Huffington Post: Republican presidential contenders Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have lined up behind a new pledge focused on social issues put forth by Bob Vander Plaats, a former candidate for governor who now reigns as a conservative kingmaker in the Hawkeye State. [ READ MORE ]
Republican Candidates Court ‘Crackpot‘ Constituency; Klansman David Duke To Explore 2012 Bid
Current TV: Michele Bachmann signed a conservative Iowa group’s “Family Leader” pledge, but did she read the part that implies children born into slavery had some advantages over children born after the election of Barack Obama? Or does she actually agree with that? Keith discusses her latest adventure in ridiculous thinking with Faiz Shakir of the Center for American Progress.
Does Bachmann Believe Slavery Had Advantages?
Bradlee Dean Rants: Michele Bachmann-Linked Preacher’s Bigoted Tirades
MMFA: Does Rupert Murdoch now know the panic Richard Nixon must have felt when the Washington Post broke the story in 1972 that a $25,000 cashier’s check earmarked for the Nixon campaign wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar. Or when it was revealed that Nixon’s Oval Office had a taping system that recorded all his conversations. Or when John Dean told investigators he had discussed the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon three dozen times? [ READ MORE ]
Media Matters’ Hogue On MSNBC News Live: We Need To Start Asking “Whether American Citizens Have Been Spied On As Well”
2.Mike Huckabee (The Man Who Wished Obama Got Shot) Likens Obama Economic Policies To Dropping “A Lit Match” Into “A Can Of Gasoline.“
3. Osama Bin O’Reilly Ignores Millions Of Jobs Created To Call Stimulus “Two And A Half Years Of Failure“
4. Mr. Syphilis Sean Hannity To Sharron Angle: “Did Harry Reid Steal This Election?” “I Wanted Him Beaten So Bad“
The Republican party rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. As part of its Southern strategy, the G.O.P aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks. For Republicans, there is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry — It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough. Nevertheless, there is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
The Howls of a Fading Species
[ By: Bob Herbert ] One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.
Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.
It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.
The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.
Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?
We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”
Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.
Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.
The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?
It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.
About The Author: BOB HERBERT — joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends.
Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on “The Today Show” and “NBC Nightly News.” He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board.
In 1990, Mr. Herbert was a founding panelist of “Sunday Edition,” a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of Hotline, a weekly issues program on New York public television.
He began his career as a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., in 1970. He became its night city editor in 1973.
Mr. Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing. He was chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury for spot news reporting in 1993.
Born in Brooklyn on March 7, 1945, Mr. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side.
The seedy underbelly of Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire?
Media Matters: He’s called former Vice President Al Gore an “evil enabler” for speaking at Netroots Nation — an annual conference that draws thousands of progressive blog enthusiasts. He’s likened Markos Moulitsas, founder of the progressive blog powerhouse Daily Kos, to white supremacist David Duke. He’s even accused The Huffington Post of using the “same exact tactics that the Nazis used.” To say that Fox News golden boy Bill O’Reilly is no fan of progressive blogs is an understatement akin to claiming the Hatfields and McCoys were mildly displeased with each other. [ READ MORE ]
White Male Republican Sociopaths Sound-Off
White “Nationalist” Pat Buchanan claims Sotomayor has a “long record… of basically believing that it is OK to discriminate against white males”
Rush Limbaugh: Obama is “seizing private sector property” and “giving it to political contributors”
Fox News Distorts Obama Again, Promotes “Another Apology Tour” — Fox News’ Jon Scott asked if “the president’s upcoming trip [to Europe and the Middle East will] be what conservatives might call another apology tour,” and both Scott and co-host Jane Skinner aired cropped clips of President Obama’s remarks from an April 3 speech in France to falsely suggest that Obama only criticized the United States. [ READ MORE ]
Klan group ordered to pay $2.5 million. A jury on Friday ordered Imperial Klans of America grand wizard Ron Edwards and two former lieutenants to pay 19-year-old Jordan Gruver $1.5 million for lost wages and medical expenses and Edwards to pay $1 million in punitive damages.
AP: BRANDENBURG, Ky. – A Kentucky-based Ku Klux Klan group was ordered on Friday to pay $2.5 million in damages in a judgment that civil rights attorneys hope will bankrupt the chapter.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the nation’s second-largest Klan outfit on behalf of a Latino teen severely beaten in 2006 by two Klan members. The Klansmen were convicted and served two years in prison.
A jury on Friday ordered Imperial Klans of America grand wizard Ron Edwards and two former lieutenants to pay 19-year-old Jordan Gruver $1.5 million for lost wages and medical expenses and Edwards to pay $1 million in punitive damages.
“I’m overwhelmed. I’m victorious,” Gruver said. “And, I’m also sad. I’m sad because those guys are still going to be the same way that they were. That will never change.”
Morris Dees, the lead attorney for the center, said after the verdict he plans to seize Edwards’ property in Dawson Springs that serves as Klan headquarters along with any other assets that can be found. It wasn’t clear what the property is worth.
Click PICS To Enlarge
THE VICTIM Jordan Gruver
KKK Criminal Andrew Watkins
KKK Criminal Jarred Hensley
Imperial Klans T-Shirt
The GRAND WIZARD — KKK Criminal Ron Edwards
Earlier, in his closing statement, Dees told jurors that a substantial financial award would stop the Kentucky-based group in its tracks.
“It’s all about the money. It’s all about the money,” said Morris Dees. “If you stop the money, you’ll cut the organization off.”
The heavily tattooed Edwards plans to appeal the verdict. Despite the judgment, Edwards said the KKK will remain active.
“We’re not going away,” Edwards said.
Dees had argued during the civil trial that Edwards’ group incited violence against minorities with racist speeches and “hate metal,” leading to the attack on Gruver. Edwards, who represented himself during the trial, denied the charge and said his group’s not generally violent.
The case was similar to nearly a dozen others brought by the center against hate groups. A similar lawsuit bankrupted the white supremacist group Aryan Nations in Idaho in 1999.
The trial centered on a beating Gruver suffered at the hands of former Klan lieutenants Jarred Hensley and Andrew Watkins. Gruver suffered a broken jaw, bruised ribs and permanent nerve damage to his left arm.
The jury ordered Edwards to pay 20 percent of the compensatory damages, while splitting the remaining 80 percent evenly between Hensley and Watkins. The jury laid the $1 million in punitive damages solely on Edwards. Hensley, who had also represented himself, left the courthouse without commenting.
Watkins reached a confidential settlement with Gruver before the trial that will account for his share of Friday’s judgment.
Jurors deliberated for nearly six-and-a-half hours after a three-day trial at the Meade County Courthouse. As Meade Circuit Judge Bruce Butler read the verdicts, several skinheads in the courtroom shook their heads and looked down.
The judgment against Edwards and Hensley is active for 15 years, giving Gruver and the center time to pursue assets, Dees said.
“No matter what he gets, we’ll get a piece of it,” Dees said.
Gruver, who testified earlier Friday about having nightmares and the extent of his injuries, celebrated the verdict by hugging his mother, Cindy. He then joined his family and left the courthouse under heavy security into a cold rain.
From Publishers Weekly: Village Voice correspondent Ridgeway ( Powering Civilization ) traces the evolution of the “racialist right” in American politics up to George Bush’s bid for the presidency, which, the author asserts, had the issue of race at its very foundation. With startling detail, this volume sets forth the violent histories of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 by six former Confederate soldiers; the John Birch Society, an anti-civil rights group masquerading as an anti-Communist force; and the Posse Comitatus, whose members gather in posses to “protect” the white race from the scourge of Jews, blacks and other minorities.
Examining their influence on the political climate of the U.S., Ridgeway profiles such leaders as David Dukes, the former head of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana who ran for the Senate in 1990. Readers may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information this fascinating book imparts, and less than smooth transitions give the work a scattered feeling. As a result, Ridgeway’s conclusions–including the obvious one that with the Cold War over, race will increasingly define “the social contours of society“–are more general than incisive.
From Library Journal: Ridgeway has written a series of compelling reports in the Village Voice on the extreme right in contemporary America, and on the impact of radical racist and anti-Semitic groups on mainstream politics and culture.
The articles are here rewritten to present a comprehensive view of racist politics in the United States (with some reference to Western European politics).
However, in the book Ridgeway relies on purple prose, unsubstantiated analysis, and superficial background, so the vivid details and acute perspective of the original reports are obscured.
One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
