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Raising McCain
Republicans Rally the Base with Racist Appeals
By Lloyd Williams
Who would ever have
guessed that the Republicans would resort to such
despicable tactics in their quest to hold onto the White
House? Aware of their plunging numbers in the polls, the
McCain/Palin strategy has been to go negative by
painting Obama as a pal to terrorists and as “not one of
us.”
The approach has
worked, at least in terms of exhorting the redneck base,
with recent Republican rallies being marked by cries of
“kill him” coming from the rabid lynch mobs. It’s sad,
if not surprising, that the GOP campaign has degenerated
into a desperate appeal to the lowest common
denominator, given McCain’s pick of Palin as a running
mate.
While she sure
looked like white trash at first blush as she burst on
the national scene deeply-embedded in all sorts of Jerry
Springer-level drama, I was still willing to give the
Alaskan Governor the benefit of the doubt and reserve
judgment until her debate against Senator Biden. But she
incessantly appealed to “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Moms”
in lieu of addressing the issues. And then I cringed
when the right-wing pundits applauded her performance,
capitulating to her celebration of anti-intellectualism.
Raising McCain back
on the stump, Boobus Americana came-a-callin’ in full
force. You can tell by the inbred cretins standing up to
ask the Arizona Senator questions, invariably suggesting
that Obama might be a Muslim, an Arab, a traitor, or all
of the above. To their credit, Biden and Barack have not
attracted a similar element to their gatherings,
sticking to the high road when it would be so easy to
take potshots at the decidedly not ready for prime time
opponents.
The Democrats could
make mincemeat of the unstable McCain simply by
recounting the timeline of his response to the economic
crisis, where he temporarily suspended his campaign to
throw a monkey wrench into the negotiations, delaying
the bill so his pals in the senate could pad it with
billions in pork. And as for Palin, just listen to any
of the embarrassing gibberish coming out of her mouth
during her interviews with Katie Couric or Charlie
Gibson.
Is it any wonder
then that the best reason the Republicans offer to vote
for their candidate is the constant reminder of Obama’s
middle name and the not very subtle implication that he
must therefore be dangerous?
Attorney Lloyd
Williams is a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US
Supreme Court bars.
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McCain-Palin
Supporters Gone Wild—A
video titled The McCain-Palin Mob is the No. 3
most-discussed video on YouTube today, with more than
675,000 views since it was posted Wednesday. In the
clip, Ohio rally-goers tell blogger Tim Russo (who’s
behind the camera) they have reason to believe Obama is
a terrorist. Russo’s questioning is clearly aimed at
putting his subjects on the defensive, but they take it
to another level, in particular one woman who keeps
pushing her way back on camera. Viewership of the video
is partisan as well, but on the other side of the
spectrum, with more than 130,000 views coming from
the Huffington Post and many more from other liberal
blogs.
Another, separate
video from a Pennsylvania rally has McCain
supporters calling Obama a “commie faggot” among other
epithets, and is the No. 25 most-discussed YouTube clip
today.
In a campaign where off-hand remarks by candidates
regularly become leading nightly news items, citizens
with video cameras wield a lot of journalistic power.
And so it’s a bit hard to take Russo’s point of view, in
that his disdain for his subjects is so clear (see some
unprintable, for us,
comments he makes about them on his blog). But at
the same time, the mocking response he evokes from the
woman at the McCain rally, which would have never aired
at length (or at all) on TV, made its way out into the
world. We live in interesting times!
NYTimes.
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McCain and Palin
Are Playing With Fire—I—and, I suspect, millions of
Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike --
couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the
ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the
William Ayers non-issue.
The Taliban are clawing their way back in
Afghanistan, the country that I hope many of my fellow
Americans have come to understand better through my
novels. People are losing their homes and their jobs and
are watching the future slip away from them. But instead
of addressing these problems, the McCain-Palin ticket is
doing its best to distract Americans by provoking fear,
anxiety and hatred. Country first? Hardly.—WashingtonPost.
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Labor warns
McCain about crowds—"Sen. John McCain, Gov. Sarah
Palin and the leadership of the Republican party have a
fundamental moral responsibility to denounce the violent
rhetoric that has pervaded recent McCain and Palin
political rallies," said John Sweeney, president of the
AFL-CIO, which has endorsed Obama. "When rally attendees
shout out such attacks as 'terrorist' or 'kill him'
about Sen. Barack Obama, when they are cheered on by
crowds incited by McCain-Palin rhetoric—it is
chilling that McCain and Palin do nothing to object.
"In a world where unspeakable violence is too often
promulgated by extremists, it is no small or trivial
matter to call someone a terrorist— or to incite
potentially dangerous individuals toward violence,"
Sweeney said in a statement. "John McCain, Sarah Palin
and Republican leaders are walking a very thin line in
pretending not to hear the hateful invectives spewed at
their rallies. McCain should end this line of attack in
the strongest possible terms. Anything less puts McCain
in the same camp as the racists and extremists who are
bringing their angry rhetoric to his campaign events."
Boston News
posted 15 October 2008
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
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Browse all issues
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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