Month: March 2016

Newspaper People don’t get it

Being inveterate laudatores temporis acti as they are, literally “praisers of times past,” or longing for the good old days.

You have to wonder: Are daily newspaper people ever struck by the fact that a movie about what they do is so much more popular than they are?

Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s movie about The Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on child molestation among Catholic clergy, was two things. It was a really great movie, and it was a delicious opportunity for self-back-patting by old ink-stained wretches.

Like myself.I watched. I patted. But since the Oscar ceremony, it has taken me a month or more to figure out why the discussion of the movie within my craft inevitably leaves me so sad and lonely. Oh, now I remember. It’s not the movie. It’s the craft.

Read the rest here: The Last People to Understand Spotlight Are Newspaper People | Dallas Observer

Did Africans Sell Africans Into Slavery? Let’s Ask Some Africans – Taki’s Magazine

Two wrongs don’t make a right, they make two wrongs, says Jim Goad, reflecting on white and black complicity in black slavery.

As in this:

Nearly all modern historians agree that the scenario depicted by Alex Haley in Roots—that of white raiders penetrating the African interior to rout African villages for slaves—is fraudulent.

Instead, European slave traders nearly always bought slaves from African vendors at coastal markets.

We hear much about the brutal “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean, but almost never about the estimated 10 million or so indigenous Africans who perished while being marched to the sea in chains and yokes by their African captors.

Goad gives close to a dozen samples of mostly African blacks condemning black slavers, then concludes:

I have endlessly more respect for modern African leaders who are willing to acknowledge their ancestors’ role in slavery than I do for modern ethno-masochistic whites that try, against all evidence, to isolate guilt only on the white side and smear all whites from here to eternity with the invisible shit stain of guilt.

I also have far more respect for these African leaders than I do any modern American blacks who blame whites, and only whites, for every last drop of black suffering.

Read all about it here: Did Africans Sell Africans Into Slavery? Let’s Ask Some Africans – Taki’s Magazine

Longtime Dem precinct worker came by . . .

. . . and we got talking. Told her I take a Republican ballot, we got talking some more and guess what? She asked whom I’d vote for in the president’s race, I said “leaning toward Trump.” Guess what? So is she. If he’s on the ballot in November, he has her vote.

Will he do what he says he’ll do? We don’t know, she said. But we don’t know what the others will do either, I said. Exactly, she said.

Locally, she’s Dem, you see. But Trump is saying all the right things. He has so many businesses going, if economy goes bad, his businesses will too. (He has skin in the game.)

Romney should have butted out, she said. Me too.

How many like her will go for Trump while supporting local Dems?

Imagine Them As Used Car Salesmen

Questions about some well-known salesmen, beginning with:

What would Donald Trump sell you?

Continuing with Hillary, ending with

the one candidate he wouldn’t buy a car from? That would be Cruz.

Yes. The Cruz missile has too many words slipping lightly off the tongue. Slippery is the word, if not forked. Has all the answers, even in his sleep. Pastes on smile now and then. Otherwise, missile-perfect. Unerring, unnerving.

For comments on T. and H., see: A Voters’ Guide To Comparing Presidential Candidates: Imagine Them As Used Car Salesmen

Mitt Romney went for the jugular, and . . . 

I googled “mitt romney galvanized trump supporters?” and got these:

Mitt Romney’s Trump Attack May Have Sealed Republican …

fortune.com/…/mitt–romney-donald-trump-attack-republican-party-fate/

22 hours ago – Romney’s denunciation will likely galvanize Trump’s supporters, creating an even deeper GOP rift. On Thursday, Mitt Romney gave a speech in  …

Mitt Romney gives election to Donald Trump

http://www.newstalkflorida.com/mitt–romney-gives-election-to-donald-trump

22 hours ago – By attacking Mr. Trump, the former governor galvanized the Trump …Romney’s remarks, but so will Trump supporters who will claim, “See,  …

Mitt Romney: Donald Trump is a ‘phony, a fraud … – CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/…/mitt–romney-presidential-race-speech/

CNN

17 hours ago – Mitt Romney delivered a sweeping broadside against Donald Trump …there are few signs it will dissuade Trump’s loyal core of supporters who  …

NICE GOING, MITT!