Just wow.
This is all about taxes, though. No racism. No sirree.
by John Cole| 91 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People, Teabagger Stupidity
This post is in: Post-racial America, Assholes, Teabagger Stupidity
The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.
Under the words, “Now you know why no birth certificate,” there’s an Obama family portrait showing them as apes.
(Donald Trump must be elated to finally have an explanation about Obama’s true birth circumstances.)
Here’s the image attached to the email:
Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”
Really, I think I said it best with “asshole.” This must be part of that whole affirmative action baby/black privilege Mickey Kaus was talking about.
I’m Not a Racist, I Just Send Racist EmailsPost + Comments (172)
This post is in: Post-racial America
Via Yglesias, here’s Mickey Kaus on Obama:
Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.
Consider this an open thread.
This post is in: Vagina Outrage
Email from a Balloon Juice reader:
I live in DC. It’s a unique situation in that we are not a state and do not have traditional voting representation in Congress, yet we pay federal taxes. Our local budget also must be approved by Congress. There has been a lot of outcry locally about the way DC was used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations to avoid a government shutdown last weekend, specifically the reinstatement of the ban on abortion funding for low-income women. The very real effects of that ban are already taking hold, as 28 local women who were scheduled for abortion procedures today were informed last night that as of midnight, Medicaid could no longer be used to pay for the procedures:
The compromise reached last week by President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner to reinstate a ban on D.C.’s ability to fund abortions for low-income women has, so far, been enveloped inside a bubble of political rhetoric. But the very real effects of the ban have started to take hold: 28 women who were scheduled for abortion procedures in the District today were informed by a local clinic last night that, as of midnight, they would be unable to rely on D.C. Medicaid to pay for those procedures.
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The DC Abortion Fund, an all-volunteer operated organization which has provided guidance to D.C. area women regarding abortions since 1995, sent out an emergency call late last night to raise funds for the 28 women. DC Abortion Fund’s Tiffany Reed says that the emergency campaign has been relatively successful to date.
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“We’ve raised over $3,965 so far in the last 12 hours,” Reed told DCist via email. “We’re still working to fundraise for the women who are scheduled today and then we have women scheduled Friday and Saturday who are just now being notified they can’t use their Medicaid.”…
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“We’re doing a big push to get these women seen through the weekend, since they won’t have adequate time to fundraise hundreds of dollars on their own in time,” Reed added.The good news is that a local all-volunteer group has been doing emergency fund-raising (and doing it well, it seems) to assist these women, but… this is only the beginning. I expect to hear a lot more stories like this (though I don’t really expect to “see” them, as this is the kind of real-world cause-and-effect story the Very Serious people in the media village rarely want to touch).
Abortions are extremely time-sensitive medical procedures — a delay of even a few weeks greatly increases the complexity, the risk, and the cost. Playing funding games on the floor of the house isn’t going to ‘save (potential) lives’, it’s just going to complicate lives that are already in existence, as Boehner’s Battalion know very well. The mostly-male national legislators playing games with these women’s lives have gone full-bore Conan the Barbarian; what they want is to “drive their enemies before them… and hear the lamentation of the women.”
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 257 Comments
This post is in: Kiss My Black Ass
I’m peacing outta here for a while. “Hooray!! some shouted, fists pumping in the air. “Boooo!!” some hissed, latching on to my leg.
There, There, little one. You know where to find me. (Or not.)
GBCW! ::dramatic faint:: -ABLxx
His words rang out with an unmistakable certitude.
“This is the most racist place I’ve ever lived,” said the man sitting across from me, a black writer and poet whose acquaintance I had only made earlier that day.
His expression made it clear that this was no mere hyperbole spat out so as to get a reaction. He meant every word and proceeded in about twenty minutes to lay out the case for why indeed this place where we were talking — San Francisco — was far more racist, in his estimation than any of several places he had lived in the South.
Worse than Birmingham.
Worse than Jackson, Mississippi.
Worse than Dallas.
San Francisco. Yes, that San Francisco.
From police harassment to profiling to housing discrimination to a persistent invisibility he’d felt since first arriving, there was no doubt that the ostensibly liberal enclave was head and shoulders above the rest.
And it wasn’t his opinion alone. I have heard similar feelings expressed about the Bay Area by peoples of color many times since, as well as about Seattle, Portland, and any number of other supposedly progressive paradises where various “alternative” types (of white folks at least) seem to feel at home. Even those who wouldn’t rank a place like San Francisco as the most racist city in which they’d lived, are often quick to insist that its racism is comparable to what they’ve experienced elsewhere, which is to say, no less a problem.
When I’ve recounted these discussions with folks of color living in “progressive” cities to my white liberal friends, they have usually recoiled in shock, followed by a kind of white leftie defensiveness that was, sadly, unsurprising. Their responses to the news that black and brown folks don’t find the history of the Haight-Ashbury district, or the Summer of Love all that inspiring — after all, when Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were entertaining white hippies in the Fillmore, black folks were fighting for their lives across the way in Oakland — often suggest a desire on their part to believe that the people to whom I’d spoken were seeing things.
Unfortunately the pattern is all too common. If people of color complain about racism and discrimination in rural Georgia, no one is surprised. In fact, to many the image is comforting as it fulfills every stereotype, regional and political, that so many folks continue to carry around regarding who the bad guys are.
But suggest that racism and discrimination are also significant problems in more “progressive spaces,” even among self-proclaimed liberals and leftists themselves — and that it might be unearthed in our political movements — and prepare to be met with icy stares, or worse, a self-righteous vitriol that seeks to separate “real racism” (the right-wing kind) from not-so-real racism (the kind we on the left sometimes foster). And know that before long, someone will admonish you to focus on the “real enemy,” rather than fighting amongst ourselves. “What we need is unity,” these voices say, “and all that talk about racism on the left just divides us further.”
[read the rest here]
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 102 Comments
This post is in: Vagina Outrage, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue
The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Pap Smears at Walgreens | ||||
www.colbertnation.com | ||||
|
Here’s more from Media Matters:
The clinics, which are a subsidiary of Walgreens, offer health services like flu vaccines and blood pressure screening at 350 Walgreens stores.
Fox & Friends’ false claim about pap smears is the latest in a series of attempts by conservatives to dismiss the importance of Planned Parenthood for women’s health services. As Steve Benen noted, “Republicans, like their cable news network, would like the public to believe the preventative health services provided by Planned Parenthood aren’t especially necessary or worthy of funding, since they’re readily available everywhere — as if every block in America has a Starbucks, an ATM, and screenings for cervical cancer. Except, that’s ridiculous, Fox News lying about it, ironically, only helps underscore the value of Planned Parenthood clinics.”
Do these morons know what a vagina is? What a uterus it is? Maybe they really don’t know what goes on down there, and that’s why they are so afraid to say the word “uterus” or even think about uteri. Maybe they simply don’t know what it takes to maintain them (and I’m not talking waxing and vagazzling — either.)
I think we need to call for a “National Introduce Your Vagina to a Republican Day.” Maybe then these idiots will stop viewing vaginas as caves of wonderment and give them the damn respect they deserve.
Just walk up to a Teabilly and say “Hi. I’d like to introduce you to my vagina.” Then just give a little ten minute history of it — what its likes and dislikes are. What needs to be done to keep it healthy. Talk to them about your uterus and what it means to you. For those who don’t have them anymore, talk about that. That’ll really blow their minds.
Maybe we should ask our white sisters to take the lead. Bieber knows Republicans aren’t quite ready to deal with VOCs yet. We don’t want to shock them to death — or
maybe we do?
Well, whatever — we can hash out the deets later. But, the first rule of “National Introduce Your Vagina to a Republican Day” has to be “NO TOUCHING!!” —
— You don’t want to get Teabilly cooties on your cooch.
::shudder::
[check out Bruin Kid’s diary at GOS if you would like to view a transcript of the bit.] [cross-posted here at ABLC (which is in the process of going mobile!)]FYWP, also. Too.
The Colbert Report on Fox & Friends’s “Pap Smears at Walgreens” LiePost + Comments (102)
This post is in: Post-racial America, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
I think the thing that pisses me off the most about the birtherism and the coverage is that no one will come out and state that what is obviously motivating this crap is racism. Period. End of story.
If Obama was white, we wouldn’t be politely rebutting lunatics questioning his birth certificate for four fucking years. But because he is black, we can spend tens of thousands of hours listening to drooling idiots wonder whether or not he is a real Murrikan.
It’s really that simple.