These are the same yo-yo’s who under the Bushshit…
Spent 8 years after invading the Department of Justice Civil rights Division, trying to find cases of “reverse discrimination, ignoring the over 12,000 complaints of real discrimination by black folks, Hispanics, and other groups – to find exactly one (1) case of provable discrimination by a minority against white folks in 8 years…
And, are convinced that the presence of two unarmed black men wearing berets on the street by a polling place in Pennsylvania traumatized millions of white voters nationwide into voting for and electing a black man for President.
Racism will indeed …
Make you stupid - and stupidity will make you a conservative.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Shaun Winkler, a white supremacist in Idaho running as a Republican for Bonner County sheriff, is defending his recent cross burning ceremony, after having invited members of the media to attend the event last week.
“Mainstream society looks at cross lighting as a symbol of hate, but it predates the Klan by hundreds of years,” Winkler told the Bonner County Daily Bee. “We look at it more as a religious symbol.”
Winkler went on to claim the ritual has Scottish roots dating back hundreds of years, but his status as a Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard and his candid admissions of racial and religious prejudice suggest that the decision to burn the cross may take inspiration from a more recent and ugly practice.
“Most people don’t know that we don’t just oppose the Jews and the negroes,” he said, according to the Daily Bee. “We also oppose sexual predators and drugs of any kind.”
While Winkler has claimed that he wouldn’t allow his personal beliefs to guide the way he would act as sheriff, his position on sexual predators is admittedly more severe.
No big surprise here, the Tea Party’s driving elements are much the same as those which created the Second Clan in the early 20th Century. And while the Tea Party certainly isn’t in majority a terrorist group like the KKK – it is driven by one of the two major political forces in the United States, the other being Populism.
The question of the hour is whether the Tea Party has any staying power. Indications are that they have overplayed their hand in a number of states where their candidates got elected – and my be facing the sort of electoral donnybrook that has been a feature of American electoral politics since 1994, where each Party has suffered huge defeats changing the power structure in Congress.
Writing at the New York Times, historian Kevin Boyle has created something of a stir with his review of two recent books on the Ku Klux Klan. Here is the lede of the piece, which also doubles as the offending passage:
Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.
No, not that movement.
Naturally, this inspired a torrent of criticism from right-wing blogs and pundits. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attacks the review as “lame” and complains that Boyle failed to mention the Klan’s ties to Democrats and Progressives (as if either group was the same in the 1920s), while the right-wing Media Research Center described the review as offensive. The Weekly Standard takes Goldberg’s approach, and points its readers toward proof that Democrats and Progressives were the real allies of the Klan.
A few things. Any honest historian will readily acknowledge the extent to which the Klan was entwined with the Democratic politicians in the early part of the twentieth century. Although both parties had largely abandoned civil rights by the beginning of the twentieth century, it’s fair to say that up until the 1940s, the Democratic Party was the unambiguous party of white supremacy in the United States, particularly in the South. That the Klan was involved with the Democratic Party through the 1920s isn’t a shock, given the degree to which both groups dominated border states like Kentucky in the early part of the century.
More importantly, Boyle says nothing about the Klan as an organ of Republican politics. Instead, he makes the (correct) point that the forces that animated the Klan—conservative Christianity, nativism, white populism, hyper-patriotism and racial prejudice—have manifested themselves throughout American history, including the present day. And while the Tea Party isn’t an anti-black terrorist group, it’s hard to deny the extent to which the movement is motivated by the same constellation of reactionary forces.
The facts bear this out. According to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 47 percent of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement also identify with the religious right, and 75 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party label themselves Christian conservatives. Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white, more likely to see immigration as a problem, and more likely to harbor racial resentment toward African-Americans. Put another way, it’s no accident that birtherism found a home among Tea Partiers. And of course, Tea Party rhetoric tends toward to loud proclamations of “real” patriotism, and a desire to return to the foundations of American political life.
The Tea Party is a classic reactionary movement in the American tradition, and as a result, it shares similarities with the Ku Klux Klan. I repeat, that doesn’t mean that Tea Partiers are Klansmen, but it’s simply true that the movement draws from similar threads in American life. Given the extent to which this isabundantly clear, the Tea Party’s conservative defenders are, perhaps, protesting a little too much.
Busy few weeks for the “hangman” here in the USA. Lots to cheer about for Rick Perry’s Tea Party crowd, as the executions stack up as they did at the Tea Party “debate”. From Supreme Court intervention stopping an execution Texas, to the planned execution of Troy Davis in Georgia – it seems killing for vengeance has become big business in a few southern states.
One has to wonder though – just how loudly the same crowd would have cheered to the execution of this miscreant – one of their own fellow “Republicans”…
Lawrence Russell Brewer - Next on Rick Perry's List?
One of three men convicted for his involvement in the infamous dragging death of a black man 13 years ago is scheduled to be executed Wednesday.
Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, is scheduled to die by lethal injection in the killing of James Byrd.
Brewer and two other white men chained the 49-year-old black man to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to death on a country road near Jasper, Texas.
Accomplice John William King also was sentenced to death and is awaiting an appeal. A third man, Shawn Berry, received life in prison.
A prosecutor called Brewer a racist psychopath during his 1999 trial.
During the trial, Brewer took the witness stand and contended that he was a bystander, not a killer.
He tearfully admitted being present when Byrd was dragged to his death but, he said, “I didn’t mean to cause his death. I had no intentions of killing anybody.”
Brewer, a former jailhouse Ku Klux Klan leader, said King initiated the killing by fighting with Byrd. He also said the third defendant, Berry, slashed Byrd’s throat and then chained him to Berry’s pickup. Brewer admitted kicking Byrd and spraying Byrd’s face with black paint.
But he said it was a reflex action taken to try to break up the fight between Byrd and King.
The execution would be the 11th this year in Texas, the most active death-penalty state.
Indeed, I’ll be surprised if we don’t get another of those “5-4″ conservative block Supreme Court decisions to save Brewer at the last minute, with the “usual suspects” suddenly finding the penalty as too extreme. Of course the $500k “donation” to Ginny Thomas’ PAC required to flip conservative votes…
“You can’t fight murder with murder,” Ross Byrd, 32, told Reuters late Tuesday, the night before Wednesday’s scheduled execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer for one of the most notorious hate crimes in modern times.
“Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can’t hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn’t what we want.”
The Tea Party for all intents and purposes is the rise of the Fourth KKK. Don’t let the fact they have given up the sheets for khakis and pinpoint shirts fool you – it’s the same message, and the same old racist evil. Whether it is Bachmann waxing fondly about slavery, or Herman Cain buckdancing and shining in his travelling Minstrel Show – the message is the same – Hate.
Now over there at conservative central, the usual suspects are in full buckdance mode trying to provide racial cover by claiming the recent “Flash Mob” attacks in Philly are symptomatic of black folks racism. Never mind that the “beat down” videos posted by teens on YouTube and other sites have been around for a few years – and the perpetrators are a cross section of America.
Auto plant worker James Craig Anderson was run over and killed by a group of white teens, prosecutors in Mississippi say.
Tea Bagger and Republican race baiting, given national coverage and viewership by the likes of Faux News has created the most hostile racial climate in America since Segregation.
The security camera footage broadcast by CNN shows a grisly scene: a black man in Jackson, Mississippi, being fatally run over by a pickup truck after he was viciously beaten in a motel parking lot on a Sunday morning in June. Prosecutors say a group of white teens chose the man at random. They say the alleged ringleader, an 18-year-old now charged with murder, laughed about it afterward and boasted in a phone conversation about how he “ran that n—– over.”
When we’re confronted with such a shocking act of violence, we search for answers. We want to know what’s in the hearts and minds of the attackers. We wonder what motivates someone to extinguish a life for no other reason than the color of the person’s skin. (more…)
One of the ugly episodes in our history was the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII. America operated concentration camps, where Japanse-American citizens, guilty of nothing but their Japanese ancestry were imprisoned for the duration of WWII. Whole familes were carted off to be locked away…
So it is no surprise Japanese would be sensitive to the virulent calls to racism by Tea Bagged Republicans – this time against another group, Muslims. They have seen this slide show before…
During the chaotic days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Basim Elkarra was passing by an Islamic school in Sacramento when he did a double-take: The windows were covered with thousands of origami paper cranes – peace symbols that had been folded and donated by Japanese Americans.
Amid the anger and suspicions being aimed at Muslims at that time, the show of support “was a powerful symbol that no one will ever forget,” said Elkarra, a Muslim American community leader in California.
Spurred by memories of the World War II-era roundup and internment of 110,000 of their own people, Japanese Americans, especially on the West Coast, have been among the most vocal and passionate supporters of embattled Muslims. They’ve rallied public support against hate crimes at mosques, signed on to legal briefs opposing the indefinite detention of Muslims by the government, organized cross-cultural trips to the Manzanar internment camp memorial in California and held “Bridging Communities” workshops in Islamic schools and on college campuses. (more…)
For different reasons, I think the Governor is right on this one. As Governor, he shouldn’t be in the business of regulating what people propose. It’s regulating Free Speech if he does that. Essentially anyone can propose any idiotic thing they want (a Dirty Diaper License plate for instance)…
Getting the State DMV or Legislature to accept it… Is a whole different story.
With that said, however – that doesn’t let Barbour off the hook for his close ties with neo-confederate and white supremacist groups.
Haley Barbour doesn’t think Mississippi’s legislature will approve the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ proposed license platehonoring Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest—but he’s not going denounce the proposal. The state’s NAACP has called on Barbour to do so, the AP reports, but when asked about it, the governor replied, “I don’t go around denouncing people. That’s not going to happen.” Pressed further, he added, “I know there’s not a chance it’ll become law.”
Needless to say, the NAACP wasn’t satisfied with the response. “I find it curious that the governor won’t come out and clearly denounce” the proposal, the group’s Mississippi president said. “As the head of the state, he shouldn’t tap dance around the question.” The incident comes just months after Barbour sparked controversy by saying that he didn’t remember segregated Mississippi as being “that bad.” For more on the license plate controversy, click here.
An Arizona jury on Monday convicted anti-illegal immigration activist Shawna Forde of murder in the killing of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter during a 2009 vigilante raid she led on their home.
The Pima County jury convicted Forde on eight counts, including two counts of murder for the shooting deaths of Raul Flores and his daughter, Brisenia, and the attempted murder of the child’s mother, Gina Gonzales, at the family’s rural Arivaca home on May 30, 2009.
The child and her father were American-born U.S. citizens.
The jury also convicted Forde on two counts of aggravated assault, and one count each of burglary, armed robbery and aggravated robbery.
The jury is scheduled to return Tuesday for the penalty phase of the trial. (more…)
A common Urban Legend is that there is a Statue in Washington, DC of Nathan Bedford Forrest – the founder of the KKK.
There is not. The statue often confused for Forrest is actually of Albert Pike, and was put there by the Scottish Rite in recognition of his service to the organization. The story that Albert Pike was a KKK Grand Dragon is probably not true.
With that said – the move to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Mississippi has drawn some ire. Check out the bumper of the car in the picture above of SCV Leader, Greg Stewart…
The Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans wants to sponsor a series of state-issued license plates to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which it calls the “War Between the States.” The group proposes a different design each year between now and 2015, with Forrest slated for 2014.
“Seriously?” state NAACP president Derrick Johnson said when he was told about the Forrest plate. “Wow.”
Forrest, a Tennessee native, is revered by some as a military genius and reviled by others for leading the 1864 massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. Forrest was a Klan grand wizard in Tennessee after the war.
Sons of Confederate Veterans member Greg Stewart said he believes Forrest distanced himself from the Klan later in life. It’s a point many historians agree upon, though some believe it was too little, too late, because the Klan had already turned violent before Forrest left. (more…)
This one apparently solved by the work of a local newspaper. Morris may have been murdered by the KKK for nothing other than the perspicacity of being a black man operating a successful business with both black and white customers.
Frank Morris was in the Apron and visor in the middle of the group standing in front of his store
Early on the morning of December 10, 1964, Frank Morris ran out of his shoe store, his clothes and skin on fire.
People who saw him in the hospital afterward said the African-American businessman was so badly burned they didn’t recognize him.
“Only the bottom of his feet weren’t burned. He was horrible to look at,” said the Rev. Robert Lee Jr., now 96.
Morris survived for four days before dying — long enough to tell the FBI that two men had broken into his store while he slept, smashed windows, doused the place in gasoline and told him: “Get back in there, nigger.”
Locals in Ferriday, the small Louisiana town where Morris lived and died, remember him as having both white and black customers, which was rare for black businesses in the segregated South in the days before civil rights. He would come out of his store onto the sidewalk so white female customers wouldn’t have to go inside alone.
No one has ever been charged with killing him. But Wednesday, more than 46 years after his death at age 51, a local newspaper has named two men it believes were part of a Ku Klux Klan “wrecking crew” that torched his store and murdered him.
One, Arthur Spencer, is still alive. The second, O.C. “Coonie” Poissot, died in 1992.
The Concordia Sentinel, based in Ferriday, reports Spencer’s son and the brother of his ex-wife both say Spencer told them he was involved in the killing.
Spencer’s ex-wife, Brenda Rhodes, says Poissot told her that he and Spencer were on the wrecking crew that burned Morris’s store.
“It came at a time of great lawlessness in this parish, when the Klan was in control of this parish — or if not in control, a great influence,” said Sentinel editor Stanley Nelson, using the Louisiana term for county.
The newspaper’s sources all indicated that the Klan wrecking crew didn’t necessarily expect Morris to be in the store when they burned it.
Spencer’s former brother-in-law, Bill Frasier, said he’d once asked Spencer if he ever killed anyone.
“We did accidentally one time,” Spencer said, according to Frasier.
Sentinel editor Nelson said many racially motivated killings in that era were done by people who might not have planned to commit murder — but should have known what they were doing.
“Almost all of the people that were killed in those days, no one set out to kill,” he said. Some beatings got too violent, for example, he said.
But, he added, “When you go to burn a building, you run the risk that a person is going to be there.” (more…)
Found this list of conservative quotes on radio and TV inciting violent attacks on Democrats and Liberals. This really is nothing more than domestic terrorism.
Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
Senator Phil Gramm: “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”
Rep. James Hansen on Bill Clinton: Get rid of the guy. Impreach him, censure him, assassinate him.”
John Derbyshire intimated in the National Review that because Chelsea Clinton had “the taint,” she should “be killed.”
Ann Coulter: “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.”
Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
Bill O’Reilly: “ll those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains.”
Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said he was “thinking about killing Michael Moore” and pondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” before concluding: “No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”
Michael Savage: “Only vigilance and resistance to this baby dictator, Barack Hussein Obama, can prevent the Khmer Rouge from appearing in this country”
Erick Ericksson: “At what point do the people … march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp?”
Here’s the core of the arguments against Atty General Holder’s DOJ. And up until the last paragraph, the author makes a reasonable case of why is the DOJ involved in such minor things that should be handled within the purview of the local school administration or at worst – State Courts.
The Author points out several cases where Federal involvement seems a bit on the overkill side such as -
In the latest outrage, the Civil Rights Division is suing the board of education in the leafy Chicago suburb of Berkeley, Ill. The board’s offense? It would not allow a middle-school computer-math-lab teacher to take off three weeks during December’s crucial end-of-semester course reviews and final exams in order to make a pilgrimage to Mecca…In 1977, in TWA v. Hardison, the Supreme Court held that it is an “undue hardship” if the employer has to “bear more than a de minimis cost” in order to provide the accommodation.
The author hints at going off the rails here with:
Extremists in the Civil Rights Division are pouncing on other school policies as well. When it was first formed in the 1960s, the division pursued cases of real discrimination — cases where, for example, black students were harassed or intimidated or provided with intentionally inferior education.
Why? Because one of the problems with the Bushit Administration’s DOJ was a complete ignoring of Minority Civil Rights for a all hands on deck, fruitless search for the Holy Grail of conservative bigots – cases of reverse discrimination.
They managed to actually find and prosecute 1 case in 8 years, despite 12,000-16,000 cases of discrimination against minorities being referred to the DOJ by local authorities a year… Which they ignored. So when the author is referring to “Extremists”… The Bushit Administration perversion of the Civil Rights Division resulted in filling the Division with…what? Good Ol’ Boys?
The current cases involve two schools in upstate New York that supposedly discriminated against one male student who wore a pink wig and makeup and another male student who wore a wig and stiletto heels and wanted to be able to “dress like a woman.” These students had violated the schools’ common-sense dress codes and were told to change clothes and remove the makeup. That prompted the Civil Rights Division to come knocking. The boys were being treated “differently” from female students, and such differential treatment, the division asserted, “implicate[s] the civil rights laws that we enforce.”
Sounds reasonable. The local school system should have the ability to define a dress code for all students as far as I can see. One of my personal heroes is the principal in memphis who has developed “The Urkel” System -
But then the author goes and quotes these scumbags -
As Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity observes: “The Obama administration apparently believes that it is unconstitutional for high schools to have a dress code that makes distinctions between what is appropriate dress for males and what is appropriate dress for females.” Clegg also points out that the division’s attempt to equate “sexual-orientation discrimination” with sex discrimination, by asserting that the use of sexual “stereotypes” is an instance of the latter, is nothing but naked bootstrapping (if you will pardon the expression). But legal justification or not, in the eyes of the warped and silly (but dangerous) lawyers inhabiting the division, barring boys from wearing stiletto heels is a serious civil-rights violation.
For those not familiar with right-wing racist code language, “The Center for Equal Opportunity” is one of the KKK organizations in suits that occupies the right, whose sole purpose is to re-segregate schools fully with the financial and legal support of the so called “Federalist Society” made up of right wing, and racist lawyers little better than the Council of Conservative Citizen scum they shill for.
So our writer isn’t really pissed about th DOJ’s intrusion into local decision making, as much as he is pissed that such intrusion isn’t on behalf of re-segregation, and the re-institution of Jim Crow.
The proof?
Oddly, one of those views is that discrimination by some racial groups is perfectly acceptable. This explains why the Justice Department dismissed the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case it had already won. It is why this administration is studiously not pursuing cases like the one filed against Southern Illinois University in 2006 for maintaining a paid fellowship program that categorically excluded white males from applying. It was the Bush administration’s race-neutral enforcement policy in such cases that enraged the radical civil-rights organizations that dominate Washington and formed the basis for much of the unfair and misleading criticism of that administration’s enforcement of civil-rights laws.
The “author” in this case, was one of the racist scumbags illegitimately placed in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Bushit Administration, who now works at one of the right wing’s premier racist “think tanks”…
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.
Methinks this conehead sheet wearer…
Has a problem.
If the best the right can do is to complain that Atty General Holder is a “bad man” because he won’t let them be bigots-in- charge anymore.
They have a weaker case than even I thought, and I already had them as the “bargain brand” in those toilet tissue commercials where one drop of water cases where you wouldn’t want to set the good china on the cheap stuff…
Welcome to the new KKK Rally – disguised as an “Affirmative Action Cookie Sale” brought to you by Faux News.
Why is this a KKK Rally, which should better be conducted in white sheets and burning crosses?
Because the Supreme Court with the UMICH Decision, and other legal threats from misnomered groups like the Center for Individual Rights have virtually shut down Affirmative Action on major college campuses.
As such, continued efforts by racist conservatives to have “Affirmative Action Bake Sales” have nothing to do with the facts – they serve the same purpose as the old style KKK Rallies and Cross Burnings…
To try and intimidate minorities and eliminate them entirely from schools by threat.
AKA known as out-and-out racism.
Why do I consider conservatives no less enmies than Al Quaeda?
Because while Al Quaeda certainly wants to kill Americans – that hatred is colorblind. Unlike conservatives pretending to be Americans burning crosses on my front lawn and trying to kill my children.
For different reasons, I think the Governor is right on this one. As Governor, he shouldn’t be in the business of regulating what people propose. It’s regulating Free Speech if he does that. Essentially anyone can propose any idiotic thing they want (a Dirty Diaper License plate for instance)…
Found this list of conservative quotes on radio and TV inciting violent attacks on Democrats and Liberals. This really is nothing more than domestic terrorism.
