Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Hobby Lobby is People!

Make no mistake about it, the Hobby Lobby lawsuit before the United States Supreme Court is about more than birth control rights for women.


On the surface, the question before the High Court is whether or not a company can deny contraception coverage to women based on religious beliefs. In other words, the Green family which owns Hobby Lobby says forcing them to provide health insurance to employees with contraceptive riders goes against their religion and they should not be forced to do it.

Further, the Green family says that since Hobby Lobby is their business, their family religious beliefs should prevail for their corporate entity as well.

In other words, “my company/my house, I can do what I damn well please!”

Maybe.

What you do in your house is usually your business. Private.

Your company however, is a different matter. Or used to be until Citizens United four years ago. Citizens United was a very bad Supreme Court decision that granted corporations personhood rights equal to people, meaning corporations have the same rights as people in the public arena.

In the four years of its existence, the Citizens United creation has become a 21st century Frankenstein monster of SUPCO making.
US Supreme Court Justices

If successful, the Hobby Lobby lawsuit will give that Frankenstein monster the right to exercise religious beliefs against anyone or anything that dares to darken their corporate door.

Think Arizona Law HB1062 vetoed by the governor a few weeks ago on steroids, and in force nationwide.

It is not just about birth control. This lawsuit is about the right to impose personally held beliefs onto people within the public arena. On any given day, you could walk into an ice cream store and be denied service because the guy behind the counter doesn't like your haircut/hair color/shoes/ skin color...

Whatever, doesn't matter, their personally held belief about you prevails, legally.

People who don't like Black people, or women, or lesbians, or Muslims or Jews wouldn't have to serve or wait on them or even allow them inside their establishments simply because they can.

This is what the Hobby Lobby lawsuit is all about.

The right for bigots to legally discriminate and get away with it.

There is no way to know how the High Court will handle this lawsuit. They upheld Obamacare which seemingly created the situation, elevating women to equality in healthcare with men, while at the same time, giving us the very opposite leaning Citizens United by a narrow 5-4 decision.

Extended oral arguments will be heard today with a decision expected just prior to the June recess.




Thursday, March 13, 2014

Stand Your Ground Ohio


Ohio's war on Black people takes center stage this afternoon as State Senators take up proposals to change the wording of laws governing self defense.

Having already passed laws to suppress the Black vote, the proposed changes on the table today, would bring Ohio in compliance with Florida stand your ground statutes, which basically declare perpetual open season on young black men by some fearful gun toting whites. No, I didn't stutter...talk at me when white guys with guns start killing wiggers (hasn't happened anywhere these laws are in force)

Now, bear in mind, there is nothing wrong with the Ohio law as is. It ain't broke. It's working as it was written to work. Police and the courts are happy as is.

So why fix it?

In the same vein as  the unneeded "fixes" to voting laws,
the “fix” changes Ohio’s self-defense law so that as long as a person is in a place he or she is legally allowed to be, the person has no duty to RETREAT before shooting someone to protect himself or his property ( note: using deadly force to defend property is illegal in Ohio-another law governs...not sure if this “fix” will supercede.)

Those in favor of this “fix” say it benefits the victims of violent crimes who should not be obligated to retreat when and if someone attacks them.

In other words as long as they feel afraid, they can justifiably shoot to kill.

Couple that with the fact that Ohioans already have concealed carry in the streets, in their car, in bars, in arenas, and coming, in schools, you may as well say, welcome to Dodge City.

Ohio, like Florida, becomes an open air shooting gallery for the mentally or fearfully unhinged.

The man who chooses to pull a gun is not just protecting himself..he is putting those around him at risk as well. What about people caught in crossfire. Michael Dunn didn't even care that there were other people around when he opened fire on the car that was driving away from him. In some respects, he's lucky he only killed Jordan Davis.

Said State Representative Alicia Reece; “We cannot, should not and would not accept a law that allows someone to follow someone who has done nothing … and hunt them down, and then hide behind the law..”


Rep. Matt Lynch, R-Chagrin Falls, “We are making smart changes that allow people to properly exercise self-defense.”

But then again, the problem with these laws is their interpretation by the police, by the courts and by the jury, if it gets that far.
All of these fixes is like building a house of cards....add the right card in the wrong place...and it's gonna tumble...
Law of averages...Law of probability...Ohio law based in fear...some innocent person is gonna get hurt or die as a result.


Yep...fear of a Black planet..
DWB
WWB
VWB
___(insert)WB


Oh high O....vote responsibly in November

















Friday, March 7, 2014

Where da Happy Negras At?

Well lemme see, where does one begin to unpack this shit...

According to American Spectator, the magazine, the movie 12 Years a Slave is propaganda while Gone With the Wind, is only presumptively false and that presumption comes in the mind of 12YAS director Steve McQueen.

Author James Bowman says of course there were happy slaves during slavery, McQueen chose to focus only on the bad. It's not the truth...it's politics...

Yes, there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr. McQueen’s camera is al-l over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to suppose that there was nothing else.” -James Bowman

Surely there must have been contented slaves somewhere in the Old South, surely, he asks.

Maybe. Many Black people believe that Jesus was really white, too, so I guess there may have been some slaves somewhere doing the happy dance at the first sight of ole massa risin' up in the mornin.'

Bowman, who is the magazine movie critic, by the way, did like actor Chewitel Ojiofor's performance as Solomon Northrup, but likened Michael Fassbinder's portrayal to that of a comic book Simon LeGree, of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame.

No mention made of the female acting....women not necessary then or now, it seems.

And as for White Jesus, another paean by Hollywood was released last week to much acclaim. This one was actually made up of outtakes or unused tape from a TV series from last year that played on cable...same story, same actors, and same footage, same hype.

Nothing new here, except this time believers were asked to pay $10 for the privilege. The same will be true for the upcoming NOAH starring Russell Crowe..loved me some Gladiator, but NOAH? (are we gonna finally see why the children of Ham were cursed and turned Black?) But I digress.........

It did get me thinking about what happened the last time somebody tried to portray Jesus as a Black man in the national arena...it was Madonna in her famous Pepsi commercial that was shown once and then yanked because it pissed off Christians of all creeds and colors.

Girlfriend even had to give back her $5 million paycheck because of it. You can remember it here.









Tuesday, March 4, 2014

GWTW to 12YAS- The Long Walk to the Back of the Bus

Watching the Oscars was something I did with my grandmother. We talked about the nominations, discussed the clothing, whether or not she could remake them (she was a professional seamstress), and how wonderful they would look on me, if I were old enough to wear them and walk down the red carpet. She taught me from birth to assume that I would walk the red carpets of the world, not sweep them when I grew up.

When we watched, the red carpet was just that, a rug to keep the Hollywood heels from getting dirty. It was not an event, just ground cover.

We watched in tandem for many, many years, until she died, our viewing fueling conversations in the days that followed, until something else caught our attention. My music tastes and movie preferences closely mirrored my grandmother's so much so that when she died, I stopped watching the Academy Awards for a while.

Other things were expanding my consciousness by that time. I had grown up and had ripped off the blindfold that had been installed at birth. Instead of ignoring white people and their very obvious obtuseness toward people of color as I had been taught to do, for the sake of survival, I looked at the world in it's phoney pale glory and got angry.

My anger wasn't a nuclear explosion. It was more like lighting a fuse, a long fuse to a dynamite bomb, that took some time, and traveled some distance, before exploding, with only the sizzle noise of the fuse speaking of the coming danger.

Detonation time was 1968 when I was taken from school to view the movie, Gone With the Wind, at the Valley Theater in Roselawn. The mini shopping mall is still there on Reading Road, but the Theater is long gone replaced by a liquor store, while Roselawn flipped from a Jewish neighborhood to a Black one. No traces of the theater exist today, except in my mind's eye as I drive past sometimes.


GWTW was a big deal in 1968 because it hadn't been seen in a couple of decades, the negative destroyed by fire or some catastrophe. Most people alive at the time had never seen the movie, and only knew of it from the Hollywood hype machine, the surviving snippets shown during Oscar ceremonies and the memories of the film from those old enough to have seen it after release in 1939.

Restoring and re-releasing Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece was a very big deal. It was the biggest and best of blockbuster cinema, we'd been told.  GWTW became a field trip for my high school, considered a history lesson of the the way we were for real.

I honestly couldn't wait to see it, movie and history buff that I was and remain.

Seated midway back in the dark, I remember going from jubilant anticipation to feeling like somebody was making me suck lemons. The rest of the audience was silent, remaining jubilant, cheering and talking back to the screen, which I thought was funny, since I had been led to believe that only happened in colored theaters. Some girl sitting down front was so overwhelmed at the sight of Scarlett O'Hara that she cried out hysterically, causing the rest of us to laugh out loud.

We quickly returned to quiet so that the historical narrative of the vibrant Old South could continue.

I felt like I was drowning. My anger was simmering, choking me, not that I could do anything about it. I was the only colored female in the graduating class of 1968. There were only 4 of us out of 293 seniors.


I don't remember if the other 3 were there that day. We didn't sit together, so I was uniquely aware of being the only Black female in the Valley Theater that day watching Gone With the Wind. I went in happy and came out pissed off, and there was no one to talk to about my feelings except my grandmother. Later that night after her long day at Tall Fashions fitting taller than average white women in tailor made dresses and suits downtown, she listened while I vented and then told me to be cool and to stay “lady-like.” It would pass she always told me. She probably used the word "calm" instead of "cool." Cool was not in her vast vocabulary.

But it didn't. I tried reading the book thinking maybe the people in Hollywood had gotten it wrong by interpretation. Couldn't get past the nigger, nigger, nigger litany on the first page. Still haven't read it to this day.

Seeing Gone With the Wind changed a lot of things for me. 



By the same token, 12 Years a Slave changed nothing except it made me wearily angry. I haven't seen the movie and honestly don't know if I will. I have read the book. It was a difficult read. It was journey that I could not make in just one sitting. Had to read and then cool off.

By now, I am numb in my readings be they fact or fiction, because I've covered a lot of ground in my personal search for my peoples' history. An American story that should be learned in school, but is still omitted purposefully from public curriculum. Our history exists in special museums or special displays in public libraries, in special order from bookstores, or in badly made Hollywood spectacle where magically, the white guy somehow ends up becoming the Darkie Savior by the time the credits roll, The End.

In my adult mind, I know that white Hollywood makes Black movies to make white people feel good about themselves and I assumed that 12YAS was just another example. It was, on one level.

But it was something else too, a movie about slavery, directed by a black man, with a screenplay adapted by a black man, with black people in the leading roles who really were black. Not African American black, but close enough. All Black people born in the western hemisphere fall from the same slavery tree anyway, so no biggy.

Hollywood stayed true to form about being by and for white people with 12 Years a Slave because they would only hand over the money to a white man to get the movie made. Enter Brad Pitt as the money man and bit part player in the film. No Pitt, no 12YAS.

The whites started bad and stayed bad, as in monstrous, to the point that some people said it was too brutal to be real. Personally I don't think Hollywood can make a movie that is brutal enough to show the true story of slavery in America. The real story still waits in the wings.

In the afterglow of the Oscars, !2YAS was named best picture of the year, and Lupita N'Yongo was given the Oscar as best supporting actress, and belle of the ball.

At least for this year, Hollywood swapped out Scarlett, a ballsy, man-pleasing southern belle ready and willing to do anything to save her plantation for Patsy a small colored slave woman trapped between her deviant white owner and his very jealous and vicious wife.

It's official...Hollywood is no longer racist..


Truth..or some of it anyway.


















Monday, March 3, 2014

Obama's Latest Greatest Crisis

The Ukraine is jumping off. Looks like Russia has invaded Crimea, apparently bent on resurrecting the old Soviet Union.

Despite the NeoCons doing the happy dance at the possibility of some Cold War tension, World War III is not gonna happen. They will have to content themselves with throwing shade at President Obama for his apparent weakness and inability to lead.

It's always something. Obama is too weak. Obama is too indecisive. Obama has no foreign policy chops. It's Monday, crisis at the White House. What Obama gon do today?

If Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney can see the potential crisis from all the way back in 2008, why couldn't Obama?  (answer: Obama wasn't president, so I told you so, doesn't work)

The President was elected to get us out of war, and he is doing that. There is no Iraq and soon there will be no Afghanistan. War with Russia over Crimea is not gonna happen. Nobody wants it, especially with a demonstrably nuts Vladimir Putin.

Well maybe with a few exceptions like Walnuts McCain and Ms. Linsey Graham. They still don't mind sacrificing other people's children to satisfy their vampiric appetite for foreign blood. Nevermind that they are also as batshit crazy as Putin.

Obama gets shade which ever way he acts. He's used to it by now.

Putin probably pulled the trigger on Ukraine and Crimea because he too thinks Obama is weak with no stomach for war. He is listening to the wrong Americans.


The one to fear in a fight is not the loud mouth. It's the quiet person who stands there waiting for you to throw the first punch. Then they finish the fight, usually by mopping the ground with your ass. Obama is the quiet one. He never tips his hand until he slaps you in the mouth. That's why John Kerry is doing all the talking. 

And another thing, the talk of reducing our military might is just that....talk...hasn't happened yet. We can still kill everybody on the face of this earth 12 times each. 

Putin is reminiscing about the power days of the old Soviet Union and has overreached himself. He will soon find that present day Russia is not the old USSR and he will begin looking for a graceful way out of the mess.

Obama should keep steady regardless of what the NeoCons are saying/implying and quietly push Putin to see that moving toward a better relationship with the European Union would be better for everyone including Russia.