Good Point

The good folks at FAIR note, and disapprove of the fact that when white people engage in racist behavior, the press does their level best to maintain their anonymity:

The presumption of innocence is supposed to protect those accused of a crime, in law and in the press. In corporate media, that rule also seems to apply to white people who report people of color to the police for doing innocuous things. As FAIR found, their identities are far more closely protected than those of people falsely targeted for “suspicious” behavior.

In the past few weeks, major news media have been flooded with coverage of incidents of alleged racial profiling and implicit bias—from golfers reported to police for playing “too slowly,” to picnickers fingered for using the wrong type of grill at a park. This coverage was prompted by viral videos and other social media posts released by the accused or by concerned bystanders, in real time or soon after these events occurred. The characters in these stories had one thing in common: The callers and officers involved were white; the alleged offenders, black or brown.

In a survey of coverage of four recent racial profiling cases, FAIR examined articles or segments in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today; on NPR, CNN, Fox, and the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news; as well as in major papers in the region where the incidents occurred.

These stories, while similar in content (often using the same quotes or incorporating Associated Press reports), didn’t lack for details. Those accused, police, witnesses, and corporate and institutional leaders were interviewed. Multimedia elements were included, such as smartphone, regular, and police body cam videos, audio from 9/11 calls, police reports and screen captures of social media posts.

But almost across the board, while the accused’s names and personal details have been made public, the accusers remain unnamed. Though equally newsworthy, they were allowed to retain their anonymity.

It took a while for the racist Starbucks manager, or the racist Yale grad student, or the woman who called the police on black people barbecuing in the park, to be revealed, and the information was crowd sourced, and on Twitter, before the major news organizations deigned to publish this information.

For other news stories, the identity of the malefactor would be in the first two paragraphs of the story, but there seems to an editorial omerta as regards wypipo behaving badly.

Headline of the Day

Conservatives Will Never Get the Respect They Crave. They Don’t Deserve It

—David Atkins

He says something that needs to be said:

But dig deeper and it’s the sort of deplorable stuff that no one involved in the creation of culture would ever want to countenance: that women should serve as obedient reproductive vessels; that white men are biologically and culturally superior to others; that the ability of corporate executives to get rich from polluting air and exploiting workers is a greater freedom than that of communities not to be poisoned and abused; that it’s the inherent right of powerful countries to bomb less powerful ones and steal their resources; that being rich is a sign of divine favor, and the poor deserve their plight; and so on.

He's right.  These ideas do not deserve respect, and they haven't since William F. Buckley endorsed a segregated south 60 years ago.

Feet of Clay

It appears that Warren Buffett's mortgage companies aggressively redline, steering affordable mortgages away from black borrowers:

Trident Mortgage Co. helps more families buy homes in Philadelphia and neighboring Camden, New Jersey, than any other company, but it primarily serves one demographic: white people.

That is no coincidence: Trident employs a nearly all-white team of mortgage consultants, and all of Trident’s offices are in white neighborhoods, where it makes the overwhelming majority of its loans to white homebuyers.

It’s a division of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the giant holding company led by Warren Buffett, which has dramatically expanded its mortgage brokerage portfolio in recent years, reporting nearly 28,000 loans worth $7.3 billion last year.

“I originally paid little attention to HomeServices,” Buffett wrote in his most recent shareholder letter, referring to Berkshire Hathaway’s real estate brokerage operation, HomeServices of America Inc., which controls Trident and two other mortgage companies. Then, he said, its “growth exploded.”

………

But as they’ve become major players in cities across America, Berkshire Hathaway’s affiliated mortgage companies have followed a consistent pattern. Government lending data reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows the companies direct their lending toward white borrowers and white neighborhoods, even in population centers such as Philadelphia where a majority of residents are people of color.

The analysis is part of Reveal’s ongoing coverage of modern-day redlining in America, which found 61 metro areas, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Tacoma, Washington, where people of color were significantly more likely to be denied a conventional home loan than their white counterparts. This was true even when people of color earned the same amount of money as white loan applicants, wanted to take on the same size loan or buy in the same neighborhood.

Reveal’s analysis found people of color were far more likely to be turned down for a loan in many of Berkshire Hathaway’s largest markets, including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. It makes loans through three firms, Trident Mortgage, HomeServices Lending LLC and Prosperity Home Mortgage LLC. Here’s a breakdown:

• In Philadelphia, Trident Mortgage made 1,721 conventional home purchase loans in 2015 and 2016, 47 of them to African Americans and 42 to Latinos.
• In Atlanta, HomeServices Lending made 1,358 conventional home purchase loans, 63 to African Americans and 46 to Latinos.
• In Washington, Prosperity Home Mortgage made 2,650 conventional home purchase loans, including 167 to African Americans and 144 to Latinos.

Legal experts said Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage companies were carrying out the very practices outlawed by the Fair Housing Act, a 50-year-old law that banned racial discrimination in lending, by locating their branches in white neighborhoods, employing mortgage consultants who – from their websites – appear to be overwhelmingly white and lending mostly to white borrowers.

“It sounds to me like they are intentionally avoiding doing business with people of color,” said Allison Bethel, director of the fair housing clinic at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

………

The analysis compared the racial breakdown of mortgage lending for every lender in every city in America. It showed Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage companies took in a far greater proportion of their conventional loan applications from white homebuyers than their competitors in its largest markets in 2015 and 2016.

The figures were especially stark for Trident, which placed all of its 55 loan centers across Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in majority-white neighborhoods, Reveal’s analysis found. The analysis also showed 92 percent of the company’s conventional home loan applications came from borrowers in majority-white neighborhoods. When Trident did lend in neighborhoods where the majority of residents were people of color, most of the loans still went to whites.

Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage business has the hallmarks of one that could be prosecuted for “failure to serve” under the Fair Housing Act, according to Eric Halperin, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw fair lending cases during President Barack Obama’s first term.

………

The government lending data analyzed by Reveal also showed Trident served a much smaller and whiter section of the Philadelphia area than the region’s No. 2 lender, Wells Fargo, which overall took in a slightly smaller number of conventional home purchase applications. Trident made 26 times as many conventional loans to white homebuyers as black homebuyers in Philadelphia in 2015 and 2016, the data shows. For Wells Fargo, that ratio was 7 to 1.

It seems to me that Oracle of Omaha might have a blond blind spot when it comes to issues of people of color.

And Rudd Falls on Her Sword

Amber Rudd has been in the unenviable, and nonviable, position of having to defend a racist attempt to expel legal immigrants from the Caribbean that was initiated by her predecessor, the current Prime Minister

She could not really reverse the policy, or blaming her predecessor, so she has been a political punching bag for the past few weeks.

Then, this Friday, the Guardian got its hands on a memo proving that she was enforcing arbitrary deportation quotas, something that she had categorically denied:

Amber Rudd’s insistence that she knew nothing of Home Office targets for immigration removals risks unravelling following the leak of a secret internal document prepared for her and other senior ministers.

The six-page memo, passed to the Guardian, says the department has set “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18” and boasts that “we have exceeded our target of assisted returns”.

It adds that progress has been made on a “path towards the 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the home secretary earlier this year”.

The document was prepared by Hugh Ind, the director general of the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement agency, in June last year and copied to Rudd and Brandon Lewis, the then immigration minister, as well as several senior civil servants and special advisers.

………

The issue has become particularly toxic because of coverage of the Windrush generation – many of whom have been made destitute, homeless and denied benefits and healthcare because of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy towards those it deems to be lacking appropriate documentation to be in the UK.

It appears that this latest revelation was enough to force her out:

Amber Rudd has dramatically resigned as home secretary, after repeatedly struggling to account for her role in the unjust treatment of Windrush generation migrants.

The home secretary was forced to step down after a series of revelations in the Guardian over Windrush culminated in a leak on Friday that appeared to show she was aware of targets for removing illegal migrants from Britain.

The pressure increased late on Sunday afternoon as the Guardian revealed that in a leaked 2017 letter to Theresa May, Rudd had told the prime minister of her intention to increase deportations by 10% – seemingly at odds with her recent denials that she was aware of deportation targets.

Rudd was facing a bruising appearance in the House of Commons on Monday. Downing Street sources said that in preparing for her statement, new information had become available which convinced Rudd she had inadvertently misled parliament – and she had therefore phoned the prime minister on Sunday to tender her resignation.

More significant than Rudd's departure is the fact that she was a distraction from Theresa May's role in creating and enforcing the "hostile environment" policies of the Home Office when she was Home Secretary.

Headline of the Day

Amber Rudd stumbles toward total ineptitude over Windrush

—The Guardian

Amber Rudd is in a no win situation, of course.

This cock-up was created by her predecessor at Home Secretary, probably deliberately, but seeing as how the prior Home Secretary is one Theresa May, now Prime Minister, and as such is Rudd's boss, (for a while, at least), she is precluded from pointing at the person who created the problem in the first place.

Hopefully, this takes both Rudd and May down.

I am Sure that Theresa May Does Not Think of Herself as a Racist

But the so-called "Windrush scandal", where Theresa May, then Home Secretary, systematically destroyed evidence that would be required of  legal immigrants from the Caribbean to prove their legal entry into the country:

The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties.

A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West Indies – usually when the individual was struggling to resolve immigration status problems.

Although the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has promised to make it easier for Windrush-generation residents to regularise their status, the destruction of the database is likely to make the process harder, even with the support of the new taskforce announced this week.

The former employee (who has asked for his name not to be printed) said it was decided in 2010 to destroy the disembarkation cards, which dated back to the 1950s and 60s, when the Home Office’s Whitgift Centre in Croydon was closed and the staff were moved to another site. Employees in his department told their managers it was a bad idea, because these papers were often the last remaining record of a person’s arrival date, in the event of uncertainty or lost documents. The files were destroyed in October that year, when Theresa May was home secretary.

A person’s arrival date is crucial to a citizenship application, because the 1971 Immigration Act gave people who had already moved to Britain indefinite leave to remain.

She then followed up with her hostile environment policy, which, much like Donald Trump's, "Self-Deportation," rhetoric was a policy of deliberately terrorizing immigrants.

The inevitable conclusion was that this was a deliberate series of actions:

Theresa May was two years into her job as home secretary when she made her strategy explicit, telling the Telegraph in 2012 her aim “was to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration”.

The outcry over the treatment of the Windrush generation of migrants in Britain legally, but sometimes without the paperwork to prove it, has exposed the scale of that strategy.

The hostile environment created by new legislation and regulation has meant migrants do not face border officials only when they enter the country for the first time, but as a constant part of daily life. They must prove their immigration status whenever they try to rent a property, open a bank account or access the health services. Landlords and employers become immigration enforcers – or risk hefty fines.

At the Home Office, May was tasked with delivering David Cameron’s election promise that immigration would be reduced to the tens of thousands, a pledge that has still yet to be realised.

………

Teather, who is now the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, said: “Theresa May was determined to transform things. She was proud of wanting to generate a really hostile environment.

“The Home Office has a culture of enforcement and disbelief which runs deep into the walls, but it is politically led. It’s a culture from the top, and it has been a bit rich for the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to blame civil servants. When you’ve had a Conservative home secretary that long, you cannot moan when civil servants deliver those policies.”

Before this metastasized into a political catastrophe for the Tories, Theresa May, and her hand picked successor at the home office, were congratulating themselves over their mindless brutality.

The fact that this happened to an immigrant population that is almost entirely black is no accident.

They are a bunch of racist rat-f%$#s, period, full stop.

Textbook (Facebook) Racism

This is a direct solicitation for ad buyers to racially discriminate using Facebook's tools. It is on Facebook's site right now. pic.twitter.com/9f43WLmmKF

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 10, 2018

Certainly, there are plenty of advertisers who could look at this ad, and not see any racism.

These are the same people who have lily white office staff, and don't see any racism either.

You see this all the time in real estate listings and job listings, and most of the time, the attempts to discourage differently pigmented people are a LOT subtler than this.

FWIW, my guess is that this sort of data mining is used a lot more for age discrimination than it is for race discrimination, but much of the allure to some advertisers is the ability to indulge in bigotry and not get caught.

Facebook knows exactly what they are doing here.

So Not a Surprise

Did you know that the only people prosecuted under a Mississippi anti-gang statute since 2010 have been black?

Are you surprised? I'm not:

In the lead-up to this year's legislative session in Mississippi, supporters of a tougher gang law in the state talked a lot about the need to arrest white people. But in an ironic twist, the Jackson Free Press has learned that everyone arrested under the existing gang law from 2010 through 2017 were African American.

Over the last year, members of the Mississippi Association of Gang Investigators worked to spread the message that not all gang members in Mississippi are African American, Hispanic or another ethnicity. In fact, they warned, many of the state's toughest gang members are now white, between the growing Simon City Royals, white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, and biker "clubs" such as the violent Bandidos, started by a white Marine in Texas in 1966 who would later be convicted of murder.

In August 2017, MAGI told The Clarion-Ledger that 53 percent of verified gang members, a number presumably pulled from the dozens of identified criminal groups in the state, are white. It is a potentially surprising statistic in the state with the highest proportion of African Americans in the nation and that experiences a large amount of media coverage of its black and Hispanic gangs.

………

It is not talked about a lot in the push for an expanded gang law, but Mississippi already has a gang law on the books. The Mississippi Streetgang Act, passed in 2001, targets "three (3) or more persons with an established hierarchy that, through its membership or through the agency of any member, engages in felonious criminal activity." That is, much like the FBI does with the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, called RICO, the State can go after a group that conspires together to commit a criminal act. That is different from making it illegal to be part of a gang and thus being held responsible for crimes other members might commit separately, as the failed gang law this session could have done.

But despite MAGI frequently warning that white gang members pose a strong threat in today's Mississippi, the arrests and prosecutions under the existing street-gang law have only targeted African Americans, State Public Defender Andre de Gruy pointed out to the Jackson Free Press after the expanded gang law failed this session.

The Administrative Office of the Courts confirmed that from fiscal-year 2010 through 2017, court disposition data show that 97 people were processed under current gang law. All of them were black.

(emphasis mine)

The existing law is being used to racially profile, and notwithstanding the protestations of politicians and law enforcement, so would the new one.

What's more they cannot help but to know this, it is their job, and their constituents cannot help but have a general idea about this, but locking up black people wins votes (NOT just in Mississippi), so more laws target black people.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Why am I Not Surprised?

One of the things that seems to be constant in the United States is that when there is a potential conflict between Nazis and counter-protesters, the police will favor the Nazis, see the case of protests in Sacramento, California:

California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.

The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.

Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.

“It is shocking and really angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis,” said Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley teacher and anti-fascist organizer charged with assault and rioting after participating in the June 2016 Sacramento rally, where she said she was stabbed and bludgeoned in the head. “The people who were victimized by the Nazis were then victimized by the police and the district attorneys.”

………

Some California highway patrol (CHP) investigation records, however, raise questions about the police’s investigative tactics and communication with the TWP.

Felarca’s attorneys obtained numerous examples of CHP officers working directly with the TWP, often treating the white nationalist group as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects.

………

In one phone call with Doug McCormack, identified by police as the TWP affiliate who acquired the permit for the Sacramento rally, CHP investigator Donovan Ayres warned him that police might have to release his name in response to a public records requests. The officer said he would try to protect McCormack.

………

The officer’s write-up about an African American anti-fascist activist included a photo of him at the hospital after the rally and noted that he had been stabbed in the abdomen, chest and hand.

Ayres, however, treated the protester like a suspect in the investigation. The police investigator recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.

As evidence, Ayres provided Facebook photos of the man holding up his fist. The officer wrote that the man’s “Black Power salute” and his “support for anti-racist activism” demonstrated his “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the neo-Nazi group. He was ultimately not charged.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, This is not a case of a few bad apples. The whole damn orchard is rotten.

Truth is Antithetical Modern Corrections

The New York Times has a story on how jails and prisons across the country are banning the book The New Jim Crow, the article is titles, "Why Are American Prisons So Afraid of This Book?"

The answer to this question is simple:  They don't want inmates to understand the subtext of their detention, because for jailers, ignorance is bliss:

In the eight years since its publication, “The New Jim Crow,” a book by Michelle Alexander that explores the phenomenon of mass incarceration, has sold well over a million copies, been compared to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, been cited in the legal decisions to end stop-and-frisk and sentencing laws, and been quoted passionately on stage at the Academy Awards.

But for the more than 130,000 adults in prison in North Carolina and Florida, the book is strictly off-limits.

And prisoners around the country often have trouble obtaining copies of the book, which points to the vast racial disparities in sentencing policy, and the way that mass incarceration has ravaged the African-American population.

This month, after protests, New Jersey revoked a ban some of its prisons had placed on the book, while New York quickly scrapped a program that would have limited its inmates’ ability to receive books at all.

Ms. Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and former clerk on the Supreme Court, said the barriers to reading the book are no accident.

“Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth,” she said. “Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.”

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections confirmed that the book had been banned but would not elaborate. A form from the prison system’s literature review committee obtained by The New York Times indicates that the book was rejected because it presented a security threat and was filled with what the document called “racial overtures.”

………

The central thesis of “The New Jim Crow” is that the mass incarceration of black people is an extension of the American tradition of racial discrimination.

It zeroes in on how the “law and order” rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s led to the war on drugs and harsh law enforcement and sentencing policies, which disproportionately affect black people.

“It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt,” she writes in the introduction. “So we don’t. Rather than rely on race we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

Jailers don't like to be called racist stooges.

They certainly do not want the recipients of their tender mercies of this fact.

So they just ban the book.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Oh, You Delicate Snowflakes!

There is a course on the history of white racism at white racists' feelings have been hurt:

When a "White Racism" class meets Tuesday at Florida Gulf Coast University, at least two campus police officers will be on guard as a precaution.

Today marks the start of the spring semester at FGCU, and Tuesday will be the first time the class meets. The course has caused controversy due to its name and garnered national media attention.

"We have prepared for any possible distractions related to Tuesday's first class of the White Racism course, but we are expecting normal campus civility as our students engage in this and other courses at the spring semester's start," Susan Evans, FGCU's spokeswoman and chief of staff, said in an email.

Ted Thornhill, the assistant professor of sociology who will teach the class, said he received some disturbing emails and voicemails after news of the class spread. He also said a couple of students enrolled in the class talked to him about safety concerns.

………

A security plan was put in place after Thornhill, FGCU President Mike Martin and others met in December. Thornhill wouldn't say if the police presence will continue throughout the semester.

………

Thornhill said he started getting the emails and voice messages as word about the class spread through news stories and on social media.

The course will cover everything from ways to challenge white supremacy to the ideologies, laws, policies and practices in this country that have allowed for "white racial domination over those racialized as non-white," according to a course description.

Some of the emails and calls Thornhill received were from people who simply expressed disappointment about FGCU offering the class and challenged the course's validity. Others expressed their views with foul language, called Thornhill a racist and referred to him using the n-word.

………

Thornhill sent FGCU police 46 pages of emails and some voicemails that were left for him regarding the course. Thornhill said he sent the emails and voice messages to police out of an abundance of caution.

Losers.

Holy Crap

The Spotlight Team at the Boston Globejust issued a clarification, or maybe you would call it a reassertion, that Yes, Virginia, "The median net worth of black Bostonians really is $8."

It was a fact that they turned up in their story on race in Boston:

The $8 detail in the Globe’s Spotlight series on race in Boston is not a typo.

The median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School.

This Spotlight seven-part series — which began Sunday — tackles the city’s most vexing question: Does Boston deserve its racist reputation?

And to answer just that question, the Globe Spotlight Team analyzed data, launched surveys, and conducted hundreds of interviews. The Color of Wealth in Boston report, which is part of a five-city study looking at wealth disparities among communities of color, was one piece of information that Spotlight examined.

………

The household median net worth was $247,500 for whites; $8 for US blacks (the lowest of all five cities); $12,000 for Caribbean blacks; $3,020 for Puerto Ricans; and $0 for Dominicans (that’s not a typo either.) The sample size for Cape Verdeans was too small to calculate net worth, the report said.

This is mind boggling.

Cheer the Orioles

The Baltimore Orioles posted a rather innocuous Tweet wishing everyone a happy Kwanzaa.

The flying monkey crowd proceeded to have a butt-hurt hissy fit.

The team's response was to tell the racist Neanderthals to go Cheney themselves:

A common love of the Orioles is what brings everyone together on this page. We’re happy to have a diverse fan base of the best fans in the world. If you cannot show respect for others, kindly unfollow us. There is no room for hate or bigotry on our social media or in our ballpark

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) December 26, 2017

As a Red Sox fan, I cheer the Orioles today.

Confederate Statues in Memphis Are Removed After City Council Vote - The New York Times

There is a law in Tennessee that prevents the removal of monuments on public land.

The intent is to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments.

The Memphis city council sold two of its parks to a non-profit, and last night, Confederate monuments were removed:

The City Council here voted Wednesday to sell two city parks with Confederate monuments, clearing the way for two statues to be removed before the city commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mayor Jim Strickland first announced the sales of Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park on Twitter.

“History is being made in Memphis tonight,” he said at a news conference later in the evening.

Health Sciences Park had a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, which was removed around 9 p.m. local time.

By 10:30 p.m., cranes had maneuvered into Memphis Park and around a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. About 15 minutes later, a crane hoisted the statue onto a truck as a crowd cheered and struck up songs, including “Hit the road Jack.”

The removal of the statues came not only as Memphis prepares for the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. King, who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while visiting the city, but also amid a sweeping national debate about the significance of Confederate monuments and whether their removal would be an erasure of history or a righting of past wrongs.

………

Bruce McMullen, the chief legal officer for the city, said in an interview on Wednesday night that the parks had been sold to Memphis Greenspace, a nonprofit led by Van D. Turner Jr., a Shelby County commissioner.

The nonprofit seems to have been created expressly for the purpose of buying the parks: It filed its incorporation papers in October, Mr. Strickland said. Mr. Turner did not immediately return a request for comment.

The city sold Health Sciences Park in its entirety, Mr. McMullen said, and it sold its interest in an easement in Memphis Park. Each was sold for $1,000, he said.

The transfer of the parks to private ownership effectively allowed the city to skirt the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, a state law that prohibits the removal, relocation or renaming of memorials on public property.

A well deserved f%$# you to the lost causer racists.

Sad I Missed This

It appears that Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates explored their differences of opinions over Twitter, with West asserting that Coates that the latter's, "narrow racial tribalism and myopic political neoliberalism has no place for keeping track of Wall Street greed, US imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty".

I have not personally seen this exchange, but Coates deleted his Twitter account after their exchange:

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates has deleted his Twitter account after a dispute with philosopher and social critic Cornel West.

“Peace, y’all. I’m out,” Coates wrote Tuesday on his now-defunct account, according to the AP. “I didn’t get in it for this.”

West recently criticized Coates in an essay published in The Guardian, slamming him for not being critical enough of former President Obama and writing that he “fetishizes white supremacy.”

In the piece, West accuses Coates, who has emerged as one of the country's leading black intellectuals, of having a “preoccupation with white acceptance” and an “allegiance to Obama.”

I don't know what happened, but I am sad to have missed this.

I also have no clue as to who "won", though like most Twitter fights, my guess is that they they both "lost".

That is just the nature of Twitter.

Still, these are two talented writers, and neither of them are slouches intellectually, so it was probably epic truly epic.

Worst Bit of Journalism of the Year

The New York Times commissioned a profile of a Neo-Nazi white supremacist leader in Ohio, and it made Jimmy Fallon's softball interview of Trump on the Tonite Show, look like hard hitting journalism.

We discover that he worried about his wedding, that he goes shopping, that they eat at Applebee’s, that he loves the TV shows Twin Peaks and Seinfeld, etc.

Any number of people have excoriated the Times over this, and the author wrote a rather self-serving response to the criticism where he basically threw up his hands and said, "Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader."

Basically, he said that there was no story there.

If there was no story, then he should have told his editor, and his editor should seen that there was no story, and should have spiked the story, because the alternative was a story that presented no insight, no information, and no news.

Absolute crap journalism.

Journalists and editors need to know when to cut their losses and walk away from a story.

Tweet of the Day

While they raped my Grandmother,lynched my Uncle,broke up my family to lost history, you find honor & compromise in that, you racist, prick? https://t.co/bOihrwd67N

— Wendell Pierce (@WendellPierce) October 31, 2017

It's in response to these comments by Trump CoS Kelly:

Kelly says Civil War was caused by 'lack of compromise' https://t.co/0FddNmwxCU pic.twitter.com/zR1PRAqvLO

— POLITICO (@politico) October 31, 2017

Yeah, Confederate lost causers are racist pricks.

Adding to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named

Former football coach and tight end Mike Ditka, who just said that, "there has been no oppression in the United States in the past 100 years:

Even before this NFL season, which has featured team owners linking arms with players as shows of solidarity amid sharply critical comments from President Trump, some players were noting that the original message of protests during the national anthem had been largely lost. To them, the cause of bringing attention to racial injustice, in particular police brutality against black men, had been overshadowed by a heated national discussion over the merits of taking a knee during the national anthem.

To former NFL coach and ESPN analyst Mike Ditka, however, that cause made no sense to begin with. In a pregame interview before a radio broadcast of Monday night’s game between the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings, he said, “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”

The Germans have a term for this, Fachidiot, (Google Translate) which refers to an expert who is a complete moron outside of his limited area of expertise.

Thus, I add Michael Keller Ditka to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, unless he decides to do something like running for office, (please God no) you will here nothing about him from me

Of course, I haven't posted about him before, so carry on.

Headline of the Day

The Cop Suing James Blake for Defamation After Racially Profiling and Assaulting Him Is the Whitest Thing That Happened This Week

—The Root

It appears that NYPD officer James Frascatore is suffering butt-hurt over being identified as a racist goon.  (His words)

Not the Onion

The National Review is siding with a black athlete over a white Republican.

I think that this is a sign of the apocalypse:

Americans do not and should not worship idols. We do not and should not worship the flag. As a nation we stand in respect for the national anthem and stand in respect for the flag not simply because we were born here or because it’s our flag. We stand in respect because the flag represents a specific set of values and principles: that all men are created equal and that we are endowed with our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

These ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the Constitution, and defended with the blood of patriots. Central to them is the First Amendment, the guarantee of free expression against government interference and government reprisal that has made the United States unique among the world’s great powers. Arguably, it is the single most important liberty of all, because it enables the defense of all the others: Without the right to speak freely we cannot even begin to point out offenses against the rest of the Constitution.

Now, with that as a backdrop, which is the greater danger to the ideals embodied by the American flag, a few football players’ taking a knee at the national anthem or the most powerful man in the world’s demanding that they be fired and their livelihoods destroyed for engaging in speech he doesn’t like?

I guess that this falls in the, "Stopped clock," category, but still, the National Review?

We are in Bizarro World.