three miles from Gwinnett County, where retiring Congressman John Linder was elected 18 years ago, back when "Gwinnettians", as the traffic reporters call them, were mostly white and mostly middle class.

Now the biggest Asian supermarket in town is in Gwinnett County, along with the biggest Hindu temple in the United States. The intersection of Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Buford Highway, which used to be major commercial corridors in Gwinnett County, looks more like you are in Mexico than Georgia. Gwinnett County is not as solidly Republican as your lazy media analysts will be telling you over the next few months.

49% of Gwinnett County was black, Asian, or Hispanic in the 2009 census, and something tells me that those numbers will be even larger after the 2010 census numbers are tallied.

The rest of Linder's district - Barrow, Walton, and a slice of Newton County - is still pretty white, but these are people central casting would go looking for if they needed to cast Tea Baggers. Which means that Reed may not have the bona fides he thinks he does with this crowd, who are all anxious to see some new faces for a change.

Which brings me back to Ralph Reed, the slimest political operator in the nation after Jack Abramoff. His political direct mail company is famous for putting out the kind of imagery that was found in the RNC PowerPoint last week. Ralph Reed isn't a dog with fleas - he is just a damn big ass flea.

As the owner of Century Strategies, Reed is one of the biggest lobbyists in this state. In a year when the dreaded "L" word isn't "liberal" but "lobbyist", he has no way to wash the stench of the "porkulus" he helps Fortune 500 companies obtain off of his hands.

Ralph Reed, the Bernie Madoff of GOP fundraisers, has relied on his schoolboy looks to charm the Christian Coalition crowd out of their hard earned money for decades to fight evils like gambling WHILE DOING ~~CONSULTING WORK~~DOUBLE CROSSING AND DOUBLE BILLING INDIAN CASINOS interested in getting favorable regulatory relief from Congress.

"I'm proud of the campaign we ran," Reed, weary but ever positive, told TIME. "I'm glad we did it." He didn't want to talk about why he lost, but those who know him say he blames the media--particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite.

He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.

Time Magazine, The Rise And Fall Of Ralph Reed

In the world of political whoring, Ralph Reed has proved time and time again that he is willing to sell his narrow ass to anybody willing to pay for a piece of it.

The only good thing about Ralph Reed running for office is that this time, with the kind of ego he's got, he is guaranteed to lose a pile of his own money in the process.

The Brown Man's Mother Goes Back To College

noreply@blogger.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:23:00 +0000

I haven't been able to get my mother on the phone yet tonight to talk to her about the proceedings at her induction into the Half Century Club for graduates of Benedict College. It is probably because she is on the phone with her sisters, whose SIXTIETH college reunion has either just taken place or will be happening soon.

This is waaay back -- before the seatbelt was mandatory, before unleaded gas was popular, before King and Malcolm X and John Kennedy had each taken a bullet for the human race, before Pampers and airbags and cassette tapes and VCR's -- before practically everything that you see now existed, if you are under forty years of age.

I guess I'll get to talk to her a little later -- actually, this post is in its own way a method for me to kill some time until she and her sisters get off the phone, but they are talkers. In fact, we are all talkers, the way some people are chain smokers, or binge drinkers, so I am sure that I need to keep writing, to keep thinking up a few more lines to entertain both you and me until I think the line is clear.

If you have old school parents like mine, who are from the Deep South, you know how unlikely it is that they will click over when they hear the phone beep.

My mother is a Jay Leno fan, so I am sure when we talk, we will touch on tonight's guest of honor, Sarah Palin, and ruminate about what Jay might have up his sleeve to make her look bad -- not that it would be hard for a third grader to make Sarah look bad, but still, thinking about Jay's antics will take up a few minutes.

We'll talk about Al Sharpton and Tavis Smiley, and both of us will say "what is wrong with Tavis?" in the same cadence, because I learned from her how to be exasperated at the kind of dumb shit certain egotistical, limelight needing black people will do or say when they think someone is paying attention to them.

What we won't talk about, but what I will write here, is the irony of her accomplishment -- to come back to her undergraduate alma mater after teaching school for thirty eight years -- in light of the recent statistics that show almost HALF of African American high school students do not graduate these days.

Congratulations, Mom, on a life well lived!!