Are You More Homicidal Than This Alabama 5 Year Old?

Mobile, Alabama just pegged a crayon-wielding kindergartener as homicidal/suicidal manic. See if you can pass the test she had to take.

Best Wishes on this Native American Day

Trigger Warning: This might seriously upset you

To explain this week’s lesson on politics, we first need to address “trigger warnings.” This is when websites warn you that an article you’re about to click on might send you into trauma or a psychotic break because it reports on corn syrup. And maybe you just kicked the corn sugar habit and might fall off the wagon if you read it — or you might just go uncontrollably ballistic.

And now, Trigger Warnings are part of college classes. “Hey, we’re reading The Feminine Mystique this week, but if the concept of equal rights upsets you, it’s okay to sit this out and catch up on last season’s CSI: Kabul.”

This all started in 2012 with the best of intentions and probably stems from everyone’s basic desire to protect their many many friends who suffer from clustering allusions, hyperbolic discounting, illusory correlation or impact bias. But we got worried this week when Amazon put a Trigger Warning on some 70-year-old Tom & Jerry cartoons because an illustrated black maid (presumably human) is portrayed in a racist manner and an unidentified illustrated character smokes a cigarette.

Amazon put this warning on their streaming Tom & Jerry collection: “Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.” Fair enough. We’re not contradicting that. It’s true. Parents should probably see a PG-13 rating on material like this in case they’re not ready to explain it, if they live in an America where racism doesn’t still exist, or if they have no idea that any film made in the 1940s is likely to have Stepin Fetchit embarrassingly shuffle past the camera with a cigar.

But this is being echoed in colleges, where people spend a lot of money to learn about the world around them. Even the ones who live in Texas or ended up playing for the Redskins.

Which brings us to this. This very short video is part of our history, too. Many have warned us that its ideas can poison your mind. But let’s see if we can learn something from it as we head into the midterm elections. Oh – Trigger Warning: It might upset you if you’re a Republican.

Come on Down! You're the Next Contenstant on "The Price is Right Wing!"

UPDATE: The Woman Fired In Florida For Being A Democrat

Earlier this week, with your help, we started a Twitter/Facebook/Blog campaign to express outrage over Marriott Vacation's Worldwide's decision to fire a long-term employee for being a Democrat. Here’s a refresher and a report on the latest developments.



How it started:

Lester & Charlie got a call from Mark Felt this week and, predictably, he told us to “follow the money.” The money in question was a $1,000 campaign contribution from Marriott International to an incumbent Republican running for another term in the Osceola County Commission.

So we posted this article on DU and on our blog and started a campaign to tell these Marriott companies how we felt about it.

And here's what's happened so far:

The article got a lot of attention from outraged liberals, rational Americans and thousands of housebound people who spend their days joining hashtag campaigns on Twitter. People swore to stop staying at Marriott and some said they would give homeless people their Marriott Points so some homeless people could check in to a room for a free night.

Thing is, not everybody picked up on the fact that the campaign was intended to demand action from Marriott Vacations Worldwide, the company that fired Viviana, and not Marriott International, the company that funded her opponent.

Granted, it's hard if not nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two companies since Marriott International used to own Marriott Vacations Worldwide and licensed their name to them so that people would think they're still the same company and same trusted brand.

And it's plausible that, because they want to keep that license, they were motivated to align with their former parent's stated political goals -- and therefore fire and defend daddy's political opponent. After all, Mitt Romney sits on the board of the one they want to suck up to.

Yes, this is confusing. Marriott Vacations hid under their blanky during this Twitter battle but the former parent company jumped in and started pointing the finger at their former subsidiary. And at Lester & Charlie.

Where does it stand? Well, Mitt Romney's cronies sent this to Lester & Charlie:

Marriott just fired an employee because she's a Democrat

Marriott fired a long-term employee, a Democrat, because she’s running for a seat on her local county commission. And it just so happens that Marriott supports her Republican opponent.

Let’s get down to brass tacks:

*Viviana Janer is a Puerto Rico-born-female-MBA and long-term internal auditor for Marriott — and a Democrat who has openly worked for social justice in her county

*Viviana decided to run against an incumbent Republican for the Osceola County Commission

*Viviana didn’t notify Marriott about her campaign because she was conducting it in her spare time and was a nearly-unfunded long-shot

* Marriott’s former parent company went and donated $1,000 to her Republican opponent’s campaign

* When Marriott found out that she was running against their Republican choice for the office, they fired Viviana citing “a conflict of interest” for the company

Seriously?

Video Distraction: Make your own brain-teaser at home

We owe you an apology

This week was all about the apology.

It wasn’t just that the New York Times had to apologize for mistakenly referring to Dick Cheney as the former president of the United States. Apologies abounded! Like the one from Jacob Dorsey, the 19-year-old Republican candidate for the Wisconsin Assembly, who not only apologized but dropped out of the race after his “hurtful” (his term) comments about black people and gays resurfaced on social media. Future GOP politicians, take note: It’s never too early to figure out that calling people “f*gs” and “n*ggers” on Twitter and YouTube might not be a winning election strategy. Even in Wisconsin!

Speaking of insensitivity, the next “OOPS” came from the editors of the Lancaster New Era, which had published an editorial cartoon that compared cramped, modern air travel with the horrors of humans packed into slave ships. “To somehow link the inconveniences of air travel with slavery in general and the slave ships in particular was not only just plain wrong it was deeply hurtful,” the editors later wrote with what seemed like genuine remorse.

More ambiguously, Sarah “it takes a village idiot” Palin came along this week to declare that she “owe[s] America a global apology [sic].” Not for refusing to go away — but for John McCain not winning the presidency in 2008.

We were trying to figure out if Palin finally realized that her candidacy was a global joke when along came another apology, this time from the retail giant Urban Outfitters. This one was a doozy. And, no, they weren’t apologizing for for making teenagers look funny.

Urban Outfitters never tires of offending people — selling things like a Monopoly board game parody called “Ghettopoly” (where players build crack houses and projects instead of houses and hotels) and stuff like T-shirts declaring Everyone Loves a Jewish Girl that’s printed amid a sea of dollar signs. It’s part of a long list of ways the company has pissed people off.

This time, one of their Mensa-Merchandisers thought it would be a good idea to sell faux-vintage university sweatshirts. Not just any university. Kent State University. Circa 1970. And part of the sweatshirt’s “faux vintage” effect include what looks like bullet holes and bloodstains.



In case you grew up on Texas schoolbooks, Kent State University is where, in 1970, four unarmed students were caught up in a protest about the escalation of the Vietnam War — when along came the patriotic Ohio National Guard to shoot them to death. Nine more students were injured; one was permanently paralyzed. Half a century later, the chilling details of that day still spark outrage.

So what the hell was Urban Outfitters thinking? “The red stains are discoloration from the original shade of the shirt and the holes are from natural wear and fray,” went the official response from the company. Oh, and the bullet holes made it difficult to fit longer words like Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook Elementary on the front. Mm hm.

Is there anything Urban Outfitters won’t commodify? Kent State. Urban ghettos. Jewi$hne$$. We didn’t even mention the time they were called out for hawking sparkly gun-shaped Christmas-tree ornaments in crime-ridden Philadelphia, or forced to stop selling a shirt with the word depression printed repeatedly across the front.

Sensitivity be damned. Offending people may not work for everyone, but Urban Outfitters obviously feels it works for them — surely they’ll find more ways to offend. It’s going to be hard to top a bloody Kent State sweatshirt, however. So let’s help them out! Since they clearly want to find the most offensive way to market their brand, what will they sell next? What do YOU think?


-- The "Helen Keller Special Edition of Scrabble" with all blank tiles?

-- American Indian blankets with "smallpox" stitched on the underside?

-- "Just for Jews" 40 Lashes Mascara?

Be as creative as Urban Outfitters in the comments.

(Published with permission of author. Original sources and poll at http://lesterandcharlie.com/2014/09/18/4-dead-in-urban-outfitters/)

Useless Household Tip: How to make your own soap

Don't try this at home:

A 9/11 Hero You Should Know About

There are a lot of things to remember and reflect upon during the anniversary of September, 11. And plenty of people will be telling their stories of grief, rage, human kindness and patriotism. So, Lester & Charlie are going to focus on someone who might get overlooked: Leo Cullum.

Leo Cullum, who died about three years ago, was a TWA pilot and a cartoonist for The New Yorker. And Leo turned out to be the person who answered the unspoken question that was on everyone’s mind following the attacks: When will be OK to laugh again?

It might not sound that important, but back then, there was a feeling that terrorists not only took away our skyline and businesses and families, but that maybe they had stolen what Americans always rely on to survive a crisis: our sense of humor.

So, he published this:


This simple cartoon gave New Yorkers a collective sigh of relief when they really, really needed it. It reminded us that laughter makes us stronger, not weaker. And that we, as Americans and New Yorkers, weren’t going to let anybody take that away from us.

Thanks, Leo.

(Posted by authors.)