Tanks For The Shame

(Cartoon by Jack Ohman published 8/19/14 in the Sacramento Bee and featured at McClatchy DC.)

(Cartoon by Kevin Siers published 8/15/14 in the Charlotte Observer and featured at McClatchy DC.)

I've slipped back into that bad habit of watching the news on television and reading the news on line.  Unfortunately, the news has been more than a little distressing.  The big stories right now are the crazy Islamic terrorists who are into beheading folks who aren't sufficiently Islamic for them and (closer to home) the news out of Ferguson, Missouri of a police shooting of a young black man who turned out to be unarmed.  It was another case of "Walking While Black."

The latter story really depressed me.  Here we are in the 21st Century and this nation just can't get past its racism.  What makes it even worse is that the police are armed to the teeth with military grade weapons.  The excuse is that the "bad guys" have them, so the police should too.  Or something.  The victim in Missouri was shot six times by the automatic weapon the officer was carrying.

Why do police departments have to have tanks, or armed drones, or even the kind of automatic weapons that can fire off six rounds in quick succession.  Wouldn't one shot by a trained officer be enough to bring "the bad guy" down?  Are our police lousy marksmen?  What?

Wouldn't wearing protective body armor be a better choice if a military arsenal is involved?

I know: too many questions from a loony old broad.  It's just that I'd hoped to see some good kind of changes before I died.  I guess I'm asking for too much.

So This Is 'Post-Racial America

(Cartoon by Joel Pett, published 4/29/14 in the Lexington Herald Leader and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)
So, the National Basketball Association has brought the hammer down on Donald Sterling, gazillionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (at least for the nonce) for his appalling racist remarks.  Actually, I have no trouble with the NBA's actions, even though I'm a staunch supporter of Free Speech.  Yes, Mr. Sterling has the Constitutional right to spout such horrid nonsense, and, no, the government shouldn't punish him, but the private club he belongs to does have a right to step in and assess a fine and whatever other penalties for such egregious behavior is on their books.

Bill Plaschke, one of my favorite sports writer does have a few well-chosen words in his column for the Los Angeles Times:

Four days after the release of audiotapes on which Sterling is heard making racist comments, the NBA has banned the Clippers owner for life.

“We stand together in condemning Mr. Sterling’s views,’’ said NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Tuesday morning. “They simply have no place in the NBA.’’

Sterling was also fined the maximum $2.5 million, but, for the eccentric billionaire who viewed his team as a way to be accepted among his social circle, the lost money is nothing compared with his lost status.   [Emphasis added]

I think the Republican drive to make voting difficult, if not impossible for African Americans, poor people, and elders is far more worrisome and damaging for our democracy.  Joel Pett's cartoon captures both issues beautifully.

I Just Don't Get It

(Cartoon by Lee Judge, published 4/15/14 by the Kansas City Star and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

I'm serious:  I just don't get it.  I don't get how, during the holiest week in the Christian calendar and on the eve of one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, some dude decides to be the new Hitler.  Or something.

From the LA Times:

The elderly man was well known in this slightly faded farm town for his failed attempts at elective office, his libertarian leanings, his Southern charm.

But Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, who also went by the name of Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., was known even more for his white supremacist beliefs that led him to try to incite a race war, pepper local papers with anti-immigrant letters and get into a shouting match with a Jewish student at Missouri State University.

Police arrested Cross on Sunday on suspicion of shooting and killing a 14-year-old Boy Scout and his grandfather at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan., and a woman at a nearby Jewish assisted living center. ...

Sunday would have been Franklin's 64th birthday. And Monday was Passover, one of the best known Jewish holidays.

Little is known about Cross' alleged motives, but Beirich posited that the avowed racist and author of a memoir called "A White Man Speaks Out" "has got emphysema, and this is a twisted, white supremacist bucket list."   [Emphasis added]

As some of you know, I have emphysema (actually, COPD) and congestive heart failure and the hospice people who pay for some of my drugs and I both know that my time is greatly foreshortened.  For me, it's not a matter of years but (at best) a matter of months. 

I can't envision facing my maker with the blood of another on my hands.  Rather, I've been working hard to show love, not hatred, especially to those here in the Cuckoo's Nest who also are living out their last days even when I disagree with their politics and their view of humans of a different color, creed, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Life is too precious to waste on such garbage, so it's not on my bucket list.

May God have mercy on Mr. Cross.  I'm working hard right now to open my heart to wish that for him.  But I have to.

Aftermath

(Editorial cartoon by Glenn McCoy and featured 7/11/13 at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

Yes, McCoy's cartoon is a snide comment on the "liberal press" and its coverage of the Zimmerman trial.  The trial is over, however, and the acquittal verdict is in.  The conservative spokespeople have now had their chance to gloat and bloviate.  Everyone on all sides has an opinion on the verdict and what it means for race relations and gun laws in this country.

One of the more interesting and thoughtful pieces to come out is found in an op-ed written by Robin Abcarian for the Los Angeles Times.  In her column, she talks about the attempt by his brother to rehabilitate George Zimmerman now that he has been declared innocent.

The rehabilitation of George Zimmerman has begun.

Robert Zimmerman Jr., George Zimmerman’s older brother, has launched a one-man PR effort, showing up all over CNN, on NPR, even finding time for Breitbart, to extol his brother’s essential goodness and the wisdom of the Seminole County jury that exonerated him of second-degree murder or manslaughter in the death of Trayvon Martin.

At first glance, Zimmerman is an impressive family spokesman.

Calmly, articulately and sometimes sternly, Robert has defended his little brother in a way only a loved one can do. ...

And yet, he also appears to be sensitive to racial injustice. “I will say that Sanford had a history in its police department of having issues with race and equal application and equal access to justice in that community,” he told NPR’s Rachel Martin on Sunday. “I know that has nothing to do with George, but I can see where there were concerns, initially, that something may be afoot in Sanford. Unfortunately, the pegging of George as a white man was essential to get that narrative traction and get that ball rolling.” (The Zimmermans’ father is white; their mother is Peruvian.)

But Zimmerman is disingenuous when he criticizes people for injecting race into the story. In fact, he has done as much as anyone to racialize the case.

In numerous interviews, Zimmerman has subtly injected racial stereotypes into the case, echoing defense attorney Mark O’Mara’s line that Martin was not, as the prosecution portrayed him, a teenager armed with nothing more than Skittles, but an angry, dangerous young man armed with his fists, and a sidewalk.   [Emphasis added]

My only kvetch with Abcarian's analysis is that she failed to point out that "white" refers to race;  "Peruvian" refers to ethnicity.  That aside, however, it's clear that the big brother realizes that George Zimmerman is now walking around with a large target on his back.  I suspect George is aware of that as well.  Perhaps that is a punishment no one considered, at least no one who has had to walk around as a target the way young Black men have to.

In that regard,  I would urge you to click on this link to see just what that punishment entails.

And that is punishment indeed.

Two Stories

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich ahd published 7/4/13 in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.)

I admit to being a little baffled by this Luckovich cartoon, which doesn't happen often when dealing with the gentleman I consider one of the premier cartoonists in this country.  He seems to be suggesting that the people of this country are being shallow by turning off the news in the Middle East in favor of the news in Florida.

I agree that the average American is deplorably, perhaps even willfully, ignorant when it comes to world affairs, especially when it concerns the Middle East.  I also agree that the average American is more apt to want to follow a "sensationalist" story like trial of George Zimmerman on murder charges for the killing of Trayvon Martin.  Still, both stories are important.

The Zimmerman case would never have entered the consciousness of Americans outside of Florida if there hadn't been a lot of noise by the Martin family.  Once the story got picked up, we had to look at a number of issues:  racism, the "Stand Your Ground" law in Florida, the two kinds of justice when it came to local police departments everywhere, not just Florida.  And I think looking at those issues through the lens of the trial proceedings is important.

Sure, many Americans haven't gotten that message yet, but they never will without the coverage which this trial and cases like can bring.

In other words, lighten up, Mike!

California Dreaming

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published 4/26/13 by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  Click on image to enlarge and then return for an explanation.)

Yes, yes, I know.  I used this same cartoon for yesterday's post.  But I do so for a reason.  It's to bring one possible specific application from yesterday's post to today's California.

I spotted an interesting op-ed piece over the weekend from Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist and commentator who ran Gov. Gray Davis' campaigns in 1998 and 2002.  Clearly Mr. South has a political bias, but he does raise some interesting issues.

First, a history lesson. In three of the last four non-presidential elections, Republicans actually nominated Latinos for statewide office: Ruben Barrales for controller in 1998, Gary Mendoza for insurance commissioner in 2002 and Maldonado for lieutenant governor in 2010. All three were attractive, articulate candidates with compelling personal stories.

But all three went down in flames, receiving an average of only 37.9% of the vote. And there is no indication in postelection analyses that they received any meaningfully higher share of the Latino vote than a white male GOP candidate would have gotten. ...

Now for some data. Part of the GOP problem with Latinos is generational. Latinos are, on average, the youngest-skewing voters of all, and Republicans are in deep trouble with young voters of all ethnicities. Data indicate that more than 70% of all Latino voters in the Golden State have registered since 1994, when the divisive, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 campaign was spearheaded by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. Proposition 187 was a watershed event in California political history, as it turned an entire generation of Latinos into reliable Democratic voters.

How reliable? Some voter blocs in California tend to be swing voters; not Latinos. A huge majority of California Latinos vote generically Democratic, whether the Democratic candidate is strong or weak, pretty or ugly, wins or loses. ...

In further bad news for the California GOP, Latinos also are the fastest-growing segment of the electorate. Whites have been declining in terms of the composition of the turnout for years. In 1994, with Wilson seeking a second term and Proposition 187 on the ballot, whites constituted 82% of the state's voters, Latinos only 8%. In the 2012 general election, whites were just 55%, while Latinos were 22%, a historic high. And since 1994, GOP nominees for president and governor in the state have received only, on average, 25.5% of the Latino vote. As Bill Clinton would say, do the math.

Latino voters, by any analysis — historical or statistical — are just not available for Republican candidates in California at this time, whether Latino-surnamed or not.    [Emphasis added] 

Like I said, South has a bias, but I have no reason to doubt his statistics and for one particular reason.  The state was smart enough to pass a proposition which took redistricting out of the hands of the state legislature (prone to gerrymandering) and into the hands of a non-partisan citizen's commission.  Districts were fairly and sensibly drawn.  The result was to make California reliably blue in most districts.

Also, his comments on the effect of Prop 187 is and will continue to be a thorn in the side of Republicans.  The party didn't want Latinos then and presumably still doesn't, unless they promise to vote for Republicans.  Young people just aren't willing to take the risk of depending on the Goofy Old Paranoids, not matter what their ethnicity.  Young people, who have grandparents here without papers surely won't.

And that's one of the reasons I'm glad I live in California.

Say, What?

I can't believe I overlooked this Horsey cartoon and column last week!  I guess other news distracted me; that and I was still recovering from the latest iteration of the flu.  But clearly David was more than merely annoyed at Justice Scalia.  He was appalled.  As in steam-coming-out-of-his-ears appalled.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is alleged to be one of the great intellects of conservative jurisprudence, but his comments during oral arguments over a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act displayed all the mental acuity of a third-tier talk radio bozo. ...

... After extensive testimony, lawmakers determined that a long list of problems still exists and they renewed the Voting Rights Act for an additional 25 years. The vote was overwhelming in the House unanimous in the Senate and was hailed by President George W. Bush as a victory for American democracy.

In court on Wednesday, however, Scalia mocked that vote. He said the Senate’s unanimity simply proved the law had not been given serious consideration. The senators were afraid, he said, to cast a vote against a law with a "wonderful" name. He went on to assert that the reauthorization of the act was merely "a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement."

That sort of legal reasoning may be good enough for someone sitting on a bar stool well into his third pint, but it is not good enough for the highest court in the land. Scalia makes self-serving assumptions about what was on the minds of senators in 2006 -- afraid, not serious, enamored with a name -- with no facts to back up his barbs. ...

Undeterred, Scalia opined that a law governing voting rights is "not the kind of question you can leave to Congress." Oh, really? The right to vote is the core of our constitutional democracy. It is not, as Scalia says, "a racial entitlement," it is an American entitlement. It seems that might be a very useful thing for Congress to watch over and protect. It was eminently important in 1965 and remains important today. ...

Given the weirdness of his comments, it might not be wrong to assume Scalia's true concern is less about "racial entitlement" than it is about making sure his fellow Republicans are entitled. Entitled, that is, to manipulate elections when they can no longer win fair and square.   [Emphasis added]

Preach it, my brother!

Two questions arise in my mind at this point.

First, what will happen with respect to the decision? Will Kennedy vote with the liberals?  Did Scalia overplay his hand, appalling the Chief Justice enough to shift his vote on the issue, joining Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer?  I don't imagine Alito will be bothered:  he's not known as "Scalito" for nothing.  And Thomas?  Oh, please!  He's not going to miss a chance to piss off liberals.

Second, regardless of the outcome of the decision (and those opinions are going to make for some very interesting reading), what will happen to Justice Scalia for his intemperate and injudicious remarks?  Anything?  Because Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life, the only way to remove this yahoo is by impeachment.  I really can't see this House of Representatives introducing impeachment proceedings, much less voting for impeachment.

I think we're stuck with him until he decides to retire or dies.

I really am too old for this.

What David Said

David Horsey posted a thoughtful, even lovely, column yesterday, reflecting on the import of President Obama's second inauguration.  I think he nailed it in one.  I recommend you read the entire column (which isn't very long), but here's a taste:

The spirits of two great men, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., stood watch over the West Front of the United States Capitol on Monday as Barack Obama took the oath to serve a second term as president with his left hand placed on two Bibles -- one Lincoln’s and one King’s.

The event not only fell on the King holiday and 50 years after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but also came within days of the 150thanniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Without the revolutionary changes for which Lincoln and King were martyred, Barack Obama’s presidency would not be possible. This was abundantly apparent four years ago when he became the nation’s first African American chief executive, but it seems no less remarkable and significant the second time around. ...

The residue of the racism that once justified slavery is still evident. There is no doubt that Obama would not be such a hugely controversial and maligned figure in some political circles and in certain parts of the country if he were white. The good news is that the beast of racial bias is cornered and dying. Obama’s reelection is proof of that and, perhaps, that is why the second inauguration of the man seems to be as important a marker of our progress away from slavery, Jim Crow and bigotry as was his first. The first time might have been a fluke; the second time is evidence of real change.

Amen.

Things That Make Me Chuckle

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published 12/30/12 in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  Click on image to enlarge and then kindly return.)

President Obama has taken the oath of office and been sworn in for his second term, has walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, and delivered what by all accounts was a fine speech.  Now the hard part comes:  presidenting.

He still has to deal with a split Congress, but this time around he has taken some pretty strong stands and has thrown multiple issues to be resolved into the mix.  Gun control, debt ceiling, deficit cuts, and immigration:  and those are just for openers.  The Republicans can't very well continue the blatant obstruction.  They failed in their drive to limit Obama to just one term and they lost ground in both the Senate and the House.  Even with their fear of being primaried by the Tea Party and extreme right wing, the saner members of the party know that they could lose the House in 2014 if they don't at least look like they're trying resolve the nation's problems in a rational, adult way.

And those saner members are beginning to speak out.  The latest blast is on immigration reform which would allow for some kind of  (gasp!) "amnesty."  The Los Angeles Times thought the story was significant enough that it was yesterday's front page headline in the print edition.

Traditional pillars of the Republican base, such as police groups, evangelical pastors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have begun to push skeptical GOP lawmakers to change federal immigration laws to allow most of the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants to apply for legal status.

The issue has long been fought mostly between Republicans and Democrats. But the fate of a potential immigration overhaul may be determined by battles erupting inside the GOP.

"Now it's conservatives versus conservatives over how much immigration reform should happen," said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that has advanced a free-market argument for opening up the immigration system. ...

Some national Christian organizations, law enforcement officials and business leaders have begun coordinating a national campaign to convince voters that immigration reform can be consistent with conservative values. Gathering in Washington last week, leaders of several groups said the goal is to help Republicans in Congress who fear being voted out of office if they support legal status for illegal immigrants.   [Emphasis added]

California Republicans have been begging for this for four years now.  They have been effectively shut out of state government because of the nasty stance on immigration their candidates felt compelled to take. And the demographics of the country, supported by the 2010 Census, have shifted.  There are more Latinos who are "legal" and who vote and who have been voting for Democrats because of the Republicans' refusal to be flexible when it comes to a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people already here.  And that's why the sudden interest in reform:

"Republicans need to change now because the country is changing," said Nowrasteh, the immigration expert at the Cato Institute. "It is self preservation as well."   [Emphasis added]

You think maybe?

Excuse me while I chuckle.

Stupid. Crazy. Evil.

(Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

It's been amusing on some levels to hear the weeping and wailing of those unhappy with the election results.  On other levels, however, it's been downright spooky.  I mean, suddenly the world is askew because the election didn't turn out the way it was promised by Fox and the GOP.  David Horsey took a look at some of the whining in Monday's column.

President Obama’s reelection has caused right-wingers to become completely unhinged. They are purple-faced and apoplectic, convinced that an ignorant horde of government-dependent social leeches has destroyed traditional America and banished God from the country. ...

All of this doomsday blather hearkens back to Romney’s infamous characterization of 47% of Americans as “victims” who only want to be coddled by government. As it was when Romney said it, this portrait of America is not only demonstrably false, it is a scurrilous slander with a racist tinge.

The most numerous voters dependent on government to keep them economically afloat are retirees who receive Social Security and Medicare benefits. This was the cohort that went most heavily for Romney. The people who put Obama over the top in the electoral vote, on the other hand, were autoworkers in Ohio; not exactly a dependent bunch.

They were also young people who do not grow faint at the thought of gays getting married or women using birth control. They were middle-class white Americans – as many as voted for Bill Clinton, by the way – who think it is unfair that all the economic benefits in this country flow to the richest 1%.

From Ted Nugent to Sarah Palin to Franklin Graham to Rush Limbaugh:  all see a future in which America slips into a Godless-Communist state run by storm troopers rushing to herd most of us into death camps and/or gay marriage and forced pot-smoking.  This once proud hard-working Christian nation is now being run by takers who simply want something for nothing.  What's worse, they are not White.

Still living in their reality-defying bubble, the Right Wing cannot handle what happened.  That their idols were rejected is inconceivable.  Horsey's conclusion suggests the reason this is so.

Right-wingers will not let go of their own misleading mythology. They have a constricted vision of who the “real Americans” are and who they are not. Until election night, they still believed that people like themselves constituted a majority in this country. Now that they are faced with the truth of their own diminishing numbers, they are rejiggering reality. Incapable of accepting that the millions of people who voted for Obama are overwhelmingly hardworking, family-loving, patriotic Americans, they have to imagine them as the “takers” that Ayn Rand warned them were coming.

This is a necessary self-deception. Otherwise, conservative crazies would have to face an inconvenient truth: On election day, a majority of real Americans rejected them.

Rainbows

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 11/11/12.  Click on image to enlarge and then return.)

Republicans (at least some of them) have done a little analyzing of the results of the election and are suddenly making noises about some changes in their approach.  Given the overwhelming vote for Obama in the Hispanic community (he tied for the Cuban vote in Florida which traditionally votes Republican) and given the rising number of Hispanic voters, some are even moving towards the idea of an immigration reform bill.

The first hint of this movement came surprisingly from the punditocracy.  Amazingly, Fox News appears to have shifted gears, as noted by Media Matters.  I must say that hearing Sean Hannity call for a new look at immigration reform rather stunned me, especially since he also said his new view is an "evolved" one.  Shocking!

But some elected Republican officials have chimed in as well, as noted by The Hill (via The Impolitic):

...Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said a “comprehensive approach” on the issue was “long overdue.” ...

 The comments from Boehner and other Republicans suggesting movement on immigration reform reflect broad fears within the party that it is cutting itself off from the fast-growing constituency.

Warning signs for Republicans in terms of its future with Hispanic voters could be found not only in the election’s results but in exit polls that found Romney tied Obama even among Cuban Americans in Florida, who have traditionally been a strong GOP constituency.

Further, on yesterday's bobblehead shows, another Republican spoke to the issue and even suggested some details to get around the "amnesty" objection.  From the AP:

Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who promoted similar proposals on separate Sunday news shows said that no path to citizenship would be available until the country's borders were secure.

Only then could those in the U.S. without authorization "come out of the shadows, get biometrically identified, start paying taxes, pay a fine for the law they broke," Graham told CBS' "Face the Nation." ''They can't stay unless they learn our language, and they have to get in the back of line before they become citizens. They can't cut in front of the line regarding people who are doing it right and it can take over a decade to get their green card."

Is this just talk or are Republicans serious?  It's hard to tell.  A couple of Republicans in California have been screaming for some movement on the issue since 2010 when the Republicans were shut out of all constitutional offices.  Things didn't fare any better for them in this last election.  It appears the Democrats have won super-majorities in both houses of the state legislature, which makes raising taxes possible.  Another blow-out election on the national level in 2014 could result in the loss of the House and further losses in the Senate for the GOP.  The fear of that happening might be enough to get things moving.

It's almost enough for me to go out and buy some popcorn.

Almost. 

Scary Stuff

(Click on image to enlarge so you can see the fine details.  Then please come back.)

So, Happy Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, another pagan holiday the Christians swiped and revamped, making it a paler than pale version than it was.  Now it's supposed to be a scary, monster-filled evening, with the upside being that little kids get free sugar-rushes if they're brave enough to ring a doorbell.

With that in mind, I was absolutely delighted with David Horsey's column from yesterday.  This man freakin' gets it!  This really is a scary time, one that will legitimize the worst of the human psyche should Romney win.

It is impossible to know if Mitt Romney would turn out to be a good, bad or a mediocre president, but one certain downside of a Romney victory is that it would reward the most venal forces in American politics. ...

From Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump to all the anonymous creators of the wild fabrications that churn out of websites and go viral in emails, the relentless vilification of Obama has been unprecedented. Sure, every president suffers unfair criticism. Many of our most effective presidents, from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, have been slandered and hounded by critics. But Obama’s detractors have plumbed new and revolting depths of mendacity.

Obama’s birthplace, his paternity, his religion, his academic attainments, his citizenship and his loyalty to the country have all been called into question by people who feel no moral qualms about spreading fabrications and untruths. Any unfair tactic, any lie is justified in order to “take back America” from someone they refuse to accept as a legitimate president, despite the indisputable reality that he was elected by a majority of American voters in a near-landslide of electoral votes.   [Emphasis added]

And what hurts this ex-lawyer most is that it was helped along by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision.  Our owners are only too happy to fund the wing-nuts in their drive to demolish a man, who, while certainly not perfect, didn't fit their mold.  And that's what the last four years have been about, as Horsey reminds us.

The ever-waffling Romney is not their perfect candidate, but, for now, that does not matter. He offers their one and only chance to drive the usurper, Obama, from the White House. That has been the right wing’s objective every minute of every day for four years, and vindication of their dishonest, un-American crusade would be the worst result of Mitt Romney’s election.

And that just scares the hell out of me.

And Some Are Scum

(Editorial cartoon by Glenn McCoy / Belleville News-Democrat (October 25, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge, although I don't see why you'd want to.)

As you've probably noticed over the past several months, I've indulged my love for editorial/political cartoons on this blog.  I've always posted those that really tickled me, that really cut through the bovine excrement being spread by the rest of the mainstream media outlets to get at the truth of what's going on.  It occurred to me that I wasn't presenting a complete picture.  You see, the conservatives and Reich Wing have their cartoonists as well, and Mr. McCoy is one of them. 

I've selected this cartoon of his to show just how the worst of the wurst operate.

OK, the main reference is to the Three Wise Monkeys aphorism, one that we're all familiar with.  Here's the thing, though, it's the Three Monkeys, not the Three Wise Apes or the Three Wise Chimpanzees.  The aphorism is Asian and it's clear what is intended.  This graphic from Japan makes my point.  Notice the ears.

And you might want to notice the ears of this picture of one of my favorite species, spider monkeys.  Here also the ears are close to the head, not sticking out. 

The ears sticking out are usually associated with apes and chimpanzees.  Liberal cartoonists had a field day with that when it came to George W. Bush, whose ears did stick out.  A whole lot of my liberal friends referred to him as "Chimpy" because of that.  And, to be fair, President Obama has acknowledged that his ears have been a life-long challenge for the same reason.

So what's my beef with Mr. McCoy's cartoon?

Well, I have several of them.

The first is easy.  The mainstream media and the lame stream media at FOX and AM talk radio have been screaming about Obama's obfuscation of what happened at the Libyan embassy since it happened, even though it's clear that the administration has been forthcoming with the information they had as soon as it was received, even though some of the information was partial.  There has been no silencing on the issue, just a whole hell of a lot of mis-reporting all the way around.

The second is that we just had a debate on foreign policy and Mr. McCoy's candidate was noticeably silent on the issue of Benghazi.  He was too busy agreeing with President Obama's foreign policy in most respects, that is, when he wasn't talking about Mali and a really geographically-challenged  view of the Middle East.  I guess Mr. McCoy was left hanging, so he went for what he thought was low-hanging fruit.

Which brings me to the third beef:  this isn't an example of a racist dog-whistle.  Oh, no.  Not at all.  It's a freaking FOG HORN.

The use of the chimp image is one thing, which is still enough to make my tin-foil chapeau vibrating.  It's the brown hand reaching down from the upper right hand corner of the cartoon.  This BLACK MAN is in the WHITE MAN's house and he's screwing things up for WHITE MEN.

And the thing is, a picture really is worth more than a thousand words and this cartoon will reach a lot of people in the heartland.  That's the power of cartoonists.

I know that's a nasty way to end the week, but I needed to vent.

Well, OK Then

(Click on image to enlarge and then return.)

OK, OK, I know it's two days in a row for touting a Horsey cartoon and column, but I liked what he had to say and I'm also not feeling too sharp after falling yesterday and landing hard on my butt. It's hard to think clearly while sitting on an ice pack and popping pain killers.

In any event, Horsey provides us with the perfect picture of today's Republican Party, a picture which is supplemented by other news from the convention.

He begins the column by noting the parade of people of color during Tuesday's proceedings, both as speakers and as delegates casting their states votes for the nominee. And then he moves in for the kill.

Republicans truly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that the best thing a poor Latino or an underemployed African American can do to better his or her condition is to vote for a party that intends to let rich people keep more of their money. Showing off all those non-Caucasian officeholders is a way of saying to skeptical minority voters, "These guys have chosen the Republican path and just look where it has gotten them!"

It is a way for a party dominated by affluent white people to not feel embarrassed by their lack of diversity and, in fact, to assert a kind of superiority: "Democrats pander to you and keep you in thrall to the welfare state; we Republicans offer you a better way -- the free-market, pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps way."

In a year when Republicans are brazenly trying to suppress the minority vote in Ohio and Florida and are taking the hardest of hard lines on immigration, voting Republican may be a tough sell in minority communities. Still, the party has found some forceful salesmen who have risen from those communities, and they are filling the stage in Tampa with them. [Emphasis added]

But, wait! There's more. Also on Tuesday, one of the uglier episodes of the week occurred on the convention floor: a CNN African American camerawoman was assaulted by two delegates.

Two attendees at the Republican National Convention were thrown out of the convention center in Tampa on Tuesday after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, "this is how we feed the animals." [Emphasis added]

That was Tuesday. Yesterday, Anne Romney was apparently sent out to do some damage control (via Eschaton). Speaking about women and Hispanic voters, Lady Anne had this to say:

Romney said her “importance in speaking out is making sure that those coalitions,” referring to women and Hispanic voters, “that would naturally be voting for another party wake up and say, You’d better really look at the issues this time.”

“You’d better really look at your future and figure out who’s going to be the guy that’s going to make it better for you and your children, and there is only one answer,” Mrs. Romney said, giving a harsher pitch than we usually hear from the woman who wants to be the next first lady.

“It really is a message that would resonate well if they could just get past some of their biases that have been there from the Democratic machines that have made us look like we don’t care about this community,” Romney said. “And that is not true. We very much care about you and your families and the opportunities that are there for you and your families.”

Um, yeah. Sure. And that's why the GOP platform would outlaw abortion for any reason and would build a fence the whole length of the Mexican border, and why her husband promises to de-fund Planned Parenthood and lies about President Obama's rolling back welfare reform to appease "his base" (wink-wink).

I really hope the American electorate isn't as stupid as the Republican Party thinks we are.

...And All His Rowdy Friends

(Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

A-a-a-and another musician weighs in on our Kenyan Muslim Socialist President:

Country music veteran Hank Williams Jr. is doing his best to become the official troubadour of the we-hate-Barack-Obama crowd. During a performance at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 17, Williams told the audience, “We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S., and we hate him!”

The throng of heartland Americans cheered enthusiastically.

Williams isn't the first and only. Ted Nugent and Dave Mustaine have also targeted President Obama with some pretty virulent speech, accusing him of planning to take our assault rifles away by staging the Colorado and Wisconsin rampages to do so. It really has become, as David Horsey points out, an American tradition that goes back a few decades. I just don't remember it being quite this hateful. I assumed that the underlying motivation was the fact that Obama was an African American, but Horsey suggests there's more at work, and he may very well be right.

...What seems strange is that Obama elicits such extreme dislike when, in fact, he is an exemplary family man and his policy positions would have made him a conventional liberal Republican not that long ago.

Many will argue that the hatred has everything to do with the color of Obama’s skin. Unquestionably, race is a factor for some people, but the phenomenon is bigger and broader than that.

Hank Williams Jr. is really typical of a large number of Americans who simply do not like how the country has changed. (One of his songs is a nostalgic tribute to the Old Confederacy built around the lyric, “If the South would’ve won, we’d have had it made.”) In the minds of folks like Hank – addled by talk radio tirades, apocalyptic evangelism and Internet fabrications – Obama has been morphed into a creature who embodies everything they believe is wrong with the urban, multiracial, feminized, gay-tolerant, secular society America has become.

They do not really hate Barack Obama, they hate today’s USA. [Emphasis added]

Perhaps so.

And that's a shame. A damned shame.

Heart Hurt

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader (July 25, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC. Click on image to enlarge and then kindly return.)

Journalist and documentary film-maker Lisa Biagiotti has a heart-breaking op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. There's an international AIDS/HIV conference being held in the US and most folks are busy congratulating each other on the fact that we finally seem to have a handle on this dread disease in terms of treatment, and some signs that we may have a vaccine in the pipes to prevent the infection to begin with.

Ms. Biagiotti reminds us that those congratulations just might be a little premature, especially in this country.

The South has the highest rate of AIDS deaths of any U.S. region. It also has the largest numbers of adolescents and adults living with HIV and the fewest resources to fight the epidemic.

The disease there is concentrated largely in poor minority communities. Diagnoses tend to be late and often only after the infection has progressed to AIDS. Treatment is less effective at that stage, and that's assuming it is even available. Thousands of those living with the human immunodeficiency virus are unable to get the medications they need, waiting in limbo for slots to open up in state AIDS drug assistance programs. President Obama recently pledged to eliminate these waiting lists, and I hope he does.

In Mississippi, the AIDS death rate is 60% higher than the national average, and about 50% of the people who know they are living with HIV are not receiving care, about the same percentage of nontreatment as in Ethiopia. [Emphasis added]

As if the racism and poverty aren't bad enough, those infected face the additional burden of homophobia from within their own family and culture.

I have spent time with and interviewed many black gay men living with HIV in the South, and they tend to tell similar stories. Their families have shamed and shunned them; their churches have condemned them. The schools they attended failed to provide even the most basic sex education.

The culture, they say, has forced them into hiding. Some marry; some have girlfriends. They try to be invisible in a culture that can accept black men as prisoners, drug dealers, gangsters, adulterers, absent fathers — but not as gay.

The underlying problems of stigma, discrimination and homophobia are palpable, and they exacerbate the crisis. One black pastor I filmed urged his flock to see HIV/AIDS as a punishment: "Some say that homosexuality is not a sin," he intoned. "It is. AIDS is God's curse to a homosexual life."

That's a rough road, one that needs to be addressed by all the smiling scientists and sociologists and politicians at that international meeting.


[Note: "deepsouth", Lisa Biagiotti's documentary on HIV in the South, premiered this week. More information on the film here]

It's Complicated

David Horsey's recent cartoon and column pretty well captures a significant strand in the Trayvon Martin tragedy: that of the racism African Americans, especially young men, still endure.

Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old kid walking back to his father's house after buying a package of Skittles at a convenience store. George Zimmerman was an overzealous block watch volunteer carrying a gun. Zimmerman may have been carrying something else around with him: an attitude about black kids and where they belonged. ...

Zimmerman considered Martin a suspicious character -- at least that's what he was telling the 911 dispatcher he had on the line. He also told the dispatcher that "these ... always get away," according to a recording of the call that has been released. Then he took off running after Martin and uttered to the dispatcher a word that some listeners heard to be a racial epithet.

Martin, of course, was African American and, even though this gated neighborhood in Sanford, Fla., happened to be where his dad lived, in Zimmerman's eyes, he did not belong there.

Yes, even after electing a Black man President of the United States, our society still is wracked by racism. And, yes, it is hard to imagine this scenario playing out as it did without that racism being part of the equation. When an alleged journalist can go on national television and suggest that a young Black man wearing a hoodie is just asking to be a target, we may feign outrage at the blatant racism of the statement, but we also need to admit that the statement is sadly true.

And so, once again, our nation is revisiting one of the most painful aspects of our culture. We were due, and it is a subject that needs to be acknowledged and openly discussed. All sides need to be part of the conversation, and all sides need to listen closely to what is being said and what is not being said if we are to move beyond this morass, however glacially, into a more open society where the content of one's character really is more important than the color of one's skin or the shape of one's eyes.

But, as I suggested at the top, racism is only one part of the story. The other significant part is the Florida law which allowed George Zimmerman to walk around his neighborhood playing cop with a gun strapped to his thigh. The law enabled the racism to move beyond crude epithets to a deadly outcome, something which opponents of the law warned would happen. Now, even proponents of the law are beginning to realize that maybe that law just isn't working out as it should.

Opinions about so-called "stand your ground" legislation — at the center of the Trayvon Martin killing in Sanford, Fla. — are as vastly different as the cases in which it has been invoked since Florida in 2005 became the first state to adopt such a statute. But now, even defenders of "stand your ground" laws say they may need tweaking to clarify the stew of interpretations that critics say are letting people like George Zimmerman, who shot the unarmed 17-year-old, get away with murder. ...

Few dispute the right of people to defend themselves inside their homes. The problem comes when both parties have a right to be where an assault has occurred, as in the Martin case, said Jacksonville, Fla., defense attorney Eric Friday, who lobbied for "stand your ground." "You fall back on who was the aggressor," he said.

That forces prosecutors "to prove the person is not reasonable" when someone opens fire, said Sam Hoover, an attorney at the Legal Community Against Violence in San Francisco, which opposes the laws. "It makes it hard in cases, including the Trayvon Martin case, to arrest the individual who killed him." [Emphasis added]

As I pointed out in an earlier post on this story, anyone with two functioning brain cells could have predicted that the law would bring forth a tragedy like this one. Tweaking it by giving the local constabulary the power to arrest the last man standing isn't going to change anything. Yes, at least George Zimmerman would not be walking around a free man while he awaited trial on the issues, but Trayvon Martin would still be dead. That's as warped a view of justice as I can imagine.

Contrary to the opinion of the all-sanctified holy NRA, the Second Amendment is not about the right to walk around town wearing a gun to shoot anyone who looks threatening, hoodie or not. It's time that organization and its bought-and-paid-for politicians are brought to heel. It's time to repeal this type of law and others like it. It is enabling legislation of the worst kind.

Be Careful What You Wish For

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on the veto of a Minnesota state legislature bill to expand the zone of the permissible use of deadly force from just the home to anywhere a citizen "felt threatened." I lauded Governor Dayton's veto of the bill, noting that police groups hated it as much as gun control people did. It was a bill designed to make our society armed and dangerous.

The tragic death of Trayvon Martin, shot by a self-proclaimed "neighborhood watch captain", brings that point home with deadly clarity. Florida has such a law, which the local police department relied on when it refused to arrest George Zimmerman, the man who shot the seventeen-year-old Martin. Now, some of the legislators who pushed the Florida bill are scrambling for cover.

The authors of Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground law say the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin probably should be arrested and doesn't deserve immunity under the statute.

The comments from the Republican lawmakers came the same day state Sen. Oscar Braynon, a Democrat, urged the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators to call for the law to be repealed, amended or subject to legislative hearings. ...

But the lawmakers who crafted the legislation in 2005 - former Sen. Durell Peaden and current state Rep. Dennis Baxley - said the law doesn't need to be changed. They believe it has been misapplied in the shooting death of Trayvon by a Sanford crime-watch captain, George Zimmerman.

Their argument is that Zimmerman doesn't qualify for the protection because he wasn't confronted by Martin. Zimmerman was the one doing the confronting, and did so even after the police department explicitly told him to back off when he called to report a suspicious Black man wandering around the gated neighborhood.

Oh, please.

Anyone with two working brain cells could have foreseen that some nutter cop-wannabe with a racist view of the world would use the law to go hunting down strangers of the wrong color who wandered into their neighborhood. It was precisely this kind of foreseeable consequence that so worried police officials in Minnesota. Such a law moves the impulse to shoot-to-kill from last to first place in self-defense options.

And the result of such a law is the death of a young man guilty only of walking while Black.

There are times when I actually hate being right.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

It wasn't a great year for Super Bowl commercials. Most were insipid, boring, or just, well, stupid. Companies dropped the usual bundle for advertising during the premier sporting event in America (over 111 million sets of eyes were watching) and they delivered some pretty disappointing content for all the money spent.

The people of Michigan got an extra "treat." Just prior to the game, a candidate for the Republican nomination to run against Senator Debbie Stabenow ran an ad, and it was a howler. Pete Hoekstra's commercial managed to insult all sorts of people.

U.S. Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s Super Bowl ad is drawing attention. Just not the kind, perhaps, that he had hoped.

The ad features a woman of Asian descent thanking Debbie “Spend-it-now” for her help in driving up what is presumably the Chinese economy.

“Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie Spend-it-now. Debbie spends so much American money,” she says. “You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you Debbie Spend-it-now.”

The ad manages to hit just about every ugly stereotype of Asians imaginable: the broken English, riding a bicycle around rice paddies with a straw hat dangling on her back. (The video of the ad is available at the link.) It got people's attention, all right.

The reaction was fast, furious and from varying quarters — including a few unlikely places.

Nick DeLeeuw, a conservative activist from the western part of the state, wrote that: “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done.” [Emphasis added]

By that evening, the You Tube of the ad had gone viral and the comments had to be cleaned up. Outrage at the overt racism seemed to be the general consensus from every segment of the targeted audience. Hoekstra promised to respond to the complaints and he did so yesterday. It was a typical response from politicians of his stripe:

In a conference call with reported Monday morning, Hoekstra, a former congressman, denied that the ad is racially insensitive.

"The ad is only insensitive to Debbie Stabenow and her spending," Hoekstra said, adding that "it doesn't criticize the Chinese at all."

Hoekstra said the ad illustrates the fact that China benefits from the "recklessness" of U.S. economic policy. He said the response has been "overwhelmingly positive" and said he is "excited" because "it has jumpstarted the debate" about what he cast as Stabinow's support for reckless spending.

"It's about stopping spending in Washington, and this ad starts the debate," he told reporters.

Right, and Newt Gingrich's dog whistle about the poor children learning the value of work by replacing their school's custodians wasn't about African Americans. Chinese women, including those who live and vote in the US, speak broken English and go around in their silk pajamas wearing straw hats all the time.

What's next? An ad featuring a minstrel show?

What a racist moron.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

As I've said before, I'm always amazed at how closely the issues facing the US are watched by other countries as reflected by their press. That's one of the reasons why I go over to Watching America at least once a week. This week was no different in that I found a very perceptive analysis of the problems America faces in enacting badly-needed immigration reform.

From Bulgaria's Capital:

In theory, it looked simple: Illegal immigrants would leave, and the unemployed in Georgia would take their jobs. An agricultural season and $79.4 million in losses later — from a harvest left on trees and in fields — the equation has been proven wrong. ...

The United States of America may have been built on immigration, but today it doesn’t have the strength to reform an immigration system that has long ago hit a dead end. Although politicians keep repeating that the current situation is unacceptable — and several states have decided to launch their own state reforms — on a national level Republicans and Democrats cannot even agree on giving a start to the negotiation process on the subject. The slow economic recovery and the approaching presidential elections fuel swings between drastic measures and complete apathy.

Because the White House has chosen to deport undocumented workers rather than push for actual reform, and because Congress won't touch the issue during an election year, any real reform is at least two years down the road, if then. States have therefore decided to take the matter into their own hands, with disastrous and often unintended consequences.

The restrictive measures insinuated fear and panic. “Women don’t dare to call the police when they are victims of domestic violence, because they fear extradition. Others don’t even dare to go to the hospital to give birth. In Alabama, where schools check on the status of children and parents, the situation is the worst. According to the statistical data, [during] the first week the law went into force, 2,300 kids did not show up at school,” Cervantes explains. The American media has shown striking images of Latin American immigrants leaving their residences in a hurry, leaving behind furniture and belongings. Other critics of the new legislation point out that it will create a burden to local prisons, which are overpopulated even without that extra pressure. The legislation in Alabama is the most severe not only because of the school checks, but also because it declares illegal any act of providing help, signing a contract or making a residence available to an illegal immigrant.

Immigration reform has become another "third rail" in politics. Xenophobes insist that any reform which provides a pathway to citizenship for those already here is "amnesty" and a "reward" for those who broke the law. All they want is higher fences along the Mexican border because, after all, all undocumented workers come from Mexico and Latin America and take jobs from hard-working but unemployed Americans. Business interests, including garment sweatshops and agricorps like things just the way they are because they can buy cheap labor who will be too afraid to report the egregiously bad conditions under which they are forced to work. And the racists, well, they just don't like anybody whose ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, which must have been a GINORMOUS ocean liner.

And, as the article points out, all of the objections overlook one very important factor:

...The immigrants are here because America needs them. Georgia’s agricultural losses would be the perfect example of what happens when the authorities are taking temporary measures where long-term decisions are needed.

Amen.