Category Archives: Racism

06/19/2015
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Charleston Church Shooting, Fox News, Guns, Nikki Haley, Racism

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Kill Joy

If anything of value can emerge from the South Carolina church shooting Wednesday, it’s the sheer entertainment we’ve gotten from the Wingnut Right’s reaction to it.

I mean, imagine how flummoxed the Fox News et al crowd has to be over this terrorist attack. Nine blacks (the American equivalent of one-half a 22-year-old suburban blonde) are killed by a white boy gun fondler whose beef against them is they represent the bestial horde that’s raping Cauc. women and “taking over” this holy land. Honestly, in the bizarro world of the Far Right, is this even a crime? Hell, the porcelain dolls who pass for news commentators on Fox and other ultra-conservative media outlets are hammering away at these grievances every day anyway.

So, while the sane among us were decrying this white supremacist attack, the Fox/Far Right people were dithering over its meaning. Golly no, it wasn’t a racial attack, a number of them bleated; it was…, um, er, more of an attack on Christianity — yeah, that’s the ticket! And the little loon who pulled the trigger wasn’t enabled by our devil-may-care gun laws; in fact, some “wits” proffered, the whole shebang wouldn’t even have gone down if the parishioners had been packing heat themselves, as should all god-fearing, Murrica-loving, primarily pale-skinned citizens.

Fox News

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For nearly two full days, the Goebbels wing of the know-nothing crowd seemed nauseatingly (albeit explicably) muted about the attack. That is, until this AM when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley finally found a reason to shout about it.

Perhaps it occurred to her as she showered. I know many of my own epiphanies come upon me as I lather up. However it happened, Haley realized she and the state could kill the kid.

How exciting! Haley announced that, goddamn yes, the sovereign state of So. Car. would indeed seek the death penalty when the kid goes on trial.

Haley

A Ray Of Sunshine

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See? Now the Fox-ers and their ilk can get all het up over this…, er, um, little incident.

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06/18/2015
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Bruce Rauner, Rachel Dolezal, Racism, Richard Lloyd, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Wealth & Privilege

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Hurt Us, Please!

Who’s the worst state governor in America? Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, whose claims to fame are his gleeful union-busting and obeisant coat-holding for the Koch Boys? Billionaire Bruce Rauner, who virtually purchased the guv’s mansion, office, and…, hell, the whole of Illinois? Can either ever be a fraction as bad as half-term slacker/grifter Sarah Palin?

At least her damage was limited to a truncated 31-month sorta term. She did do one thing spectacularly well and beneficial to the people of her state: She quit.

So Walker and Rauner duke it out in contiguous states for the heavyweight title of rotten. Except a third contender might well wrest the belt from the two. He is Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Brownback

Sam Brownback

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Here’s his mortal sin: He claims to have cut Kansas taxes. Actually, he did; only for the wealthy — those who make more than half a million a year. Acc’d’g to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Public Policy, under Brownback’s new tax schedule, unfortunates making less than $23,000 a year (read: the working poor) will pay $197 more a year in state taxes. A couple of c-notes is real dough to someone making $442 a week at best. It’s like Bruce Rauner (2013 income: $67,780,000) having to fork over an extra $5,227,000 to the state, disregarding the fact that even if he had to, Rauner still would have tens and tens and tens of millions of bucks to maintain his lifestyle of Croesus.

That poor sap making $442 bucks a week would have to forgo (choose one or more):

  • Paying the electric bill
  • Paying the gas bill
  • Paying the cable/broadband bill
  • Getting new tires for the car
  • Going to the doctor for that troublesome mole
  • Beef
  • A new pair of shoes, a pair of trousers, a shirt, and six pairs of socks

The list can go on.

And the sick-as-hell aspect of this Kansas mess? A majority of people making $23,000 or less in that state actually voted for the dirty bastard who’s fleecing them today.

They got what they deserve.

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The What & The Whys

Prof. Rich Lloyd of Vanderbilt University asks a compelling triad of Q.’s about former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal:

  • What prompted her estranged parents to publicly out her?
  • Why now?
  • And why is no one questioning this?

Count me in: I wanna know, too.

As for the corporate media, they’re loving this story because they can spin it off in a bazillion different directions, all predicated on this holy land’s singular historical malignant tumor: Blacks ain’t Whites and vice versa.

Jim Crow

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As usual, the professional wits and wags are way off on this one. The Dolezal affair has nothing in the world to do with the state of race relations in America. It has only to do with her demonstrable craziness that, quite frankly, borders on the criminal.

As Sigmund Freud never said, Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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06/17/2015
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1 Percent, 2014 National Right to Life Convention, 99 Percent, Bloomingfoods, Colin Powell, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Racism, Scott Walker, Southern Strategy, Wealth Gap

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Choice?

What’s more depressing — the possibility that the 2016 presidential campaign will be between two near-doppelgänger dynasts, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, or the fact that a farceur like Donald Trump’s entry into the race is taken seriously enough that the New York Times covers it?

Clinton/Bush

Pick ‘Em

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Me? I’d almost welcome Scott Walker’s nomination by the Party of God because at least he’s an ideologue. He’d offer us a clear choice between him and anybody else in terms of who we want to be as a nation. Then again, I say “almost” because, honestly, I don’t want him to get the nom. I mean, what if he wins the election?

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Race War Vs. Class War

With the meme of Gen. Colin Powell decrying the racism within his Republican Party making the rounds again on social media, my pal, the Lake County Republican, poses the following Q: Why does Powell remain a Republican? Why doesn’t he just quit and join the Dems? Now, while the LCR fully agrees that the racists and chronic racism within the GOP are abhorrent, he believes there’s a greater underlying philosophical reason why the Republicans are the better party. After all, the LCR himself hasn’t quit the GOP.

Here’s the LCR’s explanation:

I think it is because the actions of a few [Democrats] are despicable [and] the ethos of the Democratic Party is even worse. They appeal to the base human instincts of envy and resentment of those better off….

This, among other things, the LCR posits, makes the Dems “even more corrosive to the nation” than the racism within the GOP.

That’s quite a charge. My take: I’ll bet Colin Powell himself can’t fully explain why he remains a Republican. It may be inertia. Powell grew up at a time when the most virulent racists and segregationists were Democrats. Harry Byrd, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox all were Dems. That, of course, was before Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy folded the Neanderthal wing of the Democratic Party into the GOP.

Now then. The LCR’s charge that the 99% appeal (which precious few Dem candidates are embracing in any case) is worse for this holy land than the racism that has torn it apart since the early 1800s. Sheer lunacy, my friend. Peeps aren’t screaming bloody murder because others are successful or “better off.” They’re hollering because the game is rigged. The way the system works now, those who have dough get more at the expense of those who haven’t got it. The plutocracy more and more controls policy and legislation via lobbyists and campaign moneys. Too many Richie Rich’s didn’t earn their dough; they inherited it. And far too many millionaires and billionaires didn’t get that way through hard work and the production of goods and services that somehow benefit, y’know, people. They’ve been degenerate gamblers who gamed the system to rake in their dirty dollars.

Mr. Moneybags

A Crooked Game

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And both the Democrats and Republicans are responsible for this economic world of shit.

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Better Late Than Never

My delayed reaction to Bloomingfoods‘ divorce from long-time GM George Huntington and the subsequent axing of a nearly two doz. mid-level managers at the co-op’s three locations:

Both are good moves, albeit anywhere from two to 10 years too late.

Huntington

Bloom Mag Photo Of George Huntington By Amber Lynn Brown

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My rec. for B-foods’ next good move? Shut down the East Side and the Elm Heights stores before tomorrow morning. Concentrate on the Near West site and make it a viable local alternative to the new Lucky’s Market and the to-come Whole Foods Market.

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06/16/2015
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NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, Racism

Hot Air

Black Like Her

“I identify as Black.”

So says Rachel Dolezal. The now-former boss of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, Dolezal has been outed by her parents and further embarrassed by the revelation that she sued Howard University et al years ago, claiming she was discriminated against because she was white.

If nothing else, we’ve learned she is an awfully confused woman.

Anyway, she’s not apologizing. She’s not outright admitting Caucasian-ness, either. She’s lingering in the limbo that a lot of public-eye fabulists inhabit. Pete Rose, Bill Clinton, cigarette company execs, everybody in the GW Bush admin. who breathed the words “weapons of mass destruction,” and Donald Trump, whenever he’s asked if he has a human conscience, all have danced around the truth in the face of incontrovertible evidence.

Here’s the sin, re: Dolezal’s charade: no matter how much she digs brown and black people, no matter how many R&B singles she has in her collection, no matter how many different African ways she styles her hair, she really, really, really doesn’t know what it is to be a “nigger.”

Jim Crow

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Because that’s what the NAACP is all about: Fighting for people who’ve been nigger-ized. I’ll guess Dolezal was never savaged by dramatic, overt, racism. Not only that, she never had to endure the death by a thousand cuts that subtle, unintentional, casual racism visits upon every dark skinned person in this holy land every single day.

And even if she was, somewhere in the back of her mind — supposing that she is not psychotic or delusional — she always could comfort herself with the knowledge that she is genetically white. That is, of course, if there is such a thing as genetic whiteness. In fact, the whole notion of race is merely a a flimsy social construct anyway.

Still, the hate-laden racists of the world have a well-honed ability to sense who is descended from the nations and tribes of Africa. Like homophobes, racists devote ungodly amounts of time and energy to fingering and stigmatizing the objects of their disgust.

Brown and black people every day are reminded they’re not as good, not as deserving, not as ambitious, not as astute, not as civilized as white people. White people never fail to remind them — and themselves — of these “facts.” When you’re told that every minute of the day, you just might start believing it.

Inherent blackness — whatever that means — becomes equated with inherent inferiority. It’s the tyranny of melanin. Dolezal lives under no such tyranny.

Melanin

A Cause For Hate: The Molecular Structure Of Melanin

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For my money, what Dolezal has done is analogous to sons and daughters of wealth who pretend to live as penniless bohemians. When push comes to shove, they can always go home for a hot meal.

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06/13/2015
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McKinney Texas, Police Brutality, Racism, Rich Kent

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Hoosier Bloodlines

Okay, sure, yeah yeah, there’s something in the water in Texas that makes people, well, Texans.

And so, no one’s surprised that it’s a Texan who started a GoFundMe page to raise a million bucks so he and whatever other pals he’s rounded up can run uppity Negroes out of the Lone Nut…, er, Star State. A guy who brands himself “Dr.” Rich Kent — as well as a “red-blooded American” — pledges he will personally show up at the “little hotel[s]” and “little hiding spots” black activists are staying in down McKinney, Texas way and throw them out of the state.

Click on over to his Facebook video page. He’s not a racist — swear to god.

Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 9.56.53 AM

The “Doc’s” Video Page

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All because these race-baiters want to gripe and moan about the cop who threw that vicious, murderous, bikini’d 14-year-old on the ground and flashed his piece at a bunch of other swimsuited terrorists. Sheesh.

Anyway, the “doctor” will show up at the various hotels and hiding spots at 10 o’clock this morning to begin the eviction process. Stayed tuned for further updates on his and his pals’ progress.

A final trivia point: The “doctor” originally hails from — here it comes — Indiana.

Yup. If people from Texas become Texans because of some weird substance in their drinking water (haha), what’s our excuse?

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04/09/2015
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Chad Carrothers, Harry Shearer, Joe Estivill, Louis Malone, Michael Slager, Nixon Tapes, Pam Davidson, Police Brutality, Racism, Richard M. Nixon, Tom Henderson, WFHB

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Democracy

It’s WFHB board election time with three plucky souls throwing their hats in the ring. And, BTW, Board president Joe Estivill is snatching his hat back. Joe, proprietor of The Players Pub, is retiring after a tumultuous term as the big man of the nine-member conclave.

Among other fires he and his Board battled, the resignation of dynamic General Manager Chad Carrothers and the subsequent botched hiring of Kevin Culbertson rank among the hottest. Under Estivill’s captaincy, the Board eventually rectified the Culbertson mess and the station settled back into a somewhat peaceful existence.

spotphoto-580x330

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Joe’s Board also authorized the hiring of a politically-wired money-raiser: Dorothy Granger became the station’s Development Director in the summer of 2014. Granger also is District II representative on Bloomington’s City Council.  With on-air fundraiser revenues falling short of projections since the departure of Carrothers, the station has been in need of cash. Granger’s hat-in-hand work has been a lifesaver.

Station members will vote on the Board members at WFHB’s annual meeting in June. Here’s the slate thus far:

  • Attorney Pam Davidson is running for reelection. She serves on the finance committee, volunteers at Middle Way House and Lotus, and is a member of the WFIU & WTIU Community Advisory Boards.
  • Louis Malone was appointed to fill out an unfinished term on the Board early last year. He’s running for a full term now. Louis is shelter care coordinator for the Youth Services Bureau of  Monroe County. He’s a member of the personnel and nominating committees.
  • Tom Henderson is a first-time aspirant for the Board. He says he offers public radio, media technology, information technology experience.

The above three have been vetted by the Board’s nominating committee. As always, the Board has put out the call for petition candidates — that is, any who collects 10 signatures of station members can get on the June ballot. None have to this point.

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Harry As Dick

Y’gotta watch Harry Shearer do his dramatization of the Nixon Tapes. That’s all; just watch.

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Broken Taillights

So, a Charleston, South Carolina cop was charged with murder for shooting a guy in the back the other day. It’s not known just yet how many slugs Walter Scott caught from behind but Officer Michael Slager did fire eight shots at the 50-year-old as he ran away.

The killing might have been a blip on the radar screen of today’s police war on America’s dark-skinned citizens save for the fact that someone caught the incident on video. Hearing about a summary execution on the street is one thing; seeing it is entirely another.

Cop apologists can moan all they want about how we — the woefully uninformed citizenry — can never understand what pressures and fears officers endure on the streets. How would you react? they typically say in that challenging tone of voice. My answer in this case would be I wouldn’t shoot a goddamned guy in the back.

It’s true, we civilians don’t know all the nuances and details about the relationship between cops and people of color but we do know this: one police department after another has been busted for racial profiling, cops all over this holy land exchange racist emails, many big city police forces have KKK sects within their departments, story after story tell us about cops shooting unarmed black men but not shooting armed white men, and US citizens are 100 times more likely to be shot by the police than UK citizens, after allowances are made for the population difference.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight. Those in the know are fully aware that the broken taillight is the hassling cops best friend. As attorney Mark Geragos told one cop defender on CNN last night, “…[M]y father was a prosecutor for many years [and] used to say, ‘There’s more guys in state prison for broken tail lights than any other offense. Broken tail light means go hassle somebody of color.'”

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What the cops are doing is a natural outgrowth of human behavior. Cops are confronted with the ugliest side of humanity every day. They begin feeling helpless under the constant onslaught of immorality, illegality, and — pure and simple — viscerally disgusting behavior.

Like any other human, a cop wants to lash out. He wants to find someone to punish for the flood of vice he witnesses every moment of his working day. He wants to make someone pay. In the United States, we have a convenient population of poor, alienated, scarily different-colored people. Being poor, they’re more likely to be involved in crime — petty and otherwise — so the poorly prepared cop zeroes in.

Go look for a broken tail light and fuck that gorilla up.

And don’t underestimate the usage of the term gorilla or any other similar apish pejorative. Cops are not anthropologists. They’re not scientists of any sort. Too many only know that those black bastards are animals.

Until our American city governments start training cops properly and weeding out the reactionaries and racists, until even the “mildly” prejudiced cops are separated from the overall force, more black men will be killed. And make no mistake, it’s not just bad white cops  who see black men as the enemy — far too many black cops see ghetto blacks as some kind of substandard citizen.

These shootings have to stop.

[h/t to Richard Lloyd.]

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03/19/2015
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2015 Mayoral Election, Ashley Judd, Bloomington Plan Commission, Curt Schilling, Cyberbullying, John Calipari, Mesa Arizona Shootings, Racism, Ryan Giroux

Hot Air

Don’t Shoot; Don’t Kill Him

A fellow named Ryan Giroux killed a man and shot two others in a Mesa, Arizona, motel room yesterday, police say. He fled the motel, acc’d’g to the cops, stole a car, shooting its owner, and sped to a stranger’s residence where, while trying to rob the person who lives there, shot the poor soul. Giroux, police add, then dashed to another apartment complex where he shot another fellow. Running from that apartment, Giroux took a hostage briefly then holed himself up in yet another apartment complex where a manhunt team comprised of officers from five different law enforcement agencies apprehended him five hours after the spree began.

Let me tell you a little bit about this Giroux fellow. He’s accomplished a lot in his 41 years on this mad planet. He’s amassed seven felony convictions, including theft, burglary, and robbery, in three different states. He was convicted once of assault with a deadly weapon. He was nabbed shoplifting from a convenience store in 2006 by two police officers with whom he fought. The officers testified that he was carrying a pistol at the time and repeatedly tried to reach for it as he grappled with them. He was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for the incident.

Giroux is a known gang member who wears prominent tattoos indicating his affiliation. His very appearance screams danger. He admits to having a problem with meth which, he told authorities after being released from prison, turns him into an uncontrollably violent man. While on probation after prison, he missed one probation department appointment and, in another incident, left the scene of an accident without contacting police.

Giroux

Ryan Giroux

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It can be assumed that the law enforcement officers surrounding the apartment complex where Giroux was arrested knew all about his history. They most assuredly knew about his alleged trail of deadly violence that morning.

Still, police took great care not to shoot to kill him. They fired a taser at him, cuffed him, and brought him to the hospital for treatment before taking him downtown for questioning and processing.

Had Giroux been born with dark skin, it’s doubtful he’d have emerged from that convenience store parking lot fight with the cops with his life. The fact that he’s still alive after yesterday’s drama further proves the point.

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Time For Planning

Is the Plan Commission full of knuckleheads or is it merely the planning process in this throbbing, thriving megalopolis that’s knuckleheaded?

Under the rules of this town, the mayor gets to appoint five of the nine Plan Commission members. (Acc’d’g to the PC’s web page, two of the spots are vacant at this time, one of them the mayor’s.) Those who are thankful that three-term boss Mark Kruzan is taking a powder after his stint concludes Dec. 31st are hopeful the new chief exec will clean house starting with the Plan C’mm’n. The idea being, I suppose, that a passel of fresh faces will be less likely to approve the next Burj Bloomington that’ll come in at 200 stories.

Proposed Dubai Tower

Coming To Kirkwood?

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I’ve got it on good authority that Plan Commission members regularly receive their packages of documents only 48 hours before meetings, during which they have to decide the fate of this parking lot or that single-family home addition. Or, the next Burj.

Take February’s mtg. for example. Commissioners had a mere two days to consider the merits and drawbacks of the site plan for the proposed 146-room hotel at 210 E. Kirkwood Ave.

Compare that to last summer’s E! Online voting for the 2014 Best. Ever. TV. Awards. Viewers originally were given a window from Wednesday, July 2nd, at 6:30am to Sunday, July 6th, at 5pm to vote. But awards organizers decided even that five-day span was insufficient for the residents of this holy land to select, say, Glee over The Vampire Diaries, so they gave voters three whole days more.

We have, it is apparent, our priorities in this nation.

Perhaps the new mayor should look at the process in addition to the personalities involved.

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One Thing Liberals And Conservatives Can Agree On

I’m with Ashley Judd on this one. The avowed liberal has been receiving online abuse, threats, and harassment since she committed the unpardonable sin of tweeting about her love for the Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball game.

Judd

Judd

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No, no, I’m not with her re: her Wildcat mania. They are, after all, a semi-professional sports team masquerading as a group of college students that does not need my spiritual or emotional assistance in any way. Their coach makes more than any public employee in Kentucky. More than any ten public employees in the state, for that matter. Oh hell, let’s be frank — John Calipari is making this year a guaranteed total of $6.5 million. In human terms, that would be what some 130 spanking new assistant professors make at that bastion of higher knowledge. Or, what approximately 282 entry-level administrative assistants make there.

The labors of one “John Vincent Calipari (hereinafter ‘Coach’ or ‘Employee’)” as well as the efforts of the respective coaches of some 350 other NCAA Division I basketball teams around this holy land are so meaningful to their respective fandoms that because Ashley Judd had the temerity to reveal her rooting interest in Calipari’s gang on social media, she was rewarded with threats of forced sodomy, rape, miscellaneous violent sexual depredations, and was labeled a whore, a cunt, and countless other pejoratives.

“Not okay,” she wrote in a Twitter response. And to prove how serious she is, she spent much of Monday filling out police reports on as many threateners and verbal abusers as, I suppose, her pen had ink for.

Good. Embarrass the little bastards. Better yet, throw their threatening, hate-filled, entitled asses in jail. Let them see what forced sodomy is all about.

I’m also with former Major League Baseball pitcher and avowed conservative Curt Schilling. He took to social media to crow about his young daughter making her college softball team. Tweeters, naturally, responded with many suggestions regarding bats and her anatomy and other sado-sexual concepts. Schilling actually tracked down a number of the offending tweeters. Among others, he found a college DJ, a fraternity vice president, an employee of the New York Yankees, and at least seven college athletes before he stopped tracking.

Schilling

Schilling

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He ID’d them to their bosses and superiors. The athletes have been suspended by their respective coaches. The Yankees employee was fired. Once Schilling got tired of fingering these dopes, he posted a couple of other guys’ offensive tweets with their avatars and screen names intact. He wrote in his blog 38pitches:

I wanted to let you internet sleuths have a go. Here are two guys that, as you can see, thought they were somehow funny and tough at the same time.

[Schilling posts screenshots of their tweets.]

These guys went to town. if you guys reading this that know how to find people on the ‘net want to have at it, please do.

It doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum you occupy: if you want to be counted among the Decent Human Beings of America, you’ll want these cyber-psycho-criminals stopped.

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Free Parking

Just asking: Is it true that some or all municipal employees who drive city cars don’t have to feed the meters downtown when they’re on city business?

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The Political Arts

Each of the four candidates for mayor are scheduled to speak about how the arts might fare under their hoped-for administrations at the Waldron Arts Center starting next week. Thanks to Cardinal Stage Company managing director Marc Tschida and the theater outfit’s media maven Heidi Harmon for the tip. The Cardinal is sponsoring these four Arts Talks with the candidates in the Waldron’s main auditorium:

  • Darryl Neher Thursday, March 26, 9:45pm
  • John Linnemeier Friday, March 27, 9:45pm
  • John Hamilton Sunday, March 29, 9:15pm
  • John Turnbull Thursday, April 2, 9:45pm

Herald Times editor Bob Zaltsberg will moderate the Neher talk and WFIU’s Yael Ksander will do the same for Hamilton’s. Moderators for the Linnemeier and Turnbull talks haven’t been found yet. It’s assumed that both Linnemeier and Turnbull will be found before their respective talk dates.

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01/28/2015
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Alycin Bektesh, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bob Costello, Joe Crawford, Just In, Kari Costello, Mike Pence, Racism, Steve Martin, Village Deli, WFHB

Hot Air

It Takes A Village

I waylaid Kari Costello this AM, digging for dope on the future of her and hubby Bob’s Village Deli, which came thisclose to being destroyed by fire this past Sunday afternoon.

Village Deli

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The Bloomington institution’s hind end was devastated by flames during the Sunday breakfast/brunch rush. Nobody was injured even as thick black smoke and leaping flames forced the packed house to be evacuated in a hurry.

Anyway, K. Costello says she and Bob have entertained a couple of insurance co. appraisers in the three days since the conflagration. They still don’t know anything about when the restaurant will re-open nor how much actual repair work needs to be done.

Village Deli

The Front’s Cool

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Of equal importance to is the plight of the V.D.’s staff. “A lot of them are college kids,” Kari says. “This was their only source of income. How are they going to pay their rent? We’ve got to do something for them, and quick.”

Some V.D. staffers will work temporarily at the Laughing Planet, also part of the Costello empire along with Soma Coffee. As for further info on the Deli’s re-opening, Kari says, “When we know something, you’ll know something.”

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Moving On

And then who should drop by Table No. 1 at Soma but Alycin Bektesh, newly-emeritus news director at WFHB. She took a powder, unexpectedly and surprisingly, from the community radio station earlier this month. Her second in command, ass’t news director Joe Crawford, has been elevated to her chair and Alycin’s sticking around to help with the transition and finding a lieutenant for him.

Bektesh

Alycin Bektesh, Election Night 2014

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I’ll tell you this: Alycin looks great these days. Her face is free of the stress of working virtually every day of the week, being on call from morning until night, and spending holidays, birthdays, and sunny summer days in the on-air studio.

Alycin doesn’t know precisely what the future holds in store for her but, natch, level-headed kid she is, she won’t be panhandling on Kirkwood Avenue any time soon.

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All The News That Fits

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

— Allen Ginsberg

Pence

Gov. Mike Pence: Indiana’s Editor-In-Chief

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Yeah, I’m as harrumphed as anyone in light of the news that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has started his own state-run news service. It’s called Just IN. Cute, huh? Y’know, taking the old TV newsman’s intro to a bulletin — “This just in…” — and doubling it down to to connote news and info just from the Hoosier State. Just for you. Just, I guess, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the Guv sees it.

How, peeps are asking, can a supposed small-gov’t conservative justify using taxpayer dough to run a propaganda operation? What would the Founding Daddy-o’s, whom the Right never fails to cite when trying to win an argument, say about that?

Well, history tells us the likes of Benjamin Franklin, who ran the Colonies’ first non-Crown post office, wanted low-cost and easy delivery of mail in large part so he and his cohorts could spread news about their Revolution. The current USPS (then called the U.S. Post Office Department)) was created in 1792 thanks to legislation sponsored by George Washington and James Madison. Its paramount raison d’être was to facilitate the dissemination of gov’t news.

So it can be said the post office has always been a propaganda machine. And the Founding Fathers wanted the taxpayers to foot most of its bills.

Just as Mike Pence does for his little venture.

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Martin’s Music

Digital DJ extraordinaire Hondo Thompson passes along this news from Steve Martin’s Twitter account:

Starting now to record a new album with Edie Brickell. Peter Asher (CBE!) producing.

Just wondering: Is there a cooler guy in America than Steve Martin?

Martin

Steve Martin

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BTW: While trying to find a nice image of himself, I came upon Martin’s speaker’s appearance agency. Apparently, he gets a cool $200,000 for each speaking engagement. Yow! My speaker’s fee is negotiable, in case you’re interested. I’ll be happy with $20. If that’s too much for your blood, I’ll take a White Castle gift certificate. Or bus fare. Your choice.

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Nuh uh, Sez Michelle

Anything that’s a spit in the eye of a tyrannical theocracy (I apologize for being redundant) is good by me.

WaPo 20150127

Click Image For Full Story

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Word Police

Benedict Cumberbatch, whom millions of females find alluring for some reason or another, consigned himself to the fires of hell by using the term “coloured” to describe black and brown people, ironically in a interview having to do with racism in both Great Britain and this holy land. Cumberbatch expressed dismay that his homeland is seemingly more racist than the US. He also decried the lack of opportunity for dark-skinned folk in theater, movies, and TV.

None of that means anything, though, to people who dig finding insults under every bed.

Just to recap: White man (who, physically, could be mistaken for a mobile home owner from Bedford, Indiana) places himself four-square on the side of the angels in terms of race relations in the Anglo-American world but, unfortunately, chooses to use a forbidden term to describe the oppressed group so he’s immediately cast as a racist on the order of a Grand Dragon .

Cumberbatch

Cumberbatch

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So, I put it to my pal, a reasonably well-known African-American artist. This Cumberbunch dude, I said, used the term “coloured.” What’s your take?

After a few shrugs and a question or two about exactly who Cummerbund is, my pal finally responded, “Who cares?”

Bingo. Here’s the sham that passes for race relations in these United States today: Canary-in-a-coalmine sensitivities are elevated to moral imperatives even as real atrocities are committed day in and day out against America’s dark-skinned brethren and sisteren. It’s a trade-off everybody’s a party to — we whites promise not to drop N-bombs or other slurs and dark-skinned folks promise not to rise up en masse and kick the crap out of us for hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow, coded political catch phrases, institutionalized second-clss citizenship, and too many policemen using them for target practice.

Hypocrisy — as American as sweet potato pie.

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12/09/2014
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Book Corner, Chicago Police Department, Christiana Ochoa, Homophobia, Jack Dopp, Jackson Lynch, Michael Dopp, Misogyny, Racism

Hot Air

Sympathy For The Devil

How scared do you want to be this AM? Plenty scared? Okay, Click on over to the weblog, Second City Cop. It’s an anonymous clearinghouse for the opinions, beliefs, and rants of some Chicago police officers.

Natch, since no one’s name is attached, the true and unadulterated feelings of the blog’s author as well as commenters come through loud and clear.

CPD 1968

Not Much Has Changed In 45 Years

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What do we learn by reading Second City Cop? A significant number of sworn officers of the law in the nation’s third largest city:

  • Are chronically aggrieved
  • Exist in a state of permanent rage
  • Consider themselves persecuted
  • Are contemptuous and insulting of those they disagree with
  • Despise protesters
  • Deny or minimize the existence of police misbehavior
  • Are homophobic
  • Are misogynist
  • Are adept at concealing their racism with weasel words and code
  • Are xenophobic
  • Disdain everything from simple altruism to government programs designed to help the less fortunate among us
  • Are four-square against minimum wage
  • Hate the NFL as a result of five St. Louis Rams players protesting the decision not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson
  • Believe that FEMA concentration camps will be established soon

I can go on and on but I won’t. Read for yourself and weep. Chicago has a total of some 13,000 police officers. They carry deadly weapons. They are authorized to take your freedom away for probable cause or on a true bill of indictment. They work hand in hand with prosecutors and the courts against the accused in our adversarial system of justice. Under these simple, basic criteria they can be described as the most powerful members of our society.

If a mere eight percent or so of those 13,000 hold any fraction of the above-mentioned feelings, then a thousand of them are F-U’d and dangerous bastards whom you’d be loath to want to sit next to at Thanksgiving dinner. But they have guns and badges.

Now, try to breathe.

[h/t to Neil Steinberg.]

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Art Sells

A huge slap on the back for the son of one of Bloomington’s most beloved citizens, Jack Dopp.

Jack’s been delivering newspapers in our town for decades now through his Bloomington News operation. He’s the guy who makes sure the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Indy Star get to your doorstep or your neighborhood merchant every single day, regardless of the weather. Pushing 70 but still wiry and quick on his feet, he continues to play for several local slow-pitch softball teams.

His son Michael is an artist based in the Los Angeles area. Michael teaches art at Chapman University in the town of Orange. He also produces scads of paintings and is represented by LA’s Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

Michael Dopp

Dopp Art

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Jack tells The Pencil that Michael’s work was exhibited in the big-time Art/Basel show in Miami Beach last week. Art/Basel is an annual series of international contemporary and Modern Art exhibits held in south Florida, Hong Kong, and Basel, Switzerland. This year, the Miami Beach exhibit featured several hundred artists from our hemisphere.

The big news is Michael sold a painting on the first day of the show. Jack whispered a figure in my ear; suffice it to say loads of folks in this holy land would be able to live for a year on the check Michael pocketed.

Who sez all artists are starving?

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Smart Kid

Have you been worrying about kids today not reading?

Stop.

Working at the Book Corner, I know that countless imps are gobbling up books even in this age of smartphones and dumbing down. For instance, Indiana University Maurer School of Law  professor Christiana Ochoa tows her three sons into the Book Corner with some regularity. She tells me if it were up to the boys, they’d park themselves at the shop twice or three times as much as they do already.

The lads dig the BC so much that one of them, Jackson, the oldest at 12, created a video love letter the other day. Watch:

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My fave line: “From the outside, it may look small. But inside, it opens up entirely new universes.”

And this kid is only 12?

The future, babies, is in good hands.

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12/07/2014
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Detoxification, Health Care, Racism, Republican Party

Hot Air

Anonymous

My best wishes to a sweet soul who is suffering mightily these days. Here’s hoping our mental health delivery system for the indigent helps this person in some way.

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Real Medicine Vs. Phony-Baloney

We have a funny health care delivery system in this holy land. Countless numbers of people in dire need of help — be it physical or mental, acute or ongoing — are left to wallow in their pain and misery, frustrated and deteriorating. Too many pols and citizens alike wave them off, saying they’re lazy or opportunistic.

Meanwhile, some of the most capable among us — capable, as in possessing the ability to pay for health insurance or even visit medical specialists on their own dime — spend millions…, wait, billions of dollars on snake oil cures, quackery, fraudulent nutritional and medicinal regimes, and get-well/stay-well books written by scam-artists.

It’s as though the healthiest and most well-fed of our citizenry seem to be in a chronic pout about their great and good fortune. Perhaps they’re jealous of the occasional attention we as a society pay to the down-and-out. People are funny, indeed.

Food fanatics have been careening from one mystical, magical diet to another like pinball machine rollers since the days of John Henry Kellogg. The inventor of Corn Flakes was pathologically enamored of enemas and highly offended that the sane among the rest of his countrymen weren’t. Kellogg ran an spa for folks to eat meals according to his mixed-up philosophies and have their bowels scrubbed and scoured daily.

Kellogg was a joke but to this day scads of people don’t get it.

A great number of the world’s health- and food-fetishists for decades have been swallowing pills, powders, and liquids as well as having mini-fire hoses inserted up their anuses, all in an attempt to “detoxify.”

Folks who crave to see things in black and white believe certain foods are as poisonous as arsenic and other comestibles as curative as the waters of the Fountain of Youth. They also believe the things we put inside ourselves are leaving a patina of muck and mire on our innards that is as dangerous as a bullet to the head.

Now don’t get me wrong, if you gorge on Oscar Mayer bologna sandwiches morning, noon, and night your guts probably will be prone to functioning as well as a 12-year-old computer. But the gang who buys into detoxifying and pristine diets probably never did spend much dough on dirt-cheap lunch meats, Cool Whip, Bugles, Twinkies, and Spaghetti-Os in the first place.

Anyway, The Guardian this week ran a piece destroying the myth of “detoxification.”

It quotes Exeter University prof Edzard Ernst:

Let’s be clear, there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t. [Drug abuse detox is “respectable,” acc’d’g to Ernst.] The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.

The article’s author, Dara Mohammadi, says any build-up of toxins in the human body’s organs, the likes of which described in terrifying detail by detox advocates, would result in a medical emergency. The body itself, she says, has a perfectly good trash and waste disposal system.

As for colonics, Mohammadi writes of the belief that a “plaque” of toxins accumulates in the bowels and must be washed out regularly, otherwise dire things can happen. Mohammadi asserts:

[N]o doctor has ever seen one of these mythical plaques, and many warn against having the procedure done, saying that it can perforate your bowel.

Mohammadi’s take away? This:

[T]he idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.

You know, the evil kind of practice that demonic corporations like Monsanto engage in.

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Simple As Black And White

With yesterday’s runoff defeat of Senator Mary Landrieux in Louisiana, the Republicans’ advantage in the upper chamber will stand at 54-46 in January. The GOP will lead in the House 246-188.

No matter what Democratic pollyannas cry, the Republicans will hold those majorities for the foreseeable future. Some Dems might even be hoping that the recent spate of high-profile police killings of unarmed citizens and subsequent protests will stir the body politic out of its comfy sofa and even walk the half block to the polling place.

Maybe. But what’s far more likely is that Republican-leaning voters already have been stirred by the same thing and will continue to be so. And they will continue to vote for Republicans who talk tough, express racial hatreds in code, and promise to keep those unruly blacks in their goddamned place without actually saying so.

There are far more people frightened of a general black uprising than there are those who are outraged that police officers see young black men as monsters and Hulk Hogans and feel compelled to kill them.

Beginning with the Watts riots in August 1965 and down through the “long hot summer” two years later and even more civil disorders into the 1970s, Murrican voters have consistently cast their lot with white Republicans. The Republicans, Murricans believe, will protect the nation from the dark menace. Republican politicians even coined a catchphrase for this: law and order. That was Richard Nixon’s calling card in the chaotic summer of 1968 and it won him an unlikely presidency.

Republican presidents as well as innumerable lesser office holders since then have successfully run on the same platform even when their other positions were pooh-poohed by huge numbers of Americans.

The way the numbers worked nearly fifty years ago and still do to a large extent today, the more streets protests, the more enraged accusations against the police, the more civil disturbances, the more the real majority will vote for strongmen.

It’s a simple numbers game. And if you’re black, you still lose.

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