Death Row/What a brother knows
"Death Row/What a brother knows" stocknroll/gettyimages.com

Rantz Gets His Racist On: In a brazenly offensive post called "Edmonds police chief hire out after one week, mayor triples down on racism," Jason Rantz, Seattle's mini-Trumper, goes after Edmonds's city council for attempting to hire a black police chief. This is what happened: The council picked a black man for the job, but he only lasted a week because a background check revealed a past investigation for domestic violence. This was enough to let Rantz racism out of the cage. He goes on about how ridiculous it is for Edmonds to try to be woke. The city, which is almost totally white, could have done the right thing (hire a competent white police officer), but instead it did the wrong thing (hired a "tokenized a Black man").

The basic problem with all of this is that we live in a society where white male incompetency gets almost no press. Indeed, it is invisible to the right. Look at the leader of the GOP. Remove the color of Trump's skin, and you will find no reason whatsoever for him to be in office. He is into grabbing pussy, he can barely speak his own and only language, he recommended using bleach to cure Covid-19. But if a black person obtains a position because of the color of their skin, the whole sky must fall down. The right screams everywhere: incompetence, incompetence, incompetence.

And how does Rantz describe the white police officer that Edmonds should have hired? "Twenty-five years law enforcement experience and a master’s degree... also a graduate of the FBI National Academy, was overly qualified." This sort of drivel, the aspirations of deserving white competence dashed by black incompetence, deliberately undercounts what most Americans are likely to experience in their daily doings: white male incompetence, which happens to be the subject of a recent post by Jasmyne Keimig.

When a Passenger On an Alaska Airways Flight Saw a Brown Passenger Texting in Arabic: They were sure some kind of terrorism was going on. The texter was reported to the operators of the plane, which was scheduled to fly from Seattle to San Francisco. After the texter and his friend, another brown man, were removed from their seats, the texts were translated. It turned out the Arabic words had nothing to say of great importance or in the direction of terror. This incident happened back in February. This week, the two brown Muslim men officially accused Alaska Airlines of "violating their civil rights." And the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations described the incident as "another egregious example of "flying while Muslim.'" The future will see this shaming of Muslims as consistent with the cultural moment articulated by MAGA.

As Expected, the WA Right Is Already: Attacking Jay Inslee's push for a capital gains tax to help pay for the state's economic recovery from the year-long pandemic. There are "simpler solutions than Inslee’s capital gains tax proposal," says the right. Of course, there are other solutions, such as a dose of fiscal realism (wink wink, nudge nudge).

As If Our Times Were Not Sufficiently Strange Enough: The New York Times reports:

The coronavirus pandemic is sweeping through death row at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., with at least 14 of the roughly 50 men there having tested positive, lawyers for the prisoners and others familiar with their cases said... Two of the three people scheduled to be put to death next month — Corey Johnson and Dustin John Higgs — have tested positive for the virus.
Lawyers want the virus to grind Trump's lame-duck deathfest to a halt. The life of these prisoners depends on making it to the Biden presidency, which is a month away. The virus that's killing thousands by the day could indeed save them. I'll be a monkey's uncle.

The Right Finally Has the Match It's Been Dying to See: Rep. Ilhan Omar versus fellow “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It's color against color, baby. Progressive attacking progressive. And the winner of this fight has already been determined. The right wants to raise the hand of the brown Muslim terrorist from a shithole country. She refused the vaccine and criticized AOC, who is young and healthy, for taking it. The right does not care about the substance of this disagreement, which has strong points on both sides. (A good number of the people AOC represents are not white and are right to worry about a vaccine developed with support from a white supremacist president.) The right's preference for Omar in this particular case only shows that it sees AOC as a greater threat.

Meanwhile, on the Right:


The reason why she and other members of her party can't be unseated is because their voters don't give a hoot about the lies and lack of logic. If the Dems are still puzzled by this, then they do not know white America well enough. Souls of many in this group are daily crushed and crunched by the saddest of passions.

Hyena, I'm So Sorry You Had to Live Through This American Stupidity: "A hyena at the Toronto Zoo was caught on camera enjoying the Holidays by watching the movie Elf." How did you end up here? Where is Africa? Why is it so cold? How can you, a badass bastard in the wild, be stuck watching Christmas specials in a zoo? Humans are by far the cruelest animal out there.

If You Live In Seattle: You missed the "Great Conjunction of 2020" (Jupiter doing Saturn) because all our sky had to offer us was clouds and more clouds.