The Boss

-- by Dave

Went to see Springsteen tonight at the Key. This was the third time I've seen him, but it was his best performance of the three -- he seemed to be working harder and having more fun.

Best for me personally was that I finally saw him do "Rosalita," which is one of my three favorite Springsteen songs, none of which I've seen him perform before (though I didn't get to see him the first time until 1989, which was probably part of the problem). It was great, particularly Clemons' sax work, which I think this song showcases better than any other Boss song except "Kitty's Back" -- which happens to be my co-favorite (along with "Candy's Room," which I'd heard he never performed live, but which I see he has resurrected for this tour.) Someday I hope to hear him sing, "Catlong sighs, holding Kitty's black tooth ..." But getting to sing along with on "But your papa says he knows that I don't have any money" was one of the highlights of my year.

So I can sleep tonight a happy man.

Breaking through on anthrax?

-- by Dave

Credit where it's due: Fox News (and evidently no one else) is reporting a significant breakthrough in the anthrax attacks of 2001:

WASHINGTON — The FBI has narrowed its focus to "about four" suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.

Among the pool of suspects are three scientists — a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist — linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.

The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.

The story appears credible, particularly in the focus on Fort Detrick, which is indeed the most likely source of the lethal powder used in those attacks; this is something we've known since 2003, when it was clear that this, like Oklahoma City and 9/11, was another in the line of asymmetric terrorist attacks on American soil.

The fact that there was so little resolution of the matter probably had something to do with the political dimensions of the attacks. But it's also increasingly likely that there was some outright incompetence involved as well:

In December 2001, an Army commander tried to dispel the possibility of a connection to Fort Detrick by taking the media on a rare tour of the base. The commander said the Army used only liquid anthrax, not powder, for its experiments.

"I would say that it does not come from our stocks, because we do not use that dry material," Maj. Gen. John Parker said. The letters that were mailed to the media and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy all contained powdered anthrax.

But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

"Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"

Gee, imagine that: A general with incomplete information misled the media in the process of covering his ass. Never heard of that in this administration.

Believing in the dream

-- by Dave

I think those of us who advocate comprehensive immigration reform recognize that getting there is going to be a long, slow row. But along the way, there are opportunities to help push reform forward in incremental steps.

One of these is the DREAM Act:

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (also called "The DREAM Act") is a piece of proposed federal legislation in the United States that would provide high school students who are long term undocumented immigrants with good moral character and who wish to attend college or serve in the armed forces to be able to gain legal status.

The bill, in various incarnations, has been introduced several times in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House it has never been brought to a floor vote as a stand-alone bill; in the Senate it was finally brought for debate on the floor on October 24, 2007, and though it was able to gain a majority vote it failed to gain cloture by a 52-44 vote, 8 votes short of overcoming a filibuster.[1] The text of the bill has also been included in various other immigration-related bills, including the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Acts of 2006 and 2007, though none so far has been successful.

It's an important first step in opening up a path to citizenship for immigrants and their children, which is a cornerstone of any larger progressive approach to immigration reform.

Robert Greenwald, whose Brave New Films outfit has done such great work exposing Fox News and Wal-Mart, among other targets, has turned his focus on getting the DREAM act. He's set up a Web site where you can sign a petition urging the remaining presidential candidates to support the bill:

All three presidential hopefuls co-sponsored the federal DREAM Act, yet it has never been made law. The DREAM Act would enable states to grant in-state tuition to these hardworking immigrant students, making higher education (and eventually citizenship) a real possibility.

It's a worthy cause, and well worth your signature.

A Change of Season

-- by Sara

Faithful Orcinus readers may have been wondering over the past couple months just where Sara went. The answer is: a lot is changing for me these days, and the particulars of when, where, and for whom I blog are changing, too.

Much of my mindshare since mid-January has gone to my guest-blogging gig at the Campaign for America's Future blog. The original plan was that I'd be doing one piece a week for 12 weeks, ending in the second week of April. Dave and I knew going in that this meant y'all would necessarily see quite a bit less of me here.

But it turns out that that temporary distraction isn't. At Take Back America last week, Bob Borosage called me into his K Street office and asked me if I'd be willing to make the arrangement permanent. Since it's a hugely visible site (my co-bloggers there include David Sirota, Bill Scher, Rick Perlstein, and Digby, and our own Dave has been known to pop up occasionally) and there are actual paychecks involved -- well, of course, I said yes.

Making room in my life for this new gig (and working on my thesis, which is also now fully underway) has meant I've had to get serious about re-arranging my priorities. The new schedule has me putting up a major article at ourfuture.org on Mondays or Tuesdays. (Most weeks, I'll throw up a link to it here as well, so you can hop right over and take a look.) I'll be back here at Orcinus regularly on Fridays, and perhaps a second time whenever events compel me to speak up. And since something had to give, I've cut way back on my commitment to Group News Blog, and will appear there only very occasionally when something appropriate catches my fancy.

So that's what's happening with me.

This week's piece at ourfuture.org is a contemplation on the past, present, and future of the American civil religion, and what it has to do with the persistent insanity over the candidates and their religious advisors we're seeing in this election cycle. I'll also be doing a live interview on "The Solution Zone" with Christiane Brown on KJFK, northern Nevada's Air America affiliate, this coming Monday afternoon at 3:00 pm. You can tune in online here.

Update: The radio show was pre-empted for Monday, so I've been re-booked for Wednesday at 3:00. See you there.

The McCain of the Moment and Immigration

-- by Dave

A lot of wags have been chortling about "the McCain Moment," myself included, because it encapsulates so neatly much of what's wrong with John McCain. But not everything.

We also need to deal with the McCain Of The Moment. The guy who said one thing six months ago and says nearly its opposite now. Who knows what he'll say in another six months?

As disturbing as his obvious mental lapses might be, McCain's bizarre policy flip-flops make Daffy Duck look positively stolid in comparison, especially because they have come in many cases in which he has made himself a national reputation. Things like torture and campaign finance ethics.

And this is especially the case with immigration. The co-author of the Kennedy-McCain Immigration Act -- which, comparatively speaking, took a moderate approach to immigration reform -- McCain is now saying that he wouldn't even vote for it now, let alone co-author it:

In a March 24 New York Times online piece, reporter Adam Nagourney stated that aides to Sen. John McCain "are beginning to see a general election upside ... to the problems that Mr. McCain's support of immigration legislation caused him in the primaries." But Nagourney did not report that McCain in fact reacted to those perceived "problems" by abandoning his own comprehensive immigration reform proposal during his campaign for the Republican nomination, saying that he would no longer support it if it came up for a vote in the Senate. McCain now says that "we've got to secure the borders first" -- a position at odds with his prior assertion that border security could not be disaggregated from other aspects of comprehensive immigration reform without being rendered ineffective. The Times itself reported on McCain's reversal on immigration in a March 3 article by reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, which stated that McCain has "meandered over the years from position to position on some topics, particularly as he has tried to court the conservatives who have long distrusted him." The article noted in particular that McCain "moved from his original position on immigration" and "went so far at a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in January to say that if his original proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor, he would not vote for it."

Media Matters further notes that McCain's transigence on the issue included "conceding" at one of the presidential debates that he would vote against the bill today, when only three days earlier he had said he would sign it into law as president.

In fact, we were witness to this flip-flop on immigration as far back as last November:

John McCain spent months earlier this year arguing that the United States must combine border security efforts with a temporary worker program and an eventual path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate emphasizes securing the borders first. The rest, he says, is still needed but will have to come later.

"I understand why you would call it a, quote, shift," McCain told reporters Saturday after voters questioned him on his position during back-to-back appearances in this early voting state. "I say it is a lesson learned about what the American people's priorities are. And their priority is to secure the borders."

That's right: John McCain was for humane, comprehensive immigration reform before he was against it.

When we begin talking about McCain's positions on issues, we're going to need to ask: Which McCain are you talking about? The one who was talking a few months or weeks ago? Or the one who's running for president as a Republican? Or the one who plans to be president next year? Which McCain, which moment?

Unfortunately, I suspect that very few folks in the media will be explaining the difference to us.

The McCain of the Moment and Immigration

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

A lot of wags have been chortling about "the McCain Moment," myself included, because it encapsulates so neatly much of what’s wrong with John McCain. But not everything.

We also need to deal with the McCain Of The Moment. The guy who said one thing six months ago and says nearly its opposite now. Who knows what he’ll say in another six months?

As disturbing as his obvious mental lapses might be, McCain’s bizarre policy flip-flops make Daffy Duck look positively stolid in comparison, especially because they have come in many cases in which he has made himself a national reputation. Things like torture and campaign finance ethics.

And this is especially the case with immigration. The co-author of the Kennedy-McCain Immigration Act — which, comparatively speaking, took a moderate approach to immigration reform — McCain is now saying that he wouldn’t even vote for it today, let alone co-author it:

In a March 24 New York Times online piece, reporter Adam Nagourney stated that aides to Sen. John McCain "are beginning to see a general election upside … to the problems that Mr. McCain’s support of immigration legislation caused him in the primaries." But Nagourney did not report that McCain in fact reacted to those perceived "problems" by abandoning his own comprehensive immigration reform proposal during his campaign for the Republican nomination, saying that he would no longer support it if it came up for a vote in the Senate. McCain now says that "we’ve got to secure the borders first" — a position at odds with his prior assertion that border security could not be disaggregated from other aspects of comprehensive immigration reform without being rendered ineffective. The Times itself reported on McCain’s reversal on immigration in a March 3 article by reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, which stated that McCain has "meandered over the years from position to position on some topics, particularly as he has tried to court the conservatives who have long distrusted him." The article noted in particular that McCain "moved from his original position on immigration" and "went so far at a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in January to say that if his original proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor, he would not vote for it."

Media Matters further notes that McCain’s utter transience on the issue included "conceding" at one of the presidential debates that he would vote against the bill today (see the video above), when only three days earlier he had said he would sign it into law as president.

In fact, we were witness to this flip-flop on immigration as far back as last November:

John McCain spent months earlier this year arguing that the United States must combine border security efforts with a temporary worker program and an eventual path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate emphasizes securing the borders first. The rest, he says, is still needed but will have to come later.

"I understand why you would call it a, quote, shift," McCain told reporters Saturday after voters questioned him on his position during back-to-back appearances in this early voting state. "I say it is a lesson learned about what the American people’s priorities are. And their priority is to secure the borders."

That’s right: John McCain was for humane, comprehensive immigration reform before he was against it.

When we begin talking about McCain’s positions on issues, we’re going to need to ask: Which McCain are you talking about? The one who was talking a few months or weeks ago? Or the one who’s running for president as a Republican? Or the one who plans to be president next year? Which McCain, which moment?

Unfortunately, I suspect that very few folks in the media will be explaining the difference to us.

Confronting the radical right

-- by Dave

One of the stranger aspects of the Nazi rally in Olympia a couple of years ago was the fact that the 12 or so neo-Nazis who gathered on the state Capitol steps to demand, among other things, an end to Latino immigration, were being protected by a phalanx of the Washington State Patrol some 275 strong.

Of course, they were there to protect these Nazis from the more than 300 people who showed up to protest them. Mind you, it was clear that the protesters were mostly intent on making fun of the swastika set, and violence was far from anyone's intent that day. But besides wasting a large chunk of government dough, the event also created the disturbing impression that the law-enforcement officers were far more interested in protecting the Nazis' free-speech rights than the anti-Nazis. I'm sure that wasn't the intent, but the impression was there, in any event.

Certainly, the role of law enforcement in being too lax created scenes the year before in Toledo that no one wanted to see reproduced. And in that instance, the laxity had raised real questions about police sympathies, too.

Mostly, law enforcement is caught between a rock and a hard spot in these situations. And there's no doubt the neo-Nazi types love to exploit that fact.

Lasty Friday a neo-Nazi demonstration in Calgary turned ugly when they began getting violent with the anti-Nazi protestors who showed up:

A group of white supremacists named the Aryan Guard staged a march from the Mewata Armoury down 8th Avenue to city hall, prompting anti-racism activists to stage their own demonstration.

The activists, plus union leaders, anarchists, minority groups, passersby and gay activists held their own rally as a counter-demonstration to the white supremacists, said Anti-Racist Action Calgary's Jason Devine.

"Our message is that there's strength in numbers ... that the community is united, that racism will not be tolerated, that it shouldn't be tolerated and that we shouldn't just turn from it," he said.

Approximately 25 Aryan Guard members gathered at the Franklin LRT station, rode the C-Train to downtown and started making their way down to the Mewata Armoury, when they were blocked by counter-demonstrators along 7th Avenue, in front of a seniors' centre.

Calgary Sun columnist Pablo Fernandez voiced some of the strong emotions that watching Nazis march under police escort can raise, especially in a community where they have taken not merely to marching but to their usual acts of street thuggery:

But since they started posting pictures of themselves on the Internet with guns and baseball bats -- and after two recent Molotov cocktail attacks in the city were tied to possible white supremacist activity -- it's the counter-protesters who have to hide their faces. One person who knows the danger of standing up against the neo-Nazis is Bonnie Collins.

She, her four children -- aged three to nine -- and her husband, Jason, were all home when their house was fire bombed on Feb. 12.

That moment was painfully relived Friday, when Bonnie -- as part of a counter-demonstration -- confronted the neo-Nazis, who asked her, "How's your house, Bonnie?" while standing behind a cordon of police officers on the front steps of city hall.

"Is it nice and toasty in there? How's Jason and the kids?"

Apart from gaining ground in their intimidation campaign, the neo-Nazis showed they have absolute freedom of movement in Calgary.

They marched, under police escort, from one end of downtown to the other, and although Calgary Police Service members faced the counter-demonstrators the entire time, the white supremacists made it clear to their opponents police were there to protect them, not the neo-Nazis.

In reality, it might have been more of a problem for the police to be protecting the Nazis had the group of protesters not been so clearly intent on confrontation and ultimately violence. That was in distinct contrast to the crowd in Olympia -- though under the circumstances, certainly foreseeable.

Fernandez starts to get the right idea later in the column:

Members of the Aryan Guard also have rights.

But the fact they can intimidate, threaten, recruit and feel comfortable enough to do as they please in full public view is something Calgarians cannot ignore.

Citizens, of course, should feel free to do as they please in public view so long as it's not criminal behavior -- including threatening and intimidation, things at which the Nazis excel. And it's that point which Calgarians have the right to demand police action.

Unfortunately, threatening and intimidation from their opponents simply negates that point. If these would-be enemies of fascism wanted to be effective, they'd also be a lot smarter.

The Moonies and McCain's Main Man

Online Videos by Veoh.com

-- by Dave

I guess we all know now that the media get all worked up about some presidential candidates who have dealings with religious figures deemed "anti-American" and "hateful" -- but not all of them. If it's a black pastor at a church attended by a Democrat, well, they're on that like stink on shit. If, on the other hand, it's a Republican candidate who embraces apocalyptic nutcases and gay-bashing extremists, well, the very scent seems to make them faint.

The same principle is at work regarding the media's allergy to reporting on the way Republicans and the Moonies have their hands so deeply into each others' pockets that they're making their coins jingle. Of course, as John Gorenfeld explores in detail in his new book, Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom, this has been going on a long time. There was a brief exception back in 2004 -- when Moon held his coronation as the "King of America" in the Senate Dirksen Building.

So we can only assume that they'll likely ignore the revelations in Gorenfeld's book that none other than uber-lobbyist Charlie Black -- not just McCain's "chief political adviser" but a right-hand man for the Bush clan as well -- played a role in making that coronation happen.

According to Gorenfeld, Black admitted to helping invite people to attend the coronation. And he's listed as a sponsor in the coronation's printed program.

The Moonies and McCain’s Main Man

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Speaking of Charlie Black …

I guess we all know now that the media get all worked up about some presidential candidates who have dealings with religious figures deemed "anti-American" and "hateful" — but not all of them. If it’s a black pastor at a church attended by a Democrat, well, they’re on that like stink on shit. If, on the other hand, it’s a Republican candidate who embraces apocalyptic nutcases and gay-bashing extremists, well, the very scent seems to make them faint.

The same principle is at work regarding the media’s allergy to reporting on the way Republicans and the Moonies have their hands so deeply into each others’ pockets that they’re making their coins jingle. Of course, as John Gorenfeld explores in detail in his new book, Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom, this has been going on a long time. There was a brief exception back in 2004 — when Moon held his coronation as the "King of America" in the Senate Dirksen Building.

So we can only assume that they’ll likely ignore the revelations in Gorenfeld’s book that none other than uber-lobbyist Charlie Black — not just McCain’s "chief political adviser" but a right-hand man for the Bush clan as well — played a role in making that coronation happen.

According to Gorenfeld, Black admitted to helping invite people to attend the coronation. And he’s listed as a sponsor in the coronation’s printed program.

You recall what happened at that event: A number of congressional figures, including at least one Democrat, Danny Davis of Illinois, participated in a ceremony in which Moon was crowned "King of America" and his place as the new Messiah rather officiously confirmed. The ceremony declared "the era of the Eternal Peace Kingdom, one global family under God." Immediately afterward, Moon confirmed to the participants that he was consulting with great leaders of the past in the spirit world: "The five great saints [Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammad, and Shankara] and many other leaders of the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murder on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."

Gorenfeld had an e-mail exchange with Black about his role in the affair:

Before the crowning became a scandal, I e-mailed Black questions about his role. "I lent my name and sent invitations to a few friends," he replied. "Unfortunately, I had a conflict and couldn’t go to the event." Was it a common kind of "event"? Black said, "I don’t know if it is annaul, but they have done similar events. I don’t know Reverend Moon, but work with the management of the Washington Times and their foundation occasionally on conservative causes. I think the dinner committee list included a number of us ‘secular’ conservatives."

McCain’s "chief political adviser" is deeply connected inside the Beltway powerhouse. [More here.] A Washington Post piece on the lobbyists inside McCain’s campaign notes:

His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

[More on BKSH here.]

And of course, it’s helpful to recall the kinds of things that Moon has said which seem not to bother conservatives in the least:

The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world. I will go beyond the boundary of the U.S., opening up the toll gate, reaching out to the end of the world. I will go forward, piercing through everything …

When we are in our battle against the whole nation of the U.S. — if you are truly in love with this nation, and if you love this nation more than anyone else, this nation will come into God’s possession, and Satan will have nothing to do with it. … With that as the bullet, we can smash the whole world.

Individualism is what God hates most, and Satan likes best.

God likes the idea of a monarchy, because it removes the cycles of election after election which can obscure the focus and direction of the nation.

The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the whole world.

The time will come when, without my seeking it, that my words must serve as law.

We will be able to amend laws, articles of constitution, if we wish to do so.

Telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing … that is not a sin … Even God tells lies very often.

I have met many famous, so-called famous, Senators and Congressmen; but to my eyes they are nothing. They are weak and helpless. We will win the battle. This is our dream, our project. But shut your mouth tight.

After the demise of communism and the destruction of democracy, all that will remain will be the True Family and True Children system, centered upon True Parents [Moon's title for himself and his wife]. That is what is happening now.

America may boast of its virtues to the world, but look, democracy is now reaching the end of its rope. People thought democracy is the final anchor of the free world, but it is reaching its end. So what is left? America has been telling the weaker nations that they have to accept democracy, forcing them to receive so-called democracy. But look at America. It is rotten, top to bottom. There is nothing to be proud of, not their way of walking or talking or thinking.

When you hear me putting America down, your ears are not pleased. But if we continue living in this hub of the satanic world, this New York-DC area, we are in the darkness.

When Clinton and his policies come into being, the first opposition must come from Christianity. But Christianity has lost its center and its hope. For that reason, they have lost their power, and that is why Clinton was allowed to win the election. It was the failure of Christianity. This nation which is supposed to be Christian has been turned into almost a model nation for Satan, losing everything precious. People are losing their own identity, losing brotherhood, losing their own parents, and losing God. This nation has really become a playground for Satan.

Apparently, you’re only anti-American if you’re a liberal Democrat.

That dialogue on race

-- by Dave

OK, just in the interest of honesty, here are some things usually associated over the years with white people that, well, I as a white person find kinda embarrassing:

Bell-bottom pants.

Mullets.

"Country living" decor.

Bad country music.

Bad heavy metal.

Bad dancing.

This is just a short sampling of a much longer list, but you kind of get the idea. There are a lot of dumb things associated with white folks that I, as a very melanin-challenged person myself, would hate being associated with. And for the most part, I'm fairly comfortable knowing that since I generally don't indulge these vices myself (except that I am a truly awful dancer), I don't need to worry much about being in fact associated with them.

I'm rather more concerned about certain other behaviors associated with certain white people -- things like swastika and "white power" tatoos and shaved heads; hate crimes; and the increasingly common rhetoric demonizing nonwhites for supposed characteristics like their criminality or their laziness or their lack of intelligence.

Now, I like to think that people like myself who work to expose these haters for what they are -- and there are many of us, though probably not enough -- stand as testimony to the fact that not all white folks are like them. Certainly, a broad spectrum of whites would object strenuously if others were to make that association -- why, they assure us, they don't have a racist bone in their bodies. Their best friend at work [or their Secretary of State] is black! Mind you, the right-wing component of this contingent seems to want to constantly undermine the work of people like myself, as well as nonwhites, at healing that racial divide, but that's perhaps beside the point: It's considered broadly unacceptable, in fact, to blame all white folks for the existence of neo-Nazis, skinheads, neo-Confederates, and nativists. And heaven forfend that any suggest that the "white community" is responsible for them.

I'm sure there will always be some black people who presume that all white folks are that way. But they're in a distinct minority.

I'm not sure the same thing could be said of white folks when it comes to certain blocs of the black community and how readily those translate into broad stereotypes. In fact, I'm pretty sure it can't.

I was thinking about this because Pam Spaulding wrote an interesting post (also at Pandagon) that started off talking about Pat Buchanan's latest column -- and I couldn't agree more that Buchanan, and the many people like him, are probably the foremost example of why we have a racial divide in the first damned place -- but it's morphed, in the updates, into something perhaps even more interesting.

Pam cites one of her readers, who relates the tale of his ride upon a bus, driven by a black man, in which some unpleasant black women boarded his bus and failed to pay their full fare, leading to a running verbal conflict with the driver. The line that caught my attention was this:

The driver turned to the Asian woman seated next to me in the front of the bus and informed her that in the City there were Black people and there were niggers. Those three were nothing but niggers and gave all black people a bad name.

Pam responds by pointing to Chris Rock's classic "Blacks vs. Niggaz" sketch (in the video atop this post} and noting:

What the driver (and Chris Rock) are conveying are class distinctions. Not all black folks are poor, under-educated criminals. Now the above comments by Rock and the bus driver conveniently skirt the issue of the underclass and the cycle of poverty that foments the pathologies of gang culture, disdain for educational achievement and other negative stereotypes that are a reality in those segments of the minority community. But Chris Rock speaks for a number of blacks who shake their heads every time they see a thug perp walk that inevitably will be seen by whites as representative of all black people.

And that really is the problem, isn't it: That whites will take a narrow spectrum of behaviors by black people and assume that they come to reflect the entire black community -- and black people hate that shit. As well they should.

A recent example of how this happens came in the Instapunk post discussed at length by Glenn Greenwald this week. Instapunk writes:

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it.

Yep, it's those damned Niggaz again. And somehow, it's black people who are responsible for them.

It couldn't possibly be the responsibility of the white employers who somehow manage to overlook young black men when it comes time to hire; the white real-estate agents who won't show certain homes in certain neighborhoods or certain suburbs to blacks because, well, "blacks just don't want to live there"; it couldn't possibly be the suburban civic leaders who oppose public services and low-income housing in their towns because they might "drive down property values."

In other words, any part of the responsibility for the fact that many young, ambitious black men adopt a "gangsta" lifestyle because they know they'll never make it in the white world and don't particularly want to anyway -- that responsibility couldn't possibly lie with the people whose every step in fact closes young black people off from the very means of success that whites take for granted, could it?

Nah.

When white people insist on making every other black person bear some kind of responsibility for the behavior of a small segment of their community, people who only share with them their racial identity -- the kind of responsibility that whites repudiate on their own behalf for white miscreants -- that is nothing if not "identity politics" incarnate. And as long as it persists, there's going to be a racial divide in America that will not be bridged.

The new racism keeps bubbling

-- by Dave

Glenn Greenwald has a superb piece pointing out a Glenn Reynolds-endorsed post from post from the Reynolds-endorsed Instapunk that truly lays bare the ugly racism that has been rising, like all scum, to the top of the conservative movement these days:

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country.

I'm not proposing the generalized use of the term, just trying to be clear for once, in the wake of Obama's call for us to have a dialogue about race. However much they may scream and protest, black people will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers:

- Jeremiah Wright

- O.J. Simpson

- Marion Barry

- Alan Iverson

- William Jefferson

- Louis Farrakhan

- Mike Tyson . . .

You see, you've just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column -- unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history.

I've been calling this "the new racism", which really is just a slightly modified version of the truly vicious belief system that has been lying, like a cancer waiting to metastasize, from the body of movement conservatism for the many years since it was forced into semi-dormancy some 40 years ago. With folks like Rush Limbaugh leading the way, I describe it thus:

[It is] a trend in right-wing comentary, staking out positions that, if not overtly racist, at least seek to resurrect some of the hoary mythology of the era of white supremacy. As with most of right-wing race rhetoric of the past twenty years, it's all done with a certain level of plausible deniability, couched in "jokes" or abstrations that let the speakers feign indignation when the racism is pointed out; the current trend is only slightly more overt in its racism, but the underlying sentiments aren't hard to read.

It's a step beyond wink-and-nudge racism -- or, perhaps, more like that point in the winking and nudging when the winker begins nudging harder and harder.

Of course, it's not just Limbaugh, but rather something systemic within the body of conservatism generally:

[E]merging from behind a mask of genteel conservatism, it openly calls for a revival of ole-time white supremacism, having found that the "liberal social experiment" with racial equality has failed. Already, we've seen Patrick Buchanan drop all pretense and adopt a position that shifts from simple white nationalism to outright supremacism. Michael Savage airs denunciations of the Civil Rights movement. TV talkers like Glenn Beck pretend that blind bigotry toward Muslims is a "normal" perspective.

And as I noted then:

What's especially ironic is that all of this discussion is being raised by people with a record of attacking multiculturalism -- which, historically speaking, was the response to white supremacism and eugenics and became the worldview that replaced them. What we've been hearing, in a steady drumbeat from the right, is the notion that "multiculturalism is a failure" -- though notably, while unsparing in their critique, they have been discreet about what they would replace it with.

Now, evidently, we're finding out: a "new eugenics," to go right alongside a new kind of racism. It's all justified, you see, because multiculturalism has failed -- all it's done, they tell us, is make us more ethnically divided.

Nowhere in the discussion, of course, is even a glimmer of recognition that white people invented this ethnic balkanization over a century ago, instituted it for the better part of that century, and only recently have begun taking steps towards dismantling those institutions – many of which indeed persist well into this century. Nowhere is there a recognition of their own culpability, and responsibility to deal with minorities in good faith, instead of attempting to strip them of what few advances they have made in the intervening years.

More recently, we're seeing all kinds of white conservative pundits lay the blame for this turn in the discourse at the feet of black people.

As Greenwald puts it:

There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than "threatened tribalism." The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.

Obama's campaign, as I've noted before, is going to be Ground Zero for this trend. And as the Jeremiah Wright controversy has made clear, the supposedly mainstream media are all too willing to play along.

Those darn black people

-- by Dave

It's one of those things that seems perpetually to mystify Republicans: Why the heck don't black people vote for them more often?

After all, about 90 percent of the black vote in most presidential elections since the 1960s has favored Democrats, and the prospects of changing that this year are dim to none.

A lot of this, of course, has to do with the paucity of black Republican candidates to begin with. Periodically, the GOP makes a weak stab at changing that, as they did in 2006, when three black Republicans ran for prominent positions in Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

All three, of course, got creamed.

That has a lot to do with the larger underlying reasons: Conservatives have, since the 1870s, demonstrated a palpable animus toward black voters -- in the South, they passed Jim Crow laws to keep them from the polls -- and with the complete takeover of the Republican Party by conservatives in the 1970s, that has translated into a lopsided Democratic black vote.

Still, Republicans seem perplexed by this. Witness, for instance, Bridget Johnson's recent piece bemoaning the "lost opportunities" to gain the black vote in the current election:

This is the profile of America’s minority communities: not politically or ideologically homogenous, willing to consider new solutions, and willing to listen to new ideas and voices — if those voices would bother to make the effort to show up.

However, this election season is shaping up to be yet another year when the Republican Party quickly kisses off the black vote, and halfheartedly reaches for at least a decent portion of the Latino vote. It’s a mistake with the same script every time, like a political “Groundhog Day.”

And it could particularly be a colossal failing to ignore minority communities this election season, when the flap over Barack Obama’s questionable associations has seen the racial debate taken in a disturbing direction that strays from the colorblind, hand-in-hand path of brotherhood envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As always, these concerns come from someone who is somewhat melanin-challenged herself. But you know, she's deeply sympathetic to black issues. Really.

Now, you could call the conservative response to the Obama "pastor problem" controversy "veering off the path", I suppose, if you envision the path as situated along a sheer high cliff. Because it's clear that Republicans are just writing off blacks altogether and leaping anew into the abyss of good ole fashioned right-wing bigotry.

Take, for example, Pat Buchanan's column on the Obama flap, titled "A Brief for Whitey":

It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."

Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said -- that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

Ah yes. Anyone who's been around racial politics for any length has heard all about how black civil-rights advocates are in fact "race hustlers." And it isn't just Buchanan making this kind of remark about Obama: So, for that matter, have those sensitive folks at Powerline. A Townhall blogger even called Michelle Obama a "race pimp."

But really, the richest line in Buchanan's column -- the one that no doubt resonates most with black voters -- was this one:

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Damn, I'm sure most black people forgot to be grateful for segregation, the lynching era, sundown towns, and the continuing discrimination they face both in employment and in residence. Because the institutional conditions created by those decades of bigotry have in fact gone largely unchanged, though to white guys like Buchanan, that simply isn't a factor:

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

Well, I'm sure black voters are convinced by that argument. After all, it's obvious that the matter of continuing discrimination is just an illusion in their heads.

Meanwhile, another conservative icon, Rush Limbaugh, is following a similar line:

LIMBAUGH: "Typical white person"? What does this reveal finally about Obama? He is not transcendent on race. Obama is telling us he is a black American first and an American second. Typical white -- his grandmother, who raised him, is a typical white woman? And that these kinds of inordinate fears are bred? I have a question: I wonder how white college students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are feeling these days.

I wonder if they are nervous walking down the street, and they see a couple of black boys dressed in baggy clothes with their hats on backwards swaggering toward them. I wonder how they feel. I wonder if it makes them fear that they're going to be shot in the face for their ATM cards and their PIN numbers. Obama, do you think there might be reasons here rather than this being inbred?

... And so, Obama, in dealing with this, has thrown his white grandmother under the bus, and then, yesterday, drove the bus backwards and ran over her, where he threw her under the bus, by calling her a typical white woman.

So, all -- typical white what? Typical white -- no? Typical white woman -- typical white person. Whatever. Typical white person. And now, it is clear -- now, this is the stuff, this is the part that might bother some of you. It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side ...

What you'll notice in all this, of course, is that all these folks really aren't concerned about black people at all. They're talking to white people, and basically reinforcing the stereotypical view that there's just something wrong with those black people. Why else can't they see that conservatism is really about their greater good?

Folks like Limbaugh and Buchanan and Bridget Johnson like to complain that when blacks vote for liberals en masse, they're engaging in "identity politics". As always, they forget that "identity politics" in America was in fact created, and deeply institutionalized, by white people.

And there's no small irony when the efforts of the historical victims of identity politics to break down those institutions are denounced as merely members of a racial identity group defending their own narrow interests. That's what we call the "projection strategy."

As always, this means that Republicans are giving us a warning about their own upcoming strategy. So when they begin accusing Democrats of indulging racism, we can be quite certain that the forthcoming election season will be nothing less than a full-on onslaught of Republican racism -- excused, of course, by the claim that "they do it too."

The Republican right's Moonie problem

-- by Dave

A number of folks -- notably Ezra Klein and Glenn Greenwald -- have already pointed out quite adroitly that while the media have had little compunction about whipping up a phony controversy about Barack Obama's "pastor problem", there's almost nothing that white evangelical pastors can say that might bring down similar approbation. John McCain's "spiritual advisers" Rod Parsley and John Hagee really are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this.

As Glenn puts it:

The phrases "anti-American" and "America-haters" are among the most barren and manipulative in our entire political lexicon, but whatever they happen to mean on any given day, they easily encompass people who believe that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks, devastating hurricanes and the like. Yet when are people like Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, Inhofe and other white Christian radicals ever described as anti-American or America-hating extremists? Never -- because white Christian evangelicals who tie themselves to the political Right are intrinsically patriotic.

But the Republican right's biggest problem with having "America haters" as leading exponents of movement conservatism is someone who not only has claimed to be a spiritual mentor but is also a major financier of Republican causes: the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

As John Gorenfeld explains in delightful and excruciating detail in his new book Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom [which we'll be discussing in greater detail tomorrow for the FDL Book Salon], Moon has a long history of saying ugly things about the United States and about Americans.

And yet simultaneously, the largesse he spreads about the conservative movement has won him all kinds of friends, influence, and defenders, if not followers. Certainly, there is no one in the mainstream media who bothers to mention this, let alone play endless tape loops.

The Republican Right’s Moonie Problem

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

A number of folks — notably Ezra Klein and Glenn Greenwald — have already pointed out quite adroitly that while the media have had little compunction about whipping up a phony controversy about Barack Obama’s "pastor problem", there’s almost nothing that white evangelical pastors can say that might bring down similar approbation. John McCain’s "spiritual advisers" Rod Parsley and John Hagee really are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this.

As Glenn puts it:

The phrases "anti-American" and "America-haters" are among the most barren and manipulative in our entire political lexicon, but whatever they happen to mean on any given day, they easily encompass people who believe that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks, devastating hurricanes and the like. Yet when are people like Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, Inhofe and other white Christian radicals ever described as anti-American or America-hating extremists? Never — because white Christian evangelicals who tie themselves to the political Right are intrinsically patriotic.

But the Republican right’s biggest problem with having "America haters" as leading exponents of movement conservatism is someone who not only has claimed to be a spiritual mentor but is also a major financier of Republican causes: the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

As John Gorenfeld explains in delightful and excruciating detail in his new book Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom [which we'll be discussing in greater detail tomorrow for the FDL Book Salon], Moon has a long history of saying ugly things about the United States and about Americans.

And yet simultaneously, the largesse he spreads about the conservative movement has won him all kinds of friends, influence, and defenders, if not followers. Certainly, there is no one in the mainstream media who bothers to mention this, let alone play endless tape loops.

Here are some of the things Moon has said over the years, as Gorenfeld has detailed:

The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world. I will go beyond the boundary of the U.S., opening up the toll gate, reaching out to the end of the world. I will go forward, piercing through everything …

When we are in our battle against the whole nation of the U.S. — if you are truly in love with this nation, and if you love this nation more than anyone else, this nation will come into God’s possession, and Satan will have nothing to do with it. … With that as the bullet, we can smash the whole world.

Individualism is what God hates most, and Satan likes best.

God likes the idea of a monarchy, because it removes the cycles of election after election which can obscure the focus and direction of the nation.

The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the whole world.

The time will come when, without my seeking it, that my words must serve as law.

We will be able to amend laws, articles of constitution, if we wish to do so.

Telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing … that is not a sin … Even God tells lies very often.

I have met many famous, so-called famous, Senators and Congressmen; but to my eyes they are nothing. They are weak and helpless. We will win the battle. This is our dream, our project. But shut your mouth tight.

After the demise of communism and the destruction of democracy, all that will remain will be the True Family and True Children system, centered upon True Parents [Moon's title for himself and his wife]. That is what is happening now.

America may boast of its virtues to the world, but look, democracy is now reaching the end of its rope. People thought democracy is the final anchor of the free world, but it is reaching its end. So what is left? America has been telling the weaker nations that they have to accept democracy, forcing them to receive so-called democracy. But look at America. It is rotten, top to bottom. There is nothing to be proud of, not their way of walking or talking or thinking.

When you hear me putting America down, your ears are not pleased. But if we continue living in this hub of the satanic world, this New York-DC area, we are in the darkness.

When Clinton and his policies come into being, the first opposition must come from Christianity. But Christianity has lost its center and its hope. For that reason, they have lost their power, and that is why Clinton was allowed to win the election. It was the failure of Christianity. This nation which is supposed to be Christian has been turned into almost a model nation for Satan, losing everything precious. People are losing their own identity, losing brotherhood, losing their own parents, and losing God. This nation has really become a playground for Satan.

Those "patriotic" conservatives have not fled screaming from Moon for saying these kinds of things. They have not denounced him. They have not even discussed them — nor, for that matter, have the media.

No, they not only continue to sturdily defend him and his many operations — most notably the Washington Times Moon’s newspaper, which has employed many leading conservative pundits — they positively embrace him, mostly because of his money. The most significant of these has been his embrace by the Bush family.

George H.W. Bush has appeared at major Moon-sponsored events and taken large sums of his money. Neil Bush has toured with him and also enjoys his considerable largesse. And President Bush has gone so far as to name a former Unification Church leader — Josette Sheeran — as his undersecretary of state for economic, business, and agriculture affairs.

But have the mainstream media dealt with any of this? Er, no. In fact, when the subject of the Bush clan’s ties to Moon have come up, people like the New York Times’ David Brooks — who got his start as a pundit at the Washington Times — call it a "bizarre assertion" and an instance of the "paranoid style in American politics."

Obviously, you don’t get to watch Moon’s "hateful" and "anti-American" remarks being replayed endlessly on CNN and Fox, nor watch every media outlet in the nation obsess over whether Republicans should repudiate him.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Strangers In Our Living Rooms

-- by Sara

Dave's post below points up just how complicit the media has become in perpetuating the kind of sticky, pernicious racial conflicts so much of the country is trying hard to get past. The deeper problem here, of course, is that conflict sells -- you really can't have any kind of dramatic narrative, fiction or non-fiction, without it. And it's very hard to get the American media to give up on a conflict narrative that's served so many social and political interests so reliably for so long -- even when it's become patently clear to everyone that that narrative is now savaging the soul of the country.

And the infuriating part of it is: It doesn't have to be this way. To prove the point, I'd like to offer two examples of how other countries are using media constructively -- and incredibly powerfully -- to actively help people get past this stuff, instead of staying stuck in it.

The first example comes from Greece. Two summers ago, my son and I went to Athens for a couple of weeks, where we stayed with my grandmother's very best friend -- an elderly Greek woman we'd absorbed into our family clan decades ago as a shirttail aunt. The second night after we arrived, Menie cut dinner short and shooed us all over to the TV. It was time for her favorite show, The Borders of Love. Apparently, it was the biggest TV phenomenon in both Greece and Turkey that year; in both countries, everybody hung on every episode and discussed it in the shops and streets for days afterward. So we gathered in the front room, and settled down to watch.



The Borders of Love was a Romeo-and-Juliet tale of Nazli, a beautiful young Turkish woman, who falls in love with Niko, a dashing Greek man. The series followed the various social dilemmas this unlikely pairing caused -- the cultural clashes between the two of them, issues with co-workers, bosses, neighbors, and friends, and (especially) the huge upsets this caused within their respective families. Dramatically, this isn't anything particularly new -- but there was an interesting twist that made it remarkable in a world-changing way.

Nazli's part of the story was scripted in Turkish, with Greek subtitles supplied. Niko's friends and family all spoke Greek, with Turkish subtitles supplied. And the show was shown -- and became a massive hit -- in both countries. Young Greek men snapped up posters of the elegant Nazli; Turkish girls swooned over handsome Niko.

But the show caused a shift that went much deeper than that. As Greeks and Turks found themselves rooting for the young couple to make it through (which they did: their wedding show was a landmark TV event on both sides of the Bosporus), many of them began to question the thousands of years of mutual animosity that, in most cases, had become nothing more than a reflexive habit. People from both countries began seeking each other out and having civil conversations (often with their fondness for the show as the opening piece of common ground). New trade initiatives were launched; the amount of business between the two countries soared. Greeks and Turks on the street realized they had more in common than baklava and belly dancing; that, as neighbors, they were stuck with each other -- and that might not, in the end, be an awful thing. If Nazli and Niko could make it work in the face of their crazy families, they decided, maybe the rest of them could give it a try, too.



The second example is much closer to home -- in my case, literally. These days, Wednesday nights will usually find me curled up on the couch at my house in Vancouver, eagerly devouring the latest half-hour installment of Little Mosque on the Prairie. I've become unreasonably engrossed in the charming tale of a small town on the Canadian prairies that finds itself welcoming an influx of Muslim immigrants (which, in fact, is happening on the prairies) -- and the sitcom that gives us weekly lessons on how this culture clash can be worked out with mutual respect, humor, and sometimes even love.

The show -- which was created by Zarqa Narwaz, a Muslim writer in Toronto --features Amaar, an attorney from Toronto who abandons his practice to become the imam for the Muslims of the tiny prairie town of Mercy. The show's romantic tension comes from his relationship with Rayyan, the observant yet very feminist Muslim woman who serves as the town's doctor. (Rayyan wears hijab with such stylish flair that Muslim women all over Canada flock to websites showing how they can replicate her fabulous look.) It's love-hate between Amaar and Rayyan, but you know these two handsome, brilliantly-educated professionals are destined for each other.

Amaar's congregation gathers in unused space in the Anglican church (the "little mosque" is really a converted fellowship hall furnished with prayer rugs) which is graying and needs the rent money to keep their church operating. His co-existence with the good reverend -- and the encounters between their respective flocks -- makes for some cute plot twists, as do the various situations in which Canadian culture has to scoot over to make room for the newcomers. Parks & Rec can only find a male instructor for the women-only swim class -- and suddenly, the Muslim women have to cover up in the pool. (Further hilarity ensues when it comes out that the instructor is gay.) Orthodox Muslims struggle to come to terms with sending their kids out on Halloween, but find a way to make the holiday their own. Fatima, the vast and traditional Nigerian woman who officiates at the town's diner, creates medical havoc with her old-country cures -- and Rayyan scrambles to undo the damage. There's even a local hate-radio host who keeps trying to foment resentment toward the newcomers ("What have they got against dogs?") -- but can barely admit his overwhelming crush on Fatima.

This is all frothy sitcom stuff -- but it's smartly and compassionately written, and Nawaz and her writers deftly skewer the most absurd and extremist elements of both cultures. The result is a valuable civics lesson for a country that's reeling under the largest immigrant flow of any nation in the world -- a historically English and French culture that's now absorbing vast numbers of people from Asia and the Middle East. These days, everybody in Canada is working through these same kinds of cultural glitches together, every day. But when CBC offers us this weekly lesson showing how it all can be worked out if we keep relying on the same good will and good humor that have always been at the core of Canadian culture, it really does help the rest of us find our way.

The need to perpetuate a certain racial conflict narrative -- and the unquestioning enthusiasm with which American media as a whole is now buying into the right wing's "culture war with Islamofascism" frame -- pretty much guarantees that you're not going to see Little Mosque on the Prairie on any American network any time soon. After all, a show that like this has the potential to blast through two decades of carefully-cultivated anti-Islam stereotyping in the space of two months. (Interested Americans can acquire the first season on DVD here. Season Two is due out shortly.)

And it's a huge loss, because TV has always been a potent tool for changing the way people all over the world viewed the Other. The rising black upper-middle class was legitimized and made visible through the 70s and 80s when Americans embraced the Jeffersons and the Huxtables. Attitudes towards gays began to soften when we all got to know Jody Dallas (played by a very young Billy Crystal) on the 70s' sitcom Soap. TV has always had a magical ability to bring people we'd have never meet otherwise into our own homes, and making them part of our families. And once you know Jody or Cliff and Claire or Amaar and Rayyan or Nazli and Niko, it's far harder to objectify them, to keep seeing their tribe as something irredeemably different from your own.

That's the opportunity America's corporate media is forfeiting now with its continued insistence on reinforcing conflict-based racial narratives. As any Greek, Turk, or Canadian can tell you, TV can do more than just sell us Ziplock and Coke and Ford. It can also sell us new and better ways of co-existing in a diverse world. Our own media's obstinate refusal -- or, perhaps, lack of imagination -- in using their power to provide visions and models of other, more constructive ways of dealing with these issues is just one more way in which they are failing us, both culturally and politically.

If we're going to change the way Americans approach the Other in our midst, we need to start by demanding that those who produce our media give up on their divisive old stories, and instead start showing us all new and better ways to get along. Our TV producers used to do this so well -- but now, it's just another front on which the rest of the world now has us beat.

The media's race problem

-- by Dave

Probably the most remarkable aspect of the recent feeding frenzy about Barack Obama's so-called "pastor problem" -- besides the agility and smarts that Obama has displayed in handling it -- is not as much what it reveals about the state of race in America as what it reveals about the state of the American media.

The Washington Post's report on Obama's speech observed that this was a controversy that "threatens to engulf his presidential candidacy." Yet as far as anyone can tell, it was having only a marginal effect on the polls in the race before it blew up on the networks, and it was not generated by either of Obama's political opponents, or by any particular interest groups.

No, this is a controversy cooked up almost entirely within the media realm. Once they sank their fangs into it, the whole zombielike corps of pundits, cable talking heads, and radio talk-show hosts couldn't let go of it. And equally remarkable was the bias that was on display in discussing it: News anchors and talking heads flatly referred to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's videotaped remarks as "anti-American," "hate-filled," "vicious," "offensive," and so on and on.

It's telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright's remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama's speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with -- and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget. The remarks that were broadcast all over YouTube and replayed endlessly on the cable talk shows were, no doubt, were impolitic, but they were also largely true.

The Media's Race Problem

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Probably the most remarkable aspect of the recent feeding frenzy about Barack Obama’s so-called "pastor problem" — besides the agility and smarts that Obama has displayed in handling it — is not as much what it reveals about the state of race in America as what it reveals about the state of the American media.

The Washington Post’s report on Obama’s speech observed that this was a controversy that "threatens to engulf his presidential candidacy." Yet as far as anyone can tell, it was having only a marginal effect on the polls in the race before it blew up on the networks, and it was not generated by either of Obama’s political opponents, or by any particular interest groups.

No, this is a controversy cooked up almost entirely within the media realm. Once they sank their fangs into it, the whole zombielike corps of pundits, cable talking heads, and radio talk-show hosts couldn’t let go of it. And equally remarkable was the bias that was on display in discussing it: News anchors and talking heads flatly referred to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s videotaped remarks as "anti-American," "hate-filled," "vicious," "offensive," and so on and on.

It’s telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright’s remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama’s speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with — and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget. The remarks that were broadcast all over YouTube and replayed endlessly on the cable talk shows were, no doubt, were impolitic, but they were also largely true.

Hacktackular Howie Kurtz, the Post’s "media critic," in his column today — while notably failing to critique the media for its performance — essentially admitted that this was a media-driven frenzy:

[I]t wasn’t until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright’s sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now.

Kurtz’s description also encapsulates the blinkered bias that was at play in not just the discussion leading up to Obama’s speech, but in the general response to it:

To their credit, the network newscasts ran four or five sound bites to evoke Obama’s broader argument that while the anger of older blacks like Wright, 66, is understandable, the country needs to move beyond the racial wounds of the past. But Obama, 46, is trying to win the Democratic nomination, so the anchors kept returning to one core question.

"Is it enough to reassure white voters?" ABC’s Charlie Gibson asked.

"Does it make too many white voters uncomfortable?" asked CBS’s Katie Couric.

Their entire preoccupation, indeed, was with how Wright’s remarks might discomfit whites — while never examining the deeper questions of whether white complacence about race might be something worth challenging, as well as their own roles in failing to make that challenge.

So let’s examine the remarks by Wright that whipped up this frenzy. The controversy largely centered around these quotes:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

And there was more outrage over these quotes:

In one sermon in October 2005, Rev. Wright addressed the racial elements at play in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"The winds of Katrina blew the cover off America. The hurricane exposed the hypocrisy," Rev. Wright said, "protecting white folks’ property took priority over saving black folks’ lives." He continued, "This storm called Katrina says far more about a racist government than it does about the wrath of God."

In April 2003, Rev. Wright told his congregation that "the United States government has failed the vast majority of our citizens of African descent."

"For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you’ve got five million blacks who are out of work," he said. "For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza [sic] Rice, you’ve got one million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap-blazing hips, playing on a course that discriminates against women. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course."

What Wright is talking about here, of course, is the long and ugly history of white prejudice against African Americans, a history that continues to this day.

Regardless how much Obama may concede that Wright’s language was "anti-American" or "hateful," the reality is they can only be construed as such if one believes that any criticism of the USA, and of prejudiced white Americans particularly, is unpatriotic or vicious. It’s akin to the long-running right-wing notion that America is like a beloved mommy, and any criticism of her whatsoever means that you "hate America."

Wright may indeed have been short-sighted in failing to acknowledge that there has been progress made, but the reality is that the progress has not only fallen far short of where we need to be, but white complacence over that progress is itself a significant roadblock for creating a real bridge to cross the nation’s racial divide.

The racism he’s talking about is the lazy, blinkered notion that somehow whites have already overcome racism — that they are not responsible for the years of institutional racism, embodied in Jimi Crow, segregation, and the "sundown towns" phenomenon that created the continuing residential and professional segregation that enables young white people to form the networks and connections that are the foundations of economic and social success while leaving young blacks, Latinos, and other minorities out in the cold.

Obama, to his credit, attempted to tackle this in his speech:

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination — where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families — a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

Obama is hardly the first major political figure to address this. Back in 1995, President Clinton said something remarkably similar:

The rift we see before us that is tearing at the heart of America exists in spite of the remarkable progress black Americans have made in the last generation, since Martin Luther King swept America up in his dream, and President Johnson spoke so powerfully for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy in demanding that Congress guarantee full voting rights to blacks. The rift between blacks and whites exists still in a very special way in America, in spite of the fact that we have become much more racially and ethnically diverse, and that Hispanic Americans — themselves no strangers to discrimination — are now almost 10 percent of our national population.

The reasons for this divide are many. Some are rooted in the awful history and stubborn persistence of racism. Some are rooted in the different ways we experience the threats of modern life to personal security, family values, and strong communities. Some are rooted in the fact that we still haven’t learned to talk frankly, to listen carefully, and to work together across racial lines.

… The two worlds we see now each contain both truth and distortion. Both black and white Americans must face this, for honesty is the only gateway to the many acts of reconciliation that will unite our worlds at last into one America.

White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began with unequal treatment first in law and later in fact. African Americans indeed have lived too long with a justice system that in too many cases has been and continues to be less than just. (Applause.) The record of abuses extends from lynchings and trumped up charges to false arrests and police brutality. The tragedies of Emmett Till and Rodney King are bloody markers on the very same road.

Still today too many of our police officers play by the rules of the bad old days. It is beyond wrong when law-abiding black parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are paid by their own taxes.

And blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong when African American men are many times more likely to be victims of homicide than any other group in this country; when there are more African American men in our corrections system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men in their 20s are either in jail, on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system — nearly one in three. And that is a disproportionate percentage in comparison to the percentage of blacks who use drugs in our society. Now, I would like every white person here and in America to take a moment to think how he or she would feel if one in three white men were in similar circumstances.

And there is still unacceptable economic disparity between blacks and whites. It is so fashionable to talk today about African Americans as if they have been some sort of protected class. Many whites think blacks are getting more than their fair share in terms of jobs and promotions. That is not true. That is not true.

The truth is that African Americans still make on average about 60 percent of what white people do; that more than half of African American children live in poverty. And at the very time our young Americans need access to college more than ever before, black college enrollment is dropping in America.

These are uncomfortable truths, of course, but they are also truths. And the media have as much a role in the failure of white Americans to honestly and forthrightly confront them.

The reason we haven’t done so is that we whites have done our damnedest to ignore them. We have effectively wiped the memory of sundown towns from our memories, making us almost purposefully ignorant of them and their surrounding history of ugly violence and vicious bigotry.

Indeed, as we have seen throughout the Obama controversy, the media have been consistent in encouraging white Americans to forget them. Meanwhile, the black people who have to live with these realities cannot.

Spiting our faces

-- by Dave

Among the folks have been (shall we say) particularly amused by Americans' current fetish about keeping out "illegal aliens" are Native Americans -- who of course have a somewhat unique perspective on the issue, having themselves long endured an "invasion" of "outsiders" and the subsequent "cultural change" that followed.

But of course, we've now found a way to treat them like "illegal aliens" too, as the AARP reports, in a piece about how a Republican-inspired policy intended to keep those awful "aliens" from stealing health-care benefits has actually turned into a way to keep the most native of Americans from getting them too:

Bernice Todd's Choctaw family roots are sunk deep in the soil of Oklahoma, a state whose very name is Choctaw for "red people." But in the middle of a debilitating battle with cancer, Todd, a 39-year-old who cleans homes at a trailer park and baby-sits for a living, lost her state Medicaid health care coverage because, although she's a Native American, she could not prove she is a U.S. citizen.

While Todd's case is rich in irony, she is one of tens of thousands of Americans who are falling victim to a new federal rule—aimed at keeping illegal immigrants off the Medicaid rolls—requiring that recipients prove their citizenship and identity with documents many don't have.

Naturally, the idea for the rule change behind this travesty came from the nativist wing of the GOP:

States have always been required to check a Medicaid applicant’s eligibility, which includes citizenship. But a July 2006 rule, enforced by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), now demands specific documents as proof, such as a passport or a birth certificate, driver's license or military record. States face fines if they don't comply.

The rule, which neither CMS nor the Bush administration requested, was adopted by the Republican-dominated Congress in 2005 despite the fact that there was no evidence that undocumented immigrants were falsely claiming U.S. citizenship to get Medicaid.

"This rule was the answer to a problem that really doesn’t exist," says Donna Cohen Ross, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, a nonpartisan research organization.

In fact, the year the rule was passed, Mark McClellan, then the administrator for CMS, said that a report by the CMS inspector general did "not find particular problems regarding false allegations of citizenship, nor are we aware of any." Most states agreed with that assessment.

"In 2007 we added $1 million to our budget just to handle the cost of this new rule when we had absolutely no indication there was a problem with illegal immigrants getting Medicaid in Kansas," says Andrew Allison, Kansas Medicaid director and deputy director of the state Health Policy Authority.

Of course, as we recently pointed out, this is all being done to address a problem that doesn't exist:

Just a small fraction of America's health care spending is used to provide publicly supported care to the nation's undocumented immigrants, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

Overall, immigrants to the United States use relatively few health services, primarily because they are generally healthier than their American-born counterparts, according to the study by the nonprofit research organization.

And unsuprisingly, the rule has done next to nothing in terms of stopping "illegal aliens" from getting benefits:

So far, he says, Oklahoma has uncovered no illegal immigrants on its rolls. And Arizona, where immigration is a huge issue, has filed two reports since the rule went into effect, each saying the state uncovered "zero" illegal immigrants among its 1 million Medicaid recipients. Kansas has found one illegal immigrant on its Medicaid rolls.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office survey of the states last year found that that the requirement caused eligible U.S. citizens to lose Medicaid coverage while increasing administrative costs. A close analysis of six states, the report says, showed that for every $100 spent to implement the rule, only 14 cents was saved.

In fact, nationwide the rule has added millions of dollars in administrative costs.

As Skemono puts it:

So, because we were worried that foreigners might be using up our precious medical supplies (which was one of the top concerns over immigration on this poll, and of course isn't true), we have adopted a "solution" that instead deprives thousands of actual citizens of health care. Brilliant.

But then, that's really the problem with the nativist approach to immigration in general: Not only is it fundamentally irrational, it is also perforce going to result in travesty upon travesty.