IF ONLY FREDDIE GRAY WAS A POLICE CAR

Of course cop cars matter! So do the lives of police officers! And guess what? Freddie Gray’s life mattered! While I’m making my rounds of citing who and what matters, allow me to state what should be obvious: Black lives matter. Are you mad because I ended that last sentence with bold characters, and didn’t […]

SUNDAY SMACK: 2008 ALL OVER AGAIN?

The two stupefying Wall Street Journal charts about US credit card debt you see above has caused me to break from my typical Sunday Smack format of simply raising questions without a strong injection of my opinion. Banks are issuing more credit cards today than they did just prior to the 2008 financial crash while […]

UNDERPAID FAST FOOD WORKERS AND ROBOTS HAVE FEW FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Liberal politicians fighting for fast food workers to earn $15 an hour are either thinking on excessively narrow terms or are operating from a dishonest line of reasoning. Conservatives ranting about how fast food “robots” — or order kiosks — are corporate CEOs’ response to the coming wave of government-mandated minimum wage increases are being […]

SUNDAY SMACK: PRESIDENT OBAMA — WAR MACHINE?

This week’s Sunday Smack explores President Barack Obama’s war record. As the New York Times notes, President Barack Obama is on track to have managed one or more overseas conflicts every single day of his two-term White House tenure, which will set a new record for the amount of time any US President has led […]

ZIMMERMAN’S LYRIC: SELLING THE GUN HE USED TO KILL TRAYVON MARTIN HAS DEEPER MEANING

I didn’t want to spend too much time discussing George Zimmerman’s decision to sell the gun he used to kill 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, since doing so only contributes to his public relations platform. But I want to point out the important and converging symbolism in what Zimmerman is doing when he referred to […]

MEDIA PLAYS DOWN ANOTHER BERNIE SANDERS WIN

A fetor of anti-Bernie Sanders media bias surrounds this headline of yesterday’s Guam and Washington caucus results: “SANDERS NETS 31 DELEGATES IN WASHINGTON, BUT LOSES IN GUAM“ (Laughing) The creator of that headline isn’t counting on you to give any thought to it. But I suppose that’s a reason for why my blog exists … […]

9 PRINCE ALBUMS I PLAY THE MOST

About a year after the release of Prince’s Dirty Mind album, Music industry publication Billboard attempted to answer the question “What is Black music” by creating a Black Singles chart. Reductionist tactics like Billboard’s are worthy of a lengthy post, but I’ll say only this for now: Black creatives and their output over the years […]

PRINCE’S MUSIC WAS REPPING THE BLACK EXPERIENCE FOR 40 YEARS (AND MANY OF YOU DIDN’T KNOW IT)

It’s been about three days after learning that Prince became an ancestor, and the sadness I continue to feel is strange — as if a part of my innards was forcibly extracted, a clearly unhappy event, but my brain refuses to fully compute what just happened. I’m not the only person with out-of-sorts emotions. Prince […]

SUNDAY SMACK: DID THE SAUDIS LET SLIP THEIR ROLE IN 9/11?

Exploring this week’s Sunday Smack about Saudi Arabia’s blockbuster threat to sell approximately three-quarters of a trillion dollars worth of treasury holdings and other US assets should Congress pass a bill that would make the The Saudis responsible for the September 11th attacks requires a background understanding of at least four areas: How the petrodollar […]

TEE-BALL, AND NO JAIL FOR HILLARY IN 2016

With this puzzling statement, President Obama provided a strong clue — despite evidence that Hillary Clinton could exchange her presidential campaign aspirations for an orange jumpsuit, and in the face of an ongoing FBI investigation of whether or not Deep State’s most favored candidate conducted classified State Department business on her private email apparatus — […]