Gov Scott Walker's Secret Weapon Has Always Been Appeals to Racist, Anti-Semitic, Homophobic Human Garbage

Scott Walker in his essence is a simple bigot, never a
disqualification in Republican politics. From the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, (Stein).

Madison, Wisconsin — Among major candidates for governor, from whom would you expect to find top staff circulating explicitly homophobic, racist, antisemitic emails?

Few in Wisconsin have to think — it's Scott Walker, (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, One Wisconsin Now, DemoCurmudgeon).

Scott Walker's staff doesn't kill Jews, gays and blacks.

What they do is make jokes about Jews, gays and blacks and circulate the jokes among themselves.

Remember who Scott Walker is.

Walker is a bigoted, ignorant liar, and to this point has never paid a price because white evangelicals and other assorted bigots here love hate.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes hit on the revelation of Walker's emails four years ago.

Hayes points out "the shear jaw dropping offensiveness" of a few of those emails.

Hayes: "What kind of work environment exactly would it be all okay to get this in your inbox and then forward it to an unspecified amount of coworkers and subordinates...but think about the kind of work environment in which a chief of staff sends this kind of email to his subordinates. An email that is explicitly homophobic, racist, antisemitic and offensive in every way possible? ... These are the thoughts people who are in charge of things like, oh I don't know, running the states welfare system." 

This is who Scott Walker and new Republican Party are.

If anyone is wondering if Republican officeholders criticized Scott Walker's former chief of staff and other Walker aides for this crap, forget it.

No GOP officeholder in Wisconsin ever publicly criticizes Scot Walker and his staff.

Wisconsin Is about Race

An IWW anti-Klan poster from the 1920s.
(Ruff, Facebook)

Madison, Wisconsin — In 2011, the eyes of the nation looked askance at Wisconsin as a racist Evangelical from Iowa bragged to a man believed to be David Koch that one Scott Walker would not back down on his secret designs to depress wages for working families.

Walker has not backed down.

And Walker has proven adept using the Republican Party playbook inflicting race and myriad others as the political tool for inflicting the Republican anti-democratic legislative project in Wisconsin, including ongoing programs against voting, and gerrymandering.

White supremacy and social dominance and terror are defining features of America.

In Wisconsin where progressives still have a powerful presence, it is instructive to consider the magnitude of labor and progressives' fight against white supremacy and white terror.

One problem facing forces fighting racists today is the German ancestors of the 21rst and 20th century have rejected the socialist and anarchist roots of the 19th century, substituting a racist and anti-Semitic ethos where in this writer's lifetime 'nigger' and 'Jew' jokes were told in public settings in east-central Wisconsin with the assurance the humor met an appreciative audience.

This horror of Wisconsin is the margin of Donald Trump's victory, and Scott Walker's gubernatorial runs.

How effectively the opposition performs against Walker and contemporary racists remains to be seen but the heart and soul of Wisconsin's work for equality resides in the cities and universities, which remain targets of fascists. 

Victim of Assassination Attempt, Rep. Scalise, Was Linked with White Supremacist from Louisiana

In 2014, anti-racst voices rightfully mocked Scalsie claim the
GOP leader didn't know David Duke is a white supremacist
(Huffington Post)

Amid calls for unity following the attempted assassination of Republican congressional members, come reports noting Rep. Steve Scalise publicly addressed the white supremacist and KKK-linked gathering, the David Duke-led European-American Unity and Rights Conference in 2014, headed by a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, (Reuters), (MSNBC- 2014).

The Southern Poverty Law Center notes Duke is "most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial." 

Duke is currently online defending Scalise against what he terms "Vile, Anti-White Media Hatred"on Duke's website.

The same year Scalise addressed the European-American Unity and Rights Conference, 2014, Scalise was elected House Republican Party Whip, (CNN).

As Republican Party leaders call for unity, it behooves them to explain that this means all Americans, and not just European-white Americans working together against ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, a Wisconsin Republican state legislator, Jesse Kremer, says criticism and parody of Donald Trump made the assassination attempt "predictable," (Democurmudgeon), (Associated Press).

Trump continued the Republican Party's message of racial taunts and racist dog whistles in campaign 2016 carrying whites by a 21-point margin, (Pew Center, Independent).

Until Republican Party leaders renounce and reverse their white supremacist message and platforms, their calls for unity ring as hollow as a Republican complaint about the availability of the weapon the attempted assassin used for his rampage.

Whites flocked to Donald Trump and his message of white supremacy

Wisconsin Republicans—Dirty Tricks, Racists and Voter Obstruction

Updated - "Our campaign has had to deal with millions of dollars in misleading, negative ads from the Koch network, but this is a new low. Republicans are getting desperate, and they've resorted to the dirtiest tactic in their playbook: sending a spy into our campaign headquarters. This person came into our campaign headquarters using a fake name, a fake story, and even a fake Facebook page to try and cover their tracks," says Sarah Lindstrom, Volunteer Coordinator for the Russ Feingold U.S. Senate campaign in an email this morning.

Republican dirty tricks combined with one of the most ambitious voter obstruction projects in the nation reveal two things: The nature of the white Republican party in Wisconsin, and the desperation of the white party.

Signing off for the weekend.

Wisconsin, be advised, even the most basic right, voting, is under assault.

Scott Walker is quoted in the Capital Times today, saying Republican-enacted restrictions on early voting are needed after these restrictions were struck down in late July as unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge James Peterson in One Wisconsin Now, Inc. v. Thomsen.

Peterson held a trial and after hearing evidence, testimony, and argument found these early-voting restrictions to be discriminatory. This is an extraordinary opinion, but in white Wisconsin the significance is lost on the politcal culture.

"Those were reasonable changes at the time ... ," Walker said, not specifying why these restrictions were reasonable in 2011, or explaining if these restrictions are not needed now in 2016, then what has changed.

Getting a straight answer out of Scott Walker, or a racist bureaucrat in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, is never a good bet.

Virginia's White Supremacist Republicans Fight Voting Rights

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginia Republicans are fighting tooth-and-nail to stop the restoration of voting rights of 100,000s of mostly black Virginia citizens.

"Virginia's 1901-1902 constitutional convention, which set up poll taxes, literacy tests and disenfranchisement for felons as barriers for African-American participation," is cited by election law scholar, A.E. Dick Howard, professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who consulted with Gov. Terry McAuliffe in McAuliffe's continuing efforts to restore the voting rights of Virginians, (Nolan, Times-Dispatch).

As long as black Americans can vote, white supremacists in the Republican Party across the nation will do their worst to impede voting rights, often employing the deplorable tactics of Jim Crow-era laws and state constitutions like Virginia's.

Notes Laura Vozzella in the Washington Post: "Virginia is one of only a few states that permanently disenfranchise felons, a practice that McAuliffe and other Democrats trace back to the Jim Crow era since it disproportionately affects African Americans."

Virginia offers one example.

Wisconsin is another.

From the Beloit Daily News:

... A trial was held this week in federal court dealing with Voter ID and various other elections changes enacted since 2011. The plaintiffs argue the changes, taken together, suppress the votes of minorities, young people and others, particularly in urban areas. Several expert witnesses presented the results of academic studies supporting that argument.

But perhaps the most interesting testimony came from a former Republican aide to a Wisconsin senator who later chose not to seek re-election when his term expired. The aide testified to being present in a closed Republican caucus when legislators originally discussed passing the Voter ID bill. He said senators were 'giddy' at the prospect of what such a law could do to curtail turnout among certain groups of citizens, predicting it would make it easier for Republicans to win future elections.

 Wherever black folks vote, and Republicans rule the state legislature, no voter is safe.

Milwaukee Hate Crime—Mass Murderer Found Unfit for Trial

From Milwaukee County, with hate

Life is cheap in Milwaukee if you are an ethnic minority.

That's the message Milwaukee County Circuit Judge J.D. Watts delivered to Milwaukee County.

Watts ruled Dan J. Popp is unfit to stand trial after murdering a Puerto Rican man and Hmong couple on March 6, 2016, and attempting to kill all members of two minority families who had the temerity to breathe and live in their homes, (Sameer Rao, Colorlines), (Mal Contends), and (Luthern, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

From ColorLines:

As we reported last month, Popp faces three counts of first-degree intentional homicide and one count of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. According to a criminal complaint and witness testimony, Popp allegedy went to Jesus Manso-Perez and his teenage son's apartment and asked where they were from.

When he learned they were from Puerto Rico, Popp reportedly said, 'Oh, that's why you don't speak English, before shooting at them and killing the elder Manso-Perez. The complaint said that Popp then went to the nearby apartment of Hmong couple Phia Vue and Mai K. Vue, where he fatally shot them in front of their children.

Some of the victims' family members joined with a coalition of 22 community advocacy groups that cuts across many of Milwaukee's racial and ethnic communities to demand additional hate crime charges. 'Lives were taken because of Dan J. Popp's hatred for those who are different from him,' Tou Xiong, Mai K. Vue's brother, told reporters.

"From the beginning of this case people were rushing to say, 'Oh this was a mental illness issue,'" Darryl Morin of the League of United Latin American Citizens said while speaking on behalf of the Manso-Perez family yesterday. "Every expert we've spoken to on the issue of hate crimes has said there's always been some degree of mental illness involved."

It's open season on minorities in America, and racism remains as American as Mom and Applepie.

Wisconsin Moves into Focus of Presidential Campaigns

On April 5 the Republican Party of Wisconsin will get a
glimpse of how well its voter suppression objectives
have been achieved in the first Wisconsin statewide,
presidential election that conditions the right to vote on
possessing and presenting a Republican-approved photo ID,
(Pierce, Esquire).

Projected Wisconsin April 5 Primary Turnout Expected to Exceed the 2008 Primary Turnout

Wisconsin moves into the spotlight as the April 5 partisan primaries reveal a radicalized Republican Party opposed by two wings of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW)—the progressive wing and the corporatist wing.

Steve Kornacki guest-hosting The Rachel Maddow Show Thursday led with a 13-minute segment offering a historical perspective of Wisconsin's progressive history, Robert La Follette and the statist reactionaries, (my words) such as Joe McCarthy and Scott Walker.

Kornacki interviewed Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel journalist, Mary Spicuzza about Wisconsin's surprise prominence as a potential tipping point in the presidential primary races of both major political parties in the 2015-16 election cycle.

Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board (GAB) this week predicted voter turnout for the April 5 election could be as high as 40 percent, (Beckett, Wisconsin Radio Network).

In the historic Feb. 19, 2008 primary, the turnout was 37.1 percent, according to the United States Elections Project. This figure is a couple points higher than the official Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board's figure of the 2008 Presidential Primary turnout as 34.9 percent.

Although Wisconsin is generally thought of a 'purple' state, the Republican Party of Wisconsin has veered into openly advocating the tenets of fascism the last five years.

The Democratic Party to the extent it is guided by grassroots citizens' groups still traces back a political tradition to La Follette, Milwaukee's sewer socialists, labor union activism, and a scholarship to study labor history as exemplified by University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons in the early 20th century, (Birth of the Labor Movement, Wisconsin Historical Society).

Contra progressive citizens' movements, corporatist political forces in the Democratic Party today as embodied in U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) and Hillary Clinton have led the DPW to abandon fundamentals of Party organizing, grassroots organizing and establishing the Party as an effective counter to the historic political successes of Scott Walker and the gerrymandered, Republican-led Wisconsin legislature, (Murphy, Urban Milwaukee).

.

Republican Party's War on Voting to Reap Wisconsin Casualties on April 5

On April 5, the Republican Party of Wisconsin will get a glimpse of how well its voter suppression objectives have been achieved in the first Wisconsin statewide, presidential election that conditions the right to vote on possessing and presenting a Republican-approved photo ID, (Pierce, Esquire).

Wisconsin will hold its Spring Election and Presidential Preference Primary on April 5.

Suppressing the number of communities of color, disabled, early in-person absentee voters, low-income voters, young people, and the elderly will yield high dividends in the Fall General Election on November 8, Republicans hope.

"It's going to be much worse this November, and probably worse every other November after that until we decide that none of these things is merely accidental, and that none of these episodes is merely a clerical or administrative error. They are the result of a deliberate national campaign to restrict the franchise in new and different ways, all of which devalue our democracy, and all of them a shame to our national honor," notes Charlie Pierce.

That Wisconsin Republicans failed to fund a mandated-by-law public education campaign is just a happy coincidence for the GOP, (Smith, ProPublica). 

A long-time Election Inspector in Fitchburg, Wisconsin (Dane County) told me he would not "perpetuate a fraud" on voters by collaborating with the Republican-passed Photo Voter ID law regime which will obstruct and prevent targeted voters from casting their preference on Election Day.

The polling worker has worked elections for decades, but is finished working the polls, what he sees as a solemn, civic duty. "In-person voter-impersonation fraud is the fraud," he said.

In the 2014 federal court decision and order that halted (temporarily) implementation of Wisconsin's photo voter ID law, Republicans in the Attorney General's office, Judge Lynn Adelman notes, "could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past," (p. 12).

Wisconsin typically has been near the top in voter turn-outs in general presidential elections, (2008 at 72.8) (2012 at 72.9 percent).

Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are aware of these facts, and have worked diligently to lower turn-out, especially that 'urban' vote.

The GOP stops enough 'urban' people voting, and its candidates may win in November, though the Republican brand has become some so tainted by misconduct and incompetence, winning a statewide race is a presidential year is a difficult proposition, no matter how many election law changes Republicans have enacted to give Republicans an advantage against the Wisconsin citizenry.

Hate and Murder

They Thought They Were Free,
The Germans, 1933-45;
(University of Chicago Press.
©1955)
by Milton Mayer

"Someone perceived as a Latino will soon be murdered; you can count on it," (Mal Contends, June 2014).

Not surprising to read the latest mass murder and hate crime occurred in Milwaukee where segregation and hate fuel the Republican Party of Wisconsin and Scott Walker.

Ashley Luthern reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (March 10) a white man, Dan J. Popp, "methodically shot and killed three of his neighbors at point-blank range" on March 6 on a Sunday afternoon.

It was a hate crime. The victims are Jesus R. Manso-Perez, 40; Phia Vue, 36; and Mai K. Vue, 32. The three victims are Puerto Rican and Hmong.

A candlelight vigil in support of the victims was held yesterday in Milwaukee, noted Tammie Xiong, Executive Director of the Milwaukee Hmong American Women's Association. "Hate speech leads to hate crimes," read a sign held at the vigil.

The Journal-Sentinel's Luthern notes in her chilling report, citing the criminal complaint against Popp filed late last week:

Popp then asked where they, [Jesus R. Manso-Perez and his son], were from and the father and son replied Puerto Rico.

The son later told police that Popp replied: 'Oh, that's why you don't speak English. You're Puerto Rican.'

Manso-Perez and his son continued to the basement where they got the washing machine started. As they climbed the stairs back to their apartment, Popp stood over them on a landing. He was armed with a rifle.

The son told police Popp pointed the gun at his father — saying, 'You guys got to go' — and pulled the trigger.

Manso-Perez was shot in the head.

As his son turned to run toward the front door, he glanced up and saw Popp point the gun at him. He heard a second shot, which he told police he believed was meant for him. ...

Thia Vue, his wife, Mai Vue, and their four children lived in another unit in the apartment complex. The couple had been out of town most of the weekend, leaving a 25-year-old relative to baby-sit the children.

Soon after they returned home on Sunday, there was a knock on the door.

It was Popp. The 25-year-old relative answered the door and Popp asked her if someone was knocking. She told him no and he left.

A short time later, the family heard several gunshots coming from the apartment hallway. It was not clear in court records if the sound they heard was Popp shooting Manso-Perez or firing randomly in the hallway.

Hearing the gunshots, Phia and Mai Vue, their four children and the adult relative hid in a bedroom together. They heard pounding on their apartment door and Mai gave the relative a cellphone to call police.

Popp kicked down the front door, made his way into the bedroom and pointed the rifle at Phia, ordering him to leave.

Phia followed Popp, and his family inside the bedroom heard two or three gunshots. Officers found Phia dead in the bathroom. He had a gunshot wound to the head.

Popp returned to the bedroom and began to drag Mai and her two young daughters out of the apartment while the older relative and other children followed. Some were able to run outside.

"Hate crimes are nothing new. You have a family that has four kids without a mom and dad. As a community we are rallying around the family, and working with relatives to provide support," said Ms. Xiong. "This is nothing new. Sad to say we are not surprised."

Adds Xiong, "It's really important to acknowledge the hurt the the Hmong community faces here in Milwaukee. We really hope justice will be served for the families of this crime. We need as human beings to respect each other. To even have this conversation in 2016 is shameful."

Xiong describes the Hmong community as "close-knit."

The four Hmong Vue children reportedly range in age from approximately six-years-old to 13. Manso-Perez' surviving son is 18.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a piece on Saturday entitled "Someone Will Die".

As hate is preached at the highest levels of American political culture, you should really consider reading Marshall's piece. Fascism is in the air.

Antonin Scalia—The Ben Tilman of the Court

The political world is awash today in canonizations of Antonin Scalia.

So passionate, so principled, iconic, a legal titan, a "formidable thinker" whose legal writings stand as "a Roman candle of sparkling jurisprudential theories leavened by acerbic witticisms," (Will, Washington Post).

He had friends not sharing his masquerading quest for truth, and he was even more caustic than is known.

Wow.

Enough of this nonsense.

Scalia was a corrupt member on the Court whose service to the Republican Party and the ruling oligarchies was unwavering, and his antipathy to racial justice is repellent to any American with a fleeting grasp of history.

He played with the liberties of citizens, far more often than not finding the liberty interest of people was not prominent in the face of whatever state power inflicted onto black, brown, immigrants, Native Americans and gay Americans, in particular victims of the criminal justice system and white supremacists.

Principled?

As noted by Judge Richard Posner, a decent and honest public intellectual:

Judges tend to deny the creative—the legislative—dimension of judging, important as it is in our system, because they do not want to give the impression that they are competing with legislators, or engaged in anything but the politically unthreatening activity of objective, literal-minded interpretation, using arcane tools of legal analysis. The fact that loose constructionists sometimes publicly endorse textualism is evidence only that judges are, for strategic reasons, often not candid.

Outside of D.C. in reality land, "This doesn’t get said enough: Scalia is an intellectual fraud who uses a phony methodology to get whatever judicial outcomes align with his political preferences ... , (Campos, Salon).

Or as The Onion puts it: "Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-year Battle with Social Progress."

Good riddance.

Antonin Scalia, Republican Justice on the Supreme Court, Dies at 79

Justice Antonin Scalia (1986-2016) was found dead Saturday at 79, (Liptak, NYT).

After proper institutional plaudits and expressions of sympathy to the family, the political world has burst into a frantic posture.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other Republican senators and presidential candidates are calling for President Obama to abdicate his power and responsibility under the United States Constitution to appoint Supreme Court justices, and vow to stop any nominee the president appoints. The Party's only principle is its power.

This is an ironic position from so-called strict constructionists, originalists, textualists—a faux jurisprudence masquerading as a method of judicial policy-making.

Scalia

Scalia was a hyper-activist and embittered ideologue who in his later years became more troll and open bigot than serious jurist, as his influence faded to a "Justice of One," (Murphy NYT), as a dogmatic and alienating "Scalia emerged as an Old Testament–style Jeremiah, often hollering alone in the wilderness."

Individual rights were few and weak in Scalia's alleged jurisprudence and Scalia's radical views reveal a racist and contemptuous conception of the American citizen, explaining in part why Scalia never achieved a stature beyond a smirking Republican political operative on the Court.

Power

As the Republican Party now openly uses the Court as a means of inflating its power and decimating the rights of the citizenry, it is no surprise Republicans senators believe the president has no right to nominate a justice and the U.S. Senate has no duty to consider a nominee.

Rights and Liberty

Power is what the Republican Party is after, and the diminished rights of the American citizen are simply a necessary objective.

This absurd conception of liberty so championed by Scalia and the New Right jurists such as Robert Bork was eviscerated by the late Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) during the 1987 Bork confirmation hearings.

As Ethan Bronner writes in his brilliant chronicling of the Bork nomination, (Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America; Ethan Bronner. 399 pages. W. W. Norton):

What [Sen.] Specter wanted to know was this: If executive power could undergo organic development, if press freedom had to be interpreted for the modern era, why not the rest of the Bill of Rights? Why not liberty? Why couldn't liberty be an organic concept? Why should judges interpret liberally when faced with the vague concept of press freedom but be held back when confronted with the equally vague concept of liberty? 

The Republicans had no answer in 1987 to this question as the American public, pushing the U.S. Senate, rejected Bork, and the Senate voted 58-42 against the Republican vision of Americans with frail rights.

The Republicans have no answer today as they stand naked, revealed as a fascistic underground movement with no fidelity to the U.S. Constitution and the vast liberties of the American people against state power, save the right of citizens to own weapons of mass destruction.

Battle to Come

The high ground on Constitutional rights is a hill Republicans can never hope to take and Scalia's nominated successor will stand for the liberties of the Constitution in an epic political battle these next nine months.

The Republican political rejoinder to 'I got my rights,' is 'no, you don't,' no matter the slick, Luntz-crafted formulations Republicans will use. This truth will stare Americans in the face this spring and summer.

Republicans will defame, scream, and warn the Republic is coming to an end if the Senate confirms this black president's nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Personally, I'm hoping for Prof. Diane P. Wood, Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, or perhaps a rabbit out of the hat with the nomination of Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, or a dream appointment of Richard Posner, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Speculations abound.

As for the Republicans, let 'em scream. The result will be an aroused electorate realizing their liberty is at stake and there is very little Republicans will not do to achieve One Party rule in their project of unsurpassed ugliness.

White Supremacists Open Fire on Black Lives Matter# Citizens

White Supremacists Open Fire on Black Lives Matter# Citizens
Photo from Raw Story, via Lorena de la Cuesta

Updated - "Five protesters were shot late Monday night near the Black Lives Matter encampment at the Fourth Precinct police station in north Minneapolis, according to police."

Those who were shot sustained non-life-threatening injuries, said police spokesman John Elder in a statement,"(Minneapolis Star Tribune) (Southhall, NYT) (U.S. Uncut).

Black Lives Matter# have been staging peaceful vigils over the Minneapolis police killing of Jamar Clark on Nov. 15.

Fascism has come to America, and it has come with guns and white supremacists opening fire on black people in the streets of Minneapolis.

White people beating black people at political rallies, and the racial taunts of Republican Party politicians running for the presidency.

"Operation Wetback" Praised by Donald Trump, Notes NBC News

"Trump is right about one thing: We do have a country. We have a country where all people - not specifically citizens - are considered equal. We have a country moving towards full inclusion and civil rights for all. We have a country with values anathema to the xenophobia that inspired 'Operation Wetback,'" writes Raul A. Reyes at NBC News, noting Tuesday's debate in Milwaukee.

Trump and the Republican Party's rhetoric aimed at ethnic minorities is becoming more and more dangerous, and morally repulsive.

Will one candidate for the Republican Party's nomination for the presidency speak up and call out this racist crap for what it is?

During the debate in Milwaukee no one did.

White-out at GOP Pres Debate

Haven't seen this many white people since I lived in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Check out Joe Wilson's shot below of the "audience at the Coors Events Center at the University of Colorado Boulder on Wednesday during the Republican presidential debate." (Wilson, New York Times).

Not so popular with the brown and black folks, wonder why?

The audience at the Coors Events Center at the University of Colorado Boulder
on Wednesday during the Republican presidential debate.
Jim Wilson, New York Times

Latinos Tell GOP: Stop Demonizing

The forces of hate in the Republican Party are loosed upon a population already targeted by the rightwing.

Republican Latinos, are speaking up on the eve of tonight's GOP debate and delivering a message to Republicans: Knock it off.

Without demonizing black and brown, the Republican Party is listless.

Allegra Kirkland at TPM has the story:

According to NBC, Tony Suarez, Executive Vice President of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, said Trump's candidacy 'needs to be canceled like his last reality TV program.'

Mr. Trump has become a promoter of hate, division and insult,' Suarez said. 'If Mr. Trump were to be the Republican nominee — I don't think he has a chance at winning the general election.'

I doubt if Trump or any Republican contending for the presidential nomination will say, 'enough hate, now' tonight.

Hate is what the Republican Party does.

Message to White America from the Scary Black Man

The presidential campaign is swinging into gear fast, and so is the new demonization of the black man.

White resentment, white hatred, and white ignorance will be the target of the most prominent campaign impressions vectored into America in a presidential election without full black participation, people if all goes right with the Republican plan will be in prison, coming from prison or at least deprived of the right to vote.

This message might hurt, this might get you mad, it might even make you happy. but will it make you change. Message to America from a black man. Share this message or you're part of the problem.Oh yeah we cutting loose all the problems our time is here ...
Posted by You gone learn today

Republican Hate-mongering 'Illegals' Rhetoric

Grand Old Party of Hate

Update: Scott Walker says he would repeal President Obama's "amnesty" on Day One, in one of Walker's self-proclaimed "big, bold" ideas: "For goodness sakes, we’re seeing the real – the very real – public safety risk for what happens when you have people who commit multiple, multiple criminal offenses. They are a public safety risk to anyone in this country." (Breitbart) Who knew multiple, multiple criminals were invading and rampaging America, creating a public safety risk to anyone in this country? Republican racists know, though this is sheer, hate-mongering nonsense.
 ---
"Long past time for media to stop calling people 'illegals,'" reads a headline from DesMoinesDem writing in the Bleeding Heartland from Iowa.

The Iowa writer also hits GOP politicians, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and Radio Iowa and its 50-plus affiliate Iowa radio stations (division of Learfield Communications) for their continued use of the racially charged invective Republicans use to appeal to rural whites in America still in thrall to anything injurious to the other—them.

That goes for Fox News too, but one miracle at a time.

White and racist equals Republican Party today. Whites for liberty and equality vote for someone else.

Didn't always be that way, but appeals to racism are a main stable of the Republican political diet.

Throw in evangelical Christianitites and you have an Iowa Caucus election custom-made for Scott Walker, though Walker's faltering campaign has many anti-Latino, anti-equality and misogynistic rivals looking at other candidates with demonstrable knowledge of public policy.

Republican candidates for president see racist appeals and voter obstruction of minorities as a winning combination, and decency will not prevent the GOP from sowing the seeds of hate. (Mal Contends) (J.P. Green) (Mal Contends) (James Vega)

Medgar Evers Lives

This Independence Day, to Medgar and Myrlie Evers: Still showing the way of peace.

America’s Long History of Racial Fear

By Stephen Kantrowitz

Calling [the June 17] shootings in Charleston a "tragedy" makes this explosion of murderous violence seem like an accident. It isn’t an accident. It is the legacy of an excruciating history that began with racial slavery and continued through the post-Civil War campaign to maintain white supremacy – a campaign that has persisted to the present day and which shapes how many white Americans think about and respond to black Americans.

At the heart of [the Charleston] violence is America’s history of chattel slavery, a labor system built on violence, in which all whites were effectively authorized to do violence to African Americans in order to keep them at work and prevent them from challenging their enslavement. But this brutal system also produced rebellions. Whites – even those who never owned a slave – lived with the fear that that racial order might be turned upside down, destroying everything that they held dear. In other words, whites attributed to blacks the same desire for domination that they themselves were exercising. It is no accident that the alleged shooter is reported to have said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

The history of chattel slavery, upended in the Civil War, was followed by the history of Reconstruction, a moment during which America’s racial hierarchy was unsettled, and black people were able to claim a measure of political and civil equality. But the moment was a brief one. White conservatives all over the South, abetted by many white northerners, denounced the new interracial Southern governments as exactly the “world turned upside down” that they had feared during slavery. They overthrew those governments by force and fraud and set about reconstructing white supremacy as best they could without the law of slavery as a foundation.

The Reconstruction years thus gave way to another history: the continuing struggle by white supremacist activists to create and enforce Jim Crow’s exclusion, segregation, and lynching. This struggle took a lot of work, and it required that whites remain intensely fearful of blacks. One of the greatest victories of white supremacy in this era was to persuade whites that they confronted an epidemic of black men raping white women. Despite overwhelming evidence that this claim was unfounded (especially as revealed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett), the fantasy that predatory black men routinely victimized white women became the justification for lynching. Those fears may have run deepest in the South, where the great majority of the black population resided well into the twentieth century, but they found a home in the North and West as well.

As Jim Crow began to crack beneath the blows of the post-WWII black freedom movement, politicians drew on that history to sustain white racial domination. Scare campaigns against the Civil Rights Movement promised that civil and political equality would unleash black men’s alleged sexual ambitions and, once again, overturn a well-established racial hierarchy. The power and persuasiveness of those arguments helped explain the residential segregation and redlining across the North that lies at the heart of so many of today’s inequities. It lay behind the differential sentencing laws for powder and crack cocaine and undergirded the fearful discussion of “super-predators” in the 1980s and 1990s. It is still used to justify the overwhelmingly disproportionate police scrutiny, arrest, and conviction and incarceration of African Americans.

America’s long racial history of imagining blacks as fearsome, criminal, and bent on political and sexual domination has never gone away. This is not because the fantasy is real, but because it has played such a powerful role for hundreds of years. No wonder that it is so readily wielded as a weapon, whether through cynicism, ignorance, or ruthlessness. No wonder that its murderous version of history was so easy for Dylann Roof to find and embrace.

Dylan Roof’s murderous night is not simply a South Carolina tragedy. It is an expression and a consequence of American history – a history that the nation has hardly reckoned with, much less overcome.

--Stephen Kantrowitz is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of several books, including Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. (Chapter One, New York Times) (Book Review; Dew, New York Times)

[- Used with permission from author; from We're History -]

Wisconsin Equivalent of Racist Citizens Councils Is the Bradley Foundation

"The Wisconsin equivalent of the southern Citizens Councils is our own Bradley Foundation," writes Bernard Starzewski, (Htrnews (Gannett Co)). "[Scott] Walker himself said it best, 'We use divide and conquer.' That is what racism is — promoting division and exploiting the conquered."

Is there not some manner in which we could put blacks folks in prisons, keep them away from decent white society?

Stop them from voting, they're not informed enough.

Teach them proper values?

Or, at the very least keep them away from our neighborhoods?

Welcome to Wisconsin, we're open for business and always thinking ahead ( Eidelson, Salon).