Republicans (Sort of) Get a Clue

Funny! From the American Prospect Magazine no less…

Ringside Seat: The Angry Whites Liquidation Sale

Let it not be said that the GOP doesn’t know it has a problem. As Senator Lindsay Graham said last year, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” And in the November election, that became vividly clear. Mitt Romney lost Latino voters by 44 points, Asian-American voters by 47 points, and voters under 30 by 23 points. So in the months since, the Republicans have been racking their brains to come up with ways to appeal to voters who do not happen to be older white men.

So how’s it going? Well, this week, not so great. First you had Ben Carson, the Baltimore neurosurgeon who, as a black conservative, has become a hero to the right, getting a bit too frank about marriage in an appearance on Fox News. Heterosexual marriage, he said, is “a well-established, fundamental pillar of society and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality—it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition.” When people became somewhat displeased with this rhetoric, Carson said, “I think people have completely taken the wrong meaning out of what I was saying.” Yeah.

Cut to Alaska congressman Don Young growing wistful about the old days: “My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes.” Like Carson, he apologized if anyone got offended.

And there’s the Republicans’ problem: It’s one thing for party leaders to say, however sincerely, that they want to reach out to minorities. But if people in your party keep popping off with statements like those, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

They missed

Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota  said he didn’t feel safe on Native American reservations because of a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that allows tribal courts to prosecute non-Native American individuals for sexual and domestic violence crimes committed on tribal land. The congressman also berated tribal leaders for being “dysfunctional” and said he wanted to “ring the Tribal council’s neck and slam them against the wall.”

Michigan Republican Dave Agema says he is refusing to resign after promoting an article that said “part of the homosexual agenda is to get the public to affirm their filthy lifestyle.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Monday vowed to continue to use the slur “illegal” to refer to undocumented immigrants. At a town hall meeting in Phoenix, a 25-year-old dreamer asked the former Republican presidential nominee to “please drop the i-word,” according to The Arizona Republican.“Someone who crosses our borders illegally is here illegally,” McCain replied. “You can call it whatever you want to, but it’s illegal. I think there’s a big difference between someone who does something that’s illegal and someone who’s undocumented.”  “I’ll continue to call it illegal,” he insisted.

Rick Perry, miffed at Madonna’s comments about the Boy Scouts …Said Perry, in On My Honor:

…”Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink…And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.”

And we don’t even talk about the Kumbaya at CPAC.

On the good side –  Michael Steele Calls Reince Priebus ‘Numbnuts’ (AUDIO)

Hmmm…. Camera Angle? India Arie

Is India Arie doing a Michael Jackson?

Who’s That Lady?…Indeed.

Uncle Ben?

The newest conservative Great Black Dope isn’t quite turning out to be the perfect Uncle Tom figure of a Herman Cain or Allen West…

Of course, it’s been a tough year for black conservative lawn ornaments. Herman Cain imploding as a sexual predator, Allen West exposed as a serial abuser. And the black MILF candidate,Jennifer Carroll of Florida, didn’t quite follow in the footsteps of the Sno’ Ho’…first being accused of being a closet queen, and now under investigation for financial scamming resulting in her resigning her job at Lt. Governor.

And along comes Dr Ben Carlson… The latest in a long line of Toms… Or is he?

The Faux News commentator, Megan Kelly here tries her best to get Ben to buckdance. Carlson largely doesn’t rise to the bait. She looks at one point that if he will don the black conservative victim meme, she’d strip off her clothes, open her legs and have her way with him. About the best she gets out of him for hr breathless prodding is a single “plantation” meme, which completely discredits his argument about dropping name calling and sitting down to talk like adults. For anyone unfamiliar the “plantation” analogy is racist conservative speak for the N word.

Carlson at one point discusses poverty, at which point Megan near  orgasmically immediately zooms in to the inner city, black population, ignoring the fact or rural and suburban poverty which fits in every other social dysfunction … but isn’t primarily black. After all, Carlson is black – so he must be speaking about those dread Negroes in the ghetto!

That’s not what he said.

Let’s hope for Megan’s sake she got a chance to change clothes, and the set crew swapped in a dry chair before the next segment.

Why You Here if You Didn’t Come to Buckdance?

Conservatives, CPAC, and that racism thing again…

Interesting the mind convolutions where people will go to to deny the truth, and make the opposite fit their racist views. Frederick Douglass as a “conservative”?

These people are a joke. An evil joke – and typical of this segment of conservatism.

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.

Martin Luther King Jr.
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 – 1968)

Chris Rock and that “Black” President Thing…

Message to undecided Republicans!

The Second American Civil War

Fascinating how the more things change - the more how some things never change.

If Mitt Romney gets elected President this election, and the Republican Party makes inroads into the Congress it will be almost all due to the politics of polarization of race in America by the Republican Party.

“Polarization”?

 “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”

Richard M. Nixon as recorded in Richard Nixon’s chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman’s diary

Since Obama won the Presidency in 2008, we have seen a steady drumbeat of racism from the GOP, which apparently, if poll numbers are to believed has borne significant fruit in terms of elevating Mitt Romney. As most minorities in America are well cognizant of – if you can hoist enough racism into the mix, you can convince a significant segment of the white population in America to go so far as to even cheer the sacrifice of their own children, in a war they were lied into, for objectives which, if achieved – will do absolutely nothing to improve their lives or the country they live in. Big difference between Heroes and Cannon Fodder…

They accomplished it during the Civil War where they convinced over a million Southerners to don the Grey and 250,000 to die – despite the fact that the vast majority neither owned slaves or profited directly from slavery. They ass reamed the same group again during and after WWI to disguise the fact of the massive wealth inequality which lead to the Stock Market crash, while hiding the fact by convincing the same victims that black folks were stealing their jobs and livelihoods…

Sound familiar? You bet…Welcome to 2012.

AP poll: U.S. majority have prejudice against blacks

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51% of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48% in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56%, up from 49% during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time … it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52% of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57% in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison…

The result this time around?

The GOP’s Geography And The Confederacy

Current Electoral Projection

 

Map of the Confederacy in 1861

Are you not struck by the similarities? (The yellow states were not part of the Confederacy but backed slavery. Kansas is an exception, and Maryland and Delaware along the border too). I am not saying (and in the conversation it’s a little garbled and I can see why Heroge might have interpreted me as saying) that that the only states that will switch from Obama to Romney this year were Confederate states. Indiana is the exception. I was saying that if Obama loses North Carolina, Virginia and Florida – which I suspect he will – then the 2012 map will more closely resemble the civil war map than 2008, when the same pattern was striking.

I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama’s 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified – and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.

 

The Second Civil War… Indeed.

Let’s hope this one ends the way the one against the communists did…

 

 

 

The Boss fo Obama

 

‘Nuf Said.

Melissa Harris-Perry Calls Out Clarence Thomas

This is a good one. One of the reasons it is critical that Obama win this next election is the opportunity to replace at least 2 justices on the Supreme Court and clean up the cesspool the Rethugs made of that institution.

 

Tell Us How You Really Feel… Republican Delegate Attacks CNN Camerawoman

Or why Republicans get 0% of the black vote…

The only “critters” here…

Republican Attendee Allegedly Threw Nuts At Black CNN Camerawoman, Called Her An ‘Animal’

An attendee at the Republican National Convention was allegedly thrown out of the convention center in Tampa on Tuesday after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, “this is how we feed the animals.”

Former MSNBC and Current host David Shuster, who is attending the convention, tweeted about the incident earlier on.

Talking Points Memo then reached out to CNN, which confirmed that an incident had taken place in a statement it later sent to The Huffington Post.

“CNN can confirm there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon,” the statement read. “CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.”

There was no immediate mention of the attack on CNN’s air.

The incident would be ugly anywhere, but it is especially troubling for a party whose nominee attracted 0 percent of the black vote in a recent NBC poll.

I guess the amazing part to me is Mia Love and Artur Davis standing up there on the podium giving cover to these clowns. Speaks deeply to the (lack of ) morals and integrity of some folks.

Chris Matthews Hammers Michael Steele’s Replacement

Chris Matthews leaves Reince Priebus wishing he still had Michael Steele around to buckdance up some race cover for his party…

I mean – they didn’t even invite their former Chairman to the convention in Tampa.

The New- Old Jim Crow – “Fear of a Black President”

 

Great article by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the right wing’s reaction and vitrol against President Obama.  The roots of this go back generations, illuminated by the America’s rejection of Jesse Owens after the 1938 Olympics (It wasn’t Hitler who refused to shake Owens hand and congratulate him – if was Owen’s fellow Americans). That hasn’t changed much – as the American segregationalists just changed political parties, and now couch their racism in more “palatable” terms…

Even more interesting is the impact of President Obama’s achievement of black Republicans like Artur Davis.

Fear of a Black President

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.

Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zim­mer­man’s claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities—the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat—were photographed wearing hoodies. When Rep­resentative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.

The reaction to the tragedy was, at first, trans-partisan. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigation—and in fact it was the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, who appointed the special prosecutor who ultimately charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. As civil-rights activists descended on Florida, National Review, a magazine that once opposed integration, ran a column proclaiming “Al Sharpton Is Right.” The belief that a young man should be able to go to the store for Skittles and an iced tea and not be killed by a neighborhood-­watch patroller seemed un­controversial.

By the time reporters began asking the White House for comment, the president likely had already given the matter considerable thought. Obama is not simply America’s first black president—he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obama’s two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. And yet, when Trayvon Martin died, talk Obama did:

When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together—federal, state, and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened …

But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled. Rush Limbaugh denounced Obama’s claim of empathy. The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, broadcast all of Martin’s tweets, the most loutish of which revealed him to have committed the un­pardonable sin of speaking like a 17-year-old boy. A white-­supremacist site called Stormfront produced a photo of Martin with pants sagging, flipping the bird. Business Insiderposted the photograph and took it down without apology when it was revealed to be a fake.

Newt Ging­rich pounced on Obama’s comments: “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be okay because it wouldn’t look like him?” Reverting to form,National Review decided the real problem was that we were interested in the deaths of black youths only when nonblacks pulled the trigger. John Derbyshire, writing for Taki’s Magazine, an iconoclastic libertarian publication, composed a racist advice column for his children inspired by the Martin affair. (Among Derbyshire’s tips: never help black people in any kind of distress; avoid large gatherings of black people; cultivate black friends to shield yourself from charges of racism.)

For the rest of the article - go here.

Romney Support Among Black People…

Marginally beats their Support of KKK!

While at least some portion of the rejection of Romney by black folks has to do with the mistaken impression that Mormons are racist – a lot has to do with his cuddling up to the far right of the Republican Party which make no mistake – IS racist. Black folks have already seen the “good white guy” routine with George W. Bush who let the Republican bigot brigade tale control of parts of the Federal Government, including the Department of Justice.

Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan indicated that he is fully bent over for the racist right, and servicing them is one of the political realities of the modern Republican Party.

So he is going to lose 70-80% of the Hispanic vote as well.

Sig Heil…Indeed.

Poll: 0 percent of blacks for Mitt Romney

President Barack Obama continues to beat Mitt Romney among African American voters with a staggering 94 percent to 0 percent lead, according to a poll released Tuesday.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll — which gives Obama and Vice President Joe Biden a small lead over Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan — shows Obama has a massive lead over his Republican rival in the key political base of African-American voters, NBCNews.com reported.

Obama also beats Romney among Latinos, voters under 35 and women, while Romney does better than Obama with whites, rural voters and seniors.

The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters Aug. 16-20. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points

Looking inside the numbers, Obama continues to lead Romney among key parts of his political base, including African Americans (94 percent to 0 percent), Latinos (by a 2-to-1 margin), voters under 35-years-old (52 percent to 41 percent) and women (51 percent to 41 percent).

Romney is ahead with whites (53 percent to 40 percent), rural voters (47 percent to 38 percent) and seniors (49 percent to 41 percent).

The New Jim Crow – White Right Superpac Plays RaceCard

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…

Fought tooth and nail to pass  Voter ID Laws in states like Pennsylvania disenfranchising largely black and poor minority voters – despite there only have ever been 2 cases of individual Voter Fraud in Pennsylvania in the past 30 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.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The New Jim Crow – Racism or Class?

An interesting view from Author Robert D. Putnam on inequalities in American society and the economy. Putnam believes that racism isn’t the major impediment to economic mobility in the country anymore – class is. And as far as that goes he may be correct. However, in weighing whether racism is an issue – a lot depends on just what you define as “racism”. The conservative view of that is “we aren’t hanging you from trees and burning down your homes anymore – so there is no racism”. Of course to anyone else with an IQ above freezing water – racism is a lot more nuanced that just physical acts of depravity. I mean – just because you aren’t shooting me – doesn’t mean you aren’t trying to kill me with a knife.

Robert Putnam: Class Now Trumps Race as the Great Divide in America

Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, issued a strong warning to anti-poverty advocates at a forum on social connectedness at the Aspen Ideas Festival Saturday, urging the audience to get beyond talking about poverty and race and start thinking about social mobility and class instead.

“Those two conceptual moves, framing it as poverty and thinking about it as a matter of race, have a very deep history… and I think both politically and analytically that’s an almost fatally flawed framework,” said Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, in response to remarks from co-panelists Anne Mosle, vice president of policy at the Aspen Institute, and Mario Small, chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

“You say poverty to most ordinary Americans, most ordinary voters, they think black ghettos,” he continued, whereas over the last couple of generations “class, not race is the dominant — and becoming more dominant — dimension of difficulty here.”

“Relatively speaking, racial differences controlling for class are decreasing while class differences controlling for race are increasing in America,” he said. “Non-white folks with a college education are looking more and more like white folks with a college education and white folks who haven’t gotten beyond high school are looking more and more like nonwhite folks who haven’t finished high school.”

The New Jim Crow – Charter Schools

One of the problems with Charter Schools such as those recently implemented in Louisiana – is that they short circuit all of the existing Civil Rights laws.  Particularly in Lousisana the changeover to supposedly “private” schools enables religious discrimination.

The Old Jim Crow – Just Like the New Jim Crow – Now Dressed Up as Charter Schools

Segregation Fear Sinks Charter School

Nashville school officials have rejected a proposal to open a charter school in a middle-class part of the city, highlighting a broader national battle over efforts by operators of such publicly financed, privately run schools to expand into more affluent areas.

The Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools board voted 7-2 Tuesday night to reject an application by Great Hearts Academies, a nonprofit that operates prep-school-like charter schools, for five new establishments.

The Arizona-based group planned to open its first Tennessee school in a middle- to upper-middle class area in west Nashville, after being invited by parents who either were unhappy with local public schools or said they favored choice in education.

The board denied the application because members worried that low-income parents wouldn’t be able to easily transport their children across town to a school on the west side, meaning the plan could effectively cause “segregated schools,” said Olivia Brown, spokeswoman for the district.

“Rather than enhance diversity in the district, this would send us in the opposite direction,” said Edward Kindall, one of the board members who voted against the plan. “I went to segregated schools and this gets us dangerously close to separate but unequal.”

The school board also approved, by votes of 9-0 and 8-1, two other charter schools Tuesday, both of which will cater mainly to low-income students. Mr. Kindall backed both schools.

Dan Scoggin, chief executive of Great Hearts Academies, said the school would have been open to all students, and that his organization planned to build other schools elsewhere in the city.