David Chalian, that little twit, did all in his power to dim my joy this past Tuesday. Oh lawds, he tried. Who is David Chalian, you may ask? According to CNN, “David Chalian is a vice president and CNN's Political Director where he oversees political coverage across all CNN platforms.” He really should be fired. He isn’t doing a very good job.
On Monday, under the direction of the little twit, CNN devoted the whole day to talking about the NYT/Siena poll. On Tuesday, it was time for CNN to promote its own poll, which, surprise, surprise, also showed Biden trailing That Mutha. We were treated to rounds and rounds of repetitious, superficial word salads coupled with self-aggrandizing BS passing for analysis. According to CNN and its analysts, Democrats were looking at certain defeat in all elections to come because President Biden is weak, feeble, and disliked nationally. The Democrats are doomed! It was a very depressing day. I left for a while and came back to check the election results, and the first graphic I saw was for Kentucky. David Cameron 56% to 43% for Andy Beshear. Oh, Lord no! My heart sank.
Things didn’t stay bleak for very long. Pretty soon it became obvious that the tide was turning and we may be in the midst of a blue wave. Ohio results were coming in; Andy Beshear had pulled ahead and seemed uncatchable; Virginia results were coming in; all good news. But CNN and David Chalian wouldn’t let up. We heard phrases like “most unpopular president,” “drag on the ticket,” “didn’t want to appear with him.” Oh, they had a field day at Biden’s expense. But now my joy is rebounding and no way I’ll allow them to ruin it. I finally switched channels.
By the end of the night, David Cameron had lost; Younkin was denied the honor of announcing his grand entrance in the Republikkkan primary; Dr. Yusef Salaam was winning; and Cherelle Parker became Philadelphia’s first female mayor. Celebration time.
For Breonna! Of all the results on Tuesday night, this one gave me the most joy:
This captured my mood perfectly:
A bleak day turned into a joyous night. The big losers? David Chalian, CNN, and That Mutha. Now on to 2024!
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Court records indicate that the complainant in Dameion Pickett's case is a white man who was on the pontoon boat at the time of the altercation and is also facing a third-degree assault charge. The Grio: Black co-captain involved in Montgomery riverfront brawl charged with assault
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The Black co-captain involved in the viral brawl at Montgomery’s Riverfront Park has been hit with third-degree assault charges.
According to AL.com, municipal court records indicate that the complainant in Harriott II co-captain Dameion Pickett‘s case is Zachery “Chase” Shipman, who was on a pontoon boat at the time of the altercation and is also facing a third-degree assault charge.
The viral Aug. 5 brawl involved the Harriott II’s Black crew and passengers and white pontoon boat occupants. The melee started after the pontoon boat from Selma prevented crew members from docking the large vessel.
Viral recordings showed a group of white individuals attacking Pickett while other Black people came to his aid.
In a police report, Crystal Warren, the mother of a 16-year-old crew member participating in the incident, said someone used racial insults against Pickett during the brawl.
“You could here (sic) men yelling ‘f–k that n—-r’ and the men came down to fight my son,” Warren wrote in her report. However, she testified in October that she did not hear a racial slur.
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While attention is rightly focused on the catastrophe in Gaza, millions elsewhere are suffering — and the world doesn’t seem to care. VOX: The world’s largest child displacement crisis is in Sudan
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The civil war in Sudan, which pits forces loyal to the country’s de facto ruler, army Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the paramilitary leader Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, began when fighting broke out on April 15 in the country’s capital of Khartoum. Since then, at least 9,000 civilians have been reported killed and more than 12,000 injured, though the true number is likely far higher.
Fighting in Khartoum and in the western region of Darfur — which had already been subject to genocidal violence, leading to the deaths of as many as 300,000 people over the past two decades — has led to a horrific humanitarian crisis. Some 4.8 million people — more than a 10th of Sudan’s population — have been displaced internally, while more than a million Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries like Chad and Egypt.
Children, as always, are bearing the brunt of the suffering. Just this week, even as Israel’s bombs continued to fall upon Gaza, UNICEF issued a report calling Sudan the “largest child displacement crisis in the world,” with more than 3 million children forced to flee their homes and 14 million children in need of life-saving humanitarian assistance. With classrooms closed since the war began, an estimated 19 million children are out of school — a devastating situation in a country where the median age is just 18 years old.
More than 70 percent of the country’s healthcare facilities have been forced to close, contributing to deaths from cholera, malaria, dengue, and childbirth in a nation that already had some of the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality even before the war. Refugees are at risk of sexual violence and even slavery; children have been forcibly recruited into the armed forces. It is a state, as UNICEF put it, of “perpetual fear.”
“We cannot allow the death and suffering of millions of children in Sudan to become another forgotten humanitarian catastrophe,” UNICEF said in its report on Monday. And yet that is precisely what is happening.
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A Kenyan pharmaceutical company, Universal Corporation Limited, has become the first manufacturer in Africa to receive World Health Organization (WHO) approval to produce a lifesaving malaria drug.
The antimalarial drug, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine plus amodiaquine (Spaq), is frequently used to prevent seasonal malaria in children during months of peak transmission periods such as rainy seasons. Previously, demand for drugs such as Spaq in Africa has been met through the importation of generic versions of the medicine from India and China.
“This WHO pre-qualification is a significant step toward reducing the over-reliance on imported drugs and strengthening Africa’s self-sufficiency in providing essential healthcare solutions,” said Perviz Dhanani, managing director at Universal Corporation Limited.
More than 70% of drugs used in Africa are imported, and only six out of hundreds of pharmaceutical companies in Africa are WHO “prequalified”.
Some of the barriers to quality local production of drugs include high operation costs, inadequate technical expertise, lack of investment in the pharmaceutical industry, and drug regulation and quality issues. Falsified or substandard antimalarials are estimated to cause up to 116,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa every year.
Approval from WHO, indicating that a company’s manufacturing processes and quality control meet international standards, can make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to enter new markets and attract the biggest buyers of such treatments, including large donor-driven organisations.
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Hinds County, Mississippi, a predominantly Black county that leans Democrat, ran out of ballots in nine precincts for Tuesday’s election, and none of the five election commissioners have answered an essential question: How many ballots did they print initially for a critical election in which residents would elect a governor, lieutenant governor and eight members of the executive branch including the treasurer and attorney general?
According to state statutes, counties must provide ballots for a minimum of 60% of the registered voters. In Hinds County, there are more than 149,000 registered voters, according to the election commission website. That means they should have printed at least 89,400 ballots.
Hinds County is 73.5% Black, with a median income of $46,179 and 25% of the population lives in poverty.
Mississippi’s Secretary of State Michael Watson addressed the 60% requirement. “That doesn’t mean they can’t have more, but that’s the minimum,” Watson told Mississippi Today. “The counties then decide how they are going to disperse the ballots as needed.”
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