Racism

There is still a lot of speculating going on, but the most reasonable sounding thing I have heard so far is this:

His cousin said Maj Hasan had been resisting such a deployment.

"He hired a military attorney to try to have the issue resolved, pay back the government, to get out of the military. He was at the end of trying everything," Nader Hasan told Fox News.

He also said that Nidal Malik Hasan had been battling racial harassment because of his "Middle Eastern ethnicity".

(emphasis added)

Even on The Today Show they were interviewing people who know Maj. Hasan and talked about how much he heard things like “sand nigger” or “terrorist” yelled at him.

While the right is trying to paint Hasan as some Islamic terrorist, just look at the guy. He was American born and just spent countless years going through school to become a Psychiatrist, MD. This wasn’t a man planning on doing something like this, this was a man who snapped.

So our question now is how to fix our relationship with Muslims. The military really needs to take a long, hard inner look at itself and come up with a way to limit incidents like this.

And the fix isn’t limited to the military alone – it also must include society. For example, look at this:

Here we have a guy who went on a rampage, and so far the one of the leading reasons is that he was constantly harassed about his ethnicity and religious beliefs, and then you add in a big voice of the right making wild claims like this. This isn’t a solution – it’s asking for more of the same.

Luckily Maj. Hasan is still alive. Now maybe we can get a better idea of what was going through his mind when he decided this was the route to take. Hopefully we can use that as a teaching moment also and try to instill a better sense of tolerance in both our military and society as a whole.

This could be a make or break moment for President Obama. How he takes the lead on this will really define him not only as our President, but also as a man. We can’t afford any cover-up of what really happened. We need full transparency here and for our Commander in Chief to insure the changes needed to help prevent future events like this from happening. The coming weeks and months should prove to be rather interesting as this story continues to unravel.

It’s always a happy day when you see some racist sack of crap relinquish his power:

A Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to marry a couple because the bride was white and groom was black resigned Tuesday.

Keith Bardwell, who is white, quit the post with a one-sentence statement to Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne and no explanation of his decision: "I do hereby resign the office of Justice of the Peace for the Eighth Ward of Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, effective November 3, 2009.

Don’t worry Mr. Bardwell, I’m sure FOX News is working on a job offer for you.

There has been a lot of talk about Justin Barrett, a police officer with Boston. He made fame yesterday when it was exposed that he wrote a letter to the media and referred to Henry Gates as a “banana eating jungle monkey'”. if you missed it, here’s the run down:

The law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Officer Justin Barrett referred to the black scholar as a " jungle monkey" in the letter, written in reaction to media coverage of Gates's arrest July 16.

Barrett, a 36-year-old who has been on the job for two years, was stripped of his gun and badge yesterday and faces a termination hearing in the next week, said police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll. He has no previous disciplinary record, she said.

Barrett will be represented by the police union in his hearing, as he should be. This gets into a very iffy area of our first amendment rights. One way he may have stripped himself of that protection though is by identifying himself as a police officer in his “anonymous” email.

But there is something more interesting here. In Barrett’s letter he made a statement that should be a warning sign that a person does not understand the very fundamental’s of our nation’s laws:

According to Officer Barrett a person who is a suspect has no rights. This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. You can be caught red handing raping and killing a child, and under our laws you do still have rights. Its in our Constitution, something Officer Barrett has sworn to uphold more than once – as a police officer and as a member of the armed forces. For a police officer to even suggest such a thing goes beyond the pale.

So if they determine that Officer Barrett’s racial rampage is considered protected under the first amendment, then perhaps they need to look at this statement and ask him about rights. How could he be protected by a very right that he is trying to state American Citizens don’t have, just because the police think they might be suspicious?

A day camp in Philadelphia, composed mostly of black kids decides to cool off on a hot summer day at a swimming pool. The pool is owned by a private club that has open membership and the group did pay for it. So how were these kids received?

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

Racism – a live and well in the U.S. And the owners of the club are even being brutally honest about it:

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

I first read this story while doing my daily perusing of vile right wing sites last night. I noticed it on Townhall and then one comment really stuck out at me:

I just love the old “private property” defense. So I was thinking of how the city could go after this racist bunch. Considering how much the right is also touting “sovereignty”, I may have come up with a plan. Let the sovereign city that supplies this club their electric and water cut them off. Tell them that the use of their utilities could change the “complexion” of their services. After that we can see how long this private club continues to exist.

And wow are these files getting big. Our latest is SC GOP activist Rusty DePass, who decided say that an escaped gorilla was an ancestor of Michelle Obama’s:

DePass did apologize, but that doesn’t excuse the hidden racism in this guy. To be able to make a knee jerk “joke” like this is telling of the person’s true feelings.

If the Republican Party wants to break away from being the party of “old white guys” then they need to forcefully and very publically denounce comments like this. Instead they choose the path of ignore, which of course leads people to believe its acceptance. And comments like this are not acceptable by any mainstream standard today.

Loan officers for Wells Fargo are spilling the beans on the bank’s subprime practice and now Baltimore has filed a federal lawsuit against the banking giant:

As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”

(emphasis added)

So even if they qualified for a standard, prime loan they were “pushed” into subprime loans. This really hurts the right wing claim that people just went out and took these loans, even if they couldn’t afford them. I really hope the Obama administration is watching this and puts the breaks on anymore taxpayer dollars going to Wells Fargo.

TPM has dug up a CBS report from 1986 when Jeff Sessions, the now ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was rejected by the Senate for a court appointment over his racial views.

How’s that for the Republicans trying to “reach out”.

Oh you got to love the racist contributors at Townhall, the number one neo-con source on the internets. Chris Kelly over at HuffPo picked up on some of their latest slime:

Take Michelle Obama...please. Every time I turn around, there she is on a magazine cover. Now, normally, like the Mafia, I lay off the spouses, but inasmuch as this particular spouse attended the same racist church as her hubby for 20 years, I'll make an exception in her case. After all, in spite of the fact that affirmative action got her an Ivy League degree and a $7,000-a-week salary and, moreover, has sent billions of dollars for no particularly good reason to Africa, she insists this is a mean country. The burning question in my circle is: if the First Family gets a female dog, will she be the First Bitch or will she have to settle for second place?

This sounds so much like the old “jokes” we used to hear about Chelsea Clinton. I guess they are starting with Michelle now, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see the kids start getting this crap from the racist right.

Of course the article Kelly quotes doesn’t stop there:

Naturally, the left-wing media is now trying to convince us that this James Brown-look-alike has all the allure, glamour and fashion sense of Jackie Kennedy.

Now could you imagine if some major left wing media site called Laura Bush some Joker look alike?

It’s much better than the apology by the so called editor of the NY Post, but I really think it may be too little to late. Of course it also comes the day after Murdoch’s company saw their stocks drop 4%. Interesting timing there.

A sign of the times. Three men are now under federal indictment for seeking out black people to beat up following Obama’s victory. This was the kind of thing we knew would happen, especially given the tone of the Wasilla-billy Sarah Palin on the campaign trail.

FOX let people text in messages to appear on their ticker New Year’s Eve. If the message was approved by their “moderators”, then it would appear on live, national teevee. WooHoo. So what kind of messages did they approve? This kind:

A new year and a new low for Rupert and his merry pact of racist assholes.

 It looks like Chip Saltsman’s little CD gift is paying off:

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman, with a few questioning whether the national media and his opponents are piling on.

“When I heard about the story I had to figure out what was going on for myself,” said Mark Ellis, the chairman of the Maine Republican Party. “When I found out what this was about I had to ask, ‘boy, what’s the big deal here?’ because there wasn’t any.”

Alabama Republican committeeman Paul Reynolds said the fact the Saltsman sent him a CD with the song on it “didn’t bother me one bit.” {[}]lt;/p>

This is priceless coming from this bunch. Just think way back to September. If someone questioned Sarah Palin’s ability to govern they were called sexist by the Republicans, yet this is appropriate? I believe the Republican party is securing their status as the minority party of the United States. Perhaps they could just join another club that wears these white sheets and hoods.

Remember all the outrage over state workers breaching Joe the Plumber’s records in Ohio? The media, along with the right wing nuts went crazy over it. You would have thought someone beat the hell out of him.

Well here is a story where someone did get the hell beat out of them, and the media hasn’t said shit about it:

A 32-year-old Shreveport man is now recovering at home after he says he was badly beaten at a west Shreveport gas station for wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt.

Kaylon Johnson says he now has a broken nose and eye socket after the brutal attack that he says was racially motivated and brought on by the t-shirt. "They were screaming "f" Obama, f***. Obama something about a n**** president, basically you know I was hit."

This all happened Saturday night around 11:30 at the Citgo on Industrial Drive off of I-20.  He says he had already pumped gas and was walking out of the store with a drink when he was attacked. "Seem like some red necks, they're pretty big guys and they were blasting music or whatever, mean by the time I turned around and looked at him they were on me." Johnson says all he remembers after that was hitting his car door.

{[}]lt;p>The story says that the FBI is now investigating the case also and some 25 year old from Texas was arrested.

This should be carried by every news outlet to show those racists out there that law enforcement is not going to play around on this garbage. It’s time to make examples out of some of these people.

Nothing celebrates the season like a burning cross:

Aravosis has the details on this decoration of hate and fear being sold by the religious-right/extremists American Family Association.

Finally we have someone to make an example of. I am sure there will be more down the road:

Alie Kamara, a black Staten Island teenager, watched the results of the Nov. 4 election at a friend’s house. Soon after Barack Obama was declared the winner, he walked home alone to his house in the Stapleton neighborhood.

On the way, as he recounted on Saturday, a dark car pulled up nearby. Two men jumped out and started to chase him. Two others followed shortly afterward.

“They said ‘Obama!’ ” Alie, 17, told reporters in the driveway of his house on Pine Place, recalling that the men were carrying bats. When the men caught up with him they beat him on the leg and head, he said. “I was bleeding by my head.”

Unlike Ashley “B carver” Todd, two men have now been arrested in connection with this assault and are facing several charges, including federal hate-crime assault. I think the saddest part of this story is the fact that the victim wasn’t even old enough to vote. This is the sickness that is racism.