Being African American, I have seen and heard many things in my life, many times because most people don’t know my heritage and speak freely of others who are different.
Early in my life there were Ku Klux Klan rallies in the south. No one stirred, protested, or decried the racism. It was expected and as a family we mourned the ignorance of others.
My first thought when I heard about the actions in Charlottesville horrified me. The deadly violence towards others in this circumstance is beyond my comprehension. An innocent woman killed while protesting racism and bigotry is unforgivable.
My second thought though, was that fifty years ago you would not have seen protesters decrying this display of bigotry and ignorance or hundreds of vigils around the country in response to the violence perpetrated by those who hate others simply for looking different.
I am a Grace VanderWaal fan, and I have been attending a lot of her concerts sitting in front of my desktop with a stereo headset on. She was 12 when she won America’s Got Talent (AGT) in 2016. She’s now 13 and has a mini album out with her first-five original songs on it. After winning AGT, she was signed by Columbia records and her first mini album was “Perfectly Imperfect” and reached #9 on the national charts in the United States and #11 in Canada. She also won the Radio Disney Music Award for Best New Artist and is pending for the Teen Choice Awards. She was nominated for Best Female Artist on the Acoustic Music Awards but didn’t win that one.
This YouTube concert starts with the first four songs Grace wrote and performed while competing on AGT. I don’t watch TV, so I never saw the original performances. I learned about Grace by accident a few weeks ago and have only watched her on YouTube.
28.17 minutes
The next video is her performance on stage in front of a huge audience. She sings her first original song, I Don’t Know My Name, and a new one called Moonlight.
8:46 minutes
Next, watch her first professional video where she sings her 5th original song, Moonlight.
about 3 minutes
Last, listen to her first album on VEVO’s You Tube channel
16:48 minutes
And if you want to use Google to find the original lyrics, they are available online. Once you read the lyrics of the songs Grace wrote when she was still 12 years old, I think it makes Grace’s YouTube concert experience even better. A friend of mine says Grace must have an old soul to have written those songs.
I have discovered that watching Grace perform and sing her own original songs is therapy for me. She helps drive back the darkness being spread by #FakePresident Donald Trump and his extreme alt-right cabinet of professional haters. J. K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, says Trump is worse than Voldemort.
UPDATE August 18, 2017
Grace returns to perform on America’s Got Talent almost one year after she won AGT in 2016. She is a superstar now, and this performance proves it.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
In his Op-Ed, Kirchick points out that 32-percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Putin, who was a career KGB officer that still hates America.
Kirchick says, “Russia has been targeting the American right since at least 2013, the year Putin enacted a law targeting pro-gay rights organizing and delivered a state-of-the-nation address extolling Russia’s ‘traditional values’ and assailing the West’s “genderless and infertile” liberalism. That same year, a Kremlin-connected think tank released a report entitled, ‘Putin: World Conservativism’s New Leader.’”
That 32-percent represents #FakePresident Trump’s rabid fan base. These are the Americans who would stick with him even if he appeared in San Francisco, or New York, or Los Angeles, or Seattle with an AK-47 and roughed up and/or slaughtered dozens. #FakePresident Trump would just say the people he shot deserved to die because they were immigrants, liberals, or gay.
The 32-percent (identified as Republicans) is also where #FakePresident Trump and the Alt-Right Republican Party will recruit their brutal police-state army. Then it will be open season on anyone the Trumpists don’t like or who dares to speak out against them.
Now, how about actual numbers, not a ratio or percentage. How many people are in that 32-percent that not only love #FakePresident Donald Trump but also approve of Putin, who hates the United States.
About 139 million Americans, or 60.2 percent of the voting-eligible population, cast a ballot in November’s (2016) elections, according to data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project.
“Overall, 48% of all registered voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic compared with 44% who identify as Republican or lean toward the GOP.”
48-percent of 139-million Americans that voted in 2016 = 66.72 million
44-percent = 61.16 million
32-percent of 61.16 million = 19.57 million.
Those almost 19.6 million Americans are #FakePresident Trump and Putin’s fan base.
According to the U.S. Census Population Clock, there are about 325.5 million people living in the United States. That means #FakePresident Trump and Putin’s supportive, rabid fans, the ones #FakePresident Trump and Putin pander to, represents 6-percent of the total population or about 7.8 percent of the adult population.
These are the Americans that will support an autocratic, totalitarian, racist, fascist, police state, and who are willing trash the U.S. Constitution so the rest of us lose our Constitutional protections and rights.
The 19.57-million people seduced by Putin are the Americans that will build the death camps and prisons for the rest of us. They are the extreme Alt-Right that will bow down to conservatism’s world leader, Putin, and his puppet, #FakePresident Trump.
This will only happen if we don’t stop them before it is too late.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Last month we placed the fake wines coming out of China under the microscope, asking our followers if they could spot the two fakes from the real deal. Alarmingly, very few people could tell the difference. Counterfeits are a big concern for all wine brands, and not just for Australia’s most iconic brand Penfolds. According to fraud experts, 20% of all wine currently circulating the globe is fake.
With that in mind, I reached out to Australia’s Scott Evers of www.wineauthentication.com.au to help us understand the world of counterfeit wine. Scott is one of only eight people globally to be mentored by the world’s leading wine fraud expert, Maureen Downey. When fully qualified, Scott will become a TCM Licensed Wine Authenticator. With Maureen’s unparalleled training backing him up, Scott offers this invaluable advice every winelover in the world should heed.
Drew (Wine Wankers): How prevalent are fake wines these days?
Here’s a high stakes testing statistic you won’t hear bandied about on the news.
The suicide rate among 10- to 14-year-olds doubled between 2007 and 2014 – the same period in which states have increasingly adopted Common Core standards and new, more rigorous high stakes tests.
To be fair, researchers, educators and psychologists say several factors are responsible for the spike, however, pressure from standardized testing is high on the list.
In fact, it is a hallmark of other nations where children perform better on these tests than our own.
As you know, I was for many years involved in the rightwing corporate reform made cement. As I realized that the real end game was not to “reform” public schools but to privatize them, I became a skeptic. Then as I saw that all of their strategies were failing, I jumped ship. I am often asked why I changed my mind, and I try to explain that I realized that the reform movement was a hoax, with no evidence to support its strategies.
It turns out that I was not alone.
Mike Lofgren was a top-level staffer for Republicans in Congress.
From Wikipedia: “From 1995 to 2004, he was budget analyst for national security on the majority staff of the House Budget Committee. From 2005 until his retirement in 2011, Lofgren was the chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee.”
If you are reading this and you think the United States is a democracy, and when we elect someone to a state legislature, a governor’s mansion, or to the US. Congress, they are there to serve the will of the people that elected them, you are wrong.
Did you notice that I left out the president of the United States in the lead paragraph? There is a reason I left out the president because that office is not elected by the popular vote. The president is elected by the Electoral College.
In fact, in this century, two of three presidents were elected by the Electoral College when they lost the popular vote. President G. W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 by 543,895 votes but Gore lost the Electoral College 266 to GWB’s 271. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won a popular vote margin over Donald Trump with a total of 65,788,583 to 62,955,363 respectively, a margin of approximately 2.8 million votes (although Trump won the presidency by securing 306 Electoral College votes, 36 more than he needed to claim victory).
Has the Republican Party learned how to manipulate the Electoral College to win the White House, and does that mean the election was rigged as Donald Trump repeatedly claimed?
No matter how one is elected, elected officials do not vow to serve the people, or their political party, or whoever donated the most money to their campaign. When elected, the winners take an oath of office to defend and serve the U.S. Constitution because that document was written to protect all the people even from themselves. The problem is that too many elected officials don’t serve or defend the U.S. Constitution.
If the actions of an elected representative or even an appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice or any judge reveals loyalty to their party, a billionaire, a corporation, the people that elected them, an ideology, and/or a religion, then they lied when they took their oath of office.
How did they lie? An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, _______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” – Cornell Law School
The President’s oath of office is similar: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” – National Museum of American History
The evidence is overwhelming that Donald Trump, and most if not all of his cabinet, lied when they took their oath of office, and they have already broken the oath repeatedly branding them traitors and liable for impeachment. Many members of both Houses of Congress are also guilty of violating their oath of office, because their actions and their votes brand them as loyal to billionaires, corporations, the political party they belong to, a religion, or an ideology.
Politico.com reports, “From early in his campaign, critics have been consistently astonished by his (Donald Trump) seeming indifference to the Constitution, as he has launched attacks on the press, on mosques, and on other institutions explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights. Or consider Trump’s private meeting with Republican members of Congress, when the candidate expressed his admiration for Article 12 of the Constitution, apparently unaware that there are only seven Articles.”
A little quiz to see if you learned anything from this post:
When it comes to being an American, who or what should all U.S. citizens give their loyalty to first? There is only one correct answer, and it isn’t “All of the Above,” because that is not an option in this quiz.
The President of the United States
The United States Congress
The U.S. Supreme Court
The U.S. Constitution
The American Flag
Apple Pie
Your mother
The state where you were born or where you live
The Bible
A corporation
A billionaire
A religion
The political party you belong to
The ideology you believe in: democracy, libertarianism, socialism, communism, conservatism, liberalism, Trumpism, etc.
The one correct answer also explains why the Catholic, libertarian Koch brothers want to rewrite and revise the U.S. Constitution that will match their interests and beliefs. PR Watch reports, “Kochs Bankroll Move to Rewrite the Constitution.”
Why is this dangerous?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
