Category: Racism

The Best Speech that Ted Kennedy Ever Gave

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How many good men must we give before we finally face the fact that the weakness in our society is a weakness in ourselves?

It wasn’t his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980.

It was in Sitka in 1968, though not too many people heard, or saw it, because it was given to the Alaska state Democratic Party Convention in Sitka in 1968, talking about the assassination of Martin Luther King and its aftermath.

Not a whole bunch of people have heard it, because he gave at the but my mom was in the audience, and she recalled looking around and watching political hacks on either side of her, with tears streaming down their faces.

You can find the speech, along with introductions by both Senator Ernest Gruening and Walter Eugene “Gene” Guess Speaker of the Alaska State House of Representatives, who my father worked with when we were in Alaska.

I downloaded the video to split and Youtube it from the Alaska state archives.


Part 1 of 2


Part 2 of 2

Here’s a Surprise

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And in my own backyard, no less.

We now have confirmation that a number of banks, most notably Wells Fargo, specifically and disproportionately targeted blacks for high interest subprime mortgages:

As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

I don’t know what bothers me more, that this happened, or that I am so unsurprised that this happened.

And it ain’t just Wells.

Byron York Thinks that Black People Don’t Count

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Or maybe he thinks that they only count 3/5ths.

His claim is that Barak Obama’s support is somehow not real, because he is polling much higher among black voters, which ignores the fact that Democratic Presidents always poll higher among black voters, because they know that the Republicans have become the party of bigotry and segregation.

Simply put, when you see one party as hating you and trying to do harm to you, any representative of an opposing party looks better.

But Byron York, in a perfect reflection of the Republican Party, wants to say that black Americans simply do not count, much like the Republican Party vote suppression apparatus says that black American votes simply should not be counted.

Israel and the Overton Window

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First, a definition: The Overton window is a theory first voiced in this form by Joe Overton, which states that ideas, can be classifies as being either inside of or outside of the bounds of conversation in a group. It further notes that this window is not fixed, but rather it moves, and through the application of resources over a long term, can be made to move significantly.

Ideas can generally be classified as unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, or popular, with the latter generally moving toward policy.

Israeli elections are today, and it is likely that the racist Yisrael Beitenu party will be the 3rd largest party in the Knesset, displacing Labor to 4th place.*

What I think people don’t realize is how much of a shift this is in Israel’s Overton window.

If one were to suggest at a party an expulsion of Israel’s Arab population in 1966, or an expulsion of the Palestinians in the territories in 1968 at a party, the response would have been stunned silence, with people looking at the speaker like they had just admitted to eating children, and that person would be ostracized at the party, and not invited back.

In fact, it could be argued that this was the societal norm well into the 1st Intifada, and possibly up to some time after the Oslo accords were implemented, and the PLO returned to Israel.

Now, we have a party which endorses ethnic cleansing without the movement of people, by redrawing the Israeli border to excise most of its Israeli Arab citizenry, on a path to have the third highest number of seats in Parliament.

This idea has already moved from unthinkable to acceptable for discussion for much of the Israeli population, and the desired political outcome for over 10% of the population, and likely exceeds the vote totals of YB will get, because of the dynamics of the Israeli proportional representation system and the fact that their party leader, Avigdor Lieberman† is stridently secular.

Needless to say, this marks a significant change in Israeli society, and to my mind, this is a profoundly negative change, and I do not see its trajectory changing in the foreseeable future.

*Much of their anemic performance in recent elections has to do with the fact that “big L” Labor has largely abandoned the concerns of “small L” labor in favor of a new Thatcherite economic consensus, but that is another post.
†It seems to be a constant that politicians named Lieberman are complete asswhipes.

Why Yes, We Are A Bunch of Racists

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Today’s Republican party, where not only does a candidate for chairman of the RNC, Chip Saltsman, release a holiday Christmas CD with “Barack the Magic Negro” on it, but it now appears that doing so help his bid to succeed current Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan.

Of course, former Ohio Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, decided to weigh in in favor of Mr Saltsman, cementing his role as the biggest Tom of the century in an attempt to use this in his bid to become RNC chair.

When this crap is so toxic that Michael Steele (also looking for the chair) is keeping his head down, Ken Blackwell is bringing Tomfoolery to a new level.

Why I Didn’t Comment on the Race Baiting Fraud

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I make no claim to wisdom or prescience, but I had reasons not to discuss this story.

  • I had nothing meaningful to add. I haven’t been talking about the assaults and death threats at McCain-Palin rallies either. I put this stuff down to C=MI,* and figure that is just the way things are.
  • To the degree that I have political teeth, I cut them in the UMass SGA Senate, where I served with future actors in the Abramoff and Sciavo matters† who were in the College Republicans, which gave me a nose for College Republican bullsh&#, and this reeked of College Republican bullsh&#.

    Thus. when I heard that this was a College Republican, I figured that it was a stunt which did not deserve comment.

  • By the time I heard about it, the note that the “B” was backwards, and likely applied in front of a mirror.

I just don’t one of those typewriter font types who need to get a life.

*Conservatism equals Mental Illness.
†Interestingly enough, more often than not, we were on the same side in SGA Senate,a Mondale Democrat and College Republicans,against the “US Out of North America” crowd.

They are Lucky that they are White Folk

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Because we now have a report that Iceland is going to accept an IMF bailout in the amount of $6 billion, about $18,740.10 per person living there, and about 1/2 of the island’s GDP.

Luckily for them, they are white, because the “strict measures” to be demanded by the IMF will be along the lines of, “a stipulation that Iceland quickly deleverage its three nationalized banks Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitner.”

If they were more darkly complected, you would likely see things demanded like a reduction of the minimum wage, the abolition of free primary schooling, the abolition of the government health care system, higher sales taxes and lower income taxes to favor investors, the sale of public utilities to foreign investors, a roll back of labor rights and employment protections, and aggressive measures to depress domestic consumption at because it would theoretically benefit exports.

BTW, that the last one is called creating poverty, which is fine for the n*gg*rs, but just wouldn’t do for the pale skinned blue eyed folk.

Lynn Westmoreland Someone Who Bigots Can Point At And Say

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See, I’m no bigot, Congressman Lynn Westmorland of Georgia, now there’s a bigot:

“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,” Westmoreland said.

Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”

Needless to say, if he had said this just two weeks earlier, he’d be the vice presidential nominee right now.

I guess we should be grateful that he didn’t use the term n*gg*r.

Taser Death Heads to Grand Jury

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Well it now appears that the Taser murder investigation is heading toward a grand jury (background here).

I do not expect an indictment. This is a dead black man, and the ex-cop who Tasered him 9 times after he was in handcuffs, Scott Nugent, has little to fear from a Louisiana jury.

Even if it goes to trial, you can expect Taser International to supply tens of thousands of dollars in expert testimony to the defendant saying that a Taser can’t kill, because they know what happens if they get tagged with one death.

Why Amy Sullivan is a Complete Idiot

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Amy Sullivan has always been a one note pundit: The Democratic party must reach out to religious voters, and protect them from those evil radical secularists who would make fun of them.

The problem there is very basic: there are no radical secularists in the leadership of the Democratic party.

For that matter, I believe that there has been one atheist who has ever served as a member of Congress, so she is talking about people who do not exist.

Now, she is prattling on about how Obama is making overt evangelical religiosity work for him.

First, she claims that Obama has “pivoted to announce that an Obama administration would fix, expand and elevate the faith-based initiative”.

Except, of course, if these organizations take federal money, Obama won’t allow them to discriminate on the basis of religion, and they will be subject to federal accounting and auditing standards, which has always been the case until Bush set up his own “faith based initiative.”

The purpose of Bush’s program was to ensure that there was neither fiscal accountability nor discrimination protection, so it is a complete refutation of Bush’s program.

In fact, what is implied is that he will sweep up massive numbers of white evangelicals in so doing, even though the religious right demand that they be subject to no fiscal accountability and be given the right to discriminate.

The core message of the politicized right wing evangelical is hostility to integration and to minorities.

Similarly, when she lauds Bush’s “Compassionate Conservativism”, she does not understand, or more likely refuses to understand that this is a dog whistle to the religious right, referring to Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, which says that “true compassion” is not giving charity, because, “Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive,” which means let “black babies starve”.

The religious Evangelical does not begin with Roe v. Wade and abortion, bur rather with Green v. Connally, which revoked the tax exempt status of discriminatory private religious schools.

So we can run a poll on religious affiliation vs. candidate support, and you can see that Obama is polling lower than either Kerry in 2004 or Gore in 2000. (h/t Talkleft on the poll)

Barack Obama has no chance of picking up white right wing Evangelical voters, and the votes he picks up from black Evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics are because the Republican party is implacably hostile to them.

Amy Sullivan is a one trick pony, but her pony is a dog, and I’ll call her my “Wanker of the Day”.

So Now We Have the First Murder by Taser

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Former Police Officer Scott Nugent tasered Baron “Scooter” Pikes NINE TIMES after he WAS ALREADY HANDCUFFED, and may face criminal charges, though I doubt it: It’s Winnfield, Louisiana, only 45 miles from Jena, and the victim was black:

Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes — shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station — where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.

“After he was given that drive stun to the chest, he was pulled out of the car onto the concrete, ” Williams told CNN. “He was electroshocked two more times, which two officers noted that he had no neuromuscular response to those last two 50,000-volt electroshocks.”

Williams said he had two nationally known forensic pathologists, including former New York city medical examiner Michael Baden, review the case before issuing his conclusions. He said it’s possible Nugent was shocking a dead man the last two times he pulled the trigger.

“This fellow was talking in the back seat of the car prior to shot number seven,” he said. “From that point on, it becomes questionable [if Pikes was still alive].”

Curry said Pikes told officers he suffered from asthma and had been using PCP and crack cocaine. But Williams said he found no sign of drug use in the autopsy, and no record of asthma in Pikes’ medical history.

In the year since Winnfield police received Tasers, officers have used them 14 times, according to police records — with 12 of the instances involving black suspects. Ten of the 14 incidents involved Nugent, who has no public disciplinary record.

(emphasis mine)

Taser, International is claiming that they couldn’t have caused his death….Yeah, sure….whatever.

Nothing to see here….It’s just a n*****…move along.

30 Years for Driving While Black

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William Thornton IV, a black man, skidded through a stop sign on a rainy night, and struck an SUV, killing its two occupants. He remained at the scene, and there were no drugs or alcohol in him. He had no criminal record.

Despite this, Judge Ric Howard sentenced him to 30 years in jail, after he followed his public defender’s advice, and pled guilty and threw himself on the mercy of the court.

Thankfully, a high powered law firm noticed, but had he been white, would he have served any time at all.