You’ve probably heard about it. Over the weekend, a militia group fully armed with their guns and ammunition took over a federal building in Oregon, vowing to keep the federal building until they get their way… or else!
And just in case you haven’t heard of this government takeover, well, it’s probably because the media has not covered the militia’s action – and might I remind you that they took over a federal building, armed with guns and ammunition – …the media hasn’t covered this takeover quite the same way they have covered, let’s say, BlackLivesMatter protesters. And where are the police with their trigger-happy fingers you asked? You know, the same ones gunning down innocent, peaceful protesters and black men all over this nation?
Good question.
This fact that the media and police intervention are apparently minimal, have been noted on many social media outlets, and CNN posed this question to their law enforcement analyst while discussing the events in Oregon.
CNN’s law enforcement analyst Art Roderick, explained why the militia, fully armed with their guns and ammunition, should be reasoned with, and not be treated the same way as BlackLivesMatter protesters are often treated. And according to Roderick, the militia is not looting anything.
“The last thing we need is some type of large confrontation because that’s when stuff goes bad,” Roderick explained. “And I think in this particular instance, if we just wait them out, see what they’ve got to say, then eventually, they’re all going to go home.”
Stelter pointed out that many activists had complained if the militia members were “Black Lives Matter protesters or if these were peaceful Muslim Americans [then] they would be treated very differently by law enforcement.”
“This is a very rural area,” Roderick replied. “It is out in the middle of nowhere. What are they actually doing? They’re not destroying property, they’re not looting anything.”
“I mean, there’s a whole separate situation going on as to exactly why they’re there and that will be worked out through the legal process,” he continued. “But I think now that they’ve taken over this location out at the fish and wildlife, this brings in the federal side. And I know the federal government has learned over the years how to deal with these types of incidences.”
Republican leader Donald Trump is scoring big among regular Republican voters and other Republicans who sometimes prefer to stay undercover… or under white hooded sheets for that matter.
The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike. And former Louisiana Rep. David Duke reports that the businessman has given more Americans cover to speak out loud about white nationalism than at any time since his own political campaigns in the 1990s.
As hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump’s rhetoric is conducive to anti-Muslim violence, white nationalist leaders are capitalizing on his candidacy to invigorate and expand their movement.
“Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” said Stormfront founder Don Black, who reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career. “He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.”
Donald Trump was supposed to get 100 endorsements from black pastors today, but in the closed-door meeting between the Republican candidate and the pastors, he only walked away a few.
“Overall the mood was very positive” one pastor recalled about the closed-door meeting. Although the pastor admitted that Trump would probably not get his endorsement.
Interviewed on MSNBC, the two pastors, Bishop Orrin Pullings Sr. and Bishop Victor Couzens, spoke about some of the topics brought up in the meeting, topics including the recent incident at a Trump rally where a BlackLivesMatter protester was “ruffed up.” Asked about Trump’s response to their inquiry about that incident, the pastor replied that Trump said he didn’t know the protester was from BlackLivesMatter.
Asked if Donald Trump is the same loud mouth and outspoken man behind closed doors as he portrays on the campaign trail, the pastors responded that Trump was very different in the closed-door meeting.
“I saw somebody different behind the scenes,” one pastor said. “I was very disappointed with the fact that he did not represent and articulate himself.” The pastors said that although Trump was there in the meeting, other members of his campaign answered numerous questions and made statements on his behalf.
Asked if Trump got any endorsements in the meetings from the black pastors, the answer was yes, although he did not get the amount of endorsements he was looking for.
“I wasn’t one of the ones that endorsed him and I don’t know that I will even become ones that endorse him. I think there is a certain decorum that the president of the United States has to be able to exemplify. I appreciate his business acumen, but he short still on decorum in my book.”
The network serves mostly black and Hispanic students and is known for exacting behavior rules. Even the youngest pupils are expected to sit with their backs straight, their hands clasped and their eyes on the teacher, a posture that the network believes helps children pay attention. Ms. Moskowitz has said she believes children learn better with structure and consistency in the classroom. Good behavior and effort are rewarded with candy and prizes, while infractions and shoddy work are penalized with reprimands, loss of recess time, extra assignments and, in some cases, suspensions as early as kindergarten.
Backs straight? Hands clasped? Candy as a reward for good behavior? More homework as a punishment for bad behavior? Any public school teacher who attempted any of these would be severely reprimanded. In addition, this is not the way we’re supposed to be teaching in the 21st century. What happened to cooperative activities? Differentiation? Healthy snacks? Imagination?
By the time the week was over, the entire know-nothing education reform movement was in question. Not that teachers and others who actually work in education didn’t already know this. Because they lived with the terrible reforms every day and had little influence on whether those reforms should have been imposed in the first place. After all, the political process is slow and those right-wing money machines that were attempting not just to change the schools but also to destroy the teacher’s unions had a vested interest in drawing out the process so that the public could catch a ride on the train as it crashed in Conjunction Junction.
Not so bad, right? At least we only messed up one generation of children.
Yes, friends, education came roaring back as a national priority with the release of both the PARCC and the NAEP exams this week. In a nutshell, students did not perform very well on the tests. The reasons? Well, there’s the rub. According to those who comment on such things, they range from the fact that more students are living in poverty to the truth that the Common Core Standards, which are the basis for the PARCC exams, have not been around long enough for students to have internalized them. As for the NAEP, the answer is even muddier, but the consensus seems to be that last year’s exam asked questions about curriculum that students have not been taught.
Really? If I gave tests on information I hadn’t taught my students, I could be fired. That hasn’t stopped the know-nothings from using tests to evaluate teacher performance and use the information to retain or let teachers go. This year we’re using flawed tests created by people who are not in classrooms based on standards that have not been sufficiently implemented.
Interesting, yes? It shows that students in almost every state, save Massachusetts, do not perform proficiently on the test. Remember; the NAEP is called “The Nation’s Report Card” because it is given in every state, so it gives us an unsparing look at the differences in each state’s curriculum strength and delivery.
Want more stark proof? I knew that you did. Take a look at the 2013 NAEP Report that graphically shows the remarkable differences between student performance on the NAEP with their performance on their state’s end-of-year evaluation. Scroll yourself down to pages 3 and 4. Those graphs tell you the difference between NAEP scores and state tests scores. In every state but two–NY and MA–there was a gap between how students performed on state tests versus the NAEP. Isn’t it scary enough to be posted on Halloween? Many states were clearly giving easy tests and skewing the results.
And, no, these numbers are not confined to 2009 and 2013. They are similar in every year the NAEP has been given.You could look it up. And you should, because this has been education’s dirty little secret for too long.
The lesson here? There are many. One is that both the NAEP and the PARCC are difficult tests that hold students accountable to standards that require much more reinforcement over time. The PARCC has not been in existence long enough for us to adequately measure its accuracy. The NAEP has been showing us for years that students across the country are not getting a rigorous enough training in content and skills that a truly educated person should have.
More important is that for years, at least since the No Child Left Behind Act began mandating tests in the early 2000s, most states have been giving easy tests based on easy curricula and calling themselves satisfied with their education systems. This is the main reason why we need the Common Core Standards. They will ensure that students throughout the country be held to the same standards no matter where they live. The political opposition to the Core Curriculum has been centered on federal government involvement in what should be a state concern. The state test scores invalidate that argument. Many of the states have been committing educational fraud. National standards will go a long way towards fixing that.
The president was correct in saying that we are focusing too much on testing, but testing is not going away and it shouldn’t. What we need are tests that measure what students know based on verifiable standards and that ask students to perform evaluative tasks that stretch their brains and their imaginations. We haven’t achieved either of those yet. That will require that classroom educators be intimately involved in the evaluative process. It will happen, but we need the know-nothings to step aside and let the teachers take over this process.
He is a regular face on Fox News especially when Fox is looking for a black person to talk bad about other black people. And he has called the BlackLivesMatter movement all sorts of names in the past. So him saying “Black Lies Matter will join forces with ISIS to being [SIC] down our legal constituted republic…” is nothing strange. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is just saying what he is getting paid to say.
Today, Fox’s favorite black sheriff took to his twitter account and tweeted this;
That’s what happens when your McDonalds smoothie is almost finished. You go to the quiet car of your commuter train and you start yelling at everybody. I do it all the time. I totally understand.
The Governor was on his way home after a Sunday show appearance in Washington, D.C., during which he accused some Black Lives Matters followers of calling for killing cops and blamed President Obama for this “lawlessness”. That bomb thrown, Christie proceeded to raise a ruckus in the sacred quiet car, according to a witness quoted by Gawker, yelling at his Secret Service because he didn’t get the seat he wanted and then barking into his phone complaints like “this is frickin’ ridiculous” and “seriously?! seriously?!”.
Melissa Cronin at Gawker explained that first the Governor almost missed the train, then he didn’t get the seat he wanted and then, to add insult to injury, he got kicked out of the quiet car. Bad Sunday.
A (named) passenger told Gawker:
He got on last minute yelling at his two secret service agents I think because of a seat mixup, sat down and immediately started making phone calls on the quiet car. After about 10 minutes the conductor asked him to stop or go to another car. He got up and walked out again yelling at his secret service. He was drinking a McDonald’s strawberry smoothie.
And it’s not the moment where Nikki Minaj called Miley Cyrus a “bitch.”
The MTV Video Music Awards has always courted controversy—whether spontaneous or staged. Years ago, the night would be dominated by cheap shocks, like a Madonna-Britney-Christina lip-lock, and an atmosphere of forced “anarchy.” The stakes seem decidedly higher these days. In 2015, it feels like too much is happening in American culture, and art—even art as empty as the VMAs—is reflective of the tenuous times in which we live. So maybe that’s why Nicki Minaj going straight Queens on Miley Cyrus on national television felt like exactly the sort of cool, odd, WTF moment the most vacuous of youth-oriented awards shows needed.
After winning the award for Best Hip-Hop Video and graciously thanking her “beautiful fans” and her pastor, Nicki unloaded. “Back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press—Miley, what’s good?!”
The stunned look on Miley’s face gave an indication that it wasn’t a scripted moment—though who really knows? I’ve criticized Miley for her statements regarding Nicki and the VMAs. Cyrus was dismissive and condescending regarding Minaj’s earlier tweets about what she perceived to be racial bias in the show’s nominating process, which is an undeniable fact. And it’s obvious now that Nicki wasn’t too appreciative of Cyrus’s commentary, with the spawn of Billy Ray chalking up Nicki’s frustration to “jealousy” and being “not very polite” before lecturing her on race in America during a chat with The New York Times. Nicki’s challenge became the night’s most buzzed-about moment for obvious reasons, but it also makes me wonder if I’m getting a bit “aged” regarding what passes for outrageous. Because the Nicki moment was preceded by an unbelievably unfunny bit with Best Hip-Hop Video presenter Rebel Wilson.
The Australian comedienne spoofed the Black Lives Matter movement with a bit about police strippers. “I know a lot of people have problems with the police, but I really hate police strippers,” she said, before removing her outfit to reveal an outfit that read: ‘Fuck tha Police Strippers.’
“They come to your house. You think you’re getting arrested, and you just get a lap dance that is usually uninspired,” joked Wilson. “I hired a police stripper for my grandma’s 80th and he wouldn’t even feel her up.”
A generation of white pop stars have gone from observing black culture to absorbing black culture to feeling entitled to that culture—and who are you to tell them they can’t have this shiny new plaything?
Wilson’s bit went over awkwardly on the air and was received much worse on social media, with several viewers criticizing the tacky routine. Did MTV, Wilson, and the show’s producers assume that making fun of a political and social movement that’s come to define the past year would go over well with an audience because so much of that audience is tone-deaf to what young, Black people face? The Wilson bit was the most offensive moment of the evening in a show that included Cyrus in dreadlocks and a reference to Snoop Dogg as her “real mammy.”
With so much of the interesting political maneuvering happening on the right, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there will be Democratic debates in the fall, and they could be just as interesting as the Republican candidate-a-thons.
While Hillary Clinton still leads in every match-up with one or the other GOP candidate, she’s being pressed by Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire. Bernie’s doing his best to electrify the base with his talk about tighter government control of banks and higher wages and corporate child care centers and things that the US should already have but doesn’t because the right believes that Americans feel better by earning these things individually and that if you can’t afford them then it’s your fault. Sucker. And now Joe Biden is thinking about a run. He would most likely be a very good president if he could get beyond the verbal improvisations that have haunted him in campaigns past. Yes, there are other candidates running–Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee–but they are having a difficult time breaking through a national media that can only handle a few at a time.
In a twist, this election could see the Democrats painted as the older party, with Hillary, Bernie and Joe all much older than their Republican counterparts. In addition, there’s a bit of a rift going through the left as the Warren-Sanders far left-wing battles with the establishment, more centrist views of the Hillary, and perhaps Biden, wing. There’s been so much attention over the past few years about the yawning divide on the right, that a leftish split is certainly news and could be a potential problem unless the party unites in time for the convention, and that’s pretty much what I would expect to happen.
Hillary’s e-mails are making people nervous and the right will shout Benghazi whenever they get the chance, but on the main issues she seems to have most of the country on her side. Her recent confrontation with Black Lives Matter activists shows her empathetic and realistic, and her contrasting views with Republicans on marriage equality, gender equality, wages, education, climate change and foreign policy experience show her more forward-looking than any of the Republicans who only seem to be able to run negative campaigns.
Democrats need to be careful about being overconfident based on the Obama electoral map, with Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Colorado possibly presenting some serious challenges. Overall, though, demographics do provide the party with an advantage the Republicans will find difficult to overcome.
The video was posted by Gabriel Reilich over at GOOD MAGAZINE, and it shows protesters from the BlackLivesMatter movement having a one on one with the Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, after one of her campaign events in New Hampshire. GOOD has obtained exclusive video of the exchange between the Democratic candidate and members of the Boston chapter of #BlackLivesMatter, where a somewhat defensive yet candid Clinton responds to several tough questions.
His events have become a favorite hangout spot for Black Lives Matter protesters, so Bernie Sanders finally addressed the concerns of the movement, vowing to fight racism if he becomes president in 2016. Speaking in front of a packed Los Angeles arena, Sanders attempted to address the concerns of the group.
“There is no president that will fight harder to end institutional racism,” said Sanders, who was answered with a deafening roar and chants of “Bernie” from a packed Los Angeles Sports Arena, whose usual capacity is about 16,000 people.
The rally began taking on the issue head-on as Symone Sanders — Bernie Sanders’ new national press secretary who is not related to the candidate — opened the program and talked at length about racial injustice.
Symone Sanders is a black criminal justice advocate and a strong supporter of Black Lives Matter movement, and said Sanders was the candidate to fight for its values.
“It is very important that we say the words ‘black lives matter,’ Symone Sanders said. “But it’s also important to have people in political office who are going to turn those words into action. No candidate for president is going to fight harder for criminal justice reform and racial justice issues than Senator Bernie Sanders.”
On Saturday, protesters from Black Lives Matter took over a microphone at a Sanders event in Seattle and forced him to abandon an afternoon speech.
At a recent Netroots Nation conference, Democratic candidate for President Bernie Sanders was criticized for suggesting combating economic inequality as an answer to institutional racism in America. “Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50 percent of young African-American kids are unemployed,” Sanders said at the conference. “It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.”
He was booed by some in attendance for not directly addressing the question of racism.
On Sunday, Sanders doubled down, stating that economic inequality must be dealt with in addition to institutional racism.
“We have to end institutional racism, but we have to deal with the reality that 50% of young black kids are unemployed, that we have massive poverty in America, that we have an unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“We have to address both,” he added, referencing the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. to combat poverty in America.
Sanders was lambasted by some black activists last weekend at progressive conference Netroots Nation, where critics accused him of focusing on economic issues over racial inequality.
“My view is that we have got to deal with the fact that the middle class in this country is disappearing, that we have millions of people working for wages that are much too low impacts everybody, impacts the African American community even more,” he said on Sunday. “Those are issues that do have to be dealt with, and just at the same time as we deal with institutional racism.”
Since Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley felt the need to apologize for saying “black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter” when confronted by a group from the “BlackLivesMatter” movement, his apology has caused much talk and headlines. Jeb Bush is just one of a few presidential candidates urged to emphasize that yes, white lives matter, but BlackLivesMatter is nothing more than a political slogan.
When a reporter asked him to respond to O’Malley’s apology, an apparent irate Jeb Bush is seen rolling his eyes before offering his response.
“We’re so uptight and so politically correct now that we apologize for saying ‘lives matter?'” asked Bush. “Life is precious. It’s a gift from God. I frankly think that it’s one of the most important values that we have. I know in the political context it’s a slogan, I guess. Should he have apologized? No. If he believes that white lives matter, which I hope he does, then he shouldn’t have apologized to a group that seemed to disagree with it. Gosh.”
The annoyed Jeb Bush still doesn’t get it! When week after week black lives are gunned down and beaten and killed by those entrusted with their protection, saying “all lives matter”, although true, minimizes the need to fix an obvious problem between the black or minority community and the police. Yes, we all know white lives matter, because those lives are not being hunted by police the way black ones are, but what’s wrong with admitting that black lives matter too and deserve the same protection as white lives?
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