Why Obama Matters in History

They took your lives; they could not take your pride

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

- RFK
Day of Affirmation Address, 6/6/66,
University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa

City of Blinding Lights
(Paul Hewson; Dave Evans; Adam Clayton; Larry Mullen)


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Hate in America

Update II: See the big hate.
- Paul Krugman

Update: Can right-wing hate talk lead to murder? Two terror events in two weeks makes me wonder if media extremists might turn down the ugly rhetoric for a bit. - Joan Walsh

Another hate crime. This act a white supremacist murdering a man at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This is why we need the Southern Poverty Law Center. Why we need to become vigilant against racial profiling and all acts of racism and hate.

Why we need to constantly confront the ignorant among us.

The appeal to racism, bigotry and hate is a staple of the Republican Party, and not just isolated American whacks. You can bet this murderer is not a big fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the civil rights movement, and likely not a voice against racial profiling.

Since the inception of Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968, continuing through Reagan’s 1980 campaign kick-off in Philadelphia, Mississippi [the site of the murder of civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, 16 years earlier], right on up to Bush and McCain, playing on the bigotries in America has been standard GOP fare.

Instead of the ignorant and hateful being politically marginalized, the GOP sees a political opportunity that they have never stopped using. The results are plain and ugly.

Here in Wisconsin, for most Wisconsin GOP writers, Milwaukee talk radio, and the Republican Party, the Civil Rights movement never happened.

So it's no stretch for them to obstruct black voters, disenfranchise gays, and play on the fears and prejudices of the ignorant who comprise the base of today's Republican Party.

As always the civil rights movement will stand tall against the ignorant masses of the GOP; it's just too bad that these haters find so much comfort in a major American political party.

National Review: Obama could be a communist Jew

Update: See also Obammunists.

While still beaming from the historic win, Wisconsin Obama voters may not know that Joe McCarthy is alive and well in the National Review Online, and digging up Obama dirt (he's not fooling anyone).

Obama's parents of different ethnicities fell in love in the late 1950's, so they must be communist and, gasp!!, Jewish, argues Lisa Schiffren.

Right. No wonder Obama did so well at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with all those Jews and communists there (though this does not explain how he took Fond du Lac county).

Maybe he caught a Harvey Goldberg lecture echoing down to Illinois in his youth. We didn't really think raising the out-state-tuition in the early 1970s was going to stop them, did we?

Well, we'll let the National Review Online's Lisa Schiffren explain it for us:

... And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. ...

... It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

- National Review Online

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Reminder on Romney's Support for Gays

Update: Jim Talent: Romney will stop ‘the militant gays’ [Good, we certainly have to watch for those guys!]

I wonder if GOP presidential aspirant and aspiring bigot Mitt Romney's campaign will be handing out a flier like this in Iowa declaring Romney's support for equal rights for gays when he was governor of Massachusetts.

From Huffington Post (via The Note in 2007):
"As that shakes out, ABC has obtained one flier Romney doesn't want you to see. It's from 2002, with Romney was running for governor with Kerry Healey as his running mate. 'Mitt and Kerry Wish You a Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.' (It's even pink.)"

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U.S. Set to Deport Gay Iranian

Bush and his gay-hating pigs can always be counted on to if not lead, at least emulate, the worst of the world's bigotries.

from Doug Ireland at Z-Net:

President George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but tragically they may find common ground about the disposability of Hassan Parhizkar's life.

Since November 7, a mild-mannered 40-year-old gay Iranian businessman from Rockville, Maryland has been sitting in jail in the Frederick County, Maryland Detention Center, housed with common criminals, in the living hell of limbo between the freedom he has known since he came to the United States as a young man 17 years ago and the certain persecution, imprisonment, or worse that will be his fate as a gay man if he is sent back to Iran.

A deportation order to send him back to Iran has been issued, and any day he could be put on a plane back to Tehran, where he was born.

"I am very afraid, and so very frustrated," Hassan Parhizkar told me in a truncated, collect telephone call from jail.

"My asylum request has never been before an immigration judge. I just don't know what to do, I just don't know what to do..." he added in a voice choked with tears.

See more at Doug Ireland at Z-Net.

Now would be a good time for Bush to bash Iran's anti-gay idiocies, grant Mr. Parhizkar asylum, and tell the world that deep-down, Bush is a loving humanist.
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Racist Jim Broussard Is a Criminal

Have a gander at this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nONjlZ8YMkA&mode=related&search=

Since when did become okay to steal property and brandish a military knife and threaten people? I guess it's okay in Reno if the victims are Mexican.

I e-mailed the following to the Reno Police Dept, can't say if it were received:

Why are you not investigating this man, Jim Broussard, for trespassing, destruction of private property, theft of property, brandishing a weapon, a military knife (assault), among other causes for criminal action by your department?

I await your reply and will be monitoring your action in this matter.

I have Cc ed La Raza, the National Action Network, among other parties.

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Mendez v. Westminster and the Racist Jim Broussard

Update:

Here's video of the racist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nONjlZ8YMkA&mode=related&search=

Update II: ACLU defends flag display at tavern.

Update III: A reader at Kos suggests that the bar owner certainly has a case against Broussard for trespassing, destruction of private property, brandishing a weapon (assault), among other causes for civil and criminal action.

Madison, Wisconsin - After helping winterize my family’s home this weekend, my father gave me some stamps commemorating the 60th anniversary of the desegregation case, Mendez v. Westminster School District (California) (1947).

I had never heard of that case, but it turns out Mendez is the Mexican-American and Latino legal precedent to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark decision still despised by racists the nation-over for its obliteration of the bigoted “separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

After reading up on Mendez, it made me think of the millions of heroes whose names we will never know who have advanced the cause for social justice in this country.

Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown before the U.S. Supreme Court seven years after Mendez helped write an amicus brief filed by the NAACP in the Mendez case, along with briefs filed by the ACLU, the American Jewish Congress, and the Japanese American Citizens League.

Who knows all the forces that won the Mendez victory, but the fact that World War II saw legions of Hispanic Medal of Honor recipients may have helped.

The fight against discrimination and hate has countless allies and many enemies, seen and unseen.

Racist Fascist Jim Broussard

So, it came as no great surprise to me yesterday when a veterans’ e-mail newsletter that I receive boasted that an American believed he possessed the right to invade the private property of a Reno, Nevada tavern owned by a Mexican-American and cut down a Mexican flag flying above an American flag (pictured above).

According to WorldNetDaily.com: “After hearing a Reno bar was flying a Mexican flag above a U.S. flag, an angered U.S. Army veteran took matters into his own hands, drove to the site and cut down the banners in front of a stunned group of Hispanic patrons.”

The bigot in question identified himself as one “Jim Broussard,” according to WorldNetDaily.com, and he is one of the allies of discrimination and hate.

WorldNetDaily.com quotes Broussard:

"I'm Jim Broussard, and I took this flag down in honor of my country with … a knife from the United States Army. … I'm a veteran; I'm not going to see this done to my country. If they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us. But I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back. … I was immediately infuriated and felt a duty to do something about it. I feel there's a lot of this turning-our-heads-on-things in concern with the Hispanic community and the things they do. They seem impervious to our laws in a lot of situations."

I’ve had my dealings with the likes of racists like Jim Broussard before and they share several traits: Ignorance, hate, cowardice, and a sociopathic sense of entitlement to inflict their authoritarian, sick vision of: White America rules!

My ethnic heritage is Irish-Mexican. The Mexican part comes from my father who hails from Aurora, Illinois. And I have been both the recipient of oral history and eyewitness experience in seeing how Mexican-Americans handle the likes of the bigoted Jim Broussard.

Put it this way, it’s direct and confrontational. And Jim Broussard and his pathetic moment of racist pride would not win the day were he to attempt to pull this crap in a Mexican bar in Aurora. The SOB would have an even worse time in an Irish bar.

In May last year, I was privileged to attend a ceremony in Aurora honoring a relative who was a pioneering Hispanic police officer and listen to his daughter who ridiculed the racists (after all we are all “spics,” as the bigots say) for the fools that all racists are.

I would have loved to see Broussard there.

There is a report that the Hispanic community in Reno is considering legal and political action against Broussard.

That’s a good idea.

Brother Jesse and Brother Al, I think we may just need you really soon over in Reno.
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The One True Church

Now it’s clear.

Less than one week after the Roman Catholic Church issued its degree that the Catholic Church is the “one true Church of Christ", the one, true Church agreed to a $660 million settlement in the clergy molestation/rape case in Los Angeles, the largest settlement yet for Catholic Church rape/molestation cases.

The one-true-church declaration was issued to clear up the "confusion and doubt" piling up on the church's relationships among other faiths, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.

If all those child molestations that the church covered up seem inconsistent with its self-declared “one, true church” pronouncement; just know that none other than the supreme authority on pacifism and tolerance, our own President Bush, said of Pope Benedict XVI: “He's a man of great wisdom and knowledge.”

The Pope earlier this month had also approved the Vatican's inclusion of a prayer for the conversion of Jews in its Latin Mass, which drew the ire of the ADL.

"We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday liturgy, that it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted ... ," Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said in a statement.

Excuse me, but Pope Benedict XVI: You stink.

Update:

From The Forward:

Pope’s Statements Raise Concerns About Interfaith Relations

Marc Perelman | Wed. Jul 18, 2007
Two separate documents issued by the Vatican last week are raising concern among liberal Catholics, Protestants and Jews that Pope Benedict XVI is turning back the clock on four decades of ecumenism.

On July 10, the Holy See reiterated a controversial statement from 2000 that the Protestant and Christian Orthodox denominations are not “true” Christianity. Four days earlier, the pope authorized the wider use of a Latin mass that may allow for the inclusion of a previously disavowed prayer calling for the conversion of Jews.

The pair of pronouncements has caused substantial consternation among the more liberal streams of Catholicism, who see the German pope steering the church in a more traditional direction. While some Jewish communal officials have urged Jews to stay out of what they perceive to be primarily an intra-Catholic debate, others are continuing to sound a warning about the statements’ effect on interfaith relations.

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