Category: Bigotry

Don’t Get J.K Rowling Angry. You Wouldn’t Like Her When She’s Angry.

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It appears that the author of the Harry Potter series has taken umbrage at everyone comparing Voldemort to Donald Trump:

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has rejected the comparison of US presidential candidate Donald Trump to the villain in her seven-part book series, saying on Twitter that “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad”.

How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad. https://t.co/hFO0XmOpPH

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 8, 2015


The author was tweeting in response to a BBC report on the number of tweets comparing the Republican politician with the Dark Lord.

Trump made headlines on Tuesday when he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims, in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Trump has targeted Muslims in previous speeches, calling for surveillance of mosques across America and claiming Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a claim he refused to retract despite fact-checkers debunking it.

We live in Bizarro World.

Well, This Is One F%$# of a Campaign Slogan………

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Too Evil for Dick Cheney.

Seriously, it is a complete mindf%$# that the Donald has plumbed depths that Dick Cheney recoils from in horror:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is joining a chorus of voices slamming GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.

“I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from,” Cheney added during Monday’s interview.

This is so wrong, and so weird, that I am at a complete loss for words.

They Have Learned Nothing, and They Have Forgotten Nothing*

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We now have a report on the the police response that created the rioting in Baltimore.

It appears that excessively aggressive police actions, including when the police kettled large numbers of  students leaving high schools at the end of the day at Mondawmin in an misguided attempt at dick swinging, are not on the agenda:

As rioting erupted on Baltimore’s streets in April, the city police Command Center — where top decision-makers had gathered to get a handle on the situation — was itself in disarray, according to a new review of the agency’s response to the unrest.

 In a room designed to hold 30 to 40 people, as many as 100 had gathered, some without a clear role. The crowding was so severe that the department’s 10-person Analytical Intelligence Section, which was charged with developing information that could help the department deploy resources and anticipate threats, was blocked from its own equipment — and provided just two computers to do its work. The room was so loud the analysts could barely hear threat tips being relayed to them over the phone.

 That environment, described as “chaotic” and “distracting” by some in the room, was just one of many “major shortcomings” in the Baltimore Police Department’s handling of the unrest, according to a sweeping review by the Police Executive Research Forum, a highly regarded law enforcement think tank based in Washington.

 The group’s 79-page report, which then-Commissioner Anthony W. Batts requested this summer, is scheduled to be released publicly on Monday but was provided to The Baltimore Sun.

 The report — titled “Lessons Learned from the 2015 Civil Unrest in Baltimore” — provides new critiques of key top-level decisions and details that bolster previous criticism. It also highlights continuing gaps in knowledge about how the worst of the rioting, looting and arson erupted, noting that reviewers were “unable to determine who issued the order to cancel bus service” at Mondawmin Mall on April 27 — a decision that left many students stranded in the area that day.

 The report detailed a long list of “major findings,” reflected in 56 recommendations for the Police Department to implement. It said planning was inadequate, arrest policies were unclear, equipment was severely lacking, officer training was inadequate, mutual aid agreements with other localities were insufficient or unclear, and orders to officers were not clearly defined. Command positions were also changed at times without notice, causing confusion, the report said.

This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

They cannot find out who gave the order to kettle what were primarily students trying to get home because it was a relatively low level functionary who has gotten his friends to cover for him, and they are covering for him, because these officers believe that it is essential for them to be kept in their place.

They thought that they were justified in taunting a bunch of adolescent teens and confining them for no reason because they were “Uppity.”

Unfortunately, this deeply toxic mindset is the rule, rather than the exception in policing in the United States.

You can find the full report here.

*This is frequently attributed to the French stateman Tallyrand, but he is not the source.

Not a Surprise………

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It turns out that when correcting for poverty, crime rate, and the like, the only thing that determines the level of law enforcement personnel at a school is solely determined by the percentage of black students:

With the viral video of a police officer violently arresting a black female student at high school in South Carolina reinvigorating the debate over school resource officers, new research bolsters critics’ claims that school security can have a negative effect on students, particularly African Americans.

The new study by two academics in New York showed that the mere presence of African American students at a school makes it more likely the school will take on security measures, even when controlling for neighborhood crime and school misconduct.

The study also found, among other things, greater racial disparities in student suspensions and arrests in schools where there are cops present or other security measures are taken. Those arrest and suspensions are believed to contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

This is not a surprise.

It has been “Zero Tolerance”, and “Getting Tough On insertnounhere”, etc. have almost always been primarily an a ploy to excuse racism.

Donald Trump is Just F%$#ing with Us Now

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Trump defends Islamic head coverings, says women want to wear them: "It's easy—you don’t have to put on makeup.” https://t.co/tfLYhDv8ir

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 26, 2015

His latest bit, he just said that women might wear burkas because they find makeup too inconvenient:

Trump was speaking about foreign policy, which lead into his critique of anti-Muslim sentiments.

 Here are his comments in full:

Then I saw women interviewed. They said, ‘We want to wear them. We’ve worn them for a thousand years. Why would anyone tell us not to?’ They want to! What the hell are we getting involved for? Fact it’s easier. You don’t have to put on make-up. Look at how beautiful everyone looks. Wouldn’t it be easier? Right? Wouldn’t that be easy?

Seriously.

The Donald is trolling us, and this is a troll that is more trollish than Goatse. (If you do not know what Goatse is, do not google it. Ever. Trust me on this one.*)

*The same goes for Lemonparty. Do not go there.†
†Of course, if you had a choice between any of these and Donald Trump, any sane person would go with Goatse and Lemonparty, but barring a time machine and an accident involving an ancestor of Donald Trump’s, the best you can do is cut your losses.

Hired Guns Arrive at Predetermined Conclusion

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The prosecutors in Cayuga County hired a couple of “experts” to review the Tamir Rice shooting and they determined that Cleveland Police did the right thing when they shot a 12 year old to death.

This is hired gun expert witness bullsh%$ at its worst:

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

 Those opinions, reached separately by a Colorado prosecutor and a former F.B.I. supervisory special agent, were released Saturday night by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, whose office will ultimately present evidence in the case to a grand jury to decide on possible criminal charges.

 “The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report, which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”

 The reports, which were commissioned by the prosecutor’s office, come almost 11 months after the shooting outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. Footage of the shooting was captured on a surveillance camera, and Tamir’s name quickly became among the most prominent in a series of black men and boys whose deaths at the hands of the police were memorialized in Twitter hashtags and protest chants.

 Both Ms. Crawford and S. Lamar Sims, the prosecutor from Colorado, said in their reports that they were evaluating Officer Loehmann’s actions under the United States Constitution, not Ohio state law.

 “There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”

These so-called experts were hired by the prosecutor because they knew that they would say before they ever signed a contract:

A YouTube video of a prosecution expert who has sided with Cleveland police in the shooting death of Tamir Rice has emerged. The video shows him making pro-police comments about the case months ago.

Further, a second expert hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty to review the Rice shooting was once admonished by the U.S. Department of Justice for being “unfaithful” to the law in an effort to exonerate police in their use of deadly force.

The videotaped comments by S. Lamar Sims, a senior chief deputy district attorney in Denver, and the pro-police stance by expert Kimberly Crawford are raising questions of McGinty’s motive in retaining their reports of the 12-year-old boy’s shooting death last year.

McGinty released their respective reports late Saturday. Both experts hired by McGinty found the officer’s shooting of Tamir, who was armed only with a pellet gun, to be justified.

………

In the YouTube video posted on May 8, Sims does not mention Tamir Rice by name. However, it is clear that he is speaking about the boy’s shooting last year outside of the Cudell Recreation Center on Cleveland’s west side.

………

Subodh Chandra, the Cleveland attorney representing the Rice family, said Sims’ comments appear to favor police. Chandra said the comments make it appear that Sims was selected by McGinty for his pro-police stance.

“It’s clear from the video that this so-called expert engaged by the prosecutor’s office had already prejudged this matter long before he was engaged by the prosecutor,” said Chandra. “It also raises questions in the Rice family’s minds about whether that was precisely why that so-called expert was engaged.”

Chandra said Crawford’s past support of police also raises questions about her biases and whether those past opinions are the reason McGinty asked that she review the evidence connected to Tamir’s shooting death.

In a past case of police use of deadly force, Crawford’s opinion was rejected by the Department of Justice for being outside the law, “overly protective of law enforcement” and going “too far to exonerate the use of force.”

What we have here is yet Another prosecutor who is trying to lose a case against a rogue cop who murdered a black kid.

The USAF Supports Witch Burning

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I’m beginning to think that sees itself as a branch of Oral Roberts University.

In the latest episode of stupidity in the service, or at least the latest episode that doesn’t involve the over priced and under performing F-35, the Air Force has fired a dental technician for being a witch.

In an even bigger f%$# up, the person that they fired was a Hindu, the 3rd largest religion on the face of the earth:

Deborah Schoenfeld says she was harassed at a Fort Meade, Md., dental clinic for her Hindu faith and then fired when she complained about it.

 The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is representing a former Air Force contractor who says she was fired from a dental clinic at Fort Meade, Maryland, after complaining that her co-workers discriminated against her because she was Hindu. She claims they then accused her of being a witch.

 Group founder and president Mikey Weinstein wrote in a letter to officials: “We have spoken with witnesses at the clinic under your command who have universally confirmed that, not only did this horrid harassment take place, but ever since the execution of her punishment for failing the religious test imposed by the leadership of Epes Dental Clinic, a particular offending party has effusively celebrated her replacement by a Catholic woman by saying publicly that ‘It’s good to see we got an angel, since last time we had the devil.’”

 ………

 Reached by Air Force Times, Deborah Schoenfeld said that her co-workers at the Epes Dental Clinic harassed her over her Hindu faith, claiming she was satanic for wanting to practice yoga and meditating.

 Speaking on condition of anonymity, two of her former co-workers confirmed Schoenfeld’s account to Air Force Times and said that other employees at the dental clinic are devoutly Christian and deeply suspicious of Hinduism. One of them confirmed that she was referred to as a “Hindu witch.”

 One co-worker, who Schoenfeld said prayed for her to find Jesus, told her that meditation summons demons, adding that “all the soldiers who are doing meditation and yoga to help their PTSD, they are getting infected also,” Schoenfeld said.

When her requests for help through the chain of command went nowhere, she filed a formal complaint on Sept. 2, Schoenfeld said. That day, she was fired for allegedly using profanity against a co-worker, although she was not allowed to know who had accused her of doing so, she said.

This is something that is counter to the discipline and good order of the military, and yet it continues.

The  USAF in particular has problems with this, which is unsurprising, since their academy is a neighbor of the Talibaptist organization “Focus on the Family” in Colorado Springs.

Get a Brain, Morans

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Some inbred white bigots who don’t know how to use a spell checker have decided that enough is enough, so they took to flying pro confederate banners over various monuments:

Community activists and historic preservationists got help from an unusual source to draw attention to their protest Saturday of statues of Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue during the first day of training for the UCI Road World Championships.

 A small plane carrying a banner with a Confederate battle flag and the phrase “Confederate heros matter” circled above Monument Avenue, where the protest had gathered at the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

 The Virginia Flaggers, who took credit for the banner on their Facebook page, said the misspelling of “heroes” was “Pilot error. We sent the right spelling. We think the point was still made.”

 “This is the first time he’s ever messed up,” Grayson Jennings, a spokesman for the Virginia Flaggers, said of the pilot in an interview. “I don’t think half the people even knew he messed up.”

(emphasis mine)

Trust me, people know.

This is going to end up a major meme, kind of like this pic:

The stupid, it burns us.

Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico?

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Don’t Make Larry Wilmore Angry, You Wouldn’t Like It When He’s Angry

In Texas, it appears that if you are Muslim, and you bring a project to show your engineering teacher, they will cuff you and haul you off to jail:

Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade alarm clock got him suspended from his suburban Dallas high school and detained and handcuffed by police officers on Monday after school officials accused him of making a fake bomb. By Wednesday, it had brought him an invitation to the White House, support from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg, and a moment of head-spinning attention as questions arose whether he had been targeted because of his name and his religion.

As a result, a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., who is partial to tinkering, technology and NASA T-shirts and wants to go to M.I.T., found himself in a social media whirlwind that reflected the nation’s charged debates on Islam, immigration and ethnicity.

“Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama said on Twitter. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Mr. Obama’s staff invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night on Oct. 19, an event bringing together scientists, engineers, astronauts, teachers and students to spend a night stargazing from the South Lawn.

The president’s spokesman said the episode was a case study in unreasoned prejudice in an era when the country is fighting Islamic terrorism at home and in the Middle East.

“This episode is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.

These are not good-hearted people, and Irving is not a good-hearted place.

Their mayor, Beth Van Duyne, has successfully run on a platform of religious bigotry for years now, and I do not expect anything resembling an apology from her.

Of course, now it’s blown up into a major sh%$ storm with POTUS got into the game on Twitter:

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

I really hope that Irving will spend the next few years as the butt of “dumb hick” jokes on the late night shows.

I always knew that Irving was a center of evil, it was the Dallas Cowboys home field until 2008,* but this takes to a whole new (low) level.

If we cannot give all of Texas back to Mexico, can we give Irving back?

Please?

*They now play in Arlington, TX, the largest city in the US without a mass transit system.

I Think That Obama Is Beginning to F%$# with Republicans for Sh%$S and Giggles

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White House officials have just met with Black Lives Matter officials:

Black Lives Matter activists, including select members of Campaign Zero, met with top White House officials on Wednesday, a senior administration official confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

Activists met with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, as well as Roy Austin, the deputy assistant to the president for urban affairs, and a collection of White House officials. The meeting focused on law enforcement and community policing with an emphasis on how to increase public safety locally.

I can hear wingnut heads exploding right now.

And in the News of the Self-Evident

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The Justice Department has determined that police tactics worsened unrest and violence during the Ferguson protests:

Tactics used by police during the days of sometimes-violent street protest last year in Ferguson, Missouri, increased tensions between law enforcement and protesters, according to a report Thursday by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Service, known as COPS.

The report said the use of dogs, snipers and tactical vehicles designed for the military “inflamed tensions and created fear among demonstrators.”

The COPS office reviewed how police responded in the 17 days after the fatal police shooting Aug. 9, 2014, of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown.

Although it focused on the conduct of four agencies — St. Louis County police, St. Louis Metropolitan police, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Ferguson Police Department — it said more than 50 law enforcement agencies were eventually involved. Their participation suffered from “inconsistency in direction” and a lack of effective communication.

The report said using dog teams for controlling crowds of protesters “invokes powerful emotions in many observing citizens and protesters, particularly where racial tensions exist.” Tear gas was used inappropriately, it says, without considering how protesters could safely move away.

I am a bit more skeptical of what was going on.

I think that the actions of law enforcement in and around Ferguson were calculated to stoke unrest, because they wanted a pretext to respond with violence in order to assert their authority.

Law enforcement wanted to create a violent situation in order to justify their use of violence, and they hoped for, and largely got, a complacent media to buy into their narrative in order to discredit the protesters narrative.

Remember the Loon Who Wanted the Government to Assassinate Law Professors Who He Disagreed With?

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A law professor who published an inflammatory article urging attacks on law professors and “Islamic holy sites” and who has been dogged by accusations of misrepresenting his academic and military credentials has resigned from the US Military Academy at West Point, the Guardian has confirmed.

US military academy official William Bradford argues that attacks on scholars’ home offices and media outlets – along with Islamic holy sites – are legitimate

Although West Point hired William C Bradford on 1 August, a spokesman said the prestigious undergraduate institution where the US army educates its future officers parted ways with the controversial academic on Sunday, the day after the Guardian published an article highlighting Bradford’s proposals to treat US scholars as “enemy combatants”.

“Dr William Bradford resigned on Sunday,” army lieutenant colonel Christopher Kasker, a West Point spokesman, told the Guardian on Monday. Bradford had taught five lessons for cadets in a common-core law course, from 17 to 27 August.

The West Point resignation marks the most recent academic departure for the controversial Bradford, following a decade’s worth of apparent exaggeration of his service record and academic career.

It remains unclear how thoroughly West Point vetted Bradford before hiring him.

………

Bradford has had a checkered academic career. In 2004, he quit a job teaching at the Indiana University School of Law after allegations emerged that he had exaggerated his military service, portraying himself inaccurately as a Gulf War veteran, an infantryman and a recipient of the prestigious Silver Star, an award for gallantry in action.

The army provided Bradford’s releasable service history to the Guardian on Monday. Bradford was commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant – the same rank West Point cadets hold upon commissioning – in 1995 and served the majority of his six-year service in military intelligence in the army reserve. He neither deployed nor earned any awards.

In 2005, the Guardian has learned, Bradford took a visiting professorship at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, teaching property law. A former student who wished to remain anonymous said Bradford’s behavior included “doing push-ups in class [and] making students stand and give answers in a military-like manner”.

Bradford, the former student said, ended up leaving his class – and ultimately the college – without grading the final exam.

Seriously?  This guy was employed at West Point?

Whoever is responsible for his hiring put “Wingnut Welfare” over both academic integrity as well the good order and discipline in the armed forces.

They need to be fired, and whatever security clearance that they might have needs to be replaced by a Cap’n Crunch decoder ring.

Why Does this Guy Teach at West Point?

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William Bradford, an assistant professor at West Point is calling for the assassination anyone who opposes his view of the world, as well as the law schools where they work.

Additionally, he wants Islamic holy sites bombed, just because:

An assistant professor in the law department of the US Military Academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.

 In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.

 Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism, Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist.

 “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” Bradford wrote.

 West Point is the revered undergraduate institution north of New York City where the US army educates its future officer corps. It prides itself on the rigor of its curriculum. Representatives from the school said Bradford had only begun his employment there on 1 August.

………

In the paper, Bradford identifies himself as an “associate professor of law, national security and strategy, National Defense University”, seemingly his previous job before West Point. But a representative of the National Defense University said Bradford was a contractor at the prestigious Defense Department-run institution, “never an NDU employee nor an NDU professor”.

It appears not to be the first time Bradford misrepresented his credentials. He resigned from Indiana University’s law school in 2005 after his military record showed he had exaggerated his service. (Among his paper’s criticisms of supposedly treasonous lawyers is “intellectual dishonesty”.)

Why is this guy not asking if we want fries with that for a living?

Why is he working at West Point?

Why was he a contractor at the National Defense University before that?

This is particularly troubling when one considers that his record before both of these jobs was clouded by credible allegations that he had consistently lied about his life story.

Why does this guy continue to get jobs in the national security establishment?

Some Good Law Enforcement News for Today

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The new judge in charge of the Ferguson Missouri municipal court has rescinded hundreds of arrest warrants, and has promised to make the court less abusive on poor and black people:

A new municipal judge in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday ordered sweeping changes to court practices in response to a scathing Justice Department report following the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown a year ago.

Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June, ordered that all arrest warrants issued in the city before Dec. 31, 2014 be withdrawn.

Defendants will receive new court dates along with options for disposing of their cases, such as payment plans or community service. Fines may be commuted for indigent people.

The changes come five months after the U.S. Department of Justice strongly criticized city leaders in its report, saying the police force and court worked together to exploit people in order to raise revenue.

The Justice Department specifically said Ferguson’s municipal court practices caused significant harm to many people with cases pending as minor municipal code violations turned into multiple arrests, jail time, and payments that exceeded the cost of the original ticket many times over.

Here is hoping that the reforms stick, but I doubt it.

In the long run, there is too much money in shaking poor black people in Ferguson for it to end without an outside agent forcing them to do so.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Analysts at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that black students are expelled from school at a disproportionate rate:

With the Obama administration focused on reducing the number of suspensions, expulsions and arrests in public schools, a new analysis of federal data identifies districts in 13 Southern states where black students are suspended or expelled at rates overwhelmingly higher than white children.

The analysis, which will be formally released Tuesday by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on states where more than half of all the suspensions and expulsions of black students nationwide occurred. While black students represented just under a quarter of public school students in these states, they made up nearly half of all suspensions and expulsions.

In some districts, the gaps were even more striking: in 132 Southern school districts, for example, black students were suspended at rates five times their representation in the student population, or higher.

………

Still, “I am actually shocked that there is not more outrage,” said Shaun R. Harper, associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education who was a co-author of the analysis.

………

“This is at least partly attributed to people having these racist assumptions about black kids,” Mr. Harper said. “We argue that too little happens in schools of education to raise consciousness about that.”

This is an outrage, and it is also not even a little surprise.

We have already had the story of the three year old son of an upper middle class black woman who has been suspended 5 times, while her white friends at the preschool noted that their kids had done worse with no consequences.

We are still a deeply racist society.

Marie Le Pen Will Probably Be the next President of France

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We know this because the National Front Party, sick and tired of party founder Jean Le Pen aggressively bigoted antics, have expelled him from the party.

The kicking his ass out was done by his daughter, Marine Le Pen:

Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of France’s far-right National Front, was expelled from the party on Thursday after he repeatedly angered its current leader, his daughter Marine, by reviving the party’s anti-Semitic past, which she is eager to shed.

The party’s executive board voted to kick him out after hearing three hours of arguments from Mr. Le Pen, 87, a former paratrooper who for years has symbolized the most retrograde strain of French politics, including hatred of immigrants and nostalgia for the days of colonial rule in Algeria.

Under his daughter’s leadership, the National Front has broken into the political mainstream, and Mr. Le Pen has increasingly become an embarrassment to her, especially after repeating his familiar views on the Holocaust. He has repeatedly told interviewers that the gas chambers were a “detail of history” and has said the wartime collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain was not a “traitor.”

The Le Pens have been tussling in public for five months, with Ms. Le Pen saying in April that she was “in profound disagreement” with her father after his latest remarks on the Holocaust. France has been treated since then to a father-daughter political feud of rare virulence, one that at first riveted the French public but more recently has seemed to irritate it.

The National Front is the only credible Euroskeptic party in France, and now that they are consistently getting double digit numbers in elections, the fact that they have made a clean and dramatic break with their racist and anti Semitic origins means that they become a much more credible political player in the French electoral system.

It’s not a big move.  It’s basically their moving from Strom Thurmond to Ronald Reagan:  Still racist as f%$#, but respectably so, but Reagan did win the Presidential election, twice, and Nicolas Sarkosyn used oblique appeals to bigotry in both of his his Presidential bids.

Considering that Holland is currently polling lower than a case of the Clap, and the leader of the center right French Republican Party, the aforementioned Nicolas Sarkosy has still not recovered from his Presidency, and so polls about the level of a visit to a proctologist.

Current polling, taken before Jean Le Pen’s ouster, had Marine Le Pen about 10 points behind both of them, and I figure that removing that albatross from her neck is probably good for at least that.

Meet the Clampetts

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Cue the Banjos

Down in Oklahoma, some bigot declared that their gun shop was a “Muslim Free Zone”, the 1964 Civil Rights Act be damned.

This brought in the usual suspects who dedicated themselves to “protecting” the establishment.

One of these products of generations of first cousins marrying dropped his gun and shot himself:

The Muskogee County sheriff said a member of the group guarding an Oktaha gun shop accidentally shot himself Tuesday.

Sheriff Charles Pearson said the man dropped his gun and a bullet hit him in the arm. The sheriff did not identify the man or offer any other details about what happened.

 The group of armed citizens and veterans is standing guard outside the Save Yourself Survival and Tactical Gear store after the owners said they received death threats from all over the world for putting up a sign saying Muslims weren’t welcome.

“I saw several of those gentlemen out there yesterday,” Pearson said. “The way they were holding their weapons, with the fingers on the triggers, you can tell a couple of these gentlemen have no idea about weapons safety. It’s like the Clampetts have come to town,” Sheriff Pearson told muskogeenow.com.

According to the Supreme Court, there is a fundamental right to own firearms.

We also have a fundamental right to eat Ghost Peppers, which have a heat rating of over eight hundred thousand Scovilles.

Just because you have a right to do this does not make it right, though.

This gentleman should not own a gun, because he is too stupid to own a gun.

What Is Depressing Is That This Isn’t Even the Craziest Thing Said by a Republican This Week

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The craziest Mother f%$#er in the Republican Presidential contest ……… No, the other one, ……… No, the other one, ……… No, not Donald Trump.

OK, it’s Ben Carson, alright?

Well, the other day, he was talking immigration, and he suggested that we should use missile strikes to secure the border against illegal immigration:

Another day. Someone else surges near the top of the polls. Another nutball comes to the border and loses his mind. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present your current second-place contestant in the Republican presidential derby.

On Wednesday morning, Carson responded to a question about whether he would be open to the possibility of drone strikes on American soil to secure the border. “The take home point is this. We have excellent military leaders,” he said. “We need to employ their expertise because this is a war we are fighting. That’s the bottom line.”

Look out, El Paso. Sometimes, mistakes are made. Sorry about that junior high that used to be there.

It’s batsh%$ insane, it’s needlessly cruel, and it is is a relentlessly bigoted demonization of the other, but it’s not as bad as deliberately accusing mothers of poisoning their children for free rent.

Yes, Racism Is Rooted in Economic Inequality

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This is the title of a a thought provoking article in Jacobin that needs to be read in its entirety.

A snippet to present their basic thesis:

Here’s my question to the angry commenters: if racial inequality isn’t merely a symptom of economic inequality, what is it a symptom of?

I already feel like I can hear the answer: it’s a symptom of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid.

Yes. But what were slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid if not extreme forms of economic inequality?

What was the point of England’s colonization of Ireland if not to impose a lucrative “economic inequality” on its victims? Was the urban apartheid of Haussmann’s Paris not the “symptom” of nineteenth-century economic inequality?

It provides a very good historical perspective (as one would expect with the author invoking Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III) on how bigotry is very much the product of exploitative economics.

It should be noted that Jacobin is an explicitly Socialist publication, and socialism has a long history of viewing pretty much everything in society through the prism of economics,* so this focus is unsurprising.

Still, it is a good read, and very thought provoking.

*In fact, I would argue that the lasting contribution of Marx to the study of society was his focus on the economic. Certainly, the degree to which all aspects of society, whether they be government, judicial, or social are viewed largely through the lens of economics has expanded enormously since Marx published Das Kapital almost 150 years ago.

Just When I Thought That My Outrage Meter Could Handle It………

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I discover that a former cop tried to conduct a Minstrel Show to fundraise for the cops indicted in the death of Freddie Gray:

A Glen Burnie venue on Wednesday abruptly canceled a planned fundraiser for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray after the scheduled entertainment — a former Baltimore officer singing in blackface — drew sharp criticism.

Bobby Berger, 67, who was fired from the city police force in the 1980s after his off-duty performances in blackface drew the ire of the NAACP, had said he wanted to revive the act to help the families of the officers.

He said he had sold 600 tickets at $45 each to the bull roast scheduled for Nov. 1 at Michael’s Eighth Avenue, where he and several singers planned to perform as guests dined.

In his performances, Berger impersonates Al Jolson, a white entertainer from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s best remembered for his blackface performance of “Mammy” in the film “The Jazz Singer.”

But after news of the event began spreading Wednesday, Michael’s posted a statement on its website saying the event would not be held there.

“No contract was signed with Mr. Berger,” the venue wrote. “Michael’s does not condone blackface performances of any kind. As an event venue, it has not been the practice of Michael’s Eighth Avenue to pre-approve entertainment that is planned as part of a contracted event. This policy will be carefully and thoughtfully reviewed.”

Berger’s plans drew criticism earlier in the day from the NAACP, the city police union and an attorney representing one of the officers charged in the Gray case.

………

Michael Davey, an attorney who works with the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police, said the union was unaware of the event.

“We don’t endorse it. We do not support it, and we will accept no funds from anything involving this event,” Davey said.

The police union issued a statement Wednesday saying it has “much respect” for Berger and another retired officer organizing the event but does not condone “any performance representing the iconic racist figure that is Al Jolson” or any fundraising for the officers that does not come directly through the union.

When you have the f%$#ing police union saying that they won’t have anything to do with a fundraiser for indicted cops, you clearly have a problem with race.

The human race never ceases to amaze me.