Category: Racism

People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth

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Jeffrey Lord, writing, rather unsurprisingly, for The American Spectator, who claims that the lynching of her relative, Bobby Hall, because they beat him to death instead of hanging him.

So, according to the “white cracker inbred former Reagan White House political director” morons out there, it’s only a lynching if it involves rope.

At least ⅓ of lynchings did not involve hangings. They involved burning, shooting, and (Yes, Virginia) beating, among other methods.

Needless to say, as a result of his contemptible and brain dead rants, he is sure to be invited onto the Sunday political talk shows.

Cowards.

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When people talk about DFH* bloggers hating on the Obama they seem to think that its all about Obama being a pragmatist. It isn’t about his being a pragmatist.

It’s about his, and his people being abject cowards, who soil themselves when someone on the right wing shouts out a lie.

Case in point, Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, who was just fired for a yet another deceptively edited video from professional bigot Andrew Breitbart.

You see, she gave a talk about how when she was working helping farmers, when the first white farmer came to her for help, the thought crossed her mind was not to help, because they were white, but she realized almost as soon as the thought hit her that it was wrong.

Well after excerpting 30 seconds out of a 45+ minute speech (see below), so that Fox News could go “Oh noes! N*****s are trying to take over America.”

The response of the Secretary of Agriculture was to fire her before any real facts came out.

I am with what Digby said:

“Her decision ‘rightly or wrongly” will be called into question” because some right wing hitman put out an edited tape that makes her sound as if her point is the opposite of what it is, so she had to be fired.

They are telling wingnuts everywhere that all they have to do is gin up a phony controversy (especially about a black person, apparently) and the administration will fire them so as not to shake confidence that they are “fair service providers.”

This is sheer cowardice.

This is what pisses people off.

Video after break

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This Explains a Lot About the Washington Post

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This story is old, I saved it when I was visiting my Mother-in-Law’s, but my sense of this remains the same.

There was a snowball fight in Washington, DC, and some people threw snowballs at a Hummer driven by a Washington, DC police officer, who then drew his gun and threatened the participants.

If it hadn’t been caught on video, and posted to Youtube (included), and the police claimed that it never happened, until, of course the video, and the photographs showed up all over the web.

This is actually pretty standard: Until you have outrageous law enforcement misconduct on tape, the police deny that it ever happened, and so I have very little to say about this.

That being said, I do have something to say about the Washington Post‘s coverage of the incident.

You see, they took the original police story, “Nothing to see here, move along,” at face value, and they did so despite the fact that a Washington Post editorial staffer was at the event and reported what happened:

Washington Post editorial aide Stephen Lowman was at 14th and U on Saturday when the controversial snowball-fight-cum-police-indiscretion went down. He wasn’t there on assignment–he was just taking it all in.

And take it all in he did. He eye-witnessed the snowball fest and the cop waving around a gun, not to mention all the hubbub that ensued.

So Lowman got on the phone to the Post, to give the newsroom a heads-up. He says he was placed in contact with staff writer Matt Zapotosky. Lowman told Zapotosky about the confrontation and the gun. It was just after 3 pm.

………………

Two hours later, at 5:40 pm, the inexplicable takes place: The Washington Post files a post by Zapotosky and Martin Weilrefuting the photographic evidence already on the Web and taking the official position of the D.C. Police Department. Here are some key excerpts:

Assistant Chief Pete Newsham, who leads the department’s investigative services bureau, said it appears the patrol officer acted appropriately, and the worst the detective might have done is use inappropriate language in dealing with the snowball fighters.

So, what we have by the time that the Post covers the story is:

  • A staffer who says that a cop pulled a gun at a snowball fight.
  • Pictures and videos all over the internet showing that the cop pulled his gun and brandished it, which is technically assault with a deadly weapon.

Now the folks at DC’s alternative paper, the Washington City Paper, whose link I am citing in the story, broke this. They had the pictures, they linked to the Youtube, etc., and they, or at least their reporter Erik Wemple, think that this is all about the WaPo not wanting to link to them, because they are a bunch of DFH’s* from the alternative weekly.

I think that they are wrong. I think that what is going on is far more malevolent.

I think that this has nothing to do with the Post dissing an alternative weekly competitor, and it has everything to do with being an upper middle class, and overwhelmingly white institution in a city that is majority black.

Simply put, they went with the police story, because the unspoken bias of the Washington Post editors is that they need to keep the N***ers down. They go with a blatantly false police account of the events for the same reason that they so so aggressively repeat and amply blatantly false Republican spin: They believe that the police and the Republicans are the best way to keep N***ers in their place in the District.

Then again, maybe I am just reading way to much into this, and it’s just a crappy and lazy reporter.

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

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.

Godwin’s Law Does not Apply*

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The reason that Godwin’s law does not apply here is because we are talking about Patrick Buchanan, and, on the 60th anniversary of the start of WWII, he’s writing about how the war really wasn’t Hitler’s fault at all, but the fault of those meddling English.

OK, we know that he is a pro-Nazi kook, and we know that his Dad was involved in the German American Bund, so we can only imagine what little Patty’s dinner table discussions were like, but why does this man have a soap box at MSNBC and other networks?

The issue is not that he is an anti-Semitic and racist kook, it is that mainstream media outlets still feel compelled to give him access?

To quote the late, great Molly Ivins, “The speech was so much better in the original German.”

[on edit] I did not link directly to Pat Buchanan’s article, though I read it, because I did not want to drive page views.

*Which states that, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” with a corollary that, “the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”†
†It should be noted that this law has not been considered to apply exclusively to Usenet discussions for at least a decade, and is applied generally to all forms of electronic text based communications.