The New Black Panthers and the Old White Men

The discussion centers on whether the Justice Department's civil rights division mishandled a lawsuit against members of the New Black Panther Party, which was filed weeks before the Obama administration took office. The suit was focused on the party and two of its members, who stood out front of a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008 wearing military gear. They were captured on video and were accused of trying to discourage some people from voting. One carried a nightstick. 


This is an except taken from a piece in the Washington Post dated 7/14/10 and written by Krissah Thompson

It begins: A 2008 voter-intimidation case has become a political controversy for the Obama administration as conservative lawyers, politicians and commentators raise concerns that the Department of Justice has failed to protect the civil rights of white voters. 

Abigail Thernstrom (a member of the Bush Civil Rights Commission) said that she did not find testimony convincing and that the facts of the case raised doubts in her mind, noting that the Black Panthers were standing in front of a majority-black precinct that had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in previous elections -- not a prime spot for intimidating white voters. 


There is nothing more disgusting to me than hearing whites complain that they are being discriminated against on the basis of race when they are attempting to deport every brown person in this country who wasn't living here a hundred years ago and has a birth certificate and passport to prove it when they're asked to show their papers to some beefy red faced jackass with a gun strapped around his bulging belly who calls himself a teapartier and a patriot.  Frankly I'm ready for the uprising of all of us with some native or African DNA to deport all those racist idiots.  I'm so sick of them and their fake indignation over "illegals."  You are all illegals in my book.  My DNA dates back three thousand years of living on this continent.  Go fuck yourselves, you lilly white idiots.  Go back to the Old Country wherever that is.  Get a job cleaning someone's home or gardening for them.  Then you can start complaining about how good things were in the USofA when you were the boss of everything.

Politics: Why I Blog

When my young friends from New York were visiting in January of '08, just after I got my Imac so I could finish writing my first novel, they insisted I needed a blog.  They had to explain to me what a "Blog" was.  Web log?  WTF?  Why would I ever want to do that?  What a pointless endeavor, no one would ever read it.  And aside from working on a difficult manuscript, I didn't really have much to say.  Or so I thought.  1,365 posts later, I have discovered my voice.

It was a political season and I am a political animal.  There could not have been a better time for me to start a blog.  In the beginning of that political season, I was a Hillary supporter, but as the season progressed, I became an Obama supporter. I had begun to have readers and some of them were outraged that I, a feminist, would abandon Hillary.  It was our turn, as women, to put a woman in the White House and not as just First Lady, a term any feminist worth her salt should hate.  We are not "Ladies" we are women.  But it became clear to me that Hillary was not well served by the advise she was getting and that advise was coming from people she had chosen to run her campaign.  She was making rookie mistakes, acting like she was entitled to the nomination, as if it were a coronation and she was the heir apparent.  She was leaving States she'd lost without thanking her volunteers and supporters for their generous help and forgetting to congratulate the victor, her current boss.  She began to seem boorish and rude to me.  And I worried that if she won, she'd do the same thing as President; she'd put the same lousy advisers in positions of power, and she'd still be getting bad advise.

I'm not always sure Obama is all that well served by some of his adivser, but one person I'm positive he's getting and honest advise from is Hillary.  It was a brilliant move to offer her Secretary of State.  So we, the voters got a three-fer:  We got Barack, we got Hillary, and as a tripple player, we got Bill Clinton, the man we quietly call on when we need some charming arm twisting done in the troublesome South.