For many Black folks, the race of a cop is cop.

Tyre Nichols

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year old father, son, and friend. He was beaten by five Black cops. He screamed for his mother as he lay on the ground as they beat him senseless. You can hear him calling for her on the body cam tape, if you can stand to hear it again. I am certain Mr. Nichols was not more a saint than either of my guys, but I cannot imagine either of my guys being beaten to death by cops. 

Know why? They're White. Ziggy and I never had to have the talk with them about walking while white. 

Like most sentient Americans, I have watched the bodycam tapes of the murder of Tyre Nichols with horror and disgust. If the brutalization and subsequent death of Mr. Nichols wasn't already abhorrent beyond rational belief, it was made worse because the five cops were Black. And that got me to wondering. And apparently, I wasn't the only one. 

A number of sources remarked on the relative quiet of Memphis and other cities where protests and marches took place this past weekend, noting that had it been white officers who killed Mr. Nichols, the result would've been significantly different. That, in turn, makes me wonder about the division between generic cop and communities of color. 

In the Washington Post, Nikki Owens, cousin of William Green who was shot by a Black officer while handcuffed and sitting in a squad car in Prince George County, Virginia, observed:

"In America we’re taught that racism is black and white,” said Owens, who now works with the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability. “And we are not taught about institutional or systemic racism, even though we see it everywhere. We are taught that if a Black person kills another Black person, it can’t be racist. It’s ‘Black-on-Black crime.

The important takeaway in that paragraph is the phrase institutional or systemic racism. If you haven't run into the concept, the Wikipedia definition is actually pretty good. 

a form of racism that is embedded in the laws and regulations of a society or an organization. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, education, and political representation

Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton are credited with coining the phrase in their book 

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, but the practice has been around since clans formed villages. In America, where enlightenment supposedly happened in the 60s, systemic racism is alive and well even today. Ask any recent immigrant group; whether the folks are Somali or Hmong, in Minnesota there is more than enough racist behavior to go around. 

In the same Washington Post article, Bakari Sellers says the Tyre Nichols murder reminds him of the Black officer, J. Alexander Keung, who knelt on George Floyd's back. Keung, on his third shift ever, was a green rookie. Sellers says,

“He [Keung] talked about how he thought he could make a difference in policing...And then like three days after his hiring, he’s there watching George Floyd being brutalized and doing nothing about it. 

For many Black folks, the race of a cop is cop.”

And therein lies all the difference in the world. 

Institutional racism is an expanded matter of perception: how the targeted community is perceived (All Blacks are lazy,) how the individual is perceived (he's Jewish; I bet he knows where they keep all their money,) or how intellect is perceived (he's Asian; he thinks he's smarter than us.) It's a blanket excuse for treating others badly and it's a persistently pernicious excuse. Without addressing systemic racism, the problem with policing will never change. To address systemic racism requires that the institutions in questions admit to and come to grips with their institutional contribution to racism as practiced. And lest you forget, antisemitism is just another form of systemic and institutional racism. 

And that repair requires early childhood intervention to root out that standard.

Good luck with that. 

Right now, schools are being attacked, bombarded, maligned and otherwise prohibited from teaching about anything that wasn't the status quo in 1920. If you can't teach about the origins of slavery in these here United States, how are you going to be able to teach about institutional racism? If you cannot teach about humanity and sexuality at an appropriate age (oh, I don't know...middle school?) how are you going to explain civil and equal rights to teenagers? How are you going to teach a gay kid that there is NOTHING wrong with him/her/them? Public schools cannot pick and choose what version of the truth they're gonna permit in the classroom. 

There is no quick or easy cure to be offered. But I am certain of one thing and one thing only: if We, the People, continue to deny the existence of institutional and systemic racism, nothing will ever change. If We, the People, continue to refuse schools the right to teach our children about institutional and systemic racism, We, the People are simply wasting another generation's worth of forward motion. 

Of course, Tyre Nichols, Fernando Castile, George Floyd, William Green, and Tamir Rice will still be dead. The trick will be to prevent this kind of death from happening to others. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

You can't go home again...but if yer feeling punk

and happen to be in the vicinity of Mam's house,

maybe she will make you chicken soup and matzah balls. 

Maybe. 

If you're nice. 

Long, Long Ago, In A Mindset Far, Far Away

U of Mn. May, 1973.
Ziggy is somewhere in there. 

Long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, children rose up against the government to protest a war. Children took to the streets. Okay, we weren't technically children, we were kids; high school and college students mostly, but not all that many were grown-ass adults...although there were a few out there. Whatever. We rose up because we believed that we could change their world. We could make our voices heard, and we were a force for good to be reckoned with. 

Sorta. Kinda. 

Four dead in Ohio made a lot of us realize the world wasn't as simple as we wanted it to be, even if that didn't stop us from taking to the streets, the campus quads, and the administrative buildings. Other forms of protest, often very tiny ones, were embraced; we believed if we stopped paying the federal excise tax on our phone bills we could topple the government. We couldn't, and maybe we were naïve (yeah, we were very naïve) but we were full of the idealism and optimism that came with youth. And the US did ultimately pull outta Vietnam. Maybe they heard us just a little?

In the aftermath of that tumultuous decade, a lot of us believed we had, in many ways, changed the official life of these here United States. After all, the voting age changed from 21 to 18 in 1971, which meant guys being drafted could vote. Roe v. Wade brought reproductive freedom to women when, in 1973, the Supreme Court decided a woman had the Constitutional right to choose to have an abortion. And finally, in 1975, US troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. Kids may not have directly forced those three things to happen, but it was clear our raised voices were being heard. 

Shame it didn't last. 

Recently, the Supreme Court of the United States announced a woman did NOT have the right to self-determination of her own body, that the state does, and she must abide by the laws of any state in which she resides. We, the Women, are deemed incapable of determining how our own bodies should function. Keep in mind, the same mindset that overturned Roe V Wade is now attempting to exclude contraception from Medicaid coverage. Which makes one wonder what the real intent is here. 

They talk a great pro-life game, those GOP'ers, but not really. They refuse to prevent killing people outside the womb by refusing to pass sensible gun legislation. It was bad enough the House of Representatives seated a man who lied about everything on his resume, and still gives him committee assignments, but to assign Marjorie Taylor Greene, denialist and supporter of the insurrection to the House Homeland Security Committee is simply terrifying. Here is a woman who is supposed to represent her constituency in Congress, yet she advocated for the overthrow of the government she is sworn to uphold. What scares me most is that she was re-elected even after she did that. As much as it says about her, what does it say about the mindset of those who sent her back to congress after she rallied for its overthrow?

Don't even get me started on classified documents. Yes, documents were found in Biden's possession. Why they heck he didn't have his houses and offices thoroughly searched immediately after the Feckless Files Debacle...or at least when the first pages were found... is beyond me. Plus, the delay before the midterms was just plain stupid. Someone had to know it would come out that the pages were turned over before election day. He's been around long enough to know he just set himself up for impeachment. As my mother would say, "Dumb, dumb, dumb."

So, here's where I get to say that I may love the United States as my country, but I do not love nor support actions by my government that are childish, potentially damaging to democracy, or just plain stupid. In other words, Congress should neither be a playground nor a sandbox lacking in adult supervision. Where are the adults in the room? Clearly not in the House chamber. Instead of tending to the issues of governance, the entire congress sounds like a bunch of chronic complainers. The GOP, especially, complains about everything yet never offers a potential solution. The only thing they are aiming to do right now with their one-vote-out Speaker, is to tear down and topple our government. How the hell did these people get elected?

Or maybe the real question is how dumb are We, the People, that they were elected?

And speaking of governments, here comes the really tough stuff. 

I cannot support Israel's government under the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu. He, along with his coalition, is damaging the state part of the State of Israel. His apparent desire to alter the judicial system in order to circumvent his own criminal charges is abhorrent. 

The naming of ultra-right wing ministers to determine who is or is not a Jew, who can or cannot make aliyah, or what is taught in secular schools, rends the already delicate fabric of Israeli daily life like a mourner's ribbon. They throw rocks (literally) at Reform Movement and Masorti Jews, they deny women the right to read Torah or pray in a women's minyan at the Wall, and have their own terrorist gangs harassing Arab Israelis. They claim to be defenders of Israel, but it's not the State they are defending. Most ultra-orthodox men do not serve in the army, work outside the study hall, or contribute to the Israeli economy while they accept public assistance in the form of government subsidies. It becomes the job of the rest of Israel's secular population to protect them when they will not lift a finger to protect the state. And if they say the rest of us are less than Jews.....?

Secular Israelis have had enough. More than 100,000 of them poured into the streets of Tel Aviv, (and even more if you count the demonstrations in other cities) last Saturday night to protest this hard right turn of the government. Secular Israelis are correctly concerned that once the far right has tasted what power in the Knesset can do, they will not be satisfied until they wrest greater control from the centrists, turning themselves into a new Taliban. 

For 2000 years we dreamed of ending our exile. The State of Israel was supposed to be a beacon of hope for Jews worldwide, a place where we could be just us, Jews, living in a place where we didn't have to explain ourselves, our customs, our holidays, our calendar, our food. Israel was supposed to be the place where we were welcome and welcomed. The Mosque of Omar might sit on the Temple Mount,  but it's still where our Temple once stood, the place were Jews came to gather, to pray, and yeah, to make sacrifices. But it was our sacred place. We may share the space and some history with others, but that history begins with us. 

I don't want it to end with us.  None of us do. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

If you have family and friends in Israel, give 'em a call.

Ask them to explain what's happening in their world.

Don't offer comments or solutions.

Just listen.

Santos: "I've Lived An Honest Life" - No, I Didn't Make That Up

Even the best laid plans of this mouse often go awry between two Mondays.  Seriously. 

Last week turned into a life-cycle week....two brit milot and one funeral. One little guy was a total champ about the whole thing, the other guy was totally indignant. Both were way too cute babies. One was the son of a woman who decided to have a baby before her body clock expired, the other was the son of two dads. Both ceremonies were joyfully teary, and both boys are welcomed into two very loving and supportive families. Both will have lots of arms to hold them and the parents will get probably more support than they ever imagined possible. 

My dad: holding eternity.

What I see in those babies is continuity for us as Jews. My dad said, when handed baby Senior Son for the first time, "I am holding eternity in my hands." It wasn't until I was renamed Savta (grandma in Hebrew) that I finally understood both sides of that coin. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the visitation before the funeral, an equally life affirming event, was 2 1/2 hours away in Blair, Wisconsin. The lady was the sister of Mrs. Junior Son's aunt, and because am close to Aunty R,  I wanted be there; being in the room with the living seemed to me more important than sitting at home on a Friday night. So, I asked my daughter-in-law to bench licht (light shabbat candles) on my behalf when she lit candles, and off I went with her folks and her other aunt. The turnout in this little hamlet was stunning. The pastor, an old friend from my theater days, made being in the room even more special. I was so glad I went. Seeing the congregation gather to mark this most unexpected passing of a beloved community member was soul-warming, a testament to living one's life in the heart of a very small town. Listening to the conversations around me, visiting with the pastor, and just being there with part of my own extended family was the right thing to do on a Friday night. That kind of gathering reminds me just how full...and precious...life can be.

Meanwhile, back in the larger world...

I had planned on writing more about the post office, but my research is far from done on this. However, good ol' George opened his mouth last week and I simply have to tell you about it. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't. That, and I fell off my chair when I heard what he said because I was laughing so hard. 

On January 12th, FOX 5 in New York posted this story about a Santos interview. Watch it for yourself, but this is from the transcript:

In an interview with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Thursday - Santos made it clear he isn’t going anywhere.

"I’ve lived an honest life," he said. "I’ve never been accused of any bad doing.  All the people calling on me to resign, I beat them by double their margins in their victory because I outworked every one of them."

When asked about the mystery money - more than $700,000 in loans he gave himself for the campaign - Santos stopped short of going into specifics.

"I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from," he said. "It didn’t come from China, Ukraine or Burisma."

We called Santos’ DC office to see when the Douglaston district location would be open. A woman who answered the phone said it’s up and running. We came by on Thursday afternoon, the door is locked and the lights are off.

"I was elected by 142,000 people and until those same 142,000 people tell me they don’t want me - we’ll find out in two years," Santos said.

And two years is the time Santos should have to prove himself according to Queens GOP Committee Chair Tony Nunziato who continues to stand by his candidate.

"He wanted to become a congressman so he embellished what his background was," Nunziato said. "Am I for it, no, but it’s not against the law."

Outside the House on Thursday, Santos told reporters he expects to be on committees and insists he's not doing a political job but he’s serving the American people who elected him.

Really? An honest life? He's never been accused of doing anything "bad?" Am I having some sort of cosmic episode here? An alternate universe kinda thing? 

Oh, wait! I remember it. He was talking to Matt "I-never-pay-for-sex" Goetz on Steve Bannon's podcast. Never mind. Alternate universe confirmed. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

If you ever find yourself in Osseo, Wisconsin on a Friday,

head over to Burly-N-Bucks for the fish fry.

And they have Spotted Cow on tap.

You just cannot go wrong with that.

A Few More Details and Derails

Well, I had great intentions for tonight's episode, but the research caught me off guard and it's not the simple investigation I was planning on. More about that in a moment.

G-d bless PBS NewHour. Tonight they ran an interview with Grant Lally, publisher of the North Shore Leader, the paper that broke the Santos story last September. I loved what Geoff Bennett said: "...after a bombshell report by the New York Times last month, but the Times wasn't the first to report on Santos' fabricated biography..." Nowhere in the original NYT article does it mention that. And that, folks, pissed me off. 

Lally told PBS interviewer Geoff Bennett:

Well, look, he was a prominent personality while he was running for office. And we're pretty attuned to the political activities of folks on the North Shore.

 

So, a lot of people with a newspaper and a lot of people I knew outside the newspaper were following him and tracking him and looking at what his claims were. And what we all concluded was that he was a fraud. He was making things up and lying and boasting and putting people down, claiming he was such a rich man, when he clearly wasn't.

 

And so we all smelled a fake, and we started looking through his campaign finance reports. And we saw a lot there that looked fraudulent, really over-the-top fraudulent.

Watch the interview with Greg Lally. It's quite enlightening. The segment begins at -28.00:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...........

USPS seems to be imploding before our very eyes. I no longer get mail on a daily basis. Even with Informed Delivery, they tell me mail is coming, but it rarely shows up when it's supposed to. I've had three packages showing "out for delivery," but never delivered. One came 10 days after the tracking notice showed it was out for delivery. I actually wrote to my congresswoman, Angie Craig, and was assured I was not only not alone and she was starting a formal complaint process with the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy-less. 

Here's the thing: the PG is actually appointed by the USPS board of governors. He does not serve at the pleasure of the president, although the president often nominates the candidate. DeJoy was nominated by Feckless Loser despite known conflicts of interest with the Postal Service. From the outset, he has done more to damage the USPS than to help it, despite his claims to the contrary. 

A dear friend who works in a rural post office in another state sent me the following:

I had hoped to talk to my friend SXXXXX, who's been a letter carrier for 37 years, as to what he sees as different. I know there's been new--expensive--sorting machinery, which, like most of DeJoyless's ideas, didn't work. 

The consensus is that the man is trying to destroy the USPS, and it's working. I read the "customer satisfaction" surveys every day.  Customers are swearing off the USPS in droves. 

Since it is an absolute nightmare of a place to work, we can't hire enough people. Particularly difficult roles to fill are the delivery people, whose work week is 7 days. I know he's hired many new people--who have no more idea how a post office works than how to make mayonnaise.

I've heard tales from the front lines who report sorting machines that worked were pulled and not replaced, leaving the ones that were there flooded beyond capacity. On the few days I actually do get mail, much of it isn't mine or my neighbors...it's for different buildings on my block. I don't know what anyone else does, but I drive around and deliver the mail. That's what I hope someone would do with my mail. 

So I started researching DeJoy, USPS, and some of the peripheral issues. It wasn't a can of worms...it was a veritable snake pit.  Here's the thing: USPS is an important agency and one that is mentioned in the Constitution under Section 8: The Powers of Congress. It includes the following statement:

To establish Post Offices and post Roads

Which basically means postal service is a constitutional right. And yes, the post service should attempt to be self-supporting. And yes, I know all about mail levels dropping and shippers creating ties for package delivery. Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah. That's what the research is about at the moment. And before you blame Amazon for USPS non-delivery of your Prime orders, understand that it's contracts with Amazon, UPS, and Fed-Ex that might just be keeping the post office afloat. Still, that does not relieve the Postmaster General of his responsibility to keep USPS mail delivery on track. 

So enough for now. It's been a challenging week here and it ain't over yet. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

I understand we Minnesnowtans are not alone with USPS issues.

but I do have a request of you, gentle readers: 

if you are NOT getting normal mail delivery,  please leave a comment,

or send an email to me with your town, state, and zip code.

Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear

Let me make this perfectly clear from the get-go: whether or not The Muscovite Candidate is seated in Congress on January 3rd is not the real issue here. Santos is nothing more than a harbinger at best, a red herring at worst. The guy lied. He was exposed, stripped naked in the glare of reality's limelight. The best we can do is hope he doesn't think morals are mushrooms and scruples are money in Russia. The GOP is gonna seat him whether America likes it or not.

That said, my friend Jill who writes at Brilliant At Breakfast - Rebooted, pointed out:

Unless the incoming Speaker of the House (whomever that may be) decides otherwise, pathological liar George Santos will have access to classified national security information after he is sworn in tomorrow. Federal legislators are not required to get security clearances. They have always been assumed to [be] people acting in good will and are loyal Americans. Perhaps this needs to change.

Sleep well tonight, America.

There is nothing that can unwind the election....although I'm sure if this was a Democrat, the GOP would be screaming bloody murder....but it doesn't freakin' matter. It's over. 

But not entirely; two significant issues are still hanging out there: journalistic integrity (or lack, thereof) and political chicanery. Both of these are dangerous to any future for American democracy. Both damage the election process while undermining confidence in that process. Both are, unfortunately, very subtle subterfuge, and are easily buried in the mulch of politics as usual.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an article: As His Life of Fantasy Comes Into Focus, George Santos Goes to Washington

Mr. Santos has admitted that he fabricated key parts of his educational and professional history, after a New York Times investigation uncovered discrepancies in his résumé and questions about his financial dealings. Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether he committed crimes involving his finances or misleading statements. Now, new reporting shows that his falsehoods began years before he entered politics.

That's my highlight in yellow because that line jumped right off the page for me. The line makes it sound like the NYT was breaking the story, that their reporting alone had uncovered this deception when, in fact, they did not. The NYT, who should've reported the questions being raised back in 2020 or again in September 2022, merely jumped on the currently rolling bandwagon. Anyone wanna explain that to me?

Actually, the story was broken by The North Shore Leader, yet no one ran with it. Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post, did a fascinating piece about this failure. She wrote:

It’s possible that the Leader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics. 

Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the United States every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose a third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.

This tidbit stopped me dead in my tracks. With all the access to media and information, how is it possible the number of journalists has declined by 60% since 2005? One would think newspapers would support remote access for reporters on the ground. 

This past week, there's been a lot of attention paid to the lack of local reporting. It is entirely possible that giant conglomerates owning major news organizations dismiss local reporting as unable to generate significant amounts of income. It is also possible that local reporting cuts into advertising revenue for any number of un-great reasons causing advertisers to flee, making newspapers financially unsustainable. 

In the case of The North Shore Leader, explained owner Grant Lally, many of the reporters and contributing staff are students and retirees.

Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills. “Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.  

Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd District. He had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount. 

The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” Lally said.

That newspapers and journalists are disappearing cannot be ignored. If only the BIG stories are reported, guys like Santos will continue to exploit that fissure in the system. That should come as no surprise to anyone. 

When big news is not covering the elections on the ground, one still has to get information about candidates and platforms. We already know BIG money is running garbage ads on both sides. Fact has given way to spin, shoring up whatever bubble the algorithms think you're in. Social media's not gonna give you an even picture of candidates; it's gonna give you what you wanna hear. Who is gonna know the truth?

One can only hope the nominating parties are investigating their candidates thoroughly. One might hope, after the debacle of Feckless Loser, the GOP and the DNC would be paying close attention to the person wearing the party colors. Clearly that was not the case in Georgia where they nominated and ran a marginally cogent sexual predator for Congress. Let's not forget to mention his inability to form a coherent sentence in a press conference. One would've thought that listening to him during the primaries would've sounded a deafening warning claxon to the party, but alas; it did not. 

Perhaps even scarier is that 49% of Georgia's voting population voted for this clown. 

The failure of the machine to vet guys like Santos or Kistner (MN2 loser) or Walker (GA Senate loser) should be a warning shot across the bow of all voters. One cannot rely on a political party to tell you the truth about any one candidate. Trusting the downline of names listed by your party, filling in circles on the ballot without recognizing those names, without knowing what those candidates represent, without doing a bit of googling on your own does not give you a "Hey, I-didn't-know-that's-what-he/she-believed" hall pass; just the opposite. You own your vote.

For the record, the failure of the press isn't gonna bail you out here, either. While the Washington Post does a great job fact-checking lots of stuff, they didn't do squat here. Of course, some say Santos was within the purview of the New York Times and Newsday; it's safe to say both papers failed to cover news important to their local readership. In turn, both must be held accountable for that. 

Along with the voters. 

What can you do? Support your local paper. Read it. Write to the editor. Maybe contribute an op-ed piece or a letter to the editor. Pay attention to your local caucus. Write to your Congressclown. It's easy enough to do...every one of their websites has a contact form. And even if you write how much you hate what they're doing, it gets read. 

I've said this a hundred times: silence is complicity. You cannot draw the drapes and pretend this doesn't impact you. Guys like Santos will have access to classified information about this country. If you're okay with the very real possibility he's capable of selling information, sit back, relax and do nothing. We already learned the hard way on January 6th, 2021, that not every elected official in this country has our best interest at heart. 

What you do with this information/rant is up to you. We can only hope We, the People, are committed to the preservation of democracy. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

We lost one of the great icons of news media this past week. 

Women in news really do stand on her shoulders.

Ms Walters provided a great roadmap to success in just about any endeavor:

Be the last one out.

Do your homework.

Choose your battles.

Don't whine and  

don't be the one who complains about everything.

Fight the BIG fights. 

Barbara Walters  (1929-2022)