Wake up, Dorothy. You were never in Kansas

[Big ol' tip o' the fedora to Prometheus6 for snapping me out of "too busy to post" mode.]

Apparently you can make death threats against a Presidential candidate (translation: a black candidate, specifically Barack Obama) on the Internet and get away with it.

Man's call for Obama assassination is free speech, not crime, court rules
July 19, 2011 | 4:27 pm

A La Mesa man who posted racial epithets and a call to "shoot" Barack Obama on an Internet chat site was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in overturning his criminal conviction...

...the statute doesn't criminalize "predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president," said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

"When our law punishes words, we must examine the surrounding circumstances to discern the significance of those words’ utterance, but must not distort or embellish their plain meaning so that the law may reach them," said the 2-1 ruling in which Chief Judge Alex Kozinski joined but Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw dissented.

Quick now, who's surprised? And who thinks this would be consistently applied to threats against a white candidate? And who thinks the (two) judges in the majority are sure in their own minds that race played no part in their decision?

Full decision here.

Haiti is not rebuilt but we must have our priorities

While the media and many in the blogosphere are seemingly obsessed with how a couple of politicians' personal lives are melting down, I'm reminding by rikyrah at Jack and Jill, who was reminded by BooMan, whom I don't cite often, that Haiti is still under the imperial thumb of yore.

Believe me, if I had a better term than "imperial thumb" I'd use it. But the same external influences (socioeconomic, cultural, religious) that have been punishing Haiti since it dared attempt independence are still in full play...

And if nothing else we should remember that they had an earthquake too.

Because BooMan breaks it down like a fraction* better than I can paraphrase on this rainy Saturday morning, I will just link through. Enjoy and be enlightened.

This also reminds me that I'm overdue for a contribution to Partners in Health, one of the few NGOs that seems to just stay there and help people directly, before, during and after earthquakes. I'll take care of that today.

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*Don't worry, I will stop saying "breaks it down like a fraction" after a while.

Why We Fight, or: Clearly, America has a Black President, not just a President

On the night of April 27, 2011, the night of the day President Obama called a special press conference to personally release his birth certificate, thus "showing his papers" to the country, Rachel Maddow was smart enough to turn her show directly over to Goldie Taylor of The Grio. Goldie explains, through a story about her own family, how this aspect of race in America has shown the constancy of the trade winds.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Once you have absorbed the video, I recommend to your attention the full text of Goldie Taylor's column at the Grio.

ETA: I am reminded by rikyrah at JJP to remind you to check Baratunde's April 27 video as well.

The Black History of the White House (book)

Cross-posted at JJP.

The Black History of the White House on BookTV (C-SPAN2), author Clarence Lusane video at the link:

http://www.booktv.org/Program/...

Book excerpt at City Lights (PDF):

http://www.citylights.com/book...

ETA: Here's a 30-min. NPR segment with Lusane.

How many Senators does it take to avoid paying black farmers?

Once again, here's a timely update to the plight of the black farmers who STILL aren't paid, months after the February 2010 court settlement, thanks to inexcusable delays in the Senate. Hat tip to rikyrah at JJP for posting story & link where I would see it. Comments have been light (nonexistent) on this update over at JJP so I'm cross-posting here for possible penetration.

Black farmers ask why some get aid and they wait

By Jasmin Melvin

WASHINGTON | Wed Aug 11, 2010 8:45pm EDT

(Reuters) - Black farmers involved in a decades-old discrimination case are questioning why the Obama administration has promised to hasten aid for some large-scale farmers in the South while their case is held up in political wrangling.

The administration pledged last week to find $1.5 billion to help farmers hit by natural disasters after it appeared unlikely the Senate would promptly fund the package.

Black farmers reached a historic $1.25 billion civil rights settlement in February to compensate them for being left out of federal farm loan and assistance programs for years due to racism, but are still waiting for funding.

There have been seven failed attempts by the Senate, including one last week, to fund the settlement...

[Original story at Reuters.com]

A summer project of sorts: saving racist e-mail

Having spent a previous life in the U.S. military, I had to get pretty good at navigating institutional racism, and figuring out when people were being racist racist, being ignorant of history, or just occasionally pushing my buttons. (The last is actually a type of testing boundaries, of acceptance, of letting you into the club/treehouse; the first two are a type of rejection of you and your identity.)

I'm still in touch with some people I served with, all races, ethnicities, genders, creeds and orientations. I would go to the mat for a few of them to this day, and vice versa. Others, I wouldn't give a Heimlich to if they were choking on a salmonella-infested chicken nugget at the next table.

Anyway, there are a few who can't quite leave the military life behind, and their e-mail proves it. They rarely if ever update you on themselves or their families. They forward a lot of kick-ass photos of tanks, carrier landings, missile firings and such, as well as jokes that may have once evoked a chuckle in the geek's row during a middle-school assembly. All in good fun until they go political, then it gets strange.

There used to be a rule: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and especially Saturdays-- no, sorry, that's an old Woody Allen routine about a moose--

There used to be a rule: Pick on Democrats as weak on defense, suck up to Republicans because they'll always increase the defense budget, no questions asked, and don't acknowledge third parties at all unless fronted by verified ex-military guys like Ross Perot. Be courteous to a Democratic Commander-in-Chief because you honor the office, but that's as far as you have to go. They picked on Carter, even after living with Nixon. They picked on Clinton. So it's no surprise that since January 2009, ex-military folks whose bell-curved lives peaked when they were on active duty are picking on President Obama.

What has changed is that they can't help but bring non-political factors into the criticism. So the occasional e-mail about our current CINC is colored by thinly veiled remarks and asides, undue emphasis on the Hussein in Barack Hussein Obama, and questions about patriotism and citizenship that never would have arisen in previous Democratic administrations. (To be fair, there was a brief kerfuffle in the early '90s about a young Clinton visiting the Soviet Union as a student, but it was so darned minor as to be a non-issue.)

So this morning I was about to put one of my former colleagues on notice. Did he, a white veteran, forget I was black, or did he just think I was right of center? I wanted to tell him to cut the crap with his mass e-mails, or just not say anything to him and send everything from him to my spam folder. Then I realized that in an election year it would be nice to track what he was sending, to see if it really went over the top and pegged my race-ometer. So I'm not going to call him on it just yet. I'm going to track the mail over the summer and separate the merely patriotic and "support-the-troops" items from the treasonous, seditionist, anti-Presidential items. If it turns out there's a substantial amount of the latter, I may put my students on the case as part of their fall election-tracking. If there's a teachable moment in there I will call it making lemonade out of some quite racist lemons.

Everybody needs a hobby, right?

Why I hate the Confederacy, Part V: Treating treason like it's a good idea

OK, I'm back, with a hat tip to a commenter at JJP who posted a link to the following Washington Post item today:

Despite previous governors' refusals, McDonnell issues Confederate history month proclamation

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors -- Mark Warner and Tim Kaine -- refused to do.

This is literally "two fifths forward, one fifth back"... I like the wryness of one comment at WaPo that suggested Michael Steele cut the ribbon... (He'd charge for it, though.)

The full proclamation signed by McDonnell can be read here.

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***

UPDATE 24 hours later:

The heat was on McDonnell, especially heat from major financial backer and known black woman Sheila Johnson (who took half of the BET fortune with her when she divorced Bob Johnson). Apparently, her support for McDonnell didn't include proclamations about Confederate history that don't mention slavery:

"The complete omission of slavery from an official government document, which purports to be a call for Virginians to 'understand' and 'study' their history, is both academically flawed and personally offensive." More here about Johnson's statement.

As of late afternoon on April 7, McDonnell has issued his own variation on the boilerplate "near-apology since I got caught anyway":

"The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed."

No, by all means don't just apologize.

Under-the-radar racism in Oakland

To be fair, this was not under the radar for Oakland residents, just for me-- being several hours away, and darn careful when I go to the Bay Area anymore, down to obeying parking regulations. People who know me well are aware that I sometimes extrapolate from seemingly very small matters (butterfly flaps its wings) and wonder if they are indicators of larger effects (gale force winds halfway around the world).

The butterfly in this case is the selective enforcement, by socioeconomic neighborhood, of parking regulations in Oakland. Some of us may not be surprised at the practice of enforcing the law strictly in some zip codes, while treating offenses more lightly in others. (We could use drug law disparities as a prime example. There's nothing less impressive than sanctimonious pot-smoking suburbanites telling urban folk not to use drugs.) In this case... well, let the pullquote speak for itself:

Parking enforcement officers who shed light on the practice in The Chronicle on Thursday alleged that the policy of not ticketing cars in the two Oakland hills neighborhoods led to fines being leveled disproportionately against poor, black and Latino people in the flatlands.

What gets me is that someone-- say, a city administrator-- (a) thought it was a good idea, and (b) thought they could get away with it based on spurious comments at an Oakland city council meeting.

Oooh! ® ...Okay, here's the lead-in:

Oakland ends unequal ticketing, officials say

Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, February 26, 2010

Oakland officials said Thursday they have stopped the unequal practice of issuing tickets for certain violations in some neighborhoods while issuing courtesy notices in others.

City Administrator Dan Lindheim said that people who were cited for the violations in question during a four-month period from July 24 to Nov. 12 - when the city says the practice ended - may be able to get their tickets voided on a case-by-case basis.

The announcements came in response to an article in The Chronicle on Thursday, which exposed an internal city memorandum that directed parking officers to issue tickets to cars parked in the wrong direction or on sidewalks anywhere in the city except for two wealthy neighborhoods - Montclair and Broadway Terrace. Cars in those neighborhoods were not tagged but instead received courtesy notices when they violated either of two parking laws.