Election Day Musings
by Chitown Kev
Began at 9:19 AM CST
Nothing much to say at the present time...
1) Vote early and often. But not this often!
2) There is no state that I would love for Hillary Clinton to win more than North Carolina.
While we’re on this subject…
3) Allow me to succinctly paraphrase this.
Election polls and reliable polling aggregators say that there is a high probability that Hillary Clinton will be elected the 45th President of the United States.
My faith in those polls only goes so far. I need to see the receipts this evening.
While Armando’s taste in college football teams is certainly...uh, unfortunate, I do agree with something that I saw him write on Twitter which I will paraphrase here.
I don’t trust what white people (as a sociological group) say very much, generally.
I have many volumes of recorded history and even some personal experiences to back me up on that.
I guess that the polls are accurate to a degree...but show me the receipts.
That’s where I am with that!
4) I spent a few hours last night into this morning reviewing many of the diaries and commentaries that I posted here at Daily Kos over this much too long election season.
Today, I would change some of the grammar, syntax, and, occasionally, the tone of quite a few posts.
I do wish that I had more deeply researched some items and supported my own points of view more assiduously.
But while I occasionally had a quibble here and there (and winced at one specific thing) I largely stand by the content and the opinions expressed in those pieces….probably more now than I did at the time that I wrote them.
5) If you have not voted, see #1.
Kevin B. 11:37 AM CST...11/8/2016, Election Day
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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African-American lawyers, racial justice groups and the liberal hedge fund billionaire George Soros are combining forces to try to elect more black prosecutors in response to what they see as an insufficient response by incumbent district attorneys to the killings of black people by the police.
The effort faces steep demographic and institutional obstacles that have kept the offices of elected prosecutors — those deciding whether to seek criminal charges against the officers responsible — among the whitest reserves in American politics.
Only a few dozen out of more than 2,300 elected prosecutors nationwide are African-American, according to two recent studies by liberal groups. Even the National Black Prosecutors Association, which has 400 members, can point to only about a dozen who were elected to their posts.
But that number has begun to grow, with activists and lawyers recruiting black candidates while outside groups — largely financed by Mr. Soros, who is as revered on the left as he is reviled on the right — hire political consultants to produce slick campaign ads.
Together, the candidates and their allies are often overwhelming white candidates — some of whom have complained that they were targeted merely because of their race.
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A month after the hurricane hit the island, thousands of Haiti’s citizens desperately grapple with hunger, homelessness and health issues such as cholera. The Root: More Than 800,000 Haitians Face Starvation After Hurricane Matthew
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A month after Hurricane Matthew tore through the island nation of Haiti, the United Nations confirms that nearly 800,000 Haitians are facing severe food shortages, with riots and children begging for food a daily occurrence.
On Oct. 4, Hurricane Matthew decimated fishing villages and shredded mountain hamlets destroying for already poor Haitians their sources of subsistence: crops, livestock and fruit trees are all no more. The United Nations reports that the communities of Petit-Trou-de-Nippes, Baradères, Grand-Boucan, Plaisance-du-Sud, Asile and Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes have been severely affected, with almost 80 percent of their crops destroyed.
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Amid White supremacists and alt-right groups' pledges to actively intimidate voters of color—even as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump repeatedly accuses opponents of rigging the election—one publication is calling on voters to track instances of harassment and disenfranchisement at the polls this Tuesday (November 8).
Public interest-focused outlet ProPublica launched "Electionland" in September. The project seeks to document instances of voter suppression by electoral boards, as well as anything else that would delegitimize the election. "The need to cover the vote is particularly urgent this election cycle, as states have passed laws that could affect citizens’ access to the ballot box, and one of the presidential candidates has cast doubt on the validity of the system," reads the description on the project's website.
To that end, the publication seeks help from citizens willing to report anything problematic that they witness on Election Day, from broken voting machines to intimidation to people turned away at the polls. Those who wish to be in touch while voting should text ELECTIONLAND to 69866.
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"The not so subtle message is that Newark and its suburbs are all that White voters fear in a community: Black, Latino, Poor, Dangerous, and Blighted," reads a statement cosigned by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and others. Color Lines: Black NJ Politicians Condemn 'Blatant Racism' of Local Republican Mailer.
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In a statement released yesterday (November 3), a group of Black New Jersey politicians and their allies have accused the Republican Party of Burlington County of using coded and racist language in a mailer it sent to local residents:
The mailer, which you can see above, shows a northern New Jersey map with a red pushpin on Newark, a city that is about 53 percent Black and 34 percent Latinx. The accompanying words say, "If you don't want Burlington County to turn into this part of New Jersey....Then vote for the people who make our country a special place to live!" Burlington County, by contrast, is about 18 percent Black and 8 percent Latinx.
In their statement, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, the NJ Black Mayors Alliance for Social Justice and other state politicians of various races called the mailer blatantly racist.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
On this Election Day, as we cast our votes in a declaration of independence and civic duty, as an affirmation of our heritage as Americans, I cannot help but consider that part of our Heritage that is like the crisp autumn leaves of dried blood on our hands, a heritage passed down by the spilled blood of brothers and sisters past, of the blood of grandfathers and grandmothers weeping from a round house, the blood of elk and bison spilled on sands and in forests, blood of eagles on a snow-capped precipice and blood of mallards on a Cascade valley lake, the blood of our Heritage carried by blood-vein rivers across this vast red earth. A heritage that preceded the landing at Plymouth Rock, even that of the landing of the Santa Maria. A heritage planted by a tribal people who also, nonetheless, in a vast and distant time, emigrated from the distant shores of another distant continent. Who, because of aeons of intimate connection with this landscape, believed that every thing is alive. So much so, that coastal tribes built their dugouts with hearts and lungs; because they believed the tree was still alive in the boat.
On this Election Day, as we make those important votes and then go about our daily routines, routines that takes us along the corridors of pavement or through the static of the air, let us consider a once powerful people. A people subjugated, marginalized and weakened. A people caught between two worlds not of their choosing. A people left with only...
A Declaration, Not of Independence
Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived
Irish-American son, because,
Social-Security time come,
my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born.
He could pay taxes, though,
financing troops, who’d conquered our land,
and could go to jail,
the time he had to shoot or die,
by a Caucasian attacker’s knife.
Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s
enforcers, while hunting my family’s food,
I thought what the hunted think,
so that I ate, not only meat
but the days of wild animals fed by the days
of seeds, themselves eating earth’s
aeons of lives, fed by the sun,
rising and falling, as quail,
hurtling through sky,
fell, from gun-powder, come—
as the First Americans came—
from Asia.
Explosions in cannon,
I have an English name,
a German-Chilean-American wife
and could live a white life,
but, with this hand,
with which I write, I dug,
my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out
of hard, battlefield clay,
dug for my father’s mother, who—
abandoned by her husband—raised,
alone, a mixed-blood family
and raised—her tongue spading air—
ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.
-- Ralph Salisbury
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