Governor Brewer Gives President Obama The Finger

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was recently caught on film wagging a disapproving finger in President Obama’s face in his recent visit to the state.  What do we know?  The President descends the stairs from Air Force One, the Governor welcomes him with a smile, a handshake, and a letter asking the President for more of his limited time to talk about issues pertaining to Arizona.  And then we see the previously mentioned photograph where Ms. Brewer seems to be in attack mode and Mr. Obama appears to be at the end of his patience.  After that, the President turns his back on the Governor and walks away.

Mr. Obama said that the altercation was no big deal.  Ms. Brewer said that the President was upset over something she said about him in her book.  The President felt that the Ms. Brewer distorted a previous conversation the two had shared regarding immigration.  Ms. Brewer criticized the President saying that she would have never walked away from somebody having a conversation with her and felt that Mr. Obama disrespected.  Instead of walking way, we all know she’d take that boney finger of hers and start wagging it like a panic ridden Harry Potter trying to get his magic wand to work before one of Lord Voldemort’s cronies can get him.  She’ll start working her jaw muscles in a way that only reinforces her resemblance to a wrinkled up harpy or an evil step mother from a Grimm fairytale or some combination of the two.  She’d never disrespect the President by walking away from him.  She’d disrespect the President by sticking her finger in his face with all the gall she can muster.

But what was even more disrespectful and a better indication of Ms. Brewer’s thoughtless thinking process, Ms. Brewer tries to justify the encounter by going on the television news camera and telling the world that she felt threatened.  I guess the assumption is that her aggression on the President was a preemptive attack because she felt that at any moment he was about to bitch slap her wrinkled boney ass to the tarmac.

What could have prompted Ms. Brewer’s feeling of danger?  Could it be Mr. Obama’s behavior?  I could be wrong but I don’t think Mr. Obama has a violent history.  I don’t think he’s ever cold cocked anybody because of something that was said or written about him.  And for the record, there has been a bazillion instances of negative critiques of this man and much of it has been baseless, inappropriate, exaggerated, and/or totally without merit.  He’s never even raised his voice to utter a disapproving word.  So why the hell would he lose his composure and would open up a can of whoop ass on Methuselah’s mistress now?

Could it be that Ms. Brewer is an Osama bin Laden wannabe and with Mr. Obama’s successful history of taking high profile al-Qaeda operatives out was worried that a predator drone had her in its crosshairs?  That’s pretty doubtful.  The man was standing right next to her and that would’ve been suicide for him.  Did she fear his Secret Service detail?  Again, that’s another doubtful.  If the photo was any indication Mr. Obama’s posse had its attention focused elsewhere.  Did Mr. Obama lean over and threaten Ms. Brewer?  Nope!  By Ms. Brewer’s own words she said that she only felt threatened and not that she was actually threatened.  So what really snapped Ms. Brewer’s sense of eminent doom from Mr. Obama?  When you examine all the possibilities and eliminate them as not possible you’re left with just one conclusion: Not a fucking thing!

This blond headed albino California raisin never felt threatened.  Mr. Obama did nothing to fire her temper other than to tell her he didn’t appreciate what she said about him.  She claimed that Mr. Obama didn’t have a thick skin.  Really?  Because I didn’t see him losing his cool and getting too close to her grill with a Lee Press-On.  I saw the Governor doing that.  Judging from the picture it’s a safe assumption that Ms. Brewer’s skin only looks thick and copious.  If anything, he should have felt threatened.  One of those boney daggers could’ve been poison tipped.  The Secret Service probably should review its policies about letting harpies get too close to POTUS.

But because she’s a white woman being confronted by a black man she’s unable to control, she’ll throw a hissy fit and then play that “I was so scared” card to draw some sympathy and compassion.  And because of America’s total lack of respect and understanding for anyone that can be visibly identified as black, especially a black man, too many of us will buy that crap from Ms. Brewer hook, line, and sinker and judge Mr. Obama as the instigator.  He has the right to say he didn’t like his depiction in her book.  A lot of authors have to deal with readers who don’t like their work.  People are constantly writing how they don’t like whatever.  He gets bent out of shape on that shit enough to slam the President in his face?

The irrational fear of the threatening black man has been part of America’s shameful racial double standard since the first days an African man set foot on this continent.  People have been programmed to see the face of black men as angry or threatening even when the black man is wearing the friendliest of smiles on his visage.  So when the old white lady says that the black man is threatening despite all the evidence to the contrary, a large portion of our population stand ready to support this uncouth shrill of a woman that belongs in an old folks home and throw our first black President under the bus of condemnation.

Internet Trolls

Last night on MSNBC’s Politics Nation with Al Sharpton one of the guest invited to speak from the conservative right was tea party supported Kansas Representative Tim Huelskamp.  The discussion pertained to presidential contender former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s tax return and the fairness of our federal income tax system.  Mr. Sharpton welcomed Mr. Huelskamp and started with the interview.  Mr. Sharpton asked if it was fair for billionaires to pay lower taxes than their secretaries.  Mr. Huelskamp replied that he heard the President’s State of the Union address and it sounded more like a campaign speech.  Mr. Sharpton acknowledged Mr. Huelskamp’s reply as a talking point and asked the question again.  Mr. Huelskamp replied that according to the Internal Revenue Service secretaries don’t pay more than millionaires.  Mr. Sharpton asked the question again.  Mr. Huelskamp responded with a question of his own asking Mr. Sharpton how much was his income?

Finally, coming to the realization that Mr. Huelskamp wasn’t going to answer the question, Mr. Sharpton gave up and moved the conversation along.  In response to Mr. Sharpton’s capitulation, Mr. Huelskamp laughed, as if to say mission accomplished.

At that moment, I realized that there was never any intent to discuss the issue at hand.  While some politicians are more adept than others at avoiding poignant questions, Mr. Huelskamp made no attempt to hide his contempt for his host and flatly refused to participate with Mr. Sharpton’s agenda.  One may wonder the Congressman even bothered to agree to participate on the show at all.  In fact, I would say that Mr. Sharpton had experienced the talk show equivalent of an internet troll.  An internet troll can best be described as someone who posts inflammatory or off topic messages in an online discussion with the primary intent of provoking an emotional response and/or disrupting the topic at hand.  Mr. Huelskamp used this very technique to derail Mr. Sharpton’s conversation.

I recognized Mr. Huelskamp technique too well from all of my experience dealing with a number of internet trolls who come to my blog with no obvious intent but to try and deny me my opinion on matters with nothing more than their own opinion.  For example, anyone who regularly visits my blog will know that while I’m really no fan of liberal politics, I am thoroughly disgusted by the happenings in conservative politics.  I find way too many high profile conservative politicians racists and I am aghast at the number of people who are quick to support and defend these people who wear their racism on their sleeves.  And with the amount of blatant racism that has been emanating recently from people like Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Tom Coburn, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, and many others, I have been inspired time and time again to write about these people and why their political views are really an anathema to what should be an open and truly free and truly equitable American landscape.

But inevitably, my posse of regular internet trolls will show up with their nonsense to refute anything said.  Some examples of this drivel are: Black people are the real racist because black people need to get off welfare.  Black people hate the truth because it’s true.  You’re the racist because affirmative action gives black people an unfair advantage.  Black people are always playing the race card when somebody says something about black people.  Black people are dumb.  You can’t prove that the comment about black people was about all black people.  Black people have higher per capita crime rates so we need to throw all black people in jail.  If black kids didn’t commit all the crime then black kids wouldn’t have to go to jail as adults.  Black people need to get a job and quit living off white people’s work ethic.  You’re an idiot because you are stupid!  And there are so many tiresome others.

I used to try and engage these people.  I used to think that if I can engage these people and defend my position with logic and evidence to support my position then they just might understand.  But these people have no desire to understand anyone that might experience the world differently than they do.  Just like Mr. Huelskamp on Al Sharpton’s program they refuse to listen and engage in a meaningful conversation and are more concerned with trying to argue.  They have no point to make and wouldn’t recognize a point if it came up their rectum.  Now, I’ve set my comment filters so that anything that comes from them is automatically denied and goes straight to my spam bucket.  I’ve gotten very adept at updating the parameters for putting comments from trolls into the spam pool.

Every now and then I’ll go through the spam to make sure the filters are still working.  Without fail I’ll see a posting from my posse.  But it’s been a while.  These days, I just don’t have the time to waste on internet trolls like I used to.  One day, Mr. Sharpton might get there as well.  But until then, he’ll have to waste time with people who know they have no way to justify their opposition and will settle for nothing more than to just try and waste everybody’s time.

Less Than Fourteen Percent

White House hopeful and real life Daddy Warbucks and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has finally released one of his tax returns. According to his 2010 tax return, Mr. Romney made well over twenty million dollars on investments and paid a federal income tax rate of less than fourteen percent or about three million dollars. Asked about his tax return and Mr. Romney was quick to say that it was legal. I don’t think anybody was saying that Mr. Romney should be thrown in prison or anything similar so the insistence that it was all legal is misplaced. The problem is that the vast majority of us who pay taxes are paying at a rate that is twice that of Mr. Romney’s on income that is only a sliver of a fraction of his twenty million dollars. And instead of seeing the inherent favoritism towards the rich, people like Mr. Romney think that this part of the tax system is copacetic.

Everybody thinks that the tax system is unfair. But while some of us think that rich people need to pay their fare share, some of us think that we should fix the tax system from the bottom. Some of us actually think that the better solution for tax fairness is to focus on the people who are living at the poverty level and demand that they pay their fair share. People who are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, and to survive day to day don’t have the resources to pay much of anything should be forced to pay taxes. Let’s just take a moment to think about how many middle class families and individuals it would take to make up the three million dollars that could be obtained if somebody like Mitt Romney would just pay the same rate on his investments that people pay for earning a wage. Let’s say the average family of four had an income of about fifty grand. Let’s tax that whole wad at about thirty percent, twice what Mr. Romney pays. Their tax burden would be fifteen thousand dollars. Now divide that into three million dollars and you’ll get two hundred families, eight hundred individuals collectively paying more so that Mr. Romney can have his lower tax rate. How fair is that? Such a ratio would put Mr. Romney in the upper one eighth of one percent.

So much rhetoric is out there trying to convince us that if we raise the tax rate on people with Mr. Romney’s finances it would discourage the rich from investing in their country’s economy and things will only get worse for the rest of us. But that’s bullshit. One thing that’s a fact about a lot of rich people, they want to make money and become richer. No one can convince me that if Mr. Romney had to pay six million dollars in taxes instead of his much more favorable three million dollars, he would’ve said the hell with it and would’ve made the self defeating choice to do nothing. If that’s the case, why do so many of us go to work for forty hours a week, fifty weeks out of the year at a rate that is usually a lot less than what we think we deserve, to pay our thirty percent.

Yes, some of us don’t want to participate in this game. Some of us make the choice to give up on this rat race. Some of us will make do with the bare minimum and do nothing to improve ourselves. But in the infinite array of variations that come from humanity such exceptions cannot be avoided or ruled out. In a perfect utopia, there will still be many that will find fault and will buck trends for something else that better reflects their unorthodox way of thinking. But the vast majority of us will continue to play by the establishment rules, even when those rules are grossly unfair and stacked against us, kind of like America’s tax laws that continue to favor the wealthy. It is unfortunate, but when people don’t participate in the labor force other people move in to fill the void.

Like the rest of us, Mr. Romney and his peers have the choice to participate in our American collective or not. If rich people feel that raising the tax rate on capital gains investments to the same levels that the rest of us pay on our labor driven income then that’s their choice and they have the right to take their money and go wherever they chose to go. But just like the person who made the choice not to participate and passed up an opportunity to better his or her self for whatever reason, the rich person that does the same thing will leave an opening for his or her peer who still wants to do better.

Rich people who will refuse to make investments in a more equitable and fair America don’t have to participate. We don’t need to give the rich every advantage to have a strong economy. In fact, it is a sure bet that our economy will be far stronger and more resilient when our wealthy compatriots are held to the same rules as everyone else.

Lastly, if a man with an eight figure income who wants become President of the United States wants to point to his fellow Americans who have to struggle to make do with as little as four and five figure incomes and say that they should pay their fare share in taxes so that we can have a stronger nation, it really looks awfully hypocritical when that person tries to dodge the fact that he’s not paying his fair share when compared to the rest of us. It’s pretty obvious Mr. Romney won’t be hurting if his tax rate goes up. And if he can hide behind the claim that he’s done nothing illegal, then can’t many of those people who are at an income level that does not require a federal income tax say the same thing? The poor have done nothing illegal so Mr. Romney, and others who think like he does, really should get off their back.

Newt 2012

Regulations Are A Necessary Evil

It is a mantra of conservative politics.  Excessive federal regulations are choking the life out of business.  Never mind that a local or state government could pass the same regulation or make even more stringent regulations on a business and nobody says peep.  Regulations from Washington, DC makes it impossible for America’s businesses to compete in the global market.  Never mind that American businesses are more profitable now than they’ve ever been in history.  Never mind that the wealth of the upper echelons on the financial ladder continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.  Even though businesses are extremely wealthy, they are going broke and the primary reason is the regulations that continue to stifle creativity and competitiveness even though businesses are more competitive and are more efficient than ever.

But there is a reason regulations were put in place.  It might be hard to fathom but there was a time when businesses in this country operated with very little regulation.  Nobody thought it would take regulations to make cars safer until it became painfully apparent that American car companies would rather sell faulty unsafe hunks of junk to a public that simply assumed car companies wanted to keep us safe.  Nobody thought it would take regulations to make a food company sell us foods without toxic levels of substances until we found out that food companies would be more than happy to sell us packaged poisons.  Nobody thought it would take regulations to make a manufacturer stop dumping into rivers and streams and lakes until we saw these waters catch fire and/or poison the aquatic life under their surface.  And everybody knows that there are plenty of American companies who would prefer to pass on hiring blacks and other minorities to work in their facilities if regulations didn’t make it necessary to have some kind of racial representation on their work force.

The way some people like to tell the story you would think that some bureaucrat is sitting off somewhere doing nothing but thinking of ways to screw the business community into oblivion with oppressive regulations.  But just about every business regulation put to paper was done so because we learned that people who run businesses didn’t always voluntarily do the right thing when it comes to anything or anyone who wasn’t an investor.  Too many businesses have a history of doing nothing or doing no more than the absolute minimum as required by law.  That’s one of the reasons why we have to add regulations on top of regulations.

The other reason we have to add more regulations on top of regulations is because many deep pocketed businesses have legions of lawyers to comb through laws to find each and every loop hole that can be used to manipulate the system.  There’s a reason why the book of regulations meant to serve as the minimum requirements to manufacture a toothbrush is as thick as the Chicago phonebook.  Without explicit instructions to remove any chance of vague interpretation and/or potential for misunderstanding, businesses will simply shrug their collective shoulders and swear that they didn’t understand that polluting the drinking water was unacceptable.  Corporations hold the lion’s share of responsibility for the regulatory climate we exist under.  And if we didn’t like the way businesses conducted themselves prior to regulations, what makes us think that businesses will do the right thing if we stop regulating?

There’s a reason that we have an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Does anybody remember the images of polluted waterways from the 1970’s before the EPA existed?  Does anybody remember how phosphates were heavily used in our detergents and led to the overabundance of algae in streams that reduced the oxygen supply of the water and suffocated the fish?  Does anybody remember how lead in our gasoline led to more air pollution from cars?  Does anybody remember how automobile companies fought tooth and nail to keep seatbelt laws off the books because it gave the public impression that driving automobiles could be unsafe?  Does anybody remember how car companies resisted airbags?  Does anybody remember how we used to let chemical companies poison our children with leaded paint?

Regulations are not a bad thing.  If anything, regulations have been very helpful.  They are not a necessary evil, they are a necessary good.  The idea that we should go back to a time when businesses can operate with impunity doesn’t sit well with me and it shouldn’t sit well with you.  Businesses want to convince us that they’ve learned from the past and are ready to do the right thing without being forced is a fairy tale.  Just look at the way businesses are pushing for the abolishment of the EPA.  They are practically salivating at the mouth over the profits they’ll reap when they don’t have to be forced to clean up after themselves.  If we don’t mandate that they actually cleanup, chances are pretty high that all they will do is create a marketing campaign that will help convince the public that they’re being good citizens and their job will be done.

Keystoned XL

Shortly after he announced his retirement, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank did an appearance on ABC’s This Week With Christian Amanpour when the topic turned to the possible legalization of marijuana. Staunch über conservative George Will was against the suggestion even though it would create a ton of jobs, cut down on the need for prisons, and create a huge surplus of sales tax revenue. Mr. Will tried to stress that he isn’t totally against the idea of some legalization of marijuana, but the subject needed more study before he would be comfortable enough to endorse such a move. Mr. Frank was incredulous. It’s been studied for nearly a century. How much further study does it need?

Mr. Will said he wanted to understand the exact ramifications of legal marijuana usage and the potential for it to be used as a gateway drug. He wanted a unanimous scientific approval without a single dissenting opinion before he could even think about ignoring his own personal dissention. Mr. Frank countered that everything is a gateway drug. Alcohol is a gateway drug but nobody is advocating a return to prohibition. Tons of legal prescription drugs as well as over the counter pharmaceuticals are used as a precursor before people look for something stronger for a high. Where are the demands to outlaw these drugs until we know for a fact that they don’t serve as a gateway for something else? Ms. Amanpour interrupted the debate to move the show onto a commercial break. The subject was closed without anything really being discussed.

United States drug policy has operated on the assumption that marijuana increases the probability that users will eventually move to stronger drugs since World War II. This assumption has been the number one reason for the heavy handed approach to keep marijuana an illegal substance even though studies have shown that tobacco smoking is a much better predictor of illicit hard drug use. No widely accepted study has ever demonstrated a cause and effect relationship between marijuana and more dangerous drugs. And it has been studied for more than sixty years. But people like Mr. Will say that they need more study. We have to make sure we don’t leave any stone unturned in our search to get to the root of understanding the effects, if there are any, of marijuana using every test known to man and other tests that have yet to be invented. In other words, despite the potential for jobs and other real benefits to the country’s economy, the legalization of marijuana it’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

The Keystone XL is a seventeen hundred mile long pipeline system that is intended to transport synthetic crude oil from Alberta, Canada to multiple destinations in the United States such as refineries in Illinois, distribution hubs in Oklahoma, and various refineries along the gulf coast of Texas. Although it was originally proposed way back in 2005, the pipeline has encountered a great deal of resistance from environmentalists, economist, business competitors, and members of Congress. In November, 2011, President Barack Obama postponed the decision to allow the pipeline to be built until 2013. It is believed Mr. Obama made this choice to avoid the pipeline becoming a campaign issue in the 2012 presidential election. But the following December, Senate Republicans were able to tie the Keystone project to the approval of the payroll tax cut extension that was set to expire at the end of the year. Mr. Obama had promised to veto the legislation. But with a clear path to getting the extension, Mr. Obama signed the legislation into law. The plan was to force Mr. Obama to approve Keystone within sixty days unless it was determined that the project was not in the best interest of the country.

Sixty days to study what’s best for the country. That’s a lot of ground to cover. How many jobs would it really create? The estimate ranges from as little as fifteen hundred to as many as thirty thousand. Transcanada, the energy giant bidding to build the pipeline, admitted that the vast majority of jobs the pipeline would create would be temporary construction jobs and that the project would likely yield only a few hundred permanent positions. What would be the potential impact of a catastrophic pipeline failure? After the fiasco with British Petroleum and the gulf coast disaster that took months to resolve, people need to show a little more prudence before stamping a project approved and setting people up for disaster, especially when plans call for the pipe to pass right through a major aquifer that supplies drinking water for a good chunk of the population in a few states. What are the disaster recovery plans in case the worse happens? Who will be held accountable? And the Obama administration had just sixty days to review the plans and approve the project.

If the Keystone pipeline was meant to transport marijuana, a lot of people who are gung ho in their support of the project for the transportation of oil wouldn’t hesitate to derail this train. We’d have to study the effects of marijuana every which way for the next hundred years before we would even entertain the idea of building a transportation network for it. But if it’s oil, who cares? Jobs are at stake and the future of the economy hangs in the balance and the President doesn’t understand what he’s doing and nobody in the Obama administration gives a damn about hardworking Americans.

Sixty days is plenty of time to railroad this project down the country’s throat. It serves them right. If people would just let some of us take a toke or two we wouldn’t have all this drama in our politics. If nothing else, marijuana would’ve helped ease some of our anxiety over the fear that the dream of even more oil turns into our worst nightmare whenever something goes wrong.

When Juan Became Synonymous With Boy

It’s not often I feel for Juan Williams.  I think the man lives in a fantasy world where racism doesn’t exist and nobody sees the racial lineage of anyone else despite the lack or abundance of melanin in somebody’s skin.  Mr. Williams gives me the impression that the only time he thinks we’re justified to notice somebody’s ethnicity, culture, race, or whatever it can be that can be used as an indication of somebody’s heritage is when we can reasonably guess that somebody comes from or follows the spiritual teaching of people from the Middle East.  Then, Mr. Williams thinks it might be okay to have an issue as to whether or not we should fly on a plane with such a person without fearful fantasies of ululations of how great somebody’s vision of the Supreme Being may be before some act of terrorism.  Then, we are free to wear our racism on our sleeves as a matter of self preservation.  Otherwise, we are a racially homogenous collection of people.

Time and time again I thought Mr. Williams would have to be truly blind to see the racism that is so prevalent in our political, social, educational, occupational, and financial environments.  But instead of admitting witness to a social injustice, Mr. Williams would explain it away as nothing more than an unfortunate incident that could happen to anybody, even though it might seem to only impact black people or significantly impact black people at a much more significant rate that is too high to dismiss as coincidence.  Because of his inability to call racism out as the ugliest of monsters in our midst, I have dismissed Juan Williams as nothing more than another black person who would be more than happy to tolerate racism and acts of racism.  When Mr. Williams was fired as a contributor to National Public Radio and went to work for FOX News, I thought good riddance.  But when I saw the video clip of the exchange between Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich from the South Carolina debate, as one black man to another, I was truly embarrassed for him.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or unless you are truly racially insensitive, it should be no surprise that Mr. Gingrich has been making some serious racially charged accusations.  Mr. Gingrich has insinuated that black people don’t want to work for a living but want to live a dependent lifestyle of entitlement by doing nothing and collecting food stamps from the government.  He has accused the urban poor of not having a good work ethic.  The urban poor don’t go to work every day unless it’s to perform some criminal activity.  He’s spread so much racially insensitive rhetoric that it has even gotten under the skin of the otherwise racially flaccid Mr. Williams.

As one of the moderators of the South Carolina debate, Mr. Williams took it upon himself to ask Mr. Gingrich about his rhetoric.  Mr. Williams asked Mr. Gingrich if he could understand, if he could see why someone would be offended by his recent statements regarding black people.  Mr. Gingrich responded with a simple and indignant, “No I don’t see that”.  It was said with a flair that indicated that Mr. Gingrich wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about what he said and no explanation was necessary.  When Mr. Williams persisted, Mr. Gingrich responded with a dismissive “Juan”.  The name “Juan” rolled off Mr. Gingrich’s tongue as if he was using the moderator’s own name to call him a boy, the way a white man would call a black man boy back in the day.  It was as if Mr. Gingrich was trying to say, “Look here, boy…”

The virtually all white conservative audience loved the exchanged.  Mr. Gingrich got an unprecedented standing ovation.  Of course there was racism.  These people are tired of paying through the nose and having their tax dollars wasted on coddling black people.  If black people would just go to work and earn a living for a change they wouldn’t have to worry about somebody like Newt Gingrich telling them to get off the food stamps.  And how dare that Juan boy say anything about it.  This country is going to hell in a hand basket and this boy wants to worry about people telling black people to get their act together.  But that wasn’t the end of it.  A couple of days later during a campaign speech, a woman thanked Mr. Gingrich for putting Juan Williams in his place the way he did.  That boy was out of his mind asking Mr. Gingrich such a ludicrous question.

Juan Williams was setup perfectly.  He was the substitute for Barack Obama who wasn’t available for the evening.  The crowd booed him as he asked his questions.  Mr. Gingrich, feeling the energy in the room, gave the crowd what they were hoping for.  He gave them just a sample of what they can expect to see if he wins the primary.  Mr. Gingrich won’t hesitate to tap into his wealth of white superiority to put black people in their place.  He said it on the campaign trail.  He says it about the President.  He says it in debates.  And he will say it to a black man’s face.

Did Juan Williams deserve Mr. Gingrich’s ire?  I hate to say it, but yes he did.  Nobody set Mr. Williams up but Mr. Williams.  Throughout his journalistic career he has pretended, insisted that race is not a factor in our lives.  If nothing else, the exchange between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Williams should have been a wakeup call to whatever passes as self respect within Mr. Williams conscious and help him realize that his kind, black people who might question the behavior of his or her so-called peers, aren’t tolerated here.  If black people want to be a part of the conservative experience, they are going to have to remember their place.  Otherwise, they become a focal point for the racial animosity that these people have been struggling to keep in check for years and are just waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to unleash.

More Dangerous Than The Rest

There’s a lot of racism emanating from the high profile conservatives vying to replace Barack Obama as the President of the United States.  Doing their best to prove their worth to their white constituents, or the non white constituents who strongly identify with their white compatriots, this year’s conservative politicians will stop at nothing to protect the status quo of white privilege.  Although they have different ways of injecting racism into their contest of who can best protect old fashioned values and take us back to a time where black people knew their place, the message that black people need to stop taking advantage of the system.  According to these politicians, the best way to stop black people is to destroy the government sponsored safety nets that keep people from going to work and earning a living.  Almost every other day we hear some new racist rhetoric either recently uttered or something they have written or said back in the day.

Most recently is the racist rhetoric from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that manifested during the South Carolina presidential debates.  Mr. Gingrich claims that he has no clue that his statements that black people should want to earn a living and should want to get off food stamps or his statements that Mr. Obama, America’s first and only black President, wants to be the President of food stamps would be offensive to black people.  In Mr. Gingrich’s less than esteemed opinion, it is a matter of fact that more people have ended up on welfare during Mr. Obama’s administration than any other administration in the history of the country, never mind the fact that in many people’s opinion it was Mr. Obama’s predecessor that led this nation’s economy down a path that resulted in so many people needing government assistance.

But not to be outdone is Texas Representative Ron Paul and his lame newsletter The New Republic that’s full of racist comments that reinforces all kinds of negative black stereotypes.  One of the latest excerpts to come from Mr. Paul’s past says, “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held as responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult, and should be treated as such.”  That’s a racially charged, prejudice statement.  Mr. Paul advocates treating all black children as adults, never mind the fact that there are white children that are just as, if not more dangerous, than any adult.  Does this means it would be okay to treat with children as dangerous adults?  Case in point is the story of Alyssa Bustamante.

Alyssa Bustamante is a Missouri teenager who has been in jail for the past two years on murder charges for killing her nine year old neighbor Elizabeth Olten because she wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.  Alyssa made her confession as part of a plea bargain just a week or so ago as prosecutors reduced the original first degree murder charge to second degree murder.  Instead of Alyssa having to serve a mandatory life term in prison, she is now eligible for parole in as little as ten years.  Alyssa told the court exactly how she killed her little neighbor.  Alyssa confessed that she initially strangled Elizabeth with her hands and then stabbed the girl in the chest with a knife.  And then, after all of that, she used the knife to slit the little girl’s throat.  When she was finally dead, Alyssa then buried the body in a grave she dug near her home.  Authorities spent two days combing through the area in search of Elizabeth before Alyssa led them to the girl’s grave.

Alyssa listed her hobbies as cutting and killing people on an online profile which has since been taken down.  Prior to committing murder she was admitted to psych ward after trying to commit suicide.  Alyssa’s court appointed representative said that she had attempted to cut herself with her own fingernails while she was being held in custody after her arrest for Elizabeth’s murder and Alyssa showed signs of severe depression and anxiety.  Everyone says that she was nothing but a poor girl in need of help and understanding.

Would anyone say that convicted murderer Alyssa needed to be treated like just another adult criminal or murderer?  Not at all.  She’s a little white girl with a troubled past who needs to be embraced and rehabilitated and put back out on an unassuming public.  That is, unassuming for white girls who have committed murder in the coldest of blood.  If Alyssa was black more than likely she’d be on death’s row.  Why?  As a society we have been programmed and conditioned to see white teenage girls as something that the majority of us can relate to and therefore we can share their experiences and relate to their behavior.  They are redeemable.  We can take a chance on their salvation.  We will make the effort necessary to try and put people like Alyssa back into our midst.  She was only trying to learn what it felt like to kill somebody.  Who can hold her curiosity against her?  She’s just a little scamp with homicidal tendencies.

But young black people?  We already know young blacks are unpredictable and scary and are probably from a crime oriented environment without any positive role models to help shape their ethics and morals.  According to some, like Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, there is nothing worth saving here.  We can cut our losses and shoot young black people on sight out of racial prejudice fueled by years of conditioning by people who will do anything and everything to convince the rest of us that black people are less than the rest of us.  So if a black person is even looks like they can be accused of doing something outside their normally accepted behavior, we shouldn’t pass on the opportunity to put that person in their true place.

Romney’s America

Red Tails

Hollywood is a business that rarely takes financial risks.  It’s one of the reasons why some people with nothing more than a reputation for movie excellence stay at the top while other people with actual movie excellence struggle or wind up falling out of the game.  Hollywood doesn’t take much in the way of financial risk.  It’s one of the reasons Hollywood doesn’t have much of an interest in developing movies featuring circumstances that pertain to the black community.  Black movies that don’t feature Tyler Perry in a dress, black movies that don’t have black people in what can be little more than a jigging contest to be some white person’s sidekick, black movies that don’t cater to the black stereotype that shows how miserable it is to be black in America, usually don’t get the green light for development, or are transformed to make the original black hero a white guy.

There is a perception from the powers that be in the movie making industry that movies developed around a black theme don’t do as well as the white themed films.  Black films are perceived as not being as successful with their appeal to a limited audience of black people who only make up a fraction of the population.  Like a lot of things in America, success does not require any appeal to black people.  In fact, leave black people out and the chances for success are amplified.  That’s the perception.  To support this theory people need to think back to the Vince Vaughn movie Couples Retreat.  The poster for the film featured four couples, three white and one black, standing in beach water in some vacation paradise with varying degrees of misery on their faces.  When the movie was marketed overseas, the black couple was removed from the poster in an attempt to broaden the movies appeal.

George Lucas, the father of modern day action packed science fiction with his Star Wars anthology, did an interview with John Stewart on the Daily Show.  Mr. Lucas wanted to make a movie about the forgotten black heroes of World War II known as the Tuskegee Airmen, but formally known as the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps.  The Tuskegee Airmen were this country’s very first African American aviators in the United States at a time when blacks were regularly subjected to blatant racism and racial prejudice that was sanctioned by governments at all levels within the United States.  Like the rest of America, the military was deeply racially segregated with black people purposely forced to reside on the shitty side of the dividing line.  Yet, the Tuskegee Airmen were able to earn their reputation for distinction in service to their country flying their P-51 Mustangs as bomber escorts over Europe.

In the interview, Mr. Lucas said he had to use his own money to finance the development of Red Tails.  He actually claimed that major film studios would not back his historical movie because there were no major white roles in it despite the fact that the movie features Oscar winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terence Howard.  When Mr. Lucas presented the movie to studio reps, they declined citing that they have no experience on how to market a movie like this, meaning void of any white leads.  He also said that the studios didn’t believe there was a foreign market for the film and that accounts for three-fifths of their profit.  Undaunted, Mr. Lucas said he put nearly a hundred million dollars of his own money into the development of the film and towards its distribution cost.  And if the movie does well he’s ready to do a prequel and a sequel.

Despite the financial success of movies with an all black cast or a predominantly black cast like Boomerang, Coming To America, Soul Food, Friday, All About The Benjamins, House Party, The Great Debaters, School Daze, Malcolm X, Ray, Love and Basketball, The Five Heartbeats, and others, Hollywood insists that it’s too risky to put an investment into a black film, even one aimed to tell the historic story of how our black elders and ancestors overcame racism and prejudice to serve this country with distinction at a time when the white majority felt that the only role jobs black people were fit to have were things like cooks, janitors and sharecroppers.

Then again, what’s really changed?  The only black movies the racially generic, but predominantly white, majority wants to see are the ones that will have the black characters blending into the background of some white person’s foreground, or the ones that help to reinforce the negative black stereotypes that help to distort the black experience into a cliché, or the types of black movies that try to white wash America’s history of racial prejudice against black people to convince us that it really wasn’t all that bad back in the day.  And that’s only if the dominant majority wants to see such a black film.  Want to see Martin Lawrence in a dress and fat old lady makeup?  Not a problem.

But let somebody with a reputation for producing financially lucrative movies like Star Wars want to make a movie about America’s historic heroes, the Tuskegee Airmen.  There isn’t enough money in the world to convince some people to take a risk on something like that.  Too often the only black some people want to see is the kind that comes from investing in more orthodox films that feature characters the majority can relate to.  Make the mistake of pitching a movie about black people and the rules of what can be done to make a film a success fly right out the window.

Mr. Lucas should be applauded and supported for having the nerve to go it alone.  Sure he could’ve done another World War II movie telling the story of some group of generic white American hero pilots that fly through the air without a care for their own safety and a reputation for doing daredevil stunts.  It’s only been done about a million times over with actors from John Wayne to Marlon Brando to Jan Michael Vincent to Robert Conrad to Tom Cruise to Clint Eastwood to Jake Lloyd who played ten year old Anakin Skywalker in Mr. Lucas’ Star Was film The Phantom Menace.  We can always use another film about the white guy in a cockpit, even if he is only ten years old.  But change that character to black and more than likely all you will get is an excuse of why it can’t be done.

Like a lot of black films, like a lot of people who put their reputation on the line and buck trends to give black people and the black experience an opportunity to be heard and seen when other people say no, this movie needs the support of the black community. That should go without saying. This film also deserves the support of everyone that likes to talk about patriotism and sacrificing for life and country. That should also go without saying. The Tuskegee Airmen supported their country with their lives at a time when their country did very little to support them to be treated as equally human. And if Mr. Lucas does well with his gamble we can expect him to produce two more movies to tell part of the black community’s story. And who knows, maybe Hollywood will learn once and for all how to market a black film for the masses.