All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Kal-El Summers]

Who is Terrance K Williams?

And why is in at that rally in what looks like to be a BLACK ONLY section?

NONE are wearing masks.

He's a right-wing black comedian there for the grift like Candace Owens. You can just ignore him like most of America already does.

[mogwen]

I suppose everybody heard Trump saying he wanted To slow testing down because it finds too many cases, during the rally.What a murderous narcissist!
And once again the GOP enablers are trying to paint it as a joke.

[mogwen]

I hope you are being sarcastic. I doubt Trump thinks of his mob as friends....just dumb hicks to be manipulated.

Of course, I only said that because he wanted a BIG Great rally and didn't get one! He must be soooo furious!

[Iron Maiden]

This does get to a messy point that the studios would not allow an African-American director to have the opportunities a given white director had.

Yes, this was true for too long. But did you know that in the Silent Era there were what was called "race films"? These films were produced for Black Americans and had all Black cast, production companies and crews? I just recently became aware of them.

Many of them were produced by the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes but unfortunately like many silent films a lot of them are considered lost. This site is dedicated to researching them.

[Iron Maiden]

Of course, I only said that because he wanted a BIG Great rally and didn't get one! He must be soooo furious!

Oh, sorry. Yeah, poor little Donnie. If you've ever seen the movie "A Face in the Crowd" I see him having a similar meltdown like the Andy Griffith's character does when his world comes crashing down.

[mogwen]

Oh, sorry. Yeah, poor little Donnie. If you've ever seen the movie "A Face in the Crowd" I see him having a similar meltdown like the Andy Griffith's character does when his world comes crashing down.

That'd be great! I suppose that he's gonna come up with a "the videos have been doctored, fake news!" excuse! But his racism apart, his wish to slow down (understand stop) the testing is the real shame of his rally. He's jeopardizing your lives!

[SquirrelMan]

The inside of the arena where Trump is holding his rally. It's not even half full.


Is Trump 'The Rally is half full' or 'The Rally is half empty' kind of guy?

Twitter Link

Trump is the "The Rally was PACKED and everybody who claims otherwise is spreading fake news!" kind of guy.

[SquirrelMan]

From Tulsa: The outdoor overflow stage is being take down, because there is no overflow.

At best, there might be around 8,000.

I'm feeling bad for the contractors who'll get stiffed by Trump for setting up a stage that nobody needed to begin with.

[SquirrelMan]

More wonderful images from inside the rally.

My question is: Would real MAGA folks have reserved those tickets mass-ordered by Kpop-Stans and TikTok-Kids, or did they just give Trump's campaign a false sense of security?

Because if they kept real people from coming, those kids may have saved countless lives and deserve a Purple Heart or something.

[aja_christopher]

Do you think the problem is that there were Asian-American or Native-American writers who anyone with good literary sense would recognize as being the equals of Dickens, Jack London, or Mark Twain who were not acknowledged, or that there were other factors that might have prevented Asian-American or Native-American writers from reaching that level?

To me that's the equivalent of asking whether only white men were qualified to hold the office of the presidency during that same era.

I think there were likely Asian-American and Native American writers who were as good as or better than Dickens, London or Twain -- Dickens was boring, London was often redundant (and overtly racist in real life) and Twain might have meant well but his portrayal of "n-----r Jim" wasn't anything I enjoyed reading about on any level. Moreover, I found none of the settings and few of the characters in said books worth reading about, likely because they had no real relevance to me as an individual.

The same can be said for books like To Kill a Mockingbird -- books by white authors that portray black people as "noble savages" to be protected.

I can tell you from direct experience that I enjoyed reading authors like Sherman Alexie and Bruce Lee more than anything I read by the above authors. Ironically one of my favorite authors growing up was Chris Claremont precisely because he didn't write his "minority" characters as stereotypes but instead did enough research to give each of them their own individual personalities. In retrospect, a lot of Claremont's appeal was that he didn't erase the histories or relegate his "minority" characters to the background but instead made them capable leaders and the main protagonists in his stories.



White authors are generally revered in our culture due to Eurocentrism and not because they are more talented than non-white authors -- it's the equivalent of arguing that "whites" were better at sports (boxing, basketball, golf, tennis, etc) because society was so segregated no non-whites were allowed to compete with them or that whites were the best rock and jazz musicians back in the day because they were the ones promoted to the public.

The bottom line is due to racist Eurocentrism that most of us in America don't even know any of said authors despite the fact that our nation has a vast history of non-white contributions to American traditions, art and culture.

The question isn't "did these authors exist" because talent is not restricted to just one "race" -- the question is why did "whites" for so long deny, demean, and ignore the talents of non-white creators, both domestic and foriegn.

The answer being racism.

[SquirrelMan]

Simple.

They probably don't think that they should have to explain why it is stupid a second time. Just had to break it down once.

Nah, surely that's not it.

[SquirrelMan]

Just reading the headlines that "Rally smaller than expected", and all the anti-Trump folks are laughing like:

The accepted Russian bot response seems to be to post a picture of a properly distanced Biden press event that had a capped attendance of 20 and claim that it was a quote unquote Bide Rally.

So yeah, they have nothing.

[SquirrelMan]

The official numbers are in:

Turnout At Trump’s Tulsa Rally Was Just Under 6,200–A Fraction Of The Venue’s 19,200 Capacity

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I had the desire to put a mask on Trump, so I did.

Attachment 97796

And when the mask comes off, it's covered in that orange **** Trump slathers his face with.

I hope you are being sarcastic. I doubt Trump thinks of his mob as friends....just dumb hicks to be manipulated.

DING DING DING! Winner winner, chicken dinner!

I suppose everybody heard Trump saying he wanted To slow testing down because it finds too many cases, during the rally.What a murderous narcissist!
And once again the GOP enablers are trying to paint it as a joke.

Either that, or Republicans will opt for their default mode of "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".

The official numbers are in:

Turnout At Trump’s Tulsa Rally Was Just Under 6,200–A Fraction Of The Venue’s 19,200 Capacity

Less than a third of the arena's capacity. Delicious!

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published its profile of Steve Vaillancourt, a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives who in 2012, protested being told his time at the podium is up by saluting, “SIEG HEIL!” at New Hampshire House Speaker Bill O’Brien. He also shot his mouth off in 2014, when he said Republican Congressional candidate Marilinda Garcia would win because her Democratic opponent, Anne Kuster, was “ugly as sin” and “looked like a drag queen”. Vaillancourt thus managed to not only tick off female voters with his misogynistic assessment, but insulted the drag queen community, as well. But that’s hardly the biggest beef the LGBTQ community has with Vaillancourt, who in spite of him being openly gay, has towed the party line and voted multiple times against same-sex marriage, and voted for a “religious freedom” bill that would allow individuals to refuse to provide services for marriage based on their own “religious conscience”. Vaillancourt lost his 2014 re-election bid by 89 votes, and apparently decided to sit out the 2016 elections. He probably should stay seated.


In 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the sitting U.S. House Representative from New York’s 1st Congressional District, Lee Zeldin, who barely won his first term in office in 2014 with 53% of the vote. Way back in 2008, Zeldin made a first disastrous attempt at getting elected to Congress, and instead, with the winds of the Tea Party Hot-Air machine blowing at his back, he did manage to get elected as a New York State Senator in 2010. And what makes Zeldin stand out in particular is his vomit-inducing levels of partisanship, as relates to his military record (we’re grateful for his service, but not his attitude). Zeldin’s taken up the sort of banner once waved by former Congressman Allen West, where he’s the first person in Congress to puff out his chest and accuse Democrats of not supporting the troops enough, to attack them for not caring enough about national security in fighting the war on terror, or to take care of veterans when they get home. He’s also great about running off onto Fox News to do so, and talk a big talk about how the Obama administration’s strategies were counterproductive to defeating ISIS, in particular, his belief that we should ban Syrian refugees from entering the United States, already fear-mongering scenarios where those refugees strap on suicide vests to attack us on the floor of the House. There’s just one problem…. The New York Post noticed that Rep. Zeldin has a nasty habit of missing half the meetings of the House Foreign Affairs committee that would have been keeping him abreast on the subject, and two thirds of the meetings that he could have attended in relation to ISIS and Syria. So perhaps folks should be taking his “expert” opinion on these matters with a grain of salt. Well, that and that he’s better than his counterparts across the aisle on national security, because if he was, he wouldn’t have a vote against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a petty vote to thumb his nose at the Obama administration’s immigration policy (see below for more details). He also was part of a GOP effort to even block debate back in December of 2015 regarding Democratic efforts to deny gun sales to people on the “no fly list” for suspicion of terrorism, so there’s that to factor in.

Rep. Zeldin was one of the first people in Congress to offer an endorsement to Donald Trump for president, and while most Congressman have gone out of their way to avoid talking to the press about the big bad bigoted cheeto puff, Zeldin didn’t have the good sense to say, “No comment” and get the heck out of dodge. Instead, after Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in the Trump University case, as being biased because he was of Mexican heritage, Zeldin was on CNN to try and defend the Donald from what many Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan, begrudgingly admitted to be the textbook definition of racism. Plus, Zeldin done goofed his riposte. Not only did Zeldin voice his disappointment with PAUL RYAN and not Trump, he refused to withdraw his support for Trump, and instead tried countering that he thought you could “easily argue that President Obama is racist with his policies and rhetoric”.

On November 2nd, 2016 when all the polls showed his hero the Gropenfuhrer was going to be losing to Hillary Clinton on election Day, Lee Zeldin even released a statement that the Clinton Foundation was “the largest white collar crime in America”. Which, given the fraud around Trump’s own charitable organization, was pretty ballsy of Zeldin to say.

His entire voting record reeks with that sort of one-sided fanaticism, with votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act or defund Planned Parenthood, and that was just as a Congressional freshman. Rep. Zeldin currently is in the unenviable position of being one of Donald Trump’s “favorites” in Washington, and gets invited to private dinners with him.