Hell-ary
I didn’t watch last night’s Democratic candidates debate but I understand Hillary insisted it be conducted in Afrikaans. Yet another craven attempt to sabotage Bernie Sanders, whom the vast majority of America prefers and who holds a triple digit lead over her.
Clinton: “Ons sal julle vermorsel!”
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Like It Is
On a serious note, for all the bluster about which candidate speaks her or his mind and which one will dare to utter one or another truth, it was Martin O’Malley last night who was bold enough to say what the sane among us know:
What our nation needs right now is to realize that, while we face a terrible danger, we also face a different sort of political danger. And that is the danger that democracies find themselves susceptible to when unscrupulous leaders try to turn us upon each other.
O’Malley (AP/Patrick Semansky)
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We will rise to the challenge of ISIS and we will rise together to the challenges that we face in our economy. But we will only do so if we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us, which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our American values to racists, must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.
Unscrupulous, racist, fascist, and a billionaire with a big mouth. Yeah, that’s pretty much a capsule summary of Donald Trump. And, hell — let’s take the gloves all the way off — he’s a terrorist, too.
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Another Brown Bomber
Are you freaking kidding me? Yet another brown boy has been busted in Texas for the heinous crime of carrying something that some fever-delerious pack of scared bunnies thought was a bomb.
Yep. Last weekend, a 12-year-old kid named Armaan Singh Sarai was held in juvenile detention for three days in Fort Worth because some white boy miscreant told the schoolteacher he was going to bomb the school.
Ka-Boom!
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The teacher reacted — oh-so-reasonably, natch — by immediately calling the cops, who came to the school, took Sarai in, and locked him up from Friday through Monday. All on the say-so of some adolescent dickhead. Sarai’s parents, BTW, were not told of his whereabouts while he cooled his heels in stir.
It turns out Sarai has a backpack with a solar panel on it so he can charge his electronic device while carrying it. A dopey-assed clown in his class pointed it out to Sarai and told him he was gonna tell the teach it was a bomb. Sarai laughed and the dopey-assed kid laughed. But, mirabile dictu, the dopey-assed kid dropped a dime on Sarai anyway and paranoiac psychosis ensued.
The whole damned incident could have been no-harm, no-foul, except Sarai was incarcerated for the entire weekend and — get this! — he is suspended from school, must wear an ankle monitor, and still faces unspecified criminal charges.
No mention is made of the teacher, the cops, or any sane authority figure simply eyeballing the solar panel backpack and, once establishing it was not an weapon of mass destruction, kicking the class clown in his white-boy ass.
Kicking kids in the ass is forbidden in schools these days.
Putting them behind bars — especially when their melanin level is more elevated than the average Cauc. kid’s — ain’t.
‘Specially in the Lone Star State. Do us all a favor, Tex: Secede.
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Wissing Well
A quick update: Doug Wissing’s new book, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State, is flat-out flying off the shelves at the Book Corner. Grab it while you can, kiddies.
Douglas A. Wissing
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You’re right; it’s an overreaction to “see something say something”, kind of like removing the 10 commandments from courthouses is an overreaction (and mis-interpretation in my view) of the first amendment. It’s crazy sometimes, but I suppose it’s something we have to accept. Even Bill Maher thinks the teacher did the right thing with that kid with the clock.
David, I like Bill Maher most of the time but I don’t march in lockstep with him. He’s a reactionary when it comes to Islam, bordering on fanatical. The view from here is the teacher absolutely did not do the right thing with the boy with the clock. And the 10 Commandments have no place in a courthouse. They are of nebulous origin, their explication has been subject to thousands of years of spin, interpretation, and mistranslation, and the Christianists believe some kind of omnipotent god-being gave them to a tiny, nomadic, pre-literate, pre-technological tribe wandering the desert as a guide for how the rest of the world, through the millennia of the future, should behave. And, as an example, the “Though shalt not steal” thing at a certain point was really, “Do not kidnap your neighbor’s slaves.” No mention of slavery itself as any kind of sin. You want that shit in your courthouse?
Mike, I don’t think you’re coming at it from an objective point of view. On balance, religion has done far more good than evil and I saw a picture of that “clock”. It didn’t look anything like any clock I have seen. Yes I do want that shit in courthouses if that is what the majority of the local people want.