A Time for Change

He called it his first address to the nation and it was a rambling, very angry, hate-filled, nasty spew that was packed with lies.  If you have the stomach to watch it as I did, the videos are above.  The full text of this word salad is here.  Some colorful and telling excerpts are below:

President Obama has the ability — he has the ability to inspire excellence in people’s pursuits. He has the ability to do all this, yet he pursues a path, seeks a path that punishes achievement, that punishes earners and punishes — and he speaks negatively of the country. Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill. Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night in a corner of America that’s very obscure. He’s constantly telling the American people that bad times are ahead, worst times are ahead. And it’s troubling, because this is the United States of America. 

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To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that has to be what we’re focused on. [Applause] Why would any of us in this room who hold the core beliefs we believe, somebody tell me where is the compromise on all of this spending?

***

Where is the compromise between good and evil?  Should Jesus have cut a different deal?  Serious. From the standpoint of what we have to do, folks, this is not about taking a policy or a process that the Democrats have put forward and fighting around the edges. If we’re going to convince the minds and hearts of the American people that what’s about to happen to them is as disastrous as anything in their lives in peacetime, we’re going to have to discuss philosophy with them. We are going to have to talk about principle, because our principles are not present in what’s happening here. So where the hell do we go to compromise what we believe in when our principles are not their principles, they’re just the opposite of what’s happening?  [Applause]

***

So you say how is he getting it done?  Dumb down public education. Dumb down public education. Emotions. And the ongoing — this is why I think it’s such a waste for a man as gifted as President Obama with the communications skills, you know he could wipe out the Republican Party. He can wipe out the Republican Party if he would inspire this country to be the best it could be, but we don’t have to worry about that because that’s not what he wants. He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated. Doesn’t matter. They’ll have control of it when it’s all over. And that’s what they want. Because they think they can do it better. They see these inequalities, these inequities that capitalism produces. 

***

John Kerry [Boos], who served in Vietnam. [Laughter] Think about this, and, by the way, Barney Frank got involved with this, too. Northern Trust, a bank in Chicago — by the way, which holds the mortgage to the Messiah’s house, purchased by Tony Rezko, Northern Trust holds the mortgage. Northern Trust was forced, like Wells Fargo was forced, to take TARP money. The Wells Fargo CEO said they were taken into Paulson’s room and they were given until 5:00 to sign it. They weren’t getting out until they did. They wanted it spread all over the banking business. Northern Trust was in there. They didn’t want it. They took $1.6 billion. As you know, they went out and they sponsored the LA Riveria Open two weeks ago that Phil Mickelson barely hung on and won. [Applause]

And we find out they hired some liberals to entertain, but it still wasn’t good enough. They hired Sheryl Crow. And they hired the rock crooner group Chicago, but they had the audacity, Northern Trust did, to entertain their clients, to try to reward their best customers, to get new customers, banking is in trouble, Northern Trust is trying to do what they always do, what all businesses do, and that is mine for new clients and reward existing good customers.  Not since they took $1.6 billion, I guess. The haughty John Kerry wrote a piece of legislation said:  He’s getting sick and tired, sick and tired of these CEOs using taxpayer money to throw all these lavish parties. And I’m saying where do you get yours, Senator?  [Applause]

***

But all of a sudden John Thain’s thrown out. John Thain is thrown out. He’s humiliated and embarrassed; how dare he?  He did it a year before they took the TARP money. And all these Congressmen are standing up saying this is not going to happen. We are not going to watch these people capping executive pay while Obama tries to live like one.

OK, I have reached my fill of right wingnuts for the day, especially after having seen this speech.  I think he’s still on drugs.

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Palin Country – Warren County, in Northwestern Pennsylvania

I just saw the most divisive hate-filled speech that I have ever seen. It was Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the conservative movement, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference to his dittoheads.  It was angry. Angry. Angry.  He speaks to that radically conservative angry man out there and he knows it.   He uses them to make millions, he whips them up into a frenzy even though he is not interested in facts to support what he says.  He lies to them about President Obama because, as he has said, if Obama’s way of hope, peace and propserity works, he and his conservative movement fail.  That is why he has said that he wants Obama to fail.  Hope dies.  Rush can continue to hate.

I have been posting this week about the level of hate rising.  The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Intelligence Report was alarming. The White Heat of anger is rising and much of it is because of people like Limbaugh, Palin, Coulter, Malkin and Hannity have no apparent intention to try to limit the spew in their speeches, rallies, shows, books and their blogs that result in their base hating African Americans, Jews, Asians, gays, women and the poor.  They are the antithesis of everything that Christianity stands for while they preach this spew to the Bible thumpers who yell Amen.  These are people who blame their problems on others, unable to accept responsibility for failing to attain what they feel entitled to attain by virtue of their whiteness.

White Heat Rises as Obama is Elected: Backlash

Kaylon Johnson

Meet Kaylon Johnson.  His is the face of a hate crime victim.  After feeling euphoric over the election of the first African American, he opened a shop in Shreveport, Louisiana so that he could sell Obama memorabilia.  He soon learned that the election of Barack Obama did not mee t that the struggle was over.  The backlash had just begun.

…on the night of Dec. 6, Johnson, 33, pulled into a Shreveport gas station behind the wheel of his GMC Yukon adorned with Obama bumper stickers. Wearing an Obama T-shirt, Johnson purchased a soft drink and was returning to his vehicle when he was jumped by three white men shouting “Fuck Obama!” and “Nigger president!” The pummeling left Johnson with a broken nose and a fractured eye socket that required surgery.

Kaylon Johnson was not the only victim of a hate crime in the US in the days leading up to and after the election of Presidient Obama.  While were all on pins and needles prior to the election and euphoric thereafter, a lot of ugly has been going down.

Prior to the Election

• A  life-sized likeness of Obama was found hanging from a noose in a tree at the University of Kentucky.
• The co-owner of a Palm Beach, Fla., restaurant wrote “White Power” on staff memos taped to the eatery’s kitchen walls. She told her black employees they would be fired if they voted for Obama. 

On the night of the election, while the nation rejoiced and celebrated, others did not

 In the weeks following the election.

• Three white men were arrested just days before Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration and charged with conspiring to deprive church congregants of their civil rights.
• A sign was placed inside a general store in Standish, Maine, that read, “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool.” Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when the new president would be assassinated. “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count,” the sign said. At the bottom of the sign somebody had written, “Let’s hope someone wins.”
• An employee of a gun-and-lock shop in Traverse City, Mich., flew the American flag upside down because, he said, it symbolized “an international signal for distress and we feel our country is in distress because the nigger got it.”
• A dark-skinned doll labeled “Obama” was hung in a high-school stairwell east of Tacoma, Wash. Five students were expelled.
• A biracial student at a high school north of Pittsburgh complained that a teacher’s aide said to a student sitting near her that Obama would be killed, that the American flag would be changed to the KFC chicken chain’s emblem, and the national anthem would become “Movin’ on Up” — the theme song of “The Jeffersons,” a sitcom about a black family. The aide also berated her for supporting Obama, the student said. The aide was suspended.
• Second-and-third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted, “Assassinate Obama.”
• Federal authorities arrested a Wisconsin man in Brookhaven, Miss., four days before Obama’s inauguration for threatening to assassinate Obama in a posting to an Internet site about UFOs and extraterrestrial aliens. Steven Joseph Christopher, 42, allegedly wrote that he “can no longer allow the Jewish parasites to bully their way into making the American people submit to their evil ways.”
• Neo-Nazi radio show host Hal Turner wrote on his blog that his “inauguration dream” was for somebody to send an explosives-laden aerial unmanned drone or chemical-filled balloons into inaugural crowds. In a follow-up posting, Turner maintained that Obama and congressmen and senators attending the inauguration deserved to die, as did African Americans (“sub-human simians”) and liberals (“mentally-ill Whites”) in the crowd.

Martin Luther King once said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  While we’ve come along way, Barack Obama’s election has taught us that we aren’t there yet.   Get ready for 2010.

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The great hope of the Republican party tried to give a memorable speech and, well, it was like Chrisler rolling out a brand new car of the line and all of the wheels fell off and it backfired!  THUD!  Stylistically, it felt like Mr. Rogers was struggling to give a rebuttal to President Obama, but not really succeeding.

The lies, the lies, the lies and more lies.  I think I am going to do a remix of the 1812 overture to the track of Republican speeches from now on and every time they tell a whopper, I’ll have one of the cannons go off.  

LIE 1:  The Katrina Story Was False

He told a story that during Hurricane Katrina he stood by a local sheriff who was battling government red tape to try to rescue strnded hurricane victims. LIE.  The Daily KOS and TPMmuckracker called him out on it because no one could establish that Jindal waswhere he said he was at that particular time.   From TPMmuckraker:

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee “during Katrina,” and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn’t have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, “that’s ridiculous,” prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal’s presence in Lee’s office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story’sintended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn’t there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

There’s a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP’s prime-time response to President Obama’s speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up.

So they have to lie to make the point that government is the big, oogedy-boogedy bad thing that they claim?  If that were true, surely that could have cmeup with some facts based in realty.

LIE 2:  There Is No High Speed Rail to Las Vegas

He also made false representations about the stimulus:

[The stimulus includes] $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring”.

LIE.  Mother Jones reports that “The truth is that the stimulus bill does not allocate any high speed rail money for specific projects. In fact, any stimulus money for high speed rail would be allocated by Obama transportation secretary Ray Lahood—a Republican.”  

MISLEADING:  

The comment about volcano monitoring is a blatant misrepresentation.  Again, from Mother Jones:

According to ProPublica, the relevant portion of the stimulus money is for “U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities.” It seems obvious that employing geologists, building facilities, buying equipment, and paying people to map the country all have a stimulative effect. But more importantly, why does Bobby Jindal think monitoring volcanoes is a bad thing for the government to be doing? There doesn’t seem to be any immediate way for private enterprise to profit from monitoring volcanoes (maybe selling volcano insurance?), but there is obviously a huge public benefit from making sure volcanoes are monitored: warning people if a volcano is going to erupt. Isn’t that obvious?

To all except the dense and the liars.

LIE 3:  Bureaucrats demanded that people have proof of insurance and registration during Hurricane Katrina

“Jindal is the person who just tried to tell the nation that the problem with the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was that bureaucrats demanded that people have proof of insurance and registration. It wasn’t.”

Conclusion:  These religious extremists have a highly elastic view of the truth…What would Jesus say?

While Zimbabwe’s financial crisis continues to be in full meltdown mode and the country is gripped with a cholera pandemic and food shortages, CNN reports that today Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe threw himself a lavish $250,000 85th birthday party.  Just yesterday Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai “visited a hospital’s closed intensive care unit that he said needed $30,000 to resume operating.”

A cholera epidemic that broke out in August has since hit every corner of the country, killing 3,731 people and infecting nearly 80,000, according to the World Health Organization, which quoted Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health.

The preventable disease has spread through Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces through lack of access to clean water, faulty sewage systems, and uncollected refuse, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which released a report this month on the outbreak.

***

On Sunday, Tsvangirai appealed to the international community to help Zimbabwe’s crippled economy, saying it would take $5 billion to stabilize the country.

The cholera outbreak has worsened Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. Failed government policies and an acute food shortage because of years of poor agricultural production and widespread corruption have ravaged the currency of Zimbabwe, which has the world’s highest inflation rate. 

When asked about the celebration, Mugabe’s nephew Patrick Zhuwawo said, “I think it is going to be a great day for the legend and icon whose birthday we are celebrating today here. The country might be having problems, but we need to have a day to honor the sacrifices the president has made for this country.”  

And those would be?

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What happened to our economy?  The right blames Democrats even though the Republican party has been the party primarily in power for more than 25 years.  Others blame George Bush.  Phil Gramm blamed Americans.  Everyone blames Wall Street.  So who really is to blame?  There are some interesting theories out there.

Wired magazine blames the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression on the Gaussian copula function.  David X. Li pioneered the use of a mathematical model for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps.  According to a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:

…a Chinese-born New York banker got to musing about love and death — specifically, how people tend to die soon after their spouses do.Therein lies a tale of how a statistician unknown outside a small coterie of finance theorists helped change the world of investing.

The banker, David Li, came up with a computerized financial model to weigh the likelihood that a given set of corporations would default on their bond debt in quick succession. Think of it as a produce scale that not only weighs a bag of apples but estimates the chance that they’ll all be rotten in a week.

The model fueled explosive growth in a market for what are known as credit derivatives: investment vehicles that are based on corporate bonds and give their owners protection against a default. This is a market that barely existed in the mid-1990s. Now it is both so gigantic — measured in the trillions of dollars — and so murky that it has drawn expressions of concern from several market watchers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has asked 14 big banks to meet with it this week about practices in the surging market.

The model Mr. Li devised helped estimate what return investors in certain credit derivatives should demand, how much they have at risk and what strategies they should employ to minimize that risk. Big investors started using the model to make trades that entailed giant bets with little or none of their money tied up. Now, hundreds of billions of
dollars ride on variations of the model every day.

“David Li deserves recognition,” says Darrell Duffie, a Stanford University professor who consults for banks. He “brought that innovation into the markets [and] it has facilitated dramatic growth of the credit-derivatives markets.”

Such dramatic growth resulted in the collapse of the market. Greed drove the formula into the ground.  Please see the excellent article on Gaussian copula function in Wired here.  

In 2008, Mr. Li went to work in China. Please don’t come back.

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Just another “CRAZY” day at the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference.  On today’s agenda, CNN reports that Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina called President Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism.”   As if that were not enough, he actually felt the need to say more because that right wingnut base is just not whipped up enough right now.

DeMint…told the CPAC crowd that conservatives might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism.”

Some make excuses for the Freepers who incite violence, others say that Hannity did not personally post the checklist for anarchy on his website, but they cannot deny Senator DeMint’s comments.  I am amazed that he publicly made them without any apparent rebuke from the GOP leadership.  A United States Senator is urging members of his party to take to the streets against the United States government and a President who was elected by a clear majority.  Statements like that from the party leadership only serves to encourage people like this:

• White House set to reverse health care conscience clause (FOCA One Day at a Time)

  Sat Feb 28 2009 07:43:33 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time) · 6 of 6 Joe Boucher to Siobhan7 Blacks have used abortion for birth control for decades. Hell, the govt. (You and I) are forced to pay for this crap. Cradle to grave govt. care. Socialism. I don’t care to pay for others kids murder or their care. You can’t keep your legs closed? Not my problem. Time for a revolution?

Just to remind you, Senator DeMint’s remarks encouraging the members to “revolt” come just a day after John Bolton made a ‘joke” about the President’s home city being “nuked” which was greeted with applause and laughter.  You cane see that here.  And just the day before, Cliff Kincaid from the conservative group “Accuracy in the Media,” suggested that President Obama is a communist and that he was not born in the United States.  The “crowd” cheered “wildly.”  You can see that here.  Not to be outdone, Mike Huckabee “told the conference of conservative activists that “the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born” with the president’s stimulus package. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Huckabee said of the government bailing out financial institutions.

As Martin Luther King once said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  At the very least, those elected officials encouraging revolt should be immediately asked to step down.

Another Republican right wingnut narcissist

This is not the first time that someone has accused Hannity of high crimes and misdemeanors, but it is my first time.  (So many right wingnuts, so little time — they are like the gopher in caddyshack).  On Hannity’s blog, he actually poses the question of “What kind of revolution appeals most to you?”  You can see the post here.

Now as I sit here, i can already feel comments coming to the effect that “Oh, it was just a question, what’s the big deal?”  Oh, no, no, no.  You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see the level of hate rising. So the fact that he asks this question as the level of hate is rising should be viewed as tending to incite violence because, the following were the proposed answers to the questions:

• Military Coup
• Armed rebellion
• War for secession

When did this all become OK to openly discuss this on websites of TV personalities?  This is the second time I have called out FOX for being totally irresponsible in its blogs.  Below you will find an excerpt from my original post.

“Well niggers will occasionally chimp out like this, am I right?”

The hate is not limited to team.sarah.org though, although Palin certainly seems to drive a lot of these people out of their holes.  In fact, based on my review, it is rather benign compared to others, if you can believe that.

The below post is not uncommon on the Fox blogs with no apparent editorial intervention:

Comment by bigmarunga 
December 21st, 2008 at 10:32 am  To all the libs who thought that this was funny, think again. If the secret service can’t stop a shoe at 20 feet, how are they going to stop a .308 round from 400 yards? Like Hillary said, “you never know”. Personally I would hate to see it happen, we don’t need another useless national holiday.  

There have been many, many other examples of racism and hate.  We are in the middle of two wars abroad and these people are talking about this?  And they say “liberals” are un-American.

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I thought about heading up to the meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee this year.  Nothing like observing right wingnuts in their natural habitat.  I just don’t have the time so I am happy to report that Daily KOS is there keeping an eye on things.  The first report was amusing.

• There was a former U.N. Ambassador joking about nuking the city of Chicago … the crowd cheered.
• There was a member of the House of Representatives introduced by a man who questioned the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency … and the Congressman thanked him for his “kind words.”
• Mike Huckabee became the latest victim of the Republicans War on Words: “I’m still convinced America wants to like us. They want to vote for us. It’s when we lose our competence that the American people lose their confidence.”

Now for a fun list of the fun topics to come from Huff Po:

• “Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System”; 
• “The Presidential Banquet with Master of Ceremonies: Rep. Michelle Bachmann”; 
• “Bailing Out Big Business: Are We All Socialists Now?”; 
• A book signing with Ann Coulter; “Media in the Obama Era: Is Journalism Dead?”; 
• “The True Cost Of Global Warming Hysteria”; and 
• “Will Congress Take Your Guns?”

This is it folks.  It would make an excellent comedy.  Imagine a Saturday Night Live movie.  When crazy Michelle Bachman is the headliner, Houston, we have a problem.

I will leave you with another report of the fun festivities from Think Progress, the CPAC Obama birth certificate rant.  ” Cliff Kincaid, head of a conservative group Accuracy in Media, introduced Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). Kincaid suggested that President Obama is a communist, then suggested Obama was not born in the United States — to which the crowd “cheered wildly“:  Here’s the post and the video.

Jose Sucuzhanay, father of 2 children, victim of anti-Latin, anti-gay hate crime

[This is an update of a prior post December]

Jose Sucuzhanay and his brother Romel were in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn late last year when several men approached them, shouting anti-Latino and anti-gay slurs.

The attack occurred about 3:30 a.m. [on December 7, 2008 ] as Mr. Sucuzhanay, 31, and his brother Romel were walking home from a bar, arms around each other, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Three men jumped out of a maroon or red sport utility vehicle and attacked the brothers at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place, the police said.

Yelling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs, one of the men broke a bottle over Mr. Sucuzhanay’s head and, when he fell to the ground, another began beating him with a baseball bat, the police said. The men kicked and punched Mr. Sucuzhanay until his brother told them that he was calling the police on his cellphone, the authorities said, and the attackers piled into the S.U.V. and drove away.

According to police, Jose’s attackers yelled racial an anti-gay slurs because his brother, Romel, was walking down the street with Jose.  The two men had their arms around each other when, about a block from their home.  Romel managed to escape with a few scrapes.  

Hundreds of people marched in Brooklyn after the attack, protesting the savage beating of the 31 year old Ecuadorian immigrant, which is believed to be a hate crime.  CNN reports that protesters held sign reading,”No more hate crimes.”   He died of massive blunt force trauma to the head.

Jose’s brothers did not join in  the demonstration, but they were grateful for those who did and Diego called for “everyone to practice tolerance.”  In a statement, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the attack “a pointless and gutless crime.” He promised authorities would find and prosecute those responsible.

Diego Sucuzhanay said Jose set up a successful real estate business in a low-income area, thinking he could make a difference there.  Diego said Jose wanted to help everyone and hired a diverse team, including four African-Americans and two Latinos.

Jose was raising two children: a 9-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.”We were proud of him,” Diego said.

He said the family had wanted Jose’s mother to get to his bedside before he died. Doctors told them Jose was brain dead since the attack, and that machines kept him alive until his heart failed Friday.

At a press conference Sunday outside the hospital, Diego Sucuzhanay touched his chest and said: “My heart is broken, but my brother’s [memory] will live on. “

Asked in an interview with CNN how his brother would be remembered, he paused several seconds and answered: “For being the victim of a hate crime.”

Romel Sucuzhanay was with his brother at the time of the attack

Romel escaped with minor injuries. Jose sustained skull fractures and massive brain damage. He was declared brain-dead  and later died less than a week later. Jose came to the United States a decade ago in search of work, family members said. He was a waiter for seven years before he got a real estate license three years ago and started his own agency, Open Realty International, in Bushwick.” He was co-owner of the family-run company, and people in the neighborhood praised him for doing whatever he could to help clients find affordable housing.

A City Council member has requested the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force to become involved, but it has not yet been labelled a hate crime. The New York Times says that the “brutal attack on Jose outraged Ecuadoreans in New York and Ecuador, and came four weeks after an Ecuadorean immigrant on Long Island was fatally stabbed by a group of teenagers who, the police have said, had set out to attack a Hispanic.”

Jose’s brother Diego issued a written statement  that he was “at a loss beyond words.” Police have not yet arrested the attackers and are investigating it as a homicide.

“This is a wake-up call and shows how far we still must come to address the devastating problem of hate crimes in our communities,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, Jose’s brother, in a written statement. “Only by exposing these crimes and working together will we be able to make a difference.”

Police  offered a $22,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in the attack.

CNN announced today that police have arrested Hakin Scott, 25, this past Tuesday and charged him with second degree murder as a hate crime. Police were able to identify two suspects after inferring that they had crossed the Triborough Bridge in the course of their flight from the crime scene. They interviewed bridge toll booth employees and combed through videotape of cars passing through cash-only lanes on the bridge.”

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said the incident should send a message that antigay violence endangers straights and gays alike.

“If there was ever a message to the people of this city or anywhere as to why heterosexuals have to stand up and not permit this type of violence … it is this case,” Hynes said.

Amen.  

Hate crimes against immigrants are on the rise.  The recent Southern Poverty Law Center report on hate crime in the US provides as follows:

Organizations identified by the Intelligence Report as nativist extremist are groups that go after people, not policy. Rather than limiting themselves to advocating within the mainstream political process for tighter border security, stricter immigration controls or tougher enforcement of immigration laws already on the books, these fringe outfits target and confront immigrants as individuals.

Some conduct armed “citizen border patrols.” Others confront Latino immigrants congregated at day labor centers or informal roadside pick-up sites. Some conduct surveillance of apartment houses and private homes. Almost all of them disseminate vicious, immigrant-bashing propaganda.

Nativist extremist groups do not, however, present a unified front. Like other movements on the radical right, theirs is rife with infighting, ego clashes and allegations of fraud leveled by former allies. “I get more hate mail from members of my own movement, the so-called Minutemen, than from the open-border people,” Gilchrist told The New Republic last August. He complained about “troublemakers with personality disorders and criminal propensities” hijacking the cause.

Armed militia patrolling the borders targeting and harassing immigrants.  Ecuadorians targeted in the city. And a recent comment by a gun blogger who is clearly upset and concerned that his “gun rights” may be limited, but advocated getting rid of hate crimes.  He’s a “law clerk” so we have to forgive him because he knows not what he does.  Really, I mean it.  Forgive him for he thinks he knows something when he knows nothing should be his mantra, but no, he will continue to press his sophomoric 22 year old weltanschauung on the rest of us whenever he takes time out from video games to play in the real world before he knows what that really means and then leave 30 comments on your blog to boot just to prove it.

So, once again we place guns over human life.  He’s a poster child for gun control and the need for hate crime laws.  Jose’s family would not be amused.  It’s no lauging matter.

I wonder if the sophomore and his ilk have looked in the face of death caused by a real live hate crime? 

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CNN identified this photo as having been taken at an event called Hated and Proud in Nebraska in July 2008

One expert said on Hate Groups, “Their thinking is very distorted.”

One of the gun bloggers who thought it was funny that another gun blogger had told me to watch the rooftops also said that hate crime laws should be abolished.  This is the same group that was defending the “Vote from the Rooftops” photo and postings that was at a minimum clearly inciting to violence, if not constituting a direct threat against President Obama.  They believe the Second Amendment gives them a right to bear arms to overthrow the government, including the current government.  Are you surprised?  

Map of Active US Hate Groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center

According to CNN, the Southern Poverty Law Center recently issued a report entitled, “The Year in Hate,” which finds that the number of hate groups have increased 54% since 2000.  926 hate groups were identified as “groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people — active in 2008. That’s a 4 percent jump, adding 38 more than the year before.”   Over the last 10 years, hate groups were focused on Latino immigration to fuel the growth of hate groups.  The new growth is attributed to the country’s first African American president and the economy where jobs have been lost at a catastrophic rate.

CNN spoke to Don Black, a 55 year old former KKK Grand Wizard, who said that he hates President Obama and blames illegal aliens for undermining the economy.  The number of registered members and readers on his website has “surged to unprecedented levels in recent months,” according to CNN.  

On the day after Obama’s historic election, more than 2,000 people joined his Web site, a remarkable increase from the approximately 80 new members a day he was getting, Black said. His Web site, which was started in 1995, is one of the oldest and largest hate group sites. The site received so many hits that it crashed after election results were announced. The site boasts 110,000 registered members today, Black said.

“People who had been a little more complacent and kind of upset became more motivated to do something,” said Black, who also said he joined his first hate group at age 15.

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Obama serves as a “visual aid” that is helping respark a sense of purpose in current supporters and lure new members, said neo-Nazi David Duke, the former Klan leader who was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in the 1980s. Duke said he fears “the white European-American” heritage will soon be destroyed. He added that his Web site sees around 40,000 unique visitors a day, up from 15,000 a day before Obama won the election.

This is the Republican base that you saw at Sarah Palin rallies holding monkeys with “Obama” signs on them and who made numerous other racist and bigoted statements.  I have previously posted the You Tube Videos demonstrating the rampant racism at the rallies. This is the angry white man base that Nixon chased and Ronald Reagan brought within the fold of the GOP.  The Republican Party has distinguished itself by having elected a proud and open KKK member, David Duke, to the Louisiana State Legislature.  

In 2002, Senator Trent Lott spoke at the 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond who had at one time ran as the Presidential nominee of the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 against Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. Thurmond carried South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.  During the campaign, Thurmond ran on the platform that “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.”  Lott said at the party that “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him.  We’re proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all of these years, either.”

That statement was one moment in a career enveloped in racism.  Lott has belonged to known racist organizations and voted along racist lines when he was in Congress.  This was not a slip of the tongue or a one off.  It’s a way of life for Lott who was elected as Senate Majority Leader prior to the comments and Minority Leader after the comments  by his fellow Republicans.

In 1998, Lott’s connections to the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) were revealed by FAIR and several mainstream media outlets– including the Washington Post (12/16/98).

The CCC is the successor to the notorious white Citizens Councils, whose history dates back half a century to the 1950s when the groups were referred to as the “uptown Klan.” In December 1998, Lott denied any personal knowledge of the CCC, falsely claiming through a spokesperson that his links to the group amounted to a single speech made over a decade before he’d entered the Senate. But the facts showed otherwise: In 1992, Lott praised the CCC as the keynote speaker at its national convention; in 1997, he met with top CCC leaders in his Senate office; his column appeared throughout the 1990s in the group’s newsletter, which once published a cheerful photo of Lott with CCC members who were also his close relatives. Lott was also the guest of honor at a 1982 banquet hosted by a Mississippi chapter of the old white Citizens Councils.

And Lott’s legislative record demonstrates that his connections to the CCC were no fluke. In 1978, then-Representative Lott was behind a successful effort to re-instate the citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Associated Press, 6/2/78). In 1981, Lott prodded the Reagan administration into taking the side of Bob Jones University and other segregated private schools that were suing the Internal Revenue Service to restore tax exemptions withdrawn a decade earlier because of the schools’ discriminatory racial policies (Washington Post, 1/18/82).

In 1982 and 1990, Lott voted against extending the Voting Rights Act, the law passed to insure that minorities– especially Southern blacks– had access to the voting booth. In 1990, he voted against continuation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the crown jewel of civil-rights legislation that desegregated education and public accommodations. In 1983 Lott voted against a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1994 he voted to de-fund the MLK Jr. Holiday commission.

The Bush administration tried to, and sometimes succeeded in, suppressing the African American vote.  So all that clucking aside about how Bush was happy on the day that Obama was elected, remember that Bush was twice elected after years of attempts to suppress African American voter rights.

In the broader sense, in 2002 Time magazine published an article regarding the Republican party and its racist history, stating “The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party’s four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting.”  

…Republican heroes [such] as, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, [ ] used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern white voters away from the Democrats. Yet it’s with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican’s selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.

Space doesn’t permit a complete list of the Gipper’s signals to angry white folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s’ ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for “states’ rights” — a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.

Then there was Reagan’s attempt, once he reached the White House in 1981, to reverse a long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination and grant an exemption to Bob Jones University. Lott’s conservative critics, quite rightly, made a big fuss about his filing of a brief arguing that BJU should get the exemption despite its racist ban on interracial dating. But true to their pattern of white-washing Reagan’s record on race, not one of Lott’s conservative critics said a mumblin’ word about the Gipper’s deep personal involvement. They don’t care to recall that when Lott suggested that Reagan’s regime take BJU’s side in a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, Reagan responded, “We ought to do it.” Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court in a resounding 8-to-1 decision ruled that Reagan was dead wrong and reinstated the IRS’s power to deny BJU’s exemption.

Republican leaders and their apologists tend to go into a frenzy of denial when members of the liberal media cabal bring up these inconvenient facts.

They cannot deny it anymore.  As mentioned above, it’s on tape.  The Palin rallies, often with McCain saying nothing to stop it and certainly Palin never did.  The below is a cartoon from a right wing publication.  Even conservative evangelicals have been disgusted by the blatant racism in the GOP.  Please see Frank Schaeffer’s post entitled, “Evangelical / Republican Racist Hypocrites for McCain, or Redemption?

This party is ugly, really, really ugly.  More people need to be aware of just how ugly this party is because, at its worst,  it has the potential to tear us apart.  At best, it is preventing people from fulfilling their God given right to participate as equals in a free society in what is supposed to be the greatest democracy ever.  Imagine how many talented and gifted individuals we have prevented from making us a stronger and better country because of blind racism.  

Yes, the election of Obama brought us a long way indeed, but we are a far cry from looking at him or any other person of color for who they are rather than the color of their skin and as long as one political party in this country puts their imprimatur of approval on that conduct, I do not know when, if ever, racism will ever cease.

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An Example of the “off the Hook” Ad Campaign Michael Steele Plans for the RNC

So the new, but really same ole party leader Michael Steele, was interviewed about whether gay civil unions would be acceptable for the party. “Steele replied immediately, ‘No, no, no,’ adding, ‘What are you, crazy?’  The RNC clearly places a priority on the rights of gun owners and does not believe in equal human rights for gays. Think Progress reports:

GALLAGHER: Is this a time when Republicans ought to consider some sort of alternative to redefining marriage and maybe in the road, down the road to civil unions. Do you favor civil unions?

STEELE: No, no no. What would we do that for? What are you, crazy? No. Why would we backslide on a core, founding value of this country? I mean this isn’t something that you just kind of like, “Oh well, today I feel, you know, loosey-goosey on marriage.” […]

GALLAGHER: So no room even for a conversation about civil unions in your mind?

STEELE: What’s the difference?

That’s the same old stuff.  Nothing like progress from the party of the old white men.

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According to CNN, President Obama plans to trim $3 trillion from the federal budget to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. Here are a few of the proposals:

• closing the loophole that has allowed some Wall Street investment managers to pay lower tax rates than their low-paid assistants.  ”Under current law, investment managers have been exploiting a loophole in our tax code to pay 15 percent on their earned income, the same rate that a middle-class family making $80,000 a year pays. The budget calls for closing the so-called ‘carried-interest’ loophole.” 
• On agriculture, the Obama administration is aiming to save $9.8 billion over 10 years by phasing out direct payments to farmers with sales revenues of $500,000 or more per year. The list of spending cuts claims that “about 25 percent of direct payments go to farmers with farm sales (revenue) of greater than $500,000.”
• Federal payments to cotton producers that covers the storage of their cotton while it is under a “marketing loan,” according to the list, which could lead to savings of $570 million over 10 years.
• “Marketing loans provide eligible producers with interim financing on their production, allowing producers to store their crop, which is pledged as collateral, instead of selling it immediately after harvest.”

There are also some cuts in large Department of Defense items that were not specified.  $3 trillion is a lot of money.  Special interests will fight the budget cuts so this will not be easy, and in times like this it will surely show who supports the pork and who does not.  Let’s see if the Republicans are as fiscally responsible as they claim.  CNN already reported that Senator Lindsay Graham, one of the loudest advocates against the stimulus, included millions for a park in a bill passed recently.

 So Graham is not only whiny, he’s a hypocrite and obstructionist. 

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Yesterday, while I was working my usual 18 hour day, my blog was inundated by gun bloggers again.  It all started when Skye called them out on that horrific posting about violence toward President Obama.  You see, they descend on a blog by the hundreds and then leave really nasty, rude and sarcastic comments, and some even beyond that and then they wonder why they are asked to leave my blog?

What is the definition of harassment:

Psychological Harassment has many forms: the most common being verbal abuse. Some tactics aim at trying to humiliate or weaken the morale of individuals or groups.

Well, they certainly try.  They had poor Skye in tears.  Does that make them happy?  I think it must.  As for me, I am being cyberstalked by one real loon who apparently has nothing better to do.  I stopped counting at over 20 comments in one day and that is whether I was responding or not. Check out this definition of cyberstalking that someone was kind enough to provide. He would make largely unsupported statements and then if I did not immediately post a response to his, then I am whatever negative adjective he chooses for the moment.  I don’t exist to meet gun bloggers’ demands.  I do this for fun.  I do it when I have time and I do it to relax.  I refuse, and I mean refuse, to allow them to dominate my blog. Period.

One gun blogger (or whatever it is) actually told me to look on the rooftops, I presume thinking that I would be concerned about a direct threat just because I asked the blogger to leave because the blogger was making really offensive and potentially criminal statements about  President Obama on my blog.  I do not leave comments open to discuss assassination.    I am funny that way, I don’t think comments about the assassination of a sitting President should be debated and for the record that means any President, not just the current one.  

Now another blogger is incensed (from the look of the emails I had to delete) that I shut down my comments and deleted his emotional rants that were so far off topic and  they reached 20 or more.  I have posted rules to comment here.  When bloggers don’t pay attention to them, it’s not up to me to give them a time out.  I’m done with them.  This same blogger by the way instructed me on how to eliminate his comments, which is amusing now that he is upset that I have done just that.  

Now the blogger is saying that I lose credibility or that I somehow look bad because I have closed comments because I did not want to have to respond to these ridiculous rants while I watch 30 others roll in.  If not wanting to be harassed makes me look bad, I can live with that.

Now as for the manner and method of the gun bloggers.  For the record, when I refer to gun bloggers, I am referring to only some of those who have left posts on my blog and they know who they are.  These guys believe in the mob mentality:

Mobbing also referred to by some as Bullying, psychological terrorism, and organizational violence is described as a collective form of psychological violence in which many individuals unite to persecute an individual by making constant negative remarks, repeated criticism or sarcasm, intimidation, threats, insinuations, try to humiliate, circulate false information concerning the individual, and to socially isolate the individual. Mobbing is a way of destroying a person without using any physical means, a psychological war of nerves with wear the individual out tactics. A group attacks an individual’s dignity, integrity, self-image, self-confidence, self-esteem, place in doubt of competence, threaten their careers, and means of subsistence.

In the context of blogging they can only attack your writing, your mind and your personality and they have done all of that. Fortunately for me, I know who I am.  I’m just not going to put up with that nonsense.  Let them call it whatever they want, I don’t care.

They can bully, abuse, threaten and tell me to watch the rooftops because one of them may take me out and otherwise try to intimidate, but it will never work.  This is my country.  I have the right to express myself on my blog without their cyberstalking, harassment or mobbing.  They claim to be so big on individual freedom, but they’re not because they are trampling on my right to enjoy my blog peacefully. 

So bullies, isn’t there a little old lady you can go terrorize?

As I was watching Jindal last night, I was thinking, this is the great hope of the GOP?  I suddenly feel bad for Sarah Palin.  Seriously, I did.  The GOP has swept her right under the rug and decided to put this guy up.  At least she can give a speech.  This guy is sad, sad, sad.  

The GOP thinks it can put a younger face on old Ronald Reagan policies that never were genuine.  Reagan rather disingenuously called “government” the problem as he expanded the role of government under his administration.  So Jindal comes along, years and years later, repeating the mindless mantra about “government” and “spending.”  Laughably, when spending is more critical to our recovery than ever before, this character runs with the Republican flag and talks about high speed rail as a waste?  

Not only will high speed rail create A LOT of jobs, but it will actually mean that we are somewhat in line with our foreign competitors who are light years ahead of us in the form of transportation.  When I was in Taiwan last year and earlier this year, I was able to travel from one end of Taiwan to the other in 1 1/2 hours.  In this country we would drive and that is a total waste of resources.  I was able to do work, occasionally enjoy the scenery and it was a really relaxing and comfortable way to travel.  

China and other countries spend money on infrastructure knowing that their country will not be able to compete if they don’t.  If it were up to the GOP, no money would be spent to fix the levees that broke during Katrina, we would never improve on mass transit, we would cut funding on education and so on.  Do we really want to live in a country where we shortchange veterans and school kids?  Do we want to keep falling behind other industrialized nations?  I don’t think most of us want that at all.

Then there was this interesting moment.  Jindal critiqued Obama for something he said a few weeks ago.

“A few weeks ago, the President warned that our nation is facing a crisis that he said ‘we may not be able to reverse.’ Our troubles are real, to be sure. But don’t let anyone tell you that we cannot recover — or that America’s best days are behind her.”

As usual, Obama’s remarks were taken completely out of context.  He said that if we do nothing we may not be able to reverse it.  Now I know that Republicans have problems with economic theory, but even conservatives Paul Volcker and George Soros talked about this “recession” as worse than the Great Depression.  Now that’s dire.  Obama, however, has never said that we will not pull out of this, he just said that we cannot sit back and do nothing and expect that the economy will heal itself.

As for the rest of  ”I am Reagan raised from the Dead because the GOP has no new ideas,”  he offered tax cuts.  I am still laughing about that.  Yeah Jindal.  Why don’t we just tell the rich to stop paying taxes and tell the poor to get out of the country.  That way it will make it easier to just put the entire load of this country on the backs of the middle class.  That’s the plan, isn’t it?  It happened under Reagan, Bush and baby Bush.

Can’t someone get Jindal a shirt that fits?  I doubt he’ll go on shopping spree madness that the moose lady went on, but I hear those GOP types work wonders with make overs and this guy needs one badly.

I have not even addressed Jindal’s oratorical “skills.”   Ummmm, still trying to think of some.  I thought Palin was home spun and folksy.  It’s bad when Fox News think you stink.  

Now, there are some other whiny old tired elephants.  Let’s get to the GOP bitter Bob in Chief, John McCain.  Whine, whine, whine.  He keeps saying that he wants to sit down and work with the President, but then he doesn’t and he takes every conceivable photo opportunity to bitterly complain about the lack of cooperation.  Who’s not cooperating?  Does he think that Americans are deaf, dumb and blind?  We see what just happened with the stimulus and the polls reflect it  Republicans take pride in not playing nicely with others.  

So, the GOP has once again distinguished itself as the party of dull, old ideas.  They still don’t get it.  No one wants to see all of that negativity.  Not in times like these.  

November Fifth has a post that you will want to see about this.  I have posted about groups like this in the past and it is getting out of control,  Please see excerpt from post below:

To: PetroniusMaximus

We need to be perfectly clear that by “stopping” him [Barack Obama] we mean using political means to stop his political agenda.Political means are covered by The Three Boxes:

The soap box

The ballot box

The cartridge box

When all else fails, vote from the rooftops. (Somebody else will have to post the appropriate picture.) [emphasis in the original]

41 posted on 02/22/2009 2:28:31 PM PST by cayuga (Just sitting here waiting for 0bama’s Reichstag Fire.)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ]

Then here’s the picture someone posted:

75 posted on 02/22/2009 2:57:18 PM PST by Eaker (The Two Loudest Sounds in the World…..Bang When it should have been Click and the Reverse.)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 41 | View Replies ]

THEY HAVE BEEN REPORTED TO THE AUTHORITIES.  THIS MUST STOP.  

Update:

Once again the gun bloggers have descended. Not much of what they had to say was very interesting except the following which was posted on Skye’s blog:

Not all of us that are pissed off want ANY president dead. I have been preaching that no matter what happens (political manuevering, violence anything) Obama needs to be left alive. NO MARTYRS. Keep that in mind when you start tossing names out there. This country was once a great nation that people turned to get a new chance: Not a handout.

Sometimes people don’t really realize what they say when they say it, but this guy opened the barn door wide and the horse ran out.  ”Obama needs to be left alive.  No martyrs.”  Of course that was followed by some sort of Vonnegutesque rant about welfare that had nothing to do with anything, but which implied that “liberals,” whatever that means, don’t work, but of course gun bloggers work really hard.  Well hello, I work 18 hour days and probably pay more taxes than any of them, but then again, that had nothing to do with the post now did it.

When you shine the light on truly reprehensible conduct, people cannot hide who they really are.  It always comes out.  Period.  This commenter showed who he really is. You just can’t hide that.

Update Two:  A certain blogger yesterday said that I should look up at the roof tops from now on myself. 

Another gun blogger left more than 20 comments on my blog yesterday (I stopped counting after that).  Most of the comments were way off topic and had little, if anything to do with this post.  That’s called cyberstalking the last time that I checked so I had to shut down comments again. Is that really a surprise.  Some people are fragile, really fragile.

Update Three:  ROFLMAO.  The cyberstalker lists his occupation as “law clerk” and he is 22.  If that’s true, that would explain a lot.  The male version of “legally Blonde,” arguing about the law and lauging about threats.  Hmm.  If he ever intends to get a license, I would be a little concerned about the behavior on this blog and others.