- Donald Trump
is an ass.
- By and large, the Republican field is filled with ignorant idiots. I read today that Trump is leading the field of GOP hopefuls. How frightening.
- The Democratic field doesn't impress me either. I don't see any candidate I would vote for, in either group. The way I see it, the Republic is lost. See my thoughts on Greece, below. I think we may be in the same sinking boat and for at least some of the same reasons.
- Bill Cosby and his lawyer just need to go away. He admits he obtained drugs to give to women so he could have sex with them. And his lawyer says there’s nothing illegal about that. The word scumbag comes to mind.
- I regret to say so, but Sandra Bland created the circumstances for her arrest herself. When a cop stops you, you comply with their requests whether you know the reasons why or not, you don’t run your mouth from beginning to end and when they tell you to get out of your car, you get out of your car. You comply. You do not ever physically resist a police officer. If you are wronged or mistreated in the course of a traffic stop, or other encounter with a law enforcement officer, the place to take up those grievances is after the fact, with the officer's supervisors, with local government, or in the justice system, period; out there beside the road is not the place, because it puts you in grave danger.
That said, why was it necessary for her to put out her cigarette, and why was it necessary to make her get out of her vehicle? Up to that point, her comments had just been frank. I watched the posted video of the stop. It looks like this officer showed poor judgment in his actions during this incident – his commands to her were in large part unnecessary under the circumstances. Whatever happened to all the “Andy Taylor” kind of cops we used to see? Why was she still sitting in jail three days after an arrest which was questionable in the first place (?); was it really necessary or was it just putting her "in her place." Anyway, I still wonder why this young woman thought she needed to hang herself.
When are we going to step back from viewing our own people, our own neighbors, our own children, as the enemy? That said, I just don’t see that the circumstances of that mishandled traffic stop should cause a person, any person, to think that they needed to end it all. There’s something about this whole incident that we just don’t understand. Either this young woman was not as mentally healthy as everyone is claiming, or something else happened that is as yet hidden.
- Susan Smith murdered her two little boys twenty-some years ago by rolling her car into a lake with them strapped in their car seats. Can you imagine the terror these two babies felt when their own mother was killing them, trapped and drowning in the dark? Now she tells us (from prison) that she’s not the “monster” we all think she is. Sorry, but yes, yes she is. She still doesn’t grasp the horrendous reality of what she did. She is the worst kind of human garbage.
- Is there anyone in the world that believes that Iran will honor ANY commitments it makes on nuclear weapons programs, or anything else? I think the comparisons between John Kerry and by extension, Obama, and Neville Chamberlain prior to WWII could very well be valid.
- The Greek economy is a disaster, and from what I see, the Greeks don't want to change any of the circumstances that led them to the brink of that abyss. Why should the other countries of the EU continually be asked to bail them out, when they will do nothing to help themselves? I think much of their difficulty is of their own manufacture -- and there will come a time when they have to fix it. As they don't seem to want to "own" the problem, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- Is flying the stars and bars flag of the Confederacy really the problem in the USA? Or is it that we as a people suffer from pervasive and systemic racism? I hear comments from people frequently about how “those people” are taking “our” jobs, how they’re getting things they somehow don’t deserve, and so on. “Those people” are us, and if you don't see it that way, it is a major failure on your part.
Diverting our attention from these very real problems into making it an argument about confederate symbolism is wrong, especially since that symbolism is about more than racism. Let’s take it a step further, shall we? We need to take George Washington off of our money, demolish the Washington Monument, etc. He was a racist who owned slaves. Let’s tear down Mount Vernon, since slaves worked that estate. Likewise Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, and many others of our founding fathers and the things they built. Even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, had demonstrably racist views and ideas.
Do we need to purge ourselves of all of these icons and memories? The Confederate flag represents so much more than the racism of the old south. I don't know about you, but when I see the stars and bars, what it means to me is southern pride - and southern defiance, which are very valued American traits. What the Civil War was really fought over was the question of who we are as a nation; are we a single entity, or are we an "at will" loose affiliation of sovereign autonomous states? Slavery was simply the foremost issue and catalyst that brought that question to the point of armed resistance and conflict. More than any other single event, that resistance and its outcome shaped our country into what it has become -- for both good and bad. I am not generally in support of these revisionist purges. We NEED to remember.
What we need to do instead, is to recognize our past mistakes.
What we really need to do instead is confront racist actions and attitudes everywhere we see them, for the stupidity they are, no matter who or which group they are directed against, no matter who is behind them.
What we really need to do is try to figure out why so many of us think guns and killing people is the answer to every trouble, as happened in that church in South Carolina, where nine innocent people were executed, as happened in Lafayette, LA, in Oregon, and as continues to happen almost daily across this entire country (as well as around the world).
What we need to do is figure out how, exactly, we are breeding so much mental illness (and hatred) in the populace of our nation.
What we need to do is remember to treat ALL others as we want to be treated, and recognize that all of us deserve the basic human rights that Americans say we cherish.
And we need to remember exactly who we are (all of us) and what we've done.
If we don’t do these things, who will?
- By and large, the Republican field is filled with ignorant idiots. I read today that Trump is leading the field of GOP hopefuls. How frightening.
- The Democratic field doesn't impress me either. I don't see any candidate I would vote for, in either group. The way I see it, the Republic is lost. See my thoughts on Greece, below. I think we may be in the same sinking boat and for at least some of the same reasons.
- Bill Cosby and his lawyer just need to go away. He admits he obtained drugs to give to women so he could have sex with them. And his lawyer says there’s nothing illegal about that. The word scumbag comes to mind.
- I regret to say so, but Sandra Bland created the circumstances for her arrest herself. When a cop stops you, you comply with their requests whether you know the reasons why or not, you don’t run your mouth from beginning to end and when they tell you to get out of your car, you get out of your car. You comply. You do not ever physically resist a police officer. If you are wronged or mistreated in the course of a traffic stop, or other encounter with a law enforcement officer, the place to take up those grievances is after the fact, with the officer's supervisors, with local government, or in the justice system, period; out there beside the road is not the place, because it puts you in grave danger.
That said, why was it necessary for her to put out her cigarette, and why was it necessary to make her get out of her vehicle? Up to that point, her comments had just been frank. I watched the posted video of the stop. It looks like this officer showed poor judgment in his actions during this incident – his commands to her were in large part unnecessary under the circumstances. Whatever happened to all the “Andy Taylor” kind of cops we used to see? Why was she still sitting in jail three days after an arrest which was questionable in the first place (?); was it really necessary or was it just putting her "in her place." Anyway, I still wonder why this young woman thought she needed to hang herself.
When are we going to step back from viewing our own people, our own neighbors, our own children, as the enemy? That said, I just don’t see that the circumstances of that mishandled traffic stop should cause a person, any person, to think that they needed to end it all. There’s something about this whole incident that we just don’t understand. Either this young woman was not as mentally healthy as everyone is claiming, or something else happened that is as yet hidden.
- Susan Smith murdered her two little boys twenty-some years ago by rolling her car into a lake with them strapped in their car seats. Can you imagine the terror these two babies felt when their own mother was killing them, trapped and drowning in the dark? Now she tells us (from prison) that she’s not the “monster” we all think she is. Sorry, but yes, yes she is. She still doesn’t grasp the horrendous reality of what she did. She is the worst kind of human garbage.
- Is there anyone in the world that believes that Iran will honor ANY commitments it makes on nuclear weapons programs, or anything else? I think the comparisons between John Kerry and by extension, Obama, and Neville Chamberlain prior to WWII could very well be valid.
- The Greek economy is a disaster, and from what I see, the Greeks don't want to change any of the circumstances that led them to the brink of that abyss. Why should the other countries of the EU continually be asked to bail them out, when they will do nothing to help themselves? I think much of their difficulty is of their own manufacture -- and there will come a time when they have to fix it. As they don't seem to want to "own" the problem, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- Is flying the stars and bars flag of the Confederacy really the problem in the USA? Or is it that we as a people suffer from pervasive and systemic racism? I hear comments from people frequently about how “those people” are taking “our” jobs, how they’re getting things they somehow don’t deserve, and so on. “Those people” are us, and if you don't see it that way, it is a major failure on your part.
Diverting our attention from these very real problems into making it an argument about confederate symbolism is wrong, especially since that symbolism is about more than racism. Let’s take it a step further, shall we? We need to take George Washington off of our money, demolish the Washington Monument, etc. He was a racist who owned slaves. Let’s tear down Mount Vernon, since slaves worked that estate. Likewise Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, and many others of our founding fathers and the things they built. Even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, had demonstrably racist views and ideas.
Do we need to purge ourselves of all of these icons and memories? The Confederate flag represents so much more than the racism of the old south. I don't know about you, but when I see the stars and bars, what it means to me is southern pride - and southern defiance, which are very valued American traits. What the Civil War was really fought over was the question of who we are as a nation; are we a single entity, or are we an "at will" loose affiliation of sovereign autonomous states? Slavery was simply the foremost issue and catalyst that brought that question to the point of armed resistance and conflict. More than any other single event, that resistance and its outcome shaped our country into what it has become -- for both good and bad. I am not generally in support of these revisionist purges. We NEED to remember.
What we need to do instead, is to recognize our past mistakes.
What we really need to do instead is confront racist actions and attitudes everywhere we see them, for the stupidity they are, no matter who or which group they are directed against, no matter who is behind them.
What we really need to do is try to figure out why so many of us think guns and killing people is the answer to every trouble, as happened in that church in South Carolina, where nine innocent people were executed, as happened in Lafayette, LA, in Oregon, and as continues to happen almost daily across this entire country (as well as around the world).
What we need to do is figure out how, exactly, we are breeding so much mental illness (and hatred) in the populace of our nation.
What we need to do is remember to treat ALL others as we want to be treated, and recognize that all of us deserve the basic human rights that Americans say we cherish.
And we need to remember exactly who we are (all of us) and what we've done.
If we don’t do these things, who will?
