Jim (Con't): Dona and Ty worked the e-mails last week. Dona?
Dona: Ava and C.I.'s "TV; When Right Does Wrong" received the most e-mails -- not surprising. A number of you had caught the show at the RightNetwork online or at FIOS. A number went to RightNetwork. But a number of people wrote asking where they could watch if they couldn't watch it on their TV? That would be where you would stream it online. In addition to streaming online at the show's website, one program, Running, may end up on Hulu as well.
Ty: And while Ava and C.I.'s piece was, as usual, the most popular, there were many other features that resulted in large amounts of mail. "No Koran Was Harmed In The Writing Of This Piece" resulted in Vicki e-mailing to share, "You are disgusting and being polite will always matter more than free speech." Approximately 30 other e-mails shared Vicki's distaste for the article. About 20 came in expressing some variation on Janice's e-mail where she explained, "Reading the article, it's easy to see the problem but when I'm watching CNN and listening to everyone talk about this topic over and over, it's hard not to get whipped up by all of this and start to forget about the First Amendment." We completely agree. And we made a point to use "we" in that piece for that reason. Several of you e-mailed to note that you were shocked to realize The Nation magazine and others refused to stand up for the rights we supposedly have in this country.
Dona: One piece that garnered a large number of e-mails was "AOL, also spelled T-H-I-E-F" which demonstrates how hated AOL now is by former subscribers. Philip e-mailed asking that we "please urge anyone still using AOL to sign up with another service instead. You'll realize quickly how badly you were being screwed by AOL."
Ty: And Sherry e-mailed to say we had promised to "do a discussion on Belinda Carlisle's book and you never have." Sherry, we have forgotten but we will try to do that before the end of the month. Sherry also wondered if anyone read anything this summer that they loved and would recommend?
Betty: I didn't love it but Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy will hold your attention -- especially if you liked the characters in Waiting To Exhale because this is the sequel. There was a quality to the book that just didn't work for me; however, the characters made up for what the plot, style and tone bungled.
Rebecca: I made the mistake of reading Lynsay Sands' Born to Bite. Weak. I found it weak as a page turner and when you've got a woman falling in love with a vampire who kills his wives, then you really have to up the drama on every page. This is so staid and plodding.
Stan: Page turner makes me think of Dean Koontz's The Taking which is a summer read that held my attention.
Jim: Alright, so there's three recommendations. Betty, I didn't see your topic. I'm going to toss to you and then we'll go to Iraq after that topic's been discussed. Betty had written down a topic when we were pulling together this roundtable and I didn't even look at the list until everyone was talking about books.
Betty: Alright, Starita Smith -- a really lousy writer -- has a b.s. piece at The Progressive entitled "Dems should stop snubbing Obama." Starita's one of those eternal doctorate students and, when you read her column, you may grasp why that is. She was a bad columnist who now -- judging by e-mails and her grading by former students online -- is a bad professor at University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. As a little girl, I watched Fat Albert, the cartoon. I know the movie pretty much bombed but maybe some will at least remember Mush Mouth from the cartoon. There is Mush Mouth and, thanks to Starita, there is Mush Brain. It's an embarrassment to read this near elderly woman's teenage lustful pleas for Barack. Someone needed to grab the woman forcibly by both arms and toss her into a cold shower. Distancing yourself from the unpopular Barack if you're running for office, to Starita is racism. I'm so sick of these damn liars. I'm so sick of these stupid whores. That's all Starita, a stupid ass whore. I have stronger words but I'll just use those. Stupid Starita doesn't seem to grasp the anti-incumbent mood or Barack's declining popularity or much of anything but then the tired whore's not much of a thinker, just a mental bed wetter. The Progressive magazine worships Russ Feingold -- I like Russ myself -- so I found it hilarious that in her list of candidates avoiding Barry Obama, Starita 'forgets' to include Russ Feingold. She keeps trashing Dems for what she sees as "trying to win White voters." The idiot seems unable to grasp that Barry O is down among all racial groups except Black. The dumb ass wants to make it all about race because that's all her tired and ugly ass understands. She is an ugly woman on the outside and she is even uglier on the inside. So she preaches her hate as 'fact' and The Progressive is stupid enough to print her garbage. As Starita's long winded fart finally winds down, she declares -- and remember this runs at the so-called "Progressive'' magazine's website -- "An amazing number of Americans refuse to give Obama the respect that a president deserves." I'm so sick of this bulls**t. I'm so sick of these whores.
Mike: If I can jump in first, I think there's going to be a lot of us wanting to jump in, I think if Matthew Rothschild is going to post that crap -- and distribute it around the country for newspapers -- it is incumbent upon him to write an essay explaing "the repsect that a president deserves." I've never heard of something of something so damn stupid.
Wally: I'm going to have to jump in here because that one line, that "An amazing number of Americans refuse to give Obama the respect that a president deserves"? That never belongs at any left site or any site pretending that free speech exists in America. I find that statement offensive and Starita's a cheap and tired whore who seems to forget she's living in a democracy and longing for an authoritarian regime where public servants are worshipped.
Cedric: Amen, Wally. And let's be clear, Barack's just a servant. This effort on the part of some people to worship him, he's not Bill Gates. He'll whore when he's out of office to rake in money like they all do but he's not really accomplished anything. He's nothing but a public servant and he is lacking in his ability to serve. He's done a lousy job and Starita can finger her clit and moan "Barack" until she almost convinces herself that she's not going to spend her entire life alone and unloved, but the reality is Barack's a lousy president. He had all the chances, he had all the opportunities and he screwed them up. But, like Wally was saying, in America, we shouldn't have to read Starita's crap in supposedly leftist magazines. That's horses**t and obviously Starita bathes in it. I'm so offended by her nonsesne and I need to start before I start calling her the b-word and worse.
Ann: Well honey, let me do it. Bitch is one stupid ass bitch who needs to stop disgracing my race. I am so damn sick of all these dumb asses trying to turn Barack into Princess Diana. We live in a democracy, deal with it. Barack's unpopular, accept it. Stop screaming race every damn minute thereby giving all other races the idea that we don't know how to reason or argue and can only scream "Racism!" It's not racism, it's the lousy job he's done. It's the fact that he's focused on that stupid ObamaCare instead of on the economy. The only thing more embarrassing than his lousy performance at this point or all of Barack's bitches -- male and female -- who keep offering excuses for why the itty bitty baby can't do the job he ran for.
Marcia: I'm going to agree with Ann on that -- on everything she said in fact. I'm also going to note that I'm so damn sick of the infant Barack. I'm so damn sick of baby's first steps and baby's first poop and blah, blah, blah. Barack wanted the job, he's got the job, he needs to do the job. Thus far he hasn't. He's given a lot of bad speeches. He just hasn't done the job he was elected to do. In October of 2008, he repeatedly made the case that he was the one to fix the economy. Barack Obama, fix the economy.
Trina: On the issue of the economy, let's note how quickly it changed. He was saying he could fix it. Then he's sworn in and we're told it will take time. And then more time. And now the White House makes noises about how it will be the second term before any real growth will emerge. They came in with promises and they've downgraded their word ever since. If you're telling me that Barack Obama had no idea what he was going to be facing, I'm telling you then he wasn't ready for the job.
Stan: I think everything that's taken place since he was sworn in has demonstrated that he was not and is not up to the job. And this has been when he could get anything through Congress. There will probably not be a moment like that for Democrats again until forty years from now. The way Barack chose to squander a historic opportunity is very telling. And he is not progressive and that idiot Starita -- who obviously has a mother who's an idiot as well to name a child "Starita" to begin with -- doesn't need to be raving about Barack at a magazine called The Progressive. Matthew Rothshcild can't figure out if he wants to call Barack out for selling out the left or if he wants to suck his dick. He better figure it out pretty damn quick because if his request to return to subscribing had showed up in my mailbox two weeks ago, I would have. But it came after his massive cave where he was all impressed with a speech Barack gave. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of Matthew Rothschild. I'm sick of all the whores who sold us Barack and how will they not take accountability for their actions or even stop lying.
Kat: If I can jump in on that, yeah, stop lying. It's just so embarrassing. You watch them and they try to lie and they try to cover for Barack and it's not like it's 2008. Barack now has a history, a pattern of stabbing the left in the back. Those still defending and covering for him are nothing but battered wives in my opinion.
Jim: Dona just slid me a note saying that Iraq wasn't going to be part of this because there's not time. That's fine but we're going to slide over to elections while keeping Betty's topic. C.I. explained Thursday night why the left needs to be making clear publicly that they're not saving Dems in the mid-terms. So let's put that with what we're talking about right now.
C.I.: Okay, Libbyliberal had a post a Corrente about how Dems should be making it clear to the party that we will not vote for this and that. In other words, as long as torture, the wars, etc. continue, we're not voting for Dems. And that was her argument why -- that Barack's continuing Bush's policies. And she's right. But another reason we need to be public right now is that the Dems are expected to lose big in the mid-terms this November. If they do, the day after the revisions will begin. We will hear that the Dems lost because they were too liberal and too left. That's not been the case at all but that will be the media message. Dems, in office, are always 'encouraged' by the press to go to the right. Changing the narrative after the fact to argue that Democratic voters stayed home because Dems were too liberal is insane, yes, but the press does it all the time. So the smartest thing to do would be to get ahead of it right now and to establish that there is resistance to voting for Democrats due to the fact that they repeatedly sell out.
Jim: Thank you, C.I. Okay, Ruth, Ava, Jess and Isaiah haven't spoken so I'll let them go. Ruth, you first?
Ruth: Well it is sad that The Progressive would print the sort of piece but it is sad that they have Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey On The Moon." First of all, it's out of date and then some. Second of all, it didn't make sense in real time either. Mr. Scott-Heron's speaking about how his character's sister was bitten by a rat "and Whitey's on the moon" and all these other issues that have nothing to do with the people who landed on the moon but at the end of the poem, the narrator thinks he should send the bill for his sister's medical treatment to one of those astronauts. No, it did not make sense in real time and it does not now. Astronauts are like soldiers, they are not paid well, they do not rake in the riches. The poem never made any sense and only serves to make The Progressive look as silly as the Joan Baez knock off in National Lampoon's Lemmings from years and years ago.
Ava: What I am astounded by is how these White Anglos play the race card. I mean, C.I. and I made sure here that Bill Richardson's historic run was treated as such. We regularly would remind that no Latino had done this before. We didn't endorse Sonia Sotomayor because we do not believe in endorsing anyone without a public record on the issues that matter to us but we did make a point to note that her nomination was historic. As a Latina, I look at The Progressive and see that they really don't care about Latinos. I look at The Nation and it's even more obvious. How many African-American women are they going to hire -- bad writers all of them -- before they get candy Black and White asses and start hiring some Latino writers? In the world The Nation 'lives' in, everyone's Jewish or African-American apparently. If Sammy Davis Jr. hadn't shown all that love for Nixon, he'd probably be the patron saint of The Nation magazine.
Jess: I want to echo Ava on the Latino issue in that where are they? Where are the writers? Why is The Nation unable to add them? They could argue that if you look at the population, why are they so quick to repeatedly hire African-American writers? I can't think of one Latino writer they have. If The Nation magazine was supposed to reflect the make up of the nation, then the magazine would be a failure. It's hilarious because they can never stop whining about Lani but her voting plans are plans they don't seem to think should also be hiring plans.
Isaiah: I'm glad Jess just brought up half-baked fool Lani. I'm not even going to dignify her by giving her last name. But I will point out that Starita Smith has nothing to offer but race cries. She trashed Bill Clinton and lied about him and then used to trash Hillary. Starita is an infant kicking her crib and thinking she's engaging in adult conversation. She is an embarrassment.
Betty: I'm jumping back in. Sorry. Isaiah brought up something I was thinking about bringing up, Starita's past columns. In the one he's talking about, I have always had a question. She trashes Hillary, it's Starita's usual crap. In that b.s. column, she wrote:
After the war, the Republicans decided that only one group -- either white women or black men (but under neither option black women) -- would get the right to vote. This split the abolitionist coalition into acrimonious pieces. Some white women suffragists used racist rhetoric to argue that black men should never be allowed to vote. Black men, who were overwhelmingly loyal to the party of Lincoln, won the right to vote when the 15th Amendment passed in 1870. Black women did not get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment gave it to female citizens in 1920.
Betty (Con't): I've heard that garbage over and over and I want to call bulls**t on it. As she tells the story, as everyone does, two groups are wanting the right to vote. Only one's going to get the right to vote. The 'bad' women want to vote. How dare they! How dare they fight for the right to vote! Reality check for that stupid b-word Starita, Black men were saying things against women getting the right to vote, it was sexist. And we don't hear that side do we, when the argument's put forward today. But she's got to toss out that some women said this or that and it was racist. You can debate how racist it was, the reality is those were different times. But what you can't debate is that women like Starita think that women should always be second to men and that's what this always repeated tale is really about and as a Black woman I'll call b.s. on it. What's supposedly a story of 'injustice' to Blacks, is really the story of how some people don't believe women should fight for a damn thing and should let men have everything. If I'm not clear on that, e-mail and I will be. I know Dona had given the wrap up sign to Jim before I started speaking so I'm rushing. But we can address this next week if I'm not clear.
Jim: And I think you were clear but we may pick up with it next week anyway. That's going to be it and this is a rush transcript.
