Just because you have an excuse to be racist doesn’t mean we’ll tolerate your racism

via: newsrealblog

It’s not hard to tell what leftist comedian Bill Maher has been doing with his three weeks off from “Real Time”: watching the Rachel Maddow Show. His opening monologue for last night’s new episode was ripped straight from Maddow’s show — calling Republicans racists for their questioning of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, obsessing over the Christian group C Street, and lamenting that he’d missed “three Republican scandals.”

The attack began in the monologue:

“It was fun watching these old white men get frustrated with the answers from this Puerto Rican woman. For them it was like the cleaning lady stole something from the club! She was watering the houseplants wrong!… And the tag they kept trying to hang around her neck was ‘reverse racist.’ They said that it’s reverse racists like her that give regular racists like them a bad name! We can’t have that!”

Bill continued his ideological assault when he interviewed his first guest via satellite, former Republican congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough who was promoting his new book The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise.

(I’ve been thinking about reading Scarborough’s book and his interview with Maher only served as an additional nudge toward picking it up.)

“Do you think the Republicans in general have a problem with race?” Maher asked. “I mean I would never say that all Republicans are racist — that’s ridiculous  and wrong — but if you’re a racist in America today you’re probably a Republican. Is that a fair comment?”

“No, probably not a fair comment,” Scarborough replied, not taking Maher’s bait and trying to redirect the interview in a more constructive direction:

“At the same time this is a party that did fairly well with Hispanics in 2004, they did poorly in 2008, then you think some of them [Republican critics of Sotomayor] would have tread a bit more lightly given the poor performance at the polls… Why major Republicans were going around calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist is beyond me. That is not how you’re going to win the middle of America in 2012 and it’s certainly not how you’re going to pick up Hispanic votes for the Republican Party.”

It was a good response for Scarborough given his political objectives — drawing more moderates into the GOP and refashioning a more “Big Tent” Conservatism. It fit with the tone of his other answers — staying positive. Later in the interview when Maher listed alleged Republican failures (being on the “wrong side of history” on Social Security and the Civil Rights Movement) Scarborough again avoided Maher’s trap by pointing out that the GOP was on the right side of the debate on the Cold War and Welfare reform.

There was another way Scarborough could have responded to Maher’s “if you’re a racist you’re probably a Republican smear.” It wouldn’t have helped him sell more books but it would have been hilarious, cool, and true: “Well actually Bill, there are plenty of racists who aren’t Republicans and you should know because you have them on your show all the time.”

Examples:

• On March 14, 2003 Maher featured racial agitator Rev. Jesse Jackson, a figure notorious for his use of anti-Semitic racial slurs.
• On July 25, 2003 Maher gave platform to one of my favorite leftist radical racists, “Boondocks” comic and cartoon creator Aaron McGruder who once told leftist journalist Tavis Smiley, “Anytime your checks are signed by the white man, you’re not leading the revolution, and that’s me included.”
• More recently Maher gave Marxist professor Cornel West a seat at his table. West is an associate of notorious Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and has endorsed the militantly anti-white journal Race Traitor.

I know the canned response to pointing out West, McGruder, and Jackson as racists: it’s OK to be an anti-white racist if you’re a minority because of the historic oppressions minorities have endured.

You can take that one out and fertilize the lawn with it.

I shouldn’t have to explain this to people. Do I really have to? Are we in kindergarten again? Racism — defined as prejudice against a whole race of people — is wrong and unacceptable. It doesn’t matter if one has an excuse for it. And racist minorities have a better excuse than white racists — they’ve probably actually been victims of racism. (And their ancestors certainly were.) But it’s still not a good enough excuse to be a racist. And we shouldn’t tolerate it the way Maher does.

Educating Ed on Abortion’s Racist Past, and Present

via: newsrealblog

The most recent episode of “Psycho Talk” on MSNBC’s The Ed Show provided both the umpteenth example of the Left’s obsession with race and its simultaneous refusal to acknowledge the devastation the Left’s policies have had on minority communities.

The victim of the Friday segment — which ought to be renamed “Ed’s Daily Non-Sequitur” — was Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-KS. Tiahrt had the nerve to oppose provisions of socialized medicine that would force taxpayers to fund abortion. In the course of his argument, he asked if Barack Obama or Clarence Thomas would be alive if “free” abortions were available in their day.  Ed sputtered, “Wow. With all the trouble Republicans seem to be having with minorities, why would you think only African-Americans are the ones who might never have been born?”

But the abortion lobby has targeted minority communities, particularly black women, from its inception.  Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading provider of abortion, was a commited eugenicist. According to her New York Times obituary, she sought to encourage birth control and/or abortion among “subnormal children.” DiscoverTheNetworks.org records Sanger’s willingness to work with all who shared her goals:

In 1926, for instance, she presented a lecture on birth control to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. In September 1930 she invited Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer (whose ideas were cited by the Nazis to legitimize the extermination of Jews) to meet with her at her home.

Today, Planned Parenthood continues her malignant legacy. According to one estimate, “80 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods.” Black women now have the highest abortion rate of any ethnic group. While the white share of abortion fell by nearly 7 percent following Roe v. Wade, the black share of U.S. abortions increased 9 percent.

In recent years, Planned Parenthood officials in Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, and other states have been caught accepting donations from avowed racists contributing specifically to kill “a black baby.”

Although the calls were treated as pranks, this is standard operating procedure for the death merchants. Richard N. Goldman, “philanthropist” of San Francisco, has underwritten minority abortions on a far larger scale than the piddling $450 checks offered in the videos above. As I note in my book Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Radical Gifts:

In 2001, he awarded Planned Parenthood of Golden Gate $300,000 over two years earmarked specifically for “African-American women in East Oakland.” The same year, he donated $60,000 to the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights Education Fund “[t]o launch a Latino initiative to promote reproductive choice.”

Goldman carried forth Sanger’s agenda of limiting the birth of dusky people, blacks and Roman Catholic Latinos. (The Times obit revealed that Sanger’s “disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church led her to say in 1960 that if Senator John F. Kennedy was elected President she would leave the United States. She opposed Mr. Kennedy because of his religion.”)

In 2006, Goldman was selected to receive the Chairman’s Medal from the Heinz Awards, headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry — the wife of the Democratic Party’s last presidential candidate, Sen. John F. Kerry. Kerry’s awards literature extolled Goldman as a “generous global citizen whose heart eclipses even the magnitude of his philanthropy.”

But you were saying, Ed — Republicans were the ones having problems with minorities over abortion?

Obama’s “Tax Cut” Becomes a Massive Tax Hike

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On MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, columnist Mike Barnicle asked Meet the Press moderator David Gregory about the possibility that the Obama administration, in order to fund universal healthcare, will seek to impose a tax on the medical benefits that American workers currently receive from their employers; in other words, to treat the dollar-value of those benefits as though it were actual income, and to tax it at the same rate as the rest of the workers’ income. As Barnicle noted, “some powerful Democrats in the Senate are in favor” of such a plan even though they, like Barack Obama, opposed it during the 2008 campaign.

If the Democrats get close to passing a universal healthcare bill, Gregory speculated, “I think the White House would be open to that [taxing medical benefits like regular income].”

Then Gregory identified the key issue:

I think the biggest problem with it is they [Obama and the Democrats] open themselves up to the charge that they’re going to be taxing, you’re going to effect a tax increase on people making less than $250,000 a year, which is what the President vowed he would not do.

Consider what such a plan would mean to the average American taxpayer – you remember, the man or woman who is among the “95 percent” of the American people whom Obama bedazzled during the campaign with his bold promise of a tax cut. That tax cut, it turned out, would net each American taxpayer a paltry $8 to $13 per week.

Moreover, it should be noted that for tens of millions of people who were paying no taxes to begin with, it was not a tax cut at all, but rather a government check whose sole purpose was to expand the number of Americans dependent on government handouts (and, by extension, the number of Americans voting for the party responsible for distributing those handouts, the Democrats). As the Washington Times pointed out:

[Obama's] plan would send checks to tens of millions of tax filers who pay no personal income taxes — payments that critics say look “suspiciously like welfare” … Because the IRS says that nearly 46 million tax filers — one-third of all filers — had no tax liability in 2006, there is the question of how millions of Americans can receive an income “tax cut” when they pay no taxes.

If Congress and President Obama now impose a tax on healthcare benefits, that tax will cost each taxpayer – depending on his or her income bracket and medical plan, and on the specifics of the new tax itself – an additional $1,000 to $4,000 per year.

And don’t forget about the cap-and-trade monstrosity that the House of Representatives passed three weeks ago, and which will now be considered by the Senate. If that gets signed into law, the average American household will pay yet another $3,100 in extra hidden taxes each year.

Moreover, Obama has pledged to permit the Bush tax cuts (on income and capital gains) to expire next year, a move — or rather, a non-move — that will more than offset the aforementioned pittance that Obama gave to taxpayers in early 2009. (The Bush tax cuts were 50 percent greater than Obama’s.)  The fact that Obama will allow the Bush tax cuts to expire is no surprise, of course, but merely a fulfillment of what he said, quite candidly, during the presidential campaign:

• “I want to eliminate the Bush tax cuts,” Obama told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a May 2008 interview.
• “The Bush tax cuts – people didn’t need them, and they weren’t even asking for them, and that’s why they need to be less, so that we can pay for universal health care and other initiatives,” Obama said in a June 2007 Democratic debate at Howard University.

If we tabulate the sorry figures above, we find that the American taxpayer, who was promised a tax cut if he or she earned less than $250,000 annually, will in fact be paying anywhere from about $4,000 to $7,000 more in taxes each year.

And just think: Our benevolent President will have achieved all this in less than a single year in office. Imagine what surprises he has in store for us next year. Perhaps yet another tax cut. How exciting.

The Methodology of Media Matters, AKA Media Antimatter

via: newsrealblog

Oh how I used to love Media Matters, the left-wing media “watchdog” group founded by former conservative journalist turned Democrat activist, David Brock. When the site started up in May of 2004 I was almost at the peak of my developing career as a leftist polemicist. Each week I sought out new arguments to attack the Bush Administration, the War in Iraq, and the Conservative Movement. And there were few sites better in aiding this task than Media Matters.

The organization defines its mission in these terms:

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Launched in May 2004, Media Matters for America put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation — news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda — every day, in real time.

The principal method by which Media Matters pursues the foregoing mission is by posting its ”research” on its website. This amounts to reading and watching the media and then writing rebuttals to what conservatives and Republicans say.

Sometimes Media Matters actually follows its mission’s guidelines, acting as a fact-checker for right-leaning pundits by pointing out genuine errors. One example is Media Matters’ recent post on Pat Buchanan’s questionable claim that President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has never written a law review article.

Posts of this nature really are not what draw people to Media Matters, though; they certainly were not when I was a “progressive.” No, what I sought out were Media Matters’ examples of the wild, angry rhetoric of the Conservative Movement. Whenever Ann Coulter or Michael Savage would say something that was politically incorrect or a bit rough around the edges, then Media Matters would highlight it alongside its examples of “conservative misinformation.”

By situating its condemnations of harsh conservative rhetoric alongside errors of fact, Media Matters made a blur of opinion and research. It appears to have recognized this error. Now, factual challenges are grouped in a designated research section, while attacks on rhetoric are relegated to the Media Matters blog. Good for them.

In spite of this improvement in organization, however, the practical effect is essentially unchanged. Media Matters amounts to a political antimatter — an unnatural, expensive injection into the national dialogue. While purportedly seeking to clarify the American political discussion, it instead only intensifies the partisan back-and-forth with its conservative caricatures. The site routinely highlights rhetoric it doesn’t like, without considering the context that caused it. For example: Why is it that conservatives are so passionate about defending the American Idea? What drives them? Perhaps if these questions were considered, then the rhetoric might make a bit more sense.

Most leftists don’t read conservative books, listen to talk radio, or watch Fox News. And part of the reason is because the image of the unreasonable conservative has been so thoroughly perpetuated by the Left, with Media Matters leading the charge. If leftists only get a chance to grapple with the conservative political tradition through Media Matters’ filter, then they’re really missing out. I certainly was — until I took the time to actually confront Conservatism on its own terms and let the ideas speak for themselves.

Obama Finally Finds Something We Can’t Afford: Military Superiority

via: newsrealblog

Imagine a fighter jet that would give the United States complete air superiority in any conflict. An aircraft that’s faster, has longer range, and is more fuel-efficient at high speeds than any aircraft ever built. A plane virtually invisible to radar and deadly accurate, almost guaranteeing that any selected target would be destroyed. An aircraft so advanced that the armed forces of every country on earth are scared to death of it and know that they would be defenseless against it for years to come.

We have that plane. It’s called the F-22 Raptor, and our President and Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, hates it.

In fact, he hates it so much that, according to a report by Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Program on the Marxist mouthpiece Free Speech TV, he has threatened to veto a separate Pentagon bill “if it includes a $1.75 billion provision for the purchase of additional F-22 fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin.”

According to the Pentagon, we need more F-22’s in order to maintain air superiority. At a cost of about $150 million each, however, Mr. Obama deems these planes to be too costly. This president, who spends money faster than it can be printed on worthless projects that do nothing but ensure a legacy of perpetual debt while he steers the country towards socialism, will be the cause of widespread job losses if the F-22 program is canceled, which now looks to be a certainty.

“It’s a [huge] loss of jobs,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA). “It’s 90,000 jobs across 49 states … final assembly takes place in Marietta [Georgia], but parts and software and employees work at 49 states to make the F-22.”

Isakson says losing any job in this economy “doesn’t make sense,” and he’s right.

Think about it: the same president who authorized billions and billions in failed TARP stimulus monies, and who is now trying to push through a $1.5 trillion health care plan, has finally found something that he considers too expensive.

Killing the Patient

via: newsrealblog

Socialized medicine does not work anywhere that it has been tried.

Yet that is essentially what Obamacare has to offer.

Obamacare will mandate that everybody obtain health insurance coverage or face stiff fines.  It will set up a government-run insurance program to “compete” with the private sector.  It will add trillions more to the national budget deficit.  It will put many small businesses out of business because of onerous penalties they would be forced to pay if they do not comply with government mandates on insurance coverage for their employees, and because of crippling new taxes to fund the misguided plan.  Many more jobs in the private sector will be at risk, which will push the unemployment rate well above 10 percent.

In short, lethal dosages of Left-Wing medicine administered by the Obama quacks will  kill the American economy without solving the underlying problem in health care.

Even the Congressional Budget Office has warned of the consequences.  But the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel march on, taking us with them over the cliff.

Bill O’Reilly has offered some sound ideas based on the Swiss health system:  Regulate over-charging by doctors and the insurance companies, stop frivolous lawsuits, and set up more health clinics for the poor along with targeted subsidies for those who cannot afford comprehensive health insurance.  But don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg — the American economy — to engage in yet another in a string of Left-Wing wealth redistribution programs

Obama Fiddles As Economy Burns

via: newsrealblog

Economic commentators said on the “Glenn Beck Program” that the U.S. economy is rapidly cratering and that there is abundant evidence that it’s far worse out there than the Obama administration is telling the public.

Yet President Obama “wants to ram universal health care and cap-and-trade and everything else down our throats, because it’s an emergency, we can’t even think about it,” Glenn Beck said.

Walter Zimmerman of economic research firm United ICAP said it’s a sign of weakness that in America today that

nobody thinks twice about going into debt…It’s a sign that this country doesn’t have the same power it used to have and it’s a big cost to us all because the government is going to have to borrow money to fund that debt. They are going to crowd the credit markets. Interest rates are not going to go back down.

Mort Zuckerman, chairman of U.S. News & World Report, said

there is for a continuing trend in growth in unemployment….the Obama administration said when they proposed their stimulus program, it was going to stop at 8 percent…we’re now at least 9.5 percent…and we’re clearly going to go well above 10 percent and hitting 11 percent. That’s unprecedented…

The 9.5 percent figure understates real unemployment because it doesn’t include “people who stopped looking, who gave up looking, who are in voluntary part-time [work] because they really need full-time and couldn’t get it,” Zuckerman explained. “When you include those people, it’s 16.5 percent and growing.”

Now the federal minimum wage increase will take effect in a few days and that will “intensify the desire of companies who are all trying to slash costs…because they simply can’t be competitive in this kind of an economy and still make money,” Zuckerman said. There are now 25 million people in the U.S. who are “either unemployed or underemployed in this country — which is an unprecedented level since the end of World War II,” he said.

Added Zimmerman, “And that’s a forecast for further mortgage foreclosures.”

Rachel Maddow Spins Anti-Racism into Racism

via: newsrealblog

One surefire way to understand the Left is to listen to every complaint it levies against its opponents and instead apply it to the Left. This often develops an accurate picture from the negative that leftists present as reality.

One example of this is Rachel Maddow’s continual focus on Senate Republicans’ alleged obsession with “playing the race card” during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. Her proof consists of questions Republicans asked Sotomayor about her racialist “wise Latina woman” remark, Congressional Democrats’ treatment of Hispanic Bush federal judicial appointee Miguel Estrada, and one off-hand remark made by Sen. Jeff Sessions, a favorite target of leftist media commentators (including Maddow).

Sessions told Sotomayor:

the circuit voted and you voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit. And, in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranas, himself of Puerto Rican ancestry, had you voted with him, you could have changed that case. So in truth, you weren’t bound by that case.

Maddow, as well as The Huffington Post, jumped on the comments as proof Sessions asserted “Sotomayor Should Have Been Influenced by Her Ancestry.”

The facts would be clear to anyone familiar with the situation: Barack Obama nominated a racialist judicial activist who ruled on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that banning felons currently in prison from voting is a form of racial prejudice according to the “plain terms” of the Voting Rights Act. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs warns Republicans to “be exceedlingly careful” in opposing her, lest they be branded racists. The Left and mainstream media (but then I repeat myself) trumpet the historic importance of the first African-American president appointing the first Latina Supreme Court justice. When the demoralized GOP finally has her on the stand, Sessions simply made reference to her racialist statement that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.”

Sessions mentioned she was hiding behind legal precedent, when she could have overturned it in her decision. Then he noted a “wise” Latino, Judge Cabranas, himself wanted to overturn the case; if Hispanic judges make “better” decisions than others, why did this fellow Puerto Rican also believe Sotomayor had reached the wrong decision? In other words, Sessions’ words were reversal of Sotomayor’s racialist obsession, an admission that, yes, Hispanics are allowed to reach different decisions.

Maddow (who is obsessed with race) spun this, quite expectedly, into a Republican obsession with race, leading with this non-story last night, as she has for days.

Only leftists, in a still liberal-dominated media, can get away with a strategy at once so hypocritical and so shameless: create a racially charged environment; nominate a racialist Affirmative Action pick who admits, “If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of [entering Princeton and Yale Law], it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted…With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates.”

Next, threaten to publicly lynch anyone who questions her credentials; then when the Republicans note the Left’s obsession with race, use it as proof Republicans are obsessed with race.

Brilliant!

Jane Fonda flaunts her own mugshot on t-shirt

via: newsrealblog

Baby boomer narcissism has officially reached a new level, well beyond the reach of satire.

As noted briefly by Sean Hannity on his FOX News program last night, major Democratic Party donor, far-left activist and sometime actress Jane Fonda appeared outside the posh Mr. Chow restaurant in Hollywood earlier this week, wearing a t-shirt with her own picture on the front.

Not just any picture, either, but her semi-iconic mugshot, taken in 1970.

In November of that year, the actress was returning to the United States from Canada, where she’d addressed an anti-Vietnam War fundraiser.  Customs officials wrongly accused Fonda of drug smuggling after finding vitamins in her luggage. She was fingerprinted, and the now-famous mugshots were taken at the same time.

“Earlier this year,” reports the UK Daily Mail in a July 14, 2009, “Fonda gave her permission for her teen pregnancy charity the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention to raise money using her mugshot on T-shirts, mugs and tea towels.”

The mugshot is not as famous as other photographs of Jane Fonda, such as those depicting her “giving aid and conmfort” to America’s Communist enemies during a visit to North Vietnam in 1972. Those infamous photos show a giddy Fonda striking childlike poses while sitting atop an anti-aircraft gun that was normally aimed at U.S. fighter planes.

The trip earned Fonda a lasting nickname from her detractors: “Hanoi Jane.”

“Green Jobs Czar” is a self-described “communist”

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In another installment in his “Land of the Czars” series, last night FOX News host Sean Hannity profiled Van Jones, President Barack Obama’s newly appointed “Green Jobs Czar“.

Jones’ official title is Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The 41-year-old Yale Law School graduate and civil rights lawyer is also the founder of California’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, “a non-profit agency for justice, opportunities and peace.“

Sounds idyllic, but Jones’ past isn’t so pastoral.

The Ella Baker Center was connected to STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a “multi-racial activist collective with Marxist influences” with which Jones was involved.

In 1992, Van Jones founded another STORM project, Bay Area PoliceWatch, a “hotline and lawyer-referral service for victims and survivors of police abuse.” This is fitting, perhaps, since Jones was himself arrested and detained briefly during a protest after the Rodney King verdict that same year.

Jones told the East Bay Express in 2005:

I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th [1992], and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.

(…)

I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.

Like a character out of The Big Chill, Van Jones seems to have evolved from radical activist to Establishment insider. Perhaps only a left-wing administration incapable of recognizing irony would put a self-described communist in charge of creating jobs.

Luckily for Van Jones, and Obama’s many other “Czars”, his new job was not dependent upon making it through Congressional hearings.