Tea Party Reality Check: Bill Clinton Dismisses Michelle Bachmann in Davos

It had the potential to be a big "national stage" moment for the Tea Party.

But instead Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann (pictured left) one of the far right's heaviest hitters, came off looking reactionary, uninformed and tediously combative - and according to the Time's Deal Book, Bill Clinton coolly sat down for an interview on the 2nd day of the World Economic Forum and called her out for boldly suggesting "Every American knows we have the greatest health care system in the world."

Actually, we don't. According to the World Health Organization US health care ranks 37th out of 191 countries; just behind Costa Rica. Bizarre gaffes are nothing new for the quotable Bachmann, lists of her jaw-dropping observations are legion online.

Using Bachmann's fact-challenged assumption, Clinton delivered a back-hand to the Tea Party in front of reps from the world's leading nations:

“Everyone knows that is factually untrue,” said Mr. Clinton, “We have to stop conducting our politics in a parallel universe divorced from reality with no facts,”

With the Tea Party Senate Caucus struggling to get more than 4 members in it's ranks and 30 out of 435 in the House, the party is over and it's time to get down to business. Time will quickly tell if the party the Koch Brothers money built can muster the ability to talk straight to the American people and get along on the Hill.

Has Putin's Tolerance of Intolerance Come Home to Roost?

Pictured left, the funeral of Russian journalist Anastasiya Baburova, 25 slain by neo-Nazis in 2009 - pictured below

Last Monday, in a demand for a nationwide crackdown on extremist hate group activity in Russia (amidst the worst racial unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union) Russian President Dimitri Medvedev declared publicly that, "All Nazis, independent of where they come from... they simply undermine the cultural foundations of our state."

Seven days later Medvedev canceled his trip to Davos, Switzerland amid global shock and outrage in the wake of the apparent suicide bombing in Moscow's Domodedevo Airport that killed more than 30 and injured scores of others - raising serious questions of where the government of Vladimir Putin actually stands on the growing violent hate group activity within Russian borders that target ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants as well as Russian scholars, human rights activists and journalists.

Journalists like Anastasiya Baburova, (pictured above) a 25-year old writer for Russian magazine Novaya Gazeta killed in broad daylight less than a a mile from the Kremlin; her work focused in part on exposing Russian neo-Nazis. She was one of 14 people killed in January, 2009 a month before BTO, (a Russian neo-Nazi group) posted a "Death List" on the Internet with the names of dozens of Russian journalists, human rights activists and scholars.

For many of the millions of ordinary Russians shocked at the spike in neo-Nazi activity, the Putin government's alleged acceptance and tacit support for violent ultra-nationalist groups raises the question of whether a tolerance for extremist violence has in fact helped to create the very environment that led to today's bombing.

You can't feed the 800-pound chicken, turn your head when it violates the law using intimidation and violence, then act baffled when it comes home to roost - a lesson tiresome, fear-mongering 'Exceptional American' Sarah Palin still pretends not to have learned.

Does the term "Russian Neo Nazi" strike anyone as absurd given the (real) Nazis were directly or indirectly responsible for over 23,954,000 people killed within the borders of the Soviet Union during World War II?

Krugman Warns GOP Victory Will Prolong Recovery & Punish American Workers

Like many Americans I’m a little baffled by some Congressional leaders and candidates who seem to care less about the actual merits and long-term implications of policy decisions than they do about fueling voter anger and frustration to simply trash President Obama, denounce his agenda and shackle his efforts to help guide the nation back to fiscal health and create jobs.

Few grasp the implications of the Republican War on Reality better than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University professor of economics, author, columnist and one of the worlds leading economic thinkers. In an op-ed piece in Today’s New York Times Krugman pounces on conservatives who brand debt-relief and government stimulus as a “reward for the undeserving.”

Recognized as a leading liberal thinker, Krugman rarely shies from calling Obama out when he thinks the President is wrong.

At a lecture at Princeton University yesterday Krugman voiced grave concerns about how tomorrow’s election results could slow the pace of the economic recovery should months of angry Tea Party rhetoric, character bashing and misinformation about the real causes of the global economic meltdown push Republicans into slim majorities in the House and Senate.

Krugman calls out the "Hell No" Republican leaders who've offered blanket opposition to the Obama's efforts to stimulate the economy. Some of the same politicians who helped loosen regulations to permit large banks to lend at the unsustainable rates that drove us into the mess we find ourselves and fed the incessant global appetite to borrow and spend during Bush's two terms.

On the eve of a mid-term election Republicans seemed poised to further erode the crumbling middle class, vilify the unemployed and increase the federal deficit by insisting tax cuts for the wealthy are the magic pill.

Helped, Krugman warns, by fickle progressives who may step into the voting booth tomorrow and re-align with the GOP because they're upset that niche hot-button issues like GITMO, immigration, clean energy and same-sex marriage were pushed aside - helping to put the same people who bear a large responsibility for driving us into the Great Recession in the first place, back into office. Madness.

Happy Halloween from the KKK!

No those weren't men dressed in KKK costumes on the lawn of a Warrenville, South Carolina home on a recent Saturday night, nor was any pre-Halloween chicanery on the agenda.

The radical Tea Party's bank-rolling of perpetually pissed-off extremist candidates like New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino is apparently bearing all kinds of fruit.

Dovetailing the movement's "us versus them" anger issues, the Augusta Chronicle reports the Warrenville Klan ceremony was the first KKK cross-burning made open to the public since 1985.

Newly anointed Duwayne Johnson celebrated his ascension as the new Grand Wizard of the All American Invisible Knights by welcoming three new members with a good ole' fashioned cross-burning.

Why bother reporting about a seemingly obscure branch of a fractured, decentralized bankrupt hate organization?

"We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage." according to Chip Berlet a veteran analyst of the radical right in the US.

Americans need to pay attention when cowards who put on hoods to conceal their identities while espousing hatred aren't scared to crawl out of the shadows. We need to remember this is the byproduct of divisive Tea Party rhetoric.

As millions prepare to dress up for Halloween parades and parties, it's important to be reminded that costumes like the ones pictured above ARE scary in terms of the dark legacy of murder, terrorism and racism they represent.

Deconstructing Dinesh D'Souza

Politically speaking, writer Dinesh D'Souza has been Rogue for years. But he seems to be veering off the ranch according to reactions to his September 9th Forbes cover story, which among other things, posits the strange theory that President Obama's domestic policies and foreign policy strategy are shaped by what D'Souza describes as Obama's father's "hatred of the colonial system."

Apparently undaunted by the fact that Obama's own book "Dreams of My Father" makes clear the President was left rather disappointed with the man his father became, or that he was absent through most of his formative upbringing, D'Souza delights prominent conservative media pundits and thinkers by dangling proof that Obama is secretly some kind of foreign radical.

MediaMatters.org has completely dissected the text from the D'Souza piece and clearly identified at least ten claims from the article which are either completely false or stand in total opposition to established facts. Like Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes rushing to defend the tactless televised ramblings of Glenn Beck, Forbes stands firmly by D'Souza's error-ridden article.

Is Forbes magazine Going Rouge? The magazine wasn't always so flippant with facts. My father, a college-educated African-American raised in North Carolina during the Great Depression who went on to become a successful corporate professional and political conservative always had Forbes in his den when I was growing up. He was a long-time subscriber and considered it essential reading.

What's peculiar about D'Souza's cover story is that the Forbes brand, while certainly a bastion of the conservative, pro-capitalist economic mindset, seems to have taken a sharp right turn from the standards set by it's founder Malcom Forbes.

In the article D'Souza repeatedly combines his un-evolved conservative slant with a bizarre mix of his own brand of dime-store psychoanalysis and a rather klutzy distortion of the truth in an effort to provide some sort of intellectually substantive justification for Tea Party anger. It's like he tried to whip up some fodder for conservative pundits to use in the weeks leading up to the November election and no one at Forbes even bothered to fact check it.

D'Souza's conclusions from Obama's book "Dreams of My Father" have puzzled a number of journalists who have reported on the books factual errors.

As MediaMatters.org reports, "Everyone else" who read Dreams "saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr. In a September 13th review of D'Souza's forthcoming book, Slate.com's David Weigel wrote, "While everyone else read Dreams From My Father and saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr., D'Souza sees a man burning with 'hatred derived from the debris of the anti-colonial wars.'"

Media Matters also reports that Ryan Chittum described D'Souza's new book as "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia." in the September 13th issue of the Columbia Journalism Review

But anyone remotely familiar with Dinesh D'Souza's writings and background can hardly be surprised that he's written an error-laden piece trashing the President.

D'Souza's simplistic antiquated observations of African-American culture have long pegged him as being right up there with Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin in terms of conservative media superstars long on wind and short on intellectual substance.

In D'Souza's book The End of Racism, he demonstrated an alarmingly uninformed grasp of American history by making the claim that the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well."

He wrote a book blaming liberals for the 911 attacks.

But who is he really?

D'Souza is an immigrant from Mumbai, Matashra, India who arrived in the United States in 1978.

Raised in conservative Arizona, according to a 2007 Boston Globe article by Peter Canellos, D'Souza first grabbed headlines as a 20 year-old writer and Reagan disciple who publicly outed members of the Dartmouth Gay Student Alliance in an article for Dartmouth University's Dartmouth Review - D'Souza also honed his writing by attacking Dartmouth's affirmative action policies.

According to the Globe article, "During the 1980s, before and after D'Souza's editorship, the paper was repeatedly in the news for controversies that included taping a Gay Student Alliance meeting, publishing a column in a mocking imitation of black English, ridiculing a class by a black music professor, comparing the university's Jewish president to Adolf Hitler, and falsely asserting that a university chaplain had defended a group advocating sex with adolescents."

I don't know him personally but perhaps D'Souza's ingrained biases are fueled by his conversion to evangelical Christianity? Like Ann Coulter, D'Souza's contempt for non-white, non-Christians is always cloaked in a veneer of intellectualism and so extreme in tone that it suggests that like some immigrants from India, he was quick to adopt the worn cloak of American bigotry and prejudice based on the mental indoctrination of the Indian caste system he was exposed to as a child. Some Indians, certainly not all, come to this country and quickly adopt an open contempt for those they regard as beneath them.

I've explored Indian racism towards African-Americans previously in this blog, but D'Souza genuinely puzzles me. Why was he so quick to adopt such clearly racist views on blacks?

Was he simply eager to demonstrate just how "cultured" he is by adopting negative views of homosexuals and minorities - almost as if to separate himself psychologically from the dark tone of his own skin and his Indian origins.

It's possible he has a need to distinguish himself from those he considers lower on the mental cast system he's formed inside his mind, which is his right to do.

But I'm not sure that excuses bad journalism and sloppy writing - which is exactly what his Forbes cover story is.

Europe's Roma Dilemma

For hundreds of years populations of Roma, more familiar to many as Gypsies, have wandered various European cities like a forgotten nomadic people without a country or a homeland.

Their sad plight, which began in medieval India, has recently become a lightening rod for media scrutiny of the broader immigration policies of the member countries of the European Union, most noticeably France, who deported more than 1,000 Roma immigrants in a one-month period during August and September.

The BBC reports that the recent expulsion of large numbers of Roma populations from France has divided the members of President Nicolas Sarkozy's own cabinet and pushed the already embattled leader of France to defend his policy both to his own government and to other members of the European Union vigorously opposed to the French policy of deportation.

The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, "said he has almost resigned over the issue" according to a small blurb in 'The World this Week' section of the September 4th issue of the Economist - which also reported that a gunman in the Slovak capital of Bratislava intentionally shot and killed six members of a Roma family inside their apartment in late August.

Various human rights groups have accused the French government of intentional discrimination against impoverished Roma immigrants based on a leaked memo sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs that specifically outlines a systematic policy of closing Roma encampments and settlements in France and expelling the people from the country.

Their peculiar status sadly parallels the plight of newly emancipated African-American slaves in the south after the Civil War, or Jews fleeing Europe after World War II; and Palestinians today.

For many Americans the image of the people known commonly as "Gypsies" has been formed largely from a simplistic romanticized stereotype crafted by Hollywood.

At the core of this distorted misrepresentation are a people trapped by their own identity according to an interesting piece by Suzanne Daley in the September 16th New York Times.

The all too common image of the violin being played by a mysterious dark-skinned man with a dashing head scarf tied around his head. Or the sultry bandanna-wearing Gypsy woman/sage figure reading the future through crystal balls in the back of colorful wagons at carnivals looms in the subconscious minds of many Americans who don't really understand the history and origins of the Romani.

As is often the case the media-created image is far different than reality for the impoverished, under-educated marginalized pockets of Roma people stretching from Western Europe to the borders of the middle-east.

For the more prosperous countries of the European Union struggling to manage their way out of the global recession, (each of which harbors thousands of migrant Roma populations within their borders) it begs the question of how an often-vilified and certainly ostracized population of people will survive in a Europe that seems to regard them as a problem no one wants to deal with, and no one owns.

Black and Jewish in America - Balancing Race and Religion

If the tone of my entries on this blog sometimes seem to take particular issue with the divisive politics of the right, it's only because their narrow-minded vision of America stands in complete contrast to my own upbringing.

For me, as an African-American growing up in Bethesda, Maryland in the suburbs of Washington, DC during the 70's and 80's, understanding my own sense of cultural identity was often a perplexing challenge. Being the only, or one of a few black students in schools that were overwhelmingly white was often a lonely experience.

So I was naturally drawn to David Matthews 2007 book Ace of Spades; an eye-opening non-fiction account of his being raised in Baltimore in the '80s as the son of a Jewish mother and liberal African-American journalist father. I felt a kinship with Matthews (pictured left) for wrestling with the strange sense of cultural "in between-ness" and his memoir, which I bought last Spring after hearing an interview with him on NPR, has helped me to re-examine my own childhood.

He's an interesting writer who uses language like a hammer and I kept a dictionary next to my bed to look up the many words I'd never heard of.

Though I grew up with Jewish friends and our next door neighbors were Jewish, I'd never really heard of black Jews until hearing news reports about Israel air-lifting Ethiopian Jews from famine-stricken Africa to Israel during Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991.

There are indeed populations of African-American Jews living here in America, in last Friday's New York Times, Trymaine Lee penned an interesting piece on a small population of black Jews who live in Brooklyn, New York; and their search for an identity that balances religion and race.

Their story, like Matthews, struck me as a timeless illustration of the ongoing struggle of people from so many different religions, races and nationalities to find their place in the changing landscape of America.

The Tea Party Conceals its True Nature While Frank Rich Exposes the Koch Brothers

While right-wing radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck exhorted the thousands of the Tea Party faithful gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to reflect on God and pay tribute to the service men and women who've sacrificed for this nation, many people including myself were wondering where the real Tea Party was.

Frank Rich of the New York Times had an answer ready in the form of a must-read blistering critique of the Tea Party's three main billionaire backers; Rupert Murdoch and the highly controversial and mysterious Charles and David Koch.

Men whose extremist ideology stands in complete opposition to Dr. King's vision of racial equality, social justice and government responsibility for workers, the impoverished and those relegated to the margins of this society.

The anniversary and location of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech struck many in this nation as a peculiar place for a rally for a political movement financed in large part by the Koch brother's wealth.

To others, the Tea Party's presence on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Becks self-righteous attempt to lay claim to a vision of America as a nation of faith was simply an insult and an affront to the ideals of the civil rights movement.

Veteran political reporter Taylor Marsh attended the rally and reported the crowd was not a diverse mix of different segments of America as Tea Party defenders try to present it; despite the appearance of Dr. King's anti-abortion advocate niece. No offense to Dr. King's relative but she's never been relevant to the national political dialog and she isn't now; just because she showed up on stage doesn't mean the Tea Party platform is somehow magically linked to the legacy of Dr. King.

In the end the sanitized public version of the Tea Party on display on Saturday for mainstream media will be a distant memory as the November elections heat up and the reality of Beck's lunatic right-wing ramblings reverts back to the same narrow-minded rhetoric we've become all too accustomed to.

Will history remember Beck's rally more than 40 years from now? Probably not. Cheap political stunts like that rarely stand the test of time. Dr. King's defining vision will forever symbolize America's hope to fulfill it's potential.

GOP Hatred: Ken Mehlman Stirs the Ghosts of the Southern Strategy

Ken Mehlman (pictured left) is out; and in more ways than one.

With the former Bush campaign manager and top GOP strategist's public admission in an Atlantic Monthly interview that he is gay, comes fresh insight and undeniable proof that the Republican party intentionally uses hate, prejudice and fear as the basis of their political strategy.

What is perhaps most shocking is not Mehlman's sexual orientation, but that for years he used the media to help engineer the manipulation of the evangelical Christian right to fan the flames of hostility against homosexuals to score votes.

Among other things revealed in The Atlantic interview, Mehlman admits that he helped to put anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballots of at least eleven GOP-friendly states in an effort to boost votes for George Bush's 2004 re-election campaign and again as the RNC chair during 2006 congressional elections.

As if more proof was needed that the Republican party has declared 2010 the year of hate and intolerance, the TPM Website reports that GOP Louisiana Congressman John Fleming appeared before a Republican women's group and suggested that the upcoming November elections are a choice between America being a "Christian nation" or a "Godless society."

This one-dimensional, intellectually bankrupt "You're either with us, or against us" point of view cannot possibly co-exist in a nation as culturally diverse as America.

On Countdown with Keith Olberman last night, Olberman reminded viewers that the anti-gay GOP strategy is merely the latest version of the notorious "Southern Strategy" used by Republicans to capitalize on the racial fears of white, Christian voters during Richard M. Nixon's 1968 campaign.

What's unsettling here is that even Mehlman KNEW it was morally and politically wrong to race-bait voters - and the RNC chair admitted so in front of the NAACP National Convention in Milwaukee in 2005. Yet a year later he was using the same tactics against both homosexuals and illegal immigrants.

Only time will tell how this will impact restless American voters, but it does raise the question of whether the GOP actually intends to offer ANY new ideas to steer the country back out of the worst economy since the depression, or are they simply banking on stoking the fears of intolerance and prejudice as a means to win the hearts and minds of American voters.

What's happened to the voices of reason and principle in the GOP? When did it all become about marginalizing people and sewing the seeds of division?

I don't know whose party this is right now, but it sure ain't the party of Lincoln.

The Sovereign Citizen Movement Gains Traction

The fringe extremist front known as the sovereign citizen movement in the US rarely seems to pique the kind of mainstream media scrutiny that the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the World Trade center in New York receives, but the threat they pose is real and their membership is growing.


Pictured left, Joe Zane, 16, lies dead after he and his father, Jerry were shot by police officers shortly after the two sovereign citizens killed Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans, two West Memphis, Arkansas police officers on May 20th.

Sovereign citizen activists Jerry Kane and his 16 year-old son Joe were pulled over in a routine traffic stop by Paudert and Evans and minutes later were shot and killed by Joe when he jumped out of the passenger seat of their white minivan and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle killing both officers.

NBC Nightly News ran a piece on the story and the story did make headlines across the country, but serious examination of the movement seems to have fizzled in the mainstream press.

The incident shed light on a group that lacks a central leadership, but boasts a growing membership organized into cells across the country. Who are sovereign citizens?

The FBI and the IRS have begun to monitor the sovereign citizen membership and their activities more closely.

The Anti-Defamation League Website describes the sovereign citizen movement as:
"...a loosely organized collection of groups and individuals who have adopted a right-wing anarchist ideology originating in the theories of a group called the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. Its adherents believe that virtually all existing government in the United States is illegitimate and they seek to "restore" an idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed."

In its fall 2010 intelligence Report the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) raises the alarm about the sovereign citizen movement, detailing the murders of the Arkansas police officers as well as the bizarre array of activities of sovereign citizens.

Sovereign citizens believe themselves to be members of separate sovereign entities and hence are not subject to state or federal laws. Some beliefs seem harmless, but in this post-911 era are actually extremely dangerous.

They don't think they should be required to carry drivers licenses, social security cards or identification of any kind. They hold "courts" where they issue arrest warrants for police officers and judges; and even sanction violence against members of government and private citizens.

Most famously, sovereign citizens believe they are not bound to pay taxes and have developed a strange array of seminars, court filings, letters and protests to avoid doing so. I'd never heard about sovereign citizens until actor Wesley Snipes emerged as a advocate of the groups beliefs and I blogged about it here on culturegeist.

I believe the Constitution gives all Americans the right to believe what they want and to protest; but any group that advocates the execution of law police officers is a danger to us all.

More on Sovereign Citizens

Welcome to the Kochtopus - The Koch Brothers Meet Mainstream Media

Why has it taken so long for credible main stream media to begin taking a closer look at Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have quietly and almost single-handedly bankrolled the far-right Tea Party movement?

Are these guys (David and Charles Koch pictured left) really dangerous to Democracy?

New Yorker magazine reporter Jane Mayer pens a piece in the latest issue - but why so long for the Koch brother's names to be linked to the ultra right conservative causes they espouse? The Koch's certainly aren't invisible, they're the 9th richest people in the nation. No surprise that they oppose bigger taxes.

If you've bought Brawny paper towels, Dixie Cups, a Georgia-Pacific lumber product or used Stainmaster to clean your carpets you've done business with Koch Industries - regarded by some as the biggest debunkers of climate change data in the world. Why? Perhaps because Koch Industries is one of the biggest owners of oil pipelines in the country.

Back on December 9, 2009 the Think Progress Website Progress Report detailed how the Koch (pronounced like 'Coke') brothers have funneled millions (over $45 million to dozens of conservative groups since 1997) to oppose almost every agenda item from the Obama White House from the Stimulus Package to the health care bill.

Don't get me wrong, Charles and David Koch can spend the proceeds from their wealth any way they want. But it strikes me as odd that the same media that shows video clips from Tea Party events with 'outraged Americans' carrying signs depicting the President as a Nazi or a spreader of Socialism - never even mention Charles and David Koch, the guys who foot the bill to send 40 busloads of people to Tea Party events.

The Koch brothers are rich even by American standards. Their staggering wealth finances a wide range of politically conservative organizations and think tanks; including Americans for Progress (which might as well be called Tea Party Central)and The Heritage Foundation.

From "Obama isn't really an American Citizen", to "Obama is a Muslim" and the Glen Beckian "Obama is a racist", the squeakier wheels in the right-wing media movement have presented a strange tapestry of fabricated nonsense for their angry minions to flaunt - but what if it's all just a bunch of BS generated by a couple of hardcore right-wing conservative guys who own one of the largest private companies in America?

Is that First Amendment expression or media manipulation?

Let's see if Katie Couric or Brian Williams have the journalistic balls to introduce the heartland of America to the Koch brothers and the actual scope of their one-sided agenda. Now THAT would be a real Eye on America.

More About the Kochtopus!

The Growing Tolerance of Intolerance in America

Whatever happened to the idea of America as a melting pot?

If the tone and substance of the current conservative media message is any gauge, apparently we’ve got a lot of people taking issue with certain ingredients in the stew.

Used to be it was the Michelle Malkins, Ann Coutlters and Rush Limbaughs trying to couch bigotry in intellectual terms. No more.

Stirring up fear in the minds of those agonizing about what the fabric of this nation is going to look like in the future has become like a sport.

On truthdig.com Joe Conason reports that in family-friendly Seaside Heights New Jersey, hucksters at Lucky Leo's offered patrons a chance to take out their political frustrations by hurling objects at an offensive caricature of the President seen by some as racist.

Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch seem content with Glen Beck's use of his televised stage to pass off unsubstantiated rumor, opinionated nonsense and misrepresentation of fact as journalism.

According to MediaMatters.org Beck is now declaring his rants a religious mission, even suggesting the officials enacting policies in Washington are "enemies of God."

Is this a 1st Amendment free speech issue, or are people are listening?

Elias Ebuelazam was arrested as he tried to board a flight to Israel after the FBI pegged him as the suspected serial killer responsible for up to 20 stabbings in three states that were racially motivated - 18 of the victims were black, including a minister stabbed outside a church while smoking a cigarette last Saturday.

Intolerance hasn’t just gone mainstream, in some circles it’s become fashion. The button to push, the emotion to nudge; the pot to stir.

Views once considered marginalized are merging into the mainstream.

Or perhaps as Fordham University professor Mark Naison suggests, it was never really that marginalized to begin with.

Just quietly intolerant.

Glen Beck slips further from reality.

The Tea Party: Who's Party is it Anyway?

Is the Tea Party an actual political party in the traditional sense of American politics?

Lately the Tea Party seems to be less about fair taxation than a platform for intolerance, religious persecution and even hatred. The growing flap over the proposed construction of a Mosque and Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site has sparked a bizarre backlash against even moderate Muslims across the US.

Today's New York Times reports that in late June a Tea Party group in Temecula, California took signs, dogs and anti-Muslim rhetoric to protest while Muslims were attending Friday prayers.

But it's not just Muslims the Tea Party seems opposed to.

In a July 20th Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson called for the Tea Party to purge what is now widely seen as racist elements within their ranks in the wake of the group severing ties with the Tea Party Express and one of their most outspoken leaders, former right-wing radio host Mark Williams after he posted a fictional letter from NAACP Ben Jealous to Abraham Lincoln that was so overtly racist that even members of the Tea Party demanded his ejection from the broader movement.

Is the Tea Party marginalizing itself in the lead up to the November elections? Slowly it seems to be morphing into an intellectual dumping ground for some of the deep-seated fear and mistrust that simmers just below the surface of the fabric of this nation.

Not convinced? Read the full text of Mark Williams letter for yourself.

Andrew Breitbart's Absence of Morality

An Open Letter to James Breitbart:

The Acorn stunt was sketchy enough in it's borderline entrapment stunt - and obviously racist to anyone who saw it.

You've clearly stepped into a whole new realm with this one and exposed yourself as a biased media clown intoxicated by your ability to manipulate the truth, saturate the media with your BS and then sit back and watch as Faux News and Limbaugh & Co. repeat it as fact until it in itself becomes a news item.

Problem is this time your clever video editing so obviously perverted the actual reality of what Ms. Sherrod was talking about, that you've ended up revealing that you are in fact, a complete racist desperate to pander to the most base elements of a Republican party that's been hijacked by intolerance, greed and a sickening contempt for the welfare of the common man.

Congratulations Andy! You are the secret police! You've tarnished a woman's career - the same woman who saved the farm of the people you claim she was being racist against.

So thank you for showing us who you are. And honestly if THAT''s all the GOP media machine has got, you guys are about to get crushed in November.

Your dim-witted high school video-stunt will actually be worth much more to Democrats in 3 months than all the empty hot air your sad excuse of a Website churns out on a constant basis.

And you've got the gall to not apologize to this woman? You gutless coward. Two words for you and your James O'Keefe-ian video crew. Man up.

Jeffrey Conroy Guilty in Long Island Anti-Immigrant Slaying

What makes a seemingly normal 17-year old high school student-athlete take a knife and stab an innocent Ecuadorian immigrant in a dark parking lot near the Long Island Railroad? Does anything make sense about that?

(Pictured, Jose Lucero, brother of victim Marcelo Lucero in the Suffolk County courtroom during the Jeffrey Conroy's indictment back in November 2008)

Two of many questions floating along the stream of NY media attention given to the case of the gruesome stabbing murder of 37 year-old Marcelo Lucero on a November night back in 2008.

Today's New York Times reports that a jury of seven men and five woman, ten of whom were white, decided the killing wasn't murder, but instead convicted Long Island teenager Jeffrey Conroy of manslaughter and hate crimes for the stabbing death of Marcelo Lucero in 2008.

Lucero was brutally killed near a Long Island Railroad parking lot when Conroy and five other boys out on the town for a night of "Beaner-Hopping" (LI teen lingo for finding and beating Hispanic people they believe to be immigrants) surrounded, attacked and eventually stabbed the Ecuadorian dry cleaning store employee for being Hispanic.

The conviction goes a long way in addressing the years of unsolved violence against Hispanic immigrants in some Long Island communities - and puts the spotlight on a Suffolk County Police department under investigation by the Justice Department for discrimination in policing.

Long Island resident's concerns about large numbers of undocumented Hispanic immigrants moving into their communities warranted? Sure, but they can't excuse violent physical attacks on innocent people. What's happening to civility in this country?

Bob Griese's Racist Taco Comment Raises Eyebrows

Viewers of Saturday's Ohio State-Minnesota football game got a lot more than game analysis from ESPN sports analyst/color commentator Bob Griese.

While reading a NASCAR promo graphic with photos of the top NASCAR drivers, Griese's partner commentator Chris Spielman asked why driver Juan Pablo Montoya wasn't shown. With a laugh Griese answered, "He's out getting a taco."

It was a remarkably one-dimensional comment to come from such a well-respected and normally eloquent broadcaster. The news comes at the same time ESPN just fired baseball analyst and former Mets GM Steve Phillips for having an affair with a twenty-two year-old ESPN intern named Brooke Hundley.

While the "Taco Comment" is far from the bizarre slip that got former CBS NFL Today commentator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder fired back in 1988, the off-handed way Griese made the remark and the way he laughed made him come off as something of an insensitive bigot. He sounded more like a hick amused by simplistic stereotypes and lacking in basic understanding of Hispanic culture.

Montoya isn't Mexican he's Colombian and even if he WAS Mexican, it still doesn't mean he runs around eating tacos all the time.

Most football fans know Griese as the NFL Hall-of-Fame QB of the Miami Dolphins. A highly-respected college football color man, he was the former booth partner of former ABC broadcasting legend Keith Jackson, I never would have thought him the type to make such a comment, even in jest in privacy. To say nothing of an open mike on a nationally televised game.

What effect does a comment like that have on the minds of the thousands of young kids who were listening?

While Griese did apologize for the comment later on in the broadcast, his reputation is stained. Not so much for the comment itself, but the startling lack of awareness of the makeup of a multi-cultural society that finds such humor distasteful and offensive.

As Lord Jeffrey warned, "A good name, like good will is got by many actions and lost by one."

Cracker Barrel Attacker Troy Dale West, Jr. Indicted on Felony Charges

Excuse me is this 2009 or 1929?

Yesterday, hundreds of supporters were on hand at the Clayton County Court in Georgia for the indictment of a 47 year-old white Georgia resident named Troy Dale West, Jr. on charges he viciously beat Tasha Hill, an African-American Army reservist, in front of her 7 year-old daughter.

The incident occurred outside of a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Morrow, Georgia at about 7:30pm on Wednesday September 9th. The case has been referred to the FBI's Civil Rights Division to determine whether or not the incident is a hate crime.

Witnesses and Atlanta television station WSBTV reported that West allegedly erupted when Hill asked him to "please be careful, that door almost hit my daughter" after he slammed the door open on his way out of the restaurant, nearly striking her daughter. In response to Hill's request, West simply exploded, using his fists to hit Hill in the face then throwing her to the ground and striking her in the head several times and kicking her in the body while repeatedly calling her a "fucking black nigger bitch".

Horrified witnesses watched as Hill's 7 year-old daughter desperately tried to get back through the glass doors to help her mother while the assault was taking place.

Click the link above, or click play on the upper right side of the page to hear Hill's account of what happened. Local Atlanta news reported that the Cracker Barrel employees were very cooperative in helping the victim and police/EMTs who arrived on the scene, so kudos to Cracker Barrel.

Given the realities of America's complex racial history, it's not a shock that the election of an African-American president has stirred deep-seated resentment by some Americans.

What IS shocking and repugnant to most people is to see people of any color, religion or race violently channel that resentment onto a mother and her 7 year-old child. The Clayton County DA was so incensed, she is prosecuting the case personally.

The anger, violence and hate displayed by West should concern ALL Americans, it's an unfortunate part of the fabric of our nation that's as much a threat as the economic crisis or terrorism - Troy Dale West, Jr. is the real terrorist.

W. Horace Carter - Courageous Newspaper Man Who Challenged the KKK Dies at 88

There was a time when the power of print newspapers and the men and women who published and wrote them wielded immense power and influence to shape America's cultural identity and define the nation's zeitgeist.

On Sunday the New York Times reported the passing of W. Horace Carter, an 88 year-old newspaper publisher who demonstrated moral courage and fierce determination in his efforts to confront the spread of the Ku Klux Klan and their violence in his North Carolina community in the 1950's.

Carter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/editor who generously gave back to his alma mater the University of North Carlina at Chapel Hill.

His passing might not make waves in today's mainstream media spotlight, but his contributions to America's cultural evolution and fight against racism will be forever felt. According to Carter's paper the Tabor-Loris Tribune, his Klan campaign resulted in the prosecution of 254 KKK members, 62 of whom were sentenced to prison.

There were many journalists who displayed extraordinary courage to report on the Civil Rights struggle in America at great risk to themselves and their families.

If you're interested in learning more about their heroic efforts, I'm still in the process of reading Hank Robert's and Gene Kilbanoff's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.

W. Horace Carter's lasting legacy will be his tireless efforts to open the nation's eyes to the realities of prejudice and racism, continuing the fight to bring the freedoms and rights contained in the Declaration of Independence to all Americans.

Conservative Attacks on ACORN - Part of a Broader GOP Agenda Against Low Income Families?

In the wake of film-makers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles' video of ACORN members from different offices supposedly advising them, dressed/posing as a "couple", (O'Keefe dressed as a pimp and Giles as his prostitute looking to learn how to conceal cash earnings and hide underage sex slaves from foreign countries) has become the latest symbol of government waste and fraud on Capitol Hill.

But is it? Reality check.

O'Keefe and Giles will never be confused with Woodward & Bernstein and "the couple" were actually sent in to "set traps for ACORN to lie", according to Andrew Breitbart founder of the BigGovernment.com Website where the video first appeared.

In television interviews James O'Keefe claimed none of the ACORN offices he visited at any point kicked him out when he asked his staged questions. That's a lie.

O'Keefe's partner an "aspiring journalist" Hannah Giles is the daughter of right wing media Website columnist Doug Giles - she didn't bother showing up to a CNN television interview looking into the "couple's" self-described prostitution scandal.

According to MediaMatters.org, reps from both the Baltimore and Philadelphia ACORN offices not only asked O'Keefe and Giles to leave, they also filed police reports about the incidents.

In a recently posted video available on Youtube (or watch it by clicking play on the upper right of this blog) the Philadelphia office director for ACORN Katherine Conway Russell asserts that James O'Keefe lied about who he was in order to gain entrance to the ACORN office.

So why are so many Congressmen so fired up about ACORN?

In response to this questionable video evidence, yesterday a majority of House Democrats and Republicans moved to cut federal funding for ACORN by passing H.R. 3221 - a recently added rider to the bill would cut off ACORN's funding.

Why would a rider on ACORN funding be hidden inside a bill for student aid?

Save for the fact that Barack Obama was a community organizer for the embattled group early in his career (prompting the GOP to seize on it as ammunition to discredit him and ridicule his record) I doubt many Americans would even have heard of ACORN, if not for the GOP's media attacks and misinformation campaign.

The Website of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, describes it as a organizational platform centered around the needs of low-to-middle income families; but to hear some of the preachy Congressional rhetoric being tossed around recently, one might be led to think it's a cadre of satanists or some kind of socialist cult.

ACORN deals with a range of issues including affordable housing, living wages and affordable tax preparation services among other things.

ACORN started in the early 70's as a group seeking rights for welfare recipients. Their efforts to register voters during the 2008 presidential elections drew the ire of Republicans apparently disturbed at the thought of low and middle income American citizens exercising their right to vote.

Do sketchy contrived videos of undercover "journalists" strolling into ACORN store-front talking to a few members of a nationwide organization with thousands of volunteers automatically mean the entire organization is a fraud? Maybe not.

But the reality is that an organization is responsible for the people who work there; while ACORN has in fact done a lot to help economically disadvantaged people all over the country, the management should have done a better job training their employees and volunteers who staff their offices.

By not doing so, they've simply given conservatives an opportunity to mock and deride sincere community-based efforts to assist low and middle income Americans already on the periphery of our society.

Joe Wilson Isn't Going Away

As she has in the past, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd struck the tone for the week with a Saturday September 12th column exploring the meaning behind Joe Wilson's recent outburst against President Obama on the floor of the US Capitol.

Wilson's initial brush-off of demands to personally apologize to the House of Representatives and the President have evaporated with the growing controversy over allegations that his boorish behavior is representative of many Americans who simply don't accept Obama as President because of his skin color.

Former President Jimmy Carter went further, suggesting at a speech at the Carter Center that Wilson's comments "were based on racism".

The charge prompted Wilson's oldest son Alan (a candidate for State Attorney General) to dispute charges that his father was a racist.

Slowly the media seems to be giving more serious examination of how race impacts the way people see the president and his policies and what role racist beliefs might have on policy issues on the government's plate.

The House (both Democrats and Republicans alike) voted to demand an apology from the embattled South Carolina Congressman, but it's not just politicians.

I listened to a number of listener calls to NPR answering the question of why the issue won't go away. The vast majority expressed the feeling that not only was accusing the President of lying wrong, but also indicative that the US public has had enough of the juvenile character attacks on the President from Republicans who seem less interested in solutions for the American people than slandering Barack Obama and torpedoing his political agenda.

I don't hate Joe Wilson but it's hard to listen to his insistence that he's not a racist when, as Dowd pointed out, he was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who defended flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina state capitol.

If there's an upside to this episode it's that the media spotlight and the attention of many Americans is now focused on the realities of our nation and how race impacts our perception; Joe Wilson's comment shows that it does.