Politics of Hate category archive

Because it worked so well the last time.

At least they are showing their true colors.

PoliticalProf explains:

President Obama’s offense is that he is not supporting the tea party’s political views.

That will simplify the issue for you immensely.

At SeattlePI, Joel Connelly goes bird-watching and espies Jim Crow’s current aerie.

The new generation of Jim Crow Republicans (e.g. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas) don’t have the options once available to Dixie’s Jim Crow Democrats. They can’t hold whites-only primaries. They can’t require lengthy “literacy tests.” They can’t impose a poll tax.

They can, however, restrict early, and particularly Sunday, voting. They can require government ID and then make it difficult — particularly for elderly non-drivers — to get. They can make minority voters spend hours waiting at understaffed polling places.

They can discourage college students by not accepting college-issued photo ID. They can gerrymander legislative and U.S. House districts to such ends as minimizing Hispanics in Texas’ congressional delegation.

From the party of Lincoln to the party of stiffing Lincoln.

Nixon’s Republican Party tried to harness hate with the odious Southern Strategy. Come 45 years and the hate has harnessed them.

Do read the rest.

. . . its own polity.

I’m so old, I can remember with North Carolina was considered the beacon of the New South.

Indeed.

New York City police are investigating swastikas and hate speech scrawled on a statue of Jackie Robinson and a teammate outside Brooklyn’s minor league baseball stadium.

A manager at MCU Park noticed the defacement Wednesday morning. The words “Heil Hitler,” an expletive and racist epithets were scrawled on the statue in black marker. Workers later covered up the vandalism.

Living their fatal fantasies.

Thom takes on the Republican hate and fear machine.

Sadly, hate will continue to outsell truth.

Steve King appeals to his fellow travelers.

Via TPM.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Dick Polman takes a look at the fuss over Rolling Stone’s “Boston Bomber” cover.

Anyone who pays the least attention to Rolling Stone knows that it long ago branched out from covering “the rock scene’ (if, indeed, there is such a thing any more) to covering economic and social issues.

Anyone who read it from the beginning (and that’s when I used to read it) also knows that it’s never been a “fanzine.”

His reaction is pretty much the same as mine: this is a cavalcade of stupid, a tempest over non-existent tea in a broken tea party pot. A nugget:

Those who object to the Rolling Stone cover seem not to realize that the exact same photo dominated the front page of The New York Times on May 5 – yet there was no mass outcry about “glorifying” the kid, and nobody called for a boycott of that day’s paper. The current critics would probably say, “Yeah, well, that was different. The Times reports the news. Rolling Stone is a music magazine.” Wrong. Rolling Stone has featured long-form journalism since the 1970s, and the Tsarnaev article is the product of several months’ in-depth reporting.

And that’s not even the best nugget. Follow the link for more.

Will Bunch returns from vacation and posts an angry but quite rational reaction to Trayvon Martin’s stalker’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card and, as seems common at Bunch’s place, the comments turn into a cesspool of racism.

What is it about newspaper story comments pages that so attracts racists?

Do, please, read the post and the comments.

See how George Zimmerman’s defenders think.

One standard for you, two for me.

Just think about it.

Via Contradict Me.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long and detailed analysis of the legal reasoning leading to George Zimmerman’s getting away with murder.

Elmer Smith reduces it to one question:

Does the law allow you to kill someone because you are losing a fight that you started?

What Atrios said.

At Asia Times, Matthew Harwood wonders why law enforcement focuses on the American Muslim community when evidence shows that the danger of domestic terrorism lies elsewhere. A nugget.

The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if unfortunate, counter-terrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more prone to political violence than other Americans.

This is simply not true.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents” between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or groups of perpetrators.”

Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within US borders, and which caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century.

Don’t think it could have anything with how easy it is to single out persons who are different, now, do you?

Know them by the company they keep.

Lexington’s ban on flying the Confederate flag — and other non-governmental colors — from city-owned light poles does not violate a heritage group’s right of free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in upholding a lower court’s 2012 ruling.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, Virginia Division, sued the city after its passage of the ordinance in 2011. U.S. District Judge Samuel Wilson dismissed the lawsuit in June 2012, calling the city’s ban “eminently reasonable” because it banned all non-government flag displays, not just the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

You know my opinion of the Stars and Bars, the cause it represents, and those who would honor it.

Just in case you don’t, it is the flag of slavery, oppression, and Jim Crow. Any other attempted explanation is sophistry and delusion.

This was a good decision. The city of Lexington should not have to participate in promulgating the propaganda of sophistry and delusion.

(Bonus: Follow the link and read the comments–and those are the ones that were passed by the mods.)