Keep trying. Y’all MVP Harris haters are gonna get ratioed to a fare-thee-well
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I went back today to look at video coverage of our MVP Kamala Harris in Paris. The sound of cameras clicking was deafening. It looked like the entire European press corps was out in force. She made headlines wherever she went. Friendly headlines. There was thorough and respectful coverage.
Wish I could say the same for 24 hour US cable spews and some folks with Blue checks who call themselves “journalists” who should be assigned to cleaning out toilet bowls for a living.
What lifted my spirits though, was watching a crew of mean, nasty, petty, passive aggressive and sometimes openly hostile pun-idjits and reporters get ratioed to hell.
They tried it, they keep trying us —and we have risen up to smack their tacky asses back down. Ain’t nobody letting them slide. KHive was on the case (love y’all) but it wasn’t just us. It was sooooo damn patently obvious what was going on that folks I’ve never seen before on Twitter were kickin’ butt and taking names. The earrings were off, the Vaseline passed and the battle to stop the smears was on.
Fighting back against this shit is exhausting. We have a whole lineup of white supremacist, insurrectionist traitors aiming at overthrowing all we hold dear, gerrymandering us out of position, embracing racism, talking about burning books, banning abortion and birth control, TAKING AWAY OUR RIGHT TO VOTE, spreading COVID...applauding white murderers of Black citizens, and a white murderer who killed white people who stood up for Black folks…
Chile... the list of future (and present) horrors is wayyyy too long —and some of you want us to sit quietly, stand idly by and let these people undermine a POTUS and his MVP who helped put him where we needed him to be?
Oh HELL No. It ain’t gonna happen. Not on our watch. We saw what was done to Sec. Hillary Clinton, and we wound up with an Orange fascist. We fought back, voted in record numbers and got sanity back in office, just in time to save the entire friggin’ nation from an ongoing pandemic. Key in that victory was our MVP. Kamala Devi Harris.
I read folks disses of the KHIVE. Some right here. To be honest I don’t give a damn how you feel about KHIVE. From my perspective we are the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on social media. We will have her back, her front and her side. If you stand by and let this insidious campaign against her happen without opening your mouths — you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. I don’t give a damn who you supported in the primary. And I don’t want to read bullshit speculation about 2024. We have a fight to fight now.
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, WAPO...they are all part of this. For the clicks. Those clicks ain’t worth us dying for.
And Faux — (shudder) I don’t watch them, but Trevor Noah does — the footage he captured is beyond contemptible.
I’m posting quite a few tweets and observations below the fold, so that those of you who aren’t on Twitter can see them, and those of you who may not follow some of our defense crew can do so.
Before I get to the tweets — here’s one of the videos I watched from Paris. She makes me proud.
Thanks to some intrepid Black Twitter folks who speak French, those of us with an interest in following MVP Harris’ activities got a clear picture of what was really happening over there.
Let’s start with Jennifer Jacobs — “Sr. White House reporter for Bloomberg News. Reporting what I know, not what I think”
Really?
Then we had a major slash and burn hit piece from Edward-Isaac Dovere, a “senior CNN reporter” and Jasmine Wright, a Black woman who is clearly not kinfolk.
Eric has been excellent — I subscribe to his pressrun.media
Symone Sanders spoke directly to the bs.
A good read here:
From Allison Gaines
Kamala Harris broke a glass ceiling no other woman did before and has made it her mission to help people, to be the tie-breaker in Congress to make government work. They really have some nerve blaming a Black woman for what’s wrong with America because this country has consistently diminished Black women and immigrants since its inception. Haters don’t want to see Kamala in a position of strength, which is why so many stories portray her negatively.
Kamala Harris took the lead on voting rights, but she can’t force a White man like Joe Manchin or a White woman like Kristen Sinema to support passing voting rights legislation to protect Americans’ rights. All she can do is sign on the dotted line, which she is willing to do. I just feel that folks are trying to call her a failure with no frame of reference for what success in this position would look like. When Joe Biden was Obama’s president, we never saw this type of critique, and that’s what makes their smear campaign more than politics as usual — this is how misogynoir operates, it’s racist and sexist too.
So what is going on? Take a gander at this.
This was interesting to learn
Another good point from David
Props to Eric — again.
Tiff has done an amazing job (and time consuming too) deconstructing bullshit — check out the entire unroll on threadreader
Special kudos to our French speakers:
@ ElLo_dyie is from Martinique.
It was good to read the perspective of a brother who knows of what he speaks
A thumbs up for Aimee Allison.
Reecie speaks for me
Thanks for reading if you got down this far. How much do I owe the cuss jar?
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Last November, Democrats took control of the Gwinnett County commission for the first time in nearly three decades. This November, the county’s lone GOP state senator is engineering a sudden effort to neutralize some of those Democratic gains.
In a stealth move this week, state Sen. Clint Dixon orchestrated an attempt to nearly double the number of commission seats, neuter the power of the county’s newly elected chairwoman and make the school board, which also flipped to Democrats, nonpartisan.
The reason for this late push, according to Dixon, is the pressing desire to give Gwinnett residents more representation in the most diverse county in the state. There was no such desire last year when Republicans controlled the commission.
Since then, an epic election cycle for Democrats flipped the balance of power decisively in Gwinnett, the second most populous county in the state with roughly a million residents. Democrats now command the county school board, hold every seat on the county commission and lead the sheriff’s department, the District Attorney’s office and several other elected positions.
The makeup of the new Democratic political class in Gwinnett is just as notable. Many of the Democratic winners are decades younger than the elected officials they replaced. And every one of them is Black.
The overhaul, which would add five commission seats, would still favor Democrats with a 7-2 split. But it would create three plurality white districts in an overwhelmingly nonwhite county. State Rep. Gregg Kennard, a Lawrenceville Democrat, calls it “whitelash” targeting Black residents in Gwinnett.
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Poet and author Caroline Randall Williams joined Vox Conversations ahead of Thanksgiving to discuss what we’re getting right — and wrong — about Black culinary traditions. Vox: Soul food and the stories it tells about America
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What can we learn about our history, and ourselves, just by taking a bite?
You often hear me say on the Vox Conversations podcast or read in my writing how I believe identity is in everything. Nowhere is this more evident than with food. We associate our favorite cuisines with the people who originally cooked them. Ethnicities and nationalities are a part of our daily vocabularies because of what we eat.
Because food and identity are intertwined — in this nation and every other nation — things inevitably get complicated. It’s about to be Thanksgiving, one of the most widely celebrated American holidays, and one whose commonly told origin story is a Eurocentric fairy tale. It’s uncomfortable to think about war and genocide as you bite into your grandmother’s sweet potato pie, or as you savor that salty, smoky skin falling off your turkey drumstick. Just as the legacy of enslavement lives on in our bodies, our laws, and our cultural practices, it also goes directly into our bellies. Many of the items we see on our Thanksgiving tables, much of which I recognize as “soul food,” can teach us a lot about America — and about ourselves as Americans.
Thinking about all this encouraged me to reach out to poet, scholar, and author Caroline Randall Williams. Six years ago, Caroline authored a cookbook, Soul Food Love, with her mother Alice Randall, herself a celebrated author and the first black woman to co-author a No. 1 country hit. You might have also read Caroline’s op-ed for the New York Times in the summer of 2020. In it, she addressed the continued existence of monuments honoring Confederate soldiers with the viral opening line, “I have rape-colored skin.”
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Even in dire years like 2020 and 2021, when the pall of the pandemic and economic uncertainty still shadows much of everyday life, there are areas where things are trending in a positive direction. We’re making slow but steady progress toward ending global poverty, achieving carbon-neutral energy, and, most recently, vaccinating the world against Covid-19.
But maybe the most hopeful news I’ve read this year is a new white paper on water chlorination — a paper that suggests a simple water treatment solution could dramatically reduce child mortality in poor countries.
The economists behind the paper — Johannes Haushofer (who’s done some of my favorite randomized development studies), recent Nobel winner Michael Kremer, Ricardo Maertens, and Brandon Joel Tan — analyze a large-scale experiment called WASH Benefits, which randomly selected certain villages in rural Kenya to receive a variety of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs, while other villages served as a control group.
The experiment tried a bunch of different WASH interventions, including more sanitary latrines, programs promoting hand-washing with soap, nutrition supplements for young children, and more.
One tactic in particular jumped out: adding a simple chlorine solution to drinking water.
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Ending the civil war will require a resolution to a dispute over territories and a national dialogue on federalism. Foreign policy: A Blueprint for Peace in Ethiopia
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A year after Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces launched a self styled preemptive attack on the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), the war has left a trail of death, destruction, and humanitarian catastrophe.
Battlefield fortunes have turned multiple times, with TPLF forces recently gaining ground and, in one of the three main war fronts, controlling the cities of Dessie and Kombolcha in eastern Amhara, some 250 miles by road north of Addis Ababa, and even considering a dangerous drive to advance on the capital.
The conflict has roots in contestations over the balance of power between the federal and TPLF governments and a war of attrition, with each side accusing the other of seeking to eliminate it. The political differences were exacerbated by historical identity-based territorial contestations between the neighboring Amhara and Tigray regions and by Tigray-Eritrea animosities.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.