President Obama honours "heroes" of "Bloody Sunday"

By Richard K. Barry

President Obama spoke today in Selma, Alabama at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the iconic "Bloody Sunday" civil rights march in which police attacked demonstrators campaigning for voting rights.

"Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for African Americans, but for every American," he said.

The speech:

Debo Adegbile deserved full Democratic support and Senate confirmation to top civil rights post

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Debo Adegbile is supremely qualified to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division. He was, after all, the director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, working for that organization in different legal capacities from 2001 to now. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court and is, needless to say, an expert in a wide range of civil rights matters.

But as director of litigation at the NAACP he worked -- among many other things -- on the defense team for Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been sentenced to death for killing a Philadelphia policeman. And not in the original trial phase but only in the death penalty phase, where -- as I'll get to shortly -- there were serious constitutional problems that needed addressing. But no matter. Apparently it's not appropriate to do such things -- to defend a black man facing death on a civil rights violation (just as apparently certain people don't deserve their constitutional rights to defend themselves in court, and those who defend them are somehow doing something wrong) -- and that was enough to turn enough Democrats against him to join with the anti-Obama Republican mob to block his nomination in the Senate. He was rejected 52-47.

One expects Republicans to oppose a supremely qualified Obama nominee for the top civil rights job in the federal government, especially a black man from the NAACP, but what's up with Dems voting against him? Well, they're the barely Democratic, Republican-leaning Democrats from purple and red states you might expect them to be -- Bob Casey (PA), Chris Coons (DE), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Joe Manchin (WV), Mark Pryor (AR) and John Walsh (MT). All that was needed was a simple majority, but these cowards stood with the Republican obstructionists, and worse, to vote down a great nominee.

Read more »

Craziest Republican of the Day: Ian Bayne (for comparing Phil Robertson to Rosa Parks)

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

Yes, seriously.

This idiot, who's running for the Republican nomination in Illinois's 11th Congressional District, said that Duck Dynasty's bigot-patriarch Phil Robertson is just like Rosa Parks:

Today, Ian Bayne called Phil Robertson, star of the A&E series "Duck Dynasty," the 'Rosa Parks' of our generation.

"In December 1955, Rosa Parks took a stand against an unjust societal persecution of black people, and in December 2013, Robertson took a stand against persecution of Christians," said Bayne.

"What Parks did was courageous," said Bayne. "What Mr. Robertson did was courageous too."

Right, because Christians today are facing totally the same situation that blacks were in the '50s. I mean, Christians can't vote, can't drink at non-Christians' water fountains, and face discrimination pretty much in every aspect of society. Plus, there are those anti-Christian lynch mobs roaming the countryside and terrorizing everyone, setting churches on fire and basically making sure that poor Christians live in abject fear every moment of their lives.

I mean, totally.

Except that, you know, Rosa Parks was fighting against bigotry and discrimination whereas Phil Robertson was identifying Christianity with bigotry and discrimination.

And of course Robertson didn't just say bigoted things about gays, he also said incredibly ignorant things about how blacks were supposedly all happy in pre-civil rights Louisiana, because apparently institutionalized bigotry and discrimination is some sort of panacea for him.

Obviously, Ian Bayne is too fucking stupid, his head stuck firmly up his right-wing ass, to get the point. 

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A blow for bigotry: The Supreme Court demolishes the Voting Rights Act

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you may have heard by now, the Supreme Court -- or, rather, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority, issued a ruling today that significantly undermines the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, ruling that Congress had not provided adequate justification for subjecting nine states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.

"In 1965, the states could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. "Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were."

The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and gave very different accounts of whether racial minorities continue to face discrimination in voting. 

There was -- and remains -- good reason for such federal oversight.

What the Roberts-led majority is basically saying is that racial prejudice is a thing of the past ("the nation is no longer divided along those lines") and that the success in overcoming such prejudice means there's no longer a need for voting rights protections of the sort that were enacted back in the '60s as part of the broader civil rights movement.

Which is ridiculous.

Conservatives have been waging war on voting rights for a long time, by which I mean forever, and this is the blow they were waiting to strike.

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Progressive America: Reflections on Obama's Second Inaugural

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm really not sure how and to what extent President Obama will follow through on the progressive commitments he made in his Second Inaugural yeterday, but there's no denying that his vision was clear and that his rhetoric was in the right place.

Of course he has often been criticized by those of us on the left for not being enough of a man of the left, enough of a leader for progressive change, and deservedly so. Too often he has been a leader, or follower, of of the Beltway center, the compromiser willing to sell out core progressive principles for the sake of getting a deal done, too often willing to give in to an opposition that itself has no interest in working with him in good faith.

And yet there is hope as he embarks now on his second term.

And it is possible, just possible, that he will do for the left what Reagan did for the right, that he will indeed be, or at least try to be, the transformative figure many of us know he can be.

This was a speech of substance, unlike Bush Jr.'s second, which promised a global crusade but had nothing to back it up. It was a speech about America, about what America is -- what it was meant to be, what it has become, what it can be. It was a speech that proudly articulated a liberal-progressive understanding of America, and of America's promise, in stark contrast to the conservative view that has, in large part thanks to Reagan, come to dominate, and corrupt, the American politico-historical narrative.

This is America, the president said, a liberal America, a progressive America. A great deal has been accomplished in the face of steadfast, regressive opposition, and a lot remains to be done, but, yes, there is hope, hope grounded in the progressive vision of the Founders and in the accomplishments that have defined a nation.

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Barack Obama's Second Inaugural Address

By Mustang Bobby

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

Including Stonewall — the birthplace of the gay-rights movement — along with Seneca Falls and Selma in a presidential inaugural address for the first time.

Do not tell me that the universe has not shifted.

Here is the full speech as prepared for delivery.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Mustang Bobby

Today is the federal holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday.


For me, growing up as a white kid in a middle-class suburb in the Midwest in the 1960′s, Dr. King's legacy would seem to have a minimum impact; after all, what he was fighting for didn’t affect me directly in any way. But my parents always taught me that anyone oppressed in our society was wrong, and that in some way it did affect me. This became much more apparent as I grew up and saw how the nation treated its black citizens; those grainy images on TV and in the paper of water-hoses turned on the Freedom Marchers in Alabama showed me how much hatred could be turned on people who were simply asking for their due in a country that promised it to them. And when I came out as a gay man, I became much more aware of it when I applied the same standards to society in their treatment of gays and lesbians.

Perhaps the greatest impression that Dr. King had on me was his unswerving dedication to non-violence in his pursuit of civil rights. He withstood taunts, provocations, and rank invasions of his privacy and his life at the hands of racists, hate-mongers, and the federal government, yet he never raised a hand in anger against anyone. He deplored the idea of an eye for an eye, and he knew that responding in kind would only set back the cause. I was also impressed that his spirituality and faith were his armor and his shield, not his weapon, and he never tried to force his religion on anyone else. The supreme irony was that he died at the hands of violence, much like his role model, Mahatma Gandhi.

Read more »

Economic forecast

By Mustang Bobby

Mitt Romney and the Republicans thought that if they campaigned on the weak economy and the high unemployment rate, they would win the election. And the odds favor them on that score; it's been a long time since a president got re-elected when the rate was over 7%.

They also thought that by putting Paul Ryan, the hunky guru of the Republican budget, on the ticket they could make the case for their vision of lower taxes for the rich -- who deserve it because they do so much for the rest of us -- and force the middle class to really get to work and earn all those entitlements: no free lunch for you people.

But it was not to be. All the liberal media wants to talk about are the slutty women and their lies about rape or the queers and their ideas of marriage equality so they can do icky things and get a tax deduction for their sweaty perversions. They're the ones who are making the GOP talk about turning a one-celled organism into a person; they're the ones who are making them write the party platform that makes a condom an assault weapon; they're the ones who are turning all of the attention away from how terrible things are in swing states like Florida, and even they are conspiring against them by doing better.

The Republicans have no one to blame but themselves (by which they mean Barack Obama). In 2010, they ran on a platform of jobs-jobs-jobs, and a lot of people voted for them because they thought, "Hey, they got us into this mess; maybe now they're serious about getting us out of it." But when they won, we found out that what they really wanted was to repeal health care, ban abortions, marginalize the gays, deport the immigrants (only the brown ones), and restrict voting to those who only deserved it.

And who can blame the media? What's more fun: listening to economists drone on about interest rates and sequestration, or going after civil rights of people? Hey, come on, that's a trick question. Talking about the economy is the stuff of C-SPAN at 2 a.m. Civil rights brings back images of demonstrations in the street, cops using fire hoses, and speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

This is America, the sex-obsessed land of Jersey Shore and the Kardashians; where you can turn even the most boring topic -- health-care reform -- into something for TMZ if you can get to the sex angle: contraception for single women Georgetown law school students, and gay marriage brings forth visions of cute guys prancing around in their Speedos.

No wonder the economy line isn't selling. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

NAACP supports same-sex marriage, but what about blacks generally?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

One of the questions following President Obama's recent announcement of his support for marriage equality was how, and not just if, it would impact his support among blacks, who, it is supposed, are less enthusiastic about gay rights than, say, whites. Basically, it was speculated, within the chattering class, that blacks, a core Obama constituency, were less likely to come out and vote for the president now and that depressed turnout among blacks would be a significant obstacle for Obama to overcome in November.

Though it is certainly true that some blacks, just like some whites, oppose same-sex marriage, it has seemed to me that black opposition has, relative to white opposition, been overhyped, at least in terms of possible electoral implications, reflecting the media's general inability to see "the black community" as anything other than a monolith with a single mind on all issues. (As well, opponents of same-sex marriage have been quick to highlight black opposition, the implication being that Obama's own people are against him, and the media have picked up on this racist spin without subjecting it to much scrutiny.)

As the Post reported last week, a solid majority of blacks were against same-sex marriage, at least according to a poll conducted last November: "58 percent of African Americans called same-sex marriage 'unacceptable'; far fewer, 35 percent said it was 'acceptable' in terms of their own values and morals." That language is rather vague, though. Saying that something is "unacceptable" to your "values and morals" doesn't mean being against it in political terms (that is, being against its legality). Still, it's probably fair to say that same-sex marriage hasn't had wide support among blacks (for any number of reasons -- cultural, religious, etc. -- that I won't speculate on here). A poll conducted after Obama's announcement showed solid support among blacks for gay marriage, 54 to 37 (greater support than among the public as a whole), but the sample size was small.

As a pastor named Madison T. Shockley II wrote in the L.A. Times after Obama's announcement -- and, yes, here we are getting into those reasons:

As important as the church's role is, this fact remains: A gay rights movement never really happened among African Americans. The fight for civil rights took up almost all of the justice oxygen. For a black person to be "out," he or she was most likely also out of the black community.

*****

My hope is that the civil rights movement (of which marriage equality is the latest manifestation) will not stall at the black church door and that the broader black community will evolve along with the president. There is no credible evidence that black voters will abandon Obama this fall. In fact, a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll indicates that black support for gay marriage has moved from 32% to 50% since 2009.

My sense is that Obama's announcement, and in particular his account of his views "evolving" over time, will be hugely influential among blacks, and specifically among those either against same-sex marriage or unsure / waffling on the issue / or with evolving views just like the president's. Taken as a whole, the black community was already evolving on the issue, just like whites and others, with support building significantly over the past several years for marriage equality, and now we're likely to see more and more blacks, along with the rest of the population, joining Obama on the right side of history. The historic culmination of Obama's evolution will likely only accelerate the evolution of the rest of America, black or otherwise.

And we saw this prominently yesterday when the NAACP, long one of the most important civil rights groups (generally considered just a "black" organization, though it's not), passed a resolution affirming its support for marriage equality, which it rightly deems a civil rights issue:

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People today released a resolution supporting marriage equality. At a meeting of the 103-year old civil rights group's board of directors, the organization voted to support marriage equality as a continuation of its historic commitment to equal protection under the law.

"The mission of the NAACP has always been to ensure the political, social and economic equality of all people," said Roslyn M. Brock, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP. "We have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law."

"Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP's support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people," said Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP.

The resolution itself reads:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the "political, educational, social and economic equality" of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

That last point isn't unimportant. What the NAACP is saying is that people are free, on religious grounds, to oppose same-sex marriage -- including those, needless to say, who attend black churches that are against it. Legally, though, there must be marriage equality. It's a civil right, a constitutional right, and therefore trumps religious belief, at least politically.

Now, this is elite opinion, to be sure. The NAACP doesn't speak for all blacks, and one would expect its leadership to be more progressive on this than much of the rest not just of the black community but of the public generally. Still, it is a clear sign of change, of evolution, and this resolution coming just days after the president's historic announcement is telling -- and speaks to my point above that Obama's announcement will accelerate the already growing support for same-sex marriage, particularly among blacks but throughout the population as a whole.

Needless to say, this issue -- not so much of marriage equality but of support for it / opposition to it among different demographic groups -- is much more complex than I've made it out here. (For one thing, it always bothers me to refer to anything as "white" or "black," as if these groups are monoliths.) My point, though, is that blacks are evolving on this issue just like whites are -- just like we all are. And already we are seeing the positive impacts of Obama's announcement.

In purely electoral terms, it has always seemed unlikely to me that blacks would give up on the president en masse just because of his position on one issue, particularly what is seen as a values issue at this time of economic difficulty, as if there aren't so many other reasons to prefer him to the alternative. Some will cite marriage equality and either vote against him or stay home, but I think the impact at the polls in November will turn out to be negligible.

Conservatives never tire of letting the past be their guide, no matter how awful

By Richard K. Barry 

Not Reince Priebus.

Do conservatives actually listen to themselves when they speak? I'm really not sure.

Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee Chairman, has been doing the circuit recently re-stating the GOP position that while they stand by dignity and respect for gay Americans, that doesn't change their opposition to same-sex marriage.

He went on to say, on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday, that:

People in this country, no matter straight or gay, deserve dignity and respect. However, that doesn't mean it carries on to marriage.

Then, as CNN reports, he upped the ante.

I don't think it's a matter of civil rights. I think it's just a matter of whether or not we're going to adhere to something that's been historical and religious and legal in this country for many, many years. I mean, marriage has to have a definition, and we just happen to believe it's between a man and woman.

I just don't know where to begin to challenge the absurd assumption that because something had been true historically, or as a matter of religion, or the law, that this makes it right. Do we even have to talk about slavery, or the way women have been treated over time. Oh, let's see: Women couldn't vote before 1920 in the U.S.; women couldn't work in certain occupations. I don't think I need to go near what various religions have done to women over the great span of civilization to make my point. And then we could talk about women and property rights if we had time. I'm sure we can engage in a similar exercises for all sorts of communities that have suffered discrimination.

Past practice is a very dangerous measure for determining what is right. I'm not denying that it ought to be part of the equation, but a direct translation from past to present is very dangerous.

And then, sounding even sillier, Priebus said this, as he "sought to contrast Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation, with bans on same-sex marriage," a comparison that naturally comes to mind:

I think there's a big difference between people that have been murdered and everything else that has come with Jim Crow, than marriage between a man and man and a woman and a woman.

So, according to Priebus, the degree of violence suffered by a given group in the past should be a measure determining whether or not the equal treatment they seek is a civil right?

These guys need to work harder than this to make their case. At this point, it's not even an interesting debate.

By the way, that's Aristotle up there, who once offered this gem:

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

Aristotle lived in a society with slavery, so it seemed natural to him that some people were, by nature, slaves. Slaves, he argued, did not have qualities required for leadership, which, as they were treated as slaves, is hardly surprising. But history, the law, and convention told him that this was right, that this is what nature intended. I'm pretty sure he was wrong about that.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

The Trayvon Martin murder: When being black is all it is

By Ramona

I don't think there is anyone who hasn't been affected in some way by Florida teenager Trayvon Martin's death in February at the hands of a neighborhood watchman who thought he saw a threat in the tall black teenager wearing a dark hooded jacket. The story is almost too terrible for words. 

I am white and my children are white. At the same time that I'm grieving with Trayvon's family, trying yet again to come to terms with the needless death of an innocent child, I recognize that I can't possibly grasp what it must feel like to know their precious son would likely still be alive if only he hadn't been black.

It wasn't the hoodie he was wearing that made him a target. Kids all across the country wear hoodies every day. It was the darkness of the skin underneath that hood that provided the catalyst for the kind of tragedy that is becoming as commonplace as it is unbearable.

We're in a place where the issue of racism opens up old wounds, forcing us to once again pull it out and examine it. I would say racism is back, but we all know it never really went away. We see it in the open hatred toward our first black president; in the collateral hatred toward his wife and daughters; in a generalized hatred toward people whose only difference is in the color of their skin.

I was a young mother during the last civil rights movement. It was impossible to explain the inexplicable to my children --t hat in our own country, this country that boasts about fairness and equality in story and song -- there are white people who hate black people so much they want to do them harm.

But the conversations I had with my kids couldn't even come close to the painful necessity every black parent had -- and still has -- in explaining the same thing to their black children. How can it be explained? It made no sense then and it makes no sense now.

I look at Sybrina Fulton's face as she weeps over this latest insult to her dead son -- the gleeful egging on of a story about his suspension from high school over an empty marijuana bag in his backpack; I hear the anguished rage in Tracy Martin's voice as he defends the reputation of his murdered son; and I am back to a time more than a half-century ago, when defenseless black citizens were humiliated and hurt and killed for no other reason than the color of their skin.

September, 1955. Murdered teenager Emmet Till's mother weeps at his open casket. Emmet Till was 14 years old when he was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by white men for the crime of whistling at a white woman. His face was battered beyond recognition, but Mamie Till-Mobley wanted the world to see what pure hatred could do to another human being -- and to society as a whole. "Civil rights activists used the murder of Emmett Till as a rallying cry for civil rights protest, transforming a heinous crime into a springboard for justice. The Montgomery Bus Boycott followed closely on the heels of the case. Indeed, Rosa Parks is quoted as saying, 'I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back. My legs and feet were not hurting, that is a stereotype. I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated.'"

We are heading toward a new era of ignorance and poverty, and those two ingredients become, historically, irrationally, the fuel for a dangerous firestorm. It's not a leap to suggest that the vital issue of civil rights needs to be addressed and overhauled before violence becomes the norm again.

The stink of prejudice is everywhere. Hispanics feel it, Muslims feel it, LGBTs feel it, anyone who is "different" feels it. We can't let hatred win. We owe some measure of attention to the memories of Trayvon and all other human beings who are punished, often to the point of losing their lives, for no other crime than being who they are.

This day in music - January 7, 1955: Marian Anderson becomes the first black singer to perform at the Met

By Richard K. Barry

While I will claim a decent working knowledge of a number of musical genres, Opera is not one them. I have been to a couple of performances. I am always in awe of the talent on display. It's probably a class thing. I didn't grow up with it, and can't relate to it, though at some level I still grasp the beauty of it.

Marian Anderson (1987-1993) was an African-American contralto and one of the most important singers of the twentieth century.

She was also a significant figure in the civil rights movement, having once famously performed at an open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after having been refused permission by the Daughters of the American Revolution to sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall.

Later, on January 7, 1955, she became the first black person to perform at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City. For the opera buffs among us, she performed as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera (The Masked Ball). In one reference, it was stated that she was "the first black singer as a regular company member." Perhaps someone could explain the difference.

Anderson was an important presence throughout the civil rights movement, having, for example, sung at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, which also featured Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Among honours awarded were the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

Below is a clip of the aforementioned performance at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Still powerful.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Martin Luther King Jr.

By Mustang Bobby

Today is the federal holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

For me, growing up as a white kid in a middle-class suburb in the Midwest in the 1960's, Dr. King's legacy would seem to have a minimum impact; after all, what he was fighting for didn't affect me directly in any way. But my parents always taught me that anyone oppressed in our society was wrong, and that in some way it did affect me. This became much more apparent as I grew up and saw how the nation treated its black citizens; those grainy images on TV and in the paper of water-hoses turned on the Freedom Marchers in Alabama showed me how much hatred could be turned on people who were simply asking for their due in a country that promised it to them. And when I came out as a gay man, I became much more aware of it when I applied the same standards to society in their treatment of gays and lesbians.

Perhaps the greatest impression that Dr. King had on me was his unswerving dedication to non-violence in his pursuit of civil rights. He withstood taunts, provocations, and rank invasions of his privacy and his life at the hands of racists, hate-mongers, and the federal government, yet he never raised a hand in anger against anyone. He deplored the idea of an eye for an eye, and he knew that responding in kind would only set back the cause. I was also impressed that his spirituality and faith were his armor and his shield, not his weapon, and he never tried to force his religion on anyone else. The supreme irony was that he died at the hands of violence, much like his role model, Mahatma Gandhi.

So here we now celebrate and honor the birthday of Dr. King two years into the presidency of the first African-American elected as president and a little more than a week after yet another reminder that the violence that took Dr. King from us 1968 is still with us. There's a bitter sense of irony to that; perhaps one that Dr. King himself might have appreciated were it not so tragic.

There's a question in the minds of a lot of people of how to celebrate a federal holiday for a civil rights leader.  Isn't there supposed to be a ritual or a ceremony we're supposed to perform to mark the occasion? But how do you signify in one day or in one action what Dr. King stood for, lived for, and died for? For me, it's having the memories of what it used to be like and seeing what it has become for all of us that don't take our civil rights for granted, which should be all of us, and being both grateful that we have come as far as we have and humbled to know how much further we still have to go.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Haley Barbour, Jim Crow Republican

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've described Mississippi Gov. Haley "Boss Hogg" Barbour as "a crazy blowhard" but "pretty much your perfect Republican."

And his history of racism (and cozying up to racism) has been well-documented -- for example, the fact that he has a Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis in his office, not to mention the fact that he has been involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a segregationist group.

In many ways, Barbour is a throwback to the Jim Crow Deep South, and so it hardly comes a surprise that he thought the Old South of racism and segregation wasn't so bad:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he doesn't remember the Civil Rights era being "that bad," citing his attendance at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally nearly 50 years ago.

"I just don't remember it as being that bad," Barbour (R), 63, told the conservative Weekly Standard, which did a lengthy profile on the governor. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white."

Yes, I'm sure Barbour just loved MLK. TPM's Eric Kleefeld has more:

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

So there wasn't the Klan, but that's only because there was the Klan-lite, Citizens Councils that fought for the same things:

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

A Barbour spokesman claims that the governor isn't a racist, but the evidence keeps piling up. At the very least, he seems to have, and to have had, no problem with racism, including the organized racism of these councils.

As Matthew Yglesias points out, after all, the council in Yazoo City was actually a white supremacist group, not some benign anti-KKK group. Are we to believe that Barbour doesn't know this? Please.

Haley Barbour is just your basic Jim Crow Republican.

**********

Earlier this year, I happily endorsed Barbour for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. I stand by that in light of these new revelations.

He's pretty much the perfect Republican nominee, more perfect than Palin, more perfect than Huckabee. He's pretty much the incarnation of what it means to be a Republican. And so the Republicans would be stupid not to hand him the nomination should he decide to run.

As Jonathan Chait has written, "There are people who think that the solution to the GOP's image problem is to nominate a sleazy, corpulent, cigar-chomping lobbyist from the Deep South? Is Boss Hogg unavailable?"

You certainly don't need Boss Hogg when you've got the real thing.

Haley Barbour '12!
Because you can't be too Republican.

No more excuses

By Edward Copeland

It's been quite awhile since I've written anything here. My movie blog and my health has kept me busy and I haven't felt particularly inspired on the political front because I find it all too depressing. However, after reading a Salon blog post shared on Twitter by Roger Ebert yesterday, posting it on Facebook, where a friend of mine shared it and another friend shared it from him and I read some of the absolutely ridiculous comments, I felt I had to write about this.

I'm not going to mention candidates by name or parties in this post. For its purposes, they really are irrelevant. I'm just tired of people trying to make excuses for people's hate. The blog post in question dealt with one African-American woman's reaction to seeing a bumper sticker on a car while she was in a drive-thru lane that read THIS COUNTRY WAS BUILT BY WHITE MEN WITH GUNS. She goes on, with illustrations to recount all of the ugly, racism that has surfaced since 2008. Whenever she mentioned to friends her concerns for where this country was heading, she often was told to stop being so sensitive, as if she could forget that she lived through the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and that Emmett Till's mother was her fifth-grade teacher.

It sounded so similar to what I would always hear growing up when I would complain about relatives who were being racist or saying racist things. "Oh, they grew up in a different time." It was a sorry excuse then and if it ever were valid, the expiration date has long since passed. It reminded me of the the third season of The Sopranos when Tony went nuts because Meadow was dating an African American and Carmela trotted out that excuse about a different time and place to which Meadow responded quite rightly, "New Jersey? Third millennium?"

The very first comment on the Facebook thread accused it of being "extreme wackadoodleness from the halfwit left" and that the column and photos were all concocted lies made to make people think there was rampant racism as some sort of electoral gambit. She paid such close attention to the post she referred to the "inane author" as a he when the writer was a she. Another commenter compared it to high school cliques and by even bringing up the growing hate "in order to rally your own troops is simply widening the chasm a little further." Don't talk about it and it won't exist, I guess is his point. This isn't about rallying troops. This is about decency.

Right now, we have a U.S. House candidate who dresses as a Nazi for re-enactments, excusing it because he says it was impressive that a country as relatively small as Germany could conquer as much as it did. A candidate for governor of New York said that homosexuality is not an equally valid lifestyle and children should be taught that families should be a husband and wife raising children, despite the fact that while married to one woman, he had a daughter with another at the same time. What values does that teach?

There is no rational excuse for racism or anti-Semitism or gay bashing or any other form of hate based on race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. Those who place those categories only into political context instead of basic human decency are the ones with the problem. Ignorance is ignorance. No more excuses for it shall be allowed. Everyone with a brain knows better and everyone who sees or hears an example of it and doesn't confront it and call the perpetrator on their ignorance and stupidity may as well be as guilty as the moron themselves. It's time to bring back good old-fashioned shame and ostracism.

Big Brother's keeper

By Capt. Fogg

Tiger Woods named his Yacht "Privacy." It's obvious why he was seeking it, but we assume incorrectly that we have any right to privacy in these days of The Patriot Act and the mass marketing of fear.

Monitoring our phone calls, reading our e-mails -- that's old hat. Forcing us to produce birth certificates and citizenship papers for any cop who decides your car is weaving even if your ancestors have lived in Arizona for 15,000 years -- coming soon to a Confederate state near you.

But wait, there's more.

Law Enforcement agencies are now adding vans equipped with side scan x-ray units that can inspect the contents of your car as well as the contents of your jockey shorts if you're walking down the sidewalk. Probable cause, my ass -- and yours.

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go according to Time magazine. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the one Fox insists is so Liberaliberaliberal -- tells us we don't have a right to privacy if our cars are parked in our driveways. Search warrant? Don't make me laugh; they don't have to show you no stinking search warrant, at least not in the nine Western states under its jurisdiction, not to install the device or to use it to see who you visit or even how fast you drive . We have no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking our movements even if we pay cash at the gas station and at toll booths and don't use a cell phone. We're fools if we do.

Sound like a libertarian, don't I? I'm not and I'm not because I am not blaming this on a straw man government, I'm blaming it on you. I'm blaming it on us. We voted for the people who are doing this, we supported the Patriot act, we wallow in the fear mongering the retailing of idiot rage that "justified" it. We fall for their distractions, their distortions and we bark and growl like Pavlov's dogs. When they push our buttons, we push their buttons on the voting machines.

Sure, the Ninth Circuit is liberaliberaliberal, when they insist you can't use your religious beliefs to stop people from marrying, but they're not are they? They're not when they argue that your home is their castle as is your car, your mailbox and your telephone, and by pretending we're conservative we vote for the people who appoint them to take our freedom and make us thank them for their trouble.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

It's the "Buts" that get you.

By Mustang Bobby.

I've heard it all my life: "I'm all for equal rights (or freedom of speech, or freedom of religion), but...." That's followed by a statement that proves the speaker really is in favor of no such thing. For example, "I'm all for equal rights, but the coloreds really should stick to their own schools and neighborhoods." Or, "I'm all for freedom of speech, but burning the flag is anti-American and should be banned." Or, "I'm all for freedom of religion, but Islam isn't one."

That kind of mindset has been vocalized a lot in the last few years, and it's been brought to a head by the recent discussion -- if you can call it that -- about the plans of a group of citizens in New York to build an Islamic community center in an abandoned coat outlet within a couple of blocks of the site of the World Trade Center. It has stirred up a whole lot of passion from a wide range of people: those who are using it to exploit the fear and paranoia of Americans who are uninformed about the facts of the case ("Al-qaeda is building a mosque on Ground Zero!") or people who are exploiting it for political gain by playing off those who are misinformed, to those who are defending the basic premise that America's foundation rests on the fundamental rights of all the people to exercise all of their rights as enumerated by the Constitution of the United States in compliance with the laws.

There's not a lot of middle ground being sought, but in a case like this, it's hard to see that there is one. After all, rights are binary: you either have them or you don't. There is freedom of religion and the freedom from state interference in the lawful exercise of it, or there is not. You cannot come in and decide one religion is better than the other -- at least not on secular grounds -- nor qualify it based on the sensitivity or lack thereof of the people involved. (Ross Douthat tries to make the case for understanding both sides of the argument in his New York Times column today and basically says that in America today, there's always room for bigots.)

For a very long time a lot of people in this country; the Chinese, Italians, Irish, African-Americans, Japanese, Hispanics, Catholics, Jews, women, gays and lesbians, even the disabled, have had to endure the "But" clause in their basic rights. They have been told by ruling class -- usually by the white straight patriarchs -- such things as "the time isn't right," or "there's a lot of raw feelings" about some recent event, and that granting them the same rights as everyone else would "tear at the fabric of society" or even "destroy America as we know it." And these same people have exploited the unknown and the unfamiliar for their own political or financial gain without really caring whether or not they do more damage to the rights of their fellow citizens by their actions.

If there's anything we should learn from this most recent disgraceful row over the basic rights of Americans, including as well the ruling in California about equal protection under the law for citizens of California to marry those who they love, is that those who would qualify the rights and the freedoms of all citizens based on ignorance and cynicism can get their "Buts" out of here.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Virginia Foxx

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We all know Foxx is crazy. Apparently, she's also incredibly stupid. Consider a couple of things she said yesterday:

-- "Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country."

Maybe, if you go all the way back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt. More recently, the GOP is the party of global warming denialism and opposition to environmental legislation generally.

-- "Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle. They love to engage in revisionist history."

If it's revisionist history you want, you'll get it whenever Foxx opens her mouth. She's certainly old enough to remember that it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who was largely (but not solely) responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, Republicans were broadly against civil rights, and in fact it was to a great extent their opposition to civil rights that flipped the South from the Democrats, who had long held it, ushering in a new regional alignment in American politics and paving the way for Republican electoral success over the next few decades, pretty much up to the present. It was only in 2008, with a hugely popular presidential candidate, that the Democrats were able to break through in parts of the South -- notably Virginia and North Carolina -- that were for the most part solidly Republican. Even with Obama, though, the South remains a Republican bastion.

Did some Republicans support civil rights in the '60s? Of course. A lot of them did -- and a lot from parts of the country that are now solidly Democratic, now that the GOP has moved to far to the right. But it's crazy to think that they did it on their own, or that they were largely responsible for it, or that Democrats not only had nothing to do with it but were actively against it. That last one is insulting, not just to President Johnson but to the many Democrats who were on the front lines of the struggle, and to those who stood with their president to change America for the better.

But, then, this is Virginia Foxx we're talking about. If she's not a blatant liar, she's insane.

Nothing too shameful

By Capt. Fogg

There are a lot of Facebook and web pages and blogs from all kinds of people and organizations and it's nothing all that unusual to find something racist, something disturbing something shameful in all the vastness: the enormity amongst the enormousness, for those of you who still make the distinction. I'm quite old enough to remember segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws and even the outrageous Coon Chicken Inn, something that would shock most of us today, and I remember who supported the civil rights we now take for granted and who opposed it.

We have come a long way, or at least most of us have, otherwise there would be more widespread laughter at the audacity of the RNC Facebook page now showing off Susan B. Anthony and Abe Lincoln as GOP heroes. A few years back they were trying to sell Martin Luther King as a Republican hero and some continue to portray Jesus as a Conservative.

Neither audacious or shameful adequately covers posting racist pictures a short time ago, including this one of the President of the United States eating fried chicken and demanding repeal of Love Vs. Virginia that in 1967 locked the intrusive government and its God fearing Southern Conservative bigots out of deciding which races could marry which. It was only a few years after they were forced to stop telling us where we could eat or sleep or live or ride or swim or picnic or find a bathroom or go to school, based on our race. Obviously some Republicans haven't forgiven us for it. Evidently the GOP has done little to excommunicate or even to censure such people. Indeed many of the Republicans I know think such things are funny.

It remained up on the RNC site until those pesky and humorless liberals complained. Disgusting, but typical, and all the sniping from the snarky, snickering anonymous trolls won't change that fact.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Civil rights, back on the agenda

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I tweeted on this last night, but I thought I'd link here to the NYT story:

Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census.

As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly.

It's about time. Anyone who thinks that discrimination against minority and other disadvantaged groups is a thing of the past is living in a dreamworld of delusion. And anyone who thinks -- as Bush and his underlings did -- that there's no need to enforce civil rights is essentially sanctioning bigotry.

Conservatives talk up equal rights for all, hence in part their opposition to "special" rights for some, but they don't believe in such fairness anymore than they believe in universal health insurance. Yes, it would be nice if there were no such thing as discrimination, and no need for a Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, but the reality is still quite different than the dream.

And, in opposing the enforcement of civil rights, conservatives are disregarding the plight of countless Americans who are still treated unfairly simply because of the colour of their skin or because of some other disenfranchising characteristic -- and not because they genuinely believe in equality, either in dream or reality, but because of their own partisan, ideological preferences, not to mention their own personal advantages.