YoungDemCA

YoungDemCA's Journal

March 27, 2017

"We will make no distinction between the 9/11 terrorists and those who harbor them!"

But remember folks...he kept us safe.

March 21, 2017

What the Trump WH and Congressional Republicans are doing is unprecedented merely in degree.

March 16, 2017

Trump reveals how he and other Republican politicians really feel toward their own voters.

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/842209771457462272

Why support a Republican like Paul Ryan, who desperately tries to hide his otherwise painfully obvious Randian contempt for the "little people", when you could instead vote for a guy who embraces the fact that he's a corrupt, racist, misogynistic, arrogant, self-entitled piece of shit who cons the less fortunate for his own short-term financial gain? He's just acting transparent about it - which is more than you can say about the rest of the rich white pricks who make up the Republican Party leadership.

"Yeah, I'm Donald Trump, and I'm the biggest douche in the world. What are you going to do about it?"

March 14, 2017

When you get your ass handed to you so bad that you might as well give up now.

https://twitter.com/dennisperkins5/status/841389924884631554

March 4, 2017

"Voter fraud" has been the justification for denying black Americans the vote since the late 1800s.

Excellent, righteous op-ed in NBC News by William J. Barber II that puts the recent Republican Right's suppression of black voters in historical perspective - and emphasizes the fact that this racist oppression and disenfranchisement ultimately hurts ALL of us. Excerpts below:

On the first Sunday in March, 1965, TV networks interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to show law officers on horseback chasing and beating unarmed Americans on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. "Bloody Sunday" shocked the nation, exposing the extremism of Congress' Jim Crow caucus, which had resisted the expansion of voting rights for nearly a century.

52 years later, America is reeling from the political extremism unleashed by the first election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. In the midst of our present crisis, the blood of Selma's martyr's cries out as clearly as in 1965: America cannot suppress the vote of any one group without hurting everyone in this democracy.

Throughout the South in the late 1860s and early 1870s, black Lincoln Republicans (unlike today's GOP) voted with local whites to elect progressive state legislatures that challenged corporate interests, expanded public education, and sought criminal justice reform. These coalitions were violently attacked by the Klan, but they also faced a relentless propaganda campaign from Southern Democrats who accused black and white legislators of stealing elections through "voter fraud."

After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, unfounded accusations of voter fraud became the basis for literacy tests, poll taxes, and other voter suppression tactics. Though challenged in the courts under the 15th amendment, Jim Crow voting laws were upheld for decades because they did not deny the franchise based on an individual's race. But after Selma, the Voting Rights Act recognized that their intent and effect was the suppression of African-American votes and the destruction of the progressive coalitions that black political power made possible.

We cannot make sense of President Trump's unsubstantiated claim of 3 to 5 million illegal votes in last year's election apart from this history. "Voter fraud," though proven to be statistically irrelevant in modern elections, has been the primary justification for voter suppression bills in 22 states since the Supreme Court stripped the Voting Rights Act of its power in their 2013 Shelby decision. Though it is the responsibility of Congress under the 15th amendment to guarantee voting rights to all Americans, they have failed for nearly four years to restore the VRA.

Even more sinister than they lie of voter fraud is the lie that voter suppression only hurts black people. The policies of progressive coalitions that include African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, poor and working people today are now, as during Reconstruction, policies that lift up the good of the whole.

Extremist attacks on these coalitions hurt all Americans. The dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, the DOJ, public schools, and the EPA, as well as attacks on immigrants and religious minorities, affect all of us.

The extremism that now infects the White House, Congress, and dozens of America's state houses would not be possible without the 21st-century voter suppression which has flourished in the absence of VRA protections.

"Bloody Sunday" doesn't only offer a diagnosis of our malady; it also shows us the way forward. Diverse coalitions of people who are willing to put their bodies on the line to expose extremism offer the greatest hope of reviving the heart of our democracy.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/oped-selma-s-bloody-sunday-exposes-lie-voter-fraud-n728801

As we go forward in our efforts to resist right-wing power and nefariousness, we must continue to remember the words of this wise, beloved fighter for black Americans and furthermore, ALL people - not just Americans - who have been socially marginalized and spat upon by their fellow human beings who just happened to have more power and privilege than them:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

March 2, 2017

80% of White Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton AND Barack Obama's legacy.

That's right. I'm talking about the same "family values" voters who were staunch supporters of a once-divorced B-list Hollywood actor who was estranged from a couple of his kids and rarely attended church services himself, an elite Ivy League family intimately tied to the Saudi Arabian ruling class (you know, the same crowd who brought us RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM e.g. Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers along with wealthy donors to all of the viciously, murderously aggressive groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc.), along with one Republican Speaker of the House who divorced two of his wives (one of which he cheated on while she was suffering from cancer, IIRC) and another who turned out to be a child sex offender. And as for Trump...do I REALLY need to explain this one?

For the relentless Republican opposition to President Barack Obama and his administration from the moment he was elected (or rather, the moment he was nominated) it really says something that there was never any kind of personal, family-related, marriage or sex scandal surrounding President Obama or any member of his family. Since they couldn't go down that route like they did for Bill Clinton, they just flat-out rejected our first Black President (who TR, was ALL Americans' President, - whether they accepted that fact or not), seeking to de-legitimize him in every which way, using thinly veiled (if that) racism and racist insinuations that he wasn't "legitimate" or that he wasn't "really American." And the man who - above all others - ranted and raved on and on with those disgusting, revolting, and utterly SHAMEFUL and deeply racist accusations - who launched and built his contemporary political career within the Republican Party by his deeply personal racist assaults on President Obama and by extension, all black Americans, and all Americans of color, and even all of us white people who have supported Obama against the racist bullshit coming from our fellow "tribesmen" - THAT man was richly rewarded for it by being nominated by the Republican Party and being narrowly elected (with a little help from his friends in the FBI and the Russian government, of course ) in spite of losing the total number of votes overall to Obama's would-be Democratic successor by literally millions of votes. Yet he still became President of the United States; and in terms of votes, White, self-identified "Christians" contributed in a very out-sized way to his overall total.

I would say that this makes me ashamed to be a "Christian" if I didn't believe that for these people, "following Christ" is just a self-justifying slogan for the sanctification of White American Supremacy, and of the self-entitlement, hatefulness, bigotry, and discrimination and violence directed against black people and other people of color (not to mention, immigrants, women, LGBTQ Americans, Muslims, Jews, atheists, agnostics, and other religious "Nones", and potentially even the "liberal heretics" who have the gall to say that they, too, follow the example of Christ Jesus ). But I refuse to let them define "Christianity" for the rest of us, and I know that I'm not alone here.

/rant.

Profile Information

Gender: Male
Hometown: CA
Home country: USA
Member since: Wed Jan 18, 2012, 11:29 PM
Number of posts: 5,714