racism

This explains a lot.

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

Sneaker Tillis is holding North Carolina hostage because he doesn't have the votes to override the governor's veto of the Racial Justice Act. Governor Perdue should learn the same lesson Barack Obama has learned from his many failed attempts to compromise with crazy. She should tell Thom Tillis to go f/ck himself.

Ron Paul is doing a lousy job of handling the spotlight into the racist writings of his old newsletters. By walking off the set of CNN he made a molehill into a mountain. Paul needs to understand that you can’t run for President and then try to control the media by telling them what they can and can’t ask questions about.

The more Paul looks angry at the media for asking questions about the racist rantings in his old newsletters, the more it looks like he has something to hide regarding the sorts of racists he appeals to.

Putting people of color into neat little packages:

It's the same old recipe, just cooks wearing different hats. And it comes with an added bitter mash of racial manipulation by cramming nearly half the state's African-Americans into a handful of bizarrely shaped districts that snake all over the map.

My son asked me the other night how many legal challenges had (already) been filed. At first I said "several", but then he asked for specifics, which I couldn't supply. Does anybody have a quick rundown of the suits to date?

Neighborhood schools sound pretty innocuous to many people. I have been asked by many well-meaning parents what is so bad about kids not having to get up so early to catch a bus halfway across the county in order to arrive at some magic number made up by statisticians. Where's the harm in having your kids go to school closer to home, they ask. Doesn't that make more sense?

I hate to post a simple link to an article in the Village Voice. But those who haven't seen this from another source will certainly enjoy it.

Last Friday, September 24, I attended a lecture by Neal Caren, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill, at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies. The PowerPoint lecture and discussion were advertised as “Online Activist Communities: the case of white supremacists.” I imagined it would be about the techniques used by white supremacists that have proven successful. I was even hoping to pick up some pointers that could be applied to work in the favor of the progressive movement. I was more than happy to have my preconceived notions crushed.

We last got together about ten days ago, when I put up a story that hoped to explain to the Islamic world that, Qur’an burning aside, we don’t really hate either them, or our own Constitution.

I pointed out that, just like everywhere else, about 20% of our population are idiots, that this means about 60,000,000 of us might, at any time, be inclined to burst into fits of random stupidity, such as the desire to burn Qur’ans to make some sort of statement, and that the same First Amendment that protects the freedom of stupid speech also protects the rights of Islamic folks to freely build mosques…and finally, that this apparent “paradox of freedom” is exactly why the US is the kind of country that many Islamic folks the world over wish they lived in as well.

I then went off to enjoy my Godson’s wedding, and I ignored the posting until the next Monday.

On the two dozen sites where it could be found, this was apparently considered to be a fairly innocuous message…with one giant exception, which is what we’ll be talking about today.

Long story short, some portion of this country’s population has some bizarre ideas about Islamic folks…but maybe if they knew my friend Wa’el, they might see things a bit differently.