Government Goons & Who’s a Citizen

Those crazy “Birthers” are getting an awful lot of ink and air time lately, offering good comedy fodder for late night television while occasionally making regular people turn away in revulsion. Like the “Teabaggers” weren’t hilarious enough to use the name of a sexual weirdness as their moniker, or to publicize their racist rants and ridiculous charges against the President, after being the very same wackos who accused those who questioned any illegal act of the last administration by calling them traitors.

CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

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Filed under 9-11, Barack Obama, COM, History, Humor, Intelligence, John McCain, Media, Military, Outrage, Racism, Slime Machine | Comment (0)

Early Voting: The Haters Can’t Win

My husband, grandson and I voted Monday evening at the library in our little town of about 750 people in western North Carolina. Grandson got to register and vote at the same time, turned 18 in May. He registered Independent – probably so he could be the ‘rebel’ in our household – but his heart’s in the right place.

One of the reasons we voted Monday instead of Tuesday (when the library’s One-Stop will be open until 9 instead of 5) is because of what happened to Obama supporters in Fayetteville on Sunday. Not only were McCain/Palin supporters stationed to shout epithets and harass the long voting lines after Obama’s speech, but about 30 of the attendees of that rally got their tires slashed. Very ugly.

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Filed under Campaigns, Hate Speech, Outrage, Politics of Hate, Racism, Voting Rights | Comment (0)

Political Elephants in Black and White

As my household prepares to vote tomorrow in the NC primary, I’ll make note here of Frank Rich’s enlightening op-ed in the New York Times Sunday, The All-White Elephant in the Room.

Rich takes a refreshingly detached look at the current situation in the Presidential candidate fields on both sides of the party divide, that stupid game I like to call “Dueling Religious Bigots.” In particular, Rich dares to take on John McCain’s coveted endorsement by the right-wing religious ‘base’ wannabe spokesperson, the Reverend John Hagee. Who stars in the amazing (and highly disgusting) video below, that everyone who reads this should watch – if for no other reason than to remind you WHY Democrats very much need to win big this November…

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Filed under Campaigns, Hate Speech, Hypocrisy, Party Primaries, Politics of Hate, Presidential Candidates, Racism, Religion | Comment (0)

Holocaust Memorial Day

Israel Remembers

“We will never forget, we will never hide, and we will never stop asking ourselves every morning what we must do to prevent what happened to ever repeat itself.”

So said Israeli President Shimon Peres at the main ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned his audience that anti-semitism is on the rise across the world today, and that insidious forms of Holocaust denial were asserting themselves even in nations that have every reason to remember with circumspection what occurred in Europe 63 years ago.

Iran’s quixotic dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust is a “myth,” and hosted a revisionist Holocaust conference in 2006. Given that Israel and Iran are currently at a heightened state of tensions – complete with bravado from Hillary Clinton about “nuclear umbrellas” and US defense of Israel (which has plenty of its own nuclear weapons) – it’s worthwhile for those who weren’t born when this horror occurred to take a long, hard look at reality.

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Filed under Anti-Semitism, Eugenics, History, Memorials, Politics of Hate, Racism, Religion, Science, War Crimes | Comment (0)

Hate: When is Enough Enough?

On the last day of November, 2007, a tense standoff in Rochester, New Hampshire occurred when a man walked into Hillary Clinton’s local campaign headquarters, claimed he had a bomb strapped to himself with duct tape, and took two campaign volunteers hostage. It lasted for hours before he finally allowed the hostages to leave and walked out to unstrap the “bomb” to turn himself in.

There has been quite a lot of talk in the political blogosphere about how hate speech in the ‘normal’ course of politics as usual can incite unstable people to commit terrible crimes. And as people living near the economic edge begin to fall off, we aren’t seeing any slowdown of bizarre acts and mass murders. But in politics, the hate is just getting warmed up.

On the right (RedState and FreeRepublic) the denizens were hoarding popcorn and speculating that Clinton had arranged for this attention-grab herself, liberally (ha!) salted with the usual right-wingnut hate speech we’re so used to from that corner. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has of course embraced “The Politics of Hate” as his theme for the election season.

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Filed under Barack Obama, Campaigns, Hate Speech, Hillary Clinton, Media, Party Primaries, Politics of Hate, Presidential Candidates, Racism, Religion | Comment (0)

“War on Christmas” Gets Real

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a NYC Subway Attack Possible Hate Crime. Seems a group of overage juvenile delinquents decided to attack two men and two women in a subway car, apparently for being Jewish.

The criminal types doing the attacking have been described as your basic cowardly hoodlums. One was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty last year to “attempted robbery as a hate crime” for yelling racial epithets while assaulting two black teens in Brooklyn. This time they yelled anti-Semitic remarks at their targets, who had the tumerity to respond “Happy Chanukah” to their assailant’s greeting of “Merry Christmas.”

The victims were helped by ‘A Hero’ named Hassan Askari, a Muslim student at Berkeley College in Manhattan. Askari was also punched and beaten.

The attackers numbered eight men and two women (that’s 10 people against 4 plus one good Samaritan). They have all pled not guilty to assault, menacing and other charges, while prosecutors say the charges could be upgraded to hate crimes.

I’m sure Bill O’Reilly will be tickled with this evidence that his “War on Christmas” has finally gone publicly violent. And I don’t suppose Bill-O has the cognitive capacity to learn anything about the real Pagan roots of the Christmas holiday and all its many trappings – Yule logs, holly wreaths, adorned evergreen trees, etc. The Pagan holiday is Solstice, taking place during the week of December 19-25, a.k.a. ‘Yule’ or ‘Saturnalia’. The traditional African holiday is Kwanzaa, a.k.a. ‘Second Christmas’ in some parts of southern slave states. The Jewish holiday is Chanukah, the ‘Festival of Lights’. In Islam there is the Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice). Buddhism celebrates Bodhi Day in December (‘Enlightenment’ Day). Seems like just about every culture has a solstice celebration or festival of light couched in their own traditional religious terms but with clear roots to prehistoric reliance on the cycle of seasons.

Isn’t it about time Christians figured out that they don’t own the Solstice or control anybody else’s celebrations of it?

Links:

Winter Solstice Celebrations

Subway Attack; Skirmish from the War On/For Christmas?

Helper ‘A Hero’ in NYC Subway Attack

NYC Subway Attack Possible Hate Crime

Filed under Anti-Semitism, Hate Crime, History, Media, Racism | Comments (2)

What’s Going On?

A Surge in Racism, or Just the Demise of PC?

Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory James Watson got himself into a bit of a pickle after opining in an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times (published Oct. 13) that he isn’t hopeful about our attempts to help Africa because Africans just aren’t as smart as other humans.

Within a week Watson had been soundly denounced by his scientific colleagues, the debate over cultural bias in intelligence testing was reignited, and the subject of modern day “New Eugenics” became prominent in dozens of internet forums and political websites.

By the end of the week Watson found himself out of a job as Cold Spring Harbor desperately tried to divert unwanted attention from its sordid history as the scientific base of American eugenics in the early decades of the last century. He also had his book tour cancelled and was sent home to “think things through.”

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