Open Thread - Saturday, November 19

Time to wake up, you white people of good faith.
Look in the mirror.
See Amerikkka for what it is without the gloss.
See something black folks have been trying to tell you.
It’s not “populism” or “economic anxiety.”
Call it by name — White Supremacy.

Denise Oliver Velez 11/9/2016

White Supremacy Wins--For Now

Once upon a time, back in my childhood in the 50s and 60s, there were many who believed that integration would lead to racial peace and understanding. The idea was to begin with the schools so that young people would learn to live together and hope that the newly learned harmony would percolate through the society.

A huge white tantrum arose first in the South then spread to the rest of the country along with attempts at real school integration in the North. White Boston's reaction to busing was more violent than Little Rock's response to the end of de jure segregation nearly 20 years earlier, a reality that Randy Newman parodied brilliantly in "Rednecks."

But was the theory right? if whites had not been so successful at thwarting attempts to integrate schools with "academies" and white flight, would race relations be better in this country?

The Sam Huntington wing of the social sciences says no. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), argued that it was interaction between people of different races, religions or ethnic backgrounds that created friction, hatred and often violence. Twenty years later, there are still many social scientists inclined to agree:

Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos conducted studies concluding that even casual encounters with racial minorities can cause liberal whites to take on more conservative views. In one of Enos’s experiments, these encounters were between white voters and Spanish-speaking Latino men on commuter trains.

"The results were clear," Enos wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes."

Racial Attitudes

I have an interesting vantage point from which to evaluate Enos's thesis. We live not in the white suburbs where our encounters with people of other races and ethnicities are limited to commuter trains but in a neighborhood that consists of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics living next door to each other and sometimes, in the same house.

So how is it going on the East Side of Cleveland? Has the proximity of the races led to understanding and harmony or to open and violent conflict? Neither, of course. There's plenty of tension and name-calling at times, but there are also neighborly, sometimes friendly socialization as well.

Our next-door neighbor for the first 5 years we lived here was an example. She railed against our black neighbors, flinging the "n" word around until she saw us visibly wince. At the same time, she provided housing for her granddaughter and her mixed-race son and fiercely defended them against the racist mocking of her white male neighbor who lived two doors down from us. Our neighbor across the back fence, who grew up in Vietnam and came to the U. S. with her soldier husband, constantly complains about "those black people" in the neighborhood, but she has rented out her upstairs for several years to a black woman and her son whom she praises as good tenants. A neighbor across the street talks about how fearful she is when a group of black men gather in the park next door to her, but her household includes her daughter's black boyfriend.

In other words, it's complicated.

In the polite and erudite society inhabited by professors, language is carefully modulated and the kind of talk commonly heard among whites and Asians in my neighborhood about blacks would be grounds for social exclusion and quite possibly termination of employment. But here in East Cleveland, economic circumstances and social realities force whites who still use the "n" word to live in peace with black neighbors and even to embrace black family members. On the flip, black residents are well aware of many of their neighbors' attitudes--if they weren't, the cries of "porch monkeys" from one nutty white guy would make it clear--but they don't openly confront their white neighbors and demand admissions of racism and white privilege.

In East Cleveland, it's not like Harvard Professor Enos's study. There's no retreating to the safety of the lily-white suburbs and gated communities when the commuter train ride with "those people" is over. There's no expelling the racist whites so that black people don't have to endure racism right in their own neighborhood. Instead, we all must figure out how to live together in some kind of peace or turn our neighborhood into a war zone.

Some people's sensibilities may be extremely offended that many white people dared to vote for Donald Trump. They may write off most white people as part of "Amerikkka." Here in East Cleveland, where the PhDs are scarce and the racial epithets sometimes fly, none of us, black or white, can be so finicky. As long as we can keep a lid on the most open expressions of racial bias and hatred, as long as we can occasionally even manage a good morning or good evening to each other, as long as we can keep it peaceful, we'll get by.

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over whom somebody might have voted for. Regardless of our race, we're too engaged with just hustlin' to survive.

[video:https://youtu.be/_CCi8U4zy2w]

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riverlover's picture

but I can relate a little story. I grew up in a white, middle-class neighborhood in Louisville KY. By white, I mean mostly Caucasian, not sure where the Lebanese fit in (but he was a lawyer). Our mix was a melting pot of religious (Catholics [many parochial schools in the area], Jewish [all would leave in later better-income times], a Baptist minister next door, a strange family whose adult son living at home hit-and-ran after killing the Methodist minister by auto (drunk) and I got to see his failed escape attempt (pre-SWAT) and then second-owners of the house across the street, a Black couple. They were from Jamaica, I think, imported as servants for a better-compensated family, who had to pay the couple a large sum in damages when there was an explosion in the house and she was severely burned. I think she continued to do servant roles, he may have stayed a handyman, not sure, but he was very interactive in the neighborhood, ready to help. Always called Mr. Williams. A black man referred to as Mr. Williams, I think there was respect, not diminishment meant. But it may be because they were from Jamaica, not up-and-coming from the West End. That was around 1975. AFAIK, much more racially mixed now, the area is considered older high-end starter homes.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

trying to survive

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Still pertinent in 2016. And white supremacy still reigns.

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out our nut

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That's some irony with a Methodist minister being hit by a drunk driver.

One thing obviously missing in this little essay is any kind of perspective from the black side of things about views of white people. I did get to know one black family across the street. One morning, I brought some tomatoes and lettuce I had grown. The neighbor, Rob, was on the porch with some friends. Everyone gave me some odd looks, but no one called me any names. Once Rob understood why I was there, he was very friendly and appreciative. A little later, he yelled at me across the street, asking if we liked fish. When I replied that we enjoyed them, he brought me some white bass he had just caught from the Lake. I cleaned them, we fried them up, and they were delicious.

We got to know Rob's wife, Marissa, and his mother-in-law Gayle too. They asked how we acquired the vacant lot next to us, and when we explained, they told us about how they were acquiring houses in Glenville through tax sales.

The relationship was cut short when the SWAT team came and busted Rob for dealing, even tazing his dog in front of the kids.

But one thing we never discussed was racial attitudes.

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riverlover's picture

I had no problem having one of them, the older one, babysit my little boy when we went to my sister's wedding. I didn't care that she was Black; I was from out of town then and a babysitter whose parents lived across the street seemed perfect to me.

The Black family was the anomaly. We could sense class within the white neighbors, some trashy types more than the rest of us. First views of wife and child abuse, pregnancies out of wedlock, one story involving my sister and I covering for a neighbor whose father would have beaten her. So yes, class was apparent. The lawyers, engineers, MDs and PhDs (other than my parents, and their marriage broke) all moved on to newer and bigger. Oh, there was also a neighbor who owned the biggest strip club downtown.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

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Love ya, mean it

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Love ya, mean it

on the complexity of racial attitudes amongst the less-than-middle-middle class was the doctoral work of John Hartigan Jr., who as a white sociology grad student moved, with his also-white wife, into a racially integrated impoverished neighborhood in Detroit. the cultural and socioeconomic gap between himself and his new underclass neighbors was large enough that his report reads more like anthropology than sociology.

[Edited to add link]
Racial Situations:
Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit

[Edited to add blurb from amazon]

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters.

In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

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I was one of three white kids in my entire grade. We were one of a handful of white families within the immediate area. I was the minority, and I experienced bullying on the school playground and even extortion attempts on my way home with candy from the corner store. The racial makeup of the middle and high school was just the same as the elementary school. My parents moved me out of Detroit schools for my safety when I was in fifth grade. Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems. We moved to an affluent white suburb with the greatest schools. Job loss caused another move in 7th grade to a white, blue-collar suburb and the worst schools I ever attended including the Detroit Public Schools.

People resent being forced to do anything. The politicians love to regulate the commoners, but never themselves and their funders. If someone forced me or mine to attend a school full of Trump supporters and/or religious people, I'd move too. I would say it was about class, but that isn't entirely true. It is more about common values, goals, and truth. That is why large cities have ethnic neighborhoods

Dearborn, MI was white and Christian. Today it is almost exclusively middle eastern and Muslim. Macomb County is white and blue collar. Oakland County is white and white collar. People seek out what they know. It is where their comfort lives.

I bet his paper was interesting. I'd love to know what he found.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

still have scars from that period

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

k9disc's picture

place. Pretty solid schools in Macomb at that time, blue collar and all.

Living on Oahu in Hawaii was the big life changer. I realized what it was to be a minority. I was still privileged, though, as I didn't have to worry about taking abuse from authority figures.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

did he include a control group in which white liberals on the commuter trains were "exposed" to eastern european men -- i.e., white foreigners?

Because if he didn't, his study tells us nothing about "racism", but only about xenophobic tribalism.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Enos is a social "scientist." Wink

But you are exactly right.

Way back in the 70s, I was putting together my "senior thesis," a research paper on the impact of the immigration of white suburban Republicans into rural, Dixiecrat counties around Kansas City. The thesis was that these new voters would increase competition for local offices, and the increased competition would increase participation rates. The measure for competition was the number of column inches of political advertisements in the general election. I had control Dixiecrat counties located along the Missouri River between Columbia and St. Louis where there had been no suburban growth.

So I gathered the column inches data for my subject counties during Christmas vacation, but there was too much going on (I was getting engaged.) to hump it all the way over to those control counties to get that data. Once I was back at school, there was no way to do it short of a plane flight which I couldn't afford. So I wrote up the thesis with that fault.

One of my readers caught the flaw and pointed it out in his comments. He had been a surprise reader because I never took a course from him, and his area was not political behavior or quantitative analysis. As his reputation grew and his focus became clearer over the years, I understood better why he had been interested in reading my thesis knowing nothing more about it than a brief general description.

The reader was Sam Huntington.

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Big Al's picture

a genocidal maniac for president; supports a candidate that has been key in causing immense poverty and ill health to the BLACK people of Haiti; someone who supports a President who has bombed seven Muslim countries with people of color; and who supports a political party that is part of the establishment that keeps large numbers of black people in lower class chains and in fear of the police state.

I've long maintained that U.S. imperialism is the most racist element on the planet and Hillary Clinton is among the most imperialist humans on the planet. It is white supremacy to the max, it continues the Manifest Destiny of white America that resulted in Native American genocide and black slavery. To support that is akin to being a racist.

Ya, Trump is a racist, there's no doubt in my mind. I detest the guy. But Clinton supporters have zero moral integrity to talk.

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gulfgal98's picture

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

mimi's picture

about the dangers you and most see in Hillary Clinton. They see them definitely in Trump.

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Integration is necessary, in my opinion. De facto segregation stinks almost as much as de jure segregation. But, yes, it's complicated. The human psyche seems to be complicated.

Many of us seem to need some group or other to look down upon, whether our "need" takes the form of bias against a racial, ethnic or religious group, or a political group, or an occupation or a level of education or intellect or achievement.

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enhydra lutris's picture

look down on, and that this has played and does play a role in racism. I cannot recall my readings on that theorem/hypothesis, but at least one was a "study". (I read, of course, only a summary of said study, hence the quotation marks.)

The perspective presented was the poorest southern whites. They were not a threat to rebel so long as there was somebody who had it worse, specifically, southern blacks. Even if there were no economic and pretty much no social difference, they always knew that they were better because they could use the "white" restrooms and drinking fountains, even though they were otherwise "white trash" and couldn't gain entrance or admittance to many establishments because of their socio-economic class.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

truth hurts

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but, I believe that was based on behavior, or, at least, perceived behavior.

I can easily imagine reasons why xenophobia played a role in evolution. Strangers were probably traveling in the first place because they were no longer able to find food in their area. They were probably desperate and hungry and not averse to killing you for your food. But, I am not sure why we learned to look down on people five streets away from us.

So, yes, it is complicated. And, we are a decidedly imperfect species.

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gulfgal98's picture

to have lived and attended schools during segregation even though my early years were in a lower income neighborhood near the predominantly black part of town. As a result, I never "knew" any black people until I got my first job at Sears in shipping and receiving. My two closest friends at work were both black then. Now my neighborhood in Tallahassee, Florida is both ethnically and racially mixed and we think nothing about it. In fact, most neighborhoods here are racially and ethnically mixed. What they are not is economically mixed.

So I do wonder is if economics were not a factor, would race be as important? The idea of race is an artificial social construct that has no basis in science. We are all human beings that come in many different sizes, shapes, colors, and with many varied identifying characteristics such as hair or eye color. We are not born racist. Racism is a learned behavior. We learn it from our families and our peers.

Goin South, I am very much enjoying your Open Threads and hope you will continue to write about your experiences in your inner city neighborhood.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

I just think that idea that we should go to war with each other over whom we voted for is pretty ridiculous, especially given the awful choices foisted upon us. There are enough things and people trying to heighten racial tensions, but the bottom line in my neighborhood is we have to find a way to live together in peace. And we're doing that. Who knows? Maybe we can take a few baby steps from there and work together to make all our lives a little better.

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because they were both unsuited to be president, in my view. The sooner we get the vile election forgotten, the better so that we can focus on improving the condition of us proles and saving the planet from capitalism.

Calling the election of Trump a moment of "white supremacy" is wrong, diverts attention away from the plight of wage earners, and serves to prop up those who control the political economy rather than building a solid front of the 99%.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

with suggestions of places where divergent paths might converge to reach the same destination. I'm watching to see where common ground can be found and pursued by what would have been unthinkable coalitions until this year. "We the People" alliances.

For now, we're stuck with illegitimate processes that invite election fraud and disenfranchisement on a large scale. We're stuck with delegitimized players, parties, and government. No clue whether the latest incarnation of Neo can break through the matrix. At least more people are now awake.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

lack of polling places and short hours cannot be solved without help from the US Dept of Justice which, so far, is not forthcoming.

At the local level - work places, neighborhood committees, school PTAs, and the like, common ground can be looked for and nurtured. People are much more aware but still powerless until organized.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Lookout's picture

Racism is alive and well. Much of the negative reaction to Obomber has nothing to do with his policies - just his race. This is why many southern (so called) liberals think he was a good president - kinda reverse reaction to racism.

It is also why there were so many T-rump fans from the south.

racism.jpg

deny racism.jpg

racism is real.jpg

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/donald-trump-election-hillary-clinton...

A long piece (I don't agree with all of it), but it offers some insight in gut-punch style. Excerpts here:

...The crisis of President Donald John Trump is the bill coming due on a four-decade social, political, and economic project that has succeeded in worsening, coarsening, and ending the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. This disease permeates the air in America, crystallizing into a constellation of pain: loneliness, frustration, despair, as immutable as the stars in the night sky — distant, implacable, and hanging over every town in the country. ...

Much of the post-election nattering has focused on the role of the white working class in voting for Trump, but I would go further: this election was proof of the utter failure of either party to be relevant to 99 percent of American life — to even acknowledge the desperation that is a fact of life for most of the country. ...

...What powered Trump to victory was a maintenance of the Republican coalition, and a hundred thousand voters in several economically depressed northern and midwestern states that had previously gone for Obama. There were racists, there were nascent fascists, there were diseased rich fucks — but, I am sorry to tell you, there were also people who’d have chosen a better option were it presented. If you can’t understand that, you risk two terms of this insanity. ...

It is tempting to ascribe Trump’s victory solely to the unabashed race hatred that powered his most nightmarish assaults. This is, after all, a much more plausible explanation than many of the excuses proffered for Clinton’s failure. ...

Was it solely racism that powered Trump to victory? No. There’s more to any story in which Trump bests Clinton in districts that voted twice for Obama. Trump’s campaign is incomprehensible without his blitzkrieg against Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans; it is also not the full breadth of his slithering appeal. ...

Bernie Sanders could’ve answered Trump’s gold-plated promises with a better way, one that meaningfully addressed the pain of American life without illusions — without gimmicks and falsehoods and racist invective, without the bullshit woven into every Trump pronouncement. ...Sanders was thus destroyed in this roiling election year to clear the way for a would-be plutocrat who couldn’t explain her email storage, much less contend with these same surging forces.

And yet, this is anathema to Democratic ears. The media organs and political hacks will indulge the wildest fantasies pinning blame on Putin, or the FBI. But bring up the transfer of America’s wealth to a moneyed class that has entirely captured electoral politics, and prepare to be called crazy.

It’s become something of a joke for well-fed blogger types, that “neoliberalism” — the Econ 101 designation for the regime of free-market policies that have come to dominate capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century — is a catch-all term for denigrating anything the Left doesn’t like.

Well. Let them hear this, ensconced in their bright, wonkish chapels, in Clinton campaign HQ, in parts of New York and DC and Chappaqua. To sneer at any possibility that this election is related to the economic devastation a term such as “neoliberalism” signifies, visited upon average Americans for decades, choking the life out of communities and homes, enraging and warping the psyches of those afflicted — this is not just ahistorical, not just suicidal, not just incorrect: it’s deeply wrong. It is shameful.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

Those "wonkish chapels" in Chappaqua must be beautiful but hard to tolerate for more than 10-15 minutes.

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riverlover's picture

(husband of a friend) whose thesis is that we tend to associate even in neighborhoods by similarities. I have not read it, just heard it discussed. And it may relate more to white middle class than minorities. So even neighborhoods get more Dem or more Rep. over time.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

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MarilynW's picture

to his VP who was booed at the play "Hamilton" last night. awww

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/799974635274194947

As if he can just utter the command "Apologize!" and expect compliance. He will get even though, somehow.

The full story:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/trump-demands-apology-after-ha...

Good for them!

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To thine own self be true.

It does seem just a little ironic for a cast of the musical that seems to seek adding Hamilton to Mount Rushmore to be complaining about a lack of respect for democratic principles. Hamilton was about as anti-democratic as you could get outside of Loyalist/Royalist circles.

Where were these bold defenders of the 'Murcan way when Obama was jailing Manning, droning teenage boys and forcing down the airliner of another nation's president?

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MarilynW's picture

played before a white male Vice-President elect known for his racism and intolerance.

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To thine own self be true.

that is intentional - keep us from warring ala dkos ???? Wink

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But then I sigh; and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ;

that is intentional - keep us from warring ala dkos ???? Wink

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But then I sigh; and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ;

elenacarlena's picture

comments can post twice, LOL!

Johnny & Joe want to avoid the worst of the cliquish behavior at DKos. So no list of who upvoted, just numbers of upvotes. And no flags or downvotes. If you see something outrageously awful, private message the Admins. The only rule is DBAA, which includes no ad hominems. It's not officially a partisan site.

Welcome to c99!

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