Labels: assholes, dogwhistling, institutionalized racism, Mitt Romney, Republican Confederate Party

An Ohio GOP election official who voted against the weekend voting rules that enabled thousands to cast ballots in the 2008 election said Sunday that he did not think that the state's early voting procedures should accommodate African-Americans.

"I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban -- read African-American -- voter-turnout machine," Doug Priesse said in an email to the Columbus Dispatch Sunday. "Let's be fair and reasonable."

Priesse is a member of the board of elections for Franklin County, which includes Columbus, and chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, on Wednesday ordered all 88 counties in Ohio to allow early voting Monday through Friday, until 7 p.m., during the final two weeks before the election. Weekend voting, however, will not be allowed.

Weekend voting helped 93,000 Ohioans cast ballots in the final three days before the 2008 election. Black churches promoted taking "your souls to the polls" events on the Sunday preceding the election, an option that will be unavailable if Husted's ruling stands.

Labels: disenfranchisement, election shenanigans, election theft, institutionalized racism, Republican brownshirts

Labels: institutionalized racism, Trayvon Martin, utter horseshit

Labels: hate crimes, institutionalized racism, Trayvon Martin

So, in answer to the question, "Is America past racism against black people," I say the answer is yes.

Of course, nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect. However, our proper concern is not whether racism still exists, but whether it remains a serious problem. The election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have, that it no longer does.

Video has surfaced implicating seven white teenagers in a gruesome June 26 Mississippi hate crime that left one black man mutilated and dead.

The recently released footage shows the teens beating and ultimately running over 49-year-old James Craig Anderson. The suspects reportedly left a Hinds County, Mississippi party together with the intention of finding a black victim and drove to a nearby predominantly black area of Jackson where they attacked Anderson, the first black man they saw upon exiting the highway.

Labels: hate crimes, institutionalized racism

Republican Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is now trying to explain his way out of controversial and racist remarks about President Barack Obama. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, the presidential hopeful referenced “hanging Obama by the neck” as a way to defeat him in the next election.

During a dinner hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Romney said "Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index’ and he hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter losing." He then said, "Well, we’re going to have to hang the ‘Obama Misery Index’ around his neck."


For some odd reason, Romney kept going down the path of no return when he said, "I’ll tell you, the fact that you’ve got people in this country really squeezed, with gasoline getting so expensive, with commodities getting so expensive, families are having a hard time making ends meet. So, we’re going to have to talk about that, and housing foreclosures and bankruptcies and higher taxation. We’re going to hang him with that, so to speak, metaphorically."

Labels: 2012 election, institutionalized racism, Mitt Romney

The Arizona Senate formally passed the "Birther Bill" today, but not in its original version.

Apparently, requiring presidential candidates to provide a long-form birth certificate before allowing their names on the ballot in Arizona -- despite it already being a federal requirement to run for president -- was a bit too much for a few GOP lawmakers. So they made some amendments: if you can't find your birth certificate, and you have a penis, a document describing your lack of foreskin will suffice.

A circumcision certificate -- a document given to the parents of a male Jewish child after his foreskin is snipped off during a circumcision ceremony --  is not a legal document (see an example of one here)
but if you have one, under the amended bill, it's apparently enough to prove you're a U.S. citizen and your name can be permitted on the ballot in Arizona.

Pulling out your penis in front of election officials, however, will not prove citizenship -- and, in the worst case scenario, could get you labeled a sex offender.

Some other ways to prove that you're not a Kenyan version of the
Manchurian Candidate, as spelled out in the ridiculous bill, could be to provide a hospital birth record, a postpartum medical record, or an early census record.

Labels: America Gone Mad, And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, batshit crazies, institutionalized racism

Labels: institutionalized racism, wingnuttia

Any discussion about race and the USDA has to start with the crisis of black land loss. Although the U.S. government never followed through on its promise to freed slaves of "40 acres and a mule," African-Americans were able to establish a foothold in Southern agriculture. Black land ownership peaked in 1910, when 218,000 African-American farmers had an ownership stake in 15 million acres of land.

By 1992, those numbers had dwindled to 2.3 million acres held by 18,000 black farmers. And that wasn't just because farming was declining as a way of life: Blacks were being pushed off the land in vastly disproportionate numbers. In 1920, one of out seven U.S. farms were black-run; by 1992, African-Americans operated one out of 100 farms.

The USDA isn't to blame for all of that decline, but the agency created by President Lincoln in 1862 as the "people's department" did little to stem the tide  -- and in many cases, made the situation worse.

After decades of criticism and an upsurge in activism by African-American farmers, the USDA hosted a series of "listening sessions" in the 1990s, which added to a growing body of evidence of systematic discrimination:

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials -- especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South -- spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA's local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn't spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

Among those concluding that such racial bias persisted were the USDA's own researchers: In the mid-1990s, they released a report [pdf] which, analyzing data from 1990 to 1995, found "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

Adding insult to injury, when African-American and other minority farmers filed complaints, the USDA did little to address them. In 1983, President Reagan pushed through budget cuts that eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights -- and officials admitted they "simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them" until 1996, when the office re-opened. Even when there were findings of discrimination, they often went unpaid -- and those that did often came too late, since the farm had already been foreclosed.

In 1997, a USDA Civil Rights Team found the agency's system for handling civil rights complaints was still in shambles [pdf]: the agency was disorganized, the process for handling complaints about program benefits was "a failure," and the process for handling employment discrimination claims was "untimely and unresponsive."

A follow-up report [pdf] by the GAO in 1999 found 44 percent of program discrimination cases, and 64 percent of employment discrimination cases, had been backclogged for over a year.

TAKING USDA DISCRIMINATION TO COURT

It was against this backdrop that in 1997, a group of black farmers led by Tim Pigford of North Carolina filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA. In all 22,000 farmers were granted access to the lawsuit, and in 1999 the government admitted wrongdoing and agreed to a $2.3 billion settlement -- the largest civil rights settlement in history.

But African-American farmers had misgivings with the Pigford settlement. For one, only farmers discriminated against between 1981 and 1996 could join the lawsuit. Second, the settlement forced farmers to take one of two options: Track A, to receive an immediate $50,000 cash payout, or Track B, the promise of a larger amount if more extensive documentation was provided -- a challenge given that many farmers didn't keep records.

Many farmers who joined the lawsuit were also denied payment: By one estimate, nine out of 10 farmers who sought restitution under Pigford were denied. The Bush Department of Justice spent 56,000 office hours and $12 million contesting farmers' claims; many farmers feel their cases were dismissed on technicalities.

Labels: institutionalized racism