Tikrit

Well, wha' d ya know? A truly professional soldiering force has taken back Tikrit, as far as we know
without one beheading.
Please, Sunnis, get on board.

Battle Creek

Kal Penn spoke in a spot on MSNBC's The Cycle. Not once did he mention the hilarious show he is in on Sunday nights at 10pm EST called Battle Creek. Yes, it takes place here in Michigan, in the
cereal city itself. The show is three or four episodes old already!

Lufthansa

What were they thinking? The German superman myth was real? Have they seen one too many
Wagnerian operas?
A pilot, for one thing, should be 35 or 40 years of age, minimum, if at all possible, and not prone
to mid-life crises.

Indiana And Mike Pence Don't Know?

We already have freedom of religion in this country, this entire country.

Our War On Drug(s)

We could monitor all drugs with different classes of scripts. R.N.s could write the prescriptions
OK'd and recommended by examining physicians who visit clinics periodically. Why, because ...
I have never seen an addicted person who got clean because he or she couldn't find the drug of choice
needed to reach some desired physical and/or mental state.
Seriously, which drug, if any drug, has been conquered- is being conquered, by the "war".
We are so misguided in our drug policies.
Great that POTUS is getting people jailed for phony 'drug' amounts of time out of jail.

Chuy Garcia For Mayor?

I had such fun today robo-calling for the mayor's race in Chicago.
But Chuy may be in trouble.
A lot of households for Rahm had more than one voter for Rahm.
Some Latino persons weren't able to speak English.
"Mary" somebody cursed saying "hell No" before I could ask a question.
One black man asked if Chuy were black, I said, "Well...he's brown." and the man said.
"Well, I'll think about it?" Hilarious.
A great many persons said they would vote, or had already voted, but did not want to say for
whom they voted.
I began half-way through my calls, as a matter of fact, to say "Do you mind saying who you will
vote for, since you say you will vote?"
I made a lot of calls for President Obama in 2012, and only one person refused to say who she
would vote for that year.

So- Ben Carson Or Dikembe Mutombo

As Ben Carson began his ascent into manhood, he tripped, fell into knife-wielding juvenile delinquency; but then recovered himself, and became a full-fledged social misfit. Oh, and he's
a neurosurgeon too.
As Dikembe Mutombo entered manhood, he told the basketball coach he had to become a doctor
because his village was poor, but was paying for his medical education. So the coach told
Mr. Mutombo if he succeeded on the court he could buy many doctors, and a hospital in which they
could do their work. So Mr. Mutombo did succeed on our basketball courts. Then he bought some Ben Carsons,  and built a hospital as a place for them to do their work in his village,  and in the entire
process- became a full-fledged greater human being, and a really fun guy to boot!

What If It Had Not Been A Black Kenyan?

Some white people are born in Kenya.
What if  Mrs. Obama had fallen in love with a white Kenyan?
What if she had married a white South African?
If their son had been a perfectly illustrious person anyway; I still think black people might have
stayed away from the polls in droves, or bit the bullet and voted for John McCain.
Republicans should know our country did get a great democratic president in President Obama, twice, in some measure because we did have to suffer so through Ronald Reagan, George Bush, George W. Bush- and let's not forget Dick Cheney, Paul Ryan, and Mitt Romney! Even President
Clinton did many destructive things to minority communities.
Thanks to all these Great Whites who helped us get a president we could be proud to call our own.
They were so very misguided, so very often.

Dr. Ben (Young Felon) Carson

Carson, not President Obama, is the one who was stabbing people when he was a teen. Sounds a bit
like psychopathic to me- or is that sociopathic? I'm not a scientist.

Republicans: Get Off The ACA

Why do you pretend people are cheering the abolishing of the ACA? Even Ted Crude, I mean
Ted Cruze got tepid applause on that point when he promised to tear the law down. Get on something
else people. Though admittedly the point will probably be equally as weak.

The People On The Bus

All the SAE guys on that "chanting" Oklahoma bus knew what that fraternity stood for before they joined it. Mr. Petit wasn't the only guy chanting. He was the one who became identifiable. Where did
he learn any of it? Well, what kind of question is that? The man lives in the U.S.A. He is an American. All of SAE is American.

Here Is The Worst Thing About Unjust Fees On Minorities

The cash  from unjust and discriminatory collections in minority communities is used, like by Bloomberg in New York, and officials in Ferguson, to help enact more oppressive laws, and enforce more brutal and autocratic tactics against the same minorities who get the exploiting levies  taken from them by legislatively, inordinately heavy fines, and used against them in additionally punitive public policy proclamations and needlessly burdensome juris prudences.
So when an unjust fine is levied against and collected from a black man- the money gained will be used to fund the campaigns of racist bullies who will vote to enact many more laws against that same
black man and his family.
Of course, if that man complains in any realistic, substantive way- he will be dismissed by saying he
is playing the 'race' card.
If you are a black man who endures a slap in the face peacefully, you can be admired.
If you dare say you don't want white people slapping your face, why what's wrong with you?
The man was white by happenstance...over, and over, and over again.

We Need To Be Able To Vote

Those of us who don't get hung in trees, and could care less about SAE one way or the other, need
to work hard on making certain we can all vote.

Yes, A Black Man Was Hung In A Tree- Last Week- In Mississippi

Whatever else Mr. Petit did on his school SAE bus in his infamous chant- he did not lie.
Moms...gather up your boys.

Will Mike Brown Jr. Get To Join SAE?

No.
No he won't.
I believe the black community has much bigger fish to fry than figuring out what makes SAE stand up and cheer.
If Mr. Petit was glad to whip his fellow SAEs into a frenzy over not having an 'N' in the frat, then he
must know he is glad about that fact, and he wants his frat brothers to be glad about it too.
Let's face it. Mr. Petit didn't found SAE. He didn't write that chant.
The worst parts of the whole affair are that 1.) SAE would have been so much better by now if it ever
had accepted black members, 2.) singing and chanting about lynchings is one of the worst things anyone could do- especially in the good old U.S. of A.?
Another horror is that we don't know who leaked that video or why.
The affair is really quite sad too, because if the bus had been full of Kappas, or Qs, or Alphas on the
same campus, the last thing in the world those guys would have been joyous about would have had
absolutely nothing at all to do with white guys.
Maybe those SAEs would truly have their innocence back if they had no attitude of exclusion which
they needed to cheer.
In the meantime- Tamir Rice will never have to worry about frats. I am deeply, deeply worried
that he will not.

Is Benjamin Netanyahu Annexing The U.S. Republican Party? Does Iran Then Get The Democrats?

Who will there be left for us then? Are We to have only the Executive and an activist court to ourselves?
How will that work?
If Israel keeps the Republicans, and gives away the Democrats, what sort of people should we
vote for then?
P.M. Netanyahu has taken our votes. Why is Israel keeping that guy?
He can obviously take the Republicans away from Congress whenever he so desires.
He has let Iran know they can have the Democrats because Democrats want to go along with that guy in the White House, and that cannot be sanctioned by the newly formed U.S.A. Israeli Republican Party.
Isn't all that disenfranchising for our representative democracy on these shores?
Does this now mean the Republicans here have access to TWO nuclear programs?! Ours and Israels?
And does Netanyahu think he can really seduce all European Jews into emigrating from places they
were born to scrub hotel rooms though they have Ph.D.s as they had to do in the late twentieth century?
I hope religion won't completely trump national origin for Jews born outside Israel. If they are home
right now, they should work to get their present governments to hold on to them, especially if they are not beholding to Likud sensibilities.

The Family That Dumbs Together

When Republicans say, 'I'm not a scientist',  someone should tell them they aren't supposed to be claiming the fact as a proud accomplishment.
Not being a scientist is quite different than not being a violent felon. Is the Republican Party at all aware of this?
At the very moment Scott Walker works to gut one of the best university systems in the world, (University of Wisconsin/Madison) his sons announce they will drop out of  'college' too, like dear old dad did- for the campaigning.
How are we going to go from Harvard grads running the most lucrative or peace-keeping years of our
country since the 70s to some college drop-out gangs running all our shows?
While it's very true we don't all need to attend universities in order to be good, efficient, intelligent
citizens- why would any of us attempt to become the most powerful person in the world without
a formal education.
And I suspect it's true Walker and Co. could hardly do any worse than the war-mongering Bushes;  he wouldn't have much choice but to try. He would know nothing of what he actually was doing.
Or maybe people are thinking he wouldn't need to know. As I recall, he's a Koch brothers' toy, and they went to M.I.T. They would be the ones actually running things!
What a disaster, probably a la Dick Cheney. Speaking of, though ... the former V.P. did get it surprisingly right when he was emphatic about declaring Tom Cotton's dance with 47 colleagues a grand faux pas, as it attempted to undermine our country's real foreign policy regarding Iran.

Either POTUS Gets Fast Track Or China Gets It By Default: Then What?

When I was working, I applied to work only at union shops.
I never considered myself someone who couldn't adapt to changing times, though.
I always knew I didn't want to work without unionization because that would eventually
lead to what we have now- a plethora of part-time jobs, governments begging for companies
to raise wages, activists having to demonstrate outside union structures, corporate wage thefts,
states racing to right-to work statuses.
However, I considered myself someone who could do any sort of work and still have a union framework it.
We don't have to have unionization in the same old forms we've had it in the past.
Digital Operations managers are in a brand new field. Even though there aren't many of them, they could work under a union umbrella, and so could the workers they manage.
We don't need our unions digging in to keep all the people they represent in the fossil fuel industries
in the same sort of work they've had for decades. Ergo, the Koch brothers need to become outdated and updated; and so then will their applicable work force!
Global warming and climate change are as true for blue collar workers as they are for corporate
polluters. We have to find new work, or be left in a void China creates.
If China takes over the jobs we are wasting time to preserve here, and we have no valid finger in the
pacific pie, we cannot blame them. We cannot blame anyone but ourselves.
Twenty-first century jobs go wanting in greater numbers every day,
Unions should be fighting for us to get prepared for them. Our unions should be fighting to represent us in those new professions.
Hanging on to work from the last century is impossible whether POTUS gets fast track or not.
Turning the TPP over to power brokers in the far east, trying to protect our patents and currencies
as things come up- that won't work so well in coming decades.
I am guessing we need to have a TPP now which will provide a good framework of tools and updates lasting for about the next fifty years.
We may not get this agreement in that part of the world.
That means we still are going to protect ourselves and our businesses and technologies in fits and in
starts- but those will be tiny, incremental fits and starts.
Other powers in the far east however, will be having fits and jerks along in their growing economies, but those movements will be gigantic and momentous compared to ours as we play defense.
No need to believe me though. I am not an economist. I don't even play one on TV!
Ask Governor John Huntsman. I believe, politics notwithstanding, he will be glad to tell you the truth in the detail POTUS is attempting to outline for future. Will you believe a differ expert?

The TPP And POTUS

President Obama is trying to say in any way he can without hurting every one's feelings, that the manufacturing and industrial jobs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century don't belong to us in America any longer.
We have to moveon.org guys- even if it will be painful. Those jobs belong to developing nations now. Even determined people can't ride the wind in a hurricane.
We can ignore that reality the same way we ignore climate change; then those jobs paying $.25 in the Pacific Rim will still be paying the same wage for fifty years to come if China sets the standards in that region!
We have to turn our jobs into STEM jobs. People won't all need degrees for these new jobs- but they
will need training. What is so awful about being re-trained? Elect reps in the government who will
insure these job transitions are as smooth as possible.
The only chance we do have in the Pacific Far East, is to make sure China doesn't become so powerful in weaker countries that our business and patent infrastructure laws become meaningless.
For years they have done patent infringements, keeping our companies in court forever!
We can't afford more of it as their economy grows to dominate  trade with smaller countries.
If we get a foot in the 'agreement' door now, we can legally hold them to some things which we know
we will need to keep our economy competitive with that of a nation of over one billion people. Yes, China does have room for all its citizens. And still it will co-opt the business climates of other smaller countries if we don't do something TODAY.
Unions have to diversify now! They are the only way wages here or abroad will keep pace with international industries' growth.
If we hate fast track, we'd better come up with something better, quick.
We can't keep fossil fuel industries going, for instance, even though all those miners and processors are repped by unions. And steel, dependent on fossil fuel plants, will be impacted.We shouldn't even have as much trucking as we do. Our highways should be in more and more, part conveyor belts in the middle of highways, monitored and maintained by people who now drive trucks, and by smart computing in 'clouds', even in some measure by mid-level air drones.
We need new industries right now. We don't need to be holding on to things two-hundred years old
in Western culture. The steam engine was invented 1700s. Let it go?
POTUS sees the future. We can embrace it by standing up to it. If we don't, it is going to run us down
while we stand around denying it is on its way.
We do have the infrastructure in our society to face up to these 21st century challenges because our college and university systems can take nearly any complicated concept and break it into many real
world jobs and applications. Our universities cannot be rivalled in this world. We don't need to
Scott Walker the jewels in our crowns. We need to polish them!
Do we fail to need MIT now that the Koch brothers have gone there already and finished their educations, and bought them up some government officials? We do not.
We need these institutions now more than ever. Let's find a way to keep them in power. Let's find
a way to make our informed votes count in order to do what is needed to enhance and refine these
priceless institutions.







        

Not The Day Mike Brown Jr. Died?

Yesterday was 'reprehensible'.
Yesterday was 'unacceptable'.
Yesterday was 'disgusting'
Yesterday was 'stomach-turning'.
Yesterday was 'horrible'.
Whoever shot police in Ferguson must have been alone, and male if he could be termed
a 'damned punk'. But isn't the person innocent until proved guilty.
My, my, my...so many colorful adjectives....
I guess officials and reverends have to do their best to keep us 'peaceful'.
And they need to know people are doing their best as well.
I heard it said yesterdays actions would take us back into the past.
I thought it was Trayvon's killing which took us back to Emit Till, and back only a few years
to Oscar Grant, and a few months to Tamar Rice.
We do want to be peaceful.
We don't break the peace when there is one.
We all, each and every one of us, want to go home at the end of the day.
One big part of fractured race relations is the majority and their spokespersons telling minorities
what to feel. Well, at times, feelings do boil over when people get cornered. I know that isn't a
good thing. But I also know rhetoric can exacerbate it, however awful it is.
Our own leaders might want to keep that thought as a 'note to self' when any person gets shot.
And yet- I hear Burkina Faso is loveley this time of year, even though they may now be ruled by
the military. I don't think tanks and tear gas are in the public square yet.

Personal Preference vs. Public Policy

Maybe President Obama decided at age five, 'I believe in marriage, and I think it should be between a
man and a woman.' We don't know.
Then when President Obama was ten, he may have decided one day he would get married. We don't
know for certain.
When President Obama turned thirty or forty, he may have heard that gay people wanted traditional
marriage certificates.
When President Obama got a bit older, he may have decided marriage is fine for all people- but only
privately as couples, not as public policy in an initiative.
So when we don't see the exact timeline of President Obama's gay marriage evolution of thought, we
feel the urge to call him a liar, right?
Wrong.
We still don't know his timeline. We may never know.
And we don't know when he began to believe in it as a good American public policy.
Why would we be so anxious to use that word, 'liar'.
Maybe some of us have been dying to use that word for years. And finally, we found a way to jump
at the opportunity.
I am certainly happy not to be one of those people.

The Oscars

Could Hollywood be more boring?
No.
No it  could not.
I do love Africa.
But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would surely have appreciated an African-American actor whose
recent ancestry has derived mainly from the U. S. A. to play him in Selma.
Aside from that complaint, I see nothing interesting about Hollywood for good or for ill except
Jennifer Lawrence.
She is gorgeous, and a marvelous actress. Hollywood has hated the idea of gorgeous actresses since Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Debra Paget. The studiosrise me including
Ms. Lawrence as a career actress in their midst, though I don't believe she was front and center this year.

Brunei And The TPP

Traditional U.S. jobs are not going to be viable in the U.S. no matter what we do. Even today, business and industry have millions of jobs going wanting because Americans are not trained to
do them. What we need to do is train ourselves for those jobs. We waste millions of dollars
killing the public schools system, and finding fault with the learning minority children absorb. We
need to stop doing that. If we make certain public schools thrive, all ideas will become public in a
'fast and furious' manner. Business will be able to see the intellect of western youth intersect its needs
even before young people get to a university.
Finding fault with inner-city youth hasn't stopped African American young people from becoming
doctors, attorneys, Ph.D.s. What if America embraced the learning these kids try so hard to get noticed?
This is the one country which can get genius from the classroom to the patent office in record time.
We have the legal and educational infrastructure to do it.
If we don't get it done, now, China will swallow up the labor in the Pacific Rim and use its muscle to
keep all low skilled and/or semi-skilled jobs under their control, and will keep those 25 cent an hour jobs at 25 cents forever.
Places like Brunei don't want China's communist muscle intruding into their politics and societal customs. Nor are they apt to accept homosexuality on our schedule. To The Sultan of Brunei, America is most likely the lesser of two super-power evils, if the modern world is on track to arrive
at the doorstep of his average citizen during this twenty-first century.
America has to step up at least one rung on the skill-level ladder of jobs expertise in order to save its work force. Then, and only then do we operate from a position of power when attempting to influence other work forces to stay strong, get competetive.
Most jobs businesses will need filled in ten years don't even exist right now.
We had better stop obsessing on the jobs we are doing now, and start focusing on the jobs we need to
begin to do for our future. The jobs we are doing right now are going to go to the lowest bidder, whether we get ready for future jobs or not.
If America gets the TPP, we will have a better than even chance of forcing wages up around the small
world we live in now. If we don't get it- low wages in the Rim are going to stay low, possibly interminably. The world is shrinking. We want to keep it as comfortable as possible.

The Exit Of Geniuses From G.E. and Comcast...Sadly Joy Reid Is The Latest

First MSNBC dumped Keith Olbermann, then Martin Bashir, Karen Finney, now Joy Reid. I was so glad Savannah Guthrie got out of their line-up when she did to get a platform more suited to genius. Her work on MSNBC was noticably stellar, but the management gave others the weighty
things to analyze before she got to them. Watching that was incredibly irritating.
I don't use the word 'genius' lightly. These were people who had the gift of making salient the short
interview with long-time experts. These journalists knew the questions to ask so that the remainder of us could absorb information from the answers, and they knew how to do it quickly.
I thought for a moment  (and am glad I was mistaken) we'd also lost Turae on the show, The Cycle. 
Why should these shows have had to compete with Fox News? No MSNBC show is competitive with Fox.
America is just not yet that enlightened.

Is Israel Annexing The U.S. Red States?

I hope President Obama will remind P.M. Netanyahu that when it comes to foreign powers, 'We are
Not red states, blue states. We are The United States ...of America... still. This information shouldn't
surprise any powers foreign or domestic, except the U.S. tea party.