Georgia congressman: Wilson's outburst 'carefully calculated'

By GottaLaff

Hey, come on, what do the Sons of Confederate Veterans and keeping the Confederate flag up have to do with racism? Why would a disdainful outburst at a joint Congressional session aimed at the first black president suggest prejudice? Race has absolutely nothing to do with it! That's just silly librul paranoia!

Rep. Hank Johnson, like so many of us, must be mistaken:

Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Monday that he doesn't think that most of Obama's opponents are motivated by racism, but that he believes Wilson's comments "winked at a racist element" and that there is a small but "racially motivated fringe" among those who disapprove of the president and his policies.

"Wilson is a canny politician," Johnson said. "His outburst was a carefully calculated appeal to a particular constituency who question the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency. The symbolism of his act, which violated the rules of the House and attacked the dignity of the president's office, emboldened and validated those who believe that President Obama, despite having been lawfully elected, is an illegitimate occupant of the White House."

Johnson said that some feel "resentment that the president of the United States is a black man" and that the "risk of violence is real." He said he believes some of the angry protests during town hall meetings over the summer were also motivated by racism and warned that if that element of some opposition is ignored, it will "fester, grow and come back to haunt us in ways we haven't seen in decades."

Pfft. What a Commie fanatic biased alarmist. Next thing you know he'll start wildly speculating about the KKK's impending resurgence:

"I guess we'll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside, intimidating people," Johnson said on September 15. "That's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked."

Just ignore him.

VIDEO: Who's that Black Man in my White House

By GottaLaff

Powerful stuff. The video is courtesy of Spadecaller:

Spadecaller's poem characterizes a new and frightening voice of the Republican Party.

Since the election of our first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, the Republican party has gravitated to the fringes of the partys extreme. A shocking 58 percent of Republicans polled doubt Barack Obama is an American born citizen. Since Obamaa entry into the White House there has been a rise of hate crimes, hate speech from mainstream politicians, threats of secession by state officials, open threats of revolution, and numerous threats against the Presidents life.

The young presidency has encountered reactionary forces far beyond anything yet experience in American history. In contrast to the astounding fact that a black man succeeded in garnering the support of Americas voting majority, racial tensions have risen to a critical mass and the opposition party is willingly supporting the ideologies traditionally associated with the KKK and White Supremacists.

Former GOP lawmaker, KKK member David Duke arrested in Prague

By GottaLaff

It kkkouldn't happen to a kkkreepier ggguy:

[F]ormer Republican state lawmaker, and KKK leader, David Duke, was arrested in Prague for denying the Holocaust. It's a crime punishable by three years in prison. [...] [I]t's understandable why the Czech Republic would have laws against Holocaust denial. Though I am waiting for the religious right to now come to the rescue of their poor soulmate. After all, he's a bigot being persecuted under hate speech laws. And you know how the religious right is all up in arms over European hate speech laws. Perhaps some intrepid reporter should ask the Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council how they feel about David Duke's arrest under hate speech laws.

I'm having fantasies about the same thing happening to BushCo. Here are few more details:

The former leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), David Duke, arrested Friday afternoon in Prague, was released in the night and will be forced to leave the country during the day of Saturday, police said. [...]

David Duke, 59, was charged with supporting a movement to suppress human rights and fundamental freedoms. After his arrest in the restaurant ‘Black Eagle’ in the old Prague, he was interrogated for several hours.

Quoted Saturday by the agency CTK, the Czech lawyer of the former leader of the KKK, Klara Samkova, said she would make a complaint against the police in Prague.

H/t: I forget which Commenter, but thank you!

Sarah Palin's new disaster

By GottaLaff

I've put up a few revelatory posts about Sarah Palin's horrendous pick for Alaska attorney general, Wayne Anthony Ross. [Please follow those links if you haven't been following the story.] Well, today, Mark Karlin over at BuzzFlash e-mailed me this little Max Blumenthal gem of a follow-up. Sparky McBackfire may dump W.A.R. to save her own skin:

According to two sources close to the confirmation hearings, Palin may ask Ross to withdraw before his appointment comes to a vote. [...]

But as pro-Palin forces attempted to push back against Ross’s critics, dozens of op-eds Ross authored during the 1980s and 1990s surfaced as key exhibits in the case against his confirmation. Among them is a 1993 piece entitled, “KKK ‘art’ project gets ‘A’ for courage,” in which Ross cheered on a local college student who had offended an African-American classmate by creating a statue of a Klansman with a cross in one hand and a flag in the other. “It might have been fun to see [the African-American student] try to remove the display,” Ross wrote. “Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”

During the early 1980s, while Anchorage residents grappled over renaming the city’s 15th Street as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and state legislators mulled establishing a state holiday honoring the assassinated civil-rights leader, Ross wrote several manifestoes attacking King as a communist subversive, according to University of Alaska-Anchorage music professor and local progressive activist Phil Munger. Munger also told me Ross has routinely appeared at public events beside his friend, Don Tanner, a white nationalist who moved to South Africa for a period during the 1980s to support its apartheid government, and who reveled crowds of conservatives with anti-black “South African jokes” upon his return to Alaska.

A glance at Ross’s published archive shows he never limited his resentment to minorities. He taunted environmentalists (“It is time we quit crying over the oil spill” was the title of an editorial he wrote in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster); he denounced homosexuals as “degenerates” during a 1993 legal fight over a local gay-rights ordinance; and announced that his final wish before dying was to overturn Roe v. Wade. While rising through the ranks of the NRA’s national leadership in the 1980s, Ross published a piece in the mercenary magazine Soldier of Fortune, defending the right to form antigovernment militias.

“Ross’s profile fits where Palin wants to go after the current legislative session ends,” Munger remarked to me. “She seems to be planning some behind-the-scenes movement to stir up the crazies, especially by convincing them the federal government is going take their guns away. So nobody here is surprised by this selection.”

While Ross sustained withering criticism for his views on social issues, Native American tribes denounced his vociferous opposition to their subsistence rights. The tribes were especially disturbed by his vow during a 2002 gubernatorial debate to “hire a band of junkyard dog” attorneys to gut federal laws guaranteeing natives subsistence preferences. “It almost looked like she was rubbing our face in Anthony Ross’s appointment,” said Tim Towarak, co-chairman of the Alaska Federation of Natives, told The Bristol Bay Times. “Like rubbing our face on the ground, saying ‘Here, take this.’” With increasingly powerful tribal groups mobilizing a united front against Ross, Palin was compelled to defend her own record, pleading, “Obviously I am not anti-Native and would never appoint anyone who is.”

If Palin withdraws Ross’s nomination, she could end another embarrassing political spectacle before it registers on the national press corps’ radar. Alternatively, if she manages to ram his appointment through, Palin can begin implementing a hard-right legal agenda that will appeal to the elements she is cultivating as the base of her likely 2012 presidential campaign. However Palin decides to proceed with W.A.R., by nominating him, she has staked out the culture war as the fuel for her national ambitions.

Sparky McBackfire really picked a winner, didn't she? Oh, whoops, my bad, I shouldn't use that term. "Winner" and "Palin" should never be juxtaposed. That would be inappropriate and bad form.

Sparky McBackfire really picked a bigoted, mean-spirited, bottom-feeding boor, didn't she? There. That's better.

America unmasked: The KKK is alive and kicking in 2009, but shhh... don't talk about it

By GottaLaff

Attorney General Holder said that we are a "nation of cowards" and called for a national dialog on race. Surprise! Republicans are appalled. Of course they are. That is absolutely reprehensible! Nearly as reprehensible as this:

These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail. Anthony Karen, a former Marine and self-taught photojournalist was granted access to the innermost sanctum of the Klan. [...]

Karen’s images of the Klan and its supporters regularly appear on the recruiting websites of the far right. Out of context, the images of hooded Klansmen and their families tell us little of the real story – the inexorable rise in the number of extremist organisations in America. [...]

As people lose their homes to foreclosure and, without the benefit of a safety net, find themselves slipping into poverty, there is already a search for scapegoats underway. Immigrants from central and South America have become particular targets as the grim economic times take hold. [...]

Since the 1930s the KKK has been in a state of disorganisation and today it probably has 6,000 members. But the economic crisis is swelling their ranks and already, a month after the inauguration of the first black president, the tidal wave of interracial harmony that greeted Obama’s election is starting to recede. [...]

More than 400 hate-related incidents, from cross-burnings to effigies of President Obama hanging from nooses have been reported, according to law-enforcement authorities and Potok’s organisation, which files lawsuits against hate groups aimed at making them bankrupt.

Late last year, two suspected skinheads who had links to a violent Klan chapter in Kentucky were charged with plotting to kill 88 black students. They were then going to assassinate President Obama by blasting him from a speeding car while wearing white tuxedos and top hats. They were never going to succeed, given the huge security net around Obama, but the fact that they had planned such an outlandish attack may be a harbinger of things to come.

“There is a tremendous backlash to Obama’s election,” says Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, another white supremacist group. “Many people look at the flag of the Republic of New Africa that was hoisted over the White House as an act of war."

Now, that's appalling.

Yet, how very and awfully uppity of a black cabinet member to even suggest that people are afraid of conversing openly about racial issues. One might even go so far as to say it's presumptuous. I mean, really, what would our African American A.G. know about such things?

To those who would still challenge Holder, I'd like to pose this:

Why is it that, if America is so un-cowardly, so many people still utter the word "black" in hushed whispered tones? "HE'S black, YOU KNOW." "MY BROTHER MET FINALLY SOMEONE... SHE'S black." Gasp!

What if they were overheard? What are they so afraid of? Or am I being presumptuous by asking such a reprehensible question about their cowardice?

(Start listening to Rachel Maddow at about 2:38. She pretty much confirms the need to open up lines of honest communication.)

H/t: Ady

KKK to attend Mississippi debate

By GottaLaff

Obama fans they are not, so I'm pretty darned sure they'll be cheering for Gramm-pa:

The Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan plan to appear at the University of Mississippi for tonight’s debate, the university’s student newspaper reports. The emperor confirmed to the Daily Mississippian that KKK members and officers would be on site, but would not demonstrate publicly:

The Mississippi White Knights will have officers and Klansmen on hand for the presidential debate on September 26, 2008. Our people will be in Oxford and on the campus ‘invisible.’ That means our people won’t be in regalia or demonstrating. So, I guess you’ll just have to guess which of the people present are Klansmen.

Rather than being "invisible", I wish they'd just disappear. This news sickens me.

H/t: Paddy

Anti-Obama racist tee shirts pulled

By GottaLaff

Via Think Progress:

Michael James at DailyKos spotted several racist t-shirts targeting Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) being sold on the website Road Kill T-Shirts, which says that it sells “funny” shirts. Some of the designs featured a noose and Ku Klux Klan members chasing Obama:

Wow! Um, wow. "Funny" doesn't begin to describe them. Not even close. As you know, I write comedy, wrote for TV, still do for theatre productions, and hey, boyoboy, do I know comedy. These shirts are undeniably-- well, there are no words. I can barely breathe for all the--- We've gotta track down that freelancer (see below), and... throw him in a cage somewhere. For a long, long time.

Because I do know comedy, and guess what, "Road Kill" freelancer... those weren't funny. In the least. They were beyond vile. And you don't need to know comedy to know that.

The response that James got after he e-mailed them assured him that they'd pulled the offending shirts, and continued:

“We recently hired a freelancer to create designs and post them on our site,” wrote Mike from Road Kill T-Shirts. “We have teams of them and, unfortunately, these were put up in the last couple of days without approval. While the site can be edgy…I can guarantee you this is not the type of stuff we approve of.”

Good riddance.