Snoop From The Wire, My Favorite HBO Series Of All Time, Gets Got

I was talking to my buddy from Alabama last night when he mentioned that "Snoop" from The Wire had been arrested. So today, after taping a segment for the AFRO/First Edition political show, I asked host Sean Yoes about it, since he played Lt. Brent Hoskins on the same show.

"Actually," he said, "I wrote about it for Black America Web today."

'The Wire' Star's Arrest Imitates Her Real Life

Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates art far more often than art imitates life.”

Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, who portrayed the diminutive but cold-blooded drug assassin with the same name on HBO’s “The Wire,” has unfortunately lived out the life she played on cable and has landed in legal trouble again

As much as I enjoyed her authenticity, I had hoped that the dope game was a life she could finally leave behind.

Today At Big Think: Hillary Clinton Pins The Tail On The News Media

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

Hillary Clinton Pins The Tail On The News Media



Hillary Clinton, of all people, made my day last week when she said the news in the United States consists of “…a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads…” To add insult to injury, she held up Al Jazeera, the Arab news station, as a model of responsible information dissemination. But Clinton is absolutely right - our national nightly news shows and cable news channels are mostly a waste of time, whether you are looking for domestic news or world news. When you spend as much time on the internet as I do, not only do you already know all the details of stories they run, you can see how little information these elaborately produced newsroom efforts actually impart to viewers.


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President Obama, Stay The Hell Out Of Libya

Mr. President, there are too many white boys on your staff and in the news media and in the cartoon character gallery (this means you, Newt Gingrich), white boys that have never served a day in their god damned lives in any branch of this country’s military who have a got a tremendous hard-on these days for simply whipping out the artillery and going to town on some Libyan ass.

Contrary to popular belief, blue balls have never killed anybody. But can I guarantee you, Mr. President, that if you start sending our troops to Libya, less of them will come back alive than you sent there. Men with loaded guns in foreign countries, even when they are on humanitarian missions, can turn small battles into huge regional conflicts overnight. And in case the geniuses on your staff forgot, WE DON”T HAVE ENOUGH SOLDIERS LEFT TO FIGHT ANY MORE WARS RIGHT NOW than we are already in.

One private plane leaving the country with Gaddafi on it is all it takes to end this.

I’ve actually kind of gotten to like your posturing on the world stage, Mr. President. It is a lot cheaper for you to make pronouncements to the world than to tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff to gas up the tanks and the C-130’s. And in case you have forgotten what happens when the people in a country aren’t quite ready to push out their dictator, tell the boys at the Pentagon to send some highlight reels from their triumph in Iraq over so you can watch them in the White House movie theater. Meanwhile, even as the freedom fighters in Libya call for help, they have put a whole lot of pressure on Gaddafi to leave the country with the secret CIA troops we've given them all by themselves.

Another 30 days of civil war is about all Gaddafi can stand. It doesn't look good on the nightly news, but the citizenry of Libya who want to be free of their dictator have done a helluva job with the secret CIA troops we've given them all by themselves. The financial starvation diet you and your European allies have put him on is working, but it will take a little more time for him and his family to see the light.

What’s more dangerous to you right now than Gaddafi are these wannabe war mongers who are itching to let the world know that America can still blow shit up when it feels like it. Your “less is more” doctrine of letting events unfold according to their own timetable is driving the group of Type A control freaks you are surrounded with absolutely batshit crazy. They are all longing for the day when they can go out for some drinks after work with their buddies and brag about how many of the enemy our military killed today.

I mean, if the U.S. was really all that committed to being the humanitarian police, half of our troops would have already been scattered all over the African continent anyway, with a big ass military presence in Darfur and Somalia and Sudan.
If the oil flowing out of Libyan wells is important to America, just say so, and tell the people of Libya that their revolution will benefit as a result. But please, please, Mr. President, let’s leave all this he-man posturing that nitwits like Newt Gingrich want you to engage in with a “no-fly zone” alone, and keep your own counsel a little bit longer.

You have proven over the last two months that a little diplomacy and lot of lip service can go a long way in the Middle East.

Because 43 Billion Is Not Enough

It’s a great day in the morning when you get billionaires crying the blues in the Wall Street Journal op-ed section.

It’s an even greater one when that particular billionaire is Charles Koch, who has elected this year to play the role of the obscenely rich autocrat who is just fed up with all this cauterwauling from the masses about how much money he makes and how little taxes he really pays. He is just TIRED of people worrying about what government programs his corporations gladly participate in, because when you live in KochWorld, the government is only supposed to provide services and funding and tax breaks to those who hold the reins of commerce – all the rest of you lazy, good for nothing, molly coddled proletariat who just want police and schools and roads TO GET TO WORK ON to make KochWorlder types even more billions be damned.

"The interest of the second order, that of those who live by wages, is as strictly connected with the interest of the society as that of the first. The wages of the labourer, it has already been shewn, are never so high as when the demand for labour is continually rising, or when the quantity employed is every year increasing considerably. When this real wealth of the society becomes stationary, his wages are soon reduced to what is barely enough to enable him to bring up a family, or to continue the race of labourers. When the society declines, they fall even below this."

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume 1 By Adam Smith

It’s as simple as this for KochWorld inhabitants – all regular, non-millionaire and non-billionaire rank and file employees, or "second worlders", as Adam Smith puts it, whether you make $20,000 a year or $200,000, DO NOT DESERVE WHAT YOU MAKE.

You are overpaid, in the eyes of KochWorlders, if they are handing out anything more than it takes to sustain life. A dollar a day and a bowl of rice, in their calculations, would still leave you ahead of your Chinese counterparts in total compensation, and finally level the playing field enough, once those pesky TAXES and GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS have been removed, for them to make REAL MONEY.

It’s a fantasy most KochWorlders go to sleep by.

But that’s all it will ever be (have my TV economists all gone to sleep on the job? Or are they trying to figure out the exchange rate of a bowl of rice?), just a fantasy.

Because rich people can’t buy enough of anything to keep our economy running.

Because cutting corporate taxes doesn’t have anything to do with job creation. The trillions sitting on corporate balance sheets right now aren’t funding any new hiring initiatives, because there aren’t enough people with any money left to stimulate any kind of sustainable demand for any more goods or services than we consume right now. Cutting taxes saves a corporation money. Cutting taxes does not grow top line revenue, one of those bothersome but necessary results that happen when demand for a company's good or service actually increases. Cutting consumer wages in an economy driven by consumer spending seems to be the quickest way the United States can emulate the Roman empire's death spiral.

Putting even more money into the hands of people who won’t spend it (have you ever seen a billionaire back up a tractor trailer at a one day sale?) on anything but a raft of tax consultants to help them figure out how to avoid paying any taxes on it would stall an already unbalanced fiscal equation even further.

You are probably reading this at work. You need to quit reading and work harder, so the people on Wall Street who pushed the buttons that blew up the economy in the first place can be assured that you produce enough surplus value for your company and your 401(k) so they can roll the dice again.

Why has the nation’s toilet paper king has taken to writing op-eds? Because YOU PEOPLE JUST DON'T GET IT. His billions aren’t coming in fast enough. It’s high time someone had some sympathy for the rich and THEIR PROBLEMS, instead of worrying about paying EMT technicians and schoolteachers and firefighters – you know, those lowly Americans who buy practically every product KochWorld sells.