CAPITOL POLICE OFFICERS ARE TESTIFYING AS TO WHAT THEY EXPERIENCED ON JANUARY 6TH 2021 AS TRUMP’S TERRORISTS TRIED TO STOP THE PROCESS TO CERTIFY THE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN.
IT WAS TREASON THAT DAY, IT WAS AN ATTEMPT BY A PRESIDENT TO STIR UP TERRORISTS TO OVERTHROW THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS AND ILLICITLY INSTALL HIM PRESIDENT ZFFOR LIFE AFTER HE HAD BADLY LOST AN ELECTION.
THIS IS WHAT REPUBLICANS AND THE DUMB SHEEP WHO SUPPORT THEM WANT TO STOP YOU FROM SEEING.

What exact­ly is the strat­e­gy of the Republican party?
Apart from sup­port­ing the over­throw of the American Government, through vio­lent means to install a tin-pan dic­ta­tor, and block­ing at every turn the process of gov­er­nance at the Federal lev­el, what exact­ly is their strat­e­gy aimed at accomplishing?
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have decid­ed that to main­tain white suprema­cy with Donald Trump’s help, they are will­ing to tear down and cast aside 245 years of Democratic rule that has made the United States the rich­est, most pow­er­ful, most lethal nation in the his­to­ry of our planet.
Oh well!!!!

There is no ignor­ing the rea­son they man­aged to get away with what they have done so far, i e that white peo­ple are becom­ing extreme­ly fear­ful of los­ing white priv­i­lege because of demo­graph­ic trends.
The cal­cu­lus is that if they can­not use the old tired tropes about immi­gra­tion (peo­ple com­ing in) and Abortion (not enough white babies com­ing out) as effec­tive scare tac­tics, they will resort to cheat­ing by chang­ing vot­ing rules, tar­get­ed ger­ry­man­der­ing, intim­i­da­tion at polling places, and a host of oth­er unseem­ly meth­ods to stop peo­ple of col­or from voting.
Let us not for­get that the John Roberts Supreme court in 2013, led by Roberts, the for­mer Reagan admin­is­tra­tion anti-vot­ing rights lawyer him­self, opened that door to destroy­ing the 1965 land­mark law in its dis­as­trous Shelby coun­ty Alabama Vs. Holder ruling.
In 2020 Donald Trump received more votes than any oth­er pres­i­dent in his­to­ry, but it was not enough to save his sor­ry crim­i­nal empire that dou­bled as a pres­i­den­cy. The irony of Trump’s defeat at the polls is that Republicans gen­er­al­ly win when there is low vot­er turnout. Despite the record-break­ing turnout for Trump the Republican, his per­son­al tox­i­c­i­ty and lack of appeal turned out anti-Trump Republicans, Independents, and Democrats in a tsuna­mi that stunned both he and his par­ty cat­a­pult­ing them into a delu­sion­al stu­por lead­ing to the idea that the elec­tions were stolen from them.

The truth behind all of the activ­i­ties that the Republican par­ty has embarked on since their 2020 loss is that even with what they saw as a win down-bal­lot, they were still effec­tive­ly shut out at all lev­els federally.
Even with the largest vot­er turnout in his­to­ry, the Republican par­ty still only bat­ted 0 for 3. That is what’s guid­ing the Republican response efforts thus far.
The writ­ing is now on the wall that even when they are able to use a racist mas­cot to churn out unprece­dent­ed num­bers of votes, they are unable to win.
So the rules are out; it is now heavy armor time. The sad real­i­ty is that the Democrats are still fight­ing that war with bare knuck­les, engag­ing in a fight that they are sure to lose because of the obsti­na­cy of half their cau­cus that either (a) fail to under­stand the sever­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion or (b) secret­ly rel­ish­es an America that is a white ethnostate.
Hello Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, et al.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Two issues arose in a sin­gle address by the Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Michael Holness recent­ly that war­rants seri­ous discourse.
Remarkably, the two are fun­da­men­tal cor­ner­stones of why this writer writes on crime, vio­lence, and politics.
The fol­low­ing is the lead-in para­graph from one of the nation’s dailies; Prime Minister Andrew Holness has expressed con­cerns that crim­i­nal gangs could threat­en the sov­er­eign­ty of Jamaica if they are not rig­or­ous­ly pur­sued and nul­li­fied with the use of extra secu­ri­ty pow­ers, such as the state of emer­gency (SOE).
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​h​o​l​n​e​s​s​-​s​i​l​e​n​c​e​-​i​n​-​t​h​e​-​f​a​c​e​-​o​f​-​e​x​i​s​t​e​n​t​i​a​l​-​g​u​n​-​v​i​o​l​e​n​c​e​-​i​s​-​a​s​t​o​u​n​d​i​n​g​-​a​n​d​-​i​n​e​x​c​u​s​a​b​le/

Wait, what?
Really now, mis­ter Prime Minister? What the f**k, what an epiphany, Isn’t that what I have been say­ing for well over a decade now on this very medi­um? What is the rea­son for the sud­den awak­en­ing? Oh, wait, before we go any fur­ther, the blink­ered par­ti­sans for whom you can do no wrong will be all over me, telling me that you have done more for the police than the PNP as if I am a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the PNP or gives a shit about the PNP.
But they will not agree that the Prime Minister had this come to Jesus moment because, for the first time, he real­ized that his ass is not pro­tect­ed even though he is soft on criminals.
So you dis­agree? I don’t real­ly care whether you agree; here is Andrew Michael Holness speak­ing to the issue of the pow­er of the crim­i­nal gangs he want­ed cour­tesy corps respons­es to previously.
Speaking dur­ing a vis­it to the Parish of Saint James, the Parish where his Minister of National Security Horace Chang main­tains one of the nations most for­mi­da­ble gar­risons, Holness said the fol­low­ing; “We are mak­ing long-term invest­ments in infra­struc­ture and human devel­op­ment, but we have an urgent prob­lem that if we don’t use excep­tion­al pow­ers to address, those gangs can become a seri­ous threat to the State.” 
“I don’t have to expand and unpack that state­ment any­more. Ninety miles away from here, you see what can hap­pen.”
Hahaha, in oth­er words, the only rea­son that the prime min­is­ter has grown some balls on this sub­ject is that he now feels threat­ened based on what hap­pened to the President of Haiti recently.
I mean, these are his own words. Would the Prime Minister be this res­olute unless he felt vul­ner­a­ble? You be the judge, and by the way, it is shame­ful because all lives matter.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​t​h​i​s​-​i​s​-​w​a​r​-​p​n​p​-​m​u​s​t​-​j​o​i​n​-​t​h​e​-​f​i​g​h​t​-​a​g​a​i​n​s​t​-​c​r​i​m​e​-​o​r​-​b​e​-​r​e​l​e​g​a​t​e​d​-​t​o​-​t​h​e​-​d​u​s​t​b​i​n​-​o​f​-​h​i​s​t​o​ry/

The oth­er issue is what the courts have been doing for decades with crim­i­nal cas­es at all lev­els. I get the need for the police to be bet­ter, less slop­py, more pro­fes­sion­al in their work. Lord knows I have seen it myself, and on that note, a lit­tle bit of per­son­al back-slap­ping on the subject.
Long ago, when I was a serv­ing mem­ber of the JCF, the police would com­plain about the judges; on more than one occa­sion, a cou­ple of judges named me as they pushed back, “look at the way that offi­cer presents his case and tes­ti­fies under oath and you won’t have to worry.
So I do get that case prepa­ra­tion is crit­i­cal for con­vic­tion. I am told by col­leagues who left after I did that there are pro­to­cols in place that address­es case prepa­ra­tion ques­tions. I won­der, how­ev­er, how good those prepa­ra­tions are when the judges can toss cas­es with such care­free fre­quen­cy? And while we are on the sub­ject, what about the pros­e­cu­tors who are pros­e­cut­ing those cas­es? Do they not see the loopholes?
Having said the fore­gone, the Judges toss cas­es friv­o­lous­ly and with­out care for the vic­tims of vio­lent crimes. A seri­ous case can be made that there is seri­ous cor­rup­tion in the court sys­tem. Still, until a judge is caught red­hand­ed, this issue will con­tin­ue to be on the back burn­er because most Jamaicans naive­ly believe judges are gods..”
On the oth­er hand, when the court rules that a piece of leg­is­la­tion is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, it is not time for hand-wring­ing; it is time to sit down and draft leg­is­la­tion that will pass con­sti­tu­tion­al muster. If the old con­sti­tu­tion does not work for Jamaica, the appro­pri­ate thing to do is throw out that con­sti­tu­tion and change our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment by extri­cat­ing our­selves from the shack­les of British Colonialization and set­ting up a Republican Democracy.
Oh wait, that will not hap­pen under Andrew Holness, he was just appoint­ed to the Privy Council, a cer­e­mo­ni­al appoint­ment, but you know how we Jamaicans are hung up on titles.
I agree with the court that arrest­ing and lock­ing up indi­vid­u­als with­out charge for peri­ods out­side the peri­od stip­u­lat­ed in law is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and, there­fore, can­not be upheld by the court.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

I wish I had a dol­lar for every occa­sion that some­one (usu­al­ly African-American or a Jamaican woman) looks at an elec­tron­ic device in my store, then tells me they bought theirs on Amazon. I guess buy­ing on Amazon is a new kind of sta­tus sym­bol, a state­ment that says, “I have arrived,” much the same way some of us pop­u­lar­ized the sil­ly idea that “I paid more for mine.” Imagine brag­ging that you paid more instead of less.
I use to get real mad at the lev­els of stu­pid­i­ty; I don’t get mad anymore.
Separate and apart from the fact that Amazon and the mega-com­pa­nies attached to its site can make their own prod­ucts in China, there is the lit­tle fact that in my busi­ness as in oth­ers, mer­chan­dize is priced by brand, stor­age capac­i­ty, Price paid for them, and a whole range of oth­er variables.
For exam­ple, a 32 GB Samsung Galaxy A02 smart­phone would retail for a much low­er price than a 128 GB Samsung Galaxy A02 or the AO2s smart­phone. A 32GB Samsung Galaxy S10 would retail for expo­nen­tial­ly less than the same device with 128GB of storage.
Even if we set aside those vari­ables with­in each piece of elec­tron­ics, there is still the pos­si­bil­i­ty that they end up pay­ing more to Amazon if they are not [prime mem­bers]. Of course, ship­ping has to be tak­en into account and the lit­tle fact that Amazon is actu­al­ly a vil­lage of stores as opposed to one mon­ster store.
Many years ago, an African-American lady came to my store to pur­chase a cell­phone priced at $100; she refused to buy the device but came back lat­er to show me that she had got­ten the same device for less. I am still unsure why she thought it was nec­es­sary to bring her receipt back to my store to show me that she got the device for $99.99 and had trav­eled 45 min­utes to get it in anoth­er city? Don’t laugh.….…

This morn­ing I read a short post from a bril­liant Jamaican who went to get his tires fixed in his state, but the black-owned tire shop oper­a­tors were not there. Needless to say, I share his exas­per­a­tion. I recent­ly called one Jamaican who was rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend as an expert on BMWs. I actu­al­ly knew the dude, but I did not know that he was that stupid.
I grew tired from the con­ver­sa­tion and told him to fuck off; he could not work for me even if he were pay­ing me.
So I do share the pain of deal­ing with some black peo­ple who can fix stuff; how­ev­er, there is a dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who can fix bro­ken things and real busi­ness peo­ple who are black.
The fore­gone, how­ev­er, is not the focus of this short piece; I mere­ly want­ed to point to the con­tin­ued fal­la­cy, (yes as a black busi­ness­man who still oper­ates a brick and mor­tar small busi­ness with a young online presence)of spend­ing their mon­ey with com­pa­nies that have zero inter­est in their welfare.

Recently Richard Bronson, the bil­lion­aire, blast­ed off to the edge of space, and sev­er­al days lat­er, Jeff Bezos did the same.
Bronson, a British bil­lion­aire, came from hum­ble begin­nings. He start­ed sev­er­al busi­ness­es before he man­aged some suc­cess. He is the brains behind Virgin Records, Virgin Mobile, the cell car­ri­er, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, and oth­er ven­tures. Richard Bronson is worth an esti­mat­ed 4.7 bil­lion USD.
Jeff Bezos, the mega-bil­lion­aire best know for his Amazon brand, is worth an esti­mat­ed .….drum roll please .….…..205 bil­lion USD.
Let that sink in, please.
Amidst the great chal­lenges fac­ing the Earth on which we live, unprece­dent­ed drought, for­est fires, record floods, record heat­waves, pover­ty, pan­dem­ic, and the resul­tant deaths as so many nations can­not afford to pur­chase the vac­cines to give their pop­u­la­tions a fight­ing chance, these two bil­lion­aires decid­ed now is a good time to jet off to the out­er reach­es of space.
I am con­vinced now more than ever of the truth of the old cliché, “mon­ey does­n’t change peo­ple; it expos­es who they real­ly are.”
Whether Bronson and Bezos give to the poor is imma­te­r­i­al at this point. The larg­er issue is that as the very plan­et on which we all live is threat­ened exis­ten­tial­ly, the rich and the mega-rich are des­per­ate­ly look­ing to find some­place else where they believe they will be safe and from which they can exploit the resources (grant­ed there are any), for-profit…
In the first place, their greed and the steps they took cre­at­ed the con­di­tions that have placed our plan­et in per­il. And what are they try­ing to do? They are try­ing to find a way out!

Despite their greed and lack of char­i­ty, the greater trav­es­ty is the peo­ple who act like sheep and con­tin­ue to pour every pen­ny they have or can bor­row into the cof­fers of these greedy cor­po­rate oligarchs.
In many cas­es, the poor end up buy­ing things they do not need, things they can­not afford, and could have sourced else­where in their com­mu­ni­ties, some­times for less.
In our des­per­ate bid to show off that we are suc­cess­ful on social media, many of us run up bills on cred­it cards we can­not pay off, effec­tive­ly mak­ing us slaves to our debtors (the cred­it card com­pa­nies) or, in oth­er words„ the large Wall Street banks.
We spend our last dol­lar on Amazon, with Walmart and big-box com­pa­nies. These com­pa­nies are worth tens of bil­lions of dol­lars, com­pa­nies that have no inter­est in our com­mu­ni­ties (speak­ing of the black community).
Because of the tax breaks and loop­holes giv­en them by Republicans, those com­pa­nies invest heav­i­ly in Republican can­di­dates; those can­di­dates then use their office when they acquire them to foment and advance white supremacy.
Guess which racial group spends more mon­ey per capi­ta with these mega-com­pa­nies that fund those Republican candidates?
No one should fault any­one for try­ing to stay ahead of the game in busi­ness. Just imag­ine how many poor peo­ple could be helped with the mon­ey Bezos and Bronson are spend­ing on these flights of fancy?
We are in the mid­dle of a world­wide pan­dem­ic with new vari­ants killing a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple dai­ly. Across the globe, nations can­not find the resources to pur­chase the vac­cines they need to innoc­u­late their pop­u­la­tions from the rav­ages of COVID.
Is this the best use of those resources at this time?

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

I don’t know if you are watch­ing, but [a] poi­son has been poured out in America that has so polar­ized the coun­try that the nation’s nation­al secu­ri­ty is great­ly compromised.
It has noth­ing to do with the two polit­i­cal par­ties and every­thing to do with one par­ty; the Republican party.
The Republican and the Democratic Parties in the lat­ter part of the 20^th cen­tu­ry and the ear­ly years of the 21^st cen­tu­ry basi­cal­ly could be viewed as only slight­ly dif­fer­ent in ideology.
That was up until Al Gore won the elec­tions in Florida and the Republican major­i­ty on the Supreme court under William Rehnquist stopped the count in Florida where George Bush’s younger Jeb was Governor and appoint­ed George Bush the 43^rd President of the United States.

George Bush served two terms despite being a hor­ri­ble pres­i­dent; the events of September 11^th, 2001, would have solid­i­fied in place any Republican in the White House. The Republican par­ty is about arro­gance, brava­do, and launch­ing for­eign wars; when they do, the entire Republican estab­lish­ment coa­lesces around the pres­i­dent — the Democrats march in lock­step like sheep being herd­ed to be slaughtered.
For Decades the Republicans wrapped them­selves in the American flag and claimed that they were the true patri­ots in the coun­try. They launched wars and made for­eign pol­i­cy their touch­stone; it worked as the bulk of the peo­ple liv­ing in rur­al states, many of whom have nev­er trav­eled out­side their coun­ty of birth, believed that peo­ple in oth­er coun­tries are there to be bombed into obliv­ion when they see fit.
Afraid of being labeled unpa­tri­ot­ic, the Democrats allowed them­selves to be herd­ed along, in a Republican-lite ide­o­log­i­cal no-man’s-land, luke­warm, nei­ther hot nor cold-prob­lem is that nobody likes lukewarm.

The trag­ic irony of ironies is that the Republican par­ty that fraud­u­lent­ly claimed to be [patriots]is the par­ty that waged war on the American process to install a dement­ed old psy­chopath into the pres­i­den­cy for life.
L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. is a psy­chol­o­gist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center, argues a key dif­fer­ence between a psy­chopath and a sociopath is whether he has a con­science, the lit­tle voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing some­thing wrong.
A psy­chopath doesn’t have a con­science. If he lies to you so he can steal your mon­ey, he won’t feel any moral qualms, though he may pre­tend to. He may observe oth­ers and then act the way they do, so he’s not “found out,” Dr. Tompkins said.
Hmm, seems all of the points to prove are in order. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a psy­cho­path­ic duck!

Notwithstanding where American is today, a mere two decades or so ago, the major­i­ty of Americans con­sid­ered them­selves patri­ot­ic cit­i­zens, and they were.
They would nev­er imag­ine them­selves storm­ing the Capitol build­ing to hang the vice-pres­i­dent of the United States so that they may over­turn the legit­i­mate results of an elec­tion, in order to install a psy­cho­path­ic dement­ed King.
No, they fun­da­men­tal­ly did not want a King; they believed, as George Washington did, that they should not have a King because those were the found­ing prin­ci­ples of indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty on which the United States was established.
But the dement­ed psy­cho­path­ic would-be king did not unleash the unpa­tri­ot­ic poi­son in America. Being the con­niv­ing oppor­tunist he is, he mere­ly took advan­tage of the hatred and ani­mus unleashed by Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin came on the scene dur­ing the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, unleashed to bring life into the cam­paign of John McCain, who was run­ning against the first African-American to be nom­i­nat­ed by any polit­i­cal par­ty in the coun­try to be its stan­dard-bear­er. That man, Barack Hussien Obama, would become the 44^th President of the United States.

Sarah Palin is a racist dunce, much like Donald Trump. Still, the Republican Party did not care that they were lit­er­al­ly putting a total mis­fit a mere heart­beat from the nuclear codes; as far as Mitch McConnell and his cronies were con­cerned, they did not care who the pop­ulist was, as long as that per­son could win them the exec­u­tive Mansion.
It was enough that the per­son could draw breath to smear a mir­ror they would do to sign their poi­son pill legislations.
Truth be told, it start­ed with Ronald Reagan, a third-rate actor who was a smidge more con­strained with his racism than Donald Trump. The dumb­ing down of America was well on the way to becom­ing the strat­e­gy of the GOP.
A total feal­ty to guns and reli­gion, added to a bla­tant and idi­ot­ic dis­re­gard for sci­ence and the truth, cement­ed the par­ty as a back­wa­ter polit­i­cal move­ment that has no rel­e­vance in the 21^st cen­tu­ry. It had ful­ly mor­phed into an all-out white suprema­cist polit­i­cal party…
They did not care too much about the intel­lec­tu­al Herbert Walker Bush, but the “aw-shucks” incom­pe­tence of his son George was right up their alley.
So George W Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump give us a bet­ter per­spec­tive on how Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Bobert, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and oth­ers could have joined the usu­al imbe­ciles like Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, and Steve King in the congress.

We do not have a Democratic nation when one of the two polit­i­cal par­ties is dead set on cheat­ing, chang­ing the rules to give itself unfair advan­tages-and the oth­er polit­i­cal par­ty is as feck­less as Barney Fyffe, the cop of the fic­tion­al Mayberry.
The unfor­tu­nate thing for the world’s old­est democ­ra­cy is that this is no Mayberry.
This is a house on fire seri­ous­ness. The Republican par­ty march­es in lock-step to over­turn vot­ing rights- the touch­stone of any democracy.
The minor­i­ty par­ty’s insis­tence on pre­vent­ing some peo­ple from vot­ing, aid­ed by the nation’s high­est court, places the nation’s social order in grave danger.
Whether the major­i­ty of the American peo­ple will sit idly by and allow a minor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion to push the nation into total­i­tar­i­an­ism is yet to unfold.
That is the great­est threat fac­ing America today, white racism encap­su­lat­ed and cocooned into the Republican party.

…Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

In what is a must-read arti­cle in the con­ser­v­a­tive Wall Street Journal, snip­pets from a report on a new book from reporter Michael Bender titled, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” tells of Donald Trump crum­pling up a news­pa­per and throw­ing it at Mike Pence dur­ing a heat­ed con­ver­sa­tion about the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elections.
According to the sto­ry, Pence was get­ting ready to pre­side over the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote in the con­gress Pence’s polit­i­cal com­mit­tee had just hired Trump’s advis­er Corey Lewandowski, prompt­ing Trump to report­ed­ly hold up an arti­cle about the news while com­plain­ing it made him look like “his team was aban­don­ing him.” Trump report­ed­ly then “crum­pled the arti­cle and threw it at his vice pres­i­dent,” say­ing, “So dis­loy­al.” That’s when Pence “lost it,” accord­ing to the book.“Pence picked up the arti­cle and threw it back at Trump,” Bender writes.”
He leaned toward the pres­i­dent and point­ed a fin­ger a few inch­es from his chest. ‘We walked you through every detail of this,’ Pence snarled. ‘We did this for you — as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.’ ”

Haha, ha, I guess that was the moment he decid­ed that Pence had to go. You all remem­ber that his syco­phants entered the Capitol grounds with a gal­lows and noos­es, chant­i­ng ‘hang Mike Pence”.
I shed no tears for Mike Pence, Mike Pence is every inch as bad as Donald Trump is nar­cis­sis­tic, patho­log­i­cal, and socio­path­ic, but I can­not help but won­der where exact­ly did his min­ions get the idea that Mike Pence should be hung?
The Journal went on to say that after Donald Trump was told by Jared Kushner in a phone call that the tele­vi­sion net­works had all called the elec­tion for Joe Biden, the Democrat, he went on to fin­ish play­ing his round of golf on the morn­ing of Nov. 7, 2020.
Trump calm­ly lis­tened to his son-in-law as he strolled across the man­i­cured grass under a clear blue sky. He hung up, non­cha­lant­ly hand­ed the phone back to an aide, and fin­ished the final 12 holes, as more than a dozen golf carts filled with gov­ern­ment aides and Secret Service agents trailed behind him.
When Mr. Trump final­ly pulled up to the club­house in his cus­tomized cart — com­plete with a pres­i­den­tial seal stitched into the seat — club mem­bers cheered him on the back patio. “Don’t wor­ry,” Mr. Trump told them. “It’s not over yet.”
“Let’s do all the things we didn’t get to do because of all of the dis­trac­tions, and have fun,” Hope Hicks, a long­time Trump aide, said to the president’s team gath­ered inside cam­paign head­quar­ters in Arlington, Va.
Mr. Trump had won far more votes than his team pro­ject­ed, with sur­pris­ing sup­port from Black and Hispanic men. He was imme­di­ate­ly the run­away favorite for the party’s 2024 nom­i­na­tion, and Ms. Hicks was express­ing that vibe with her sug­ges­tion for a jaun­ty cur­tain call.
The report went on to add that Trump’s two sons Donald Jnr. and Eric, told Hicks that what she was propos­ing was not even an option.

This is what I found not just objec­tion­able but remark­able. Both of the younger jack­ass­es knew that their moron­ic dad­dy had lost the elec­tions and that it was legal­ly over; nev­er­the­less, they told their father’s aide that mov­ing on was not an option.
How inher­ent­ly crim­i­nal? How inher­ent­ly dis­gust­ing and reprehensible?
If the United States were tru­ly a coun­try of laws in which every per­son is held to the same stan­dard of account­abil­i­ty under the law, Donald Trump, his two sons, and every sin­gle per­son who aid­ed and helped him to try to over­throw the United States Government on January 6^th, 2021, would be locked away in jail hav­ing already been tried and con­vict­ed for treason.
But the United States is not a coun­try where the laws apply the same to everyone.
Donald Trump, his fam­i­ly, and friends all attempt­ed to over­throw the con­sti­tut­ed order of the American Government to make him­self an unelect­ed dic­ta­tor, and not a damn thing has been done about it.
Donald Trump’s attempt­ed coup de tat is now accept­ed prece­dent for a smarter despot to finess and end this experiment.

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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

As far as ‘pro­gres­sives’ go, the ques­tion remains in the sup­posed deep-blue New York City, how real­ly pro­gres­sive is New York City?
Emerging from the slew of can­di­dates run­ning on the Democratic tick­et to replace the term-lim­it­ed Mayor Bill de Blasio were three top-tiered can­di­dates, (1) for­mer san­i­ta­tion com­mis­sion­er Kathryn Garcia, (2) Eric Adams, for­mer NYPD cap­tain, for­mer Republican & (3) Maya Wiley Attorney, Activist and the true progressive.
In the end, it will be Eric Adams, the so-so for­mer Republican, a for­mer cop, and the Brooklyn Borough pres­i­dent, who will face off against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican can­di­date in November, to decide who will be Mayor of the city of 8 plus mil­lion peo­ple. Sliwa is best known for his red T‑shirt, beret-wear­ing guardian angels, a fix­ture in the city for decades.

In a city that is sup­posed to be heav­i­ly Democratic and pro­gres­sive, it is remark­able that an ex-cop, turn­coat Republican will most like­ly be the next may­or, black or not. No black per­son should feel that they will skate into elect­ed office by virtue of their skin color.
According to the Board of Elections, Eric Adams reg­is­tered as a Republican in 1997 before switch­ing back to the Democratic Party in 2001. We all know it is eas­i­er to gain polit­i­cal office if you have a “D” beside your name in New York City. Adams served as pres­i­dent of the Grand Council of Guardians, an African American patrolmen’s asso­ci­a­tion. In 1995, he co-found­ed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advo­ca­cy group for black police offi­cers seek­ing crim­i­nal jus­tice reform, and often spoke out against police bru­tal­i­ty and racial profiling.
Adams was opposed to police stop and frisk but is now sup­port­ing the mea­sure that has caused untold agony and pain to count­less black and brown youth in the city. Adams came under intense racist ridicule from his white for­mer col­leagues dur­ing and after his career as a cop. He want­ed their sup­port; hence, he changed his posi­tion to cur­ry favor.

The long and short of the Eric Adams sto­ry is that lib­er­als and pro­gres­sives failed once again to turn out and vote for the can­di­date that best rep­re­sents their interest.
White lib­er­als with skin in the game did, so Maya Wiley, the only true pro­gres­sive in the race, came in third in the city that is sup­posed to be the bluest of all in the nation.
It’s not that the city isn’t blue; Blacks and Latinos, the peo­ple with the most at stake, are too lazy to get up off the back­sides and vote for the can­di­dates that will best advance the poli­cies in their interest.

Eric Adams speaks from both cor­ners of his mouth, and I’m sure that most politi­cians who want to be elect­ed do that from time to time. However, New York City has been plagued by far too many inci­dences of mis­con­duct by mem­bers of the NYPD, which is a huge gang that is out of con­trol by all intents and purposes.
They try to run over law­ful demon­stra­tors with cruis­ers, engage in racist behav­ior, and com­mit all kinds of crimes against black and brown cit­i­zens of the city with almost absolute impunity.
They have zero fear they will be held account­able for what­ev­er crimes they com­mit. Take, for exam­ple; One New York City police offi­cer was accused of pep­per-spray­ing a woman, then deny­ing her med­ical treat­ment while she was hand­cuffed in a Bronx hold­ing cell. Another offi­cer slammed a 51-year-old man who had been argu­ing with some restau­rant work­ers onto the floor, knock­ing him uncon­scious, the man said. A third offi­cer was accused of tack­ling a gay man dur­ing a pride parade and using a homo­pho­bic slur. The city’s inde­pen­dent over­sight agency that inves­ti­gates police mis­con­duct found enough evi­dence in all three cas­es to con­clude that the offi­cers should face the most severe dis­ci­pline avail­able, includ­ing sus­pen­sion or dis­missal from the force. But in the end, senior police offi­cials down­grad­ed or out­right reject­ed those charges, and the offi­cers were giv­en less­er pun­ish­ments or none at all — the kind of rou­tine out­come that has left the Police Department fac­ing a cri­sis of trust in its abil­i­ty to dis­ci­pline its own. (The New York Times reported).
See that com­pre­hen­sive sto­ry here; https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​2​0​/​1​1​/​1​5​/​n​y​r​e​g​i​o​n​/​c​c​r​b​-​n​y​c​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​m​i​s​c​o​n​d​u​c​t​.​h​tml

One cop, Sgt. David Grieco, nick­named bul­let­head by his cohorts, who is now assigned to the 67^th Precinct, has a raft of civil­ian com­plaints against him for abus­ing the cit­i­zens he is sup­posed to serve. In the east New York com­mu­ni­ty he is sta­tioned in, res­i­dents com­plain that he sum­mar­i­ly bru­tal­izes them and they have no avenue for redress.
That tough guy is one of the most-sued cops on the force and has cost the cit­i­zens of New York a whop­ping $600’000 to set­tle com­plaints against him.

According to the New York Daily News, he has been the sub­ject of at least 69 CCRB com­plaints, 12 of which have been sub­stan­ti­at­ed. Imagine that it’s next to impos­si­ble to file a com­plaint against a mem­ber of the NYPD, much less to have one deemed cred­i­ble or substantiated.
This guy has 12 sub­stan­ti­at­ed; he is still a cop in the NYPD. he was recent­ly docked a mere 10 days pay by Dermott Shea, the Commissioner after the CCRB rec­om­mend­ed a stiffer penal­ty against him for vio­lat­ing the rights of Uber dri­ver Nash Martin fol­low­ing a January 2018 car stop in Brownsville.
Even though he was iden­ti­fied in a cell phone video record­ing of the ille­gal stop and search of mis­ter Martin’s car Sgt David Grieco lied that he did not believe that the per­son in the video was he.
These are the kinds of char­ac­ters who are super­vi­sors in that mam­moth gang that Eric Adams was a part of.
These are the kinds of char­ac­ters that Eric Adams will unleash on black and brown cit­i­zens of New York City because these same peo­ple were too dumb or too lazy to get up off their ass­es and go vote for Maya Wiley.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

June 30 — Donald Rumsfeld, a force­ful U.S. defense sec­re­tary who was the main archi­tect of the Iraq war until President George W. Bush replaced him as the United States found itself bogged down after 3−1÷2 years of fight­ing, has died at age 88, his fam­i­ly said in a state­ment on Wednesday.

“It is with deep sad­ness that we share the news of the pass­ing of Donald Rumsfeld, an American states­man and devot­ed hus­band, father, grand­fa­ther and great grand­fa­ther,” the state­ment said. “At 88, he was sur­round­ed by fam­i­ly in his beloved Taos, New Mexico.”

The state­ment did not say when Rumsfeld died.
Read more @ https://​www​.reuters​.com/​w​o​r​l​d​/​u​s​/​f​o​r​m​e​r​-​u​s​-​d​e​f​e​n​s​e​-​s​e​c​r​e​t​a​r​y​-​d​o​n​a​l​d​-​r​u​m​s​f​e​l​d​-​d​e​a​d​-88 – 2021-06 – 30/

Many years ago, I opined that I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe that the United States is poised for anoth­er bloody con­flict on the scale of the civ­il war of 1861.
My opin­ion is not based on a wish to see the world’s old­est democ­ra­cy implode, God for­bid. The United States has been my adopt­ed home since 1991, and she has been good to me.
My con­cern then, as it is height­ened now, is derived from the fact that democ­ra­cy can only work when all polit­i­cal play­ers share the com­mon goal that the process of Democracy is sacrosanct.
The first world war start­ed in 1914; it was a bloody war that last­ed for four years; the total num­ber of mil­i­tary and civil­ian casu­al­ties in World War I was around 40 million.
The sec­ond world war began a mere twen­ty-one (21) years lat­er, in 1939. That con­flict was even more bloody; esti­mates sug­gest that some 75 mil­lion peo­ple died in World War II, includ­ing about 20 mil­lion mil­i­tary per­son­nel and 40 mil­lion civil­ians.

Foundationational pil­lars were cre­at­ed after 1945 when the allied forces defeat­ed Hitler’s nazi axis, i.e., the United Nations (NATO), The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and oth­ers. Those pil­lars have been instru­men­tal in ensur­ing world peace and have pre­vent­ed anoth­er glob­al conflagration.
As a result of America’s push, dic­ta­tor­ships col­lapsed around the world save and except for a few places, mak­ing way for thriv­ing new democracies.
The Berlin wall came down, reuni­fy­ing East and West Germany into one pow­er­ful and wealthy Germany.
In Eastern Europe, the Soviet influ­ence col­lapsed, result­ing in Democracy tak­ing hold in for­mer Soviet satellites.
Even Communist China opened its doors and allowed the free mar­ket to thrive to a cer­tain extent, result­ing in tremen­dous wealth pour­ing into China, lift­ing huge sec­tions of the Chinese pop­u­la­tion out of pover­ty, and mak­ing China a mighty pow­er on the world’s stage.

As a con­se­quence of west­ern nations mov­ing most of their man­u­fac­tur­ing to China and that coun­ty’s mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of west­ern intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, China has become very rich. However, China has not changed its total­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies; it is now flush with cash to export its totalitarianism.
On July 1^st, 1997, sov­er­eign­ty over the British colony of Hong Kong was for­mal­ly trans­ferred to China. Since then, China’s heavy com­mu­nist hand has turned the thriv­ing for­mer colony into a place of fear for the cit­i­zens of that coun­try who pre­vi­ous­ly enjoyed pros­per­i­ty and the rule of law.
Russia too has emerged from the embar­rass­ment of the Soviet col­lapse; arguably not a rich nation, Russia is still a nuclear-armed pow­er that has solid­i­fied itself as a plu­to­crat­ic state that still seeks to exert its influ­ence out­side its own borders.
In Turkey, total­i­tar­i­an­ism has tak­en a stran­gle­hold, effec­tive­ly chok­ing off the dis­sent of pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and all across Europe, right-wing nation­al­ism is on the rise.
All of these events could not come at a worse time for the forces of democ­ra­cy, as forces in the United States that once hon­ored the idea of democ­ra­cy as now eschewed that idea because it now feels hold­ing on to pow­er is more in its interest.

The Republican par­ty has there­fore become the great­est threat to America’s nation­al secu­ri­ty. To make mat­ters worse, the Democratic par­ty is a weak bewil­dered polit­i­cal par­ty that wants to play by the rules, but there is no one to play with.
Between January 2017 and January 2021, America has lurched errat­i­cal­ly to the right under the lead­er­ship of a mad unso­phis­ti­cat­ed, unlearned, immoral, and amoral sociopath.
The harm done to the world’s most pow­er­ful nation would have tak­en decades to clean up even if the Republican par­ty was a will­ing partner.
Not hav­ing the Republican par­ty as a will­ing gov­ern­ing part­ner fur­ther bewil­ders and con­fus­es the democ­rats on what to do to stop the onslaught against demo­c­ra­t­ic rule launched by Republicans in red states.
Donald Trump and his under­lings, includ­ing William Barr, set out to dis­as­sem­ble the struc­tures of demo­c­ra­t­ic rule in the United States.
Even though the infan­tile Trump is no longer in office, Republicans across the coun­try have main­tained a scorched-earth approach to dis­man­tling the rule of law. They have enact­ed vot­er sup­pres­sion laws aimed at chang­ing the way Americans, par­tic­u­lar­ly Black & Brown peo­ple, vot­ed at the state lev­els, while in Washington DC, they have blocked the H.R.1 (For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts that would pro­tect the fran­chise for all Americans.

This is a house-on-fire moment for American democ­ra­cy; if the Democratic Party can­not mount a defense of democ­ra­cy while it has the house sen­ate and the exec­u­tive, what chance is there for demo­c­ra­t­ic rule when the Republicans take over the reins of governance?
As dire as it seems for American democ­ra­cy, it is just as dire for the rest of the world when America has giv­en up on the noble idea of demo­c­ra­t­ic rule.
Outside of com­plain­ing on MSNBC, it appears that the Democratic par­ty has no idea how to counter Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, and oth­ers as they con­tin­ue the decon­struc­tion of the American demo­c­ra­t­ic process.
Dark clouds are rising.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Over the years, I have writ­ten sev­er­al arti­cles, inart­ful­ly attempt­ing to show that the mod­ern Democratic par­ty that most black Americans sup­port is not the same old par­ty of the south­ern Dixiecrats.
It is a tough row to hoe as peo­ple will not allow you to for­get where you are com­ing from, regard­less of the trans­for­ma­tion you go through to change the way you were.
People get a kick out of den­i­grat­ing you to the worst of what you are. So frauds and hyp­ocrites like Kentucky US Senator Rand Paul are quick to point the fin­ger at the his­to­ry of the Democratic par­ty’s racist past, even as he and his par­ty are exact­ly where the Democrat par­ty of old has been.
The thing about point­ing a fin­ger is that there are always a few fin­gers point­ing back at the point­er, but the sym­bol­ism of that is lost on the likes of Rand Paul, who are iter­a­tions of humankind that are devoid of shame or guilt.
In the Bible, scrip­tures refer to Simon the [lep­er], one can make the point that the scrip­ture uses Simmon’s old afflic­tion as a ref­er­ence. Still, there must have been some pos­i­tives about Simon that could be used to speak of him out­side of the worst mal­a­dy to befall him.
Leprosy meant ban­ish­ment, excru­ci­at­ing pain, and even­tu­al­ly cer­tain death in solitude.
Because your ene­mies want to degrade you, they con­tin­ue to point to your worst moments, but God does not see us that way; he sees us at our best.
Thanks, Pastor B.

The Republican par­ty would be in a bet­ter place moral­ly if it were point­ing to the past sins of the old Democrat par­ty while it was itself occu­py­ing a high­er moral ground. Of course, the worst one could say about that kind of fin­ger-point­ing is that it is in poor taste to judge, but that is not the case.
The Republican par­ty long trans­formed itself into a white peo­ple griev­ance par­ty of racism, hatred, xeno­pho­bia, and fascism.
It is now a fascis­tic par­ty of snivel­ing lit­tle bitch­es who are filled with hatred and fear of the prospect of hav­ing to com­pete based on their tal­ents, and so they are mov­ing hell and high water to rig the way the game is played through vot­er sup­pres­sion laws.
As those of us who are pay­ing atten­tion look on in hor­ror at what is hap­pen­ing to the American Democracy through the actions of the Republican par­ty and the weak­ness of the Democrats, peo­ple are focused on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two US Senators.
Focusing on the two is exact­ly what ought to hap­pen because they were elect­ed to office to car­ry out the Democratic agenda.
If they want­ed to be Republicans, both Sinema and Manchin should have run as Republicans. It is treach­ery of the high­est order to run on one par­ty’s agen­da then vote to enhance the oth­er par­ty’s agenda.
Yes, I will con­tin­ue to say that the par­ty which gave black Americans the civ­il rights act of 1964 & the Voting Rights act of 1965, which came a full hun­dred years after the end of the civ­il war, is a dif­fer­ent par­ty than the Dixiecrat par­ty of Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace, in the same way, that the Republican par­ty is not the same par­ty that.….….…..
Okay.….… now that I have your atten­tion, the Republican par­ty was nev­er the par­ty of Black Americans. The par­ty was sup­pos­ed­ly formed to stem the spread of slav­ery to west­ern states, but that does not mean they loved Black people.
That includes the con­tin­ued non­sense that Lincoln freed the slaves as if Lincoln cared about enslaved blacks.

Republican President Lincoln’s let­ter to Publisher Horace Greely on his feel­ings about the enslaved peo­ple suf­fer­ing in the United States.

Hon. Horace Greely: Executive Mansion,
Dear Sir Washington, August 22, 1862.

I have just read yours on the 19^th. addressed to me through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any state­ments or assump­tions of fact, which I may know to be erro­neous, I do not, now and here, con­tro­vert them. If there be in it any infer­ences which I may believe to be false­ly drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be per­cep­ti­ble in it an impa­tient and dic­ta­to­r­i­al tone, I waive it in def­er­ence to an old friend, whose heart I have always sup­posed to be right.

As to the pol­i­cy I “seem to be pur­su­ing,” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the short­est way under the Constitution. The soon­er the nation­al author­i­ty can be restored, the near­er the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slav­ery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slav­ery, I do not agree with them. My para­mount object in this strug­gle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slav­ery. If I could save the Union with­out free­ing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by free­ing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by free­ing some and leav­ing oth­ers alone, I would also do that. What I do about slav­ery and the col­ored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I for­bear, I for­bear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less when­ev­er I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when­ev­er I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to cor­rect errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stat­ed my pur­pose accord­ing to my view of offi­cial duty, and I intend no mod­i­fi­ca­tion of my oft-expressed per­son­al wish that all men every­where could be free. Yours,

A. LINCOLN

Abraham Lincoln need­ed black bod­ies to fight his war; he was also afraid that the French would enter the war to pro­tect their then ter­ri­to­ry of Louisana. Had the French entered the war, the com­ing togeth­er of east and west would have been a dream only.
It was freed black men who freed oth­er black men. Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration was only applied to states that had seced­ed from the Union and had declared war on the United States. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln did not take the full cor­rec­tive steps against the (Confederate Traitors) who declared war against the United States that enabled the insur­rec­tion of January 6^th, 2021, one hun­dred and fifty-six years later.
Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis, two trai­tors, suf­fered zero con­se­quences for tak­ing up arms against the United States. That, how­ev­er, was only the tip of the ice­berg; not only were the trai­tors from top to bot­tom not pun­ished, but mon­u­ments were raised up in aston­ish­ing num­bers across the United States, in nation­al parks, on state­house grounds, on mil­i­tary bases, and places beyond.
And the con­fed­er­ate bat­tle flag flew on south­ern state­hous­es as if they won the war. The idea that the Republicans were some­how bet­ter than the Dixiecrats who declared war against their own coun­try is laughable.

Fast for­ward to 2021, although both polit­i­cal par­ties have tak­en decid­ed moves from where they were as late as the 1960s, it does not mean that every­one in the Democratic par­ty is purged of racism, not by a long shot.
As far as the Republican par­ty is con­cerned, it is dif­fi­cult to argue that it is not solid­ly a homoge­nous racist white fas­cist polit­i­cal par­ty. After all, they purged mod­er­ates from their ranks. I hope you do not believe that Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Murkowski are moderates?
Democrats, how­ev­er, nev­er did a purge; the par­ty con­tin­ues to hold to the belief that the coun­try is a cen­ter-left, cen­ter-right nation that wants both par­ties to stay close to the center.
There is no evi­dence to sup­port that the­o­ry in my hum­ble esti­ma­tion. A full 46% are Republicans who are far-right adher­ents. There are approx­i­mate­ly 52% who are Democrats, who, by the way, long and yearn for a tru­ly pro­gres­sive, no-non­sense par­ty rep­re­sent­ing their val­ues, anoth­er 2% remains some­where in the mid­dle who are basi­cal­ly wishy-washy fin­ger to the wind voters.
The Democratic Party is a par­ty of dif­fer­ent coali­tions, Blacks as the foun­da­tion, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, Gays, Lesbians, Whites, and every­one not white who has self-respect.
This explains Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin’s game could be seen as self-right­eous as he bleeps about bi-par­ti­san­ship and pre­serv­ing democ­ra­cy. (I will come back to this).
He is also seen as cater­ing to his own polit­i­cal sur­vival in a state Donald Trump won by over forty per­cent­age points.
Some make the case that no oth­er Democrat can win statewide in West Virginia, except Joe Manchin. So despite Manchin’s shenani­gans, Democrats have no choice but to grin and smile with Joe Manchin as they hold the slimmest of majori­ties because Joe Manchin can win in a Republican state.
The oth­er moti­va­tion for Joe Manchin’s stance on the Biden agen­da is that despite the pol­i­tics of the state of West Virginia and his own polit­i­cal sur­vival, Joe Manchin may very well share the views shared by Republicans on vot­ing rights.
Yes, I said it.
What oth­er plau­si­ble expla­na­tion could there be on [vot­ing rights]? If Joe Manchin does not secret­ly har­bor old Dixiecrat views, how could he a Democrat refuse to sup­port the right of all Americans to vote?
Set aside Kyrsten Sinema’s stu­pid­i­ty about chang­ing atti­tudes, Manchin is an old hand, not a fly-by-night like Sinema.
Surely Joe Manchin under­stands that this is the nation’s last best hope of block­ing Republican all-out assault on the rights of peo­ple of col­or to vote.
Joe Manchin must have seen what the Roberts court did to the vot­ing rights Act in 2013 in the Shelby County Alabama Vs Holder. He must know that the court destroyed the law because John Roberts the Chief Justice was a Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer who hat­ed the vot­ing rights act.
Manchin is no dum­my like Sinema, he knows that the major­i­ty of Americans are pro­gres­sives but even so, the coun­try is ruled by a sen­ate that does [not] reflect the will of the majority.
Manchin also knows that Democrats have lost three elec­tions in which the plu­ral­i­ty of Americans chose his par­ty yet the pres­i­den­cy went to the Republicans.
And I believe that the west Virginia sen­a­tor under­stands that in 1876, Democrats won the elec­tions which in fair­ness was a mess, the Republican Rutherford B Hayes was giv­en the pres­i­den­cy on the con­di­tion that he pull fed­er­al troops from the south enforc­ing recon­struc­tion after the civ­il war.
In what is now known as the com­pro­mise of 1876 Hayes pulled fed­er­al troops out by 1877, paving the way for the estab­lish­ment of Jim crow laws which all but re-enslaved blacks for almost anoth­er century.
Joe Manchin knows all this even if the flighty Karen doesn’t.
So his claim that he will not destroy the Republic rings hol­low. Not act­ing while the coun­try per­ish­es is not patri­o­tism it is cow­ard­ly acquiescence.
No Senator Joe Manchin there are not ten patri­ot­ic Republican Senators who will do the right thing. Therefore you must vote to end the archa­ic and destruc­tive fil­i­buster which allows the minor­i­ty to run the county.
That was not and could not be the intent of the founders and you damn well know it, so stop with the bull­shit show and sup­port fil­i­buster reform, and while you are at it get the flighty pat­sy to vote with you.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

The bla­tant hypocrisy and igno­rance of Arizona US Senator Kyrstema Sinema are pal­pa­ble. Sinema oppos­es end­ing the Filibuster.
Two days after pres­i­dent Joe Biden chal­lenged her and Joe Manchin with­out nam­ing them for sup­port­ing Republicans over their own par­ty, as if to flout her two-faced treach­ery, Sinema appeared with Texas Republican John Cronyn and declared that the thing to do is to change behav­ior, not change the rules.
The irony of Sinema’s stu­pid­i­ty is that Republicans, includ­ing John Cornyn, are busy chang­ing the rules they do not like; it is their intran­si­gent obstruc­tion that makes it nec­es­sary to have the con­ver­sa­tion about fil­i­buster reform.
Sinema should be speak­ing against that, yet she seemed to aim her igno­rant ire at the par­ty that got her elect­ed a US Senator in a state that Democrats won for the first time in a long time.
How do these igno­rant and decep­tive peo­ple gain such high offices?
The two sen­a­tors toured facil­i­ties in Tucson hous­ing migrants appre­hend­ed along Arizona’s bor­der with Mexico, includ­ing unac­com­pa­nied children.
According to the Arizona Republic, the pair is sched­uled on Wednesday to vis­it sim­i­lar facil­i­ties along Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Sinema, D‑Ariz., said the vis­it is aimed at learn­ing about dif­fer­ences in migra­tion and enforce­ment pat­terns along the U.S.-Mexico bor­der and boost­ing sup­port for a bipar­ti­san bill she intro­duced with Cornyn R‑Texas, that is aimed at address­ing “imme­di­ate” needs at the border.
While the wolf in sheep cloth­ing US Senators Kyrsten Sinema believes that Democrats can change the minds of a uni­fied Republican par­ty that is dead set on end­ing American Democracy, and the oth­er, Joe Manchin, who believes end­ing the fil­i­buster as we know it is destroy­ing American democ­ra­cy, Republicans are busy across the coun­try actu­al­ly dis­man­tling the Democratic process.

Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save America from becoming an autocratic state run by Donald Trump under the dictates of Vladimir Putin.
They must come together and end the Senate filibuster now, because the next time this Republican party seizes power, it is game over.

A democ­ra­cy is con­tin­gent on two or more polit­i­cal par­ties agree­ing to the prin­ci­ples of the found­ing doc­u­ments on which the nation will be governed.
The Republican par­ty no longer believes in those found­ing doc­u­ments à la the con­sti­tu­tion, bill of rights, etc.
Therefore, it is time for new polit­i­cal think­ing, one that does not include the Republican party.
The House is on fire, and half the coun­try is too stu­pid to see it, and the oth­er half is too weak to do any­thing about it.
Republicans who haven’t won the pop­u­lar vote in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in four cycles see the writ­ing on the wall. White suprema­cy and the old order are threat­ened by a new surge of minor­i­ty vot­ers who pre­vi­ous­ly did not care too much about voting.
Republican par­ty’s state leg­is­la­tures have since embarked on a sys­temic assault on vot­ing rights aid­ed by the Roberts court.
At the Federal lev­el where the US Senate would nor­mal­ly tem­per the rash­ness of house mem­bers, Mitch McConnell’s cau­cus offers block­ing for to the ball-car­ri­ers of vot­er suppression.
In the House, the lat­est iter­a­tion of (Joe McCarthy).…..Kevin McCarthy is no dif­fer­ent than the un-American Moscow Mitch McConnell, except that he has to con­tend with a supreme­ly com­pe­tent Democrat named Nancy Pelosi.
Oh, while we are on the ques­tion of Nancy Pelosi, you Democrats who want to replace her as Speaker, you do real­ize that by oppos­ing her, you are doing the bid­ding of Republicans?
You do know that the rea­son they hate Nancy Pelosi is that she is effec­tive? Just ask­ing, and just so you know, there is absolute­ly not a sin­gle Democrat in your cau­cus that could out­do Nancy Pelosi’s savvy, so there is that.
Sorry, Congresswoman Katie Porter.

But it isn’t just Moscow Mitch in the Senate; there is Moscow Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Tom Cotton. The entire Senate cau­cus has sold out to the idea that the Republic is now expend­able for a more author­i­tar­i­an mod­el ruled by dear leader Donald Trump, a Putin stooge.
“Wow.”
If one par­ty decides it will over­turn two hun­dred plus years of demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, the oth­er par­ty is equal­ly empow­ered to stop it.
The Republican Party sup­ports white suprema­cy, some­thing the major­i­ty of American vot­ers eschew. the par­ty made itself the par­ty of insur­rec­tion and con­spir­a­cies. Its expressed and implied desires are to turn America into a total­i­tar­i­an state run by Donald Trump, some­thing that would make Vladimir Putin extreme­ly happy.
After all, I can only imag­ine how he is smil­ing, hav­ing out­done him­self. How could he imag­ine that his lit­tle plan to help an igno­rant, amoral stooge gain the pres­i­den­cy, poi­son the nation­al dis­course with lies, set the stage for the unrav­el­ing of the American soci­ety in such a dra­mat­ic and expe­di­tious fashion?
Putin is shrewd and cun­ning; he under­stood that America’s mul­ti-racial make­up is indeed its strength. Still, he also under­stood that where there are dif­fer­ences, there are oppor­tu­ni­ties to exploit.
He under­stood white self-doubt, and so he decid­ed to use a car­ni­val bark­er to spread the poison.
And so, aid­ed by the gullible media, spread the lies the car­ni­val bark­er did in duti­ful sub­mis­sion to his mas­ter. Long after, inde­pen­dent writ­ers like myself were ask­ing why is no one call­ing Trump’s lies what they are?
The media used nuanced lan­guage like half-truths & mis­state­ments; it was painful to watch even the so-called lib­er­al media elites twist them­selves into knots to devel­op palat­able syn­onyms for the word lie.
Me, I was shout­ing liar, liar, liar, long before the media elites real­ized that the guy was a frack­ing patho­log­i­cal liar and that his lies were part of a larg­er, deep­er, and dark­er cam­paign to dis­rupt and ulti­mate­ly destroy every­thing that held the nation together.

By mak­ing it expo­nen­tial­ly more dif­fi­cult to vote, Republican leg­is­la­tures effec­tive­ly turn states like Georgia, Florida, Texas, Michigan, and oth­ers into sep­a­rate enti­ties from the United States.
If Democrats are unable to com­pete fair­ly in states in which Republican leg­is­la­tures have moved the goal-post, and if Republicans can com­pete in Democrat-run states in which vot­ing is a free and open affair, in short order, there will be no Democrat-run state.
The prob­lem for Democrats is that despite the sol­id base of African-American vot­ers that [is]the core of the Democrat par­ty, whites still rule that par­ty, and even though they may not say the things the Republicans are say­ing, some Democrats are not opposed to them. Ask Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema if I am telling the truth.
Even President Joe Biden is pissed by their treach­ery; he lashed out at them on Memorial day at those wolves in sheep cloth­ing who vote more with Republicans than their own par­ty. (my words)
The Democrat par­ty wit­nessed what we all wit­nessed over the past five years. Unfortunately, the Party lead­er­ship also wit­nessed what the world saw on January 6^th, 2021.
It also wit­nessed what the Roberts court did in 2013 to destroy the 1965 vot­ing rights act for no good reason.
Every Democrat politi­cian must also know that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is opposed to every qual­i­fied per­son cast­ing a vote.
Democrats wit­nessed Putin’s pup­pet sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fol­low Putin’s play­book of stack­ing the courts with right-wing flunkies; in fact, he also added three of those flunkies to the high­est court with Moscow Mitch’s help.
They saw him try to tear down and cast doubt on pub­lic insti­tu­tions like the DOJ, state elec­tions appa­ra­tus, the media, Government agen­cies, world bod­ies that have kept the peace, and bowed to Putin like a mon­grel dog.
Democrats now hold the exec­u­tive branch; they have a 50 – 50 split in the Senate.
Despite what Republican Senators say out of the sides of their mouths, speak­ing of Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, James Lankford, Lisa Murkowski, et al., they vote with their Fascist part, why would Democrats dither around the ques­tion of end­ing the Senate Filibuster to save the Union?
Oh, wait, Joe Manchin’s ego and Kyrsten Sinema’s stupidity!
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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

Republicans have used Trump’s lie that he lost the elec­tions of 2020 to accel­er­ate a cru­sade they have long waged, that is, to lim­it the rights of Black and brown peo­ple to vote.
Behind this fias­co is the hard truth that the Republicans have lost the pop­u­lar vote in the last four straight pres­i­den­tial cycles.
Saved only by the unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic mech­a­nism called the Electoral col­lege, Republicans have also lost the pop­u­lar vote in the last sev­en of the last eight elections.
As I have point­ed out in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, the United States is gov­erned by a white minor­i­ty because of the débâ­cle known as the elec­toral col­lege and the two sen­a­tors per state.
The idea of can­cel­ing out the voic­es of black and brown Americans was already long enshrined in the two United States Senators’ rule…
So, North Dakota, with few­er than a mil­lion cit­i­zens, 770,026, and Alaska, with 724,357 cit­i­zens respec­tive­ly, has the same rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the United States Senate as California’s 40 mil­lion or New York’s 20 mil­lion citizens.
By this met­ric, the voic­es of 39 mil­lion cit­i­zens in California get drowned out, and in New York, the voic­es of 19 mil­lion peo­ple are silenced by a small, almost lily-white minor­i­ty in small rur­al states that con­tributes next to noth­ing to the greater good.
South Carolina US Senator Lindsay Graham said that his par­ty can­not extri­cate itself, can­not move for­ward with­out Donald Trump.

The con­ven­tion­al think­ing is that Trump has gal­va­nized Republican sup­port into an impen­e­tra­ble block that the par­ty can ill-afford to agi­tate or offend.
Donald Trump’s con­tri­bu­tion to America has been self-serv­ing attempts to enrich him­self at the expense of tax­pay­ers, graft, theft, divi­sion, lies, trea­so­nous activ­i­ties in ser­vice to Vladimir Putin, and racism.
The sin­gle com­po­nent that gal­va­nizes white sup­port around the grifter Donald Trump is Trump’s obvi­ous sup­port and encour­age­ment of white supremacy.
After the Robert’s Supreme Court evis­cer­at­ed sec­tion 4 (b) of the 1965 Voting Rights law in Shelby County Alabama vs. Holder, many states embarked on a mas­sive leg­isla­tive attack on vot­ing rights, in Republican-run states, in par­tic­u­lar, hun­dreds of bills have been tabled that would dras­ti­cal­ly cur­tail or lim­it the right to vote.
In Michigan, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and many oth­er states, there are all-out assaults on the right to vote; in many states with Republican-con­trolled leg­is­la­tures and Republican Governors, those bills have already become law.
At the Federal lev­el, Democrats have a razor-thin mar­gin in the US House and the thinnest of majori­ties in the even­ly divid­ed US Senate. Consequently, Republican Senators are solid­ly opposed to pass­ing a new vot­ing rights bill passed by the US House that would pro­tect the votes of all Americans.

Where is the Democratic par­ty in all of this?
A Democracy can only sur­vive when both sides agree that this is the sys­tem they both want. Based on the dynam­ics of fad­ing white numer­i­cal strength, we know that issues of Immigration and Abortion have already tak­en cen­ter stage in Republican’s war to main­tain white hegemony.
America has been gov­erned by two polit­i­cal par­ties since the ear­ly 1850s; how­ev­er, the Democratic par­ty is the old­er of the two, and so for this writer, the ques­tion remains; “what is the senior polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion doing about the junior par­ty’s attempt to dis­man­tle the republic”?
Democrats are con­di­tioned to be vic­tims; all they do is com­plain about Republican’s unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic actions. Even when they hold pow­er, that is con­trol of the white house and both hous­es of con­gress, they com­plain, not act.
Afraid of what Republicans will do in response to what they do, Democrats are frozen in fear of tak­ing bold actions to end the fil­i­buster, pass­ing vot­ing rights, and the pres­i­den­t’s infra­struc­ture bill.
No leg­is­la­tion is as impor­tant as pro­tect­ing the right to vote. The Republic’s future depends on whether Joe Biden and the Democrats will grow the balls nec­es­sary to end the fil­i­buster and pass the bills the vot­ers sent them to Washington to pass and pro­tect the future of the republic.
At the very least, it would demon­strate to the trea­so­nous Republican par­ty that they are seri­ous about defend­ing the United States against trea­son and Fascism.

There is no secret to Republican’s inten­tions; we already know what they will do, they are pre­pared to over­throw this democ­ra­cy to retain white con­trol. Why would Democrats not get rid of the fil­i­buster to pass a fed­er­al vot­ing rights bill?
If and when Republicans get con­trol of the exec­u­tive and the con­gress, this repub­lic will cease to exist as it has for hun­dreds of years. Republicans can­not win the pop­u­lar vote any longer, and so they have decid­ed that they will walk away from the way this coun­try operated.
End the fil­i­buster now; if the Democrats do not end it now, they will be com­plic­it in what Trump, McConnel, & McCarthy are doing to decon­struct the world’s old­est democracy.
After all, the Democratic Party is made up of whites too, so could that be why they are doing noth­ing in the face of the assault against vot­ing rights all across the country?
In June of 2019, (Alex Pareene) writ­ing for the New Republic said the following.
“Even when Democrats deign to declare that they are opposed to Republican rule, it fre­quent­ly seems forced, as if they’re pan­der­ing to their sup­port­ers while secret­ly hop­ing their non­sup­port­ers won’t get offend­ed. At the heart of this predilec­tion for the flight over the fight is a tac­it ide­ol­o­gy that is wild­ly out of step with the polit­i­cal real­i­ty of Trump’s America, where vil­lains abound with almost com­ic ubiquity.
And it is an ide­ol­o­gy that, for the first time in liv­ing mem­o­ry, is being chal­lenged by an invig­o­rat­ed pop­ulist left, not only out of prin­ci­ple but also out of a sense that the old way is naïve and ulti­mate­ly self-defeat­ing. The future of the Democratic Party, and by exten­sion the coun­try, may well depend on whether the par­ty is final­ly will­ing to ditch its fret­ful pos­ture of peace­mak­ing and give war a chance.

I agree!!!

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

As a small busi­ness own­er, hir­ing some­one to work with me would mean that the hiree will add to my busi­ness. At least, that is con­ven­tion­al wisdom.
I nev­er quite under­stood what CNN saw in for­mer Pennsylvania Republican US Senator Rick Santorum.
Santorum served in the US House of Representatives & the US Senate. He is a lawyer, author, com­men­ta­tor, and con­sul­tant, but Rick Santorum is also a bigot.
Rick Santorum ran for pres­i­dent twice and lost in the pri­maries, but his record as a politi­cian has been check­ered at best. Santorum has a holi­er than thou per­sona, even though he was involved in the K‑street project then denied that he was asso­ci­at­ed with it.
Rick Santorum’s views on issues are more in line with the back­ward think­ing of Patrick Buchanan than they are of rea­son­able edu­cat­ed Republicans like Adam Kinsinger.
Santorum’s hypocrisy knows no bounds; he admit­ted to smok­ing weed in col­lege. Still, when it became con­ve­nient to denounce mar­i­jua­na as is cus­tom­ary for right-wing politi­cians, Santorum denounced the weed and said he was against the legal­iza­tion of cannabis and believes that the fed­er­al law against it should be enforced in Colorado.
Despite know­ing that Rick Santorum is a light­ning rod, CNN hired him as a con­trib­u­tor in ear­ly 2017, right in time for the Trump sur­ro­gate to poi­son the air­ways with big­otry and lies on behalf of the lying-thiev­ing Donald Trump.

Addressing the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive youth orga­ni­za­tion Young America’s Foundation at their “Standing Up for Faith and Freedom” sum­mit, Santorum told young peo­ple that while most cul­tures around the world devel­oped over time, America just sprang into the world ful­ly formed.
“We came here and cre­at­ed a blank slate; we birthed a nation from nothing.”
“We birthed a nation from noth­ing. I mean, there was noth­ing here,” he con­tin­ued. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but can­did­ly, there isn’t much Native American cul­ture in American culture.”
Despite calls for CNN to fire Rick Santorum, it took a whole month for the net­work to announce on Saturday, May 22^nd, that they cut ties with him.
Earlier this month, in a tweet queer activist, Rebecca Nagel ridiculed CNN for not fir­ing Santorum, quote.
Hey, @CNN, how many Native Americans polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors do you have? Since you give a plat­form to ppl like Rick Santorum — whose entire career is based on scor­ing polit­i­cal points by tak­ing cheap shots at LGBTQ folks, ppl of col­or, and now Native Americans.
CNN made a tac­ti­cal deci­sion to hire Rick Santorum; it will argue that it is a mid­dle-of-the-road news orga­ni­za­tion, and as such, Santorum as a voice on the right was a unique fit.
No, Rick Santorum has, and will always be a racist big­ot who spews racist invec­tives to the extent he is allowed to get away with it. CNN hired and kept him to attract the bot­tom feed­ers that believe as he does in white suprema­cy. They did it for money.
That’s all.

Previously, some reg­u­lar folks did­n’t both­er pay­ing atten­tion to bor­ing stuff like how con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tives vote on issues. Instead, many vot­ers wait­ed for elec­tion time to be edu­cat­ed before mak­ing their vot­ing decisions.
Today, how­ev­er, the stakes are much high­er, it seems; how rep­re­sen­ta­tives and US sen­a­tors vote on issues is crit­i­cal because the issues seem far big­ger and more con­se­quen­tial because, in many ways, they are.
Over the last sev­er­al decades leg­isla­tive bat­tles were waged in the mid­dle between the cen­ter-right and cen­ter-left. Finally, they would find a sweet spot in the cen­ter, and the bill would become law.
Not so today, the ide­o­log­i­cal divide is so wide that there is hard­ly any com­mon ground on which to find solutions.
The Republican par­ty has lurched so far to the right that Democrats do not have a gov­ern­ing part­ner to work with. Democrats are forced to nego­ti­ate with the dif­fer­ent wings in their own party.
There remain a few Republicans in Blue states forced to play the bi-par­ti­san game, but noth­ing gets accom­plished by their will­ing­ness to work with Democrats.
Most of the posi­tions that the Republican par­ty now take are hand­ed to par­ty lead­er­ship by shad­owy out­side right-wing groups.
Those posi­tions are anti­thet­i­cal to repub­li­can and good gov­er­nance, so Democrats can­not sup­port those posi­tions nat­u­ral­ly. The Republican par­ty lost all cred­i­bil­i­ty because it does­n’t even acknowl­edge truth any longer; this makes work­ing with them on leg­is­la­tion impossible.

During Obama’s tenure, they adopt­ed a pos­ture, which they have rolled out once again, nego­ti­ate on bills, offer amend­ments, draw out debate on bills, and even when they get what they asked for, vote against the final bill.
The idea is to waste time, hop­ing that the Democrats will get noth­ing done, giv­ing them a mes­sage to run on.
Votes now are about whether to cre­ate a bipar­ti­san com­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate an insur­rec­tion that invad­ed the seat of gov­ern­ment, com­mit­ted a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of felonies, includ­ing murder.
Who would have thought that this would be a polit­i­cal thing?
Democrats and Republicans band­ed togeth­er after ⁹⁄₁₁ and gave George Bush incred­i­ble pow­ers to go after those who destroyed the twin tow­ers in Manhattan.
After the dredged-up Benghazi inci­dent, Trey Goudy and the oth­er Republicans in the con­gress held dozens of hear­ings which turned up absolute­ly noth­ing nefar­i­ous or under­hand­ed by Hillary Clinton or the Obama Administration.
However, find­ing some­thing unto­ward was not the rea­son for the series of hear­ings and the dis­in­for­ma­tion Goudy, Jim Jordon, Devin Nunes, and the oth­er right-wing ide­o­logues waged.

The idea was to have hear­ings that would lead into the Presidential elec­tions of 2016, which is exact­ly what they did.
It is no won­der that the pro­posed bipar­ti­san com­mis­sion to get to the bot­tom of who, how, why, of the January 6^th insur­rec­tion does not have the sup­port of Mitch McConnel or Kevin McCarthy, the top two con­gres­sion­al Republicans, they knew what they did. They expect that a com­mis­sion to explore the events of January 6^th, 2021, would do the same thing.
Votes are now about set­tled laws, Roe v Wade under assault because the supreme court sud­den­ly decides to hear an abor­tion case from Mississippi. The right-wing Supreme court has stead­fast­ly decid­ed to throw out (stare deci­sis) by upend­ing set­tled laws; even when the court is not asked to vis­it a cer­tain sec­tion of some laws, it does so any­way and make changes to the hor­ror of the minority…
Brett Kavanaugh, Amey Coney-Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, & uncle Clarence Tom-azz are the right-wing judges that are deter­mined to reshape America, return­ing the nation to the decades before the civ­il rights fights of the 60s.
Votes are about the vot­ing rights, set­tled laws that the Roberts court upend­ed for no rea­son oth­er than the ide­o­log­i­cal cru­sade that the court is on. For exam­ple, in 2013, while Barack Obama was in the White House, the Roberts-led court struck down sec­tion 4(b) of the 1965 vot­ing rights Act in Shelby County Alabama vs. Holder.
In sim­ple terms, the court’s log­ic was that the law was no longer need­ed because the racist con­di­tions which exist­ed then no longer exist.
In her dis­sent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg ridiculed the court’s argu­ments stat­ing that the rul­ing was the equiv­a­lent of walk­ing with an umbrel­la in the rain, then throw­ing away the umbrel­la because you weren’t get­ting wet.
Since then, all across the nation and par­tic­u­lar­ly in Republican-run states, Republicans have embarked on pass­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion laws not seen since after reconstruction.

John Roberts, the chief jus­tice, is a for­mer Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer with hatred for vot­ing and civ­il rights. So much for Roberts’ disin­gen­u­ous com­ments that there are no Democratic or Republican judges, judges call balls and strikes[sic]
Some strike zones are much wider than oth­ers; it depends on who is call­ing balls and strikes jus­tice, Roberts.
Voting is about whether the Republic remains one.…… or does it devolve into a dic­ta­tor­ship ruled over by a socio­path­ic narcissist.
Voting is about whether native Americans are allowed their rights. It is about whether the nation takes on cli­mate change and pre­pares for it while tak­ing steps to mit­i­gate and roll back its dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences to our planet.
Voting is about African-Americans right to exist as full human beings in a coun­try in which there are ele­ments hell­bent on stomp­ing on the rights of peo­ple dif­fer­ent than they are.
Voting is about clean drink­ing water, edu­ca­tion for our chil­dren, health­care, ensur­ing that chil­dren do not go to bed hun­gry, clean air, and a future in which those who worked hard can be secure in their lat­er years.
Voting is about the anti-Asian hate crimes bill that was passed into law recent­ly. It is for those rea­sons that we need to know who are the peo­ple oppos­ing these fun­da­men­tal pieces of leg­is­la­tion that are nec­es­sary to fix some of the chal­lenges in an ever-chang­ing environment.

HERE ARE THE REUBLICAN HOUSE & SENATE MEMBERS WHO VOTED AGAINST THE BILL

• Robert Aderholt of Alabama
• Rick Allen of Georgia
• Jodey Arrington of Texas
• Brian Babin of Texas
• Jim Banks of Indiana
• Andy Biggs of Arizona
• Dan Bishop of North Carolina
• Laurne Boebert of Colorado
• Mo Brooks of Alabama
• Ted Budd of North Carolina
• Tim Burchett of Tennessee
• Kat Cammack of Florida
• Jerry Carl of Alabama
• Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina
• Michael Cloud of Texas
• Andrew Clyde of Georgia
• Tom Cole of Oklahoma
• Warren Davidson of Ohio
• Byron Donalds of Florida
• Jeff Duncan of South Carolina
• Virginia Foxx of North Carolina
• Matt Gaetz of Florida
• Louie Gohmert of Texas
• Bob Good of Virginia
• Lance Gooden of Texas
• Paul Gosar of Arizona
• Mark Green of Tennessee
• Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
• Michael Guest of Mississippi
• Andy Harris of Maryland
• Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee
• Kevin Hern of Oklahoma
• Yvette Herrell of New Mexico
• Jody Hice of Georgia
• Clay Higgins of Louisiana
• Ronny Jackson of Texas
• Mike Johnson of Louisiana
• Jim Jordan of Ohio
• Trent Kelly of Mississippi
• Doug LaMalfa of California
• Barry Loudermilk of Georgia
• Nancy Mace of South Carolina
• Tracey Mann of Kansas
• Thomas Massie of Kentucky
• Tom McClintock of California
• Mary Miller of Illinois
• Alex Mooney of West Virginia
• Barry Moore of Alabama
• Ralph Norman of South Carolina
• Steven Palazzo of Mississippi
• Gary Palmer of Alabama
• Scott Perry of Pennsylvania
• August Pfluger of Texas
• Tom Rice of South Carolina
• John Rose of Tennessee
• Matt Rosendale of Montana
• David Rouzer of North Carolina
• Chip Roy of Texas
• John Rutherford of Florida
• Greg Steube of Florida
• Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin
• Randy Weber of Texas

In the sen­ate Missouri’s Josh Hawley the insur­rec­tion­ist vot­ed against its pas­sage as well.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

IMAGINE THIS WAS YOU, WOULD YOU NOT FIGHT WITH EVERY FIBER IN YOU?

Imagine that you are liv­ing your mun­dane life in the year 1948, going about your busi­ness. You, a gro­cer, maybe a sub­sis­tence farmer? You farm dates in the arid con­di­tions, you grow olives too, you may even grow veg­eta­bles, as your ances­tors had done for thou­sands of years before you.
Then one day some new peo­ple came they con­fis­cat­ed your land, they chased you out of your home and took it.
These peo­ple had no right to your land, and they cer­tain­ly had no right to your home, but that did not stop them from tak­ing it and chas­ing you away into exile.
Imagine that the peo­ple who did that to you were not the same skin col­or as you are, they did not speak your lan­guage, but they claim they have a right to your land and home because their God promised them your property.
Worse yet, their reli­gion is not only dif­fer­ent than yours; they [adopt­ed] their reli­gion and, as a con­se­quence, laid claim to your prop­er­ty under the guise that God had promised them your land.
Remember, these invaders were nev­er from your part of the world, but they claimed that they have a divine right to your inher­i­tance based on the reli­gion they adopt­ed and took as their own.
How would you feel? What would you do?

Now imag­ine that 73-years lat­er, if you are still alive, nei­ther you nor your off­springs are allowed to return to your home­land. According to the invaders, you [you have no right of return].
Your home­land, your coun­try, is now swal­lowed up; it has a dif­fer­ent name now.
Where you once farmed, there are hous­es, fac­to­ries, and even farms, but you can­not enter; sep­a­rat­ing you from your birthright is barbed wire, walls, and armed guards,
You are frus­trat­ed, so you throw stones, you light tires, and you protest. The younger gen­er­a­tion is now more mil­i­tant, so they build and buy crude bombs, but their bombs are no match for the pre­ci­sion-guid­ed 21^st-cen­tu­ry mis­siles that rain down on the tiny bit of hell on which you have been forced to exist,
When you protest, there is more destruc­tion and death, more bul­lets for your slingshots.

The occu­piers pledged to dri­ve you into the sea, and they may well have because you are not even allowed to fish in the waters that crash ashore the tiny strip of land on which you are imprisoned.
The occu­pi­er tells you if and when you may fish to feed your fam­i­ly; he even tells you just how far out to see you are allowed.
That is your existence,
That is your life.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.