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With GOP presidential contender Herman Cain’s presidential candidacy effectively dead, now’s a good time to turn a hard glare on the suddenly surging GOP Presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s racial skeletons. His closet is stuffed with them. The first reminder of that was his off the cuff crack at Harvard that ghetto children are lazy and chronic thieves and should be dumped into menial jobs early on to break their alleged ghetto slothful habits. This racially loaded slur was vintage Gingrich. More than any other major party office contender he has never shied away from spewing some of the most bigoted, racially charged, digs on and off the campaign trail. The crack about ghetto kids having “no habits of working” was a near verbatim repeat of Gingrich’s jab at poor blacks nearly two decades ago.
Then he chided a group of black journalists that blacks were poor because of their “habits.” Gingrich didn’t stop there. The habits that he said held blacks back were that they were too religious, and too law suit happy (meaning mounting legal challenges to discrimination), rather than acquiring the good old habits of business and professional skills to lift them out of poverty. In his ill famed Contract with America he touted as Congressional House Speaker in the 1990s, he moved to encode his obsession with the presumed “habits” of social and personal dysfunctionality that supposedly pervades all black communities when he proposed lopping off all welfare benefits for poor teen mothers and taking some of that money saved and dumping their kids into orphanages.
This harsh throwback to 19th century poor houses and workhouses was mocked, laughed at and sneered at the time by critics but a part of the proposal wove its way into law when then President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act. The law contained rigid time frame limits and top heavy work requirement provisions for welfare recipients.
In a Meet the Press interview last May he did double duty on racial bigotry. He slammed Obama with racist code name calling, branding him the “food stamp president.” He double downed on racist coding by huffing that Obama’s policies would turn the country into Detroit. Gingrich may have preferred to lambaste blacks again for the alleged “bad habits” of the ghetto—sloth, poverty, and dependence on government handouts—but Detroit is universally recognized as the poster city for urban decay, the mere mention of the city was enough to make the point about alleged black dysfunctionality.
While blacks are a favorite target of his, Gingrich has spread his bigotry around. He’s gone after Muslims, railing at the notion of putting a mosque near the twin towers, and endorsed racially profiling them under the guise of fighting terrorism, and likened gay activists to fascists. Gingrich gets an occasional mild rebuke in the press, and quiet cheers from his supporters, whose numbers have climbed with the crash and burn of Bachman, Perry, and Cain, and the fear and loathing of Romney by ultra conservatives. This insures that Gingrich’s blatant bigotry will continue to get headline coverage. If Gingrich forbid should make it to or near the White House race baiting would be back on the nation’s table. Before that happens turn the glare on Gingrich’s bigotry.
by Earl Hutchinson
The Chair of the Sumter South Carolina Tea Party posted — and then quickly pulled — a post on her Facebook page earlier this month that joked about throwing the Obamas out of a helicopter, reports TalkingPointsMemo.com. Shery Lanford Smith posted the joke on her Facebook page on August 11th. The page has since gone “private.” In the joke, the Obamas are on a helicopter talking about how they could make people happy if they threw money out the window. The pilot says: “I could throw both of them out of the window and make 256 million people very happy!” Smith added: “If you’re one of 256 million, PASS IT ON.” Smith reportedly pulled the joke after the Sumter Item contacted her about it.
“It’s just a joke,” she told the Item. “I had no idea it would be an issue.” The Sumter SC Tea Party’s page is now also defunct
SIDEBAR: Bytch please you knew exactly what you where doing and who you wanted to see it. Joke or funny my azz that is straight up bullshyt. How would she feel or the Tea Party members started to come up missing, would you find that as Facebook humour. Oops forgot your educated folks that know what your doing at all times!
In the heat of the political debate over the debt ceiling last week, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) may have crossed the line when he said that being associated with President Obama would be similar to touching a “tar baby”.
“Even if some people say, well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that, they will hold the President responsible,” said Lamborn said Friday during an interview on a Denver radio station. “Now I don’t want to even have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get, you get it, you know… you are stuck and you are part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”
Now critics are questioning his use of that term and are calling it highly offensive to the president.
The term “tar baby” is a reference to 19th-century Uncle Remus stories about Br’er Rabbit but has taken on a negative connotation towards African-Americans.
Lamborn spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen said the comments were a misunderstanding and he apologizes.
“Congressman Lamborn regrets any misunderstanding. He simply meant to refer to a sticky situation or quagmire,” she said.
The Republican congressman is not the first to run into trouble with the phrase. Mitt Romney referred to the Big Dig construction project in Boston as a “tar baby” in 2006 during a fundraiser on the campaign trail. And Sen. John McCain also used the term during his campaign for president. Both men apologized.
The White House has not given any comment on Rep. Lamborn’s remarks.
Finally, a publication has taken responsibility for its actions…after a nudge from readers!
Normally, people talk a good game about weighing in on an issue, protesting, revolting, but this time the people really took it to the online streets and stood up against for an instrumental cause … BLACK WOMEN!!
Psychology Today admitted being in error for putting up the article they dismantled almost as soon as they posted it to their site called, “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women? Why black women, but not black men?”
Color Of Change.org, who define themselves as the nation’s largest African-American online political organization, spearheaded a campaign to have the author removed and/or an apology submitted to the public.
We reported the nonsense May 17, the day they posted it and it was met with contempt and shock, especially when we know that a lot of women that are not black try to enhance their beauty with attributes of black women (i.e. botox, tanning beds, butt implants). Color Of Change posted the disciplinary action that was taken on their site. Most importantly, Satoshi Kanazawa will not be writing for them again. He’s fired! Check it out here.
Maybe we can get together and make it so he’s unable to get published anywhere ever again. United we stand, divided we fall!
Mark Williams, the tea party leader who wrote a blog post this week calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) racist, has been “expelled” from the National Tea Party Federation.
Williams wrote the blog post on Thursday in response to the NAACP’s Tuesday declaration accusing the tea party movement of tolerating racist elements in its midst (see The Upshot’s rundown on the week of attacks and counterattacks here). It was written as an imaginary letter to President Abraham Lincoln and accused the NAACP of being racist for using the word “colored” in its name. When some reacted to it in outrage, Williams deleted it from his website, declaring it time to “move forward.”
The National Tea Party Federation apparently decided to move forward without Williams. Spokesman David Webb said on Face the Nation this morning that Williams and his Tea Party Express had been pushed out because Williams’ posting was “clearly offensive.”
The tea party movement has been growing in influence in American politics since it began as a series of rallies in 2009. Candidates endorsed by local and national organizations that are a part of the coalition have won surprising victories over establishment Republican Party candidates in states like Kentucky and Nevada.
Part of their challenge, however — especially in handling broader debates about what they “are” — is that there isn’t a single Tea Party that speaks for all tea party activists. Rather, there are dozens of national and local organizations that loosely coordinate and all emerged in opposition to Wall Street bailouts that occurred under Presidents Bush and Obama and what they perceive as the Obama Administration’s efforts to expand the role of government. The question of whether or not it also has racial motivations has dogged it since the beginning.
National Tea Party Federation’s expulsion of Williams and the Tea Party Express could be the first of many internal disputes to define the national tea party identity.
thxs Golis
Is Mel Gibson a racist? After his latest public gaffe, it sure seems like it. Gibson, best known for his work in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies has some explaining to do. Gibson made headlines four years ago during a drunken anti-Semitic tirade towards a Malibu cop. Now, Gibson has been battling his baby momma, and she saved the tapes of his other rants. In a voicemail message, Gibson is heard telling her she’s an embarrassment, a f******g pig, a woman who dresses like a slut and if she gets raped by a pack of n**gers, it’s her fault. What’s up with the racist rants Mel? You make your fortune off of the backs of minorities and Jewish people. Mel, get help! You only have yourself to blame for ruining your career.
Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, died Monday at 92. While he was most famous as a master of the Senate’s obscure rules, Byrd wore many hats during his lifetime, including that of Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. What are the job responsibilities of an Exalted Cyclops?
He presides over the Council of the Centaurs and writes quarterly reports to the Grand Giant. In the Klan hierarchy, each local chapter, or Klavern, is led by an Exalted Cyclops. This member is typically elected by his fellow Klansmen and serves a one-year term. According to the original 1867 Prescript of the Ku Klux Klan, the Exalted Cyclops reports to a Grand Giant, or provincial leader; a Grand Dragon, or state director; and the Grand Wizard, or national chair. Below the Cyclops on the org chart were the Grand Magi, the Grand Monk, the Grand Exchequer, the Grand Turk, and, finally, the rank-and-file members known as Ghouls or Knights. (Many of these titles have changed over time, and most of the sub-Cyclops ranks have been eliminated.) The Exalted Cyclops’ responsibilities include presiding over Klavern meetings, initiating new members, and appointing Councils of Centaurs—that’s Klan-speak for a jury—to try and punish wayward Ghouls.
Despite the specific duties laid out in the Klan’s founding documents, there’s no way of knowing exactly what Byrd did as Exalted Cyclops. Klaverns have clashed with the central office throughout the Klan’s history, and there’s plenty of evidence that many chapters operated on a much less formal basis than the Prescript and subsequent manuals suggest. The meeting agenda for a typical Klavern in the 1940s, when Byrd was an Exalted Cyclops, would have included a discussion of black or Jewish outrages against native-born white Protestants. Byrd denied that his members ever discussed violence or even so much as held a parade, and there is no evidence to contradict his claims.
There wasn’t much money in it for Byrd, either, since the Klan operated as a pyramid scheme. Each member paid $10 at initiation (that’s about $115 in current dollars), plus annual fees of $6.80. The national, state, and provincial headquarters each got about a 20 percent slice of the action. The Kleagle, or recruiter, also took a cut. The remainder was used to pay out a nominal salary for the Exalted Cyclops, but it wasn’t enough to live on. (Local Klan leaders had other, more regular jobs.) During the 1920s, when national membership topped 4 million, holding high KKK office could be lucrative—the Grand Dragon of Indiana, for example, earned more than $200,000 in 1924. By the time Byrd came along, however, membership had plunged. He managed to rope in only around 150 members, so his Klavern could not have been making much more than a few hundred dollars annually, with most of that revenue paying for recruitment activities and meeting space.
These titles, while odd to the modern ear, were in line with fraternal organizations of the time. Members of the Masons, the forefathers of the fraternal-order movement, aspire to be Worshipful Masters or Senior Wardens. The Lamb’s Club, which first appeared in the U.S. in 1874, is headed by a Shepherd and a Boy. When the Shriners formed in 1870, their leaders were styled the Potentate and the Chief Rabban.
Today’s Exalted Cyclops is responsible for rehabbing the chapter’s image, as the Klan tries to rebrand itself as a community service organization, civil rights advocate for whites, and semilibertarian political action group. (They do advocate placing all HIV-positive Americans in state-owned hospitals.) Several Klaverns now participate in the Adopt-a-Highway program. The group has also adopted the slogan “America’s Oldest Civil Rights Organization.”
thx, brian palmer
White Philly Cop Claims Black Man Shot Him, Later Confesses. Either someone is a white supremacist or someone was in a neighborhood doing something they had no business. Something happened the night Sgt. Robert Ralston shot himself. That’s right! He shot himself! But in his initial account of the events, he told the world that a black man had shot him in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelhipa called Overbrook. He said he was confronted by two men and one ran, but the other shot him. It isn’t clear whether he tried to claim that the two black men were trying to rob him, assault him, or what they were doing to him, but the result was a gunshot to the shoulder…grazing the shoulder.
Was former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy a racist or was she just being fed derogatory information by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover? That was the question which emerged last week from the release of tapes recorded in 1963. The tapes recorded in interviews with historian Arthur Schlesinger revealed a First Lady who loathed the principal leader of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s calling him “terrible,” “tricky,” and “phony.”
However, the bulk of the information, the First Lady received about Dr. King came directly from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – a man who clearly detested King. Hoover even appeared to secretly suggest to King during that the 1960s that he would publicly reveal an extra-marital affair if the civil rights leader did not commit suicide.
Jacqueline Kennedy’s comments about King came shortly after her husband – President John F. Kennedy – had been assassinated in 1963. They also came after she had been fed information by Hoover that King had made derogatory comments about her husband and joked about aspects of his funeral.
Caroline Kennedy last week explained what she believed to be the origins of the First Lady’s hatred of Dr. King to ABC’s Diane Sawyer: “Obviously J. Edgar Hoover had passed on something that Martin Luther King said about my father’s funeral, to Uncle Bobby and to Mommy. And obviously, she was upset about that,” Caroline Kennedy added. “It shows you the poisonous … activities of J. Edgar Hoover.”
Meanwhile, the British Daily Mail has carried a report suggesting that the former First Lady believed that then Vice President Lyndon John was somehow involved in her husband’s assassination; But ABC contends the Daily Mail report was inaccurate. Jacqueline Kennedy later married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.