FactCheck: if the President says water is wet, FACTCHECK, Memphis version.

RantWoman is quitely collecting media accounts of various cities reactions to offers of national guard troops for no apparent emergency, especially when there are areas where there are emergencies that tne Guard is not getting sent to.

Let's talk about Trump, troops in Memphis, and a fact check....

PS. RantWoman is a big fan of Belle of the Ranch for concise and always pithy reporting and analysis

Jason Aldean comes to the Gorge, not exactly a large town even on big event weekends.

YouTube thinks RantWoman needs another video especially of African Americans telling people to CHILL OUT about Hason Aldean's "Try that in a small town."

Quote from the video below: "CMT took it down because it could incite violence (?)."

But of COURSE.

According to NPR, yes liberal nemesis to the President, Jason Aldean is performing at the Gorge in George WA this very weekend.

Watershed Festival 2025 Tickets | Gorge Amphitheatre

That explains YouTube sending RantWoman a bunch of reaction videos about his song 

Try That In A Small Town

Just to play along, RantWoman did a search and discovered a bunch of draft posts with still other Reaction videos. RantWoman is NOT going to post everything in drafts.

Instead RantWoman is going to link a previous well-read item.

Adventures of RantWoman: A few words from and about the earworm of the Week: Jason Aldean's "Try that in a Small Town"

New Protests at UW about Gaza crises

And a comment from Protest Curmudgeon

I am old. I think a VERY urgent message about the humanitarian crisis and ethnic cleansing in Gaza is getting lost. I fear that all the visuals will be dumpster fires and complaints about protestors' clothing choices. I have no patience with voices that clamor "domestic terrorism" in the presence of nonviolent protest. I am also sick of the idea that ANY insistence that Palestinian people have rights terrifies others. Long ago in a university across the country, I organized speakers about a number of topics. The ONLY topic that consistently got bomb threats was Palestinian human rights. Where does anyone imagine THOSE bomb threats came from?

Demand the FULL podcast: Michelle Obama edition

Michelle Obama: This Is A Scam! People Were Running From Us Because We W...

Former First Lady Michelle Obama probably does not need RantWoman to stand up for her. Thanks, though, to Elon's sandbox and one of RantWoman's X contacts who definitely thinks differently than RantWoman, RantWoman's Sunday has been blessed with a window into the #MAGA infoverse.  Reminder: this is the same infoverse that for years has been proclaiming Michelle a man, based solely on Michelle in one of her podcasts phrasing a question to a Black Man she was interviewing "As a black man, (what do you think...?"

In today's moment, well into the video below, Michelle speaks about how it's expensive to live in the White house and the family is expected to pay for every bite of food and their daughters' plane fares when they travelled with Michelle on her plane, not with their dad on Air Force One. Michelle goes on to talk further about how having young kids in the White House does not happen with every President and how much she had to put her foot down to make space for her family.

Because the venue of RantWoman's initial encounter with this topic was X and the clip only showed the short comment about the cost of being President, the replies and quote tweets (sorry Elon, not sorry about word choice) were all about people frothing at the mouth about how out of touch Michelle is compared to everyone else's realities.

RantWoman wanted to scream and demanded from her X correspondent a link. RantWoman still had to do a bit of search on her own, but OH LOOK. Michelle grew up in a two-room apartment in an aun't house. Her dad had a disability and a career as a civil servant. People who can't handle people, on the strength of their own hard work and striving plus a few book contracts, starting from this kind of modest beginning, paying off law school debts, and now being able to afford several properties just need to get over themselves! Maybe listen to the full arc of Michelle and Barak's lives, choices they made in service to the country and stop participating in mindless smears!

There. End of Rant, for now.

Now please appreciate all that there is to appreciate in this video..

PS. One of RantWoman's favorite quotes, paraphrased: "We are being led by people who have not found their best selves."

Apply Now for Community Leadership Initiative program

APPLY BEFORE APRIL 30

 Community Leadership Institute (CLI) offers a stipend and a competitive leadership program that prepares emerging BIPOC leaders and other marginalized communities to serve strategic City, County, and Statewide Boards and Commissions as well as transferable skills for their careers.

Are you interested in becoming a Community Leadership Institute fellow?

Sage Leaders’ Community Leadership Institute (CLI) is a fellowship program that resources, educates, and places emerging leaders from communities of color and low-income communities to serve on strategic municipal boards and commissions.

Launched in 2015, the six-month fellowship trains emerging leaders in issues such as housing, land use, transit, climate, and economic development. Graduates learn the nuts and bolts of local government processes, such as municipal budgeting, parliamentary procedures, and lawmaking, as well as advocacy, storytelling, and communication skills.

After graduation, the fellows apply for and are placed on strategic boards, commissions, and task forces at the city and county level. Through participation, CLI alums have the opportunity to move forward a racial equity agenda at a government level by asking critical questions about who benefits and who is burdened by policy decisions and offering solutions that integrate community participation and perspectives as part of the decision-making process.

2025 - 2026 Community Leadership Institute (King And Pierce CountIES)

Location: In-person in Seattle, WA (Open to all applicants in King and Pierce Counties or can attend in person in Seattle, WA)

Dates: September 2025 to April 2026

Contact: Francis Abugbilla

Application Timeline: February 24 to April 30, 2025 at 11:59 pm PST

Apply Now

 

--

Celebrate (?) Seattle's Infamous Redlining Guide.

Okay, Okay, RantWoman will NOT give in to all the ways one could misread the event title.

Instead, RantWoman VERY much esteems the work the following invitation represents, both diligent research and, as RantWoman can attest, creation of electronic content with lots of great accessibility features.

RantWoman is going to let the rest of the event speak for itself.

Please enjoy the electronic walking tour even if you don't make it to the celebration described below.

Thanks to a grant from 4Culture and support from friends, the new self-guided digital walking tour, Seattle's Infamous Redline Guide is ready for release. It can be downloaded for free from the App Store, Google Play, or on the web.

Please help us celebrate! The celebration takes place Saturday, March 22, 2-4 pm at HOME | Made Space Seattle 

The tour begins with the founding of the Central District by William Grose, through the rise of a vibrant community despite the city's efforts to exclude Black people from land and wealth, and ends at Africatown Plaza and Wa Na Wari with an invitation to join efforts to fight displacement and build Black prosperity. Now more than ever, we need to remember the past as we work for a positive future.

Please come celebrate with us, and spread the word. You can let us know who's coming by clicking the link in the attached invitation

Hope to see you there. I should mention that the venue is wheelchair accessible.

The Bill Russell call to action on MLK Day: ‘What are you going to do with it???

MLKDay2025

#Inauguration2025

First we open with some serious celebrating.

RantWoman and the RSOF: The really important stuff today: #MLKday2025

Bernice King's call at the 2025 MLK Service

#NotGoingBack

Woke is a GOOD THING.

Oh wait. There was that other thing: #GrandpaSleepyhead and the wall of white people.

This MLK Day We Are ALL Michelle Obama

Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | The Daily Show

President Trump Takes The Oath, Skips The Bible | Manifest Destiny In Space | A New Golden Age

Biden's Shock Pardons | Did Trump Save TikTok? | Snoop Dogg Plays The Crypto Ball - More Monologue

Trump Inauguration Leaves MAGA Fans Out in the Cold as Musk & Tech CEOs Get VIP Seats: A Closer Look

Jimmy Kimmel Reacts to Donald Trump’s Inauguration - YouTube

There.

RantWoman is VERY grateful for everyone who helped find things to laugh about.

And RantWoman's head is about to explode so further chronicles will just have to wait.

Presidents and spouses on parade with body language analysts at the #JimmyCarter funeral

The musical soundtrack and the word of the hymns are a fascinating aspect of this video. I would have to think to articulate the points that seem significant. It definitely enhances the sense of theater. Kamala and Barack are the only two people of color in this sea of white people. I don't think it would have helped to have Michelle Obama there. I wonder whether there is a gender aspect to the visual exchange or lack of between Kamala and Barack As an asterisk, Trump clearly cleans up well, compared for instance to the sketch artist images from his NY trial. But I also mean that there have been SO many comments about his body odor at different points and there was NO indication of that from anyone around him. All of the former Presidents are smiling because as one of you noted, they are very attuned to engaging and they are all with their peers. Hillary and Kamala are the only two women who have ever been at the top of a national party ticket and they have both lost to someone who has SUCH a long and deplorable record of behavior toward women. If I were writing an SNL sketch about this sequence, it might be WAY too much to play that up WAY beyond what is anywhere near appropriate at a state funeral. Daggers in their eyes.... The comments about the wives were interesting. I am guessing that some of Emhoff's expression might be desire to protect his wife. He is also the only Jew in the group at this very Christian funeral. He is probably used to that feeling of difference, but I imagine this might have been exacerbated in the context of everything else. I think Trump might be a little bit afraid of heat from his base if he admits to friendliness, even faint, with Obama. Anyway the commentary is really interesting. I am legally blind and probably would have missed everything here without the commentary.

Gathering for healing and gardens

Sometimes, just showing up matters.

It was a beautiful day for a National Gun Violence Awareness Day event at Martin Luther King Memorial park

It was also another needed Remembrance for Amarr Taylor Paine, who was shot outside Garfield High School on Thursday.

RantWoman did not really track all the speeches beyond many longstanding neighborhood connections and fierce urgency about ending gun violence. RantWoman did enjoy dancing by an all ages group from the Central Area Senior Center.

Enjoy the video.

The video does not say much about RantWoman's favorite takeaway: information about the Clean Green Farm and Market.

The Clean Green Farm and Market

Read about the Clean Green Youth Program

Join the Clean Green CSA

RantWoman has been a little afraid of CSA's because she knows people who get more food than they can use. The Clean Green CSA provides boxes in 3 sizes at 3 prices. The $15 / week single person price sounds like a bargain and doable for RantWoman's budget. Plus, although some of RantWoman's neighbors admit to not liking vegetables, RantWoman thinks that any surplus from her house can feed some neighbors.

Who knows? Maybe RantWoman will also decide she needs some dirt therapy and sign up to volunteer!

And for more connections check out Seattle Parks and Recreation

PS. One person asked RantWoman whether anyone close to her is a victim of gun violence.

RantWoman gulped and realized it has been 20 years since a very suicidal friend who should not have been able to buy a gun shot himself.

Plus an atmosphere with a lot of gun violence is bad for everyone.

The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations

This REALLY is a #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackHistoryMonth2024 item. DO NOT PANIC about the intro

Author Clay Cane Traces Roots of Black Republicans to Modern Day

Another #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackHistoryMonth2024 binge blog item and another book on the Mean to Read list.

Audie Cornish interviews Roy Wood Jr. about The Daily Show and the Future of Comedy

#BlackHistoryMonth #BlackHistoryMonth2024 

RantWoman may or may not achieve coherent commentary of her own. In the meantime, RantWoman will be curating selected items that the interwebs bring her.

Enjoy.

Rroland scorches JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon

#BlackHistoryMonth2024 #DEI #DumpTrump

RantWoman promises not to post a Roland Martin EVERY day during #BlackHistoryMonth. Instead, readers, Subscribe your own selves.

But yeah, this!

Speaking Truth; the POINT of the day.

RantWoman's #MLKDAY2024 observances, such as they are. Shameless recycling of others' words

More From RantWoman's other Blog

There are not enough wars going on; we must have media flamefest about ...the White House Christmas celebration.

The Damage Report re the White House Christmas party

Watch this video FIRST for spirit of the season.

Lean into our better selves.

RantWoman is not that into tap but she is more than tired of the Nutcracker as a seasonal phenomenon and this performance is such a great pickup.

Plus apparently RantWoman needs practice praying for the souls of these poor commentators.

Apparently though heaping scorn on White House Christmas celebrations is part of how the national zeitgest fights the war on Christmas.

See the comments in the first video about Melania Trump, bless her heart.

RantWoman also remembers the year that the punditocracy were just horrified, I say horrified that Michelle's theme for the season was just too brown.

Come on, everyone, we all need to find ways to be nicer to each other. Anyone who does not like someone's holiday decorations is free to decorate to taste in their own home, faith community, front yard....

A few words from and about the earworm of the Week: Jason Aldean's "Try that in a Small Town"

 Reacting slowly to Jason Aldean's Don't Try that in a Small Town is a must for RantWoman. For one thing, while the fast video cuts in the video may have some kind of propaganda value for many viewers, for people with RantWoman's particular flavors of bad eyesight, they are such a nightmare to try to focus on that RantWoman relies for visual commentary on what others digest as on her own wonky and unreliable eyes.

Consider

Empress Joy Jean Reacts

Today's video commentary genre: the person of color with a strong accent who, RantWoman guesses, may have no concept of the what some of the US historical and cultural markers setting the internet ablaze because of the video for Jason Aldean's "Try that in a small town."

RantWoman resonates with many voices who want to HAVE A CONVERSATION.

RantWoman notes that themes of community come up over and over in the video.

RantWoman is not so easy about "unity" without more conversation.

RantWoman is clear:  RantWoman is an overeducated white person. It is not her job to tell people of color what is or is not racist, what is or is not any more or any less than the level of racism in some people's daily lives, how to live with racism, which battles to fight, whether Aldean's video is more or less  culturally problematic than rap music.

RantWoman has seen lots of commentary on all of the themes above.

RantWoman has also decided that as a white person, it is perfectly appropriate to ask, particularly of other white people "what could this mean" or "what did you mean by  that?"

Today's sampling:

What are we to make of the timing of the video release? The song was released months ago. Is it some kind of coincidence that the video has come out in the middle of indictment summer when The Former President is too happy to try to fill the internet with calls to rescue him from things he brought on himself?

Are the gun memes in the video an accident at a time when most of the public is heartily sick of mass shootings and some parts of our polity melt down any time they hear phrases like "gun reform now?"

And, finally, as #J6 insurrectionists are still being rounded up, as the public is still grappling with accountability for the largest single-day crime wave since 9/11, as the reach of justice is climbing closer and closer to the former President himself, is it an accident that for all the riot footage in the video, there is NOTHING from the #January6Insurrection?

Stay tuned. RantWoman was a literature major. RantWoman has several more strands of reflection on her mind.

But wait!

RantWoman let herself get sucked into ANOTHER topical video:

Dana Loesch Interviews country star (and anti-vaxxer) John Rich

1. Liberals DO grow up in small towns.

2. LOTS of commentary resonates about themes of community.

3. Dumb, violent stuff happens in small towns too. It is probably done by home town druggies, probably NOT antifa.

4. RantWoman is interested to hear about "Old Glory Bank." Maybe in another post.

5. RantWoman really wants to hear about "I'm offended that you're offended...let's all go have a beer and be offended together." RantWoman is not that into beer, especially not beer she can afford to drink, and RantWoman's interest in good conversation is a little at war with desire to be intentional about where money, time, and other resources go. But Bring it on and let's see where things go.

From Ukraine to your hood: Black perspectives on war at home and abroad

RantWoman enthusiastically recommends, for anyone who has time.

Graphic that includes the info below

Join us next Tuesday April 19th, 2pm PT / 5pm ET for "From Ukraine to Your Hood: Black Perspectives on War at Home and Abroad," a conversation hosted by the It Takes Roots Black (African Descent/Diaspora) Caucus featuring Black panelists conversing about the war in Ukraine & its impact on our communities, people & world from a Black perspective.  Register at: https://bit.ly/ITRBCukraine We will also livestream the event from the It Takes Roots Facebook account.

#ItTakesRoots centers the leadership and power of urban and rural communities on the frontlines of racial, gender, housing, environmental, energy and climate justice in the United States to advance regenerative economies and healthy communities. ITR is a multiracial, multicultural, intergenerational alliance of networks and alliances representing over 200 organizations and affiliates in over 50 states, provinces, territories and Native lands in the U.S. and Canada, and is led by women, gender nonconforming people, people of color, and Indigenous Peoples. It is an outcome of years of organizing and relationship building across the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ), Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), and Right to the City Alliance (RTTC) alongside Center for Story-based Strategy and The Ruckus Society.

Judge Jackson CONFIRMED. Where you goin, Republican Senators?

There was applause all over Twitter when Vice President Harris announced that the Senate had voted 53 to 47 to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

RantWoman thanks the #AmberRuffinShow for calling attention to all of the Republican Senators who voted not to confirm Judge now Justice Jackson and then walked out when her confirmation was announced. RantWoman deeply hopes Democratic opponents of everyone up for re-election use that clip over and over on the campign trail.

Watch the rest of the clip for zinger after zinger about other issues of the day.

There. Now RantWoman will step away from #DontSayGay media streams and wade back into #DontSayWar atrocities and fierce efforts against such.

In contention for most aggravating media thread of the week: Armageddon Update | Judge Not Lest Ye...

Haappy #WomensHistoryMonth

Happy #KBJConfirmation #KBJ4SCOTUS

Happy televised demonstration of full-on Republican jackassery, to quote Sen. Ben Sasse, R, NE who has enough spine to call out fellow Republicans but apparently at least as of the end of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, not enough spine to vote to confirm Judge Katanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme court.

Readers who are too triggered and disgusted disgusted to want to go any further, please take care of yourselves and click away.

If, like RantWoman you appreciate people who Do Not Mince Words, please meet Christopher Titus



And

The Damage Report: KBJ Dunks on Kavanagh without even trying.

RantWoman feels a rant coming on herself but this offering may have to suffice.

Being a Black Journalist in America: Beyond the Scenes LIVE at SXSW | Th...

Sometimes the most educational thing one can do is let people talk. Advice here for people of any race