RELATED: "Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years."
Another day, another post about prejudice and racism in America. Ah! just another normal day in post-racial America. Let me go back to drinking my tea and reading my newspaper. What else is new?
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the State Department has released passport records of Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother – but records for the years surrounding Obama's 1961 birth are missing.Image Credit: The Astute Bloggers, "Naughty Obama Mamma."
The State Department claims a 1980s General Services Administration directive resulted in the destruction of many passport applications and other "nonvital" passport records, including Dunham's 1965 passport application and any other passports she may have applied for or held prior to 1965.
Destroyed, then, would also be any records shedding light on whether Dunham did or did not travel out of the country around the time of Barack Obama's birth.
The claim made in the Freedom of Information response letter that many passport records were destroyed during the 1980s comes despite a statement on the State Department website that Passport Services maintains U.S. passport records for passports issued from 1925 to the present.
The records released, however, contain interesting tidbits of new information about Obama's mother, including the odd listing of two different dates and locations for her marriage to Obama's Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele is the missing person of the midterm election. Instead of cable news appearances and debates with Democratic counterpart Tim Kaine, Mr. Steele has spent the past month leading a "Fire Pelosi" bus tour across the country.RTWT.
His small role in the campaign, highly unusual for a party chairman, is matched by the scaled back effort the RNC has mounted in 2010. And no one is happier than Mr. Steele's many Republican detractors, glad to see he's attracting little attention from the national media.
Since Mr. Steele was elected chairman last year, the RNC has raised almost $153.7 million, roughly $90 million less than in 2006. It has aired only a few TV ads and its get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drive is considerably less ambitious than in previous midterm elections.
Yet Republicans, including Mr. Steele, appear satisfied with the division of labor in the campaign. What the RNC isn't doing, well-financed outside groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Republican Governor's Association (RGA) are. Mr. Steele's bus tour doesn't interfere. Exploiting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's unpopularity, it has drawn largely favorable coverage from local and regional media.
This improvised arrangement is entirely fortuitous. The so-called independent expenditure groups were established to counter campaign spending on behalf of Democrats by liberal groups, particularly the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO and MoveOn.org. They also aimed to offset the fund-raising advantage (now 1.5 to 1) of Democratic candidates.
The need to bail out the RNC arose last year after it quickly ran through $22.8 million and had trouble replenishing its war chest. Reliable donors were turned off by Mr. Steele's overexposure in the media, his insistence on making paid speeches as chairman, and statements that put him at odds with other Republican leaders.
The RNC brought in $9.7 million in September, $4 million short of its goal. This compares with $11.2 million raised last month by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which supports House candidates. And the RGA, led by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, raised $31 million in July, August and September.
Many congressional Republicans and governors no longer trust Mr. Steele as their spokesman. They tend to work around the RNC rather than engage Mr. Steele. He does have supporters, and he has recruited an experienced staff. But his dismissal of Rush Limbaugh on CNN as an "entertainer" and other statements have stirred criticism.
Well, three out of four isn't bad!
But we still wish they could have abolished ALL of these ridiculously RACIST and unjust policies!
A few readers asked me why I hadn’t commented on MSNBC’s latest attack on the Tea Party as RAAAAACIST. Been there, done that. Over and over and over again. (The Dallas Tea Party posted an excellent rejoinder video here.)Michelle's got lots more stuff at the link (especially The Root's unbelievable, "Black Folks We'd Like to Remove From Black History."
The whole right-wingers-are-racist and minority-conservatives-are-race-traitors-wrapped-in-color thing is getting really, really old. Staler than last year’s Halloween candy, Diane Keaton’s wardrobe, and the Smothers Brothers’ show. It’s gotten so old that yet another white liberal bigmouth has now resurrected a smear I first heard in college: “Coconut.”
It's the same folks who say America is a the greatest country on Earth, that its people are exceptional and destined, who talk about how special we are as a people, invariably they are the first to turn on their neighbors and say "I don't care if there's not any jobs out there, go paint fences and collect aluminum cans. I'm not helping you. Get a job you lazy bastard."Extending unemployment insurance is unsound economic policy. It reduces incentives for workers to find employment or shift to new industrial sectors. Even Krugman recognizes this, but says Republicans are mean anyway. Zandar the Stupid just uses this as one more chance to scream RAAAAACIST!!!
The deficit numbers are just an excuse to heap more misery upon the unemployed. That's because a lot of people in Krugman's first two categories believe everyone who is unemployed still must be lazy, or trying to scam the system, or trying to fleece them personally. It's a depressingly cynical worldview, and in reality that's just covering up for fears of something far more nasty: that everyone who's still unemployed by this point is shall we say of a certain ethnic background.
Yeah.
Because, you know, it's totally racist if black people use "derogatory" ethnic slang. Whatever. Let's just say the mofo Obama is f**ked up in da hood:
WASHINGTON — Turning their attention to the 2012 presidential election, Republican leaders are digging in for a battle over control of the Republican National Committee, judging that its role in fund-raising, get-out-the-vote operations and other tasks will be critical to the effort to topple President Obama.
Some senior party officials are maneuvering to put pressure on Michael Steele, the controversial party chairman, not to seek re-election when his term ends in January or, failing that, to encourage a challenger to step forward to take him on.
So far, the effort has been tentative, with Mr. Steele’s most ardent opponents working behind the scenes to persuade an alternative to run against him — fearful that any overt moves will create a backlash in Mr. Steele’s favor among those committee members who tend to view the establishment in Washington with suspicion.
One man leading the effort is a Mississippi Republican Party committeeman, Henry Barbour, who is a nephew of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi — a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, himself. Governor Barbour is said by people involved in the discussions to be among those eager to see a change at the top the party and recently criticized party fund-raising under Mr. Steele.
Officials close to the presumed new House speaker, Representative John A. Boehner, and the Senate minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said that both men would prefer a new chairman, as well, but that they were also resigned to Mr. Steele’s continued leadership should no clear alternative emerge to defeat him.
In an interview Tuesday night, Henry Barbour said, “I like Mike Steele and I’ve worked hard to support him as chairman.” But, he added, “I do think we have to make a change and I have actively talked to some other members in the last week or so and encouraged a few of them to consider running.”
Among those Mr. Barbour has approached is a member of Mr. Steele’s “kitchen cabinet” of advisers, Reince Priebus, who is chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and who helped manage Mr. Steele’s first election for the chairmanship two years ago.
Several officials involved in the discussions, all of whom requested anonymity to share details of the talks, said Mr. Priebus had recently warned Mr. Steele that a run for re-election could prove difficult this time around, and advised him to consider leaving the chairmanship at time when he could point to big Republican gains nationwide.
But Mr. Priebus has made it clear that he is personally uncomfortable with the idea of challenging Mr. Steele directly for the post, given their friendship.
The effort to woo Mr. Priebus was first reported Tuesday on the Web site of The Washington Post.
For years, pundits and politicians on the left have been calling themselves "progressives" to avoid the apparent stigma of the word "liberal." But a USA Today/Gallup poll released today indicates that a majority of Americans still aren't sure what "progressive" really means.Long-time readers of American Power will recall that I never use the word "liberal" to refer to Democratic-leftists. I've always thought "liberal" was an unacceptable bastardization of the more traditional "classical liberal," from which we draw our political heritage (in the Declaration of Independence, for example). And since around the time of the Iraq War in March 2003 --- as one who had voted Democratic my entire life --- it finally dawned on me that today's Democratic-leftists are not only not "liberal" but they're literally allied with all the anti-democratic ideologies and movements in world politics today. Of course, as I've noted here recently in my commentaries on The World Turned Upside Down, leftists adopt a righteous infallibility that disdains anti-statist ideologies as backwoods. Of course, the most irrationalist and totalitarian programs are entirely associated with the left (which of course includes its alliance with global jihad). What's unfortunate is that if the respondents at Gallup really knew what was going on they'd be distancing themselves from the "progressive" label faster than you can say "RAAAAACIST"!!
In any case, progressives today are not social and economic reformers, or those who're directed toward modernization and social improvement. They're totalitarian ideologues working for the idealized utopia that always historically ends in the terror and the gulag.
Here's a bit from David Horowitz on the bankruptcy of communism (what progressivism is really all about):
In what sense can a bankrupt idea be called “progressive”? For two centuries the socialist idea -- the future promise that justifies the present sacrifice -- has functioned as a blank check for the violence and injustice associated with efforts to achieve it. The “experiments” may have failed – so go the apologies for the Left -- but the intentions that launched them were idealistic and noble. But it is no longer really possible to hold up the socialist fantasy to justify the destructive assaults on existing societies which, whatever their faults, were less oppressive than the revolutionary “solutions” that followed their demise. The failed “experiments” of the Left and its divisive crusades must be seen now for what they are: bloody exercises in civil nihilism; violent pursuits of empty hopes; revolutionary actes gratuites that were doomed to fail from the start.UPDATE: Linked at Doug Ross, Linkiest, and The Rhetorican.
Historical perspective imposes on us a new standard of judgment. Because they were doomed from their origin and destructive by design, these revolutionary gestures now stand condemned by morality and justice in their conception and not merely in their result. If there was a “party of humanity” in the civil wars that the Left’s ambitions provoked in the past, it was on the other side of the political barricades. In these battles, the enlightened parties were those who defended democratic process and civil order against the greater barbarism that, as we now know for certain, the radical future entailed.
Latinos have moved to the South in growing numbers over the last decade, and their presence has been accompanied by growing anger and resentment aimed at illegal immigrants. If Hunt gets his way, Mississippi will become the latest Southern state to pass a law aimed at driving illegal immigrants out — establishing the Deep South as the U.S. region with the most-stringent restrictions on illegal immigrants.Well, it's about the rule of law, if you ask me. But that won't stop progressives from screaming RAAAAACIST!!!
In Mississippi, there's a struggle that goes beyond immigration. Latinos, regardless of legal status, are part of a grand contest to define the state's future.
Blacks, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, make up 37% of Mississippi's population, the highest percentage of any state. Latinos, if they vote Democratic, could one day tip the balance of power in a state where whites — that is, white Republicans — have the upper hand.
When Hunt describes this dynamic, it is not in racial terms — because, he says, these are not the terms he thinks in. Though he is a white Mississippian raised in the '60s, he says, "I changed, along with most of the people in my generation. We try to accept people as they are, and not by the color of their skin."
His public appeals have been based on familiar arguments about illegal immigrants: the jobs they are taking, their flouting of the rule of law, their burden on government coffers.
His broad goal, he said, is not to retain white power in Mississippi. It's to retain conservative power.
"It has nothing to do with race," he says.
