Category: Bigotry

The NAACP Has Discovered That There Are Racists Amongst the Teabaggers

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

I wonder what took NAACP this long to issue what is a remarkably tepid statement:

“We take no issue with the Tea Party. We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

“We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement,” Jealous said.

This statement is long overdue, and might have been appropriate about a year ago, but now, it is awfully weak tea.

Still, it’s fun to see teabagger heads explode over this is amusing.

Federal Judge Rules Parts of Doma Unconstitutional

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The areas of the lawsuit were rather specific, and pertained only to couples legally married in Massachusetts, but the the fact that the judge, Joseph Tauro, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the Mass AG and GLAD brought separate suits, is good news.

I’m an engineer, and not a lawyer, dammit, but I think that part of the decision, where the judge found a 10th amendment violation, because, “federal restrictions on funding for states that recognize same-sex marriage violates the 10th Amendment,which, “declares that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government, or denied to the states, belong to the states,” is likely to be overturned.

Basically the 10th amendment has not been a big part of jurisprudence since some time in the 1930s, and runs in the face of precedent.

The second decision, in GLAD’s case, is based on the 5th amendment equal protection claims, which I think will go a lot further.

Still, I think that it’s heading to the Supreme Court, and that the decision will be overturned by a 5-4 majority.

If I were an attorney for the plaintiffs, I would be starting to suggest that some of the justices who have already made statements that pre-judge the outcome, most notably Scalia, whose public endorsements of bigotry have been longstanding, recuse themselves.

If you don’t start making a stink about these now, then they will be sitting on the bench with their minds already made up later.

Unsurprising News of the Day

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4 out of 9 Supreme Court justices believe that there is a constitutional right to discrimination:

An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won’t let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group’s ”discriminatory practices.”

The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards ”unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle” as being inconsistent with that faith.

But Hastings, which is in San Francisco, said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.

The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college’s nondiscrimination policy.

I guess we can call them the hate caucus.

I Suppose that I Must Comment on This

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Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

In an interview, she said:

Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.”

Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:

  • It appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing.
  • About 60% of the Jews in Israel came from the Arab world, Iran, India, Etc.*

Needless to say, while I respect Thomas’ contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when anyone sounds like Meir Kahane.†

I’ll miss her at press conferences

The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.

(on edit)
I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[/url]:

Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she’s doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don’t have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas’s remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.

Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.

* They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as “oriental” Jews.
†Let me google that for you.

Finally, Someone in Arizona Stands Up to Bigots

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In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice.”

Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.

The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children’s faces:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

It’s gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.

Here’s hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.

Once Again, the White House Does the Right Thing, When Forced To……

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And then they weaken it significantly.

In this case, the White House is now behind repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this year, because it’s clear that it’s going to hit the floor of the House, and probably the Senate, and while they have been fighting against this behind the scenes, Obama and His Minions™ don’t want to fight against this in public.

The thing is, in order to get Obama’s tepid support, they have created a repeal of DADT that does not repeal DADT:

Discussions around what that repeal measure would include were ongoing as Levin continued to lobby his colleagues. But a couple concessions designed to pacify Gates were being considered: allowing the Pentagon to complete its study before implementation proceeded and potentially requiring a stamp of approval (e.g. a certification letter) from military leadership and/or the president.

But by the time repeal advocates were invited to the White House on Monday morning to be briefed on a new compromise, a third concession had been added. There would be no nondiscrimination mandate. In other words, even after the law is repealed, it will not be replaced at any point with a policy that explicitly states gays and lesbians are allowed to serve openly in the military.

So, the repeal of DADT is just putting the policy back in the hands of Barack Obama, who will doubtless delegate to Robert Gates, who appears to be the most hostile person to gays serving currently working in the Pentagon.

Not feeling hopey changey.

Jon Stewart: National Treasure

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I don’t think that Jon Stewart is saying that all Republicans are Racists, but he is saying that this Republican calling into to CSPAN is a racist, and he is also making a comment on the sort of, “Opinions on the shape of the Earth differ,” coverage that you see amongst people who see themselves as members of the journalistic community.

Fundamentally, one of the major problems in our political discourse these days is that fact that there is literally nothing that a right-winger can say, no matter how bigoted or deceitful, that can get a meaningful push-back from the gentleman in the 4th estate.

We Now Have a Video of a Teabagger Spitting on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.)

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People Who Don’t Read the Constitution

So much for all the Teabaggers, as well as Sean Hannity, denying that it ever happened.

Someone does not understand congressional immunity:

…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same, and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

(emphasis mine)

A congressman in that position could have pulled out a gun and shot the protesters dead,* and shot them dead, because they are immune from almost all prosecution.

Doubtless any member of the House or Senate who did this would be expelled in short order, but prosecution would be complex, to say the least.

*Take my legal advice with a grain of salt, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!†
†I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

The Face of the Opposition to Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

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Former NATO SACEUR, John Sheehan, has mad the claim that The Srebrenica massacre happened because the Dutch allow gays to serve openly to the Senate Armed Services Community:

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende attacked on Friday claims by a retired U.S. general that Dutch forces were overrun in Srebrenica in 1995 because of the presence of gay soldiers.

At a U.S. congressional hearing on Thursday on allowing gay soldiers to serve openly in the military, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander John Sheehan said there was a causal link between having homosexuals in the Dutch forces and the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war.

“The remarks were outrageous, wrong and beneath contempt,” Balkenende told a news conference.

So is retired General John Sheehan.

He apparently cites the general who was fired for the deaths of civilians, something that does not happen in today’s US military.

It should be noted that there was a far simpler reason, that there were only 450 troops, armed with light weapons, deployed to protect the city, and the man he quotes denies every saying this:

Dutch television reported that when he was pressed to name a source in the Dutch military, General Sheehan said that he was basing his remarks on what someone named “Hankman Berman” had told him. The Dutch Defense Ministry guessed that this was a reference to Gen. Henk van den Breemen, the country’s former chief of defense staff. On Friday the ministry issued a statement saying that General van den Breemen, now retired, called this “absolute nonsense,” since he did not believe that the presence of gay troops had anything to do with what happened at Srebrenica and had never said any such thing.

The problem here is that, beginning with Bill Clinton’s capitulation to Colin Powell’s insubordination on gays in the military in 1992 and 1993, Democratic presidents have allowed insubordination, particularly on this issue, from the military, and so now we have an increasingly radicalized culture in the military.

In Case You Were Wondering About the Tea Baggers…

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The fact that they were screaming “f****t” at Representative Barney Frank, and screamed, “n***er” at Representative, and civil rights icon, John Lewis:

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”

………

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter.

They are doing this because they can, and they have wanted to for years, but feel that the level of social disapprobation involved in such an act in different contexts will be too great.

Post racial society my ass.

Republican Family Values

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California State Senator Roy Ashburn (R-18th district) was cited for DUI after leaving a gay bar:

An anti-gay California state senator was placed under arrest for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar. A male passenger was in the vehicle along with the lawmaker was not arrested, reported Sacramento CBS affiliate Channel 13.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol at about 2:00 a.m. on March 3 when his state-issued vehicle was observed being driven erratically. The driver, identified as Ashburn, was taken in and charged for driving under the influence. Channel 13 reported that unidentified sources said the senator had been at Faces, a popular gay nightspot, prior to his arrest.

According to TPM, this guy was big into banning gay marriage.

Remember the Auschwitz Sign Theft

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In December, some Jamokes stole the sign over the gate of Auschwitz, the one that said “Arbeit Macht Frei,” basically saying (it was a lie) that work would set the inmates free.

I remember reading about it, and thinking that I would wait a couple of days until the full story played out.

I wasn’t sure if this was a stupid prank, something involving organized antisemitism, or something falling into the middle ground, where the history Polish anti-Semitism could be inferred from the incident, but there was no some grounds for doubt.

Well, 2 months later, and the story has played out, and Mithras has nailed what happened in just 28 words (+ title):

Turns Out, It Was Anti-Semites
The guy who commissioned the theft of the Auschwitz sign is a Swedish neo-Nazi. The Poles who stole the sign for him say They Were Just Following Orders.

(emphasis mine)

Why I Hate the World

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It makes te Gay, or so it seems

Because the folks at Christwire have put out a blistering screed against the 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls” titled, “How One TV Show Turned A Generation Of American Boys Into Homosexuals.” (Their server is slow, so you may have to wait)

It makes me hate the world.

Why does it make me hate the world?

Well, it’s because, highlight the rest for my answer……………

It’s satire, only it took me a couple of hours to confirm this.

It’s what bothers me about The Onion. The parody is spot on, and should be funny, only all to often, I cannot tell the difference between satire and the real world.

The problem is that the real world is just too perverse and weird to be parodied. Truth is indeed stranger than the fiction of satirists.

We live in Bizarro World.

H/t Atrios.

The Racism of Our Press

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Whenever someone flings a shoe at someone as a gesture of contempt, the press seems compelled to note that this action is an Arab gesture of contempt.

As Matthew Yglesias notes, when commenting on a shoe throwing incident involving Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir, throwing shoes means, “you suck!” in every society out there:

My continuing question about this shoe-throwing business is in what culture, exactly, is it not the case that throwing a shoe at a guy giving a speech is a sign of contempt? I recall going as far back as when shoes were thrown at Iyad Allawi media types calmly explaining that this is an insult “in Arab culture.” But is the message really so unclear that we needed to break out our handy-dandy Arab cultural translation manual for? I think one thing that makes the shoe-toss such an effective gesture of protest against figures in the global news is that the message is loud, clear, and unambiguous to an audience from any culture. You’re talking to an audience, I’m in the audience throwing a shoe at you—it’s disrespectful.

You see, young Yglesias, the press is, or believes that their audience is, full of racists, and so they feel the need to describe the behaviors of brown people as if they were tour guides on safari.

What the Hell is it With South Carolina

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First they start the Civil War, then there is the entire Confederate flag thing, which is followed by the Governor who makes the phrase, “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” suspect, and now we have their Lieutenant Governor, and candidate for Governor calling for a eugenic program to exterminate poor people:

GREENVILLE – Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to “feeding stray animals.”

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said.

In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

I know Southerners of all stripes, and whether they are young or old, or conservative or liberal, they are generally very offended by what they see as the insinuation that Southerners are somehow stupid as a people.

They are correct, of course, there are some stupid people in any group that you define.

That being said, electing Andre Bauer to any office, including dog catcher or head of the PTA, would tend to reinforce that unfortunate stereotype.