Truckload

Via Wonkette:

Caught Showing Your Racist Ass? White Privilege to the Rescue!

Fuckhead's parents wasted money on a repug PR firm; the White Male Supremacy cavalry was already on the way with free excuses.

A corrective from Stephen Robinson at Wonkette:

No white guy's life is ever going to end because he was cruel to women or minorities. The sneering Nick Sandmann will probably be on the Supreme Court shortlist in a few decades. During the Trump era, the "cruelty is the point," and a disturbing number will rush to protect those who are cruel in Trump's image.

And this, from the Root.

The Kroger Shooting Was Racist Violence

White asshole shot just black people, passing up potential white victims, telling one armed white witness "don't shoot me, whites don't shoot whites."

Who do you think he voted for in 2016?

From the Courier:

Minutes before a deadly shooting began Wednesday at the Kroger in Jeffersontown, the shooting suspect is believed to have tried to enter a nearby predominantly black church, authorities said.

Jeffersontown Police Chief Sam Rogers said during a Thursday news conference that surveillance footage from First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown captured an individual attempting to gain access into the church on Wednesday afternoon, about 10 to 15 minutes before the shooting at Kroger started.

Background: Louisville Kroger shooting: Here's what we know

The latest: Victims of the Louisville Kroger shooting have been identified

'Whites don't shoot whites': What one man says Kroger shooter told him

 

Rogers said the individual is believed to have been Gregory Bush, the man arrested and charged with killing two people Wednesday at the Kroger at 9080 Taylorsville Road.

The individual was unsuccessful in entering the church, and possible motives for the attempted entry were not immediately available, Rogers said.

First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown is located at 10600 Watterson Trail, about two miles away from the Jeffersontown Kroger.

The first call reporting shots fired inside the Kroger came into MetroSafe at 2:54 p.m. There were reports of "multiple injuries."

By 4 p.m., authorities said they had secured the scene. Two people were dead: a man in the store and a woman in the parking lot.  

According to Jeffersontown police, Bush, 51, entered the grocery store and "gunned down" the first victim, and then exited the store where he killed the second victim. 

Make Every Repug Candidate Pay For Kavanaugh

Rapey McLiarFace is now the raping, lying face of the republican party.  His despicable performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the screaming hysteria of repug fanatics spouting ludicrous conspiracies have laid bare the true nature of their party: despising and degrading women in order to promote and protect privileged, rich, straight, conservative, freakazoid white men.

 

To repugs, either you are one of them, or you are scum to be assaulted and kicked into the trash.

 

Which side are you on?

 

29 Days.

VOTE

The Repug Skeleton Key

Albert Burneko at The Concourse:

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

Massa Bevin: Slaves Were Just Apprentices

When your racism and White Privilege are so ingrained that you can't even pretend any more.

Joe Gerth at the Courier:

When Master Matt Bevin thinks of the “good ol’ days,” who knew he thinks about the late 1700s?

Marse Bevin — according to WFPL — went to the Kentucky Registered Apprenticeship Summit on Monday and extolled the virtues of indentured servitude as being something akin to an early form of an apprenticeship.

According to the radio station, Marse Bevin said that a couple of his ancestors came to America as indentured servants, learned how to make bells from their master and went on to form their own company after they were freed.

He hailed the harsh practice of keeping people in bondage as a way to give workers hands-on experience.

Well shackle me up and teach me to cast bronze.

Indentured servitude, of course, was the practice of paying one’s way across the pond by selling oneself into bondage for a prescribed number of years — essentially a form of slavery.

It differed from the enslavement of Africans practiced throughout the South, though, in that with Southern slavery, there was no contract and the prescribed number of years was the rest of one’s life, and the rest of one's children’s lives and the rest of their children’s lives, and so on.

So, slavery was far worse. But indentured servitude was no picnic, either.

Sure, a few indentured servants learned trades, but the vast majority of serfs were field workers and household servants, working alongside the African slaves, or doing the same jobs in lieu of the African slaves.

For Master Bevin, this is not to be thought of as a time we should regret and think “thank heavens we’ve gotten past that and don’t allow such a barbarous practice any longer.”

No, for Master Bevin, it is the age of enlightenment. A time of great learning.

(Someone should point out right here that labor unions, which Bevin has harshly criticized and pushed to neuter or kill with right-to-work and other anti-union legislation, run amazing apprenticeship programs that don’t require bondage or a period of servitude.)

Of Course They're Raping the 4-Year-Old Girls; That's the Point

 It's a terror tactic and a war crime, and it's exactly what repugs want.

 

Down with Tyranny:

UPDATE: Who's Taking Care Of The Kidnapped Kids?

Guys like Deputy Sheriff Jose Nunez, a 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriff's Department. According to the Dallas Morning News Nunez (not Devin Nunes this time) sexually assaulted a 4-year-old girl and threatened the victim's mother into staying quiet about the assaults.

Sheriff Javier Salazar said the girl had been assaulted multiple times over the course of several months. The mother is an undocumented immigrants and Nunez said she'd be deported if she told anyone.

Campaign of Terror

Digby:

But that isn't the only horror being inflicted on immigrants in this country.Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and the rest of the deplorable GOP are terrorizing the Latino community in order to rid this nation of --- Latinos. They are doing everything in their power to scare them into taking their families and leaving the country by going after mothers and babies, teen-agers brought by their parents and even legal residents who had a brush with the law decades ago.. I suspect they would prefer that Hispanic Americans follow:

SNIP

You can't beat the irony of ICE deporting someone who committed domestic violence 20 years ago in the same week that the ttorney general unilaterally ruled that women cannot seek asylum in the country if they are fleeing domestic violence. 

This is a campaign of terror being waged by the government against a specific community in the United States. There's no other way to describe it.

The Resistance: No More Being Nice

Zandar:

So no, the notion that Republicans will turn on Trump even should Mueller or the Senate present evidence of conspiracy or worse is ludicrous.  They will defend Trump even at the cost of their own livelihoods.  The Republican party is nothing more than the racist, misogynist, bigoted cult of personality that worships Trump, and so are all of his voters.

I'm tired of being nice to them.  It's only made them love Trump more.

It's time to call these assholes out this November and throw them out of power for good.  Get registered, get ready, get friends, get to the polls.  At every turn President Obama's open hand was met by fist after fist.

Now it's time to fight.

Deport All the White Immigrants First. That's All Y'All, Motherfuckers

And start with the ones whose pasty ancestors got here the earliest.

 

Charlie Pierce:

This is now clearly a war on all immigration, legal and otherwise. The history of this country would be immeasurably different—and immeasurably worse—if you eliminated from it all those people who came here fleeing violence and oppression. In fact, if you did that, you wouldn’t have a country here at all. Maybe we don’t any more.

Just Dynamite the Thing

It's an incitement of right-wing violence.

Get that thing out of the capitol and out of the damn state.  Replace it with one of Muhammad Ali, who accomplished more and was more of a hero than Davis ever did or was.

From the Herald:

A white nationalist group claimed credit for hanging a "patriot, hero, statesman" sign to replace a plaque removed from the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Capitol Rotunda.

People associated with Identity Evropa placed the placard on the statue Monday, the group said on Twitter Tuesday night. But the timing of the act was disputed by state officials.

State officials said they quickly removed the placard and are reviewing security measures.

A picture shared by the organization shows that its sign matched the original plaque's inscription of "Patriot - Hero - Statesman." The original plaque was removed March 11. The group's sign also said, "Our history will not be erased."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article209764479.html#storylink=cpy

The original plaque was taken down after the Historic Properties Advisory Commission, which oversees state-owned statues, voted unanimously in October to have it taken down.

The group claiming credit has been monitored.

"Identity Evropa is at the forefront of the racist 'alt-right's' effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Rather than denigrating people of color, the campus-based organization focuses on raising white racial consciousness, building community based on shared racial identity and intellectualizing white supremacist ideology."

What Trump-Driven Terrorism?

I don't see any domestic terrorism. Especially not any domestic terrorism committed by white people.  And certainly not any domestic terrorism committed by white people emboldened by the Orange Loser's blatant racism to kill black kids

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:

Maybe he thought blowing the kid away would make America great again.

In the midst of the media madness over Stormy and Syria, it’s easy to ignore seemingly minor stories that have major implications. One such story comes to us from Michigan, where an innocent 14-year-old was nearly killed due to what can only be described as Trumpian ideology:

The 14-year-old was walking to high school after sleeping late and missing the bus when he decided to ask a neighbor for directions.

It was a banal request, but it nearly got the student from Rochester Hills, Mich., killed Thursday.

The woman who opened the door after Brennan Walker, who is black, knocked on it started yelling at him. Then the woman’s husband grabbed a shotgun and fired it at him, Walker and police officials said.

Walker told WJBK-TV that “she was like, ‘Why are you trying to break into my house?’ I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High. And she kept yelling at me. Then the guy came downstairs, and he grabbed the gun, I saw it and started to run. And that’s when I heard the gunshot.”

After sprinting away from the house, Brennan, who was not hit, hid and broke down in tears, the outlet reported.

“I’m kind of happy that, like, I didn’t become a statistic,” Brennan told the outlet, saying his mother had told him that black boys were at risk of being shot by others.

What would make the homeowner assume that a 14-year-old kid was a dangerous home invader? What would motivate the homeowner want to grab a shotgun and take this young man’s life?

 

Is it too far-fetched to conclude that the homeowner likely had the same thought process Donald Trump had back in 1989 (and afterwards), when he called for the execution of the individuals falsely accused of assault in Central Park?

Anyone who thinks progressives exaggerate when they say Trump has freed Americans to act on their prejudices needs to speak to young Brennan Walker. In one moment, this young man’s hopes and dreams could have been taken from him because of the assumption that he was a criminal–an assumption promoted by the man in the White House and his political and media allies.

The horror of what happened to young Brennan Walker cannot be overstated. This young man is psychologically wounded for life. He will never forget the morning he knocked on a door asking for help–just help–and barely avoided having a bullet in his chest.

These are the bitter wages of Trumpism. This is the natural consequence of a President effectively declaring that it is moral to be malevolent towards minorities. Thanks to Trumpism, it is no longer safe for American citizens to ask for directions when they’re lost…or walk home at night after a 13-hour shift…or even wait for friends at Starbucks.

I can’t help wondering what HUD Secretary Ben Carson–or, for that matter, Diamond and Silk–would say to young Brennan Walker, and what their rationale would be for continuing to support a President who obviously doesn’t believe Walker’s life matters. Then again, it’s probably reasonable to assume they’d use the same excuses right-wing commentator Walter E. Williams used nearly two decades ago when he attempted to downplay the dangers of racial profiling. Yet there’s no excuse for what happened to Brennan Walker.

At some point, Trump will go. Yet Trumpism will remain with us, a social malady that must be resisted with as much political and cultural force as possible–because, as a real President declared over fifty years ago:

These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.

Only White Penis-Havers Who Kill Black Teens Get to Claim Credible Threat

Brown children bearing scars from attacks in their home countries need not apply, because BROWN.

Political Animal:

As the White House heralded the “four pillars” they required for any DACA fix, most of the attention was focused on their attempts to end the diversity visa lottery and family-based visas. What was not as widely reported were the changes they sought to U.S. policy on asylum seekers, which would include many of those traveling in the caravan. Here are some of the items included in their proposal:

* Significantly tighten standards and eliminate loopholes in our asylum system.

* Elevate the threshold standard of proof in credible fear interviews.

* Impose and enforce penalties for the filing of frivolous, baseless, or fraudulent asylum applications, and expand the use of expedited removal as appropriate.

* Ensure only appropriate use of parole authority for aliens with credible fear or asylum claims, to deter meritless claims and ensure the swift removal of those whose claims are denied.

When Trump tweets about how we need to change our weak border laws, this is the kind of thing he has in mind. They want to severely restrict the ability of migrants to claim and prove the need for asylum, which is what David Leopold told Greg Sargent yesterday.

“He’s saying that is a bad border law — that the legal way for them to enter temporarily should be ended,” Leopold tells me. “He’s saying that in order to have effective border laws, we need to cut out the asylum process. That’s a radical shift.”

It is a radical shift that happens to be a significant part of Stephen Miller’s white nationalist agenda.

The Proud Deplorables

Their candidates are shit, and they are shit. Stop making excuses for them.

Digby:

I keep hearing this. And it's true that the rest of the country disdains them. It's because they are voting for cretinous monsters who are destroying the country and possibly the world. Maybe if they stop doing that the rest of us would have a little bit more respect for them.

Seriously --- pussy grabbers and child molesters? They have lost all common decency. And they expect the rest of the country to just sit back and say nothing? 

When Free Speech Gets Patriotic

The First Amendment guarantee of free speech was designed to protect dissent.  Political speech that criticizes government is the most patriotic speech and thus deserving of the strongest protections.

Especially when that speech - "speech" of course including action, even if silent - offends members of the ruling class and their pet storm troopers

Dave Zirin at The Nation:

A remarkable coalition of athletes, activists, and academics has come together in solidarity with Michael Bennett against the slander being put forward to discredit him by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the Las Vegas Police Protective Association. Their statement of support follows.

Statement of Solidarity With Michael Bennett

We, the undersigned, stand with Michael Bennett, a professional football player with the Seattle Seahawks, philanthropist and activist, following an incident of police brutality in Las Vegas. On the morning of August 27th, a reported shooting on the Vegas strip led to chaos. Michael Bennett ran for cover, as did hundreds of others. Instead of being assisted, video and photographic evidence shows that Las Vegas police targeted Bennett, put him on the ground in handcuffs while the primary officer took out a weapon and placed it near the back of his head. According to Bennett, the officer said that if Bennett moved, he would “blow [his] fucking head off.” Bennett was then put in a police car, and after a period of time let go without charges.

We condemn this act of racial profiling and excessive force perpetrated by the Vegas police against Mr. Bennett.

This story is awful enough. The response by the Las Vegas police union has been even worse. They have issued a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell calling for Bennett to be investigated for “obvious false allegations against our officers.” Instead of refuting these allegations, the police union made reference to Bennett’s protests of the national anthem, writing, “While the NFL may condone Bennett’s disrespect for our American Flag, and everything it symbolizes, we hope the league will not ignore Bennett’s false accusations against our police officers.” They are, in effect, using Bennett’s political protest as a pretext to investigate him.

Since Bennett publicized his encounter with the LVMPD, a spokesperson for the police has confirmed that it is conducting an investigation of Bennett to determine “Whether Mr. Bennett was involved in the altercation at the hotel casino prior to his detention on Las Vegas Boulevard.” This is clearly an act of retaliation against Bennett for speaking out against police brutality. It is also a gesture of intimidation against anyone else who would dare challenge the right of the Las Vegas police department to act with impunity. This is unacceptable.

Michael Bennett has been sitting during the anthem precisely to raise these issues of racist injustice that are now an intimate part of his life. Now we stand with him.

This is a threatening escalation of the blackballing being perpetrated against Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and even of the deliberate breaking of Thabo Sefolosha's leg.  The next black athlete who dares to challenge the ruling power is going to get killed.

Stop Talking Respectfully About Traitors

Steve M. writes that confederates are winning the public opinion war.

Racists want the monuments to stay up, of course, but for others, the "tearing down history" argument seems to settle the question, and opponents can't seem to refute it effectively. We can say that we don't put up monuments to the 9/11 hijackers, or to Hitler and Hirohito's soldiers, or even to British troops in the Revolutionary War, and no one says that we're "denying history." But that argument doesn't resonate.

SNIP

The backlash is strong. It's not going away. And Americans in the middle simply don't understand the reasons for opposition. 

But at the Smithsonian, Christopher Wilson writes that we're letting the traitors win by talking about them with respect:

Those artifacts are not the only way we legitimize and honor the deadly and racist 19th-century rebellion against the United States. Much of the language used in reference to the Civil War glorifies the rebel cause.

The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity? In recent years, historians in academia and in the public sphere have been considering these issues.

SNIP

Landis goes on to suggest that we call plantations what they really were—slave labor camps; and drop the use of the term, “the Union.” A common usage in the 19th century to be sure, but now one we only use “the Union” in reference to the Civil War and on the day of the State of the Union address. A better way to speak of the nation during the war, he argues, is to use its name, the United States.

In the same way, we could change the way we refer to secessionist states. When we talk of the Union versus the Confederacy, or especially when we present the strife as the North versus the South, we set up a parallel dichotomy in which the United States is cast as equal to the Confederate States of America. But was the Confederacy really a nation and should we refer to it as such?

When historian Steven Hahn participated in the 2015 History Film Forum at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, he noted that using these customary terms to tell the story of the Civil War —Hahn suggests we use “War of the Rebellion”—lends legitimacy to the Confederacy.

 

“If you think about it,” Hahn said, “nobody in the world recognized the Confederacy. The question is can you be a state if no one says you are a state?”

SNIP

In his writings, Lincoln referred to the group he was fighting as the “so-called Confederacy” and Jefferson Davis never as president, only as the “insurgent leader.”

 

And if the so-called Confederacy wasn’t a country, but rather what political scientists would call a proto-state, because not a single foreign government in the entire world recognized it as a nation-state, then could Jefferson Davis legitimately be a president? Could Robert E. Lee be a General?

The highest rank Lee achieved in the United States Army was colonel, so given his role as general in service to a failed revolution by a group of rebels, how should we now refer to him?

It would be just as accurate to refer to Lee, who led an armed group against national sovereignty, as an insurgent or a warlord, if not a terrorist. Imagine how different it would be for a school-age child to learn about the War of the Rebellion if we altered the language we use.

When news reports about the debate over monuments say “Today the City Council met to consider whether to remove a statue commemorating General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army,” what if they instead were written in this way: “Today the City Council debated removing a statue of slaveholder and former American army colonel Robert E. Lee, who took up arms in the rebellion against the United States by the so-called Confederacy?”

Douglass knew, day-by-day, after the shooting stopped, a history war was playing out. It is clearly not over yet. Words, though they do not stand as marble and bronze memorials in parks and in front of buildings or fly on flagpoles, are perhaps even more powerful and pernicious. The monuments we've built with language may, in fact, be even more difficult to tear down.

They are Traitors in Defense of Slavery (thank you, Erik Loomis), and so are their apologists and defenders today. 

Call them out and name them accurately: Traitors in Defense of Slavery.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Read this piece on Wednesday's rally to demand Gov. "I Don't Know What History Means" Bevin remove the statue of Traitor in Defense of Slavery Jefferson Davis from the Capitol Rotunda.

If you had been there, you might have noticed something unusual about the Rotunda statues, meant to honor the great men of the Commonwealth.

Here is bigger-than-life Abraham Lincoln, in the exact center of the Rotunda.

His left boot toe is shiny because 7 million schoolkids a year visit the Rotunda and just have to rub it.

Yes, of course I did.

There's a sign asking people not to do that. It doesn't work.








Here is Senator Henry Clay:

Here is Senator and Vice-President Alben Barkley:

Here is Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first successful abdominal surgery in 1809.

 

All of them are cast in bronze, all of them dark brown from time and lack of rubbing.

Then there's this one, in the fourth corner. 

That blinding white motherfucker went up in 1936, 71 years after the Traitor in Defense of Slavery - who might have been born in Kentucky but who grew up and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi - surrendered.

He doesn't belong in the People's House, for more than aesthetic reasons.

But you don't want to hang from a rope until he's gone.






Who do I want in his place?  This guy:

Bevin Lies About Treason Statues; Gets Schooled by Girl

If you lived your life by one maxim, you could do worse than: Do I want Robyn Pennacchia of Wonkette to rip me a new one on this?

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he “absolutely” disagrees with removing Confederate symbols and monuments from government property, calling it the “sanitization of history.”

 

The actual sanitization, of course, is the statues themselves.  They were erected to erase the real history of Treason in Defense of Slavery, turn Slavery Promoters into heroes and reverse Emancipation with Jim Crow.

Bevin - and the Nazi-living apologists who pretend the Civil War Participation Tropies are historic landmarks - has it exactly backwards, as Wonkette explains.

There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.

There is, however, a far more accurate analogy to be made here. Imagine if, in Germany, 50 years after WWII, groups of Holocaust deniers did put up statues of Adolph Hitler looking triumphant? And then got mad that people wanted to tear them down, because how dare they not remember history?

Well, that is exactly what happened in the United States after the Civil War. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is revisionist history just like Holocaust Denial is. It is also about as accurate.
 
Germany, as you may know, bans people from promoting Holocaust Denialism. After the Civil War, America did the exact opposite. It allowed the Lost Cause bullshit to proliferate, believing that it would help the nation to heal. Lost Causers were allowed to pretend that not only was the war about more than just slavery (it was not), that t was noble in some way, but also that slavery wasn’t really all that bad anyway. This was taught in schools and even promoted in Hollywood, with movies like Gone With The Wind and The Birth of A Nation. My mother grew up living in Florida for half the year because of her father’s job, and she was taught in school that it was not the Civil War, but The War of Northern Aggression. That the real villains in this story were the carpetbaggers. If slavery was ever mentioned, she says she does not remember it.

To this day, many textbooks in the South teach that slavery was but a “side issue” to the Civil War, rather than the reason it was fought in the first place.
A fake history was created to make the South feel better about losing, to help us heal as a nation. That was a bad idea. It did not help, it hurt. Rather than dealing, as a nation, with the devastating horror of slavery and the evil that produced it, we allowed the South to whitewash the whole thing and still think of themselves and their generals as heroes. Who want to believe they were good, because they don’t want to confront a “heritage” that was wrong. We did the wrong thing.

Because now we have people who have been taught, and who truly believe in, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, freaking out because they can’t understand why anyone thinks they shouldn’t celebrate their glorious heritage. All of this should have been dealt with over 100 years ago, and it wasn’t, because America would rather ignore pain than deal with it. The Germans dealt with their atrocities responsibly, and we simply refused to. Because it was easier this way, because it preserved everyone’s idea that America is and was always basically good. Because if we lost that, then who would ever fight our wars for us?

These statues are not about remembering history, they are about misremembering history. And this war is being fought between those who want to remember history correctly, and those who want to protect their made-up history, because actually confronting the real history feels bad.

Auschwitz is ugly. It’s harrowing. It makes you sick to look at it. It makes you say “NEVER AGAIN.” Keeping it up is necessary for that reason. It is not there to provide comfort to Nazis. These statues, however, are meant to provide comfort to those who wish to celebrate the South and fondly misremember what it stood for. And they don’t deserve that.

They Are Who We Thought They Were

via Down with Tyranny:

If you haven't given money to the ACLU lately, do it now.  They are the only thing standing between us and Rwanda.

Civil War Participation Trophies

Leave it to Dok Zoom at Wonkette to come up with an honest description.

Northam has called for the removal of Civil War Participation Trophies, since they honor actual traitors to the USA, and were mostly erected to reinforce the post-Reconstruction myth of the “Lost Cause” — historically, they have more to do with reinforcing white supremacy than anything else.