I was on a skiing trip with the band and while I did in fact end up with all the other crippled kids in the back of the bus (a football line backer wacked into me at speed and opened up a foot long gash in my leg with his edges, I would have kept skiing because I love it but my boot was full of blood) I was not as badly injured as some.

I was the second horse behind a future Miss Connecticut on a stately amble that was part of the amenities when her horse slipped and kicked the horse right ahead of me. That horse was a little pissed off (naturally) and climbed up on the back of Miss Connecticut’s horse and started biting her. It wasn’t life threatening mind you but it certainly put a damper on her stay.

Anyway I know very little about horses but even I understand that you hold the reins in one hand and wrap your legs around the horse instead of sticking them out like an ill fitting doll (perhaps I should call it an “action figure”, nah). Also you don’t dress up like Howdy Doody.

So in addition to his other reprehensible qualities, Roy Moore is not the cowboy he imagines himself.

Polls in Alabama have just closed.

@ 10 pm 515,244 Moore 501,518 Jones.
@ 10:22 pm 562,068 Jones 560,045 Moore 88% reporting.
@ 10:34 pm 585,183 Jones 572,380. Some news organizations are calling it for Jones (not MSNBC though).

@ 10:45 Mitch McConnell (admittedly biased) calls it for Jones.
@ 10:47 MSNBC calls it.

Fluent Russian

Awesome, I’m better at Excel than Serena Williams

Cats

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court halts the presidential recount in Florida, effectively making Republican George W. Bush the winner.

You don’t have to love them. You just have to respect their rights.

Ed Koch

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You know, I’m dead serious about Acela.

Maybe I’m too subtle.

A historian destroys Roy Moore’s myth about ‘united’ black families during slavery
History News Network, Raw Story
11 Dec 2017

At a campaign event in September, one of the few African Americans in the audience asked Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Alabama, when he thought America had last been “great.” This was, of course, an allusion to the slogan of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign – “Make America Great Again” – a theme that Moore has enthusiastically embraced. Moore answered that, in his view, America had last been “great” during the era of slavery before the Civil War. He informed his questioner: “I think it was great at the time when families were united – even though we had slavery – they cared for one another . . . . Our families were strong, our country had a direction.” For Moore, who has built his political career around his supposed embrace of traditional family values, the Old South was a golden age.

Moore’s characterization of family life in the Old South is reminiscent of that expressed by southern proslavery apologists at the time. Governor James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, for example, a prominent slave owner, responded in 1844 to abolitionist charges that slavery disrupted southern family life by boasting that “there are fewer cases of divorce, separation, . . . seduction, rape, and bastardy than among any other five millions of people on the civilized earth.” Hammond’s claims are misleading at best. Social conventions and legal practices made divorce nearly impossible in most parts of the Old South; it was legally prohibited in Hammond’s South Carolina. Separation was made difficult by women’s limited legal and economic options and laws that transferred all of women’s property to the husband at the time of marriage. Cases of seduction, rape, and bastardy were seriously underreported because of social conventions and the possibility of public embarrassment. Of course, Hammond doesn’t even allude to the slave community, where marriages lacked legal recognition, families were frequently separated by movement or sale, and women and girls were often raped or coerced into sexual relationships with white men.

Hammond’s own marital and sexual behavior belies his (and Moore’s) claims about southern family life in the era of slavery. In his mid-twenties, he wooed and married Catherine Fitzsimmons, a sixteen-year-old who brought substantial family wealth into the union. He also began to buy slaves. In 1839 he acquired Sally, an eighteen-year old bondwoman, and Louisa, her young daughter. After fathering several slave children by Sally, he took twelve-year old Louisa as his mistress and fathered additional slave children with her.

Hammond’s sexual misconduct didn’t end with his females slaves. It also extended to his white relatives. Thanks to his voluminous diaries, which were discovered in 1989, we have an extensive record of his transgressions in his own words. In the early 1840s, he became sexually involved with his four “lovely and luscious” nieces, ages thirteen to eighteen. Although he apparently stopped short of sexual intercourse with them, he recorded that he loved “permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them . . . in the most secret and sacred regions.” Eventually these dalliances became more than Catherine could abide and she separated from Hammond, before reconciling three years later, possibly because all of her wealth and social standing had remained with her husband.

So there you have it all. Racism, Bigotry, Misogyny, Sexual Abuse, and Incest. Pretty much the perfect Southern “Gentleman”.

Umm… Let’s define traitor, shall we?

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

U.S. Constitution Article 3, Section 3

Fair enough. Now that we know what the rules are I ask you to consider whether Thomas Jonathan Jackson, Robert Edward Lee, and Jefferson Finis Davis levied war against the United States. This is an open book test, you can use the Intertubz all you want.

How Georgia Racists Created a Confederate Myth
by Shaun King, Sierra Pettengill, The Intercept
2017-12-09

In 1916, a year after the KKK hosted a cross burning on Stone Mountain to announce their resurgence, plans moved forward to grossly deface the dome with a gargantuan 1.57-acre wide carving honoring the Confederacy. While it is true that many horrible men sustained and advanced systemic racism in the United States, the central roles played by many white women in advancing Jim Crow are drastically under-told. In “Graven Image,” however, the central role of women in making the mountain a monument for bigots is not overlooked. Pettengill shows us these white women in archival footage, seated in lace dresses, sewing a Confederate flag.

It was Caroline Helen Jemison Plane, the president of the Atlanta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who convinced the owners of the property to give the United Daughters of the Confederacy access to the mountain. Forming the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association, Plane’s original vision was for the mountain to feature the KKK alongside Confederate generals.

From 1916 until the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the carving proceeded in fits and starts, always with the foundational support of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And what never stopped was the usage of the mountain as a gathering ground for racists.

It was widely understood among black Georgians during that time that you simply didn’t set foot near the place. I learned this firsthand all the way back in 1998 as a young student at Morehouse College — a school for young black men that has stood on its own Georgia hill since 1867. Sitting in an African American history course with the legendary Dr. Marcellus Barksdale, he told us we should never go there — not now or ever. With a seriousness that struck us all on that day, he communicated that everything about the place was not just rotten, but designed to offend and intimidate us.

Just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement exploded in both respect and impact, Georgia’s white politicians, a full 100 years after the Civil War, decided that it was time again to pour their hearts, souls, and money into completing the Confederate carving once and for all. I mean, what did the American South need more in the 1960s than a monument to the leaders of the Confederate Army, right?
…
Stone Mountain was not made into the world’s largest monument to the Confederacy because it had anything at all to do with the Confederacy, it was done because the horribly racist people who bought it — and loved for it to be a meeting place for the KKK — knew full well that nothing would make their racist worldview more known than such a monument.

In “Graven Image,” we see Georgia’s racist, segregationist Governor Marvin Griffin announce that he’s using state funds to purchase the mountain in 1958, urging that the carving continue. He knew full well what such a monument in such a time meant, but moved forward anyway.
…
The KKK continues to use Stone Mountain for their gatherings to this very day. It makes perfect sense: Few places in the entire country have done more to make them feel more at home.

Stone Mountain was Charlottesville before Charlottesville. For generations, it has been the place where insecure white men put on costumes and walk around aimlessly with torches, in an effort to intimidate all who see their tomfoolery. Yet elected leaders in Georgia continue to embrace Stone Mountain’s painful past and refuse to even consider blasting away the monument and taking the entire park back to the way it was over 349 million years ago.

409 Views folks. WTF?

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Britain’s King Edward steps down; Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declare war on the United States; UNICEF organization launches; ‘Magnum PI’ makes television debut.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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About those penises

By the way- What Trump Eats