Your Tax Dollars Protecting Treason in Defense of Slavery

Defacing monuments to Treason in Defense of Slavery is patriotism. Protecting those monuments is defense of treason.

 

Think Progress:

President Donald Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has “quietly” spent millions of dollars on private security for Confederate cemeteries since the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.

The effort is “aimed at preventing the kind of damage that befell Confederate memorials across the U.S. in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence,” according to a new report from the Associated Press, which reveals the VA has already spent almost $3 million on round-the-clock private security for at least eight Confederate cemeteries.

Records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act show that the VA has spent nearly $3 million on the cemetery security since August 2017. Another $1.6 million is budgeted for fiscal 2019 to pay for security at all Confederate monuments, which could include other sites. The agency has not determined when the security will cease.

There have been no incidents of vandalism in the privately-guarded cemeteries since paint was added to a Confederate monument in Springfield, Missouri right before Trump visited the city in September 2017. A spokeswoman for the VA defended the spending in a statement.

Private security was needed “to ensure the safety of staff, property and visitors paying respect to those interred,” Jessica Schiefer, spokeswoman for the VA’s National Cemetery Administration, said in a statement. The agency “has a responsibility to protect the federal property it administers and will continue to monitor and assess the need for enhanced security going forward.”

Heather Heyer was killed in August 2017 when James Fields Jr., a white nationalist, drove his car into a crowd of protesters. Fields Jr. has pleaded not guilty to federal hate crimes.

Despite near-universal condemnation of the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville to oppose the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, Trump instead said “many sides” were to blame for the violence in an infamous press conference. The president’s remarks were praised by white supremacists.

Numerous Confederate monuments have been torn down or vandalized since the violence in Charlottesville.

Trump has defended Confederate monuments and recently praised Lee at a rally in Ohio.

The Men Who Fought

Down with Tyranny:

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.)

What Your Tax Dollars Support at Charter Schools

The garbage pits are not legal in Kentucky ... yet.  But Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You is slavering greedily for them even more than he slavers for forcing teachers to work for minimum wage and zero benefits.  Which is exactly what charter schools do.

From A Nice Lady at Wonkette:

Earlier this week, the parents of an 8th grade student attending a San Antonio, TX charter school took to Facebook to share the latest item to be filed under prevalent, dumbass institutionalized racism. A worksheet, assigned by an unidentified male history teacher currently placed on leave by Great Hearts Academy Monte Vista Charter School, that included the morally unsound activity of listing both the “Pros” and the “Cons” of slavery.

Yes of course the other parents wrote passionate defenses of "teaching the controversy."  Racist teaching is exactly why they put their kids in a charter school in the first place. Let's hope the tragically misled parents of the well-raised child who knew better than the teacher soon find a real school for their kid.

One that makes crystal clear that the white people fighting to keep black people slaves were nothing but Traitors in Defense of Slavery.
 

Because One Day is Not Enough to Celebrate Crushing Treason in Defense of Slavery

Today is Emancipation Day, which celebrates Lincoln emancipating the slaves of the District of Columbia in 1862.

But it's also my excuse to post - a week late - this wonderful thing from Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Today (April 9) is the greatest day in American history. Robert E. Lee surrendered, effectively ending Treason in Defense of Slavery. The best way to celebrate is to read, or re-read, the single greatest document in American history: Jourdon Anderson’s infamous kiss-off letter to his ex-master.

Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

Moving Statues Isn't Enough

Kentucky can take the next step by replacing jeff davis in the capitol with Muhammad Ali.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

The only way to fight against all of this is to make interpretations of the Civil War a central part of the left agenda. It’s not enough to say that we will move the Lee and Davis statues to cemeteries. They need to be eradicated entirely. We need monuments to John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass erected where they once stood. The bland statues of a typical Civil War soldier you see in towns through the South (and the North) should be replaced by monuments to slaves. We need to make sure that every textbook used by your children has a proper interpretation of the Civil War and when it doesn’t, to raise hell about it with the teachers and the school board. When conservative white male teachers tell your students that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, they need to face repercussions for that. Again, this is a battle that will never end and it’s part of the larger battle against racism and for genuine freedom and justice in this nation. This isn’t some sideshow of a bunch of historians. It is critical to the future we all share.

OK, But Not Nearly Good Enough

Unless they replace the plaque with one identifying Davis as a Traitor in Defense of Slavery, an Embarrassment to the Commonwealth and a Permanent Symbol of Racism, Slavery and Treason, the next step must be removing the motherfucker and installing Mohammad Ali in that place.

From the Herald:

A plaque proclaiming Jefferson Davis as a hero and a patriot will be removed from Kentucky's Capitol, the latest effort to alter Confederate monuments across the country following outbreaks of racially motivated violence.

The Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted to remove the plaque, which is attached to a 15-foot-tall (5-meter-tall) marble statue of Davis in the rotunda of the state Capitol. The plaque declares Davis is a "patriot, hero, statesman" and lists his accomplishments in both the United States and Confederate governments. Last month, a committee recommended the state remove the plaque because of its "subjective" language.

"There are people who don't think he was heroic. And so we just decided to remove it to eliminate that subjective word," commission chairman Steve Collins said.

Leslie Nigels, director of the Division of Historic Properties, said the plaque would be removed in a few days.

 The decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

First: There's a fucking Kentucky division of the shameful females defending treason in defense of slavery? They're not just treasonous, they're stupid.  Kentucky never joined the confederacy.

Second: When you donate something, it belongs to the organization to which you donated it.  If you don't like what they do with your gift, tough shit.

Third:  Let's think of a way to not just remove Davis, but to destroy that statue in a publicly humiliating way that will put the traitors in defense of slavery in their place forever.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

It's Always the Same

Via Political Animal:

Black Aziz Ansari \uD83D\uDC4F‏ @Freeyourmindkid

Some things never change.

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.

Sacred to the Memory

The fate of Lexington's Traitors In Defense of Slavery statues is now in the hands of the military "heritage" commission set up to prevent exactly the progressive removals the City Council is requesting.

Meanwhile, Political Animal reminds us of this:

* W.E.B. DuBois once wrote that Confederate monuments should contain this inscription: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to perpetuate human slavery.” He also penned his thoughts about Robert E. Lee. You’re going to want to read all four paragraphs, but he ends with this lighting bolt:

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.

Who's Really Lazy? Or, Projection Is An Amazing Drug

It's always amazing and sickening to me to hear rich fucks condemn poor people - especially poor black people - for being "lazy."  Amazing and sickening because the rich fucks saying that have never worked a day in their lives.

No, sitting in front of a camera denouncing the people whose poverty supports your lazy rich ass is not work.  Sitting in front of a computer watching your money make more money is not work. Sitting at a desk ordering underlings to evict renters so you can sell their apartments as condos to other rich fucks is not work.

Work is cleaning the toilets in the buildings where the rich fucks pretend to work.  Work is serving food you can't afford to rich fucks who don't tip because that would be encouraging your "laziness."  Work is juggling three minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table.

As Melissa Harris-Perry once exclaimed in a memorable television moment, being poor is hard work.  It always has been.  Keeping it that way is yet another legacy of the confederacy that needs to be swept away.

In a fascinating article on radical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, the Smithsonian captured this quote:

Enslaved men, Lay noted, would “Plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses.” He saw enslaved women busy with “all the Drudgery in Dairy and Kitchen, within doors and without.” These grinding labors he contrasted with the idleness of the slave owners—the growling, empty bellies of the enslaved and the “lazy Ungodly bellies” of their masters. Worse, he explained with rising anger, slave keepers would perpetuate this inequality by leaving these workers as property to “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children for them to Domineer.”

They're Not Historical. They're Avatars of Jim Crow.

Like most people from border states, I have ancestors who fought on both sides in the Civil War. The battles, the families torn apart, the dead: all are part of my family history.  Heritage, if you will.

But those confederate statues of Breckinridge and Morgan in Lexington, and Lee and Stonewall and Beauregard and the rest are not historical representations.  They were not raised in the aftermath of the war.

They were raised 40 years later, after Plessy v. Ferguson authorized Jim Crow.  They were raised not to honor those Traitors in Defense of Slavery.  They were raised to remind African-Americans that they were still not full citizens.  That they still had no right to the guarantees in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the constitution.  That they remain subjugated.

They are symbols of oppression, meant to intimidate and terrorize African-Americans. 

And to remind the rest of us that the slave power still rules.

Conservatives Chaining Democracy

Yes, conservatives have always hated and feared democracy.  Yes, it all goes back to slavery. Yes, they will do anything to establish autocracy.

You already knew that.  But Nancy MacLain proves it.

Colin Gordon in a terrifying review:

Democracy in Chains is a revelation, as politics and as history.

We know a lot about the rise of the Right in postwar America ....

Democracy in Chains assembles all of these fragments into a much more coherent, and much more frightening, whole.

It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOP’s southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. It demonstrates that the lurch right in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Iowa represents not some existential crisis of a forgotten working class but the triumph of a long push to use statehouses as laboratories for autocracy. It understands the post–Citizens United wave of “dark money” as but the most recent chapter in a long history of corporate stealth and influence.

And it reminds us that, however incompetent the current White House and legislative leadership, they are winning handily.

Happy 225th Birthday, Kentucky - and Shame on 152 Years of Post-War Confederacy

The Bluegrass State is officially the 15th state of the union, but only because Congress wanted to balance slave states with non-slave states, so it gave the 14th spot to Vermont.

Like fellow border slave states Maryland, Missouri and Delaware, Kentucky never joined the Confederacy or voted to secede.  Unlike the other border states, Kentucky responded to being forced to give up its slaves by becoming the only state to join the Confederacy AFTER the Civil War ended.

Treason in Defense of Slavery is so popular in Kentucky still that you can meet many people - even educated ones - who will insist that Kentucky did, indeed, secede from the Union.

Note that Governor "Trump Is Great for Kentucky" never mentions any of that currently relevant history in this press release.

The Kentucky Department of Tourism, among others throughout the state, will celebrate Kentucky’s 225th anniversary of statehood on June 1. Additional events will honor the Commonwealth during the course of the year.
 

The Bluegrass State was admitted to the Union 225 years ago in June of 1792 and became the fifteenth state in the United States of America. Through the years, the innovation, creativity and steadfastness of generations of Kentuckians have developed our Commonwealth into the vibrant and prosperous place to live that it is today.

“Kentuckians take great pride in our state and we want to encourage them to celebrate not only on June 1, but throughout 2017,” Tourism Commissioner Kristen Branscum said. “We invite you to join us in a year-long celebration of our history, natural beauty and rich traditions that make us proud to call this state home.”

Earlier this year the Kentucky Department of Tourism launched ky225.com, a website dedicated to the celebration of Kentucky’s 225 years of statehood in 2017 and includes an interactive map of bucket list ideas to experience across the state, as well as list of events.

Visit ky225.com for a full listing of events. June 1 events include:

·         June 1, 10 AM - 3 PM, Constitution Square Historic Site 105 East Walnut St Danville, KY
A historic day of commemoration and celebration in the birthplace of the Commonwealth. For more information contact: 859-236-7794 info@betterindanville.com

·         June 1, 10 AM – 5 PM. Kentucky Statehood Day, Kentucky Historical Society at Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History
Opening of new exhibit, “People of Kentucky”, Ribbon Cutting at Noon, Admission is Free. Free campus admission June 2-3 to continue the celebration. For more information visit: historyky.gov.

·         June 1, 9 AM - 5 PM, KY 225 Day at Woodford Reserve Distillery
Special $2.25 pricing for History Tours, including a tasting of Rye, various $2.25 items available in the Cafe including Original Carmel corn from Taylor Hollow, Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie from Midway School Bakery, and KY Proud side salad. For more information visit: woodfordreserve.com.

·         June 1, 5 PM to 9 PM, Central Bank Thursday Night Live
A special CBTNL is planned with live music from Charlie Shuck & The Trendells.
Fifth Third Bank Pavilion at Cheapside Park (251 W. Main St)
Local food and beverage vendors, VisitLEX will host a table and provide KY 225 celebration-themed cupcakes and balloons. Visit www.downtownlex.com/central-bank-thursday-night-live.

·         Current – September 23, 2017, 225: Artists Celebrate Kentucky's History, Berea Artisan Center
With a long and rich history behind it, Kentucky offers artists a multitude of historical subjects, ideas, traditions and connections. This exhibit includes 60 works by 51 Kentucky artists that record, capture, embrace and celebrate a facet or subject from Kentucky’s rich 225-year history. For more information visit: http://www.kentuckyartisancenter.ky.gov/learn/exhibits/.

The year-long celebration is an initiative of the Kentucky 225th Anniversary Commission, which includes state agencies, legislators, local partners and volunteers.

Travelers are encouraged to share their Kentucky 225 anniversary adventures by using #Ky225. For more information on travel in Kentucky, visit kentuckytourism.com. For additional information visit kentuckytourism.com.

Take Jeff Davis Statue Out of the KY Capitol Rotunda Now

Motherfucker might have been born in Kentucky, but he made his home in Mississippi.  Contrary to the hallucinations of the Commonwealth's many Defenders of Treason in Defense of Slavery, Kentucky never seceeded from the Union, never committed Treason in Defense of Slavery, never joined the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis has no business looming over people in the Capitol Rotunda as if he were a hero.  He's a traitor, and a motherfucking piece of shit.  Get his statue the fuck out of there and replace it with one of a genuine Kentucky hero:  Muhammad Ali.

Erik Loomis on the removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis in New Orleans last week:

This is genuinely a wonderful thing. Again, these aren’t “monuments to history.” They are expressions of Jim Crow power, placed on the population of New Orleans at a moment where black voting and social rights had been repressed by force. They served, in the minds of the people who erected them, as social lessons to the black population, reminding them who was still in charge. There is no good reason to keep these statues up.

 UPDATE: New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's op-ed:

But New Orleans was also America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of misery and torture. Our history is forever intertwined with that of our great nation — including its most terrible sins. We must always remember our history and learn from it. But that doesn’t mean we must valorize the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal — literally — in our most prominent public places.

The record is clear: New Orleans’s Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were erected with the goal of rewriting history to glorify the Confederacy and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. These monuments stand not as mournful markers of our legacy of slavery and segregation, but in reverence of it. They are an inaccurate recitation of our past, an affront to our present and a poor prescription for our future.

The right course, then, is to excise these symbols of injustice. The Battle of Liberty Place monument was not built to commemorate the fallen law enforcement officers of the racially integrated New Orleans police and state militia. It was meant to honor members of the Crescent City White League, the people who killed them. That kind of “honor” has no place in an American city. So, last month, we took the monument down.

This week, we began the removal of a statue honoring Davis, and soon thereafter Lee and Beauregard. It won’t erase history. But we can begin a new chapter of New Orleans’s history by placing these monuments, and the legacy of oppression they represent, in museums and other spaces where they can be viewed in an appropriate educational setting as examples of our capacity to change.

After we’re done moving these monuments, we’ll face an even greater task: coming together to decide who we are as a city — and as a nation. Over the past few years, before the monument removal effort, we began Welcome Table New Orleans, which facilitates tough conversations about race and brings various communities together on projects in their neighborhoods. As part of our work, residents have discussed and designed reconciliation projects, such as a mural and oral history project on what was once part of a plantation, as monuments to the future, not the past.

Lexington Kentucky was the biggest slave market north of New Orleans. Long past time the snooty denizens of that city (in which I was raised, so I know of what I write) get their snowy white asses down off their thoroughbred high horses and demand the removal of Jeff Davis.

Still Treason in Defense of Slavery

These motherfuckers never quit.  That's why we need to shut them down at every opportunity.

Evan Hurst at Wonkette:

In the wee hours of Monday morning in New Orleans, workers wearing flak jackets and military-style helmets, with balaclavas over their faces to protect their identity, removed the first of four monuments to the Confederacy that the city council voted to get rid of in 2015. The military-grade armor, supplemented by snipers on nearby rooftops, was deemed a necessary precaution for the workers after death threats were made toward contractors. Just to be on the safe side, even the name of the company on the sides of the trucks hauling the monument away was covered up with cardboard, because some people really, really love the losing side in the U.S. Civil War — which, as you know, was only about tariffs and states’ rights.

The big ugly obelisk taken down Monday commemorated the “Battle of Liberty Place,” a failed 1874 coup by white supremacists during Reconstruction, and included this cheery inscription remembering — with lots of heritage but no hate at all — what a terrific time for white supremacy that was:

SNIP

Plenty of people in New Orleans are perfectly happy to see the Confederate monuments go; for a nice thinky-piece on the real historical significance of taking down these tributes to white supremacy, see this Times-Picayune op-ed arguing that the monuments themselves were a despicable revision of history in pretending the Civil War was a noble fight for freedom and self-determination — for a bunch of slaveholders. Says columnist Jarvis DeBerry,

Apparently, the crime of rewriting history is far worse than the crime of being a warmongering, secessionist white supremacist. The crime of rewriting history, to hear the monument-huggers tell it, is offensive in a way that slaveholding is not and treason is not and the decision to elevate and honor slave-holding traitors is not.

But the real revisionism, he says, was embodied by the monuments themselves, erected after Reconstruction to help advance the lie of the Noble Lost Cause, depicting the integrated city government as “usurpers” and lionizing the brave racist insurrectionists who tried to murder as many as possible.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

I know people will say, and not just neo-Confederates, that these are history and shouldn’t be torn down. But let’s be clear. New Orleans is a black city and was a black city in the 1890s. These monuments, among them some of the most imposing Confederate monuments erected, were placed there an overt symbol of post-Reconstruction white power. They were intended to intimidate African-Americans into submission. They are an insult to every African-American in New Orleans. We need to remember history, but we are not obligated to leave the public monuments of our racist ancestors there because of some vague appreciation of the past. These things are living, breathing symbols of white supremacy and they need to go. That this is happening in 2017 is all the more important.

Blantantly stolen from Juanita Jean:

The New War on Drugs is the Old Terror: Legal Lynching

Jeff Sessions doesn't give a flying fuck how many drugs people do; all he cares about is how the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some Classes of) Drugs (tm LGM) gives him an excuse to throw millions of ni**ers in prison for life. Or just mow them down in the streets. The latter saves money, while the former puts money in the pockets of his private prison corporate friends.

The world he intends to re-create is the one depicted in the movie Rosewood: successful blacks lynched and burned out by drunk, stupid, violent whites.

Charlie Pierce:

It is now conventional wisdom that one of the worst mistakes the country ever made was launching its idiotic, wasteful "war"on drugs. In the three decades in which this "war" has been waged, we have lost two generations of African-Americans to the prison system, shaved the Bill of Rights down to a nub, tied the hands of the judiciary, and, finally, made not an appreciable dent in the problem of drug use and drug addiction. We have blessed ourselves with private prisons and militarized police forces, so there is that.

Prior to the ascension of President* Trump, there was a strong, evolving, and bipartisan consensus that it was time to call a truce on the "war" we were making on our own citizens. The country was getting sensible about marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences at the same time; conservatives abandoned simplistic law 'n order coding and hopped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform; in many cases, they took the wheel on it. And, at least rhetorically, the response to the opioid crisis was more reasoned and measured than the response to the crisis of crack cocaine was—and the reasons for that are worth exploring. But nobody wants to, least of all JeffBo. Over the weekend, we learned that this brief, fragile truce had ended.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I’d like to remind you of that day when Trump’s OMB Director Mike Mulvaney told us that the reason this administration’s budget cut funding to programs like Meals on Wheels and after-school initiatives for kids was because they could no longer defend spending tax dollars on programs that don’t work.

Let’s put aside the fact that feeding seniors and children is a self-defined success: hungry people are no longer hungry. It’s really that simple.

My reaction to Mulvaney was that if we’re going to defund programs that don’t work, then the best place to start is by ending the so-called “war on drugs.”

But of course if your goal is to kill and imprison as many ni**ers as possible, then the failed War on Drugs is a brilliant success.

Apparently AG Sessions and his top lieutenant Steven Cook think that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the drug problem, even though both science and recent history tell us that is nonsense. It is worth asking why this administration would cling to one failed federal initiative while proposing to eliminate so many others. Ava DuVernay answered that question with a documentary titled simply: “13th.”

Whether it is Sessions’ move to pull away from police reform, his history of opposition to voting rights, or his plans to ramp up the war on drugs, there is one key element that binds his approach on all of these issues: racism. While we’re in the business of breaking taboos, let’s get rid of the one that keeps us from naming exactly what’s going on here.

What's going on here is what's been going on in this country for 400 years. Vicious, cowardly whites terrified of having to compete on a level field enslaving and killing with impunity.