Terrance Heath's List: sotomayor

• What bothers me, Anderson, is this whole piece. Democrats say things that are racist or at least racially insensitive about Republicans all the time.

   

  Donna Brazile, who works for your network, once referred to the Republican Party as having a white-boy study.

   

  Howard Dean once said, well, if Republicans were here at this convention, Democrats -- blacks were -- Republicans were here, the only blacks here would be serving tables.

   

  Claire McCaskill running for senate said, George W. Bush let people suffer and die on rooftops in Katrina because they were poor and they were black.

   

  Charlie Rangel, the head of the house and ways committee --

   

  COOPER: You're saying a double standard?
• ELDER: -- said that Republicans want taxes. They don't say "N" word or "s" word anymore, they just say, let's cut taxes. They make blatant racist appeals all the time that you let a Republican do a parody, and the fit hits the shan (ph). It's nuts, Anderson.

• The States' Rights Democratic Party (commonly known as the Dixiecrats) was a segregationist, socially conservative political party in the United States. The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. It split with the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century determined to protect what they saw as the Southern way of life against an oppressive federal government.^[1]

   

  In the period following the Civil War, Reconstruction took place. The Union Army occupied the states of the former Confederacy, enforcing federal law protecting the rights of blacks, many of whom were freed slaves. Reconstruction abruptly ended in 1877, obliterating many of the gains that had been made in securing political and civil rights for blacks. When Reconstruction ended, the so-called "Redemption" occurred, disenfranchisement began anew, and the region gave its political allegiance almost entirely to the Democratic Party, giving it the name the "Solid South."

• In the 1930s, after the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a realignment occurred. Much of the Democratic Party shifted towards economic intervention and support for civil rights and liberties. After the crises of the Great Depression, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War, Southern Democrats began to drift from the mainstream of the party. The formation of the Dixiecrat movement heralded an end to the New Deal coalition. For more than a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but in 1948 many bolted from the party, angered by Harry Truman's efforts to abolish or ameliorate the effects of racial segregation, and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president.

   

  Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage. For example, it was used to refer to those members of the Electoral College who voted for Harry F. Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, and to the white Southern voters and electors who supported George C. Wallace in 1968.

• During the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. The Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota Hubert Humphrey gave a speech urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank, causing thirty five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama to walk out. When President Truman endorsed the civil rights plank, governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was concerned with states' rights.

   

  The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the official Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Benjamin Travis Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him in the 1950 gubernatorial election, but McMath won the position handily.

• Efforts by Dixiecrats to paint other Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates. Among these moderates was Rep. Brooks Hays of the 2nd District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus. Faubus had notoriously used the National Guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a Federal court order.

   

  On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, as well as Alabama (whose Democratic party refused to recognize the Truman-Barkley ticket and had Thurmond on the ballot as its nominee), receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. Henry A. Wallace drew off a nearly equal number of popular votes (1,157,172) from the Democrats' left wing, although he did not carry any states. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman was able to narrowly win election.

• In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised that his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party and it did. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

   

  Senator Strom Thurmond switched parties and became a Republican as a result of his support for the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. Jesse Helms also switched his party registration to Republican in 1970 and won a Senate seat in North Carolina in 1972. Several other Southern senators, such as Richard Russell, Jr. of Georgia and James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi remained in the Democratic Party. They went on to become prominent senators who served multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority and put them in positions of power and prestige.

   

  Into the late 20th century, the South changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. This change, which became quite evident in 1972 with the electoral success of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", peaked with the elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. It was consolidated in 1994 when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

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• "Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
• He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged.
• The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-world analogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby. Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. He refers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycle of ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting. The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distribution of “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”
• As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limited social mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audience had nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class’s political and cultural power than to the perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned.

  • It's this hegemony that's threatened and along with it the belief of working class whites that they might find a place in it, and have "nothing to fear."
• Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.
• Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America. And it’s possible that “beige Americans” will self-identify as “white” in sufficient numbers to push the tipping point further into the future than the Census Bureau projects. But even if they do, whiteness will be a label adopted out of convenience and even indifference, rather than aspiration and necessity. For an earlier generation of minorities and immigrants, to be recognized as a “white American,” whether you were an Italian or a Pole or a Hungarian, was to enter the mainstream of American life; to be recognized as something else, as the Thind case suggests, was to be permanently excluded. As Bill Imada, head of the IW Group, a prominent Asian American communications and marketing company, puts it: “I think in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, [for] anyone who immigrated, the aspiration was to blend in and be as American as possible so that white America wouldn’t be intimidated by them. They wanted to imitate white America as much as possible: learn English, go to church, go to the same schools.”
• Today, the picture is far more complex. To take the most obvious example, whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become “white” in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the United States.

• Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity—except whiteness. “It’s become harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor,” remarks Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, of the Hispanic marketing firm Enlace. “You read casting notices, and they like to cast people with brown hair because they could be Hispanic. The language of casting notices is pretty shocking because it’s so specific: ‘Brown hair, brown eyes, could look Hispanic.’ Or, as one notice put it: ‘Ethnically ambiguous.’”

    

  “I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male,” laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group. Imada and Newman-Carrasco are part of a movement within advertising, marketing, and communications firms to reimagine the profile of the typical American consumer. (Tellingly, every person I spoke with from these industries knew the Census Bureau’s projections by heart.)

    

  “There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment,” Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. “I got a response from a friend—he’s, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I really feel like the hunted. It’s a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I’ve tried to do stuff, but it’s a tough time.’”

• “I always tell the white men in the room, ‘We need you,’” Imada says. “We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It’s okay to be white!

    

  “But people are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control!’”

  • This is the ultimate fear. Losing control, no longer being in the "in group."
• f they’re right—if white America is indeed “losing control,” and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.
• Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire. (Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan both tapped into this white identity politics in the 1990s; today, its tribunes run the ideological gamut, from Jim Webb to Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin.) But the core grievance, in each case, has to do with cultural and socioeconomic dislocation—the sense that the system that used to guarantee the white working class some stability has gone off-kilter.
• Wray is one of the founders of what has been called “white-trash studies,” a field conceived as a response to the perceived elite-liberal marginalization of the white working class. He argues that the economic downturn of the 1970s was the precondition for the formation of an “oppositional” and “defiant” white-working-class sensibility—think of the rugged, anti-everything individualism of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit. But those anxieties took their shape from the aftershocks of the identity-based movements of the 1960s. “I think that the political space that the civil-rights movement opens up in the mid-1950s and ’60s is the transformative thing,” Wray observes. “Following the black-power movement, all of the other minority groups that followed took up various forms of activism, including brown power and yellow power and red power. Of course the problem is, if you try and have a ‘white power’ movement, it doesn’t sound good.”
• The result is a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with “the real America.” (In the Scots-Irish belt that runs from Arkansas up through West Virginia, the most common ethnic label offered to census takers is “American.”) Arguably, this white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.
• This vision of the aggrieved white man lost in a world that no longer values him was given its most vivid expression in the 1993 film Falling Down. Michael Douglas plays Bill Foster, a downsized defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters, railing against the eclipse of the America he used to know. (The film came out just eight years before California became the nation’s first majority-minority state.) Falling Down ends with a soulful police officer apprehending Foster on the Santa Monica Pier, at which point the middle-class vigilante asks, almost innocently: “I’m the bad guy?”

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• Those examples aside, there is a segment of the GOP that brings that attitude to the immigration debate, and it's made up of House members, not the aforementioned marginal figures in the Party. To start, here's Dana Rohrabacher, the Congressman from the pristine beach communities in Southern Los Angeles and Northern Orange County on Real Time with Bill Maher:

    

  "ROHRABACHER: It's bad for the American people to have so many people coming in from overseas, bidding down the wages of our average person, taking - and at the same time, a lot of employers aren't giving the same kind of benefits. So we end up with less tax revenue. We end up with our education system under - collapsing under this pressure. Our health care system collapsing under the pressure.  

  MAHER: You're blaming all that on the Mexicans?

    

  ROHRABACHER: Yes, I am. Yes, I am."

• And we can't forget Michele Bachmann of Minnesota:
   
   

  "One amendment [to a MN legislature budget] was offered that said that drivers license tests should be in English only, and that amendment failed. It's an outrage, it's unthinkable..."

    

  Nevermind that this was in response to a tragic and fatal car accident where the perpetrator was an undocumented immigrant with a phony license, and having an English requirement for a drivers license would send the fake ID business through the roof. Bachmann's unmatched abilities to match bigotry with mere poor logic were also on display last September when she plamed the entire subprime mortgage crisis on the fact that banks didn't just stick to lending money to white folks.

    

  So yes, Ben and Contessa. There is a segment of the Republican party that is clearly racist and will block real immigration reform by appealing to the xenophobic wing of their constituency that keeps them edging past their opponents every two years.

• Let me be crystal clear about this. ACORN’s 2008 voter registration program, in which we helped 1.3 million Latinos and African-Americans complete voter registration applications, would not have been the subject of so many attacks and hysteria if we’d been conducting it in mostly-white affluent suburbs. But because the program targeted some of the most marginalized constituencies in the United States, it not only posed a threat to the status quo, but it tapped into deeply held suspicions and stereotypes about people of color. ACORN became the proxy for “Black people are coming to take your stuff.”

  And conservative activists can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to us. We’re the boogeyman in their closet, the organization onto which they can project all the manifestations of their lizard-brain fear of people with skin darker then theirs.

  It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t used by conservatives as a way of distracting huge sections of the American people from some of the practices that affect all working families, not just those of color. The folks at News Corpse make this point: 

•  Let me be crystal clear about this. ACORN’s 2008 voter registration program, in which we helped 1.3 million Latinos and African-Americans complete voter registration applications, would not have been the subject of so many attacks and hysteria if we’d been conducting it in mostly-white affluent suburbs. But because the program targeted some of the most marginalized constituencies in the United States, it not only posed a threat to the status quo, but it tapped into deeply held suspicions and stereotypes about people of color. ACORN became the proxy for “Black people are coming to take your stuff.”

  And conservative activists can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to us. We’re the boogeyman in their closet, the organization onto which they can project all the manifestations of their lizard-brain fear of people with skin darker then theirs.

  It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t used by conservatives as a way of distracting huge sections of the American people from some of the practices that affect all working families, not just those of color. The folks at News Corpse make this point: 

• “While Beck and his ilk get so worked up about an organization working to help low income communities - even though the things they allege produce no harm except to ACORN itself - these same guardians of virtue don’t seem to care much about the criminal behavior of defense contractors who have been responsible for outfitting our soldiers with faulty gear, electrocuting them in their showers, and bilking American taxpayers for billions of dollars.”

•  Make no mistake. ACORN members, regular people from places like Watts in Los Angeles, Apopka in Orlando, Anacostia in DC, Phillips in Minneapolis, or Lents in Portland (to name just some of the neighborhoods in which ACORN members live), stand up every day for low- and moderate-income families and families of color. And whether it is addressing the devastation of the foreclosure crisis, the need for health care for all, calling for a raise in the minimum wage, or helping rebuild from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, ACORN members will continue to do so, no matter what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Michelle Bachmann has to say about us.

  So get ready for more whining from the winguts because we’re just getting warmed up.

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• So shrill were the criticisms that it is no wonder that the party of "NO" is dwindling into the party of no one!
• Today few Americans have empathy (pardon the expression, conservatives) for what's left of the GOP, and no wonder. The notion that Judge Sotomayor practices "reverse discrimination" is absurd and reflects the Republican tendency to use scare tactics.
• At one point Judge Sotomayor said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who just hasn't lived that life."
• Conservatives have seized on this statement as evidence that she is racist. They do not understand that this is an aspirational statement, not a condemnation of white males. It is also an incomplete representation of what she said. The judge went on to say, "I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate."
• The decision relied on precedent, not on judicial activism. The case, known as the New Haven 20, is now before the Supreme Court.

  • If the decision relied on precedent, then reversing the city's decision would have been judcial activism. Conservatives seem to want judicial activism in some cases but not in others. It's in line with their view of the courts as little more than functioning to rubber stamp the present will of the majority.
• She said, "Court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know this is on tape and I shouldn't say that because we don't make law." But they leave out or dismiss the follow on sentence, "I'm not promoting it, I'm not advocating it..." She went on to clarify her comment, "When you're on the district court, you're looking to do justice in the individual case, so you're looking much more to the facts of the case than you are to the application of the law because the application of the law is not precedential, so the facts control. On the court of appeals, you're looking to how the law is developing so that it will then be applied to a broad class of cases. So you're always thinking about the ramifications of this ruling on the next step of the development of the law."

  • It is perhaps in these individual cases where a diverse judiciary can lends a deeper understanding of the facts of the case. A judge like Sotomayor may bring her experience and understanding as a Latina as an asset when considering a case, if it gives her understanding of the facts of the case based on her cultural knowledge that her colleagues without that background might simply not know.
• Judge Sotomayor's life story is powerful and compelling. Raised in a Bronx housing project, she has had to overcome great obstacles to achieve success. Unless something more serious comes up, Judge Sotomayor will take her place on the Supreme Court. She will be the third woman and first Hispanic to serve her country as a justice. She is living the American dream.

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• Rush got the show rolling by praising Sotomayor's inspiring and tremendous personal story, but felt impelled to point out that she accomplished everything in her life during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. We're not sure why he wanted to point this out -- perhaps to knock down liberal claims that Sotomayor can travel through time? Anyway, Rush counseled that Republicans should absolutely "go to the mat" in opposing Sotomayor, explaining: "I doubt that Sotomayor can be stopped; she should be. She is a horrible pick. She is the antithesis of a judge, by her own admission and in her own words."
• "She is a hack  like he is a hack, in the sense that the court is a place to be used to  make policy -- not to adjudicate cases, not to adjudicate constitutional  law, but to make policy."
• "You know, Obama talks about 'we  need people with empathy.' It's not even about empathy, folks; that's just  cover. He just wants one of his own on the court to do his dirty work from  the highest court in the land, and she fits the bill."
• Now, when Rush said that Sotomayor is a "hack" because she views the court as "a place to be used to make policy, not to adjudicate cases," he was referring to a 2005 panel discussion in which Sotomayor said the "court of appeals is where policy is made." Rush aired audio of her comments, saying that she is the embodiment of a judge that is all wrong for the high court, because she stands for "policy-making." Actually, Sotomayor was explaining the differences between judging at the district and federal appeals courts. As the legal observers at Volokh Conspiracy explained: "As presented in the clip, it seems to be nothing more than an observation that, as a practical matter, many policy disputes are resolved in the federal courts of appeals. This is an indisputably true observation. Moreover, the fact that many policy disputes are resolved in federal appellate courts does not mean that judges are resolving those cases on policy grounds." But, as a rule, saying something that is "indisputably true" does not dissuade the right from attacking you -- they actually seem to view it as more of a challenge -- so be sure that we'll hear more about this one from Rush.
• Then Rush turned his attention to a speech Sotomayor gave in which she extolled the importance of diversity in the courts in which she offered this comment, which has been isolated for criticism by the conservative echo chamber: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Rush offered his thoughts on this: "So here you have a racist. You might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist. And the libs, of course, say that minorities cannot be racists because they don't have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one." After reading extensively from Jeffrey Rosen's disingenuous New Republic piece calling Sotomayor's intelligence into question, Rush said that "she's not the brain that they're portraying her to be. She's not a constitutional jurist. She is an affirmative action case extraordinaire."

  • Somehow, it is not racist to require Sotomayor and any other minority to disavow and divorce themselves from their heritage, identity, experience, lest any of that "distort" their work, in the name of "objectivity." Only white, male, christian, heterosexuals seems to be except from this.
    
    So, how is it not racist to essentially say, "We are the norm. You must forget who you are and emulate us?"

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• Hate speech is different. It's when you accuse the President of the United States of being a socialist, a terrorist, a Muslim, an anti-Semite, or a traitor based on lies and distortions. And it becomes particularly meaningful when the venom comes not from the radical fringe -- as it often does from the Left -- but from the heart of the party leadership -- as it often does from the Right.

    

  This weekend, the Young Republicans will meet to elect their national chair. Audra Shay, a 38 year old military veteran and mother from Louisiana is considered one of the front-runners for the job. A few days ago, she moderated a session on her Facebook page where a participant called Obama "a commie and a mad coon." Shay's response to the young man was to urge him on. "You tell em Eric," she said.
• When a number of participants criticized her for not condemning the racist statement, Shay responded by "defriending" all of those who were critical which blocked them from further participation in the conversation. That is hate speech being endorsed from the highest levels of the party.

• It is eerily reminiscent of Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman sending a CD including the cute song "Barack the Magic Negro" as a Christmas gift to the members of the Republican National Committee last year. That clever song had been played repeatedly by Rush Limbaugh for much of the prior year. Limbaugh was picked in a recent Gallup Poll of Republicans as the person who best represents the party -- a title he also claims for himself.

    

  At the time, Saltsman was a front-runner in the race for Chairman of the Republican National Committee -- grownup version. He was edged out by Michael Steele at the end but this is another example of stupidity, racism and hate speech coming from the top.

• There is nothing wrong with criticizing people in power. It is essential in a democracy and our ability to do so has helped make our country great. But there are ways to do it hatefully and ways to do it with dignity. It is the hatred and anger that seem to ooze so effortlessly from the leaders of the Republican Party that are so disconcerting.

    

  It is up to all of us who believe that our country needs a dignified and credible Conservative voice to seize control back from the slimers. If we can't, then the Libertarians should be viewed as the credible alternative to Liberal Democrats. They actually believe in small government and fiscal responsibility.

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• A few days ago, the national Young Republicans elected 38-year old Audra Shay as their new chair. As I wrote last week, Ms. Shay is an Arkansas native who now lives in Louisiana and was endorsed for the position by her governor, Bobby Jindal.

    

  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, she gained some unwelcome notoriety during the week prior to her election for cheering on a participant in a conversation on her Facebook page who referred to President Obama as "a commie and a coon." Participants in the conversation who criticized her response were immediately defriended and blocked from the website. Eric, the commie and coon guy, was not.

  • This suggests that SHay's comments were indeed in response to the "coon" remarks, since they were defended and critics purged from her Facebook page. The "coon" commenter was not.

• This and other arguably racist comments she has made caused a number of Young Republicans, including John McCain's daughter Meghan, to encourage her to drop out of the race. Instead she won election by a comfortable margin after scrubbing her Facebook page in an effort to destroy the evidence of her past remarks.

    

  The next day marked the beginning of the confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a 17-year Federal court veteran who has been nominated by Obama for the Supreme Court.

• Ranking Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama -- who himself was rejected for a Federal judgeship by a GOP controlled Senate committee years ago based on his numerous apparently racist comments -- humiliated himself with his line of questioning expressing his surprise and disappointment that Sotamayor didn't vote along with her fellow Puerto Rican in the Ricci case. His clear implication was that it is surprising that all judges of Puerto Rican descent don't think and vote alike.

    

  Can you imagine a Senator expressing surprise that Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Breyer don't vote alike because they are both white males? Can you imagine repeatedly citing a line about "wise Latina women" that Sotomayor used in speeches eight years ago as a reason to repeatedly express concerns that she would be biased in favor of minorities who claim they have been victims of discrimination?

  • The irony here is that during the campaign and after the election, conservatives critized the likes of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice for "supporting Obama because he's black," essentially for "thinking like other voters of African descent." Conservative should be clear when they prever minorities to think as a herd and when they prefer minorities to think for themselves. (Of course, it part of the bigger trope: that minorities are thinking for themselves when they vote for and support Republicans and are thinking like sheep when they vote for and support Democrats.)

• The next day, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) -- who you may remember as Senator John Ensign's spiritual advisor and marriage counselor -- did his best Ricky Ricardo imitation in a response to a Sotomayor answer telling her that "she had a lot of 'splainin' to do."

    

  After three days of hearings, the Republicans on the committee have revealed themselves to be so obsessed with race and bias that their efforts to transfer their own bigotry and "concerns" to Sotomayor has come across as childish, transparent, dishonest, and scary.

• The Republicans are a decade late and a trillion dollars short. There just aren't enough racists and bigots still around to give them a base on which to build. Instead of opting for facts, reason, and dignity they continue to flail away at those pesky Black and Hispanic tar babies. The harder they punch, the more ensnared they become in the sticky, unyielding mess.

    

  That may play well in the former Confederate states that voted against Obama and with a smattering of proud and closet racists here and there.

    

  But we all heard those Uncle Remus stories growing up.

    

  And we all know how they end.

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• As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?
• As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?
• One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called "stereotype threat," and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

  • A stereotype is, if you a minority, is what the dominant culture has told you -- sometimes in whispers and soemtimes in screams -- about who you are, almost from birth. You absorb it on some level even before you can talk, or even understand if someone tried to explain to you what was happening.
    
    It becomes a source of shame, locked away in the back of your mind, keeping you afraid that it might really be who you are. And perhaps discouraging you from trying to be more, lest you fail and confirm it.

• Remarkably, the power of stereotype threat was enough to overcome true aptitude: even people who, according to screening tests conducted before the experiment, generally had good working memories and weren't prone to anxiety — in short, great test-takers — performed worse after being reminded of their age. The power of stereotype is so strong that it can overwhelm many of our other traits, which means that what you learned in kindergarten is true: you're only as good as you expect to be.

     

  But the good news is that you can flip this particular psychological coin on its opposite side: recent research has found that positive stereotype reinforcement may be just as powerful as any negative threat. In a study published in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Indiana University psychologists found that women's performance on math tests did not suffer as researchers had expected, even when the typical "women are bad at math" stereotype was invoked, as long as a positive stereotype (say, college students are good at math) was presented at the same time. In this case, that means that the aged are likely to have better-functioning memories when they are told, for instance, that older people "have more experience" or "have seen it all before."

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• The event, on March 31, was devoted to the Bill of Rights, but Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives.

  “Today there is much focus on our rights,” Justice Thomas said. “Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights.”

  “I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances,” he said. “Shouldn’t there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?”

  He gave examples: “It seems that many have come to think that each of us is owed prosperity and a certain standard of living. They’re owed air-conditioning, cars, telephones, televisions.”

  Those are luxuries, Justice Thomas said.

  “I have to admit,” he said, “that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how the dishes were magically cleaned.”

• He was asked how his religious faith influenced his work on the court.

  “I think that it really gives content to the oath that you took,” Justice Thomas said. “You say, ‘So help me God.’ ”

  “There are some cases that will drive you to your knees,” he added. “In those moments you ask for strength and wisdom to have the right answer and the courage to stand up for it. Beyond that, it would be illegitimate, I think, and a violation of my oath to incorporate my religious beliefs into the decision-making process.”

  The questions from students were read to Justice Thomas, and the first one seemed to throw him off. “Since the Civil War, what has changed the way Americans view the Constitution the most and why?” an unidentified student asked.

  Justice Thomas gave a rambling response, touching on the Fourteenth Amendment, the rights of freed slaves, the application of parts of the Bill of Rights to the states and Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that endorsed the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

  “I’m sure there are other things that have happened,” he said, wrapping up his answer. “So I would have to say just off the top of my head the Fourteenth Amendment. And I bet you someone’s going to hear that and say, well, no, it’s the dormant commerce clause or something.”

  • Should religion -- something almost inextricably bound up in culture and identity -- inform a judges decision? What if that judge was Jewish or Muslim and sitting on the Supreme Court? (And there I have just invoked an image that will fill conservatives with dread. But will also inspire a demand that non-Christian judges also swear that their religious beliefs will not "distort" their rulings and consideration of the facts in a case.)

• Justice Thomas is an odd duck. Unlike the four other conservative members of the Supreme Court, Thomas makes no bones about his desire to repeal the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era and return America to the utopian days of the Hoover Administration:
   

  In a series of decisions beginning with U.S. v. Lopez, Justice Thomas would have restricted Congress' power to enact economic regulation to a point unheard of since the Great Depression. It's difficult to count the laws which would cease to exist under Thomas' approach, but one commentator lists "the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws" as likely suspects. In Clarence Thomas' America, whites-only lunch counters are permitted, but basic labor protections are forbidden.
• When you set aside the vitriol, however, Thomas' remarks are quite probative into just how the conservative mindset differs from that of other Americans. Conservatives like Thomas start from a position that deprivation is the state of nature, and that any upward departure from the most bare bones lifestyle has to be earned. Two things follow from this mindset. The first is that basic human rights like freedom from discrimination or the maxim that a fair wage is the price of labor have no place in the law. The second is the fallacy which teaches that if freedom from deprivation must be earned through one's own efforts, than those who are free from deprivation must have actually earned that freedom themselves.

  • The conservatism embodied in Clarence Thomas, who has, I guess, come closest to what the Senate Judiciary Committee would like Sotomayor to emulate, would by its very nature mean a lot more economic pain in the midst of hte current downturn for the poor and even the middle class (who would soon be joining the ranks of the poor).
    
    But Thomas' "self-evasion of the mind" is merely what it required of a minoirty in his party: he has all but divorced himself from his past, his background, except for that which fits the script.
• Progressives believe something different. First, while we do not believe -- as Thomas suggests in his remarks -- that everyone has a fundamental right to own a television, we do believe that there are certain basic needs which one is entitled to have fulfilled merely because they are a human being. Foremost among these rights are those things which enable people to take their lives into their own hands: education so that they may compete in the workforce, nutrition and medical care so that they do not grow up stunted physically or mentally, basic access to modern communications so that they can speak with potential employers and discover the opportunities that are available to them, and the ability to be judged according to their accomplishments -- not because of traits they are unable to control. Clarence Thomas escaped from poverty because he worked very hard to do so, but he also escaped because a generous society rightly chose to reward his talent and hard work with scholarships; and Justice Thomas is wrong to forget this.
• And this, of course, leads to the second thing that differentiates progressives from conservatives. Progressives understand that hard work is an essential part of accomplishment, but we also know that wholly unaccomplished men and women enjoy stunning opulence not because of their own efforts, but because they were lucky enough to be born into the right family. Policy cannot eliminate the inequalities bred from luck, but progressives understand that a just society cannot allow birth to become destiny. We understand that by investing in education, health care and a basic safety net we can ensure that hard working Americans achieve whatever their talents will allow them -- even if they were born poor -- and we understand that the entire nation is enriched when its most talented members rise to the top regardless of what their parents did for a living.
• His America is a nation of silent children marching lockstep behind the flag and the cross, or cast aside because of their unwillingness or inability to do so. It is not an appealing vision, but it is the vision conservatives offer, and I have nothing but faith that America will reject it.

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• "A typical street whore." "A bunch of ghetto thugs." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion."

  These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative 'Free Republic' blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.

  The thread was accompanied by a photo of Michelle Obama speaking to Malia that featured the caption, "To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds."

  Though this may sound like the sort of thing one might read on an Aryan Nation or white power website, they actually appeared on what is commonly considered one of the prime online locations for U.S. Conservative grassroots political discussion and organizing - and for a short time, the comments seemed to have the okay of site administrators.

  • Even she may not care to own it, but this is precisely the wing of the party that Palin was brought on to whip into a frenzy, which she did quite skillfully. The entire GOP campaign played into that brand of bigotry with carefully coded soundebytes about wondering if Obama "gets Americans" the same way they do -- from the barely concealed racism of the most belligerent Palin/McCain rally-goer to the more nuanced Peggy Noonan questioning now whether Obama loved America, but how.

• "Could you imagine what world leaders must be thinking seeing this kind of street trash and that we paid for this kind of street ghetto trash to go over there?" wrote one commenter.

  "They make me sick .... The whole family... mammy, pappy, the free loadin' mammy-in-law, the misguided chillin', and especially 'lil cuz... This is not the America I want representin' my peeps," wrote another.

• A note on the front of Free Republic reads, "Free Republic does not advocate or condone racism, violence, rebellion, secession, or an overthrow of the government," but one comment on the thread read, "This disgusting display makes me more and more eager for the revolution," while another read, "I never actually wnated [sic] to be a pistol before but..."

  After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender's email address intact.

• Only after significant negative attention from a host of left wing political blogs did the maintainers of the Free Republic site place the thread under review for a second time, before finally pulling it.

  In the wake of the controversy, some Free Republic posters complained about the vitriol.

  One poster by the name of "fullchroma" wrote, "To Jim Robinson: The recent uptick here in racist vitriol, aimed at Barrack, Michelle and their children has made me wonder if I belong. My objection to Obama has nothing to do with skin tone. Is the ugly stereotype of Conservative racism true?"

  Another, going by the name of TChris, wrote, "Free Republic is a political discussion forum. It SHOULD be beneath us as a group to stoop to such juvenile tactics as I see increasing here lately. Do we REALLY have to insult Mrs. Obama's appearance like a clique of nasty 14-year-old girls?"

  But such opinions were not shared by all. Said Roses of Sharon, "Poor libs .... Too late, the battle has been joined."

  • This is a wing of the party that GOP leadership, having adopted, nurtured, and pandered to it must at once mollify and minimize, if they want a chance at returning to power in the future.

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• A cartoon in the New York Post newspaper has triggered accusations that it is a racist depiction of President Barack Obama. 

  Commentators denounced the cartoon, while campaigner Rev Al Sharpton vowed to picket the newspaper's headquarters. 

  Cartoonist Sean Delonas drew police shooting dead a chimp, while remarking "they'll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill". 

  The paper has defended the cartoon as a "parody of a current news event". <!-- E SF -->

    <!-- S IANC -->    <!-- E IANC --> On Tuesday President Obama signed into law a massive, $787bn (£548bn) economic stimulus package. 

  The plan failed to achieve Republican backing and came after weeks of political wrangling. 

• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backpedaled from his reverse racist slur of Supreme Court designate Sonia Sotomayor as a racist. A defiant Rush Limbaugh didn't. There's a reason. For more than four decades the reverse racist tag has been the most potent weapon in the arsenal of ultra-conservatives and closet bigots to torpedo affirmative action, cower elected officials and judicial appointees into silence or tepid support of civil rights and poverty related issues and court decisions, and deflect attention from the continued political and economic dominance of well-to-do white males. Obama's election did not change the racial power dynamic in America.
• There is still only a handful of African-American, Latino or Asian CEOs who run Fortune 500 companies or who sit on their Boards of Directors. The overwhelming majority of top, middle and lower corporate managers are white males. There is only one African-American in the Senate. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that the increase in the number of minorities on the federal bench has been frozen during the Bush years. Minorities still make up a small percentage of state and federal judges. The first Latina on the High Court won't change that. Laws and public policy are still made, shaped, and enforced by white males.
• Sotomayor and any minority perceived to be a threat to corporate and political white male dominance will be branded a reverse racist. This is not new.
• The term reverse discrimination seeped into the official lexicon in 1969 when conservatives took the first light swipe at alleged racial favoritism in government contracting programs that mandated hiring goals and timetables for minorities. The term didn't fully resonate at that time. There was still the glow and goodwill from the 1960s civil rights movement. And then President Richard Nixon backed affirmative action programs that included minority hiring and contracting quotas in the trades. The mood abruptly changed in the late 1970s with the first full blown assault on affirmative action. The assault was fueled by the notion that white males were fast losing ground to hordes of unqualified, incompetent blacks, Latinos and women in business, the professions and the trades. Reverse discrimination or reverse racism now became a staple in the public vocabulary. In its Bakke case ruling in 1978 the Supreme Court virtually banned the use of quotas for minorities in hiring and education, under the guise of ending reverse discrimination.
   
   Since then the faintest hint of a tilt toward minorities in a corporate hiring program, or a university hiring or scholarship program has drawn instant howls of reverse discrimination and piles of lawsuits. The chill on affirmative action programs partly worked. Republican and Democratic presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton, vowed to end or modify affirmative action programs in government agencies. Much of the public now firmly believed that minorities were getting unfair advantage in business and the professions, and that this and they were racist.

• In private meetings with moderate Democrat and conservative Republican Senators, the judge slightly pulled back from the reference she made to herself as a wise Latina in a 2001 speech. She called it a poor choice of words. This won't be the last mea culpa she'll be required to make for her alleged racism before she's confirmed. She'll be under tremendous pressure to assure Senators that she'll play it strictly by the moderate and conservative playbook on any and all decisions that even remotely touch on race and class issues on the bench.

    

  This is the terrible price that a wise Latina or anyone else tagged as a reverse racist will have to pay. And will continue to pay.

  • If is a way of making a person of color "watch what she says," because the reverse racist label is nearly as hard to shake and refute as the racist label, and shouldn't be loosely thrown around any more than the other.

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• Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Chip Forrester denounced an email sent out by Republican staffer Sherri Goforth depicting Barack Obama as two eyes peering out of a black background.

   

   

  “Is this indicative of what Senate Republicans think about our Commander-in-Chief?” Forrester asked. “This email is reprehensible, insults the office of the President, and is embarrassing to all Tennesseans regardless of political party.”

   

  Sen. Diane Black’s staffer sent an email with an attached collage of traditional presidential portraits, except that President Obama was depicted as two eyes peering from a black background.

   

  “When I ran for Chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, I said that no longer would our Party sit idly by and allow Republicans to make bigoted attacks on Democrats in our state and our country. Well, once again, a Tennessee Republican has earned national attention for a racist, hate-filled attack on our President,” Forrester said.
• Unfortunately, Sherri Goforth’s email joins the list of shameful episodes by Tennessee Republicans, from the infamous “Birds of a Feather” (PDF) direct mail piece that featured black crows with the heads of Barack Obama and Rep. Nathan Vaughn (who is also African-American), to the “Barack the Magic Negro” song that former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chip Saltsman sent to RNC members during his failed campaign for RNC chair.

• A state Republican activist has admitted to and apologized for calling a gorilla that escaped from the Riverbanks Zoo Friday an "ancestor" of First Lady Michelle Obama.

  A screen capture of the comment, made on the Internet site Facebook, was obtained by FITSNews, the website of South Carolina politico Will Folks.

  The image shows a post by an aide to state Attorney General Henry McMaster describing Friday morning's gorilla escape at Columbia's Riverbanks Zoo.

  Longtime SCGOP activist and former state Senate candidate Rusty DePass responded with the comment, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

• We spoke with DePass over the phone Friday night. He said, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

  "You know, I don't think there's anything funny about that comment," says Coble. "That is the First Lady of the United States. We've had a long tradition of wonderful first ladies, and I don't think any of them deserve that type of comment."

  DePass took his apology a bit further. He also said, "The comment was hers. Not mine," saying the first lady made statements in the media recently saying we are all descendents of apes.

  But an Internet search for those comments turned up no news articles of the like.

  "I don't know of any," says Coble.

  All of that aside, the mayor wants a clear-cut apology.

• The picture you're looking at on the right was allegedly sent from Sherri Goforth, research analyst executive assistant for Sen. Diane Black, on May 28 via e-mail, under the headline "Historical Keepsake Photo." We've never seen President Obama in person, but we're pretty sure those pair of spooked white eyes against a black background don't quite do him justice. In fact, one could argue that forwarding an e-mail like this to 20 of your friends makes you look like an out-and-out bigot.

• I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.

   

  When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

• I talked to my local rep, Mark Maddox about it, and described the picture to him at a recent fund raising event. I think he was as appalled as I was. I was going to post it last week but there was a death in my family and I had to think about it.

   

  Because it made me mad.

   

  But, you know, people need to know that this stuff is going on. I would be just as angry if a democratic staffer had sent it.

   

  Dammit, Tennessee, haven’t we moved past this kind of crap. I’m serious.

   

  Leaders and their staffs need to be just that. LEADERS! And they have done a pretty suspect job this year if you ask me.

   

  We live in a world of uncertainty and a lot of hurt. In Tennessee, it’s more important to pass dog bills than the budget. But, I guess we can find the time to send out junk, racist emails. Jeez.

   

  Racist imagery matters.