Even In His Dying Days, John Lewis's Words Are Among The Self-Evident Truths That We Have Held Dear

In a fitting final gesture of goodwill and hope, US Representative John Lewis (D-GA) submitted this essay to the editor of the NY Fishwrap's Opinion page to be published posthumously on the day of his funeral in Atlanta. Glance at the Tag Cloud (below) that is a visual summary of the content of a past. There is not a capitalized word or name anywhere. It is a demonstration of John Lewis's humility: all of the words are equal in importance. That said, John Lewis was present in many — most — of the important events in our racial history since his participation in the Nashville Sit-In Movement of 1960 to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. If this is a (fair & balanced) inspired contribution to our patriotic literature, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x NY Fishwrap]
Together, You Can Redeem The Soul Of Our Nation
By John Lewis



TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

answer away best brothers build burdens called century challenges change compassion complicit constrained country cousins days democratic feel freedom generation heart help hope human laid life love nation nonviolence peace people power prison redeem searching sisters society something soul speak stand story struggle trouble truth turn violence vote world years

created at TagCrowd.com

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21^st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide. ###

[John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman (D-GA) who died on July 17, 2020, wrote this essay shortly before his death. He served in Congress for 33 years (1987-2020) and before that was the chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1962-1966. Lewis received many honorary degrees from 50+ colleges and universities and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011). He received a BA (religion and philosophy) from both the the American Baptist Theological Seminary (TN) and Fisk University (TN).]

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Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, The Notorious BIG, There Is Only One Person Worthy Of The Sobriquet "The Notorious" & That Is "The Notorious RBG" (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)

One of the best minds on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is possessed by an octogenarian grandmother, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On top of that, RBG's daily, hour-long physical regimen of cardio and strength training is something The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin; King would never attempt despite being a decade younger. Compared to RBG, The *ILk is both a village idiot and a 90-pound weakling. If this is a (fair & balanced) account of a woman warrior in a judicial robe, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x NY Fishwrap]
Stay Safe, Justice Ginsburg
By Mimi Swartz


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

American anyone approaching coffee coronavirus cups daily degrees determination done door far father feels fight fragility gets Ginsburg grandmother health hell important inability incontestable Justice law life Live losing McKinnon means mental Mimi months mother people possible president raging range real replacement report safe Stay summer swivet systemTrump women

created at TagCrowd.com

The only word to describe life here right now is this: hell.

The pandemic is raging, the economy is shuddering and the energy city’s lifeblood, oil, while rebounding from a terrifying negative $37 a barrel in April, is still in the not-pretty $40 range. The state leadership is, at best, useless. Temperatures are averaging around 90 degrees with the “feels like” button on my weather app hitting 99 plus, due mostly to our Kolkata-rivaling humidity.

The prime months for hurricanes, August and September, are fast approaching. All the people who could leave town have done so, with flying tree roaches and mosquitoes taking their place.

It was in this atmosphere that I got the news last week that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s liver cancer had returned. It seemed like the rotten cherry on top of the bad-news sundae that has come to define life in America in the summer of 2020.

There’s an obvious explanation for this: If illness forces Justice Ginsburg to step down in the next few months and President Trump gets to pick a replacement, it would strengthen the conservative wing of the Supreme Court for as far as the eye can see, despite some recent rulings that might suggest otherwise. (Yes, President Trump could also have that option and more after his possible re-election, but some things are just too painful to contemplate this summer.)

I do not know Justice Ginsburg personally, nor do I own any of the products she has not endorsed but that her most ardent fans seem unable to resist — the coffee cups, T-shirts, socks and now coronavirus masks with her image. Nor am I one of those people who get into a swivet about whether she should have retired back when Barack Obama could have installed a suitable replacement without Mitch McConnell’s dastardly interference. What’s done is done.

Still, as the mental health professionals like to say, there’s a message and a meta-message in my reaction to Justice Ginsburg’s health report.

In real life, she is an 87-year-old woman with a deadly disease and a host of other ailments. A mother and grandmother, a widow with a long and happy marriage behind her.

Thanks mainly to her career-long fight for the rights of women, she has achieved icon status, which means that her fragility has become our fragility. Anyone of a certain age — anyone who feels mortality knocking on the door — would respond with a shiver to her latest medical report.

But more important, our whole vision of ourselves as Americans feels threatened right now. We are learning just how fragile it is, from our inability to combat systemic racism to our helplessness and embarrassment over the clear triumph, so far, of the Coronavirus. The very real possibility exists that the American experiment, and with it our own lives, could break into a million pieces.

Of course, one of the few people standing between us and chaos is Justice Ginsburg, the anti-Trump, the benevolent if steely matriarch to his raging father. “Never in anger,” is one of the lessons she took to heart from her own mother. She got where she is by being studious and strategic, with a bracing, incontestable honesty.

Without complaint, she raised her children, and nursed a sick husband while getting through law school — Harvard, no less, where she became only the fourth female member of the law review. No wonder so many women law students — and so many others — buy those coffee cups as talismans.

This in contrast to a president who is living proof of failing upward, with so many hefty lifts from his wealthy father, with a value system that is invested in only one thing: perpetuating his own myth of success. Her frailty is on the outside; Mr. Trump’s is all internal.

The only quality Justice Ginsburg shares with the president is relentlessness. Her daily workouts, so perfectly satirized by Kate McKinnon on “Saturday Night Live,” are examples of an almost literal determination to fight to the death. You can bet Justice Ginsburg has rarely, if ever, feasted on a taco bowl.

She is, in short, the embodiment of all that we believe is good about the country, of all that has been worth fighting for. The thought of losing that fight is as tragic as, well, losing a beloved grandmother, the one who holds the family together.

Stay safe, Justice Ginsburg. Help me get through the summer. ###

[Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, also is a NYT contributing Op-Ed writer. She is the author of Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart (2018). See her other books here. Swartz received a BA (English) from Hampshire College (MA).]

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Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Today, The NY Fishwrap's Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Bites Male Chauvinists (Ted YoYo Yoho, The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King, and Don Jr.) & Hisses Her Appreciation Of AOC (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY)

Today's essay is a classic demonstration of The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)'s Elegant Snark to demonstrate how out of touch are The *ILK and his followers. The *ILK and his crowd are throwbacks to the age when people lived in caves and The Cobra makes sport of them. If this is a (fair & balanced) example of poison-pen political commentary, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x NY Fishwrap]
AOC And The Jurassic Jerks
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

added America bad behavior bitch boss camera Capitol Cheney Clinton Congress daughter feels House housewives issue Liz Longwell mad man master moms person point positive Post president protect remarks Republicans sentence shine someone something step strange talking think Trump TV tweet typing vote woman women work wrote years Yoho youngest

created at TagCrowd.com

President Trump is oh so proud of having mastered the ability to intone, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

But the more pressing issue is whether he is a person who can master talking to women through a TV camera without sounding like a cave man.

We continually debate whether Trump is a madman, but there’s no doubt he’s a Mad Man. He’s a ring-a-ding-ding guy, stuck in a time warp redolent of Vegas with the Rat Pack in 1959, talking about how “broads” and “skirts” rate. He was in his element bro-ing out with Dave Portnoy in an interview for “Barstool Sports” that aired Friday.

Trump’s idea of wooing the women’s vote, which is decisive in this election, was to tweet out a New York Post story headlined “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs” with the directive: “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article.”

Clearly, the 74-year-old president thinks that American women are in the kitchen, clutching their pearls à la June Cleaver, sheltered in the ’burbs in their gingham aprons, waiting for their big, brave breadwinners to come home after a hard day’s work manhandling their secretaries.

Trump believes that the coveted electoral cohort that used to be known as soccer moms are actually sucker moms, naïve enough to fall for his schtick that the unleashed forces of urban America are marching toward their manicured lawns.

How perfect that the pussy-grabbing president — whose personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, got in trouble over his boss’s porn-star payout — wants to protect the desperate housewives of America.

In a speech on drug prices on Friday, Trump took his strange brand of feminism for a spin, pausing while he talked about middlemen profiting in the Big Pharma arena, to say “and women, I guess.”

On the Bulwark, a conservative website, Sarah Longwell wrote about her three-years-worth of focus groups with women who voted for Trump in 2016.

She found that they chose Trump over Hillary Clinton because they did not like Clinton and because they felt that Bill Clinton’s bad behavior with women canceled out Trump’s bad behavior with women.

But the relationship with women voters has soured, not only because of his pugnacity and bullying, but because of his lack of compassion and competence dealing with the Coronavirus and painful issues about race.

“They don’t see Trump as someone who can protect them from the chaos,’’ Longwell wrote. “They think he’s the source of it.”

And his party is on board with the antediluvian vibe. R-Misogyny. Even on the 100^th anniversary of women getting the vote, Republicans can’t help themselves.

It feels strange to be typing something positive in a sentence with the word Cheney in it, but it was disturbing to see a bunch of MAGA bros in Congress beat up on Liz Cheney because, among other offenses to the cult of Trump, she defended Dr. Anthony Fauci and shaded Trump on his denial on the virus by tweeting a picture of her father in a mask with the hashtag, “realmenwearmasks.”

One Trump disciple in the House, Representative Matt Gaetz [R-FL], tweeted that “Liz Cheney has worked behind the scenes (and now in public) against @realDonald Trump and his agenda.” He added, “Liz Cheney should step down or be removed.”

Donald Jr. chimed in on Twitter, “We already have one Mitt Romney, we don’t need another.”

(Of course, while it feels strange to be typing something positive in a sentence with the word Trump in it, Don Jr. was right in his second point, “We also don’t need the endless wars she advocates for.” That point was echoed by the president on Twitter. I would never agree with a Cheney’s mindless hawkishness.)

As Republicans sniped, one Democrat soared.

Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, tried to slap down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A reporter overheard him muttering that the congresswoman was “a fucking bitch” as Yoho walked away after having an argument with her about crime and policing on the steps of the Capitol. (Yoho denies he said it.)

The youngest woman to ever serve in Congress is so full of natural political talent, burning so bright, that the 2020 field seems dull next to her luster. It was a remarkable moment on Capitol Hill, where for years super-achieving women have let such sexist remarks slide.

She went to the House floor Thursday and schooled Yoho the Yahoo and the retrograde crowd.

“Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters,” she said. “I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter, too.” She added, “I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter, and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

Showing her skill in a generational dimension foreign to Congress until now, AOC posted a video of herself on Instagram Stories strutting to the rap tune “Boss Bitch” by Doja Cat, her long hair whipping to the music, with the Capitol in the background. “I’m a bitch and a boss, Im’a shine like gloss.” She captioned it: “Shine on, fight for others, and let the haters stay mad.”

And that’s the way you make Paleolithic men understand that they are history. ###

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University of America (DC).]

Copyright © 2020 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, Phil Collins — Today, Professor Nell Irvin Painter Takes On The Orthographic Dilemma Of The 21st Century's "True Colors"

Today's essay by a renowned scholar in African American history, Nell Irvin Painter, grapples with validity of capitalizing the color words for Caucasians (White v. white), African Americans (Black v. black) and muses briefly about Asian Americans (Yellow v. yellow?), Hispanic/Latino Americans (Brown v. brown?), and Native Americans (Red v. red?). Unfortunately, there is no clear path through the difficult terrain of racial color designations. In fact, this blogger grappled with the capitalization and color designation of African Americans in the early 1970s when the times were a-changin'. The first history dissertation accepted by Texas Technique University was entitled, "The Negro In Texas, 1876-1900" and that was followed by another dissertation in African American history — "Black Texans: A History, 1900-1930." As the writer of the third dissertation in African American history in Texas, this blogger attempted to avoid controversy with the opening paragraph of "A Survey Of The History Of The Black People Of Texas, 1930-1954." These three dissertations were the beginning of what two writers termed, "The Texas Tech School Of Black History" in The West Texas Historical Association Yearbook (2006), pp. 102-119. It would seem that the issue of color words and capitalization of those words has not come clear over the past 50 years. If this is a (fair & balanced) consideration of the American Dilemma, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Why "White" Should Be Capitalized, Too
By Nell Irvin Painter


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

absence American apply Associated black brown capital category change compare considered culture different Ewing group historically identity ideology individual intellectual journalists letters linked Lives lowercase matter National nationalists others people power race racial recently reservation simply situate something State summed terms thinking Times took University unraced visible white years York

created at TagCrowd.com

Let’s talk about that lowercase “white.”

Restructuring policing in ways that matter will take years, and many more Confederate monuments remain standing than have come down. But in these past few earth-shaking months, one change has advanced with startling speed: All this social upheaval has suddenly and widely restored a capital B to the word “Black.”

I say “restored,” because that capital B appeared in the 1970s. I used it myself. Then editors, uncomfortable with both the odd combination of uppercase “Black” and lowercase “white,” and the unfamiliar, bumpy “Black and White,” took off both capital letters. “Black” returned to “black.”

In the wake of massive George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, however, media outlets and journalist associations are re-embracing the capital B. The Associated Press, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and many others took the step. (The Post has said it is considering the change.) Even Fox News joined the crowd. The most common motive can be summed up as respect. To many, the case for capitalizing “Black” seemed obvious, whether as an ethnicity or a racial designation.

But what about “white”?

I had been inclined toward the new formula: capital B for “Black”; lowercase w for “white” and lowercase b for “brown” (another important question to resolve) — but with serious reservations.

My initial thinking: When I compare the cultural, intellectual and historical heft of the three categories, “Black” comes out well ahead of “white” and “brown.” We have whole libraries of books and articles about “Blackness,” world-beating traditions of music and literature, even entire academic departments 30 to 50 years old specializing in African American/black studies. Compared with blackness, whiteness and brownness are severely under-theorized.

But, in a June statement, the National Association of Black Journalists articulated a different view, stating, “NABJ also recommends that whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalized, including White and Brown.” Such a recommendation from the leading organization representing black journalists should give anyone pause.

A second reservation arose as I considered the asymmetry of racial identities of blackness and whiteness — and how they function differently in American history and culture.

These two identities don’t simply mirror each other — one works through a pronounced group identity; the other more often is lived as unraced individuality. However much you might see yourself as an individual, if you’re black, you also have to contend with other people’s views. W.E.B. Du Bois summed this up as “twoness,” as seeing yourself as yourself but also knowing that other people see you as a black person. You don’t have to be a black nationalist to see yourself as black.

In contrast, until quite recently white Americans rarely saw themselves as raced — as white. Most of them, anyway. The people who have embraced “white” as a racial identity have been white nationalists, Ku Klux Klansmen and their ilk. Thanks to President Trump, white nationalists are more visible than ever in our public spaces.

But that group does not determine how most white people see themselves. Instead, in terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized “White” challenges that freedom, by unmasking “Whiteness” as an American racial identity as historically important as “Blackness” — which it certainly is.

No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. Being racialized makes white people squirm, so let’s racialize them with that capital W.

Others have come to similar conclusions. In June, Kwame Anthony Appiah of New York University said capitalizing “White” along with “Black” would situate “White” within historically created racial identities that have linked the two terms over a very long run. For intellectual clarity, what applies to one should apply to the other.

More emphatically, Eve L. Ewing, a poet and sociologist of education at the University of Chicago, recently started capitalizing “White” to emphasize the presence of whiteness as a racial identity: “Whiteness, she says, is not only an absence.” She compares the fates of the McCloskeys, a white couple who pointed loaded firearms at protesters in St. Louis, with that of young Tamir Rice, who lost his life simply for playing with a toy gun in Cleveland. The capital W stresses “White” as a powerful racial category whose privileges should be embedded in its definition.

Ewing may have been thinking of James Baldwin, who said at Wayne State University in 1980, “white is a metaphor for power.” The capital letter can underscore the existence of an unjust racial power imbalance.

Capital-W “Whiteness” is less saliently linked to white nationalism than to racial neutrality or absence. We should capitalize “White” to situate “Whiteness” within the American ideology of race, within which “Black,” but not “White,” has been hypervisible as a group identity. Capitalizing all our races — “Black,” “Brown” and “White” — simply makes this ideology visible for all.

One way of remaking race is through spelling — using or not using capital letters. A more potent way, of course, is through behavior. ###

[Nell Irvin Painter is a US historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and as president of the Southern Historical Association. Painter began her career at the University of Pennsylvania and moved on to history professorships at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and, finally, at Princeton University (NJ) as the Edwards Professor of American History until her retirement in 2005. She has written several books and that bibliography includes a New York Times best-seller, The History of White People (2010). See Painter's books here. She received a BA (anthropology) from the University of California at Berkeley and both an MA and PhD (history) from Harvard University (MA),]

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Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Final Word In The Last Panel Of Today's 'Toon Has VP Ha'Pence Ironically Saying To The *ILK: "How Do You Do It, Sir?" Indeed....

In yesterday's email, along with today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:

Hey All,

Another light-hearted, wacky look at our increasing descent into outright fascism. This one started as just a dialogue between a non-Hulked Trump and Chad Wolf, “Acting” Director of DHS, but as I worked on it, I felt like it read as a transcription of a conversation that could have actually happened. Such are the problems of satirists in the current era.

This job has always required a certain flexibility — in “normal” times, there could always be a late-breaking story at the end of the week that seemed important enough to throw out the week’s work and start over on Friday night. The cartoon first goes live on Monday mornings on Daily Kos, and then rolls out throughout the week with The Nib, The Nation, and various print clients. So my drop-dead deadline is Sunday evening, but I used to try not to work through the weekend. And in pre-pandemic times, my son would visit every other weekend, meaning I had to pretty much have things wrapped up by Friday night. These days, what are rules? what is time, even?

Mondays and Tuesdays are generally slow days — I start absorbing the news, via Twitter and the cable networks mostly, but also take care of the ancillary chores of running a one-man business — accounting, invoices, all the tedious-but-necessary stuff. By Wednesday, in an ideal world, I am writing the next brilliant cartoon, but more realistically, I am surrounded by a pile of notes with no idea what to do with them. Most weeks, Thursday is when the writing comes together, though this week it didn’t happen until Friday. If possible, I like to sleep it once I get something written, so I can read it with fresh eyes the next morning. Then I start working on the art, and with any luck I have everything finished up by Friday night or Saturday morning. Then I post the cartoon in the half-dozen or so different formats my various clients require, and then I have a day, day and a half off, to clean my apartment and buy groceries and take care of other chores. One of those chores has been sorting through old boxes of newspaper clips — printed copies of my cartoon from my alt-weekly days, and various articles and interviews with me. Over the course of a long career I have accumulated a *lot* of this stuff, and I’ve been slowly shipping it all off to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library in Columbus, which has done me the extraordinary favor of housing my “archives,” such as they are. I started this process about five years ago, after finishing up work on the big 25 year compilation, because I wasn’t sure what else I was going to do with them — leave them in my attic forever (when I imagined I would be living in that house longer than turned out to be the case). Right now I have a storage space in Connecticut with the “final mile” of boxes and things that I need to somehow sort out — I’m also a toy collector, and when I had a giant studio in the suburbs, oh boy did I accumulate things. One positive side-effect of the whole divorce thing has been winnowing this stuff down to a merely insane level of possessions, rather than an absolute batshit crazy level. It’s… a process.

I also try to fit in a neighborhood walk most days (or, in theory a bike ride, though I’m still working on making that part of my daily routine), and in the pre-pandemic world I tried to have a social life in the evening. But the struggle of being funny in an oppressively not-funny era is what takes up most of my time, if you were wondering how doing a single cartoon a week could possibly be a full time job. Staring at the computer in horror for hours on end doesn’t necessarily look like work, but it really is.

On a more frivolous note, I’ve also been playing Animal Crossingl lately. I admitted this to someone interviewing me the other day who replied jokingly, “what are you, a millennial?” If anyone else has been wasting time seriously let me know, maybe I’ll throw my island open for a Sparky’s List visit sometime. My house is as whimsical as you might expect.

Until next time!

Dan/Tom

And there you have it from a week where the most popular catchphrase is "Person, woman, man, camera, TV." This has become the mantra of The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King. This sorry excuse for an occupant of the Oval Office belongs in the Guinness World Records book as the only person identified (in this blog) as a One-Man Super-Spreader Of COVID-19. Thanks to the inaction by this fool — in November-December 2019 and all of 2020 thus far — COVID-19 is a world-wide pandemic. The rationale for his inaction was to protect his hopes of gaining a second term in the White House. The irony of this nonsense is that the last year of the fool's first term has been a monumental trainwreck and the likelihood of a one-term presidency IS NO HOAX. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of our DISMAL, DREARY DAYS IN 2020, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x TMW]
The Unbelievable Trump
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Sarah Cooper Might Write This Header For Dana Milbank's Opinion Essay — "How To Ballot Absentee/By Mail"

The DC Fishwrap's Dana Milbank offers a homiletic lesson in the country's civil religion that holds voting to be a religious act. The essay is filled with voter information and links to sites that support casting a ballot in US elections. In fact, this blogger tested one of the links and received an almost simultaneous text message containing voter information on his iPhone. Welcome to 21^st century civic activism. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of belief in our democracy, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Stop Fretting About Trump And Do Something About It — Right Now!
By Dana Milbank


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

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created at TagCrowd.com

Do this now.

Take a pause from President Trump’s latest outrage (sending federal police to foment violence in US cities in hopes that it will help his flagging campaign) or inanity (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) — and do the only thing guaranteed to end the nightmare.

Go to Vote.org, or, if you are reading this in the dead-tree edition, type vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote into your browser, spend 30 seconds entering your name, address and date of birth, and you’ll find out instantly if your voter registration is current. If not, follow the instructions to register.

Next, click this link or type vote.org/absentee-ballot into your browser, and sign yourself up to receive an absentee ballot for the November election. That takes about two minutes.

Finally, make sure your friends and family do the same. If they’re technology-challenged, help them through it or give them the phone numbers for their states’ elections offices, available here at the US Election Assistance Commission, eac.gov/voters/election-day-contact-information.

Heck, do it even if you support Trump. Fine by me. If turnout is higher than in 2016 — if Americans truly have their say in November — then Trump doesn’t stand a chance. As he said himself this year, if you have higher “levels of voting … you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

One hundred days from Sunday, the election will decide whether the madness subsides or accelerates. Lawmakers so far haven’t provided states with the funds needed to prepare for the expected onslaught of mail-in ballots because of the pandemic; New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice estimates $2 billion to $4 billion would be needed to avoid a massive electoral crisis. And Trump, who is counting on chaos so that he can dispute unfavorable results, has publicly cast doubt on the security of mail-in ballots at least 50 times this year, The Post calculates. (He draws an essentially meaningless distinction between “mail-in” and “absentee” ballots.).

There’s no evidence of the potential for widespread fraud he alleges. But the best remedy is to reject Trump so thoroughly in the balloting that his refusal to commit to honor the outcome will simply look silly. “I have to see,” he said last week when asked about accepting the results, as if honoring the will of the people in a democracy is strictly optional.

Underfunded state election offices mean we can expect serious backlogs with the distributing and tallying of mail-in ballots. This is why now is the time to request ballots, before the systems are overwhelmed. The Post’s Kate Rabinowitz and Brittany Renee Mayes this past week calculated that 76 percent of American voters can cast ballots by mail in the fall.

Only nine states, an electoral Hall of Shame, make you choose between your health and your right to vote, because they don’t count the pandemic as a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. The nine: Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas [Ugh!], and West Virginia.

Conversely, if you’re lucky enough to live in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Utah, California, Vermont or the District of Columbia, all you have to do is make sure you’re registered and your address is correct and you’ll automatically receive a ballot in the mail.

If you live in one of the other 34 states, request your ballot at Vote.org. Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio say they will automatically send absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters. But in the rest — including battlegrounds Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — it’s all up to you to take action and request your ballot. (Some states let you bring the completed absentee ballot to a polling place or collection spot instead of mailing.)

Vote.org’s chief executive, Andrea Hailey, tells me that for those in the 13 states requiring a “wet” (non-digital) signature to get an absentee ballot (Ohio and Georgia among them), the nonpartisan, nonprofit group will send stamped envelopes. Those who prefer not to use Vote.org can of course go directly to their states’ election offices; other groups doing good work in this area include Rock the Vote, HeadCount, TurboVote, and the Voter Participation Center.

Several Republican-controlled states have imposed voter-suppression measures — purges of voting rolls, voter identification laws, closing polling places, restricting voting hours and limiting early voting — and those assaults on voting rights will disenfranchise many. Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots, without which people would be forced to risk their health in long voting lines, could discourage many more.

But sufficiently massive turnout will overwhelm all voter suppression schemes — and the results will leave no doubt for Trump to exploit. The first registration and absentee-ballot deadlines are in about 60 days. Check your registration and get your absentee ballot — now. ###

[Dana Milbank is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist at The Washington Post. He also provides political commentary for various TV outlets, and he is the author of three books on politics, including the national bestseller Homo Politicus (2007). Milbank joined The Post in 2000 as a Style political writer, then covered the presidency of George W. Bush as a White House correspondent before starting the column in 2005. Before joining The Post, Milbank spent two years as a senior editor at The New Republic, where he covered the Clinton White House, and eight years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, where he covered Congress and was a London-based correspondent. He received a BA cum laude (political science) from Yale University (CT).]

Copyright © 2020 The Washington Post




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Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, Vaughn Meader — Your Voice Impressions Mocked JFK Until November 22.1963 & Today, Comedienne Sarah Cooper Doesn't Imitate The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King's Voice, She Lip-Syncs Audio Of The *ILK's Blather With Devastating Facial Expressions & Body Language In YouTube Videos ("How To... Whatever")

In a stroke of comic genius, Sarah Cooper , went beyond impersonations of *ILK's voice and broke new ground in presidential comedy with short videos on YouTube with titles that followed the site's popular video tutorials: "How To Eat Boiled Shrimp" or "How To Use Swifter" became "How To Bunker" or "How To Water" (see below). Lip-syncing The *ILK's voice from the audio of his various reality TV Shows from the White House with devastating facial expressions and body language. Cooper's "How To" videos t are made in her own apartment. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of the power of comedy in our political discourse, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x VF]
How Sarah Cooper Trumped Donald Trump — Without Saying A Word
By Yohana Desta


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

agreement American bad Berry blazer boat boredom Brooklyn bunker comfortable Cooper disdain Donald evil fans feel going grief hours implication inspired Jimmy life lip lip-synch looking Making Memorial navy office parody people possibly president remarks Sarah saying shower sociopath sound stand-up swore talk think TikTok Trump tweets Twitter water
wigs

created at TagCrowd.com

"My husband has to hear Donald Trump’s voice over and over again,” says Sarah Cooper. “I think he’s probably going to jump out the window at some point.”

The writer-comedian occupies an unusual place in our culture: Many of her most ardent fans have never heard her talk. This spring, Cooper started going viral on TikTok and Twitter for her virtuoso Trump lip syncs, satirizing his tackiest and most ludicrous sound bites, such as when he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln or swore he never hid in a bunker. Her acting is as slyly inspired as her lip-synching. In “How to Bunker,” her Trump defends his honor while cowering in the shower and clutching at the curtain.

“I like the idea that I’m inspiring the next generation to make fun of our president,” says Cooper. She’s sitting in a WeWork, in Brooklyn, talking over Zoom and radiating the vibe of an adjunct professor: witty, smart, a dab neurotic. Cooper is wearing the navy blazer from her videos, eschewing orange makeup and tawny wigs in favor of much simpler Trumpian drag. In a few hours she’ll appear on "The Tonight Show," where a clap-happy Jimmy Fallon will disintegrate with laughter as Cooper debuts “How to Water,” based on a 2019 interview in which Trump rambled about water conservation: “We’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms….”

Prior to TikTok ubiquity, Cooper, who’s Jamaican American, was a little-known stand-up and a Google employee regarded around the office as a consensus builder. “I would just repeat what other people said and come to an agreement,” she says. “I didn’t want to rock the boat.” Scroll back far enough into her tweets, and you’ll see she also used to be a prolific reply guy, furiously responding to dozens of Trump’s tweets. (The president blocked her in 2017 for calling him “unfit for office.”) Like many of us, quarantine boredom drove her to TikTok.

“Being a black woman, I could never get away with talking like that in a meeting, let alone as president of the United States,” Cooper says of Trump’s Coronavirus press briefings, which inspired her parodies. Making the videos—a process that can take up to four hours, between memorization and filming—has also given her insight into the president’s psyche: “Any time he had to talk about grief, or loss of life, he stumbled. He’s not comfortable with empathy. He’s not comfortable with grief. He’s not comfortable with anything that makes him feel bad or look bad.”

Though Cooper’s disdain for Trump is clear, MAGA true believers have praised her work: “I really thought I was going to get a ton of hate mail. [But] that hasn’t happened because, on some level, they’re entertaining to his supporters as well. I don’t know how to feel about that.” Cooper suspects that Trump himself has watched. “I think he thinks I like what he’s saying,” she says, half whispering the dark notion. “Maybe! If you’re a sociopath, you don’t get emotional cues.”

Cooper says she would never parody Trump’s cruelest remarks, like his implication that late representative John Dingell was “looking up” at him from hell (“Just evil,” she says, shaking her head), or his most poorly timed failures: “He messed up several words at a Memorial Day speech and people were like, ‘You should do that!’ But no. It’s still a sacred day.”

While amassing 1.5 million Twitter followers, Cooper has signed with talent agency WME and drawn fans like Halle Berry, Jerry Seinfeld, and news legend Dan Rather—who attributes her appeal, in part, to Trump fatigue. “You feel like you need to know what he’s saying and doing, [but] you’re sick of what he’s saying,” says Rather. “What she brings is something totally new and fresh. And it’s short.”

With a never-ending stream of terrible Trump quotes, Cooper could lip-synch for years to come. But instead, she’s hoping to branch out into television. She’s currently writing and pitching a show about an overly confident boss who “fucks up all over the place and still somehow fails up.” Who could possibly have inspired that? ###
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[Yohanna Desta has been the Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair since 2016. She also has written for MSN, USA Today, Mashable, France 24, Yahoo, The News International, RealClearPolitics, Vogue Australia, Vogue India, GQ France, them., and RealClearLife. Desta received a BA (journalism) from American University (DC).]

Copyright © 2020 Vanity Fair/Condé Nast Digital




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves