What The Hell Is Wrong With America

What the hell else can be said after watching a grand jury refuse to bring a (white) cop to court on obvious evidence he used an ILLEGAL CHOKE HOLD to kill a (black) man on the mere suspicion of selling individual cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island.

"No reasonable cause"?!

There's video of it, where Eric Garner is arguing about what's happening to him but being non-violent about it, still getting caught in the cop's chokehold and begging for life gasping "I... Can't... Breathe..."

The official coroner's report came back as a homicide.

What part of "Illegal choke hold" is getting overlooked here?

That old "joke" that a grand jury - basically a tool of prosecutors to sort out the evidence useful to bring charges on a suspect - would indict a ham sandwich?  That's two grand juries in a row refusing to bring a white cop to trial for killing a black man.

That's two different prosecuting attorneys - both of whom deserve to get disbarred for their bias or ineptitude, take your pick - who basically controlled grand juries into doing nothing.

That's two groups of fellow Americans either buying into the "Blue Wall" excuse granting cops full immunity to kill all in their path, or else refusing to see the injustice of not bringing killers to any accounting for the lives they've taken.  Lives that happened to be black men.  Lives taken by those who happen to be white.

Anybody who claims we don't lynch blacks in this country anymore ought to take a look at the body count the last 5 years.

I've said this before: Our cops are not supposed to be executioners.  Our cops are supposed to follow an oath to Protect And Serve.  It's their job to bring the suspects to trial and have the juries and judges determine the guilt.  It is not the jobs of cops to execute with lethal force.  Our cops do NOT have a license to kill.

There are so many legal and effective means to arrest anybody without resorting to pulling out a gun or a taser or a baton or the use of a lethal hold.  GOOD cops do that every day of the year, and we don't hear about those arrests.

What does it tell you that we're hearing and witnessing more and more BAD cops on a weekly, now daily basis, beating the crap out of people, smashing in car windows, blowing up baby cribs, and outright shooting 12-year-olds the second they arrive on scene?  We have one cop shooting a teenager even after other cops - GOOD cops - had stabilized the confrontation, saying "We don't have time for this."  We have cops shooting a guy holding a BB gun in a Wal-Mart, all because some jackass claimed the guy was threatening people with it (in-store video proved he wasn't).  In the only good news out of all this police misconduct, there was a recent incident where the cops arrested and pepper sprayed a black foster child in his own home.  If you can call that good news.

And now our cops are out in the streets blockading the marches and protests, now in New York City as the outrage over Garner's death takes over the city, much like Brown's death took over Ferguson.  

We've got prosecutors who won't hold anybody accountable for death after death after death, after maiming after wounding after false arrest after false reports after lie after lie after more lies.  We've got police departments arming themselves with firepower that matches our army, rolling heavy through our own communities as they escalate the violence trying to impose order in response to the injustice they're refusing to recognize in their own actions.

Don't be surprised if our nation's faith - not just Black folks who'd figured out a while back that their lives don't matter, but Whites who genuinely want this nation to work for ALL its citizens - in the very concept of JUSTICE is dying in the streets just like our own citizens.

What the hell is wrong with America tonight?  We're living under a cloud of fear, living with a legal system skewing more against its own people.

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#FergusonFAIL

So that happened.  It was kinda expected that a cop would not answer for shooting an unarmed teen all because of (insert our nation's racial fears here).

What horrified me and what still sticks with me is how that prosecutor was so eager to blame everyone BUT the guy who pulled the trigger and killed someone.

McCollough blamed social media for angering up the protesters calling for some form of justice.  No.  The protesters have been marching and calling for justice since before any of us were born.  They've been marching and rising up for justice ever since the chains were put on them as far back as the Roman Republic.  This is still Jim Crow.  This is still political leaders calling "Segregation Forever" and South Carolina's Declaration of Keeping Our Slaves and Redlining and Ghettos As Policy and This Land Ain't Your Land.  This is still the heavy chains of racism that 400 years of this nation's history from colonies to empire has not removed from its own people.

McCollough: the grand jury "gave up their lives" to deliberate on the matter.  NO.  The only one who gave up his life here was Michael Brown, that unarmed teenager.

Call Brown what you want, haters, that he was a thief or a thug or any other kind of racist label you can put on him.  The one label that speaks to the facts is "unarmed civilian".  The one label that speaks of Michael Brown is "dead on the street with an entire clip emptied into him."

The labels "excessive use of force" and "deadly force" and "fearmongering" should apply as well.

Meanwhile, we've got cops shooting kids who are running around with toy guns.  We've got cops bullying bystanders, and bullying families at traffic stops, and just plain old bullying.  At what point does the intimidation efforts go from harassment to assault?  Whenever the cop feels threatened.  At which point there's nothing the rest of us CAN do except watch as the legal system washes their hands of the misconduct and carries off the bodies.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?  Who guards the guardians?  Who polices the police when the police are the lawbreakers?  Because while the letter of the law may protect these trigger-happy bullies among the enforcement profession, the spirit of the law - the purpose to SERVE AND PROTECT the citizenry regardless of race or gender or age - is pretty much dead on the streets alongside Brown.

Lemme caveat: obviously, not every cop is bad or a bully.  A lot of them are doing their jobs and checking themselves in check.  It's the fucking bad apples abusing the rulebook, and then a goddamn culture of complacency - the Thin Blue Line of "Us vs. Them" - that blemishes the entire profession of being a cop.

I've had that quote at the top of my blog banner since the first round of protests in Ferguson: We should be rolling lighter than this.  In our own cities, in our own communities, among our families.

We should be doing a better job upholding Justice For All.

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Forget It Jake It's Florida

So there's kinda four things going on here in Florida to pass along, some of which you seven blog followers might have seen already...

• In the good news category, the second trial over Michael Dunn's shooting of Jordan Davis ended with Dunn found guilty of first-degree murder.
• In the bad news category, a grandmother checking on her daughter and grandkids getting arrested - for a minor probation violation -  ends up getting tasered in the back by the arresting officer.  Who then handcuffs the unconscious woman for "resisting arrest" because apparently after nearly killing someone with 50,000 volts the cop is required to be a total dick.  "Resisting arrest" has become, has always been really, a lousy excuse by cops to arrest anybody...
• In the Finally Happened category, the city of Waldo finally did something about the nationally-infamous speed trap by voting to close down the city's police department altogether.  The official reason is that the city could no longer afford the costs - there's a current investigation into the outdated equipment and reckless poor storage of documents and evidence - but let's be blunt: the Waldo police has been a long-term embarrassment to the area due to that speed trap they enforce (there's a second investigation into the department using an illegal ticket quota).
  Ever driven through there (between Gainesville and Jacksonville)?  You're driving at a decent 55 MPH on County Rd 24 heading north until you get about three feet inside Waldo city limits.  All of a sudden the traffic sign says 35 MPH and then fifty feet later just as the road's turning you get a 15 MPH sign and when the road turns further into this little township you're facing a School Zone crossing that's "strictly enforced."  Guess how many people get tagged for speeding?  Lemme tell ya, the ability to slow down from 55 MPH to 15 MPH within a 1/10 of a mile's distance is harder than it looks without killing your brakes.  Heading south on US 301 to get to CR 24 for Gainesville is just as bad.
  I've known people living in Gainesville who go out of the way to take I-75 to I-10 in order to get to Jacksonville just to avoid this.  AAA Road service listed Waldo as one of only two speed traps in the whole nation (another Florida city just up US 301 was the other)!
  If you're wondering, the Alachua County sheriff's office will take over in Waldo.  There's a rather pleasant flea market there.  Might drive back there some day...
• In the INDUCING RAGE category, the College Republicans came out with a pro-Rick Scott ad (yes, inducing Level 1 Rage right there) that tries to sell to young women voters (a major problem for the GOP has been the loss of women voters) by comparing the candidates like wedding dresses (da fuq?) with "The Rick Scott brand" (That's that standard GOP problem of thinking it's all "branding", here's me at Level 2 Rage now) being the prettiest of them all (Level 3 Rage now and spitting out my morning tea).
  The amount of stupid in this ad boggles the mind.  It seems to take for granted that women are impressed by "pretty" images, that a pretty young woman so entranced by the "Rick Scott brand" means other young women should be entranced as well.  It attacks the "Crist brand" as frumpier and more expensive using the same un-researched attacks the Republicans always aim at Democratic opponents.  This ad seems to take the whole "Disney Princesses Are Popular With Girls" idea and runs with it in the worst way possible.
  It's already been tagged as the "most sexist ad" of the 2014 midterms.

So, there's that today.  Gotta get some writing done on this day off...

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Homework for the Horde: Reading Assignment for September

Just to let the seven people following this blog know, Mr. Coates is asking the Horde to take part in a book discussion.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with it this time.

What we're reading this time is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.  With luck your local library owns a copy, or else is available through your library's Overdrive eBook lender.

Discussions should open up on September 17, so we've all got a few days to get some reading done and take some notes.

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At What Point Can The Stupidity of Racism End?

(Update: Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar linked this blog to the 2014 Jon Swift Memorial Roundup.  Hi, everybody!  Please leave comments if you want, and if this is your first visit here, please take a look around.  Io Saturnalia and here's hoping the next year isn't going to be as sh-tty as this one...)

It's easier to express rage during a round of Twitter messages.  It's been more than a week since the shooting death of yet another unarmed black teen by an angry guy with a gun... only this time the angry guy with the gun was a cop.

I don't want to pity Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates.  But every time there's been a shooting involving an unarmed black teen and an armed angry guy (usually white), he's been called to make comment:

...It will not do to point out the rarity of the destruction of your body by the people whom you pay to protect it. As Gene Demby has noted, destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. The body of Michael Brown was left in the middle of the street for four hours. It can not be expected that anyone will be held accountable.

We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their Skittles yelling, "You're gonna die tonight," and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.

And Coates has been called too often the last few years to this role as the Speaker To Unspoken History. It must be tiring.

What's been horrifying in the wake of Michael Brown's murder has been the combination of arrogance out of a police force over-reacting to the protests by the Ferguson community, and the willful eagerness of the racists (there is no other word to describe those people) who were and still are quick to demean, defame, and demonize the victim as well as the mostly black neighborhood in which he lived and died.  As that Salon.com/AlterNet article by Steven Rosenfeld notes, "the victim becomes the suspect."

It came so easy to the haters on Twitter.  I lost count of the number of tweets calling Brown a "thug", and claiming the city and county police were in their rights to break up the street protests using any violent force available.  I saw about fifteen, maybe twenty different tweeters bringing up the argument about how all the "white-on-black" protesters keep ignoring the "black-on-black violence", despite the evidence that, yes, black communities ARE protesting such violence and it's just the haters and the mainstream media are the ones ignoring that issue in the first place.  And I'd like these critics to give some public time and effort decrying "white-on-white" crime please and thank you...

What's at argument here, what's at stake, is the ongoing problem where a powerful governmental agency - responsible towards serving and protecting the public - is abusing such power when dealing with the poor and disenfranchised public they're supposed to serve.  What's at stake here is as much the militarizing of our nation's varied law enforcement offices as much as the dehumanization of entire communities.  Where the police lining up with tear gas and body armor are calling their unarmed civilian targets "f-cking animals", less about how those protesters were acting - most of them just walking with their "hands up" calling "don't shoot" - and more about the skin those protesters wore.

The threat of racism among our law enforcement agencies has been and continues to be a serious problem.  The racism in our nation's history, and our nation's current psyche, continues to be a serious problem.

At what point, haters, at what point do you f-cking let go of all that hate in your heart?  At what point do you stop the fear, recognize that the problems with our communities come NOT from skin color but because people - white and black and brown - are poor?  At what point do you give up the f-cking obsession of some southern conservative pipe dream of returning to an 1850 "utopia" where everyone knew their place by the power of who held the whip?

I am serious.  Dear Ferguson PD: when your fan base is made up of the KKK (!) you are clearly on the wrong side of history.

This entire week has been an exercise in watching the police enforce the unenforceable - the outrage of a community - through violent militarized tactics that even actual military veterans decried as overkill.  (The quote that's stuck with me all week, and needs to be said here, from the Business Insider article: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone.")  At only one point had calmer heads prevailed: when after a violent police-instigated crackdown on Wednesday night during that first week went global on the news, it forced the state governor to order the local police to stand down and sent in state troopers to handle the crowds.  The state law officers went in that Thursday with bullhorns instead of batons, standard patrol uniforms instead of body armor, and hugs instead of tear gas.  That night saw little if any violence.

What the hell happened after that Thursday?  Other than the Ferguson PD coming back with accusations that Brown was wanted for shoplifting cigars at a local store, making another attempt at defaming the victim to justify the shooting.  An accusation that quickly developed holes when the store-owner revealed he never called in a theft, that the police never even showed up for the video until that same Friday, that the timeline and earlier testimony was that the shooting cop Darren Wilson couldn't even have known Brown might have been a suspect, and that a subsequent review of that video showed Brown actually tried paying for those cigars.

In the wake of all that, the Ferguson and county police went back to their heavy-handed body-armor arrest-all-reporters tactics.  Against all evidence that Soft Power efforts - engaging the protesters on an equal level - work, they went back to the violent confrontations.  The only reason why I can figure out is racism: the Ferguson police want this fight, they want to debase and demolish their own citizenry because they can't imagine handling the issue - them vs. the black community - any other way.

Is that racism ever going to go away?  Is that blind stupidity - pushing them to shoot tear gas at kids and families, most of them unable to avoid it all because they live there - ever going to go away?

We should be rolling lighter than this through our own communities.  What the hell is wrong with us?

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Reparations, History, Justice (With UPDATES)

The Atlantic's cover story in their print magazine is from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Case For Reparations.

It is a hard look at the centuries of racism that underpinned the history of the United States.  About how it was hard for Blacks in both the rural South and the urban North to find any kind of economic and social equality.

You need to read it.

These are just samples from Mr. Coates:

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world...

And

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history...

He's asking for a lot: the rot of racism and the fear/ignorance of the hateful are going to be tough to overcome. But isn't that the whole point of America... to make ourselves - not just as individuals but as communities and the nation as a whole - better? To leave a stronger lasting legacy to our posterity, our children?

We can bail out the banks that crash our economy every ten years or so.  But we can't bail out the impoverished?  We can't bail out the families that have lived in poverty for generations?

UPDATE: Coates has followed up with an Open Thread of sorts to handle any comments on the Reparations article (in order to keep the troll-haters off the main article).  Dunno how long that thread will stay open.  He's followed THAT up with a "how I got here" article describing how reparations became an issue for him to investigate.

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This Week... No, This Year... Hold On, This Ongoing Timeline In Racism

It's telling that some of the major news stories of this past week (actually, the past year, no wait the past decade, wait wait let's take this all the way back to 1963, but if we do that might as well drag it out to 1877...) has been about racism in America.

We had a Supreme Court led by a Justice in Roberts - who openly operates on the idea that the way "to end discrimination is to stop discriminating", as though not focusing on the problem will make it go away - issuing a recent ruling in favor of states that vote to end affirmative action policies for colleges.

The big news story of the week started off with a Nevada rancher, who spent years (decades) refusing to pay grazing fees for his cattle on public lands, stirring up an armed showdown against the feds that quickly turned Cliven Bundy into a Far Right, Tea Party, anti-government hero... who just as quickly got caught on tape making disparaging remarks about "the Negro" and claiming Blacks were better off being "happier" as slaves, to where most of the big-name Republicans who were cheering him on found themselves denouncing Bundy as fast as they could (with a few hardliners doing their best to defend the rancher or at least publicly tell him to keep his mouth shut before he digs a deeper hole).

And just this weekend, the sports world is aflame with reports and captured audio of a prominent basketball team owner - Donald Sterling of the Clippers - telling his mistress (oh by the by Sterling's still married, the adulterous lout) to stop bringing Black people to his Clippers' games (the argument apparently started over the girlfriend posting pics of her posing with Magic Johnson).  (P.S.: the mistress is part-Black, which adds a whole different layer of loathing to Sterling's issues)  The shocking element to this story is how Sterling's had the reputation of being a jerkass on racial issues for decades, ranging from unflattering dealings with basketball coaches and players to his mistreatment and disregard for the people who rent from his property holdings.  There'd been talk about doing something to slap some sense into Sterling... going back to 2006.  And only now almost 8 years later there are enough people honestly talking about it.

It just all piled up this one week, didn't it?  I mean, all this ignorance and hate.

Except it's been floating out there (I almost typed "flouted", but in some respects that word fits too) for years now...

Roberts' and the conservative SCOTUS Justices have just last year struck down the enforcement methods that kept the needed Voting Rights Act of 1965 functioning.  Roberts' reasoning seems to keep going back to his insistence on being literally color-blind - that pro-active efforts to fight discrimination were actually perpetuating that same discrimination - and therefore striking down enforcement provisions wherever possible.

Except that fellow Justice Sotomayor isn't having any of it, and has called Roberts out on his willful blindness:

...Sotomayor is not content to belittle Roberts’ formulation that racism will end when we stop helping minorities. She tells him that the act of ignoring pervasive structural racism is an abdication of judicial responsibility: “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter...”

...Roberts makes a substantive point in his rebuke of Sotomayor: Racial preferences may lead minority students to suffer shame and self doubt from racial preferences and that it is not “out of touch” to suggest that affirmative action doesn’t remedy race problems. But his deeper, sharper, point is that it is bad for the national dialogue about race for jurists to accuse one another of bad faith and lack of candor. His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing...

Justice Antonin Scalia goes even further in his concurrence, describing Sotomayor’s logic in analogizing the Michigan anti-affirmative initiative to Jim Crow as “shameful.” In his view, she has crossed the line of poor taste by suggesting that racism in America today is as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s...

With all due respect to Justices Roberts and Scalia... it IS still as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s. It's as though Roberts and Scalia haven't noticed the high number of black youth getting shot at with Stand Your Ground laws in effect, or the indefensible policy of "Stop and Frisk" that overwhelmingly targeted Blacks and Hispanics over Whites. These Justices seem to think racism ended open discrimination Jim Crow laws were struck down in the Sixties and Seventies... little realizing that while those laws are gone the sentiment behind them is still out there wreaking havoc on our society.

And then you've got Rancher Bundy, Far Right Hero of April 22 2014.  The link here is to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who opens his essay with this point: "I've been laughing my way through the Cliven Bundy fiasco because, as Jamelle Bouie suggests, there may be no better example of racist privilege than the right to flout the government's authority and then back its agents down at gunpoint. Bouie asks, hypothetically, how we'd respond if Bundy were black..."

On the moment when Bundy's video got out to the media, Coates had more to say:

A couple days ago Jonathan Chait asserted that modern conservatism is "doomed" because it is "rooted in white supremacy." The first claim may or may not be true, but there's little doubt about the second. Whether it's the Senate minority leader claiming that America should have remained legally segregated, a beloved cultural figure fondly recalling how happy black people were living under lynch law, a presidential candidate calling Barack Obama a "food-stamp president," or a campaign surrogate calling Barack Obama "a subhuman mongrel," the preponderance of evidence shows that modern conservatism just can't quit white supremacy...

This is unsurprising. White supremacy is one of the most dominant forces in the history of American politics. In a democracy, it would be silly to expect it to go unexpressed. Thus anyone with a sense of American history should be equally unsurprised to discover that rugged individualist Cliven Bundy is the bearer of some very interesting theories...

It wasn't too surprising to others - like New Republic's Beutler - not just that Bundy was saying this stuff but that there's been an environment among conservatives for this ignorance for years:

...And now there's the lawless, mooching Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who takes things further than Robertson and argues that slavery, not segregation, was truly the golden age for "the negroes." Better to be enslaved than subsidized—unless your subsidy comes in the form of the public land upon which your cattle graze for free.

The right's special pleading for Robertson outstripped its special pleading for Bundy. Some conservatives have been willing to admit that Bundy's just an opportunist, not a tribune for individual liberty. But he nevertheless became a folk hero to high-profile conservatives like Sean Hannity and even some national GOP figures.

Today, most of them are either in full retreat from him, or pretending he never existed. Conservative radio host Dana Loesch is one exception. She isn't willing to throw him under the bus just yet, arguing that Bundy's problem may be a lack of polish rather than a rotten core: "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn’t media trained to express himself perfectly."

Bundy's either a hideous aberration, or another misunderstood soul. But he can't be representative of a subculture, because that would entail acknowledging that safety-net opposition and voting-rights opposition and other conservative policies draw political sustenance from sources other than heady libertarianism....

Same goes for (Duck Dynasty's) Robertson. And the Southern Avenger. And Chris McDaniel's surprisingly robust Senate candidacy in Mississippi. It's all just a weird coincidence...

The Daily Beast's Tomasky is clear on the whole coincidence point as well:

Come on, fellow liberals. Calm down. I guess maybe it’s fair to call Cliven Bundy a racist. That “picking cotton” business put it over the top, and wondering whether they were better off under slavery... 

OK, so Bundy’s a racist. It’s fine to point that out. But point up the fact that he’s a registered Republican? That’s where I draw the line, friends. I mean, come on. That’s just a coincidence. Total cosmic coincidence. Just like it’s a coincidence that that one black comic, a Barack Obama impersonator, was yanked offstage at an official Republican Party meeting in 2011 for telling a series of racially themed jokes. I mean, that could easily have happened at a Democratic—well, maybe not. But still. A coincidence. 

Just like it’s a coincidence that one federal judge who sent an email around to friends saying that Obama’s father was a dog happened to be a Republican. Complete and utter accident of fate, the puny matter of his voter enrollment.

Those rancidly racist T-shirts and posters one sometimes sees at Tea Party rallies? They’re just a coincidence, too. I mean, Tea Party people might not be Republican, strictly speaking, and it’s totally unfair to assume that! OK, Tea Party candidates run in Republican primaries, not Democratic ones, and the Tea Party caucus in the House doesn’t include one Democrat. But still. Guilt by association!

Bundy has a broad libertarian streak, too. But please, let’s not suggest that libertarian-leaning Republicans might be a little racist, too. I mean, again, what’s the evidence for such a statement? What—the fact that Ron Paul’s ghostwriter(s) of his newsletters in the 1990s had very clear Confederate sympathies? If I were you, I would be careful about drawing any inferences from that. It was a long time ago. And a sentence like this one: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began” ...well, admit it. It’s open to ambiguity. Can be interpreted in any number of ways. What’s that? You counter by telling me that all that was two decades ago? OK. You’re right. And you’re right that it’s also a coincidence that his son Rand’s ghostwriter—that’s Rand Paul, the current Republican front-runner to be the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—on his book also has expressed sympathetic views about the Confederacy? Remember this guy—called himself the Southern Avenger, was photographed wearing a stars and bars superhero kind of mask? It’s just a coincidence that he ended up in Rand Paul’s orbit...

And it's just a coincidence that it's been Republican-nominated Justices like Roberts and Scalia talking about how racism isn't the problem like it used to be in the 1950s...

Topping this all off has been the cherry of a sports owner who's been known for years to be a total dick: not just a racist but also a sexist and a penny-pinching miser of a team owner who kept his Clippers franchise a joke for years just out of sheer spite half the time.

This is a guy in Donald Sterling whose outside means of income of being a team owner is property rentals.  And has a bad history of that to boot: he's been sued multiple times for discriminatory practices, either banning certain ethnic types from renting or using dirty tactics to force those ethnic types out.

With regards to Sterling's behavior towards his rental tenants, that problem has been a major racial issue for decades itself: Coates' biggest discussions lately have revolved around poverty, race, and a policy of neighborhood segregation that kept minorities - Blacks above all - trapped in impoverished conditions regardless of their income.  Sterling's pretty much a poster boy for how those racial policies work in today's America.

So here we are, in Roberts' color-blind America: where Black kids get frisked for the crime of WWB or worse shot at by gun-toting angry guys; where the voting rights of minorities can get legislated out by the states where Republicans fear they'd lose in fair elections; where college admission guidelines can ignore maintaining any semblance of ethnic diversity without requirement to create alternative means of keeping minority enrollment up; where rental costs and neighborhoods suffer at the whims of landlords who express the worst about the very people trying to live under their roofs; where white guys get all the public support they need to break the law but whenever blacks rise up they get arrested or worse...

I'm with Sotomayor.  Racism isn't going to end by turning a blind eye to it.  Racism ends when you get in its' collective goddamn face and tell it you "dare to care."  You fight racism by calling it when you see it, and pointing out the flaws of logic that fear and hate bring to the issue.  You work to end it, you work to find solutions to the segregation we inflict on our communities, you work to get the kids to break the cycle of fear and keep them engaged with each other as friends, as allies against corruption and hate...

Meanwhile, the clock ticks and with it another day of stupid to defeat... sigh.

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Schadenfreude In Florida: Why Yes, It Does Involve Rick "MEDICARE FRAUD" Scott...

While I was lost in the halls of the Orange County Convention Center this weekend, this was taking place:

In a campaign shakeup, Gov. Rick Scott’s top fundraiser — billionaire healthcare CEO Mike Fernandez — abruptly quit his post late Thursday after weeks of behind-the-scenes disagreements.

Fernandez said he was quitting to spend more time with his family (NOTE: RED FLAG) and businesses. And he praised Scott's campaign in a letter to the campaign's leadership team...

Fernandez began expressing his frustrations at least a month ago when he sent an email to top Scott allies and complained about two campaign aides who had joked around in a cartoon-style Mexican accent en route to a Mexican restaurant in Fernandez’s home town of Coral Gables.
Fernandez, who is Cuban, wouldn’t comment about the email...

Leave it to the Republicans - a party having serious issues shaking off the public perception of being run by aging white men who hate gays, ethnics, and women - to find a way to piss off a member of the one voting bloc - billionaire CEOs - they try (consciously) not to piss off.

The official story is that Fernandez is really resigning because he's upset with the campaign's direction and poor messaging.  But the messaging can't be helped with this story about the tactless aides getting out.

When Scott's new Lt. Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera - remember the other one had to resign?  I wonder what the current status of the criminal investigation involving her is at... - tried to go public with a new attack ad campaign today, the questioning got cut short because all the reporters would ask about was Fernandez's quitting over the possibility that the campaign staff was secretly mocking the very ethnic group the Republicans need to win this midterm.

One of the things a political campaign can ill afford is to look disorganized and in disarray.  It doesn't help that Scott's office has been hard-line on immigration reform for most of his tenure and that any attempt to start appealing to Hispanic voters is going to backfire.

This schadenfreude is a bit tasty, but it's an appetizer.  It's a long wait for the main course in November, and part of me wants to see how Scott's people can screw up even worse...

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From Ta-Nehisi, Not Just For the Lost Battalion But For Every American, Every Son

If I could repost this article in its entirety I would.  But it's better to follow the link and read it yourself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews the mother of Jordan Davis.  For the interview, he brings along his own son, 13 years old and black and pretty much in the same unsettling reality that Jordan and Trayvon lived (and died).

Last Thursday, I took my son to meet Lucia McBath, because he is 13, about the age when a black boy begins to directly understand what his country thinks of him. His parents cannot save him. His parents cannot save both his person and his humanity. At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me. No one was amused. If I were to carve out some peace myself, I could not be amused either. I think I lost some of myself out there, some of the softness that was rightfully mine, to a set of behavioral codes for addressing the block. I think these talks that we have with our sons—how to address the police, how not to be intimidating to white people, how to live among the singularly plundered—kill certain parts of them which are as wonderful as anything. I think the very tools which allow us to walk through the world, crush our wings and dash the dream of flight.

I am white.  I grew up getting The Talk on how to behave with girls and how to obey the traffic laws and how to avoid drunken fights and that was it.  I was never lectured to be afraid of being hunted by my own neighbors or other adults the way Ta-Nehisi and his son had to be lectured.

I told her that I was stunned by her grace after the verdict. I told her the verdict greatly angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that jury thought it plausible there was a gun in the car baffled me. I told her it was appalling to consider the upshot of the verdict—had Michael Dunn simply stopped shooting and only fired the shots that killed Jordan Davis, he might be free today.

She said, "It baffles our mind too. Don’t think that we aren’t angry. Don’t think that I am not angry. Forgiving Michael Dunn doesn't negate what I’m feeling and my anger. And I am allowed to feel that way. But more than that I have a responsibility to God to walk the path He's laid. In spite of my anger, and my fear that we won’t get the verdict that we want, I am still called by the God I serve to walk this out."

What happened to Jordan Davis wasn't Jordan's fault.  It's not Jordan's fault Michael Dunn was carrying his gun, it's not Jordan's fault that Dunn couldn't control his own anger when he called on Jordan's friends to turn down that loud music, it wasn't Jordan who pulled a trigger it was an angry man with a gun and a crazy broken law giving him license to open fire.  There are kids playing loud music everywhere.  They are driving in their parents' cars up and down these roads with the windows down and laying out a bass that shakes the surrounding car windows.  Some of them are white.  I don't see anyone at the gas stations shouting at them to turn the damn music down.

She stood. It was time to go. I am not objective. I gave her a hug. I told her I wanted the world to see her, and to see Jordan. She said she thinks I want the world to see "him." She was nodding to my son. She added, "And him representing all of us." He was sitting there just as I have taught him—listening, not talking.

Now she addressed him, "You exist," she told him. "You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid of being you."

She gave my son a hug and then went upstairs to pack.

The only difference between me at 13 and Ta-Nehisi's son at 13 is the color of our skin.  That and maybe whatever geek thing he's into that I'm not.  The only difference between me and Trayvon Martin at 17 was the skin color, and that he preferred Skittles over M&Ms.  The only difference between me and Jordan Davis was the skin.  And that I had Led Zeppelin blasting at top volume instead of Beyonce.

I didn't have to live with the fear of some angry adult blasting away at me because of who I was.

What the hell is wrong with us as a nation that we let fear dictate what we do?  That we let our anger get the better of us?  That we have some people who think themselves privileged enough to sell that fear and anger to get away with it?

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The Long October: How It Came To This, a Followup Post

Following on a previous thought about how we as a nation got to this shutdown debacle, and how this all echoes back to the obstruction / nullification follies of the 1860 Southern Democrats as well as the shifting of conservative ideology whole-heartedly into the modern Republicans due to the Southern Strategy, I'd want to add a few more thoughts on this, and at best from another person who's been thinking about the same problems and doing a better job of discussing it.

Zack Beauchamp over on ThinkProgress had a great article today on the whole thing: How Racism Caused The Shutdown...

...A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.

The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits...

But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history... Yet, Reed notes, the New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party. “The Social Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal Writers’ Project, CCC and other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief,” he reminds us. “Black Americans’ emergence as a significant constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party’s center of gravity and was one of the factors–as was black presence in the union movement–contributing to the success of the postwar civil rights insurgency.”

...UC-Berkeley’s Eric Schickler and coauthor Brian Feinstein built a database of state party platforms from 1920-1968 and examined their positions on African-American rights. They found that “the vast majority of nonsouthern state Democratic parties were clearly to the left of their GOP counterparts on civil rights policy by the mid-1940s to early 1950s.” African-Americans and other sympathetic New Deal Coalition constituencies, like Jews and union leaders, deserve the bulk of the credit — these new Northern Democrats made supporting civil rights a litmus test for elected Democratic officials. That explains why, from the Early New Deal forward, congressional Northern Democrats voted more like Northern Republicans than their Southern brethren on civil rights...

That last bit kinda helps explain the hostility Southern states still have (the "Right to Work" laws that are nothing but) towards unions... but I digress.  Continuing on:

...Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and like-minded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.

But the Dixiecrats weren’t ready to migrate en masse to Party of Lincoln just yet. Something needed to happen to make the Republican Party shed its commitment to leading on civil rights wholesale. That “something” was the rise of the modern conservative movement...

...By the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick — it provided an on-face racially neutral language by which Southerners could argue against federal action aimed at integrating lily-white schools and neighborhoods...

...The Reagan realignment of the 1980s dramatically expanded the number of Republicans and conservative independents in the region’s electorate.” The Blacks attribute this to a combination of Reagan’s winning political personality and (more persuasively) the relative prosperity of the 1980s. Not only were white conservatives ideologically inclined to support Reagan’s Republican Party, but they became wealthier on his watch...

...The South’s conversion to movement conservatism led to local and Congressional Republican victories throughout Dixie. These culminated in the Gingrich Revolution in 1994, when hard-line Southern conservatives took charge of the Republican Congressional delegation, seemingly for good...

We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default...

It's all there. The obsession with Southern politicians to dismantle everything New Deal, which was the breaking point of the Jim Crow era. The merging of conservative ideologies that were previously unwedded - race, economics, religion - into a broad movement.

From this point, Beauchamp draws his conclusions:

...First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history. The Republican Party is the way that it is because of the base that it has evolved, and it would take a tectonic political shift — on the level of the Democrats becoming the party of civil rights — to change the party’s internal coalition. Radicalized conservatism will outlive the shutdown/debt ceiling fight.

Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogeneous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today. There’s no zealot like a new convert, the saying goes, and the South’s new faith in across-the-board conservatism — kicked off by the alignment of economic libertarianism with segregationism — is one of the most significant causes of the ideological inflexibility that’s caused the shutdown. That’s not to dismiss the continued relevance of race in the Southern psyche. There’s no chance that, when 52 percent of voting Americans are over 45, the country has just gotten over its deep racial hang-ups. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful “Fear of a Black President” if you don’t believe me...

As the Southern faction became the face of the GOP in the mid-90s, the GOP’s electorate became a lot more conservative nationally. Panel data reviewed by Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders found that, from 1992-1996, ideological conservatives joined the Republican Party in droves. That’s because Southern elites played a key “signalling” role; their prominent national conservatism signaled to conservatives around the country that the Republican Party was theirs.
Penn’s Matthew Levendusky, who literally wrote the book on conservatives “sorting” themselves into the Republican Party, says that “even when the data are consistent with a nationalization hypothesis, the South still played a crucial role in the sorting process because of the key role of Southern elites.” As conservative Southern elites took over the Republican Party, hyper-conservative Americans followed, becoming the GOP primary voters we know and love today...

Given the evidence that Beauchamp puts together, he paints a situation where a very lopsided Far Right national political party - the modern GOP - has set itself up with an ideology driven by Southern factional needs.  While it's not as overtly racist as it once was, the attitude is still there: the hatred of any kind of social service that could benefit minorities even though whites benefit as well; open contempt for voting rights by way of pursuing voter purges that disproportionately affect minorities; the desire to shut down a federal system that upholds such things as due process and citizenship rights.

The biggest reason this Long October is going to be long: The modern Republican Party is still fighting the Civil War... and the Reconstruction... and the New Deal... and the 1960s... as well as Obamacare and Obama himself.  It's been a long war already, and it's not over yet...

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The Secret About White Voters

This was something I spotted on Think Progress earlier today:

...McAuliffe’s numbers among black voters are likely to improve as undecideds tune into the campaign, but right now he is not riding a groundswell of African-American enthusiasm. Instead, his relatively strong lead comes from a counter-intuitive Cuccinelli weakness: white voters.

In the simplest possible terms, Cuccinelli has a white voter shortage. Consider Romney’s performance in in the state in 2012 in what was, after all, a losing effort. Romney carried white voters by a very strong 23 points. By comparison, Cuccinelli only leads among whites by 8 in the Quinnipiac poll.

The mystery deepens when you break down the numbers even further. Among white college graduates, Cuccinelli is only breaking even (Romney won this group by 10 points). The difference can perhaps be explained by Cuccinelli’svery public identification with hardline social conservatism, though it’s hard to say for sure.

What’s really baffling is Cuccinelli’s underperformance with white working class voters, who tend to identify with more “traditional” moral values. In the Quinnipiac poll, Cuccinelli has a 16 point lead among these voters. This may sound good, but it is not remotely large enough for a GOP candidate to carry the state even allowing for the relatively favorable turnout patterns of an off-year election. Romney carried Virginia’s white working class by a whopping 44 points, and still wound up losing.

Cuccinelli may have assumed his far right economic and social positions would be catnip for Virginia’s white voters, especially the white working class. So far, that’s looking like a poor assumption...

The blogger Ruy Teixeira is wondering how candidate Cuccinelli - already a national name thanks to his grandstanding on climate change and pogrom against consensual sex acts - could be losing not just young white voters (as Millennials are proving more liberal at their young age than previous generational cycles) but also older more traditional white voters (the Angry White Guy Coalition).

Well, there's a little dirty secret about white voters that people seem to keep forgetting: well, you see white voters are not as monolithic a group of voters as the pollsters, hucksters, media elites and suckers think we are.

By comparison, let's look first at the major ethnic groups.  Blacks, as documented rather well, nowadays tend to vote entirely for Democrats: sure, there are notable exceptions of African-American conservatives, but they're honestly few and far between.  Blacks are by generational development more pro-government (for good reason), pro-voting-rights (for good reason), pro-public-works (which tends to focus on construction and urban development, both solid job markets).  On the political spectrum, a solid number of African-Americans would lean to the Liberal end, which is currently best represented by the Democrats.  But it's not so much that Blacks are whole-heartedly Democratic: it's that the Republican Party in its current form is so anti-government, anti-voting, anti-anything that it's driving away African-Americans (even moderate ones) to a near 93 percent (98 percent in major urban areas) population count.

Hispanics aren't as devout (that chart for Obama's results show 71 percent compared to Blacks' 93 percent), but still vote in large enough numbers for Democrats to make note (7 out of 10 is a very solid majority).  It's partly due to the Republicans' hard-right turn against immigration, but it also has to do with the Republicans' stance against government social services and health care.  Both are key issues to the Hispanic communities: Hispanics don't have the disdain for the public sector that the current Republicans do.  Where Hispanics can be more conservative on an individual basis, as a community they'll vote the community interests (La Raza as a social concept).  And community interests tend to lean more Liberal (shared resources, free or low-cost public education, health care, public works) than Conservative.  Which is one reason why the Republicans' failure to pass any immigration reform - which hurts the Hispanic community as a whole - is proving foolhardy...

Asians as a smaller percentage of the national population still vote much the way the Hispanic population does, voting for Obama in roughly the same 7 out of 10 percentage.  It doesn't help the GOP that Asians are also greatly affected by the failure of immigration reform.

Into all of this is the White voter bloc.  Other major ethnic groups - Blacks (9 out of 10), Hispanics (7 of 10), and Asians (7 of 10) - have definable voting blocs.  Whites?  While they're the only group to lean Republican,  it's a 59 percent to 39 percent split.  More like a 6 out of 10 vote, the weakest voting bloc by percentage out of the ethnic groups.

While White Americans share the largest overall numbers of the population, White voters overall don't follow clear voting habits: of the major ethnic groups, Whites have clear distinctions between Right, Moderate, and Left voting groups.  Part of it has to do with how little the White voters have at stake on certain issues, especially on immigration (Hispanics, Asians) and on voting rights and civil liberty issues (Blacks overcoming decades of Jim Crow and segregation).  Those issues can galvanize those ethnic groups like no other. Whites would get more worked up on issues like taxes and business regulation, which are more polarizing than galvanizing.  On issues shared between all ethnic groups - education and health care - again these are more polarizing due to their complexity, and while White voters may lean Conservative on those two issues they are not unilaterally inclined to do so.  There may be one issue where whites are more Conservative than others - gun ownership - but even then it's not as absolute a vote-getter as it's polarizing as any other issue.

There's another aspect of the dirty little secret about White voters: we're not as a group keyed to the idea about race conflict the way the GOP is preaching it.  Yes, there are a good number of Whites who take serious the "reverse racism" argument, but not a majority of whites do.  Left-leaning Whites clearly don't, and there are signs the Moderate White voting bloc won't as well:

...But if the GOP determines that its future lies with an all-out pursuit of whites, it might find an unwanted surprise. Some white voters, particularly young ones, won’t align themselves with a party that can’t attract support from Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians. To attract more white voters, the GOP, ironically, might first need to attract more minorities.

That’s the central dilemma of any plan to win with a nearly all-white coalition. As the minority share grows with each presidential election, Republicans would need to win a greater and greater percentage of the white vote to prevail. That challenge proved insurmountable last year, when Mitt Romney won nearly 60 percent of white voters and still lost... 

...Seventy-six percent of likely millennial voters, for instance, say immigrants make the country a stronger place, according to a July poll from the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Just 61 percent (Note: that's still a huge positive for immigration reform that the GOP is pissing off) of all likely voters agreed with that. “On a number of key issues, if the party appears to be intolerant of gays, minorities, or immigrants, it’s going to have trouble competing with this group,” says Michael Hais, a Democrat and a coauthor of the book Millennial Makeover...

...College-educated women and suburban moderates hold similar views. Both groups are more accepting of diversity, and they recoil at the notion of backing a party that doesn't encourage it. It’s a story that has played out in the GOP’s past, says Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster and immigration-reform advocate. The Republican Party’s perceived intolerance turned off voters who otherwise might have been drawn to the GOP on issues such as the economy and foreign policy. “It’s just like the white suburban women who were uncomfortable with politicians who used quasi-racist language,” he says. “They just don’t want to be associated with them.”

For all the crowing in the nation's media elites about America being a "center-right nation" or the counter-claim of it really being a "center-left nation", the ones making those distinctions keep focusing on the "right" and "left" and forgetting the "center" part.  The thing about the voters in the "center" (aka the Moderates): we tend to be open-minded, kinda the whole point of being moderate.  Moderates tend to be open-minded about voting rights and immigration reform, which as the GOP turns further to the Right on those issues will drive those Moderates away.  (Moderates also tend to vote for competency, a skill set the modern Republican lineup is failing at, but that's a divergent issue.  Just related, that's all).

To get back to the issue with Cuccinelli's failings in Virginia, I need to point out that while Virginia has a solid conservative voting base it's not a dominant one: the state isn't fully a Red State (Republican), it's voted Blue (Democratic) the last two elections for President and has voted for Democratic governors (2001, 2005) in its recent history during Republicans' national dominance (both governors now serve as U.S. Senators): Virginia tends to be considered a Purple state (in flux between two parties) far more than other states.

Cuccinelli is currently losing Virginia by about 6 percentage points behind a Democratic challenger - McAuliffe - who really isn't considered even by fellow Democrats to be the best possible choice for the Governor's seat.  That 6 percent difference is similar to the victory difference current Senator Tim Kaine won over his Republican challenger last fall.  And at this point in the election cycle (the governor vote is this November), it's not like Cuccinelli can rally even more Far Right voters who are already rallied for him to make up for that 6 percent difference: this is the point in the general election where the candidates have to appeal to the moderate/undecided voters.  But Cuccinelli's failures to lean more moderate on immigration (he noted he doesn't support amnesty, a key reform issue) doesn't help.

If Cuccinelli does fail in the Virginia election, it will be a big signal to the national Republican Party how their stance is failing with the moderate/centrist voters that are always key to any statewide/nationwide election (in gerrymandered congressional districts, independent votes tend to get wasted).  The Republican leaders - Limbaugh, Fox Not-News, and other non-elected types - always argue that they've lost the last big elections - 2008, 2012 - because the candidates were too moderate.  They won't be able to argue that with Cuccinelli: he's not moderate on anything, there's no way to disguise that.  And while this is a state-level election, the national interest in the campaign during a key mid-term period - especially as it's drawing in fund-raisers across the nation - will draw a lot of dissection and truth-seeking.

That Cuccinelli is "losing" the White Vote - he's actually losing a sizable bloc of it - isn't the reason I took notice of that Think Progress article.  It's that the Republican Party is losing that voting bloc.  I'm starting to feel a little hopeful about 2014...

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This Is What Fear And a Gun Creates: Trayvon Martin Is Dead.

Trayvon Martin's intent: walk to a store and back for a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. George Zimmerman's intent: follow a black kid walking through a neighborhood while carrying his gun. Confrontation ensues. Zimmerman shoots Martin. 
Zimmerman gets acquitted because of "reasonable doubt". Trayvon Martin is dead.
Try to remember this: Trayvon Martin had a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. Martin was not committing any crime. He was walking home through his neighborhood. Zimmerman still chases after him. And Zimmerman shoots him dead.
As a teenager I spent a lot of time biking and walking through my neighborhood, but I never had some freaked-out adult chasing after me with a gun fearing for his life. Maybe because, gee I dunno, I was white. Who's to say? Certainly not Trayvon Martin. Because he's dead now.
It is now legal in Florida, and pretty much the rest of the nation, for terrified angry white guys to shoot young black kids walking through neighborhoods.
This is not justice.

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Is The Skin Color Of Our Terrorists Important?

(UPDATE 4/19: Read below)
Yes.

Because if anything it gives us the right to tell the racist morons - most often the shrieking fear-mongers on the Far Right - jumping to conclusions about the Boston attack and the Ricin Mail attack that they are SO VERY GODDAMN WRONG.

Lessee... in the last 20 years or so, our terror attacks/mass murders have been for the most part - I'd say 92 percent of the time - committed by Angry White Guys lashing out at any the best convenient targets - innocent people who had nothing to do with those Angry White Guys being angry.

I'm with Sirota on this:

...This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.
Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.
“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”
Because of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental, political and societal response we see in the coming weeks. That means regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.
To know that’s true is to simply consider how America reacts to different kinds of terrorism.
Though FBI data show fewer terrorist plots involving Muslims than terrorist plots involving non-Muslims, America has mobilized a full-on war effort exclusively against the prospect of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the moniker “War on Terrorism” has come to specifically mean “War on Islamic Terrorism,” involving everything from new laws like the Patriot Act, to a new torture regime, to new federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to mass surveillance of Muslim communities.
By contrast, even though America has seen a consistent barrage of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled against foreign terrorists. In fact, it has been quite the opposite — according to Darryl Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat... 

We have a terrorist organization in the United States.  It's called Angry White Guys.  It is not a rock band.  It's a loose coalition of Anglo-European descended males feeling privileged and authorized to hate and hurt anybody they want.  And they attack sometimes solo, sometimes in teams, using such methods as shooting up malls and schools and movie theaters, or driving armored bulldozers through a town, or piloting planes into the nearest IRS building, or killing corrections supervisors and court prosecutors, or blowing up federal office buildings in Oklahoma City.  And worse of all they tend to blend in, except for when their neighbors and co-workers get interviewed after the rampaging and they all say "Well, there was always something off about that guy..."

And don't worry: I don't fit the profile for Angry White Guy.  Oh, sure, I'm of Anglo-Irish-Germanic descent... and male... and over 40... and sexually frustrated... and occasionally railing against the oligarchy that's killing our jobs market... and... and...  why are you on the phone to the FBI?!  Wait!  Relax!  I'm trying to tell you I'm UNITARIAN!  I don't fit the full profile!  I'm clean, I SWEAR...

Here's the Update: Law enforcement released the photos of the two guys - White Ballcap and Black Ballcap - and within the next 12 hours located them on the MIT campus, they tried robbing a 7-11 gas station, got involved in a shootout with grenades getting thrown about, the Black Ballcap guy got shot and died from the wounds, and right now (6:52 am EDT) White Ballcap is on the loose in one of the outlying towns of Boston (apparently not a "suburb", they hate being called "suburbs" to Boston).  The two suspects were/are apparently brothers and foreigners on student visas - although not sure yet if they were MIT students.  Current report has them as Chechnyans where there's an ongoing insurgency after Russia re-took control after a second civil war there in 2009.  As there's a Islamic influence in the Chechen fighting, we're gonna get hit with the Evil Mooslums crap some more...  I still stand by my Angry White Guy rant, though.  And considering, like I said, that the wingnuts are gonna go crazy about these bombers possibly being Sunni Chechens still proves Sirota's point: when it's foreign ethnics, the entire ethnicity (or their religion) gets blamed, but when it's an Angry White Guy ohhhh it's just an individual the whole group doesn't deserve blame.

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The Martyrdom of Shirley Sherrod

This needs to be said.

Racism has been in the news lately.  The NAACP came out and accused the nationwide Tea Party movement of tactically supporting racism at their rallies.  The Tea Partiers and their Republican defenders promptly rose up to accuse the NAACP of "reverse-racism" (or Black-on-White) themselves... and then had to kick one of their "leaders" Mike Williams out for responding with a blatantly offensive "letter to Lincoln" that not even openly-proud racists could ignore.

Next thing we know, along comes Andrew Breitbart - responsible for hiring twentysomething idiots to pretend being pimps and prostitutes, videotaping ACORN employees, and then selectively edit said videos to make it look as though ACORN was helping pimps with their prostitution efforts - and he puts up a video on his website of a current USDA employee named Shirley Sherrod speaking at a meeting on racism.  A Black woman, Sherrod discussed how after years of helping poor Black farmers she was once confronted with having to help her first White farmer, and she admitted that in the beginning she didn't help that White family as well as she had helped Black farmers.

AHA!  So the saying goes, Breitbart has evidence at long last of reverse racism in action!  This video quickly made its way to FOX News, who quickly pounced and broadcasted it nationally.  The snowball became an avalanche, the NAACP jumping into making a statement denouncing Sherrod's racism against Whites.  Somewhere along the chain of command from the USDA up to the Secretary of Agriculture (and maybe Obama's White House) someone came up with the yellow-belly idea of forcing Sherrod into resigning before the matter could be fully investigated.

Because when the matter WAS fully investigated, it turns out that Breitbart had - yet again - used a selectively edited video of Sherrod's speech.   A full video shows Sherrod continuing her story about Her First White Farmer by pointing out she realized she needed to move beyond her own racist attitudes, and Sherrod HELPED that White Farmer find a lawyer, and made every effort to make sure that White Farmer kept his farm.  Even more, the White family she helped came out and publicly supported Sherrod's efforts helping them, and they were grateful for her help and that "she treated us good."  No one - not Breitbart, not FOX, not the Department of Agriculture or the NAACP or anyone else - made any effort to find out more information, to get more evidence and eyewitnesses, to do ANYTHING to see if Sherrod was just another target of Breitbart's selective editing.

This is what I posted on Ace of Spades website, where Ace was cheering Breitbart on for having punk'd the Obama administration into hastily firing innocent people:

I seem to recall Dan Rather making a hasty and poorly researched report into George W. Bush's service record with the Texas National Guard.  When Rather's team got caught with various holes in their reporting, Rather got forced out the door in disgrace.

Breitbart creates a hasty and poorly researched report into a woman's internal conflict with her own racism THAT SHE OVERCOMES by the by.  When Breitbart got caught pushing a selectively edited videotape, and failed to either hunt down the white farmers who DID get help from Sherrod or look for other witnesses to Sherrod's speech to verify if any other interesting statements were said by her... YOU (Ace) want to give Breitbart a MEDAL?!

I'm sorry, but Breitbart f-cked up here as badly as Vilsack did.  There needs to be accountability in the media and for this Breitbart needs to go.  Get kicked out the door just like Rather was.

Everyone EXCEPT Sherrod and those farmers she helped were in the wrong here.  Whoever gave Breitbart that edited video... Breitbart for failing basic rules of reporting (get more than one source!  verify!  interview as many people as you can!)... FOX News for quickly jumping on Breitbart's story without doing THEIR own research... The NAACP for jumping too quickly themselves and attacking her, in an effort to position themselves after recently attacking the Tea Party for racism... Vilsack, the Obama Administration and probably Obama himself for jumping the gun and forcing an innocent woman out of her job...

SO far the NAACP is the only one to have openly apologized, I haven't seen anybody else who screwed up to do so.  Obama needs to apologize directly to Sherrod and re-instate her.  Vilsack needs to apologize and offer his resignation to Obama (Obama can refuse it with a harsh reminder to Vilsack to watch his steps... or accept it and find a replacement).  FOX News and any other news outfit that jumped on this story need to apologize for their rush to judgment and take good-faith efforts to fact-check their stories and hold people accountable something they haven't been doing for years (like I keep saying, it looks like the last one who was held accountable was Rather, and that was 5-6 years ago).

And Breitbart needs to go.  No f-cking awards for him.

I swear to God we have no honest journalism anymore.  We have no sensible leadership that recognizes when we're getting bum-rushed by idiots with agendas re-enacting the whole "Boy Who Cried Wolf" crap, how many times you gonna believe Breitbart after the stunts he's pulled?  And people are suffering because of it.

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