Can Maxine Try To Tell Anyone They Should Not Be In Politics?
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) reportedly blasted musician Kanye West on Monday evening for talking “out of turn” when asked about West’s recent praise for President Donald Trump.
“Kanye West is a very creative young man who has presented some of the most revolutionary material in the African-American community. … But we also think that sometimes Kanye West talks out of turn and perhaps sometimes he needs some assistance in helping him to formulate some of his thoughts,” Waters reportedly told Politico at an Oakland event with members of the Congressional Black Caucus that pushed for more diversity in Silicon Valley. “We don’t think that he actually means to do harm, but we’re not sure he really understands the impact of what he’s saying, at the time that he’s saying it and how that weighs on, particularly the African American community – and for young people in general. … And I think maybe he should think twice about politics, and maybe not have so much to say.”
West created a firestorm last week when he tweeted that the “mob” cannot make him not love his “brother” Trump.
“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy,” West tweeted. “He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”
Trump thanked West for his complimentary tweet soon after Breitbart News White House Correspondent Charlie Spiering asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders last week at a press briefing whether Trump had recently communicated with the musician.
Trump also praised West over the weekend, saying that West has done a “very important thing” for his legacy, and touted the record-low unemployment numbers for black Americans under his presidency.
“In all fairness, Kanye West gets it,” Trump said on Saturday at a Washington, Michigan, Rally. “He gots it. He gets it! And he saw that. When he sees that African-American unemployment is the lowest in history, you know, people are watching. That’s a very important thing he’s done for his legacy. It’s a very important thing.”
In a Monday video, West said he finds Trump “inspiring” even though he does not agree with “half the shit Trump does.”
Kanye West has performed a great service to the Black Community – Big things are happening and eyes are being opened for the first time in Decades – Legacy Stuff! Thank you also to Chance and Dr. Darrell Scott, they really get it (lowest Black & Hispanic unemployment in history).
You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.
Why Don’t The Goon Just Say Hell Yes I Said It And It’s True?
Joy Reid’s old blog, The Reid Report (2000-2014), is littered with even more anti-gay posts than were originally discovered, reports the far-left blog Mediate. The MSNBC host is claiming these latest discoveries were not written by her, but by hackers as a means “to taint my character.”
Earlier this year, Reid admitted to authoring a number of posts on her old site that mercilessly ridiculed then-Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist as a homosexual (even after he married a woman). Reid was clearly using homosexuality as a pejorative, as a weapon of ridicule, so the left-wing MSNBC anchor’s homophobia has already been well- established.
Nevertheless, after she apologized for this (and because she is not a conservative), Reid was allowed to resume a media career that traffics in conspiracy theories, race-baiting, and uninformed Trump-bashing.
Here are some the new finds on Reid’s old site that she claims she did not write:
Keeping it real … most straight men feel exactly the same way, and would have the exact same reaction to the idea of stripping naked in a sweaty locker room in close quarters with a gay teammate. Most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing… Most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Broke Back Mountain.’ (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.)
Does that make me homophobic? Probably. And I’m not exactly proud of it. But part of the intrinsic nature of “Straightness” is that the idea of homosexual sex is … well … gross … even if you think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals. For the record I’m sure gay people think straight sex is gross, too, it’s the that the nature of political correctness is that gay people are allowed to say straight sex is gross but the reverse is considered to be patently homophobic.
While defending a Marine General who declared homosexual acts “immoral,” Reid (or her hacker) wrote in 2007…
“Some people use the [word] ‘immoral’ when they really mean ‘distasteful’ — I think a lot of heterosexuals, especially men, find the idea of homosexual sex to be … well … gross, and they lump it in with immorality.”
Mediaite adds that Reid (or her hacker) went on, “And then there are the concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral… Ditto with gay rights groups that seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.”
Other posts included a list of the top five “totally not gay celebrities” that included CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and singer Clay Aiken, who were only rumored at the time to be gay. In 2005, seven years before he came out, Reid said that Cooper is the “gayest thing on TV” and added that she has it “on good authority that Cooper is totally gay.”
Interestingly enough, Mediaite adds that Reid repeatedly wrote about opposing same sex marriage.
Reid’s hacker must have been fairly busy and thorough because dozens of politicians and celebrities were hit with gay jokes, according to Mediaite, including one aimed at her current colleague, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
Here is Reid’s full denial:
In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.
I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.
It is worth noting, however, that Reid does admit these posts came from her blog … with the caveat that they were added by nefarious hackers after she had the site shut down. It’s unclear when the nefarious hackers would have hacked her site and added the controversial content, since it has been defunct for years and still is. More importantly, NBC could or would not specify exactly which posts Reid is claiming were doctored.
On top of Reid, there is Saturday Night Live star Alex Badwin, who has long history of homophobia. Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski slut-shamed a woman who had photographic proof disgraced ex-Senator Al Franken (D-MN) groped her. Despite credible allegations of “stalking, groping and making explicit comments to female colleagues,” NBC still hired Mike Tircio to anchor the Winter Olympics. Andrea Mitchell is a rape denier. NBC paid off a staffer who accused Chris Matthews of harassment, and no fewer than six NBC staffers were fired for various acts of sexual misconduct, which in some cases went on for years.
Being a homophobe, sex abuser, or enabler, appears to be the opposite of a disqualifier at NBC News, so Reid has nothing to worry about.
Gentleman’s Quarterly has proposed refashioning contemporary culture by unmooring it from the past, a feat that can be accomplished — in part — by updating lists of required reading to fit the modern Zeitgeist.
In their essay titled “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read Before You Die,” the editors of GQrecommend rewriting canons of Great Books by swapping out works that are hard to read, dangerously backward, or politically incorrect with more contemporary works that conform to the values and sensibilities of the modern cultural elite.
So, out with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and of course, the Holy Bible, and in with chick-lit, inclusive language, edgy plots, and entertainment purged of traditional values or outdated suppositions about the human person, family, and society.
The Great Books are taken down in one fell swoop. “Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring,” we learn.
First among these “overrated books” is the Bible, for which the GQ editors reserve some particularly choice epithets. It is “repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned,” or, in a nutshell, “certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced.”
As a substitute, why not read Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, the editors suggest, “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.”
Their scorn extends well beyond the Good Book, however.
Pulling no punches, GQ says that the “cowboy mythos” of Lonesome Dove, for example, “with its rigid masculine emotional landscape, glorification of guns and destruction, and misogynistic gender roles, is a major factor in the degradation of America.”
Instead, we are told to read The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford, which “acts in many ways as a strong rebuttal to all the old toxic western stereotypes we all need to explode.”
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, “is without any literary merit whatsoever” and therefore should be replaced by Olivia, the Sapphic story of a British teenage girl who falls in love with her teacher Mademoiselle Julie.
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves, is definitely out, since it is “incredibly racist.” If one really must read about war, a more sanitized option is Dispatches by Michael Herr — we are told — which properly conveys “the cruelty and violence of modern warfare.”
And so, on and on.
One reads that Ernest Hemingway, with his “masculine bluster and clipped sentences” should give way to kinder, gentler writers. The Old Man and the Sea can be fruitfully substituted by The Summer Book, a “heartwarming” series of vignettes about a grandmother and granddaughter living on a remote Finnish island that “teaches us what it is to be in sync with the world.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets the axe, of course (“Mark Twain was a racist”), as do The Bible, Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Try reading instead Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, we are told, “in which emotions are so present and sensory they almost hold a physical weight.”
The exercise seems aimed primarily at avoiding contact with antiquated beliefs, racist language, and sexist assumptions.
In keeping with similar crusades on college campuses, it also seeks to bring in many more female writers, which GQ seems to think especially necessary for domesticating its predominantly male readership. Of its original list of 21 “required” works, not one is written by a woman. The new list, on the contrary, is dominated by women authors.
It is also noteworthy than its original list, GQ includes not a single volume from antiquity or even the Renaissance. Unlike the Great Books, here there is no Homer, no Plato, no Greek drama, no Virgil, no Dante, no Cervantes, and no Shakespeare.
Of course, different strokes for different folks. Everyone interested in literature has his own list of favorites that merit wider circulation as well as a similar list of “highly acclaimed” works that could just as well be forgotten. The core of the GQ proposal, however, is the surgical excision of books that serve to keep traditional values alive.
As simple as it is straightforward, GQ’s plan follows the tried-and-true political strategy of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist mastermind who explained in great detail how to overcome a “cultural hegemony” by replacing it with a new one (counter-hegemony).
According to Gramsci, society can only be changed by changing culture, and this can only be accomplished by developing a new cultural hegemony, which is necessarily rooted in folklore, popular culture, and religion.
The brave new world that the cultural left wishes to establish cannot come about as long as “folklore” (which includes art, literature, history, and other sources of national identity) remains rooted in the ideas and values of the Judeo-Christian West.
Only when a new set of values has been adopted and assimilated as a “commonsensical world view” to which any thinking person is expected to spontaneously adhere, can we say that the cultural hegemony has been successfully changed.
The original collection called The Great Books of the Western World, brainchild of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, was presented at a gala party in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, on April 15, 1952.
In his speech, Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, spoke glowingly of the project, underscoring its utility for the preservation of the culture of the west.
“This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education,” he said. “Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.”
GQ’s proposal can only be viewed in these terms. It is not about suggesting more “entertaining” literature. It is about changing the cultural hegemony for the generations to come.
Idiots wasting taxpayer money on fake Climate Change.
Los Angeles officials are going forward with a $40,000-a-mile program to coat public streets to fight climate change, despite the city’s many financial challenges — including a $73 million budget shortfall for dealing with the ever-expanding homeless population.
The program uses a light-colored sealant to cover the streets, which decreases the pavement temperature of so-called “heat-islands,” according to media reports.
The LA Street Services began rolling out the project last May, which preliminary testing shows has reduced the temperature of roadways by up to 10 degrees.
The project involves applying a light gray coating of the product CoolSeal, made by the company GuardTop.
Los Angeles painting city streets white in bid to combat climate change
California officials are hoping their latest attempt to stem the rising tides of climate change leads to a more socially conscious — and cooler — summer.
“CoolSeal is applied like conventional sealcoats to asphalt surfaces to protect and maintain the quality and longevity of the surface,” according to the company website. “While most cool pavements on the market are polymer based, CoolSeal is a water-based, asphalt emulsion.”
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Last year, the L.A. Daily Newsreported on the high cost of the project — and that local officials approved it nonetheless.
The morning temperature of the black asphalt in the middle of a nearby intersection read 93 degrees. The new light gray surface on Jordan Avenue read a cool 70 — on what would turn out to be the first heat wave of the year.
“It’s awesome. It’s very cool — both literally and figuratively,” exclaimed Councilman Bob Blumenfield, whose Los Angeles district includes Canoga Park, squinting into the laser handheld thermometer. “We are trying to control ‘the heat island effect’ ” — or hotter temperatures caused by urban sprawl.
“The downside: we won’t be able to fry eggs on the streets,” Blumenfield said.
Los Angeles painting city streets white in bid to combat climate change
California officials are hoping their latest attempt to stem the rising tides of climate change leads to a more socially conscious — and cooler — summer.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is eyeing a run for the White House in 2020, has embraced the program “as part of an overall plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city by 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2025,” according to Fox News.
And environmental activists are praising L.A.’s street-sealing project.
“Advocates are confident that advances in asphalt technology will drive down the cost,” Mother Nature Network reported on Sunday.
“There’s also the related economic benefits to consider: in once-sweltering neighborhoods where streets are now painted white, residents will be less likely to crank the air conditioning on full blast, leading to significant savings on energy bills and decreased emissions,” the website reported.
“What’s more, the highly reflective nature of white-coated asphalt means that street lighting doesn’t have to kick in quite as early in the evening, saving additional energy.”
Supreme Court Rules To Protect Illegal Immigrants That Commit Felonies.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision of federal law Tuesday that allows the deportation of foreign nationals convicted of certain felonies.
Justice Neil Gorsuch joined with the court’s four liberals to strike down the law, in keeping with longstanding conservative anxieties about sweeping and imprecise grants of power to bureaucrats and regulators.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for a five-member majority.
At issue in the case was a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that permits the deportation of any alien convicted of an aggravated felony. The law lists a number of convictions that qualify as “aggravated felonies,” then includes a catchall provision for “any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”
James Dimaya, a lawful permanent resident, was slated for deportation to the Philippines following two convictions for first-degree burglaries. An immigration judge ordered his removal under the INA’s catchall provision, as first-degree burglary does not appear on the list of qualifying offenses. In turn, Dimaya challenged the provision, arguing it is unconstitutionally vague.
In a 2015 decision called Johnson v. U.S., the high court struck down as unlawfully vague a section of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) that defined a “violent felony” as, among other things, “conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” Since then, litigants have brought a number of vagueness challenges to similar provisions of federal law.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the Johnson decision.
Dimaya argued the catchall section of the INA was substantially similar to the statute the court overturned in Johnson. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, prompting the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) appeal to the Supreme Court. The DOJ argued the 9th Circuit’s review of the statute was excessive, since civil laws are only considered vague if they are “unintelligible.” Deportation proceedings are civil, not criminal matters.
In her opinion for the court, Kagan rejected that argument, finding the grave nature of deportation warrants heavy judicial scrutiny. She then explained the INA’s catchall provision has precisely the same elements as the unconstitutionally vague section of the ACCA, minor linguistic differences notwithstanding.
“Johnson is a straightforward decision, with equally straightforward application here,” she wrote, elsewhere noting the statute “invited arbitrary enforcement, and failed to provide fair notice.”
Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment, in which he argued vagueness challenges to civil laws should be treated as seriously as challenges to criminal laws. Many civil penalties — and not just deportation — are in his view so sweeping that courts should police aggressively for vagueness, and abandon the “unintelligible” standard currently in use.
“Grave as that penalty may be, I cannot see why we would single it out for special treatment when (again) so many civil laws today impose so many similarly severe sanctions,” he wrote. Such sanctions include “confiscatory rather than compensatory fines, forfeiture provisions that allow homes to be taken, remedies that strip persons of their professional licenses and livelihoods, and the power to commit persons against their will indefinitely.”
His opinion largely tracks the growing distrust in conservative legal circles of draconian penalties assessed through administrative processes, and is part of a growing campaign to challenge economic regulations on vagueness grounds.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the primary dissent, joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
The Justice Department said Congress should quickly amend the INA to ensure a wider range of criminal convictions qualify for deportation.
“We call on Congress to close criminal alien loopholes to ensure that criminal aliens who commit those crimes—for example, burglary in many states, drug trafficking in Florida, and even sexual abuse of a minor in New Jersey—are not able to avoid the consequences that should come with breaking our nation’s laws,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley said after the ruling.
In an interview that aired Sunday night, former FBI Director James Comey sat down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and offered an ominous assessment of the country under President Donald Trump’s leadership.
Stephanopoulos brought up Comey’s remarks that right now is a “dangerous” time in America.
“I think it is [dangerous],” Comey told Stephanopoulos. “And I chose those words carefully. I was worried when I chose the word “dangerous” first. I thought, is that an overstatement? And I don’t think it is.”
Indict That Bastard.
He expounded, “I worry that the norms at the center of this country — we can fight as Americans about guns, or taxes or immigration, and we always have, but what we have in common is a set of norms — most importantly, the truth. And if we lose that, if we lose tethering of our leaders to that truth, what are we?”
