Friday Rap

Vanity Fair Comes to the Nati

No, I'm not talking about the racist cover article... I'm talking about the one that's got some Cincinnatians upset because it dissed us here in the Queen City.....The diss was by some British wannabe writer exile who apparently flew here to visit the Creation Museum and didn't like his cab ride or something...One of the knocks on the city was that it took us sooooooo long to react to his poorly written tripe...

Well...it took so long to react to this so called slight in the first place because, honestly...who reads Vanity Fair magazine?

I mean, in my community, Vanity Fair is only famous for who it doesn't put on its cover or write about in its pages...

To paraphrase Kanye West....and let me be clear...I despise all things Kanye....”Vanity Fair don't like Black people.”

And as I've said before....I don't deal with anyone or anything, which obviously doesn't like me or my kind. It's my own personal ongoing boycott of all things racist and/or bigoted in America..

Vanity Fair fits that bill to a “t” and apparently a lot of people agree with me...

As for slamming Cincinnati because of the Creation Museum....we have many, many museums in Cincinnati....National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, The Museum Center at Union Terminal, The Cincinnati Art Museum, The Taft Museum, to name just a few....

But the Creation Museum is in Kentucky...not Ohio...and last time I looked...Cincinnati was in Ohio..and so, for that matter, is the airport that this ill informed second class scribe reportedly flew into..so my question is....was he ever in Cincinnati in the first place?

Regardless....I've wasted far too many words on nothing....so let's move on shall we...

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Tiger Woo

tiger, tiger, not so bright

back from rehab full of fight

tired of hiding, ready to play

back to the course after slight delay

mea culpa news conference first he must hold

re-polishing his image before retrieving his gold

no broken teeth nor busted lip

covered up with doctor's trip

he'll talk at the media

but no questions he'll take

He's the Tiger after all, no need to fake

Sorry, he'll say, but not really mean it

He's still god on the course, of course

of course....

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Elton, my Elton

One Brit that I dearly love is Elton John...The famously anti religious Sir Elton told the world that Jesus was a gay man.....

I'm okay with that because I'm convinced that God is a Black woman and what better couple to bring civility to this crazy world than a fierce and compassionate Black woman and a fabulously fashion forward gay man.....

God being a man goes against everything we know about creation....men don't create...so why would the first humans who populated the world and related to it at the basest levels...worship the human who can't create, while the other human, woman, was busy popping out life every 9 months...think about it..

Doesn't make sense..

The Bible....man's first revision of the way of the world...and his first grab at power and control....

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CPAC Circle Jerk

John Birch Society sponsored yearly gathering of conspiracy theory conservatives. Darth Cheney and his mealy mouthed daughter standing in the middle of the circle....see dick run...run, dick run...

Sounds like a venereal disease...

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Homegrown Suicide Bomber

Another mad, arrogant SOB takes the coward's way out...flies his plane into a building and kills innocent people...wingnut blogs praise this guy for taking a stand against the government

What stand...he killed innocent people...He's a murderer, period.

He killed for his own highly personal reasons..nothing more

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Crazy Killer Lady

Kills her brother...accident

Suspected of mailing bomb to colleague...never charged.

Slaps a Stranger in the head in a restaurant.....gets hit with fine

Kills 3 colleagues, wounds 3 others at faculty meeting.....now charged with murder

She says it didn't happen....

Husband seems a nutty as she appears to be...

American Taliban

Buried underneath all the financial bad news of the past week is a story in the Washington Post about 33 pastors who have decided to defy the governmental edict by mixing politics with religion from the pulpit.

One of them, the Reverend Ron Johnson, jr. told his congregation that a vote for Barack Obama represents a moral schizophrenia and was in violation of the Bible. Johnson stopped short of endorsing John McCain, but not by much.

The 33 ministers are part of a group that is attempting to generate a court battle that will ultimately overturn the 54 year old ban on telling their congregations how to vote. They say they have a constitutional right to tell their people who to vote for. They say the law violates their rights to religious expression.

The law, which is part of the national tax code says churches or any entity with a tax exempt status are barred from participating in, or of intervening in any political campaign on behalf of any person or public office. The law was enacted to prevent the joining of church and state government. There is no such ban on pastors who talk issues from the pulpit.

The IRS has taken no action...it says it is monitoring the situation.

For me, the solution is simple...if you want to talk politics from the pulpit...give up your tax exempt status. Pay taxes like the rest of us and you can say anything you want.

These blatant attempts to circumvent one of the basic tenants under lying the founding of this country has always scared the hell out of me. The people who came to these shores, and founded our country, and authored the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, were escaping from religious persecution, not running toward it with the goal of setting up their own system of preferential abuse.

If these American Taliban are ever successful at infusing our government with religion, me and people like me, will be in big trouble. There are things about me that I can’t change...the very things that make me, me, are the things that these fanatics, and they are fanatic, want to control...lock away...kill...

I’m a woman....they want to take away my control of the only thing I really own....my body..
I’m black....their religious book says I should be a slave....
I’m lesbian.....they say I can’t love the one I choose...or that I should be killed for having such thoughts...
I’m left handed......at one point in our history...left handed babies were put to death because it was said that left handed children were sired by the devil....

Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, in 1956....My first grade teacher tried to make me right handed because she said it wasn’t correct to use your left hand.. I told my Mom...she put a stop to it...That teacher should have lost her job, because who knows how many other little kids she messed up because they didn’t tell their mom, or their mom chose not to intervene in the abuse.

Civil rights for Blacks and the LGBT community continues.....look at the vicious racial attacks on Obama in this campaign...I’ve had my fair share of personal brushes with racism, some of it based in the old testament, my phone chats with the late Bill Wilkinson, grand wizard of the KKK, for instance. I was okay with him until I told him I was black, this coming six weeks into our weekly phone conversations....He couldn’t tell I was black by hearing me talk....When I started in broadcasting...I had a news director tell me that I was too light to be black on television...I’m high yellow in complexion, as we say in the ghetto...I can’t help that...My complexion is testimony to the race mixing of America...been going on for ages...yet this white man chose to judge me for color...never mind that I had a track record of running rings around every other reporter he had on staff.....I won that battle....I worked in darker makeup for about six months..until he stopped paying attention...It didn’t end there...but it’s over...I don’t choose to look back....unless provoked.

The specter of the repeal of Roe v. Wade looms large these days...It’s not just about abortion..It’s about returning women to second class citizenship or the days of barefoot and pregnant. There is actually a legal group who is studying whether or not women can be limited in their travel or crossing of state lines, if they seem to be with child..or someone thinks they may be traveling in order to get an abortion...no proof necessary...just the suspicion would be enough...

Anyone who is sitting on the fence need only look to the middle east to see religion taking over government....dissenters silenced in the name of religion...women killed in the name of religion.

Don’t think it can happen here? Listen to the pseudo Christians of the conservative right. Listen to the Governor of that great state of Alaska. The concentration camps have already been built with our taxpayer money by KBR, the Bush/Cheney favored corporation. Bush, as I said has done away with some basic civil rights protections that would make it easy to co-opt the government if the religious right in this country makes it to the White House. Don’t believe me, then go read The Patriot Act. We basically have no rights. The trouble is most of us won’t know, until the government starts to use our laws against us.

Back to the topic at hand....In an open letter from the Rev. Eric Williams, of the United Church of Christ...he warned that many members of the clergy are "exchanging their historic religious authority for a fleeting promise of political power," to the detriment of their churches.

"The role of the church -- of congregation, synagogue, temple and mosque -- and of its religious leaders is to stand apart from government, to prophetically speak truth to power," Williams wrote, "and to encourage a national dialogue that transcends the divisiveness of electoral politics and preserves for every citizen our 'first liberty.' "

I just hope that more people are listening to Rev Williams than Rev Johnson.

When Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday

2008. Happy New Year to all of you paying attention. I’ve just walked through the door, into the twilight of my fifth decade on this planet. Still kicking, still feeling pretty optimistic about life in general.

Still paying attention to the happenings of the world around me.....the upcoming presidential elections here in this country....the assassination of Benizar Bhutto, may she find peace....the latest nuclear petulance out of South Korea....the continued ignorance and futility out of Washington.

Iowa caucuses in two days and if you listen to the media, all of the candidates are in closing arguments, in an attempt to seal the deal for themselves.

It’s a two man race in the GOP...that’s the “gay old party” for those of you who don’t know what GOP stands for....It used to mean “grand old party.” But the name has changed to accommodate all of the righteous old guys who keep falling out of the closet away from Jesus and the right leaning moral majority.

Preacher Huckabee is slugging it out with Mormon Mitt... but neither is charting new ground....just plowing the same old fields of pseudo hypocritical righteousness trying to out religious the other.

Fred Thompson seems to have fallen by the wayside. I guess he’s still in it for awhile since they’ve promoted Jack McCoy on Law and Order and taken away his day gig. Maybe he can come back as a judge who’s running for president on TV.

Rudy is busy too. He’s working hard to justify the latest group of skeletons popping out of his closet. He seems to have written off Iowa, instead concentrating his attention on New Hampshire.

The media says it’s a dead heat on the Democratic side with Obama slightly ahead of Clinton and Edwards, or vice versa, depending on the poll.

I’m not real excited about the Democrats either. I’m still not hearing anything new. Obama keeps talking about real change and I’m all for that, but is the change that he’s talking about merely changing a black man for a white man in the White House?

Alright, already, I know he is against the war in Iraq...Tell me something else. Tell me about social security...tell me about health care...tell me about ending violence in the streets...tell me about getting rid of guns...tell me about improving education.....tell me about civil rights for all people, not just rich people or straight people or Christians.

The middle class needs tax relief, too. America needs an end to the devastating voodoo economics of the Reagan era. Trickle down economics has never worked and it never will.
All of the people who support this economics plan need to understand that this is merely debt deferment. Your kids are screwed, period. They are dead and buried before they even get out into the world thanks to the past years of tax relief for corporations and the rich one percent of America. We, as Americans owe our collective soul to the banks of China. I don’t want to be around when they call that loan.

How about outlawing lobbyists, permanently. What’s the point of advertising by drug manufacturers? Wouldn’t it be better if that big advertising budget were used to develop new and better medications?

America needs to come to grips with AIDS. Is that in Obama’s health plan? Especially since fully fifty percent of all new cases of HIV infection are straight black women?

Hey Hillary, I haven’t forgotten you. Is the plight of infected black women in your health budget? If the polls are right, you’re favored by black women two to one over Obama. Are you going to take care of your constituency?

Hillary Clinton, like Obama, is the face of change. She is a woman. That is the biggest thing going her. She is not a man. On the face, she is not the status quo. But is that true? She went along with Bush on Iraq. Her health care plan seems a retread of the one that failed when her husband was in charge.

The problem that I have with her is that she has been in Congress and the White House and still feels like the old way of doing things despite her gender. As much as I want to, I can’t get excited about her.

I want someone to talk about really cutting the waste in government...no more automatic raises until lawmakers fix this mess. Absolutely no more pork barrel projects until we have a budget surplus in Washington.

I want the Patriot Act repealed. I want Homeland Security dismantled. It’s a joke on the American people. I want checks and balances restored between government branches.

I want the IRS retired. How about a national sales tax....a user tax...the bigger the item, the larger the tax.....same for everybody.....that way...you could put up a chart for all to see and read what the tax penalty is, instead of the way it is now. ....Or I would be okay with an across the board ten percent....Everyone pays ten percent of their yearly earnings...Kind of like tithing to your church, only it’s to the government....Going even further....take the ten percent and divide it in half with part going to the feds, the rest going to the state where you live.

Bottom line, I want more than I’m hearing. The candidates, none of them, have come close to speaking to the important stuff. So let’s knock off the attack rhetoric and get down to business.

The candidate who does that, will get my vote.

And trust me...........Ron Paul is not the answer!