Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Bernie Sanders's Decline from Principle into Abysmal Pettiness

What kind of man tries with all the resources at his command to destroy a terrific young woman?
Debbie Wasserman Schultz will remain in the House of Representatives, I trust, despite the flailings of an elderly misogynist who started out idealistic, by mid-April had let the roar of his fans convince him he was deserving of the world's adulation and became himself so puffed up with self-adulation that he lost the chance to help the Democratic Party in the national election and seems to have no concern with down-ballot candidates except the one he determined to crush to earth. Shame, shame, you petty old man. If Trump is elected, Sanders will be to blame more than the third party candidates and I have a strong feeling that he will take pride in that result of the election. Vanity and self-delusion and a Javert-like determination to destroy his victim. After Philadelphia in April, his character was gone.

Beach scene


On the Beach


Krugman's "false equivalency" at Work--Parag from SALON

Digby in SALON:
It’s already happening with the State Department emails which have been gathered by right-wing organizations for the express purpose of feeding the scandal machine. You can see the outlines of how the mutually reinforcing feedback loops works from Sunday’s “Face the Nation” in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz cites a discredited AP report about the Clinton Foundation as proof of corruption and promises thorough investigations in the next congress. Likewise, on “Meet the Press,” in which Clinton’s speech condemning Trump’s incestuous relationship with the alt-right was presented as equivalent to Trump’s incestuous relationship with the alt-right and characterized it as a “race to the bottom.”


On Chris Matthews, Michael Steele said that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were going "hand in hand" into the mire. Why? Because Trump had plunged into the mire and Hillary posted shots of Trump saying ugly things from the mire. To denounce real evil is as nasty as to act evilly, in Steele's head. Remember, he is a Republican, no matter how cool he has appeared in recent months, until now.

It's a fact that in our society now when you point out that someone has lied about you (and give the evidence) you are accused of being just as bad as the liar. This is "in-fighting." Every point of view is equal. CNN does it all the time. MSNBC does it less often.

I still have kept my mind pure of Kellyanne Conway--not a word of her defence of Trump have I allowed to defile  me. When will she be fired?


Sunday, August 28, 2016

Under the Wall--Trump's about-face backtracking on his flip-floping somersault



BRIAN STELTER (HOST): Jorge, you have been outspoken about this issue. What's your answer to Trump's shifting position?
JORGE RAMOS: Who knows what he's thinking about the deportation, possibly leaning toward the deportation force, he's backtracking on his flip-flop. I honestly think that Donald Trump is in panic mode with Latinos, I think he realized too late, Brian, that he cannot win the White House without Latinos, and I have seen the latest polls, Univision says that he might get 19 percent of the Latino vote, and Mitt Romney, with 27 percent, lost the election. So I think he's realizing that he can't win Nevada, Colorado, Florida, without Latinos. You know, almost a year ago he expelled me from a press conference after I told him that he couldn't deport 11 million people. Now, just think about it, it's the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. Maybe some people are telling him that it is impossible. It is not only impossible, it would be inhumane. And now he wants to take that back, well I think the damage has been done already. [CNN, Reliable Sources, 8/28/1

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Another entire day without hearing a word from the mouth of Kellyanne Conway

This does, I have to say, take some doing.
But Michael Steele disgraced himself with the false equivalency argument that Trump and Clinton are descending into the mire hand in hand. Then you remember that he was once head of the Republican Party and decide that it really is hopeless . . . .

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

No Hunger Strike for Me: I Do Without Hearing Kellyanne Conway Speak a Word

That should keep me sane.

So I skip Rachel Maddow & thanks for fair warning against Kellyanne C

Another day without hearing a word and scarcely seeing a nose on the face of Trump's campaign manager. What could she possibly say that would have any truth to it?

Bernie Sanders’s New Political Group Is Met by Staff Revolt By ALAN RAPPEPORT and YAMICHE ALCINDOR

Jeff Weaver on TV was the dark double of Senator Sanders, a Cruz-clone with a beard. You could only marvel that anyone so seemingly overflowing with bile could be so intimate with the passionate Senator--the Senator who had his own problems with daily increasing self-adulation. Who is surprised that their projects would collapse? Weaver kept on being himself and Sanders waited far too long to separate the good of the country from his own self-glorification.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Another day without seeing or hearing Kellyanne Conway

So I went to have my teeth cleaned. Easier on the heart and mind.

Judge sets aside rape charges for probation so ex-athlete can enjoy ‘a college experience’ Travis Gettys

Sometimes I wish I could have enjoyed a college experience instead of taking correspondence courses while working as a depot agent or taking correspondence courses while recovering from TB or taking overloads while working 8 at night till 4 in the morning as a telegrapher. Poor me! No typical college experience.

Monday, August 22, 2016

Surviving without Kellyanne Conway--yet another day

I have managed yet another day without hearing a word from Kellyanne Conway thought I have to confess that a little picture of a blond woman appeared in a thumb-nail size next to an article on Trump's great desire to get black votes.

My goal is to mute her if she comes on a screen and swiftly change to an HGTV show.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Banning Kellyanne Conway: Think how much time and stress I saved today by not watching her for a moment.

I am so very grateful that I thought of a strategy after reading about her but before seeing or hearing her. I may get through to 9 November this way--or as long as she and the Breitbart man last.

I Pledge Not to Watch One Minute of Kellyanne Conway


Articulate evil such as MSNBC spread through Jeff Weaver was too much for me. I now pledge not to watch any interview with Kellyanne Conway and to stop reading any online article where I see the name Kellya . . . . .

By now "Trump Supporter" is a sufficient warning that you want to keep your soul purer by any means possible.

Ancestral Pride and Ancestral Shame in working on ORNERY PEOPLE



           
            Around 1780 George Parks, then a young fellow in the Patriot militia, tricked my GGGGGG Grandfather Solomon Sparks by appealing to his better nature and lived to boast about it in 1833: “Not long after, & all during said eighteen months service he and others of said Company of Minute men, Captured Old Solomon Sparks a celebrated Tory. They employed a Whig from a distant neighborhood and a stranger to said Old Tory to decoy him out of his house without his gun under the pretence of being a traveller & enquiring the Road. They succeeded admirably. He fought bravely without arms and considerably injured this Applicant by kicking him. He was sent down the Ya[d]kin in a Canoe. After tied hand and foot on his back he repeatedly hollowed “‘Hurra for King George.’” (“Celebrated,” of course, meant “notorious.”) Grandpa Sparks may have been the orneriest of us all, but at least he got his licks in against the young Parks.
            I have to talk about the wretched trickster George Parks because he is the only source of information about this episode in the life of Grandpa Sparks. Born in Virginia, Parks was brought to Rowan County (later Wilkes), grew up there, had a daughter by Jane Rainey out of wedlock in 1778, married twice over the next decades, had more than a dozen children, and died at the end of 1837 in Monroe County, Indiana. We forget that North Carolina and South Carolina Scots-Irish and Germans settled parts of newly opened French Illinois and even Indiana after the Revolution, opening up new migration trails, particularly about the time of the War of 1812. George Parks first moved after the war to Burke County, not taking his first child whom he was supposed to provide for. There in Burke County (remember that counties changed names and sizes frequently) another George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, married Polly Moore, born in January 1791. Polly was the daughter of my cousin Daniel Moore, who at 16 became a private in the Continental line. The kidnapper’s oldest son, James, was born in September 1781, the month before Yorktown, a year or so after his busy father was kicked severely by Solomon Sparks. He lived with his father until he was twenty-five, as he wrote in an absolutely fascinating memoir when he was 97, four years before his death at 101 in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1842 at the age of 78 Cousin Daniel Moore saddled his horse in the Globe, Burke County, and rode off to Bloomington, Indiana, to see his son-in-law James Parks, son of the kidnapper, and some of the children of his dead daughter Nancy (1789-1828), and on to Georgetown, Illinois, to see his daughter Polly and her husband George Parks, namesake and nephew of the kidnapper. The weather was bad in that long flat stretch between the two midwestern towns, and Daniel suffered after he made it home to the Globe. I am proud of Cousin Daniel, uncle of tens of thousands of Arkansas Cokers. Like it or not, also on the paternal side, I am kin to descendants of the kidnapper through his son James and Nancy and their children and kin to the descendants of this James’s cousin George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, and his wife Polly. Still worse, James’s and Nancy’s daughter Hannah Parks, born in 1797, married William Nelson Pruitt (1797-1876), one of my Bedford County Virginia Pruitts, so I am doubly kin to Hannah’s descendants through her and her husband. I just hope the young trickster of the Yadkin is not kin to Cynthia Martha Parks, my GG Grandmother, wife of Samuel Henderson.
       My Double Cousin Lois says that in the South if you are not kin you are connected. The trouble is that most of the time you ARE kin. What a wretched thing to do to Solomon Sparks!




           
            Around 1780 George Parks, then a young fellow in the Patriot militia, tricked my GGGGGG Grandfather Solomon Sparks by appealing to his better nature and lived to boast about it in 1833: “Not long after, & all during said eighteen months service he and others of said Company of Minute men, Captured Old Solomon Sparks a celebrated Tory. They employed a Whig from a distant neighborhood and a stranger to said Old Tory to decoy him out of his house without his gun under the pretence of being a traveller & enquiring the Road. They succeeded admirably. He fought bravely without arms and considerably injured this Applicant by kicking him. He was sent down the Ya[d]kin in a Canoe. After tied hand and foot on his back he repeatedly hollowed “‘Hurra for King George.’” (“Celebrated,” of course, meant “notorious.”) Grandpa Sparks may have been the orneriest of us all, but at least he got his licks in against the young Parks.
            I have to talk about the wretched trickster George Parks because he is the only source of information about this episode in the life of Grandpa Sparks. Born in Virginia, Parks was brought to Rowan County (later Wilkes), grew up there, had a daughter by Jane Rainey out of wedlock in 1778, married twice over the next decades, had more than a dozen children, and died at the end of 1837 in Monroe County, Indiana. We forget that North Carolina and South Carolina Scots-Irish and Germans settled parts of newly opened French Illinois and even Indiana after the Revolution, opening up new migration trails, particularly about the time of the War of 1812. George Parks first moved after the war to Burke County, not taking his first child whom he was supposed to provide for. There in Burke County (remember that counties changed names and sizes frequently) another George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, married Polly Moore, born in January 1791. Polly was the daughter of my cousin Daniel Moore, who at 16 became a private in the Continental line. The kidnapper’s oldest son, James, was born in September 1781, the month before Yorktown, a year or so after his busy father was kicked severely by Solomon Sparks. He lived with his father until he was twenty-five, as he wrote in a memoir when he was 97, four years before his death at 101 in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1842 at the age of 78 Cousin Daniel Moore saddled his horse in the Globe, Burke County, and rode to Bloomington, Indiana, to see his son-in-law James Parks, son of the kidnapper, and some of the children of his dead daughter Nancy (1789-1828), and on to Georgetown, Illinois, to see his daughter Polly and her husband George Parks, namesake and nephew of the kidnapper. The weather was bad in that long flat stretch between the two midwestern towns, and Daniel suffered after he made it home to the Globe. I am proud of Cousin Daniel, uncle of tens of thousands of Arkansas Cokers. Like it or not, also on the paternal side, I am kin to descendants of the kidnapper through his son James and Nancy and their children and kin to the descendants of this James’s cousin George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, and his wife Polly. Still worse, James’s and Nancy’s daughter Hannah Parks, born in 1797, married William Nelson Pruitt (1797-1876), one of my Bedford County Virginia Pruitts, so I am doubly kin to Hannah’s descendants through her and her husband. I just hope the young trickster of the Yadlin is not kin to Cynthia Martha Parks Henderson, my GG Grandmother, wife of Samuel Henderson.
My Cousin Lois says that in the South if you are not kin you are connected. The trouble is that most of the time you ARE kin. What a wretched thing to do to Solomon Sparks!

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

For Trump's EXTREME SCREENING Just see Wikapedia: "Mau Mau Uprising."



Mau Mau Uprising

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
or read the ending of William Shaw's A SONG FOR THE BROKENHEARTED 


Trump has already championed waterboarding. The fun for sadists starts with "screening."

The History of Trump's "Extreme Screening"--Unimaginable Torture of Blacks

Here. What the British did in Kenya in its fight against the Mau Mau is never been fully acknowledged. At Google type in "Kenya" "Mau Mau" "screening."

[T]he horror of some of the so-called Screening Camps now present a state of affairs so deplorable that they should be investigated without delay, so that the ever increasing allegations of inhumanity and disregard of the rights of the African citizen are dealt with and so that the Government will have no reason to be ashamed of the acts which are done in its own name by its own servants.[156]
—Letter from Police Commissioner Arthur Young to
Governor Evelyn Baring, 22 November 1954

Interrogations and confessions

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Last births in US Territories that Became States

I was thinking that not many people could say, as I do, that none of my white ancestors came to the United States and neither of my parents was born in a State in the United States.

I was forgetting that people whose parents were born in New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii could be younger than me and say the same thing.

Friday, August 12, 2016

Remembering one of the Last Births in Indian Territory

This makes 109 years since my father was born in Indian Territory, three months before statehood.

How many people can say with me that none of their white ancestors came to the United States and neither of their parents was born in one of the states?

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Monday, August 8, 2016

Looking at the Sparks, Bryan, Boone connections








In1773 Uncle Jonas Sparks and some Bryans and their brother in law Daniel Boone set out for Kentucky. They did not get there. The nine year old Elizabeth Sparks, daughter of Jonas Sparks, was in the Powell River on a horse and carrying a little brother when the Indians attacked. After the war she married a Bryan who had been raised by Daniel Boone's wife Rebecca and followed Daniel Boone to Missouri, where she lived to be 98, dying in 1863. Imagine her memories from the death of James Boone in 1773 to weeks after the battle of Milliken's Bend when, as she would not have known, her cousin Jesse Sparks was falsely accused of committing atrocities.