ARE THEY THAT AFRAID OF WOMEN?

Or Is It the Fact That It’s a Black Woman?

Recently we’ve been hearing more of this type of story, where black women are being verbally and/or physically attacked by loud, combative, usually drunk white men, who don’t seem to give a hoot in a holler whether or not there are witnesses, including in some cases the woman’s minor children. (Click for another story like this) I wonder what it is about black women that seems to set them off. I couldn't find any answers to that question, but click here to read the results of a research study into white men's attitudes toward black women that I found very interesting.

Confederate Flag-Waving Man Arrested After Pointing Shotgun at Black Woman, Vandalizing Car

Thomas Lee Campbell

Thomas Lee Campbell, 54, was charged with brandishing a firearm and vandalism after he allegedly threatened Cierra Mayes with a shotgun and vandalized her car.

A Virginia woman says she was terrified after a white man waving a Confederate flag pointed a shotgun at her and vandalized her vehicle, WTVR reports. 

Cierra Mayes was at a community yard sale Sunday morning when the incident occurred. According to police, Thomas Lee Campbell, 54, got upset after he saw a car parked in front of his home. Campbell allegedly jammed tree branches inside the vehicle, which belonged to Mayes, damaging the windshield.

Mayes discovered the branches in her car after she and her father returned to the vehicle.

“That’s when I noticed a yellow note sitting right here on my windshield with big black letters that say F you,” Mayes told the news station. “I noticed someone was hurrying down their driveway so I went to the door and I knocked and I rang the doorbell, but immediately he came out yelling, saying racial comments.”

Mayes said she confronted Campbell about the note, and that that is when the 54-year-old went into his home and retrieved his shotgun. 

“He points it at me, and then pulls it back up,” Mayes said. “I literally just froze, because I’ve never been in a situation where a gun was that close to me and someone was actually pointing it at me.” 

One individual witnessed the entire incident from outside her front window. 

“He was outside of course yelling, screaming, cussing, and just being very belligerent,” said Marisa Turner. 

“He was waving his gun out and as soon as I saw that I went downstairs, because I said I’m not playing with this.” 

After brandishing the shotgun, Campbell, according to Mayes and other witnesses, went back inside his home and came out again with a Confederate flag, which he started waving around. Mayes called the police.

“At that point, it had just gone too far. There was damage done to my windshield. With the comments that he said, he pulled out a gun … I was concerned for my safety,” she said.

Let's Hope This Is The First and LAST One!

     This PR firm is using the Orlando victims to push 

a stupid novel!!

HAS EVERYONE LOST THEIR SENSE OF COMPASSION??

Some folks are trying to get all the use they can out of Orlando…. I am all agog at this company trying to be like the politicos (blaming Islamic terrorists) but doing it for a profit! Come on, these were human beings that were slaughtered, and you are not only using this tragedy to make money, you’re not even honoring those who were killed! You’re just wiping them off the page (no pun intended); whether you are for homosexuality or against it, you cannot pretend these people didn’t exist by putting all the focus on a fallacy so you can sell this guy’s book!!!

Stewie knows!

Here’s the story from Bill Browning’s Bilerico Report on LGBTQ Nation (There is some profanity):  

        

Ascot Media Group is the worst PR shop in the nation today. Maybe this week. Maybe forever.

The firm sent me a pitch using the victims of the Orlando massacre to try to get me to write about some guy’s shitty novel about a domestic terrorist. The book is two years old.

This was my reply. (You can read their entire email here) I left a review of the firm on their Facebook page. Maybe I should call them at (281) 333-3507 to express my outrage too. That’s the number listed on their website, after all.

Sadly, they may be the first out the door with this kinda thing, but they likely won’t be the last.

—
Are you seriously sending me a pitch that uses the victims of a massacre as the hook?

Are you seriously sending me a pitch that not only uses the victims to sell a goddamn book, but erases the fact that the victims were LGBT and Latino in favor of framing it as an ISIS attack?

Are you seriously sending me a pitch that not only ignores the existence of our friends and family that died in that attack, but then worries that churches – where the attacker learned his anti-LGBT views – will be the next target and THAT should be our worry (so buy his book!)?

And finally, are you sending me all of this horrifically offensive garbage to sell a novel – a work of fiction – and linking to the news station (FOX) that has given all sorts of Republican assholes a platform to claim that our marriage will “irrevocably harm” society, that transgender people will rape your child in restrooms, and that our love is equal to dogs having sex?

The bodies aren’t even cold and you’re trying to use them as a prop to sell a shitty novel. Fuck you. Fuck him. And fuck Ascot Media Group.

Never email me again.

Bil

Guilt By Association

Disclaimer: The following is not being written for or against anyone directly involved in the case. It is a statement of fact as the author knows them, and the author makes no attempt to find the guilt or innocence of anyone involved in any act discussed.

Two months ago a 20-year-old woman named Leslie Rasmussen from Ohio was one of 39 people asked by a judge to write a character reference for someone she knew who was going to trial.  The instructions were fairly clear. "Per the request of the court, I was asked to write this statement in an effort to shed light on his character as I knew it to be during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood when I interacted with him as a classmate and friend."

Seems pretty straightforward, right? Just write about what he was like back when she knew him. No prob. WRONG!! Big problem.  You see, the person she was asked to write about was someone being vilified now in the media; it was convicted Stanford racist Brock Turner. Now that he’d been found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail, the case was on everyone’s lips. Some felt he should receive leniency, considering he had no previous record for anything and was the big swimming jock on campus, while others felt he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of the lack of a police record or the lack of physical violence in his crime. It was a heated debate, and because she wrote what the court asked her to write, Ms. Rasmussen had landed squarely in the cross hairs of a lot of the public.

Now, I have questions, first off being why was her letter released to the media in the first place? The trial was barely over, and not only her letter but Turner’s father’s letter to the court pleading for leniency for his son were both released to social media, which began to tear them both to pieces. Why were these letters not confidential? Then, what happened to the letters of all the other people who were asked to write a character assessment? Why was hers singled out?

                Leslie Rasmussen plays drums in a band called Good English with her sisters. They have released two albums and WERE all set to tour this summer.  Not anymore, and this is the thing that gets me.  The band was set to play a venue on June 11^th, and were immediately cancelled after hearing about the letter on social media!! They didn’t even confirm the truth of the matter, or try to find out if the details were exaggerated, they just immediately cancelled the band’s appearance! Their reason? "We will not tolerate the support of rape culture.”!!!  The company responsible for the band's publicity label, Behind the Curtains Media, also decided to cut ties with the group, and their reason was the same. AND, all the band's social media accounts were closed!

Now, here’s the problem I see with that. While anyone has the right to do business with anyone they wish, it was Leslie Rasmussen the old friend of Turner’s who wrote the letter, not Leslie Rasmussen the drummer for Good English!! It might have been different if she were the out front lead singer who was always making headlines, but that wasn’t the case; I’m quite sure that a lot of people didn’t even know who she was when the band played! She’s a 20 year old girl who was asked by the court to write about someone she went to school with, and that’s what she did! Why is the entire band being punished for that? No, it’s more than being punished; the band has been castigated almost out of existence for something that THE BAND had nothing to do with! We’re not talking about Pussy Riot here (read story) where all the members were involved; this was something that one person did all by herself. They had contracts with this band and cancelled them! They’ve taken away their livelihood for goodness’ sake, for something one person did…. I just can’t stand it!

Here is what has everyone so up in arms against her and the band:

In her letter to the court, Rasmussen calls Turner "respectful and caring, talented, and smart enough to know better.” “It’s pretty frustrating to see the light that people are putting him in now. It used to be 'swim star' and now it's like he is the face of rape on campuses," she wrote.

But it was her perceived excuse for his actions that spurred public indignation.

"I don't think it's fair to base the fate of the next 10+ years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn't remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him," her letter read. "I think it is disgusting and I am so sick of hearing that these young men are monsters when really, you are throwing barely twenty-somethings into these camp-like university environments, supporting partying, and then your mind is blown when things get out of hand."

            Wow. Okay, so what she said may not have been what most people wanted to hear; as a matter of fact, some of it sounds like what a defense attorney would say when trying to get him off. To me personally though I don’t think it sounds like she “supports a rape culture”, it sounds more like a young girl who doesn’t understand how her friend could be so hated and vilified when he never seemed to be like that. She sounds like a college student who has seen cases like this where the guy was never accused of rape, and she can’t understand why someone she knows IS. Still, what she said is no reason to cut the band off from its livelihood and punish them for what she said in a letter that should have (IMO) remained confidential anyway. And that’s basically it, to all those who have jumped on the bandwagon and want to see Good English crucified because of its association with Leslie Rasmussen, step back a minute and think; don’t you have a friend or two whose opinions you would not want known if you could be convicted by association with them? We all do. Give Good English a break. No matter how you feel about what their drummer wrote, it was just the drummer who signed that letter.

               

Ga. Man Arrested for Yelling ‘N–ger B–ch’ at 82-Year-Old Woman, Ramming Car

             So many people are saying that racism is dead, that we’re beyond that in this country, that black people are “using the race card” just to benefit themselves and not because it is actually warranted. You ask them, well what about the video tape of so-and-so getting shot while walking down the street? “We don’t know what happened before the beginning of the video; that’s just an isolated incident; you know people blow things out of proportion”; or any one of a number of other tired, clichéd excuses that they use to hide the fact that racism is NOT dead. As a matter of fact IMO it’s just as bad if not worse than it was in the Emmett Till days! 

             There's one area that's better today though, and that is the area of communications. We have cyberspace to get the news out, rather than relying on newsprint, so we find out about these cases a lot sooner than we used to!

            Using cyberspace also does one other thing; it documents any racist activities  so that it’s no longer a case of “black man said vs. white man said’. (And the white man always winning!)  Unfortunately, in a lot of cases being recorded hasn’t changed the behavior of some hard case, died in the wool bigots, especially those wearing their tin whistles and little blue suits! When the white man is wearing that costume, he’s still always winning!! 

                Anyway, on to today’s post.         

Sherman Crow

              

An 82-year-old woman out shopping with her daughter-in-law was cursed at and then had an airbag deploy in her face when the car she was riding in was rammed in a case of road rage gone amok.  Ira McPherson pulled up in front of the store to pick up her mother-in-law, Joan Wilson so that the elderly woman would not have to walk across the parking lot using her walker. As McPherson helped Wilson into the car Sherman Crow evidently became impatient and began to yell racist slurs at the women, “You nigger b**tch” among them. When Wilson was finally settled in the car, McPherson got in and the two women tried to pull out of the parking lot. Crow wasn’t finished with his tirade, however, and continued to yell slurs while repeatedly ramming his car into the women’s car.  He rammed it so hard that the air bags deployed, which, as we all know, can be life-threatening in itself! (click here for details) 

Police were called of course, and Crow was arrested. An officer escorting Crow to the patrol car later reported that “I could smell the strong odor of an alcoholic beverage as he was talking”.

Both McPherson and Wilson suffered minor injuries in the attack, and McPherson’s car fenders and doors were badly damaged.

Now this part really gets me. Crow was charged with reckless driving, reckless conduct, disorderly conduct, making terroristic threats, aggravated assault and driving with an unlawful blood-alcohol level, (all sound like misdemeanors to me) but this was the 2^nd time he’d been arrested for the same thing! The first time was in October of 2014, when he was arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, and simple battery charges after he allegedly yelled racial slurs at an employee when he was denied service at a local Subway. Crow also tried to climb over the fast-food store’s counter and attack the woman, throwing items at her! First, how does he get off with simple battery when he tried to go over the counter after her, and failing that, starting throwing things? Sounds more to me like assault!  He’s going to court June 28^th, and I sincerely hope they look at his record before giving him some light sentence like probation or six months’ suspended sentence! I mean, this guy has shown a pattern of violence and prejudice towards blacks and makes no bones about it. At his age, I seriously doubt if he’s going to stop it now.