Category: Bigotry

A Clarification and an Apology

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In my earlier post on the Taliban severing ties to al Qaeda, I said the following:

Al Qaeda was never particularly popular in Afghanistan, where the people are, after all not Arabs, and they have about as much love for rich Arabs as we in the United States do.

Bin Laden was there because the Taliban wanted his money, not him.

When they were in control of Afghanistan, not only were they not fierce protectors of him, but they were trying to find a way for help the US make him dead in a way that gave them some plausible deniability.

As Sortition notes (In the comments of the previous post. BTW, read his blog, Pro Bono Statistics), this could be construed as an endorsement of bigotry against Arabs. This is not my intent.

To the degree that some people in Afghanistan or the West dislike “Arabs”, it is an indictment of those people, who are exhibiting bigotry toward Arabs.

Arabs are people like everyone else, and they love their families, just like everyone else, and while there are shortcomings in the governance of most Arab states, these are issues of complaints against the ruling elites.

So, a criticism of the House of Saud (or Mubarak in Egypt, or Qaddafi in Libya, or the Al-Sabah’s of Kuwait, or the Zayed’s of the UAE, the Assads of Syria, al Bashir in Sudan, King Mohammed of Morocco, etc.), or its policies is no more a criticism of the Arab people than criticism of the rulers of America, Goldman Sachs, would be a criticism of the American people.

Obama Knifes Gays Again

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Not surprising, when he replaced the Gay friendly DNC chair (Howard Dean ) with yet another bible thumper (Tim Kaine)bible.

As I have said before, Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are desperately afraid of offending homophobic bigots.

Well, the DNC was claiming that they sent those emails to folks in Maine, asking for support for Corzine in NJ, without any mention of the Hate Referendum in Maine by accident, but John Aravosis got a copy of an email sent to donors which proves that to be a lie.

Ironically enough, the email was from Andrew Tobias, who is the author of The Best Little Boy in the World, who later got involved in the comments section of the above thread, and blamed John for, “turning people against support of the Democrats,” ignoring Obama’s record on such things.

I think that it is absolutely clear now, between Donnie McClurkin, his reversals on DADT, inviting homophobes to offer prayers at the inauguration, and, of course, the disgraceful DOMA briefs that Barack Obama will do whatever is possible to avoid basic civil rights for gays.

I don’t know if it’s because he wants everyone to like him, and so does not want to offend anti-gay bigots (homophobia-phobia), or if he is homophobic himself.

It does not matter. There is a pattern here, and it’s not going to change.

Excerpt of email after the fold.

Email to donors:

1. An email went out asking activists to make calls to New Jersey. It was insensitive not to omit Mainers from that email. I apologize that no one thought to do that. I can’t imagine it could have cost No On One even a dozen votes, but I still wish someone would have thought of this in time to catch it. Mistake noted.

2. A different email went out to Mainers urging them to vote. As the only thing of substance anyone was voting on in Maine was Question One, and as Democratic activists vote our way, this was a small but positive effort to be helpful.

I would have liked to see that email discuss No One One directly, in case there may have been an email-enabled Organizing for America activist someplace in Maine who did NOT know where Maine Democrats stood on this issue. (Out of the country without Internet access until the night before the election?) But I’m told there was concern that advocating specifically for a ballot initiative, whether LGBT or otherwise, would set a precedent for every other ballot initiative. Bureaucracies are nervous about setting precedents.

Republicans Horrified that N***ers Vote

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Yep, it’s John Fund, whose other claim to fame is to have bedded a mother and her daughter roughly 20 years apart, and when police came to investate a resulting domestic abuse charge, he hid in the bathroom:

Appearing on Fox News’ Glenn Beck, John Fund claimed that Hispanic voters in Camden, New Jersey, are being told that there is “a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar” — an anecdote Fund suggested was evidence of voter fraud in the state’s 2009 gubernatorial election. In fact — as Fund himself wrote in a Wall Street Journal column published hours earlier — that incident actually occurred in Philadelphia in 1993.

Of course, there is also the fact that anyone in New Jersey can vote by mail if they so choose, as opposed to Pennsylvania 16 years ago, where absentee ballots were supposed to be available only to those who could show a good reason to not be in town that day.

In NJ, anyone can mail in a ballot for any reason.

I Wonder What Rush Limbaugh Will Say About This Tomorrow

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Un-Dirtyword-Believable.

Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace for Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana just denied a marriage license to a couple because they were interracial:

A justice of the peace in northern Louisiana has refused to grant a marriage license to an interracial couple because he believes it would harm any children born of that relationship.

“I’m not a racist,” Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in the state’s Tangihapoa Parish, told the Hammond, Louisiana, Daily Star. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.”

Ummm….Dude, You Are a Racist, and with a little bit of justice in this world, you will shortly be a convicted felon.

As to what Rush will say? I’m not sure, but not that he won’t be part owner of the Rams, I’m pretty sure it won’t be “sensitive new age” stuff.

I am Reproducing This in Full Because the Cache Will Expire

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H/T Below The Beltway for the screen shot (click for full size)

Some background:

Remember when I suggested that recent rhetoric about Barack Obama was really about encouraging someone with the, “Psychological stability of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the shooting ability of…well…Lee Harvey Oswald (he was a Marine) to whack Obama?”

I also mentioned the Facebook “Assassinate Obama” poll.

It seems like it was only yesterday when I mentioned these….Hold on, it WAS yesterday when I mentioned this.

The tinfoil hat crowd is a bunch of very busy people this week.

Well, another part of the right wing sewage brigade, Newsmax published an article explicitly calling for a coup to overthrow him. Don’t click the link though, once the cowards at Newsmax realized that it was getting play, they pulled it, but here is the Google Cache.

In any case, I think that it is crucial that his word remain alive on the net in their entirety, so here is his article, in all its Fascist glory:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

  • Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
  • Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.
  • They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.
  • They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.
  • They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.
  • They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America’s troop strength is allowed to sag.
  • They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.
  • They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before. So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

    Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

    Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

    What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, “I’m not interested in victory”) that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?

    Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

    Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America’s military leadership is lost in a fool’s fog.

    Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

    Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

    Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

    Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

    In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

    John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com.

    • (emphasis mine)

    I guess it might read better in the original German. In the Confederate States of America dialect of English, it’s a lot shorter, of course, “Lynch the n*gg*r.”

    My first thought was to register LiberalsWithGuns.org, but someone has already beaten me to it, so I sent them an email offering my very poor HTML coding skills.

    Why to Hate Iceland*

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    If you have cable, or satellite, or FIOS, you have doubtless seen Whale Wars, a show about the (almost completely lily white) members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society pursuing the Japanese whaling fleet down around Antarctica.

    Japan, is, of course a bad guy in all of this, classifying commercial whaling as “research”, and bribing countries to join the IWC to overturn the moratorium on commercial whaling.

    But, as Needlenose notes, Iceland pulled completely out of the IWC, and is butchering whales as quickly as possible and shipping the meat to Japan.

    So, we have two bad players, one is gaming the system, and the other is operating completely outside the law.

    Also note that Iceland, which has told the world to go pound sand, is also begging for money from the IMF, World Bank, EU, and pretty much any other acronym with two cents together, which means that they are in a position where world opinion is crucial to them.

    So, which one are all the anti-whaling forces going after?

    Why, the ones who aren’t alabaster white, of course.

    In all fairness, the Icelandic catch is limited to about 250, as versus the about 600 for Japan, but I do think that there is a bit of bigotry behind not going after the low hanging fruit.

    *Besides Bjork, of course.

    House Moving on LGBT Job Protection Bill

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    The House Labor Committee is looking at a bill which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to protected classes under the civil rights laws.

    About damn time. It passed in the house in 2007, but wilted under a Bush veto threat.

    The cynic in me wonders how Obama’s people are going to try to knife it this time around, because they have gone out of their way to knife the LGBT community on almost every other level, because they found morality inconvenient in their quest for bipartisanship.

    I May Not Be Fasting on Yom Kippur

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    Because that pig felching junkie and drunk Glenn Beck has decided to announce that he wants to use September 28th this is a day of fasting and prayers for conservatives, and that is also the daytime portion of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

    My guess is that this a cunning plan for him to claim that “millions were fasting,” because we do that every year.

    I have no health issues that would prevent me from fasting.

    In fact, giving my gut a 25 hour rest is actually pretty good for me, settles everything down, but I think that there must be something in Halacha* that prohibits even the appearance of listening to that bigoted repugnant moran.

    H/t Old Pinko.

    *Jewish religious law

    Talk About Damning With Faint Praise

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    As some of might know, professor Niall Ferguson wrote an article in the Financial Times where he said that, “President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US.“

    I saw it, I read it, and thought that it was sophomoric bullsh@$ of the sort you frequently see college students who want to play at radicalism, both left and right.

    One of the people who called him out on this was Paul Krugman, who said that he could not, “fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages,” and James Fallows, who suggested that would like to see him, “discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.“

    I did not blog about it, because I didn’t have anything to add, but Niall Furguson decided not to let sleeping dogs lie, and he did discuss it with Dr. Gates.

    So Krugman offers an apology of sorts:

    What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American. The mind reels.

    For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.

    I think he’s a poseur.

    I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.

    And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.

    (emphasis mine)

    Remind me to never demand an apology of Nobel Prize winning economists.

    Gee, No Racist Cops in Cambridge

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    Gawker has some pics of a Cambridge police officer’s vanity license plate, “WHY-TEE“, as in “Whitie,” get it?

    Nope, nothing racist there.

    Also note that he is parking illegally, and that I think that I have had a sub at this shop.

    Even if this particular police officer does not have a single bigoted bone in his body (Yeah, right), this is clearly inappropriate, and the fact that no one has taken him aside to have a word with him on this is telling.

    Obama is Dog Whistle Gay Bashing

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    Normally, I’m not a big fan of protest theatrics, to my mind, Code Pink frequently does more harm than good to the cause, but I have to approve of ACT-UP’s chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda today.

    What’s going on here is that during the campaign, Barack Obama promised to lift the ban on funding needle exchange programs, which:

    • Do not encourage drug use.
    • Reduce AIDS transmission.
    • Reduce the cost to society.
    • Provide an entry point with addicts for counseling.

    The problem is that the White House submitted a budget to Congress still contained the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs.

    So this wasn’t even a matter of his not fighting for the program, it’s a matter of him submitting language reauthorizing a program that he explicitly campaigned against in his budget.

    A president’s budget is purely advisory. Congress can, and does, amend it, or ignore it, as they see fit, but he is unwilling to even leave out a bit of language authorizing a program he claims to oppose.

    I’m with John Aravosis’s take on this

    1. The candidate promised to lift the ban.
    2. The White House Web site reaffirmed the president’s commitment to lifting the ban.
    3. The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
    4. The president now refuses to lift the ban.
    5. The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting [and] defending the ban.
    6. The spokesman reiterates the president’s support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.

    There is a pattern to all this, whether it’s his sucking up to homophobic screeds “reformed homosexual” Donnie McClurkin, using legal arguments equating gay marriage with pedophilia and incest, refusing to take administrative actions to even modestly impede the anti-gay witch hunt in the military, and now affirmatively submitting anti-gay legislation to Congress.

    Either there is some real homophobia here, or there has been a political calculus made that appealing to homophobia is a political win, because the opposition wants gay people dead.

    At best, it’s no different than the prosecutors in and around Baltimore who will routinely demand more severe sentences in plea bargains for black defendants, because they know that they have a better chance to convict a black man, even in front of a black jury.

    I believe that this action has been taken because it can be seen as a gay issue, not in spite of it.

    This is dog-whistle gay bashing, and it is quite deliberate.