Different Day, Same Shit.

Just a friendly reminder from yours truly that black history isn't something you can just shove into the shortest month of the year and promptly forget about it when that month ends. Every Month is Black History Month.

More and more haters are climbing out of the woodpile for our esteemed president. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, would-be/could-be/shouldn't-be contender for the 2016 presidential elections, who recently expressed doubts over POTUS's love of country and all it stands for, for better or worse. Meanwhile...

- The Great State of Alabama officially apologizes for mistaking an elderly Indian man for a really skinny black guy. You know how these things are and, well...they all look alike sometimes. Fortunately for Sureshbhai Patel and family, the Indian government has brought to bear tremendous pressure upon the state on their behalf, resulting in the offending officer's swift dismissal and arrest. Meanwhile, the black community looks on in envy.

- Police shootings are kinda getting out of hand. You shouldn't be shot 16 times in your own bed for grabbing your wallet. At least the victim got a $3 million settlement out of it.

- As it turns out, the conservative PACs that benefited most from Citizens United have been lining their own pockets by fleecing their donors:

Let’s say Ronald Reagan is still alive and someone starts the Re-Elect Ronald Reagan To A Third Term PAC. Because people love Reagan, let’s suppose that conservative donors pony up $500,000 to help the organization. However, the donors don’t know that Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the PAC. Furthermore, the real goal of the PAC is to line the pockets of its owner, not to help Ronald Reagan. So, the PAC sets up two vendors, both controlled by the PAC owner: Scam Vendor #1 and Scam Vendor #2. Let’s assume it costs $50,000 to raise the half million the PAC takes in. Then, the PAC sends $100,000 to the first company and $100,000 to the second company to “promote Ronald Reagan for President.” Each of the companies then goes out and spends $1,000 on fliers. The “independent expenditures” that show up on the FEC report? They’re at 40%. That’s because the FEC doesn’t require vendors to disclose how much of the money they receive is eaten up as overhead. The dubious net benefit that Ronald Reagan receives from an organization that raised $500,000 on his name? It’s $2,000. On the other hand, the net profit for the PAC owner is $448,000. Is that legal? The short answer is, “It’s a bit of a grey area, but, yes, it is legal.”

I'm not surprised. This is what happens when you open the floodgates to every grifter and con artist on the block.

- Dinesh D'Souza continues to fight for America's freedoms using the power of Twitter. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

And remember folks, a little rioting is healthy for the soul. Unless you happen to be black, then it's a mug's game for thugs or, as buyers of commemorative "I Am Darren Wilson" sweatshirts would say, "a good day for a good shoot."

I'll admit - I've been out of the loop these past few months. A lot of things have happened and there's a lot of ground to cover, but playing catchup, let alone keep up with a fast-paced news cycle that has a life expectancy shorter than Michael Sam's NFL career, takes time and effort. But I'll do my best, which leads me to ISIS.

Or IS. Or Islamic State, as it seems to be called at the moment. According to the mainstream media, it's a terrorist group that's shaped up to be the worst thing that's happened to the world since...well...this happened.* According to Gary Brecher, Pando Daily's (and formerly NSFWCorp's) very own War Nerd, it's just a collection of sullen Sunni Arab combatants who weren't happy about winding up on the losing end of the latest rounds of sectarian warfare. Sorta like the various Confederate revanchists who weren't happy about the dream of the southern planter class going up in smoke.

See that analogy? IS reminds us of a lot of things. The most recent antics of IS reminded Chauncey DeVega of a little thing that most good Americans have worked hard to studiously ignore, which is the lengthy reign of terror suffered by black Americans all throughout the post-Reconstruction and pre-Civil Rights era. Domestic terrorism, even under the guise of white anti-federalism as expressed by the likes of Timothy McVeigh, isn't really called that. That's a title generally reserved for leftist groups and people of Middle Eastern persuasion or non-Christian religious mores.

The people who were responsible for the 4,743 officially counted lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1968 - good, upstanding Christian Americans one and all - wouldn't have considered themselves "terrorists," nor are they referred as such anywhere other than the occasional comment on a black-oriented blog. Make no mistake - those acts were every bit as much terrorism as the act of hurling two fully-loaded jets into the tallest skyscrapers New York City had to offer. Both acts were designed to instill sheer terror in those watching or even hearing about them.* The main difference is that 9/11 was designed to strike terror into the heart of all Americans. With few exceptions, the average lynching struck terror in the heart of minority groups who weren't fortunate enough to have their rights as citizens and human beings respected.

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It's that comparison that apparently drew the ire of the War Nerd:

For people like Chauncey’s fans or Moyers’s admirers, nothing that happens outside the US matters at all. Only our sins are important. So a man burned alive in the Syrian desert becomes nothing but an excuse for a sermon on American History X, because only America matters, only America’s sins are real.

Brecher's beef lies with how, along with Bill Moyer, DeVega seemingly discounts Muadh al Kasasbeh’s death in favor of expounding on America's own flaws and ills. It's something that many of the more conservative types accuse liberal minded folks of doing - gleefully pointing out how America's just as bad as the bad guys it fights. It's no wonder this apparent failure to acknowledge this act and its ramifications in the broader geopolitical world in favor of domestic navel-gazing somehow struck a nerve:

Try imagining Chauncey or Bill minimizing an IDF phosphorus bombing in Gaza the way they trivialize this IS pyro video. Phosphorus burns people alive just as horrifically as kerosene, but would Moyers or de Vega trivialize Palestinian kids burnt alive with phosphorus by saying, “Remember the KKK! We’re just as bad!” Never. Because everyone would scream, quite rightly, that they were trivializing the IDF’s atrocity.

But both these fools spend thousands of words trivializing IS snuff movies, because…ah, it’s too stupid to paraphrase, but it goes something like this: “The US is the root of all evil, so IS is only acting out because it’s a victim. We did something bad to it somehow.”

If Brecher thinks DeVega is minimizing terrorist actions overseas by throwing up comparisons to lynching, then he should probably step back and consider this from the perspective of the average black person, a person unencumbered by the sectarian shit-kicking antics of a dying terrorist group in a land beset by sectarian strife and international intervention, but sorely affected by an entire institution seemingly sanctioned to commit a much quicker and more solitary form of lynching.

To the average black person on the street, the doings of IS pale in comparison to what they've directly and collectively experienced at the hands of America's own oft-acknowledged terrorist groups, with plenty of ongoing help from state institutions that continue to instill terror in black Americans to this day.

To say that DeVega gives few damns about what the IDF does to Palestinian children because what the NYPD does to young black Americans by far and large somehow overshadows the former is...well...a damn sight moronic in its own right, as DeVega himself points out. As for the distress over how lefty liberals are loath to go all-in on IS-bashing, Moyer's biggest fear is how it might lead to a renewed occupation effort by U.S. forces - the very thing that many on the left had fought tooth-and-nail against during the salad days of Iraq.

I respect the War Nerd's work, as it offers a no-bullshit perspective of current events (which is why I enjoyed NSFWCorp in the first place) and the occasional no-holds-barred takedown of some of the more egregious assholes who've somehow managed to actually get paid for their fluff work (I see you, Jen Percy). But he's off-base on this one. Even the commentariat over at Pando's calling foul.

* That's right Mack, just crack open the hornet's nest with your bare fist.