What It Comes Down To

Weekend Humor

The Way I Feel Right Now!

Don't Drink The Kool Aid

Don't Stay Home Today! (Vote)

It's election day here in Pennsylvania...Or I should say...Primary Day.....Use your power to vote...Don't stay home....Vote...Let your voice be heard!

What Privilege Is

PRINCE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!

''Life is just a party and parties aren't meant to last."

REST IN PEACE!!

PRINCE ROGERS NELSON

June 7th 1958- April 21, 2016

Why Are You Mad Amerika?

Time Will Be On Their Side

Why Hillary Should Read This

I'm not trying to be funny and this isn't a cheap plug for anyone else to read this blog...but what I'm going to talk about here is something Hillary Clinton and her staffers should be aware of if they want to win and if they want to stay relevant...

It's quite obvious that in order to get to the White House..She needs the votes of people of color..African Americans and Latinos...And while it at first seemed like a lock that she would get these votes...It is quite obvious that there is a generation gap that is splitting Black America and it's a gap that Bernie Sanders understands , but that the Clinton's don't seem to understand yet...

Last Week, Former President Bill Clinton was here in my city, Philadelphia ,speaking and stumping for his wife...Now mind you...I voted for Bill Clinton both times..and have always admired the man...in spite of the sex scandals..I'll still go on the record and say he was a pretty decent President as Presidents go....

But my child and the children who are in the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movemant don't remember that man..They were too young and we face a different dynamic today than we did in the early 90's....

As everybody knows, A fiery exchange broke out between the activists and the former president as Mr. Clinton forcefully defended the legislation.His 1994 Crime Bill But it was not just Mr. Clinton who criticized the young protesters. Afterward, some older African-Americans did, too.

 

“I think it is crazy to protest the crime bill,” said Caryl Brock, 53, a social worker from the Bronx, who scolded the protesters on social media. “Should it be amended? Maybe. But a lot of people really wanted it. I really wanted it.”

 

Young and energized African-Americans this election cycle are aggressively challenging longstanding ideas and policies, especially those carried out during the Clinton administration in areas like crime and welfare. But the activism is also laying bare a striking generation gap between younger and older African-Americans, whose experience, views of the former president and notions of how they should push for change diverge dramatically.

 

The parents and grandparents of today’s young black protesters largely waged the battle for civil rights in courtrooms and churches. They carefully chose people who were viewed as upstanding citizens, like Rosa Parks, to be the face of their movement, and dressed in their Sunday best as they sought to gain broader acceptance.

 

 Mr. Clinton endeared himself to these generations by campaigning in black churches and appointing more blacks to the cabinet than any previous president had.

 

But many of today’s activists — whose political consciousness has been shaped by the high-profile killings of black people by the police — do not believe that acting respectfully will protect them from being harassed or shot. They aspire not to become a part of the political system, but to upend it.

 

“You do have older generations of church folk who believe that marching and singing is the best way to bring about change,” Mr. Farmer said. “We’ll march, too, but we’ll do what we need to do to communicate our message, if it happens to be yelling, or blocking an intersection. And we don’t care if people — particularly white people — believe it is respectable.”

 

The gulf between young black people and their elders surfaced repeatedly in more than two dozen interviews conducted in the days after Mr. Clinton’s clash with the protesters.

 

To young Black Lives Matters activists, Mr. Clinton’s legacy on crime is paternalistic and damaging. But many older black voters who raised families during the crack epidemic — an era many of these young people do not remember — remain steadfastly loyal to the Clintons.

 

Ms. Brock said she had been a social worker in charge of the removal of children from dangerous homes in the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack tore a path of destruction through those neighborhoods.

“I saw it all,” Ms. Brock said. “Moms would give birth and leave the hospital to get a hit. My car got broken into every week. People were scared to walk down to the bodega, afraid they’d be followed and robbed.”

 

She said she was relieved when the crime bill passed. In addition to providing more money for prisons and the police, the law banned assault weapons and offered funding for drug courts and rehabilitation.

 

“Because of the crime bill,” she said, “anybody that wanted rehabilitation, we could process them and get them a detox bed in a hospital.”

 

Ms. Brock’s comments underscore a sometimes overlooked reality in today’s re-examination of the crime bill: The legislation was broadly embraced by nonwhite voters, more enthusiastically even than by white voters. About 58 percent of nonwhites supported it in 1994, according to a Gallup poll, compared with 49 percent of white voters.

 

Mr. Clinton has seemed rattled at times as he tries to defend the measure to younger African-Americans in an era in which concerns about mistreatment by the police and mass incarceration have eclipsed the fear of crime in many black communities.

 

And among these younger voters, the Clintons lack the deep admiration that they enjoy from previous generations of African-Americans. In the Democratic primary contests so far, 92 percent of black voters 65 and older cast ballots for Mrs. Clinton, compared with 45 percent of black voters under age 25, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

 

Some middle-aged and older African-Americans found themselves siding with Mr. Clinton after his confrontation with the protesters in Philadelphia, which was widely broadcast on television and social media. During the exchange, Mr. Clinton said that the legislation targeted gang leaders “who got 13-year-old children hopped up on crack and sent them out the street to murder other African-American children.”

 

He then lectured the activists, who support the Black Lives Matter movement: “You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.”

 

Roz Rodgers, 55, a community engagement worker from East St. Louis, Ill., said she understood what Mr. Clinton was trying to get across.

“All black lives should always matter — that is what Bill Clinton was saying,” Ms. Rodgers said. “It bothered me, the reaction he got.”

 

About the activists, she said: “This younger generation is more vocal. They are not accepting the rules, regulations and expectations that exist.”

 

Today’s angry demonstrations over Clinton-era policies make it easy to forget how the former president was hailed two decades ago for taking a stand against gun violence in black communities.

 

An emotional, unscripted speech Mr. Clinton gave in 1993 about the toll of violence on black youth has been called one the best of his presidency. He delivered it from the pulpit of the church in Memphis where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon.

 

“The other day on the front page of The Washington Post was a story about an 11-year-old child planning her funeral,” Mr. Clinton told the congregation that day, 10 months before he signed the crime bill.

 

“The freedom to die before you’re a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for.”

 

Black churchgoers gave him sustained applause and named him an honorary member of their congregation. A columnist in The Washington Post said the speech “embodied what has always been the promise of Clintonism.” “Only Clinton could say it, and only now,” read a column in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

 

Willie W. Herenton, the first African-American mayor of Memphis, was in the church that day.

 

“It’s easy for people to lose the connection of where we were in 1994 and where we are today,” Mr. Herenton said.

 

The national murder rate hit a high in the early 1990s, disproportionately affecting African-American neighborhoods in major cities. Today, violent crime is down and mistreatment by the police and excessive incarceration have taken center stage in the minds of many younger voters.

 

In 2013, nearly one-quarter of black men 18 to 34 reported being treated unfairly by the police in the previous 30 days, according to a Gallup survey. That has stirred anger among some young black people, which has crystallized in resentment of the Clintons in this election cycle.

 

Charli Cleland, 24, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School, said he planned to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders, even though his family has always admired the Clintons.

 

“Growing up, there was always this idea that Bill Clinton was a man for people of color,” he said. “Then this political year comes around, and there is so much being exposed as to what they have said in the past and what kind of bills they have approved in the past. I’m realizing that it’s actually against everything that I initially thought about the Clintons.”

 

When he watched the exchange in Philadelphia, Mr. Cleland said he viewed Mr. Clinton and his remarks as “paternalistic” and “implicitly racist.”

 

It’s easy for people to lose the connection of where we were in 1994 and where we are today...Hillary Clinton needs to get a hold on the concerns of these young people who are protesting police misbehavior and bad treatment and a whole different dynamic....Or else she'll risk losing a voting base she has depended on.

Keith's Favorite Quotes

I was in the Military...(The Author of this blog served his country proudly for 22 years in the U.S. Air Force) The only man who loves war is a man who has never fought one!

Weekend Humor

Two female co-workers are chatting it up, and they are discussing the boyfriends they've had in the last year.

One girl says "The last 3 boyfriends I've had, I've named after soda pops. The first one I called 7up, because he had 7 inches and honeyyy he knew how to keep it up.

 The second one I called Mountain Dew, because when it came to mounting....wooooou,  he knew what to do. 

The third I called Jack Daniels....Hot dang it...." she shouted....

Then the other girl interrupts saying "Hold on a minute. Isn't Jack Daniels hard liquor?"

The girl smiles and says "Yes it is"


Wellllllllllllllllllllll...have a sexilicious weekend everybody!

Something Else I've Been Saying

Vote...Your Opinion does matter.....It may be the only time that it truly does.

Cult Of Ignorance

I've been saying this for a long time....When I listen to Donald Trump supporters and others on Television and especially on Social Media...It justifies and bares out everything Isaac Asimov said in the above quote!

Why I Might Be Feelin The Bern

I was going to wait a little later before I officially endorsed a candidate for President...but if you have been reading and or lurking on my blog for the past few months..You know that I was leaning closer to Bernie Sanders anyway....

Even though, unlike some Sanders supporters...I could live with a Hillary Clinton presidency...I don't see her as the queen of evil the way some of them do....

I could live with A Hillary Clinton presidency!

But here is why I am feeling the Bern....We may never see another presidential candidate like him again...He is saying something that is definitely striking a chord in people's minds...He's won like 7 of the last eight primaries...That has to mean something..

He like myself is an avowed Socialist and while a few years ago...That was a bad word...somehow some Americans are buying into what he is saying...

Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are suddenly rising up against the money men who control everything and who have left the majority of the people out of the spectrum...

Bernie is not selling snake oil....If he was..He wouldn't be around this long...Somebody is buying into what he's selling..

Critics of Bernie Sanders dismiss his policy proposals, like a single-payer health care system or free higher education (rights long ago established in Europe) as simply “pie in the sky.” But in reality, it is people who can't think outside of the box they are so used to being in , who are engaging in wishful thinking.

Last month, Oxfam reported that the richest 62 individuals now own as much wealth as the poorest 3,500,000,000 human beings, half of the whole species. To believe that such a system can be “reformed,” and that t we can't ever or shouldn't even try to disrupt this monumental theft of the world’s resources, is dangerous self-delusion.It can be done if we demand it and vote for it and fight for it..

Yes, the 2016 presidential race is still about Democrats and Republicans. But it has also become a national referendum on capitalism. For the first time in modern memory, Americans are being given the rare opportunity to affirm, or to reject, the trajectory of their economic and political system.

That's why I say we may never see another quite like Bernie...Win or lose ,he has changed the conversation in American and he may make the Democratic Party go a little more left of center than it has been in the past few years..  There was a time when I couldn't tell the two party's apart...Bernie Sanders ,by changing the conversation may well give American's a choice..

It would be hard to exaggerate how much is at stake in the coming weeks. I say.. It is far better to embrace an uncertain future than to affirm a doomed one......

This is why I am feeling the Bern...

Easier To Get Away With Murder

Weekend Humor

Everybody Have A Super Groovalicious Weekend!

Mississippi goddamn!!

The stupidity of certain people just astounds me!

What I've Learned

1. Death is no respecter of youth or age.

2. Cliche's have never helped anyone mourn...

3.It's best to make the most of the time you have...

4.Living with no regrets is easier imagined than done.

5.Sometimes we are better off just for having known someone.

6.Life really is a game of give and take.

7.Unlike when I first started writing,I no longer have a craving to be understood!

8.Happiness for me has changed with age...I wake up expecting a lot less.

9.If you've worked hard all day...You really don't feel like talking about it at a bar or over dinner.

10.Anyone who said that they hoped they die before they get old was more than likely lying.

It's Official

Keith's Favorite Quotes

Author Unknown!

Weekend Humor

Death Be Not Proud

This is a post that breaks my heart to write....The man in the photo above is my second cousin, Howard Lanier III...

Today is his birthday...Had he of lived...He would have been 32 years old...

He died this past Thursday...We don't know the reason yet...He went into Cardiac Arrest and died soon after...

31 years old...

That's how old I was when I got married...

Life was just beginning.....

That photo above was taken on his wedding day, this past November....The happiest day of his life...It was also the last time I saw him alive...

I can't get ahold of this...He was such a vibrant young man...College Graduate...Had just bought a beautiful house and married for about four or five months...I didn't get to know his wife...

No one this young with so much promise, so much life...Should be dropping dead...I just can't get around it...

He was a phenominal young man and I was so proud of how he was conducting his life....I'm still trying to wrap myself around the fact that he is no longer amongst the living...

Pray for me and my family.

Howard Lanier III

April 1, 1984 - March 30, 2016

Rest in Peace!