Hi Brad - Re: the Ralph Northam business

You asked our thoughts on this. I agree that he should step down but not for the reasons you state. I have no idea if the governor is a racist, but he proved himself a liar. He went into great detail to describe his Michael Jackson dance number. And he said he only used "a little bit of shoe polish under the eyes" because, he went on to say, "I don't know if you've ever used it, but it is VERY hard to get off". So.....if he'd never used blackface before, how did he know before putting it on for the MJ dance, how very hard it is to get off? Made me very suspicious of his truthfulness.

So...perhaps his nickname was "Coon man" because he did a lot of Blackface back in the day.

So the first reason he should step down is that we have enough problems with lairs in office. It's not a good thing at all. How can the people of VA trust anything he says now after his weekend of whopper?

One more reason he should step down: 20% of Virginians are black. There is no way any of those people can consider him their leader anymore.

I agree that he could and should work for racial justice and reconciliation in his state but there is no reason he could not do that outside of government.

He is no longer capable of running the state which has huge issues right now. Staying in office would distract from those issues. He should step down.

The media firestorm over Northam is ridiculous. First of all he is accused of appearing in costume or heavy cosmetics in a yearbook photo, "therefore" he should resign. Probably it was not even him in the photo, based on the fact it sure doesn't look like him. No media I saw has ever apologized for misidentifying the man in the photo. Here's my notion: the actual outrage is that anybody in the media would call for anybody, ever, to resign based on a bogus photo while giving zero evidence it was a valid photo. Second, I simply do not care. Somebody appearing, or more likely not appearing, in a weird costume, in a photo 30 years ago? What possible relevance does that have to his job performance? Hey, maybe there is a photo of you as a child dressed as a witch on halloween. Guess that means you should resign huh? Third, I graduated from a number of schools. In each, there was a yearbook. What did those yearbooks say about me? I have absolutely no idea, since I never bought a yearbook, never looked in a yearbook, never participated in any way in the making of any of those yearbooks, and never cared in the slightest about those yearbooks, and thought they were just a stupid waste of time by whoever was creating and/or buying them. If somebody now reveals that next to my name in one of these yearbooks, is some wacky photo of something, then you know what relevance that has to my job performance in any job whatever? Zero.
Fourth, re the whole concept that this "proves" Northam is a racist, HELLO?? His running mate was a black guy. Don't you think, if Northam were a racist, he'd probably be, at the very least, trying to get a white guy to be his Lt. Governor? Because, I mean, he's the most ineffective racist ever if his goal is to gain the topmost powerful
office in VA to start a White Takeover, and then he can't even get a white to be his own running mate.

This is complete bullshit. And meanwhile, McDonnell, another recent governor of VA was, e.g., convicted of
bribery while in office and never resigned, never impeached, nothing. So Northam should resign for no crime whatever?

I've got news for the Black Whiner movement. If you go around trying to throw people out of office based on this kind of nonsense, it is not going to help the cause of blacks. It is simply going to make you look like whining irresponsible screamers having a temper tantrum. That will hurt your cause, because people do not like whining
screamers who have no underlying facts behind their screams.

And another little point: black people have appeared, in public, and in photographs, wearing "blackface" makeup.

I have such a photo. You too can have such a photo, if you look for one on the internet, quite easy to find examples.

So: should any such black person be forced to resign from his job?

Oh wait, there's more. Now somebody actually looked at the yearbook, in a first time ever case of journalists actually accessing a primary source (it had to happen eventually, only a few days after they published the story), and there were other pages with photos of other people including men dressed as women, and white men pretending to be black women for a double black+women whammy in one photo. Whoo whee! Golly, should all of them be fired? I don't know who's being insulted more, white men, white women, black men, or black women!
It is so hard to keep track of all the possible insults and what they all might mean and who might be insulting who.

Or, maybe, just maybe, this all has no freaking worthwhile meaning whatsoever and never did.