Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog wishes you a happy Juneteenth, marking the day Democrats lost their slaves. (Democrats owned slaves, not Republicans.) African-Americans continue fighting for their freedom from the Democrats, who today treat people of color like they still own them and that they MUST vote for Democrats and ONLY Democrats.
That political party, which I’m ashamed to say I used to belong to years ago, even distorts the Juneteenth holiday. They try fundamentally transforming it into a day when Democrats – the only extant political party which supported slavery and even fought a Civil War over it – can act like they are above reproach while THE REST OF THE COUNTRY shares a guilt The Party pretends to be free from.
Joe Biden, embodying the grotesque hypocrisy of that detestable political party, EULOGIZED A KLANSMAN – DEMOCRAT SENATOR ROBERT BYRD – yet Biden thinks he’s fit to give finger-wagging lectures to the rest of us. (If this post upsets you, tell the Democrats to stop politicizing Juneteenth by pretending they had nothing to do with slavery, or the Ku Klux Klan, or Jim Crow, etc.) Continue reading
JANUARY 1910 – James Larkin Pearson, poet and newspaper man, carried on the Fool Killer tradition from 1910 to 1917, then again from 1919 into the 1920s. Pearson’s fellow North Carolinian Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans had written the Fool Killer Letters of the 19th Century so it’s appropriate that another Tar Heel continue the lore for so many years of the 20th Century.
Pearson’s Fool-Killer was the mascot of the entire publication, which was merely 4-6 pages anyway, not simply the supposed author of letters regarding his body count of “fools.” Think of this Fool Killer (I prefer no hyphen) as the written word equivalent of Puck (1876-1918), the political cartoon mascot of the humor magazine of the same name.
*** Frederick Cook, who, the previous December, had seen his claim to have reached the North Pole ruled invalid and possibly fraudulent by the University of Copenhagen. (The Fool Killer was unable to locate Cook, however.)
PART FOUR – We pick up this time with Trader Horn’s reflection on how the British and German firms in Africa dominated the European trade in ivory and rubber, while France was a distant third. There were whispers that the French (whom Horn referred to far more insultingly than he ever referred to the indigenous Africans) were strategizing about using their Colonial Governments to limit the success of Great Britain and the German Empire wherever they could. 
Previously I examined Joel Chandler Harris’ 1902 story Flingin’ Jim And His Fool-Killer, set in Georgia in October of 1872, plus Ridgway Hill’s Facts for the Fool-Killer, set in and around Buffalo, NY in 1909. 
(Oh, and never forget that anti-Trump fascists acted like forcing Trump to release years of his tax returns was so important, yet the returns revealed he had done nothing wrong. Our corrupt elected officials then declined to have any other politicians reveal several years of their tax returns. It has only – and ever – been about “getting” the outsider Trump.) 
Balladeer's Blog 