Waka Flocka Flame And Other Insane Resurrection Day Inspirations

I never really thought of Easter as a holiday growing up. Back then, Easter meant interminable treks through department stores, looking for new clothes. A longer than usual church service, where you sat scrunched up next to people because all of the once-a-year Easter visitors who came that Sunday.

The only saving grace was the food.

I still don’t think of it as a holiday, but S. does. Which means we have a feast, the kind that requires us to pull out a hundred dishes that will take two hours to clean up afterwards. A variety of wine. Scrumptious desserts. And then we sit down to eat after church, where I am now one of those once-a-year Easter visitors who makes everybody sit closer to their neighbors than they really want to be, and eat and talk for hours.

There is something about the languorousness of it all, the slow progression from your first serving to your second, the settling effect that allows you to begin digging into dessert an hour or so after the main course, and the warm patina a few glasses of wine give to the whole thing, that makes it feel positively Italian, if real Italian family dinners are as decadent and baroque as the ones we see depicted in the movies. It felt even moreso this year when the Resident Diva dubbed my brother “Luigi” out of the blue, after the Super Mario Brothers video game character.

The conversation is, loosely speaking, a round robin affair, with stories and gossip and imaginatively recounted memories that are poignant and hilarious and heartfelt all at once.

Which is how I learned who Waka Flocka Flame is.

How my brother, isn’t much younger than me, knows who this rapper with no album is is beyond me. But the Resident Diva, who was as surprised as I was that my brother knew this, took the storytelling baton from my brother and kept running with the tale about the rapper with the crazy name.

The name was so funny I kept saying it over and over.

Waka Flocka Flame

Then I open up my USA TODAY yesterday(yeah, I know, its a schlocky excuse for a newspaper, but hey, I’m a writer – a social and political commentator, no less - you gotta look everywhere for ideas these days) and I see that Michael “Money Mike” Steele has got all his executive rats jumping ship.

Waka Flocka Flame

I turned on the TV last night to see slimy Republican hatchet man Alex Castellanos, who was an unpaid advisor to Steele just last month, stare into the camera and call for Steele to step down. Castellanos looked as if the big money boys in the GOP had a gun in his back. If you ran diagnostics on the video with some super sensitive recording analyzer you could probably pick up a faint “TELL THAT NEGRO TO WALK THE PLANK! NOW!” coming through the Castellanos earpiece.

Waka Flocka Flame

Steele, looks like you are on the ropes. The way “Luigi” and I and a few of my other brown-skinned consigliore’s see things, your boys have two choices. They can offer you a cushy landing pad at one of these fake ass think tanks they pay to print up propaganda and drop $30,000 or $40,000 a month in your direct deposit for a year or two, to keep you quiet…

…or jump into this dogfight to get you out of office with both feet and risk having you spill the beans on the whole operation.

If I were you, “Money Mike”, I’d call in Waka Flocka Flame. Tell the board you are working on a “resurrection” of your chairmanship, and Mr. Flame is your first new “disciple.” Keep it simple - make him your “fuck you” consultant. From what I’ve seen in the videos on youtube, he is very, very good at saying “fuck you” with meaning – not Samuel L. Jackson type good, but pretty damn good for a rookie who says he’s only been rapping for six months.

Could you imagine Brian Williams having to report on that shit? "In today’s political news, RNC political consultant Waka Flocka Flame dropped the 'F-bomb' 37 times…in one sentence during a fundraising call before exhorting large donors to 'help us get our stacks up, bitches' for the fall election season."

Think about it, Money Mike.

You’ve got nothing to lose. You would make history. Who knows? The RNC board might even kick in a NetJets lease for 12 months “to ease your transition” if you brought enough real flavor to the office to scare the shit out of them.

That’s W-A-K-A F-L-O-C-K-A F-L-A-M-E

Blacksheep Political Consulting won't even send you a bill for this hour, Mike...

...but we'll be happy to let you take us to the strip club the next time you're in the ATL.

GOP In Talks With Blacksheep Political Consulting To Revamp Message

It looks like Blacksheep Political Consulting will have to quit living off the money it defrauded its last paying clients out of by guaranteeing to deliver the Vietnamese immigrant vote for Congressman Roscoe P. Coltrane (RR-GA) and come out of semi-retirement to give the beleaguered Republican Party a hand.

Because whoever they are paying to advise them now needs to be brought up on crimninal charges.

This latest shenanigan - the Senate work slowdown - at a time when what's left of their tattered image is tottering over the edge of a cliff is beyond frat boy stupid, beyond redneck rowdy. These are the kinds of actions that make me think of an old dog that starts walking around in circles just before it lays down to die.

But don't worry, John Boehner and friends - Blacksheep Political Consulting is coming to the rescue, just as soon as we can set up the off-shore account where you're going to wire our fees.

There are no guarantees though - we've learned our lesson from the Vietnamese unregistered voter fiasco.

But I know I can do better than Frank Luntz, your messaging guru. As a matter of fact, I can turn your whole year around with just one change.

"Quit contradicting yourselves."

Well, okay, two changes - "quit contradicting yourselves" and "find somebody other than old fish faced Mitch McConnell to stand in front of the cameras with nasty-assed frown - he is scaring away every voter under 35."

And before you start getting all defensive, Mr. Agent Orange Orange Red, I just want you to look at the research/stuff we are "borrowing" from Russell King's blog so you can see what the public sees when they see the GOP:

You can't flip out -- and threaten impeachment - when Dems use a parlimentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that is centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.


You can't vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it's done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) --  114 of your members (at last count) did just that -- and it's even worse when you secretly beg for more.


You can't fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.


You can't call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.


Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war" at Gitmo? You can't have it both ways.


You can't carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.


You can't refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn't meet with you.


You can't rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters.   Repeatedly.


You can't rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.  (It was Bush who came up with that one.)


You can't be for immigration reform, then against it.


You can't enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.


You can't flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same.  Bush.  Ford.


You can't complain that the president hasn't closed Gitmo yet when you've campaigned to keep Gitmo open.


You can't flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush.  Nixon. Ike. You didn't even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed (on the mouth) leaders of countries that are not on "kissing terms" with the US.


You can't complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent.  (And, no, Newt -- the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)


You can't attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn't issue any condemnation).  *Obama administration did the day of the event.


You can't throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when -- in fact -- only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.


You can't condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attemted terror attack on his.


You can't mount a boycott against singers who say they're ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he's ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Moaist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.


You can't cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it's too short.


You can't support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.


You can't demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.


You can't praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it "treasonous" under a Dem president.


You can't propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.


You can't be both pro-choice and anti-choice.


You can't damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you've paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.


You can't condemn critizising the president when US troops are in harms way, then attack the president when US troops are in harms way, the only difference being the president's party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).


You can't be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.


You can't vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of  'open debate'.


If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it's 2004 or 2010.  This is true, too, if you're taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN.  Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution.  This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God's stand, too.


When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can't send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).


You can't criticize Dems for not doing something you didn't do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.


You can't decry "name calling" when you've been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile.


You can't spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare.


You can't praise the Congressional Budget Office when it's analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it's unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don't.


You can't vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don't. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.


You can't call a reconcilliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.


You can't spend tax-payer money on ads against spending tax-payer money.


You can't condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the madates were your idea.


You can't demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don't.


You can't whine that it's unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party's former leader admits you've been doing it for decades.


You can't portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.


You can't complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you've routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain -- threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented -- and admitted it.  Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.


You can't question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn't object when your own Republican president appointed them.


You can't preach and try to legislate "Family Values" when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer's wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coherce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife's mother. ***

You say you didn't catch how much Blacksheep's fee was, Agent Orange Orange Red? Well, since your RNC chairman Michael Steele insists that "a million dollars really isn't a lot of money" just add another zero to that bid we emailed to you.

You know how it is. Jet fuel is kinda high these days. And with Tiger screwing up the bimbo market, our "out of pocket" expenses could run to six or seven figures...

...easy.



***This list REALLY WAS compiled/created/crafted by Russell King of Street Prophets  -  if you go by his site to thank him, where he has a much, much longer list of GOP "can't do's", please let him know that his check from Blacksheep Political Consulting is "in the mail." 

Dip, Baby Dip!

When I read the other day that Michael Steele was the person credited with inventing the phrase "Drill, Baby, Drill", something in the article about hip hop made a connection somewhere deep in my memory banks.

"Drill, Baby, Drill", the phrase so enthusiastically chanted at Republican gatherings after Sarah Palin came on the scene, was an adaptation of "dip, baby dip", a constant refrain in the song Tootsee Roll by the rap group 69 Boyz. There is no anthropological proof to back up my claim - the many Wicked Wednesdays I whiled away in nightclubs years ago are all the evidence I need to satisfy me about my hypothesis.

I guess Michael Steele wasn't kidding about liking hip hop after all. Now that I think about it, he looks like the kind of dude who fell through the club after a political rally, his tie still around his neck, bobbing his head as he tried to fit in with the Downtown Browns back in the day who were sporting their after work uniform - multicolored Jhane Barnes shirts and designer cologne.

The good thing about Wicked Wednesdays, at least in the places I hung out, was the way a guy from the Urban League could hang out with the guy from DA's office, the way the doctors could hang out with the funeral home owners, the way the teachers and principals could hang out with the TV and record producers, the way the Democrats could hang out with the Republicans, because no matter what niche any of us came from, we all had to go to the same place if we were interested in shaking our behinds for a little while.

It was the two images the Republican chant evoked - square jawed, tow headed white men chanting about domestic oil drilling to the same tempo that square jawed, freshly barbered black men used to chant at nightclubs across the country years ago as they two stepped in time to the tempo of their dance partner's rear end - these two images, twining themselves around each other, have amused me to no end the last few days.

"Dip, baby, dip!"

"Drill, baby, drill!"

I was reading a post on the blog Average Bro the other day about how Average Bro was rethinking his attitude to Michael Steele when I understood this feeling of lost kinship I'd been having lately, because I am tired of laughing at the brother. This is no longer funny. At the end of the day, Steele is still black, just like Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice are still black.

Right now, I feel the same way about Mr. Steele that I do about a football team that gets behind three touchdowns in the first quarter. Even if the losing team is playing the Falcons, my home team, I have to pull for their opponent when the score is that bad – otherwise the game is no longer interesting.

So Michael Steele, while your fellow Republicans are hemming, hawing, twitching and resorting to doublespeak in order to accept and reject you in the same breath during all the political gabfest shows this morning, I will start cheering for you whole heartedly – not for your policies, or any reverence for the office that you hold within the GOP, but because I hate to see black men of any political stripe (other than Alan Keyes) get humiliated day after day on national TV.

Rush The Magic Ego

My buddy called me Tuesday afternoon. There was a little anger in his voice.

"Who are these people who listen to Rush Limbaugh? Aren't they the same people who have retirement accounts and stocks and bonds that are way down right now?"

"Dude, the niche market that Limbaugh talks to everyday figure you are the reason why their stocks are down."

"What?"

"You think I'm kidding - how many times have you heard the cause of the mortgage crisis was Community Reinvestment Act lending? 'Weakness in the moral fiber of minority communities caused stock market collapse' is the kind of shit you might be hearing soon."

My buddy paused for a minute, sighed, then asked, "have you been following this thing with Rush Limbaugh?"

"Which thing?"

"You know,” he continued, "the thing with the brother who is the RNC chairman - Michael Steele. What the hell is this?" It bothered him to no end that Limbaugh had the last word in this sparring through the media "If Steele is supposed to be the head of the RNC, then isn't he the head of the party? And if he’s the head of the party, then why is he apologizing to Limbaugh? A man doesn't do that."

And just like that, he had come to the crux of the matter. My buddy, who normally could care less about what was going on with the Republican Party, was steaming mad because Steele was not acting the way he thought a real man should, especially when Limbaugh wasn’t officially anything but a radio host.

"Dude," I said, "you’ve lived down here in the South for a long time, but you don't get it yet. You, you look at the president, and you see a well educated, intelligent, thoughtful, organized, motivated black man who has just as much right as anybody else to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

But there are quite a few people in this country who see Buckwheat.

A Buckwheat who outsmarted their all-time favorite enemy, the Wicked Witch form Arkansas. To them, Obama is Buckwheat with a haircut and a blue suit on. Do you remember the Little Rascals? Buckwheat was cool with Spanky and the gang so long as they could laugh at him. Could you imagine him trying to take Spanky's place?"

"Then what the hell is Steele there for? Why would he stay in a job like that when he has no power? That brother needs to resign. Just quit."

"The kind of brother you want him to be doesn't get to be the head of the RNC. Although as you were talking, I was wondering how old J.C. Watts would have handled this if he had been in the same position."

For all the square jawed, resolute eyed men you normally associate with the Republican Party, these last two national minority representatives of the GOP do not fit the mold. Steele and Jindal do not have the "take no prisoners", "bulldozer" type of mentality that we often identify with Republican Party leaders. They do not look like the kind of men who are willing to take as much punishment as they dish out.

For that matter, Limbaugh doesn't either, but then again, he's never had to be elected to anything. His value isn't just followers - it is his ability to get people to send millions of dollars to a candidate or a cause, millions that Steele and Jindal can't generate, that comprises the real throne Limbaugh sits on.

"Dude," I continued, "you know how I am about this kind of stuff, since my father is a Republican. I don't take railing against Republicans lightly. But I don't think this is really about the Republican Party. Limbaugh might have dropped out of college, but even he can count – a 131 million people voted in the last election. It was a big turnout - there probably will be a whole lot less people voting in 2012 - but the 13 million or 14 million listeners he has have a problem.

They don't multiply well."

The kind of person who is a true believer in the stuff Limbaugh says are the kind of people who turn others off with their fanatical ideological rigidity. What the Republicans need right now are the kind of people who can turn people on."

Rush Limbaugh is well on his way to becoming another in a long line of men, like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, or Eugene McCarthy, who reach an apogee as a social change agent and then harden in place, their stances becoming more anachronistic by the day as the winds of change inevitably blow society in another direction until they turned into caricatures of their former selves.

It hit me later, when I was reading an interview Mr. Limbaugh did last year for the London Telegraph at his radio studio in Florida, that he is to politics what Richard Pryor was to comedy – an entertainer on the edge who is willing go into the political unknown. "That Cracker's Crazy", a play on Pryor's famous comedy album "That Nigger's Crazy" leaped into my head. If you watch Limbaugh's facial expressions while he's speaking, you quickly see that he has the comedian's instinct for satirical irony, a distinction that some of his listening audience is not always so quick to recognize.

When you look at all of the facets of Limbaugh's life that he compresses into the energy powering his three hour radio show everyday – his hearing loss, his multiple marriages, his larger than life father and grandfather, the drug abuse, his fear of being labeled a "racist" – you realize, the same way you did with Richard Pryor, that this is what living on the edge looks like.

'I don't have guests on my show because I don't care what other people think,' he tells me. 'Most guests are boring.' But it's not only others he is bored with, it is also, perhaps, himself. This may be what explains his recklessness, his bravado, his determination to say the unsayable. And perhaps it also explains why he never misses a beat, until you draw him out about himself — how he is difficult to live with, how he cried when his cat died, how, to his surprise, he found it helpful talking to a therapist. Only then does he hesitate.


Excerpt from the Telegraph.co.uk

Limbaugh seems to be the cat's meow right now, but he is as vulnerable as these men were. One of the worst things you can do is turn a friend into an enemy, because they know all your weak spots and all your intimate secrets. And when Limbaugh's political friends begin to realize that the Obama agenda is to actively continue to expand the electorate in the hopes of capturing even more congressional seats for the Democrats, while all they have is "1 X 1 = 1", the GOP hatchet men will be out for the frat boy with a vengeance as they try to keep the party from dying.

If Steele goes, at least he can say he was there. But if he stays on, he can shelve the hip hop initiative. Cancel the urban outreach. Just quit throwing good money after bad. Because the image that is playing in the minds of many black American men right now is not a good one.

Are Politics The New Black?

These days, black seems to go with everything.

To those who get most of their information about African Americans from TV and talk radio, this newest version of us - smart, articulate, attractive, and highly skilled at marshalling resources and attracting political support - must seem like an overnight sensation, a sudden invasion of the highest levels of American political power.

Michael Steele's ascension to the head of the Republican National Committee is a bigger watershed moment in some ways than Barack Obama's rise to the White House. Even if it is window dressing, as many suspect, and some Republicans already freely admit, I would imagine shock waves are being felt around the country, especially after Colin Powell's famous interview on Meet The Press last year in which he took Republican leadership to task after endorsing Barack Obama for president.

"Will Steele be another Powell?" is certain to be on the minds of many of the party faithful this weekend.

I talked to my father earlier today about the whole thing. He's been a Republican for over 30 years. A lot of my friends ask me how I square my own political views with his. The answer is, I don't have to. We actually don't talk about politics all the time, but when we do, a lot of our discourse revolves around the philosophical underpinnings of various political stances rather than the tit-for-tat, "party versus party" type of heated rhetoric you see so much on political gabfest shows.

Anyway, since he was on the phone, I asked him about Michael Steele. He didn't immediately address Steele, starting instead with Katon Dawson, Steele's main opponent, who is now famous for having held a membership until last year in a white's only country club. My father, who is normally a big booster of all things relating to our home state of South Carolina, gave a guarded assessment of Dawson. "If Katon had gotten elected, he wouldn't have been able to be very effective because of the baggage he would bring in with him."

So I pressed him about Steele again.

"It took him six votes!" he said, as if Steele's victory had been a struggle, rather than the triumph the media has proclaimed it to be.

"But he won," I said.

We talked a bit longer. My father wondered how much that a need to pander to the nation's new fascination with black politicians had to do with this outcome. "If he doesn’t go in their trying to take over right away, he might have a chance to do something," my father said, although the tone in his voice was wary.

We didn't get a chance to talk about the party's dynamics, and how this was going to interface with the Rush Limbaugh end of the GOP. Internet blogs are already beginning to call Steele Limbaugh's assistant. It remains to be seen whether Limbaugh is willing to sacrifice the allegiance of his radio audience by attempting to push for a more inclusive party, which is certain to cost him many of his staunch "us versus them" listeners.

Ron Brown was in the same position Steele was when he was the first African American to run the DNC – the Democrats were in disarray, and the Reagan Republicans were steamrolling everything in site. Whether or not Republican operatives can be as open to working with Steele as the Democrats were when they finally warmed up to Brown remains to be seen.

If Steele is going to suit up as the GOP's "anti-Obama", then they are going to have to give him the tools to work with, and get out of the way. This was a tall order for the Democrats back in the 80's, and it is an even taller order for the Republicans today. The faith of many of the party faithful is about to be tested in ways they would never have imagined a year ago.

Are politics the new black?

Not yet.

Maybe that will be the case when we get to the point when there are viable, competitive African Americans who campaign for senator, governor, and even president under the GOP banner the way the Democrats have finally begun to do it.