Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Why I voted for Joe Biden, and why I would continue to do so, is that he's updated his views on race and has realized what Republicans are trying to do, rewriting the entire civil rights struggle out of American history and pretending we're all a "post-racial society". We're not, and everything the GOP does proves that. Biden gets that, and he understands what he has to do.

President Joe Biden on Monday criticized Republican attempts to limit how educators discuss race and systemic discrimination in schools, arguing that teaching these topics isn’t about being “woke” but about acknowledging history.

Speaking at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington, D.C., the president highlighted some of his administration’s recent accomplishments including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday — which was met with opposition from some Republicans who decried the effort as “identity politics.”

“The idea that we’re supposed to remain silent on the abuses of the past, as if they didn’t occur? That’s not being woke, that’s being honest,” Biden said. “That’s talking about history.”

 

Remember that being honest about America's faults, faults that still exist today, in order to try to improve those issues, is "hating America". 

Biden’s remarks come amid renewed efforts by some Republicans to ban “critical race theory” in schools. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that studies how race has influenced societal, legal and political structures, but the term has been used by Republicans in recent years as a blanket indictment of any discussion of systemic racism or discrimination. Across the country, Republican legislators have pushed bills seeking to restrict how these topics are taught in public schools, including by banning books.

Most recently, newly inaugurated Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in public classrooms. Sanders, who previously served as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, defended the ban Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing teachers “shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country.”

And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is looking to overhaul public universities, beginning with the historically progressive New College in Sarasota where he recently appointed six conservative trustees to the board.

 

Republicans want to take America back to the pre-civil rights era 60's and invent a new America where it never happened. They expect enough people will agree with them, and cast the rest of us into the abyss.

 

Biden at least defends the dvil rights era. Nobody who would ever be nominated in this Republican party for president would ever do so, in fact they would run on the opposite.

Fantasma Santos, Prizrak Edition

That George Santos was somehow going to be involved with Russian oligarch money may actually be the least shocking thing about the whole pack of lies he's told to get elected.

 

George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York who lied about his biography, has deeper ties than previously known to a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to video footage and court documents.

Andrew Intrater and his wife each gave the maximum $5,800 to Santos’ main campaign committee and tens of thousands more since 2020 to committees linked to him, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Intrater’s cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry.

The relationship between Santos and Intrater goes beyond campaign contributions, according to a statement made privately by Santos in 2020 and a court filing the following year in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a Florida-based investment firm, Harbor City Capital, where Santos worked for more than a year.

Taken together, the evidence suggests Santos may have had a business relationship with Intrater as Santos was first entering politics in 2020. It also shows, according to the SEC filing, that Intrater put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos’ onetime employer, Harbor City, which was accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme. Neither Santos nor Intrater responded to requests for comment. Attorneys who have represented Intrater also did not respond.

The congressman, whose election from Long Island last year helped the GOP secure its narrow House majority, has apologized for what he called “résumé embellishment” while rebuffing calls for his resignation. He is under scrutiny by prosecutors in New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Ties between Santos, 34, and Intrater, 60, reflect the ways Santos found personal and political support on his path to public office.

While Intrater is a U.S. citizen, his company, the investment firm Columbus Nova, has historically had extensive ties to the business interests of his Russian cousin. As recently as 2018, when Vekselberg was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, his conglomerate was Columbus Nova’s largest client, the company confirmed to The Post that year.

Intrater’s interactions in 2016 and 2017 with Michael Cohen, who at the time was working as a lawyer for Donald Trump, were probed during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between Trump and the Kremlin.

Intrater’s company paid the lawyer and self-described Trump fixer to identify deals for his business, and court records show they exchanged hundreds of texts and phone calls. Neither Intrater nor Vekselberg was accused of wrongdoing in Mueller’s investigation.

 

Sure, but Michael Cohen was.

 

Look how much stuff that has been uncovered since people began digging into Santos, and look how much the GOP leadership knew and ignored in order to get him into office.

 

None of it is a coincidence, I assure you.

Dr. King's Legacy, Con't

This Dr. Martin Luther King Day finds Letter From A Birmingham Jail turning 60 years old, and Dr. King's views on the "white moderate" are, more than ever, both relevant and representative of the Republican Party as a whole.

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

 

Today's Republican Party is the party of unjust laws, and applied injustice. They are trying to undo the last sixty years and say that Dr. King's dream as been achieved, and that just laws are no longer necessary, that protection for Black, Hispanic, and other classes of marginalized people aren't needed because we're somehow past the bad old days.

And they they want to use the lack of those protections to bring those days back, to "Make America Great Again" and continue down that track as far as possible, rolling us back before anyone other than white land-owning men had citizenship at all

 

I implore you, as I do every MLK Day, to ask yourself if you are the white moderate waiting for a more convenient season, now that we're a couple years removed from the George Floyd protests.

It's not on Black America to solve racism, and it never was.