Archive for the 'Bigotry' Category

Sometimes, it really is this easy to spot

From the Associated Press:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.” If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.

It’s amazing to me how people like Bardwell can be so ignorant of how they appear to decent people. Then again, if he wasn’t such an idiot, he probably wouldn’t be a racist.

Reader ‘Bedrocktruth’ shows off his new tattoo

In a recent exchange with Bedrocktruth, I argued that those who say that we shouldn’t have universal healthcare because it might allow illegal aliens to get free healthcare are revealing their bigotry. BRT took exception to that, and I liked my reply so much that I’m reproducing it here:

If you want to argue that universal health care should not include care for illegal aliens, fine. Most people, including most liberals, would agree. But the Axis of Bigotry (Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Michael Savage) says that the prospect of a few illegal immigrants getting care is in and of itself a valid argument against universal health care. To show why this is racist, I’ve cooked up a little scenario.

Let’s say you have a neighbor who has a family of five, and you’re concerned because you think his two youngest children are getting overly thin. You decide to address the problem:

BRT: I noticed that Jimmy and Reggie are getting awfully thin.

Neighbor: Well, the economy isn’t all that great and I can’t afford to feed everyone a full portion. Jimmy and Reggie are only 6 and 8, so they’re the least productive members of the family. So Jimmy skips breakfast 3 days out of the week, Reggie skips the other 3 days, and they split one portion for dinner every night.

BRT: That’s monstrous!

Neighbor: You’re just a bleeding heart pinko. The kids all have SOME access to food, so I’m still doing more to promote the general welfare of my family than that Mexican guy across the street.

BRT: You’re doing more than the alcoholic who beats his kids and spends all the family’s money on cars and jewelry, and who allows a drug dealer to live in his basement? Bravo.

Neighbor: Well, if you’ve got a better solution for controlling the runaway cost of food, I’d like to hear it.

BRT: Since you mentioned it, there IS something that me and my friends do that we think you should try. Instead of shopping at Whole Foods, try shopping at Costco like we do. Your household has the highest per-capita income on the block. The only reason you don’t have enough to feed everyone is that you’ve got the least efficient food buying system. Half of the money you spend on food goes right into the pocket of Whole Foods’ billionaire CEO!

Neighbor: Nothing doing. We have the best food in the neighborhood. At Whole Foods we can buy 86-grain bread and organic yogurt flavored with sticks and gravel!

BRT: That’s a non-racist argument, but it’s not really a valid one. Two of your boys are starving! You really can’t afford the luxury of being stubborn about this. Whole Foods costs so much that you’re paying a lot more and getting a much worse outcome for your money. Since your the one whose food buying system is failing, doesn’t it make sense for you to emulate your neighbors until you figure out how to shop more effectively?

Neighbor: But I heard that the line waits at Costco are so long that your food spoils before you get through checkout.

BRT: Again, a non-racist argument, even if it depends on getting the facts wrong. There can be long lines at Costco for stuff you don’t need like beer and chips, and for some canned goods. But if you have perishable food, the line waits are about the same as they are at Whole Foods.

Neighbor: Yeah, but even though I can get good food at Costco in a timely manner, and get more of it for less money, I’m still going to continue to shop at Whole Foods. You remember that family of Mexicans across the street? The ones with the corrupt, abusive father? Well, one of the kids from that family has been sneaking into my house. We pay him a buck an hour to clean our toilets and rain gutters, but I’m afraid that if I had a little extra food in the fridge, he’d steal some of it. And I’m willing to see my own children wither away rather than risk having that little Mexican steal some of my food.

BRT: You racist bastard! I hope you’ve got health insurance, because I’m about to put you in the hospital!

In case you missed it, here’s the money quote:

“If illegal aliens are not going to get Obamacare… why are [Hispanic groups] lobbying for Obamacare?”

Gee, Rush, maybe it’s because those groups represent Hispanic AMERICANS, millions of whom can’t afford health insurance. Not every Hispanic is an illegal alien, you know.

And I feel the need to point out, once again, that the “OMG illegal aliens might get health care! Oh noes!!!1!” argument is inherently racist. It amounts to saying that we shouldn’t provide health care to all Americans, at a lower cost than we now pay to provide care for some Americans, because by doing so we might accidentally provide health care for some Mexicans. Instead, we should continue to pay more and leave millions of Americans without insurance, because that’s the only way we can be sure that Mexicans aren’t getting health care.

Also, notice how Limbaugh equates abortion and women’s health. If a professional misogynist like Limbaugh thinks that providing abortion is the same thing as providing health care to women (and it is), then I’m not surprised by the fact that he hates abortion.

Play him off, Keyboard Gato!

Breaking news from yesterday that Faux seems to have missed.  A little something to hook nearly anyone’s sense of the macabre.   It seems like a couple of guys on the inside think there is not much that Prince is not capable of.
The Nation

ABC News

Some of us don’t take much convincing, already pretty convinced that this stuff was going on, but everybody else needs to take a much harder look at this crook and his organization, pretty much fits the definition of violent psychopath.

Palestinians evicted in Jerusalem

Palestinian officials say the families lived in the houses for over 50 years

Israeli police have evicted nine Palestinian families living in two houses in occupied East Jerusalem.

Jewish settlers moved into the houses almost immediately. The US has urged Israel to abandon plans for a building project in the area.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and later annexed it, a move not recognised by the world community.

The evictions have been condemned by the United Nations, the Palestinians and also the UK government.

The US said the evictions were not in keeping with Israel’s obligations under the so-called “road map” to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

‘Deplorable’

The operation to evict the 53 Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah district of the city was carried out before dawn on Sunday by police clad in black riot gear.

It followed a ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court that Jewish families owned the land. Israel wants to build a block of 20 apartments in the area.

The evictions were quickly condemned by the United Nations.

The incumbent Israeli supremacist government continues to show itself to be as guilty as hell of outrageous, outright, persecution.

And/or racism. And/or apartheid. And/or long time, serial denial of basic human rights for innocent Jerusalem, Arab families.

Moreover, anyone who attempts to tell anyone at all anything different is at best, hopelessly misinformed and/or unbelievably naive and/or incredibly ignorant.

At worst, they’re flat out unforgivable, damned bloody liars.

And, anyone even considering calling us anti-Semitic, obviously knows a lot less than squat about us personally.

(Cross posted from across at ‘How This Old Brit Sees It’)

Here’s Pat Buchanan, articulating the bigoted assumptions that underlie the current backlash against women, minorities, and affirmative action:

And here’s Rachel Maddow, correcting the record:

Read the rest of this entry »

First Mark Sanford governor of South Carolina simply vanishes for a week, and then comes back to admit an affair with a married woman in Argentina…

This is so weird you just can’t make this stuff up.

Sheesh not even your northern liberal press even and they got the Emails, too.
This outdoes anything that ever happened in Minnesota. Not even Jesse the Body did anything this flamboyant while he was in office.  Sanford didn’t even leave a way for his staff to get a hold of him had there been an emergency. Gone over Father’s Day on top of everything else.

To be perfectly honest I couldn’t give a rat’s ass whom he pokes.  That is for his wife to clean him out on in divorce court.  As far as I am concerned that is for her to make whatever hay on she decides to.  But if the state of South Carolina lets him get away with simply vanishing for a week, completely out of touch, without forcing him out of office, then SC does a real sloppy job of running its affairs.  Conservative or liberal this guy is a sleaze bag, and no more deserves to retain his office than Elliot Spitzer did in New York.

So long Sanford…

Thank goodness the French are finally doing something about oppressive women’s clothing

French legislators are now considering legislation to ban burqas and nuns’ habits:

France could impose curbs on wearing the full Islamic veil if a parliamentary commission finds the burka or niqab degrading for women, a government spokesman said Friday. A group of lawmakers is calling for a special inquiry into whether Muslim women who cover themselves fully in public undermine French secularism and women’s rights.

“If it were determined that wearing the burka is a submissive act, and that it is contrary to republican principles, well naturally parliament would have to drawn the necessary conclusions,” said spokesman Luc Chatel. Asked whether that would mean introducing legislation, he said: “why not.”

Communist lawmaker Andre Gerin is spearheading the drive for a parliamentary panel that would look at ways to restrict the burka which he describes as a “prison” and “degrading” for women. The deputy is also mayor of the southern city of Venissieux, home to a large north African immigrant population, where he says the sight of covered women is not a rare occurrence.

The proposal has won support from many politicians from both the left and right, but France’s Muslim council accused lawmakers of wasting time focusing on a fringe phenomenon.

Oops. My mistake. I guess they’re saying that when Muslim women cover themselves, it’s degrading to women and harmful to secularism. But when Catholic women do it, that’s just fine.

Is there any way that these assholes could be any more transparent in their bigotry and hypocrisy? It’s sickening to see them invoking liberty, equality, and fraternity as a way of attacking their fellow Frenchmen.

And as Jill Filipovic helpfully points out, measures like this don’t liberate women. In fact, they have the opposite effect:

When it comes to religious requirements especially, we know that outlawing certain garments in public doesn’t make women shed the offending item of clothing; it just makes women refrain from public interactions.

And that’s precisely what will happen here. Outlawing the burqa won’t make women who cover themselves decide to walk outside in a sundress; it’ll just mean that women and girls won’t leave the home as much. The women who are supposedly victimized and imprisoned by some pieces of cloth will instead be prisoners in their own homes and communities.

Empowering women doesn’t come from limiting what women can and cannot wear in public. It comes in part from giving women — all women — wide access to the public sphere. You don’t have to like the burqa to realize that outlawing it will have a hugely negative impact on women.

Shawna Forde: murderer, washed-up bar hag, and National Executive Director of Minutemen American Defense (image taken from Shawna’s semi-literate racism blog)

The national leader of one of those totally-not-racist Minuteman outfits was arrested for the massacre of a Mexican-American family, including a 9-year-old girl:

Three people, including the leader of a border watch group and an officer within that group, were arrested in connection with a May 30 home invasion that left a father and his daughter dead and the mother wounded, authorities said. One of those arrested, Shawna Forde, is the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a group out of Washington state that conducts operations along the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona. The group is not related to either the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps founded by Chris Simcox, or the Minuteman Project founded by Jim Gilchrist.

Authorities also arrested Jason Eugene Bush, 34, who serves as operations director for the Washington group, and Albert Robert Gaxiola, 42, in connection with the shooting deaths of Raul Flores, 29, and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.

Raul Flores was a suspected drug dealer, and the three suspects targeted the house with the intention of stealing money and drugs, Dupnik said. They did not plan to leave any survivors, he said. “The plan was to kill everyone. To kill a 9-year-old because she might be a potential witness is one of the most despicable acts I’ve heard of.”

Dupnik said Forde and her cohorts even searched for the couple’s other daughter, who had spent the night at her grandmother’s, with the intention of killing her.

Not surprisingly, Forde has ties to other Minuteman groups. She was once a leader with the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, and she and her organization have been close to Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist.

Forde appears to have staged an assault last December, which she naturally blamed on Mexicans.

***

There are a few of sites out there dedicated to chronicling crimes committed by immigrants. They tend to contain lots of racism, and present a skewed picture of who actually commits the most crimes in this country (immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, so deporting them would have the effect of making the crime rate go up). Not surprisingly, these sites seem to be avoiding the Shawna Forde story.

Michelle Malkin loves to feature stories about immigrants committing crimes and championing the Minuteman movement. So far, nothing on Forde. However, there is an interesting rant about CAIR’s failure to issue condemnation of an attack by a Muslim in Little Rock.

Like I’ve always said: if you’re going to be a racist, it helps to be a hypocrite as well.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)