Jim: Roundtable time and we're focusing on a lot. Participating our roundtable are The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava, and me, Jim; Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude; Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man; C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review; Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills); Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix; Mike of Mikey Likes It!; Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz); Ruth of Ruth's Report; Trina of Trina's Kitchen; Wally of The Daily Jot; Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ; Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends; Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub. Betty's kids did the
illustration. You are reading a rush transcript.
Another land sale event held in Baltimore invited attendees to “Buy Your Home in Israel Now!” But, as with the other events, attendees couldn’t just be anyone interested in some freshly stolen land. You have to be Jewish, but not just any kind of Jewish.
Greg Kaplan, a local Jewish community member who wanted to learn more about these restrictive events and who tried signing up for the April 1 land sale event in Baltimore, which was hosted by the Jerusalem-based CapitIL Real Estate Agency, told me:
I got a call from Shmuly Eisenmann of CapitIL. He asked me where I daven, who the rabbi is there, and for the rabbi’s number, seeming incredulous that I wouldn’t just have the rabbi’s number stored in my phone. He said he would check on me with the rabbi and asked if the rabbi would know who I was. I said probably not because I don’t go to shul that much. He asked if there was someone at another shul who could vouch for me.
Kaplan was not allowed into the event, which was scheduled to take place at Shomrei Emunah, “a full-service shul and Jewish center” in Baltimore whose list of speakers and scholars in residence includes an IDF lieutenant colonel.
Jim: Okay, Ty, big topic in e-mails?
Ty: BLACK POWER MEDIA, specifically their attacks on African-Americans in film. I think Quincy's e-mail says it best, "Tell Ava and C.I. thank you for their coverage of so-called BLACK POWER MEDIA which continues to attack every African-American it can. THE COLOR PURPLE, AMERICAN FICTION, the Bob Marley movie, Sidney Poitier, SHIRLEY. Nothing is good enough for BPM. I'm not saying you have to like every film but they attack everything. Where is the uplift? This is just like the haters piling onto Amanda Seales." Sierra e-mailed, "Sorry Dr. Jared Ball, you're not a good judge of film and I intend to support and applaud my brothers and sisters not tear them down. How dare he attack RUSTIN. 'Too gay'? He and his two idiots back up singers look like homophobes.' The RUSTIN comments are noted in tons of comments including by one person who states he had Ball for a professor spring of last year and can't imagine that, as a professor, Bell would have let the comments fly in the class the e-mailer took. Ava, C.I.?
Ava: We wrote what we wrote. It's appeared here. We discussed it, C.I. and I, ahead of the roundtable and how we've linked to Betty and Stan's critiques as well in our pieces here but to let them go first since they've covered this issue at their sites as well.
Stan: Betty, you go first.
Betty: Okay, thank you, Stan. And thank you Ava and C.I. I don't hate Jared Ball. Or maybe I do now, but I didn't hate him at first. I tried to gently suggest things at my site with regards to him. But RUSTIN was the turning point for me. He and those two broke ass idiots who shouldn't be on any podcast because they don't how to speak and if you're trying to uplift us, don't bring in the guy sitting on the concrete outside the barber shop going, "Got a dolla?" to everyone just trying to go in for a haircut. Are there any real qualifications that have to be met? Because the women on BPM have to be well spoken -- and are. But they'll invite any crusty lipped fool on if they're a man. And let me take this one more place, this all male trio that attacked RUSTIN? It's the same trio that did a segment after this attacking Olay. Jared and his backup singers. Now they couldn't be bothered with actually watching the video Olay recorded -- the one they were slamming her for. And see Ava and C.I.'s "Media: What's The Point Of A YOUTUBE series?" for more on that because they covered it in real time. And they couldn't be bothered learning who she actually was -- as they noted, they didn't know her. But they could and did distort what she said and attack her. Why? Because they hadn't beat up on enough Black women that week. I'm not even watching THE REMIX MORNING SHOW now. And I love Kim and Jacquie. But I can't stand to see Jared's face. I am so damn sick of brothers who want to talk liberation but are subjugating women. And I will never forget the hostility and hate that Jared went after Kim Brown with on one episode of THE REMIX MORNING SHOW.
C.I.: Jumping in just to note that Stan covered that in "Explaining why I'm taking a break from THE REMIX MORNING SHOW" and Betty covered it in "Shameful."
Stan: He was bullying Kim. And this was streaming live. Over an Andre 3000 album. On air, he decides to expose his inner Ike Turner. Watch that and watch as Kim tries to defuse him and ask yourself why? Why should she have to be defusing him? She didn't start the s**t. Not only is she being bullied by him, but it falls to her to make the whole thing better. Ball, be a man and clean up your own messes. Better yet, don't start them. And that's not how you ever talk to a co-host.
Betty: Right. And The Ear Doctor's just sort of like, "What the hell is going on?" on his face -- it was him, Kim and Jared. And he's probably thinking, "Jared just went off on me earlier this week because of my health beliefs." And Jared had gone off on him, after all. It's just too much drama. And you can dislike THE COLOR PURPLE, for example. That's not the issue. The issue, as Ava and C.I. noted in last week's "Media: MARY & GEORGE succeeds, SHIRLEY gets attacked and the Pope is . . . dead?," is that you hate everything with Black people. And you claim to be uplifting? You claim to be serving the Black community? It reminds me of how biracial Barack couldn't stop attacking Black fathers when he was president.
Marcia: Because Jared is biracial.
Betty: He is. Do we need to let him host a beer summit to work through his issues? I don't know but I know I'm sick of it.
Ann: If it's okay to jump in, another BLACK POWER MEDIA issue -- and it's one C.I. has raised repeatedly -- where are the women? I see clip after clip with women and men and tons of them with men but there are two African-American ladies who get to come on once a week and only once a week and have their own segment.
C.I.: That's Erika Brown and Amber Sims who do BROKE-ISH once a week on BPM.
Ann: Thank you. And that's it. Otherwise it's all men or let's sprinkle one woman in with a man or group of men. Why the hell do we need Renee Johnston doing her Saturday segment with Jared next to her? Renee's a grown ass woman. She can handle the segment all by herself. They don't let women do that. From BURN IT DOWN WITH KIM BROWN, we damn well know that Kim could solo on BPM. But they don't let women do that. And then they get butt hurt -- the men -- when they're called out for these segments where Jared and two other idiot males start tearing apart Olay, misrepresenting what she said, dismissing her because they've never heard of her --
Cedric: And Renee had praised her for that segment on Twitter. The same one that the Jared and his two lapdogs were barking about, Renee had praised it on Twitter before the old men decided to dog Olay.
Ann: Exactly. There is too much toxic on BPM. They need to chill their jets. They need to stop doing one segment after another with men, men, men. I'm an African-American woman and I don't see any reason I should be watching BPM. Not when Olay's attacked, not when Kim's attacked to her face because she was keeping it light and bully Jared couldn't back the hell off. And he never apologized. Again, there's no reason for me to watch BPM. Like Trina, I watch Jacquie's Friday segment. And that's her old show that she did for years so I'm not faulting her for having a male co-host. But, no, Renee does not need a man sitting next to her. And I won't watch her Saturday show because Jared's on it. Supposedly, he's a busy man what with teaching and his family. So how about he takes his tired ass off Saturdays or at least Saturday mornings and let Renee handle her own SATURDAYS WITH RENEE.
Trina: Which is not called "SATURDAYS WITH RENEE AND JARED."
Marcia: Exactly. It's disrespectful and, as an African-American woman, I'm tired of the eternal disrespect shown to us. Ava and C.I., for their column at POLLY'S BREW a few weeks back, wrote about that stupid Drew Barrymore who seems intent upon becoming the ultimate Karen. She had a -- what she called a -- FACTS OF LIFE reunion on her lousy talk show. Excuse me? If Kim Fields is alive and she's not part of the 'reunion,' then you didn't have a reunion so quit fronting. That was so disrespectful. As a young girl, Penny, Dee and Tootie were so important to me and I wasn't the only African-American girl who felt that way. Kim Fields was on every season of FACTS OF LIFE -- something Nancy McKeon can't say for herself -- and you don't have a reunion of FACTS without Kim being there. Charlotte Rae? She's passed away. Same with Cloris Leachmen. But Kim's alive and how dare you promote your show having a reunion of the cast when Kim's not part of the reunion.
Cedric: Kim played Tootie -- and she played Regine on LIVING SINGLE and she currently plays Regina on THE UPSHAWS whose fifth season is about to start on NETFLIX.
Ava: Next week. Starts April 18th.
Cedric: She is the only success. Lisa hawking what amounts to an informercial on METV every Sunday. She destroyed her career with her freaky and nutty religious views -- this said by a man who is in church every Sunday and Wednesday so don't think I'm hating on Christianity. No one ever liked Nancy McKeon -- as is pointed out repeatedly on FAMILY GUY. Her fauxtense of being Brooklyn was always laughable. Mindy Cohn thinks she's having a renaissance and maybe, for her career, it is one. But Kim's the only one who starred in FACTS OF LIFE and went on to star in two other long running sitcoms. So Drew and the other White Karens need to stop disrespecting Kim Fields.
Marcia: Agreed. And, one more time, I'm glad that Ava and C.I. wrote about that.
Betty: Me too, Marcia. And you're right, Penny -- Janet Jackson was later Charlene on DIFF'RENT STROKES -- and Tootie on FACTS OF LIFE and Dee on WHAT'S HAPPENING were big relatables for Black girls who too often did not see themselves reflected on TV shows in the 70s and 80s.
Jim: Ty, next e-mail topic?
Ty: The election. E-mailers want to know who everyone's voting for?
Ava: C.I. and I said, before the Democratic Party primaries started that we'd be voting for whomever the Democratic Party nominee was. We said we weren't telling anyone else how to vote but that we had made our decision and explained why. So we'll be voting for whomever's at the top of the ballot on the Democratic Party side.
Marcia: I'll be voting for Joe. I'm hugely disappointed in him over Gaza but I do see many other things he's done that are praiseworthy. That includes his Supreme Court nominee, that includes his support for transgender Americans. There are other things as well.
Jess: I'm not voting for Jill Stein. I've been stuck voting for her in two elections already and she's a loser and she's a fool and she's a fake. I'm voting Joe Biden. I thought about leaving it blank but as it appears that the Green Party -- my party -- respects me so little that they're going to run a loser for the third time, I'll be voting for Joe. And I've always voted Green so they could keep their ballot access. Were they lose it in 2024 they'd deserve to do so for forcing Jill Stein on us once again. It's a big country the party doesn't need to run the same loser for president three times.
Ann: Agreed. And this Green will be voting for Joe as well and for the same reasons.
Jim: Is anyone not voting for Joe?
Dona: There's silence but let me ask if anyone is uncomfortable saying who they're voting for? Okay, no one said anything so we're all comfortable saying who we're going to vote for and it appears we're all voting for Joe Biden.
Jim: Cornel West announced his running mate last week and the two were on THE TAVIS SMILEY SHOW. Anyone have any impressions on Cornel's running mate Melina Abdullah?
Cedric: I was surprised to learn she wasn't Black. She's biracial. Jacob Crosse (WSWS) reports:
While presenting herself almost exclusively as a “Black woman,” Abdullah is the daughter of John Reimann, a non-practicing Jewish person born in New York in 1946.
Adbullah’s paternal grandfather, and John’s father, was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist who fled Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. As a teenager, Günter wrote for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Die Rote Fahne (The Red Banner), the press organ of the Spartacus League in Germany. Following the January 19 assassinations of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the paper continued to be published by the Communist Party of Germany until Hitler came to power in 1933.Günter died in 2005. John is still a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with which Abdullah also has close relations. On his personal blog, Reimann advocates US funding for the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Marcia: Good catch, Cedric. Did not know that. Betty?
Betty: I had no idea.
Jim: Thoughts on Robert Kennedy Junior's pick of his running mate?
Wally: Before we get to that, let me note that yesterday Junior announced he would not seek the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination.
Mike: Weeks after the Libertarian Party made it clear that they would not be asking him to be their nominee.
Wally: True. And he's a liar so who knows what happens next month but he did declare yesterday that he wasn't going to be their nominee?
Trina: Junior's campaign made news for something else on Saturday:
The Black voter engagement director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign posted — and then scrubbed — a homophobic attack against the founder of a Black conservative group.
On Wednesday, Angela Stanton King, who has been working with Kennedy’s campaign for months, took to X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram to attack Diante Johnson, who hosted former President Donald Trump at a gala event for the Black Conservative Federation in South Carolina in February.
In a screenshot of the Instagram post shared with POLITICO, Stanton King called Johnson “an open flaming Feminine closet Gay.” She then continued in the caption: “How is he gonna lead heterosexual black men to the Republican Party?”
The post, which was on X and then shared as a screenshot on Instagram, was time-stamped April 10 at about 6 p.m. Both have since been deleted.
Stanton King’s post continues a pattern of behavior from Kennedy’s consultants that has drawn negative attention and forced the campaign to respond. These issues could turn off donors and volunteers.
Marcia: I guess that's Junior's idea of classy.
Mike: Probably so.
Trina: I'd say it was in keeping with the kind of campaign he's running. As was his selection of Nicole Shanahan -- someone he apparently selected solely to say, "See, there are people less qualified then me in this election. There are!!!!"
Jim: We're all laughing at that so let's end on that high note. This is a rush transcript and we thank Ava and C.I. who took notes and will also type this up.
