Black History Month 2 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Abraham Lincoln Was Strongly Opposed to Slavery

Abraham Lincoln is often put on a pedestal in American textbooks as one of the greatest opponents of slavery for freeing enslaved people with his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. But in fact, he struggled with conflicting and ambiguous views on slavery during his entire presidential career. This fact is confirmed by his own words: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

The Gorsuch Appointment

Even if I could agree with what Judge Gorsuch is likely to hand down, I think I'd still have to be opposed just because he's a Rich-Boy Legacy Puke who started climbing the ladder fifteen rungs above everybody else.

Handing things off to the next generation is one thing, but enough with this American Aristocracy shit.

Vox:

Donald Trump has selected Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appeals court judge on the 10th Circuit, as his choice to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is a widely acclaimed jurist, a favorite of conservatives and libertarians but also very respected by liberal colleagues. He’s exactly the kind of elite, educated figure who's traditionally made it onto the Court. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was Ronald Reagan's director of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983. A graduate of Columbia (where he was a Truman scholar), Oxford (where he got a doctorate under the acclaimed Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis as a Marshall scholar), and Harvard Law (which five other members of the Court attended), Gorsuch clerked on the DC Circuit and then for both Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy before working at a boutique litigation firm in Washington, DC, for 10 years and doing a brief stint in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that when Bush appointed to him to the 10th Circuit — which covers much of the Mountain West, including Gorsuch's home state of Colorado — at the age of 38, he was easily confirmed by voice vote.

This time should be different. Gorsuch is more outspoken and forthright in his positions than your typical Supreme Court aspirant, providing a lot of fodder for any opponents. A Democratic filibuster motivated by Republicans’ successful obstruction of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for this same seat last year is a certainty for any nominee, and if Democrats conclude that Gorsuch’s views on issues like the right to life and religious liberty are outside the mainstream, the filibuster might have a chance of success.

Today's Fake News

Here in the Age Of Alt-Fact, we have to get used to Poe's Law having supplanted Godwin's Law.

Alas, snopes.com says it's false.

And It Comes Down To This?

Yeah, that's great, CNN - super classy.

Sanders to debate Cruz live on CNN https://t.co/5xvPG42hcH pic.twitter.com/a6sUA66eQl

— The Hill (@thehill) February 1, 2017

Because we haven't made politics into enough of a fucking joke yet.

I Hear You - Now Show Me

I'll call it a win when I see evidence down the road, but I'm willing to give 'em a conditional Atta-Boy for right now, and hope others will follow.

From Reuters yesterday (01-31-17): 

In a message to staff today, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way:

The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all – and especially challenging for us in the news business. It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party.” It’s hardly surprising that the air is thick with questions and theories about how to cover the new Administration.

So what is the Reuters answer? To oppose the administration? To appease it? To boycott its briefings? To use our platform to rally support for the media? All these ideas are out there, and they may be right for some news operations, but they don’t make sense for Reuters. We already know what to do because we do it every day, and we do it all over the world.

To state the obvious, Reuters is a global news organization that reports independently and fairly in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack. I am perpetually proud of our work in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists. We respond to all of these by doing our best to protect our journalists, by recommitting ourselves to reporting fairly and honestly, by doggedly gathering hard-to-get information – and by remaining impartial. We write very rarely about ourselves and our troubles and very often about the issues that will make a difference in the businesses and lives of our readers and viewers.

We don’t know yet how sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our news-gathering. But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern our work anywhere, namely:

Do’s:

--Cover what matters in people’s lives and provide them the facts they need to make better decisions.

--Become ever-more resourceful: If one door to information closes, open another one.

--Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources.

--Get out into the country and learn more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.

--Keep the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles close at hand, remembering that “the integrity, independence and freedom from bias of Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved.”

Don’ts:

--Never be intimidated, but:

--Don’t pick unnecessary fights or make the story about us. We may care about the inside baseball but the public generally doesn’t and might not be on our side even if it did.

--Don’t vent publicly about what might be understandable day-to-day frustration. In countless other countries, we keep our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal animus. We need to do that in the U.S., too.

--Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example – and therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating information and insight of any news organization anywhere.

This is our mission, in the U.S. and everywhere. We make a difference in the world because we practice professional journalism that is both intrepid and unbiased. When we make mistakes, which we do, we correct them quickly and fully. When we don’t know something, we say so. When we hear rumors, we track them down and report them only when we are confident that they are factual. We value speed but not haste: When something needs more checking, we take the time to check it. We try to avoid “permanent exclusives” – first but wrong. We operate with calm integrity not just because it’s in our rulebook but because – over 165 years – it has enabled us to do the best work and the most good.

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driftglass

Nobody deconstructs David Brooks better than driftglass:

In case you hadn't caught on by now, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is not really a person.

Mr. David Brooks is a brand. Mr. David Brooks is a profitable multimedia Conservative corporation that specializes in one and only one service. Like a bank or insurance company or funeral home, Mr. David Brooks sells reassurance. He specializes in very high-dollar, high-influence clients. Addlepated university presidents, for example. CEOs. Political professionals. Beltway media assholes. Sclerotic, plutocrat shut-ins. And so on.

His job for the last 20 years has been to reassure his clients that no matter how fucking insane, obstructionist, incompetent, vicious, dishonest, seditious and pig-ignorant the Republican Party may appear to be on any given day, it's not really as bad as you think. In fact, the real Republican Party -- the secret Republican Party which operates behind a curtain that only Mr. David Brooks can peek and sets policy using a code only Mr. David Brooks can decipher -- is doing just fine.

Everything is under control.

And if there are evident cracks below the water-line? Well you can trust Me. David Brooks when he tells you that they're very tiny cracks -- inconsequential really -- and certainly weren't caused by the captain and crew of the USS Saint Ronald Reagan rammed the ship repeatedly into every fucking iceberg in the North Atlantic.

 

A Coupla Memes

Standing Up

It's almost like the Dems are discovering it gets a little easier to stand for something when you can actually stand up, and standing up becomes a little easier when you get some fucking backbone.

Chuck Schumer:

A little more than a week into the Trump presidency, the new Administration has violated our core values, challenged the separation of powers, and tested the very fabric of our Constitution in unprecedented fashion. It is clear that the Supreme Court will be tried in ways that few Courts have been tested since the earliest days of the Republic, when Constitutional questions abounded.

Now more than ever, we need a Supreme Court Justice who is independent, eschews ideology, who will preserve our democracy, protect fundamental rights, and will stand up to a President who has already shown a willingness to bend the Constitution.

The Senate must insist upon 60-votes for any Supreme Court nominee, a bar that was met by each of President Obama’s nominees. The burden is on Judge Neil Gorsuch to prove himself to be within the legal mainstream and, in this new era, willing to vigorously defend the Constitution from abuses of the Executive branch and protect the constitutionally enshrined rights of all Americans.

Given his record, I have very serious doubts about Judge Gorsuch’s ability to meet this standard. Judge Gorsuch has repeatedly sided with corporations over working people, demonstrated a hostility toward women’s rights, and most troubling, hewed to an ideological approach to jurisprudence that makes me skeptical that he can be a strong, independent Justice on the Court.

Make no mistake, Senate Democrats will not simply allow but require an exhaustive, robust, and comprehensive debate on Judge Gorsuch’s fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice.

We've got a 60-Vote Minimum on this shit now - your rules, not mine - and it looks like maybe Judge Gorsuch ain't gonna pass muster.

Black History Month 1 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Many African-Americans Fought for Confederacy

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders in 2010 said that thousands of African-Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the conflict. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, told The Washington Post she found the information about Black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write,” she said. “I am a fairly respected writer.”