Tag Archives: BLM

Paradise Lost

 

Critical things to think about in 2023

I never dreamed I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all my life and the one I served for nearly thirty-six years. I have never wanted to live anywhere else. This is my home—I was born here. But now every day when I wake up and have my morning coffee, I come face to face with the reality that everything is changing for the worse. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, no matter how much I pray, something evil has invaded our nation, and I personally believe our lives are never going to be the same.

I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life—so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think I may well have entered the Twilight Zone. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!

You can’t justify this insanity:

If a guy pretends to be a woman, I am required to pretend with him.

Somehow it’s un-American for the census bureau to count how many Americans are in America. I have a neighbor who was a census taker. He told me he counted everyone in the house, legal or not. When ask why, he said it means more money for the county.

Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.

It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine. He laughed while bragging about it.

Hunter Biden is a crook, but the DOJ nor any of its agencies will investigate him. He has literally become untouchable no matter how much wrongdoing he commits.

Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote.

People who never owned slaves should pay reparations to people who have never been slaves.

People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees, many of which were in majors that they now cannot find jobs, but oh it was fun.

Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous and lengthy vetting process, but any illiterate gang banger or terrorist who jumps the southern fence is welcome.

Five billion dollars for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care to those who jumped the fence is okay.

If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college free.

If you cheat in an election nothing happens to you, but if you point out the mathematical errors of that election you are a conspiracy theorist & disdained.

People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.

We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan for us.

Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while others are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people but keeping them in custody is a violation of their rights.

The imbeciles in this country elected—with the help of outright fraud from a group of about five key states—an incompetent president who can’t string a series of words together into a coherent sentence. We as a nation have become the laughingstock of the entire world—no nation will ever trust us again.

Nothing makes sense anymore—no values, no morals, and no civility. People are dying of a Chinese virus, but it’s racist to refer to it as the China virus even though it began in China.

And, of course, pointing out all this hypocrisy makes me a “racist!”

We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good.

Our once viable political parties are in shambles. One is run by a collection of minority misfits appointed by leaders whose interests are self-centered and self-fulfilling. While the other is run by a collection of old, tired, worn out has-beens who have made their fortunes in the political arena and need to be ousted, and some new breeds who know what needs to be done, but are shouted down and suppressed by the has-beens.

And the biggest has been of all is one who did a good job as president but did not know how to win friends and influence people. And as a result was hated so much even by some members of his own party. Yet, he continues to run his mouth and talk ill of fellow party members thinking that will put him in good graces with the members at large. He would do well to remember a phrase from the greatest GOP president in my lifetime, “No Republican should ever speak ill of another Republican.”.

Wake up America, the once great unsinkable ship  America has hit an iceberg and it’s taking on water and sinking fast. We are being shouted down by the generation who came of age during the participation trophy era and believe everything needs to be fair and everyone deserves what they want, regardless of the cost to society. We Americans are drowning. Speak up while you still have a breath and a voice, for soon you will have neither.

This needs to be sent on to a lot of people. Please do it.

 

Originally posted 2023-02-28 13:18:12.

You’re Out!

What a shame that one of America’s favorite past times is going by the way of the NFL. Millionaires haggling over salaries while playing a game while its fans pay the bill. Not me! I don’t watch either.

MLB’s Alternate Universe

By: G. Maresca

As the Russians deployed tens of thousands of troops for an invasion of Ukraine, Major League Baseball’s (MLB) owners and the players’ union agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement.

MLB’s latest contract ended a lockout that lasted more than three months and barely registered a blip on the news’ radar. Their lockout impacted not just the spring training stadiums, but the local bars, restaurants, and hotels throughout Arizona and Florida. According to Seidman Research, these venues lost nearly half of their revenue when spring training was cut short in 2020.

Once upon a time in America, the national pastime was baseball. The once coast-to-coast sporting diversion is long past its time and prime. Baseball is the Pony Express in the era of the iPhone.

A work stoppage should be the last thing any professional league facing declining numbers needs. Billionaires argue with millionaires who disagree on how to divvy up a dumpster full of cash with the remaining fans paying the freight. Players and owners are heading down the Niagara River fighting over who gets to steer. Such unhinged business practices do not bode well for future growth.

When the MLB minimum salary is well over half a million, it is difficult to convince anyone with a pulse that the players are undergoing financial hardships, while the league’s anti-trust exemption remains. Making it to the “show” as players refer to the majors means the last guy on the bench can afford a wine cellar in their self-driving Bentley, while your average fan is fighting growing inflation that will price many out.

The issue is always the almighty dollar and if MLB’s goal is to drive their fans out, they are clearing the bases. Most could care less about salary caps, player minimums, arbitration, and baseball’s luxury tax structure, which parallels the federal tax code. The more they muddle with it, the more incomprehensible it becomes that has even seasoned tax attorneys bamboozled.

As Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal put it recently, “the nation’s most self-sabotaging sport is once more setting its own shoelaces aflame” and they have been at it for the last half century.

The league’s television ratings and attendance are proof the game remains in a serious funk. MLB is its own worst enemy and cannot afford to keep their fans away. Commissioner Rob Manfred makes his NFL counterpart Roger Goodell seem like a once in a lifetime lottery pick. MLB attendance last year was down to a 37-year low. The final game of the 2020 World Series had the lowest television ratings ever, while last year’s All-Star game was the second lowest. The league saw 45.3 million fans attend regular season games in 2021, a drop of 33.9% from 2019 – the lowest figure in 35-years.

There remains no joy in Mudville as COVID’s ominous clouds still cast a long shadow as unvaccinated players will be barred from Canada to play the Toronto Blue Jays. MLB’s slow suicide picked up steam when the league stenciled BLM on mounds and outfields, while moving their All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver to appease Leftists – an insufferable and impossible task.

For many, MLB could terminate the season and it would have the same impact if the American Ceramic Society cancelled their annual convention. Even a game as superbly conceived as baseball can be so mismanaged that its fan base is doing a MacArthur and fading away. Those who still find the game worth the time and the expense, MLB’s opening day was Thursday, April 7, one week later than initially scheduled with its 162-regular season games in place.

Greed and envy are just two more nails in MLB’s coffin. In the free marketplace, businesses are at liberty to choose and live with the consequences.

Baseball will survive as it is great entertainment at many levels from the minors to college, high school, and youth leagues, where games don’t last three and a half hours and a hot dog and a beer won’t cost you a small fortune.

MLB’s hubris cares little about their fans just like Hollywood. Fans, however, can be heard by using their pastime money to support the millions of displaced Ukrainians – a grand slam in the humanity game.

 

Originally posted 2022-04-07 09:27:09.

BLM

Good Day Followers, I hope this post finds you well, safe, and enjoying life as best we can during these very troubling times within the world we live. I am so sick about hearing about BLM, I want to puke. It seems everyday there are more and more indictments coming out concerning the so-called leaders of this organization.  Finally, there seems to be a  significand rise in Black people realizing just what this organization is really all about. Lord, I hope hope so.  

From The “Patriot Post” MARCH 3, 2022

Marxist Envy Drives BLM Grifters

Black lives matter, and that’s why the organization that coopted that phrase as its name deserves utter condemnation for being little more than a bunch of Marxist grifters.

Consider Patrisse Cullors, the self-described “queer” and “abolitionist” (as in abolishing the police) cofounder of Black Lives Matter (BLM). If you doubt that she’s a Marxist, don’t just take our word for it; take hers: “We are trained Marxists,” she said. But she’s also a wildly successful capitalist because she managed to peddle her divisive tripe all the way to the bank, raking in millions of dollars and buying multiple mansions before “retiring” from BLM last year at age 37.

She must be content to sip chardonnay in the quiet spread of one of her four homes, chuckling at all the dupes who funded her lavish lifestyle, right? Wrong. Her recent interview with The Guardian begins this way:

“You’re gonna make me cry,” Patrisse Cullors warns when I ask how she feels about being criticized by other Black people. Then [she] turns away from the webcam and starts to sob, hand to her mouth. “I’m crying because I was prepared for rightwing attacks. I wasn’t prepared for Black people to attack me. And I think that’s probably the hardest thing in this position, to lose your own people. The people that you love the most, the people that you do this work for. The human being feels betrayed, the leader feels like: ‘Yeah, welcome to Black leadership. This is the f**king hazing.’”

She talks about having been to therapy, which she claims is “difficult because we don’t live in a world that cares for black people’s vulnerability.” What is she talking about? In the years since she and two others began BLM, she raised perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars ($90 million in 2020 alone), often from decent Americans who simply thought their gifts meant they were showing that they care for black people. Yet here’s Cullors, vengefully biting the hand that fed her, while admitting that she daily contends with “a lot of resentment.” Resentment for what? That she didn’t raise a billion dollars?

No, that she’s being “treated as the fall guy” for all of BLM’s missing money.

Speaking of Black Liars’ Millions, we recently noted that roughly $60 million of BLM’s graft was unaccounted for. Well, it seems that’s an underestimate. Thanks to BLM’s diversified network of fundraising arms, millions more dollars have mysteriously become what Democrats love to deride as “dark money,” vanishing to who knows where.

Whether or not Cullors used BLM money to fund her real estate or anything else, she certainly cashed in on the racial resentment and division BLM fomented. “I’m also a published author, writer, producer, professor, public speaker and performance artist,” she has said previously. “I work hard to provide for my family.” Indeed.

So why did BLM fail at financial transparency? “I think it’s because black people in general have a hard time with money,” Cullors said. “It’s a trigger point for us.”

Just imagine a white person saying that.

Her hatred of the police comes from her circumstances growing up. Forget the war on drugs, she says; let’s focus on the “war on gangs.” She describes growing up in 1990s LA where “essentially the federal government [was] declaring a war on brown and Black children and calling them domestic terrorists.” She claims it was “a literal war zone.” Going to school in a neighboring white community, however, is what fed her resentment and envy.

Her comments are actually quite enlightening about leftism generally and Marxism in particular. That philosophy and ideology is built almost entirely on envy. A Marxist thinks, Someone else has something I don’t, so I’m either going to take it or at least make sure they can’t have it or pay dearly for it. That’s obviously oversimplified, and it’s not to reject the reality that sometimes life isn’t fair. Sometimes it doesn’t seem right that one group has it so good when another group doesn’t.

But envy is a foundational idea behind Marxism, and building ideology on top of sinful desire is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, Marxism is increasingly the ideology undergirding American leftism and the Democrat Party.

AMERICAN NEWS Mar 15, 2022 6:35 PM EST

Boston BLM leader charged with fraud in federal indictment

Monica Cannon-Grant and her husband are charged with three separate schemes: defrauding donors, illegally collecting about $100,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits, and lying on a mortgage application.

A prominent Black Lives Matter leader in Boston was arrested Tuesday, and she and her husband were charged in an 18-count federal indictment.

1-year-old Monica Cannon-Grant and her 38-year-old husband, Clark, were charged in connection with three separate schemes outlined in the indictment: defrauding donors, lying on a mortgage application, and illegally collecting an estimated $100,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits, Boston Globe reported

The pair allegedly raised more than $1 million in donations and grants for those in need, but used a substantial amount on themselves for expenses like rent on their Boston apartment, and buying a car for a relative.

In one case, Cannon-Grant was handed a $6,000 grant for her nonprofit, Violence in Boston Inc., to take a group of at-risk young men to a retreat in Philadelphia.
The trip never happened though, and she used the money to take a vacation to Maryland with her husband, dining at restaurants like Bubba Gump Shrimp, paying for groceries and car rentals, and visits to a Boston nail salon, federal prosecutors allege.
“While Cannon-Grant reported to the IRS and the state attorney general’s charity division that she received no salary, prosecutors said that in October 2020 she started paying herself $2,788 a week,” according to the Boston Globe.
This marks the first time that Cannon-Grant has been implicated in the schemes, and brings additional charges against her husband, who was arrested in October by federal agents after a raid on their Taunton home.
Her husband was previously charged with illegally collecting unemployment benefits and making false statements on a mortgage application.
After appearing before US Magistrate Judge Judith Dein on Tuesday, Cannon-Grant was released on personal recognizance, and was told that she could continue working at her nonprofit, but cannot handle the organization’s finances.
Cannon-Grant will be arraigned on the charges next week.
“VIB [Violence in Boston] and Monica have been fully cooperating and their production of records remains ongoing. Drawing conclusions from an incomplete factual record does not represent the fair and fully informed process a citizen deserves from its government, especially someone like Monica who has worked tirelessly on behalf of her community. We remain fully confident Monica will be vindicated when a complete factual record emerges,” said her lawyer, Robert Goldstein.
“We are extremely disappointed the government rushed to judgment here.”
Really?

Originally posted 2022-03-17 13:46:50.

The Democrats’ BLM Disaster

Once a source of energy in Democrat politics, Black Lives Matter has become a serious liability.

Not much to say here except keep it up Liberals. Press On!

The Patriot Post

DOUGLAS ANDREWS / FEBRUARY 24, 2022

Yesterday, we examined the disappearance of the Democrat Party in rural America, in the places beyond the big cities and suburbs. Today, we’ll look at one of the causes of that disappearance. We’ll look at a self-inflicted wound that is without a doubt the single most alienating allegiance that the Democrats have developed in recent years — namely, the party’s embrace of the cop-hating, money-grubbing, family-wrecking Marxist pressure group known as Black Lives Matter.

As is often the case with political marriages, this one turned out to be a deal with the devil. What began as a partnership between a sclerotic post-Obama Democrat Party and a cool, charismatic, street-credible cause devolved into an off-putting, tent-shrinking public relations disaster for the Democrats.

While the three-word string of Black Lives Matter played on white guilt, captured the mainstream media’s imagination, and worked its fundraising magic all across corporate America to the tune of $90 million in 2020 alone, it was another three-word string that sowed the seeds not only of the group’s demise, but of the Democrat Party’s demise among independents and rural whites: Defund the Police.

How so? Safety and security are among the fundamental needs of a citizenry and the fundamental functions of a government. When a people aren’t secure in their property and possessions, they rightly blame those they elect: their congressmen and senators, their mayors, governors, and presidents. Without safety and security, nothing else much matters. And when an organization’s war cry is to defund the very institutions that ensure our safety and security, that organization begins to bleed support. After all, it’s one thing to be shaken by the plight of young black men and the everyday genocide they inflict upon themselves in our big cities and blighted neighborhoods, but it’s another thing entirely to buy into the slander, the lie, that the cops are to blame for it.

As researcher and author Heather Mac Donald points out, police officers fatally shot 1,004 people in 2019, most of them armed or otherwise dangerous. Blacks accounted for about a fourth of those killed, 235, a ratio that’s been stable since 2015. Further, as she notes, the police fatally shot just nine unarmed blacks in 2019. Nine. And given that more than 7,600 blacks were murdered in 2019, the math is irrefutable: For every unarmed black person shot and killed by a cop, more than 800 other blacks were murdered, mostly by other blacks.

Thus, Black Lives Matter has perpetrated the vilest of lies and done the deepest of disservices to the very lives it purports to value. By calling for the defunding of our law enforcement institutions, BLM called for the pulling back of the cops from the very neighborhoods where they’re needed most. As National Review’s Rich Lowry writes:

The BLM agenda on criminal justice — based on the idea fewer criminals should be arrested and held in jail — took hold in blue jurisdictions, and the slogan “defund the police” got traction despite its utter impracticality and obvious political destructiveness.

Now, it’s obvious how shortsighted and foolhardy all this was. The rise in violent crime is a clear and present danger to the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and progressive prosecutors allied with BLM who have pursued soft on crimes policies in the midst of a crime wave are under fire, facing either recalls or heavy criticism.

BLM has also become a racket, a grift. One of its founders, Patrisse Cullors, went on a real-estate buying spree last year before shuffling off with a sweet retirement package. More recently, no one seems to be accountable for the group’s $60 million bank roll, and its purported leaders have slipped quietly away. Even Amazon has seen enough. Last week, it took the extraordinary step of kicking BLM off of its charity platform. Better late than never, we suppose.

Also last week, a one-time rising star within BLM, 21-year-old Quintez Brown, was arrested and charged with shooting up the campaign office of a Louisville mayoral candidate, Craig Greenberg. So what did the Louisville chapter of BLM do? It posted Brown’s $100,000 bond, and he’s now a free man.

These are not the actions and activities of a healthy organization. And yet the Democrats are stuck with Black Lives Matter, because the party doesn’t have the guts to denounce or distance itself from the group’s radicalism and corruption. The Democrats will thus keep on shooting themselves in the foot — which should suit the Republican Party just fine.

Postscript: Gotta love this guy; wish we had more like him! Get the last one, may have to reply it. Why isn’t he the senate minority leader instead of that idiot McConnell. At least we’d get clarity when he talks.

Originally posted 2022-02-26 09:56:42.

Parents Beware!

From one of the few newspapers that tell it like it is — the Wall Street Journal. Make no mistake about it parents and grandparents, your children are at risk

Merrick Garland Has a List, and You’re Probably on It

By Gerard Baker

Merrick Garland’s got a little list.

The attorney general is compiling a steadily lengthening register of “society offenders who might well be underground and who never would be missed,” as Ko-Ko, the hypervigilant lord high executioner, sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.”

Mr. Garland’s list of society offenders is compendious. At the top are right-wing extremists who’ve been officially designated the greatest domestic threat to U.S. security, but whose ranks seem, in the eyes of the nation’s top lawyer, to include some less obviously malevolent characters, including perhaps anyone who protested the results of the 2020 election. Then there are police departments not compliant with Biden administration law-enforcement dicta, Republican-run states seeking to regularize their voting laws after last year’s pandemic-palooza of an electoral process, and state legislatures that pass strict pro-life legislation.

They’d none of them be missed.

Oddly, the list doesn’t seem to extend to the hundreds of thousands of people who have crossed the southern border so far this year and are now presumably at large somewhere in the U.S. without a legal right to be in the country. Nor to those benevolent folk who have reduced several of the nation’s urban centers to crime-infested wastelands.

Which is presumably why the latest names on his roll are those parents who have had the temerity to challenge local school boards about the mandates they are imposing on their pandemic-ready classes and what the children are learning.

That wasn’t how the attorney general presented it when he announced the news. Citing a “disturbing trend” in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school-board members, teachers and other school employees, he declared that he was directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with local and state law enforcement to develop “strategies” for dealing with the problem.

The announcement looked as though it had been carefully coordinated with the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had asked the Biden administration to do exactly this.

Decent people everywhere acknowledge that violence is intolerable—whether perpetrated by Black Lives Matter agitators torching buildings, Trump supporters smashing federal property, or parents who throw projectiles at school board members.

But the letter from the NSBA contained barely any evidence of actual violence. It cited mostly antisocial behavior and threats, and some of the offenses referenced—such as a parent making a mock Nazi salute to a school board—are, however offensive, constitutionally protected speech.

And, as has been widely noted, when acts of violence occur, they can and have been dealt with by local or state law enforcement. There is no federal interest in any of these infractions.

All this merely underscores what the real objective of the attorney general’s action was—and we don’t need to engage in speculation because it was recently spelled out to us by another leading member of President Biden’s party, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia.

In a rare moment of honesty from a politician, Mr. McAuliffe made clear, in a television debate with Republican Glenn Youngkin, the Democrats’ conception of the role that parents should have in their children’s education: none whatever.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Aside from the jaw-dropping disdain for families, Mr. McAuliffe’s prescription is at odds with Article 26.3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the sort of grand multilateral pronouncement the Democrats usually fetishize, which states: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

This flagrant attempt to intimidate parents into handing their children over to the mercies of the state is as sinister as anything the modern progressives who now control the Democratic Party have done.

The message is clear, and it has been the character of education in totalitarianism systems through history: These are not your children; they are wards of the state, and the state (in this case through the teachers unions that fund the Democratic Party) will determine what they learn and how.

Democrats like Mr. McAuliffe insist that pernicious racial doctrines teaching the ubiquity of white supremacism and the inherent racism of American society and encourage racial segregation aren’t actually taught in schools. But this is laughable. The same Democrats have spent the last year insisting on racial “equity” as the defining objective of their social program. Why would they leave it out of the schools they mostly control?

Mr. Garland’s brazen attempt to intimidate will likely backfire as more parents—including many who aren’t especially conservative—become alarmed by what they see and hear in their children’s schools. By placing them on his little list, he may have done us all a favor.

Originally posted 2021-10-12 15:01:23.