Flannel Shirt

Excellent essay

Why hasn't the mainstream noted the government's oppressive surveillance before now? Because it was focused on the underclasses. Thus:

For decades now, I’ve seen the aftermath of botched drug raids; early morning mayhem in which police, using mauls and wearing body armor, smash through the front doors of ghetto homes, guns drawn, shouting for sleeping residents to drop to the ground.  I’ve seen raids of sixteen or eighteen addresses come up empty for drugs and weapons at more than half of those locations. And of course, I’ve seen raiding officers drop a copy of the signed, documented and perfectly legal probable cause on the rowhouse floor, gather equipment, and walk out of homes from which they recovered no evidence of criminality.

“Are you gonna fix my door?” is always a stunned resident’s first question.

“You need to call the city for that,” is always the ready, ambiguous reply.

What poor and working-class communities routinely endure within the very constitutional construct of our drug war makes the wails of indignation over this NSA data-mining astonishing and embarrassing to me. And no, before you get wound up prematurely and choose the too-easy, I-didn’t-read-deep-enough argument, I am not saying that overreach in other realms of the criminal justice system justifies overreach anywhere else.

After all, no one is suggesting that we do away with court-approved search warrants for domestic crime suppression. Or dialed-numbered recorders. Or interrogation rooms. Or informants. Or just about any other law enforcement asset that can be used properly and misused egregiously.  Oh, more people are now complaining about the excesses of the drug war, to be sure.  But all of us understand that the existing legal weapons and strategies are there for all crimes — for murder, for rape, for robbery, for burglary. Hell, if a crew of detectives were pulling cell numbers off a tower to identify and arrest a rampaging serial rapist — and traipsing through the phone metadata of ten thousand other citizens to do it — we’d do more than applaud; we’d buy the film rights. We are comfortable with a certain level of intrusion involving all previous weapons of law enforcement, and even the use of phone metadata as it can be utilized.  Why, I wonder.  And why has this particular law enforcement intervention– no less legal as it was proposed to the FISA court — engaged the worst fears of many.

 

Idaho Hitler head: art or what?

I suspect this won't make to the antiques roadshow.

A blast from the past

It turns out he was always a dick. Written five years ago.

In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell's denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.

Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life--in 1999 he warned that Tinky Winky, a character on the children's showTeletubbies, might be gay--but his most infamous remark arrived on the morning of 9/11, after the terrorist attacks, when he proclaimed, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Though Falwell's influence waned in his twilight years--his approval rating among evangelicals, according to a 2006 Pew Poll, had drifted downward to 46 percent--his well-publicized gaffes continued to make him one of the most recognizable figures of the Christian right. While the names of evangelical heavies like Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins are unknown to most people, Falwell's pudgy visage remains the symbol of the culture war his apostles have inherited. As Perkins wrote of Falwell in a newsletter after his death, "He was a pioneer whose legacy, marked by courage and candor, blazed the trail for all men and women of conviction to engage--boldly--on the great questions of our day."

But for Falwell, the "questions of the day" did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality--nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell's life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.

As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher's own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"

"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."

Falwell's jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration.... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."

In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

Falwell concluded, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners."

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.

For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell's Christian soldiers.)

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

As the Christian right gradually transmuted its racial resentment into sexual politics, Liberty University began enrolling nonwhite students and Thomas Road Baptist Church integrated. In the irony of ironies in 2006, at Justice Sunday III, a rally for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a white-only "eating club" at Princeton University, Falwell haltingly rose to sing "We Shall Overcome." Beside him stood Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece, Alveda King, an evangelical antiabortion activist.

On the day of Falwell's death, Republican presidential frontrunners fell over one another to memorialize him. Arizona Senator John McCain, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had called Falwell an "agent of intolerance," then spoke at the 2006 graduation ceremony at Liberty University, praising Falwell as "a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country."

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose Mormon faith is listed as a cult by Falwell's Southern Baptist Convention, hailed him as "an American who built and led a movement based on strong principles and strong faith.... The legacy of his important work will continue through his many ministries where he put his faith into action."

Rudy Giuliani, the thrice-married prochoice former New York City mayor, gay rights advocate and erstwhile cross-dresser, was also profuse in his praise of Falwell. "He was a man who set a direction," Giuliani said. "He was someone who was not afraid to speak his mind. We all have great respect for him."

The gushing eulogies of Falwell by leading GOP presidential hopefuls demonstrated the preacher's earthly limitations and his enduring influence. Under Falwell's guidance, the Christian right subsumed much of the Republican apparatus and now holds the key to the presidential nominating process. McCain, Romney and Giuliani may never see eye-to-eye with Falwell, even in heaven, but in the end they paid fealty at his grave.

They're all Jerry's kids now.

A bad disease spreads in Alabama

Here.

Weeks before Derek Mathew Shrout allegedly started building improvised hand grenades in his military family’s home, before the 17-year-old was arrested for plotting to use the devices against black and gay students and a teacher, he was committing racist acts in full view of everyone at an Alabama high school.

Two of his former friends say that Shrout – sometimes wearing his Junior ROTC U.S. Army-issued uniform – repeatedly performed stiff-arm sieg-heil salutes and shouted “white power” at Russell County High School in Seale, Ala., where he apparently intended to carry out the attacks. The community is some 20 miles from the U.S. Army’s sprawling Fort Benning, Ga., compound, where the suspect’s father is stationed.

Some of the suspect’s hateful antics apparently were captured on the school’s security cameras, and authorities may now be reviewing that video, if it still exists.

David Lee White, an 18-year-old senior at the high school, told Hatewatch last night that he repeatedly saw Shrout and a group of other white students – ranging in numbers from seven to 12, most of them boys – conduct impromptu Nazi-style salutes in the school’s hallways, at breakfast in the cafeteria and in a school bus parking lot. Many times, he said, this occurred in full view of teachers and other staff.

“They would even do it right in front of the [school’s] security cameras – stand there and salute and shout ‘white power,’” White said in an interview with Hatewatch. “It was right where everybody could watch it, and he [Shrout] didn’t care who saw it.”

White recalled seeing Shrout conduct his “white power” salutes on Wednesdays,  when he and others in the school’s JROTC program would be required to wear their green U.S. Army dress uniforms – jokingly called “pickle suits” by the students.

“It didn’t matter what he was wearing, he’d still do it,” White said of the Nazi-style saluting on the high school campus. “I even saw teachers standing there in the hallway, watching him,” he added. Asked why high school teachers wouldn’t intervene and stop such conduct, White said: “There’s a lot of good stuff going on here at this school, but I think some of them [staff] don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

White said that to the best of his recollection, students started engaging in the “white power” salutes sometime last fall, perhaps in October, about the time White decided for personal reasons to drop out of the Junior ROTC classes he shared with Shrout. “I thought it was a joke at first,” the high school senior said.

White said he has no idea what particular racist group, if any, his former friend idolized or followed — only that he expressed deep-seated racist views.

Shrout, arrested Friday on a charge of first-degree attempted assault, was released Monday afternoon after his parents posted the $75,000 bond set by Judge Albert Johnson. The judge ordered Shrout to wear an ankle monitor, remain at home, not contact anyone at the high school and only access the Internet with adult supervision.

Hatewatch contacted White Monday evening, a day after he and his best friend, David Kelly, the senior class president at the school, made similar on-camera statements to Dante Renzulli, a reporter for WTVM-TV in nearly Columbus, Ga.

White said he and Kelly befriended Shrout about a year after he moved to Alabama, when his father was transferred from Kansas to Fort Benning. “We used to hang out, play touch football together, wrestle, you know,” White said, adding that he considered Shrout “cool” before he seemed to become preoccupied with white supremacy.

In his interview with WTVM, Kelly said Shrout initially appeared to be “confident, well-rounded, but as time went by he was doing the whole ‘white power’ thing,” causing him and White to distance themselves, Kelly said.

In an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer in today’s editions, Russell High junior Jessica Watkins also spoke of Shrout’s racist reputation. She sat in Shrout’s seat on Monday and told the newspaper she “was horrified by what she saw written on the desk.” “It said, ‘white power’ with the F-word, and it was covered in Nazi symbols,” Watkins told the Columbus newspaper. The teacher attempted to scrub off the racist graffiti, but couldn’t because it was in permanent marker.

Watkins also reported seeing Shrout frequently holler “white power” and make a “W” sign with his fingers and hold it to his chest, Watkins said. “But I always thought he was joking around,” she said.

One teacher at the school, who hasn’t been publicly identified, did grow concerned after she found and read a notebook left behind in a classroom last week, allegedly by Shrout. The teacher took prompt action, turning the journal over to a school administrator and the school’s resource officer, a deputy sheriff.

Shrout’s journal contained hand-drawn Nazi swastikas and plans for a potentially deadly attack at the school, targeting five students and a teacher, all of them black. Russell County Sheriff Heath Taylor told Hatewatch the plans also targeted a sixth student who Shrout apparently believed was gay.

When the teen was confronted by authorities, he claimed his journal plans were mere fiction. But a search of his home turned up two large homemade explosive devices made from metal cans and two dozen chewing tobacco cans, punched with holes and filled metal shrapnel, that are being described as the beginnings of crudely made hand grenades.

Ignition devices weren’t located, but the sheriff said if the homemade bombs were completed the way they were described in the suspect’s journal, they could have caused serious injuries or fatalities.

The sheriff said he wasn’t sure if his investigators seized a home computer or its peripherals that may have been used by the suspect, but that likely will be of high interest to the FBI, which is now involved in the investigation.

The sheriff emphasized that the teen’s mother and father have been extraordinarily cooperative with investigators and were stunned to learn of their son’s racist views. “They both have been very cooperative, and were taken aback and shocked about what they were learning,” Taylor told Hatewatch.

Shrout’s parents, who live in Fort Mitchell, Ala., declined to comment to the media after Monday’s hearing, where defense attorney Jeremy Armstrong convinced the judge to release the suspect. Armstrong told reporters that the case against Shrout “is an overreaction” sparked by last month’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

If school authorities are now investigating the suspect’s circle of “white power” friends at the high school, nothing has been said publicly to that effect. Words such as planned massacre, killings or racism weren’t mentioned in an official posting on the school’s website, which referred to Shrout’s arrest as an “event.”

“With the event that occurred at Russell County High School last week, we want to assure the students and parents that we are taking every precaution we can to provide a safe learning environment for our students,” it said. “As a way for each of you to help, please alert us when you know of circumstances that might jeopardize the safety of our faculty, staff and students. We appreciate your support as part of the TEAM at RCHS.”

The school’s roster lists Army Lt. Col. Lee Washington as the Junior ROTC advisor. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

White said that he learned from friends who are still in the school’s ROTC program that his weekend interview with the Columbus television station was the topic of discussion in the ROTC class on Monday. “I heard from my friends that Col. Washington was talking that I shouldn’t be talking about that to the news media.” The senior said that while he hasn’t been contacted by Washington, “I was just thinking of telling him, ‘Who are you to tell me what to say or what to do?’”

Surprise surprise

Bullies, again

Sadly. Any guesses what the bullies said?

The family of a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide outside a school in a Salt Lake City suburb says he was a victim of bullying.

David Q. Phan was released early to his mother on Thursday from Bennion Junior High in Taylorsville before he returned an hour and a half later to a corner of the campus, where he shot himself in front of students.

"David had been bullied for the past few years. He would come home crying sometimes," the teen's cousin, Vy Lake, told the Deseret News.

"Bullies would walk home with him, taunting him and throwing things at him. After ignoring them didn't work, he started fighting back and got into trouble at school because of this," added Lake, who spoke on behalf of the boy's parents.

But the family neither wants to point a finger at anyone for the suicide, Lake said, nor speculate that his death was the result of bullying.

"We are not trying to place a blame on anyone," Lake said. "We just wish everyone would be more aware to bullying in the schools, and a little friendlier to their peers."

Granite School District spokesman Ben Horsley said school officials stayed in close contact with Phan after he reported "a bullying concern several years ago."

"Counselors have further remained in close regular contact with (him) because of other issues in his personal life," Horsley said in a statement. "Despite specific personal inquiries, David never reported any further bullying concerns and on the contrary, reported that things were going well."

The teen also was "facing significant personal challenges on multiple fronts," but Horsley declined to elaborate.

While his family is of Vietnamese heritage, Phan was born in Utah.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Family-Utah-boy-who-killed-himself-was-bullied-4083629.php#ixzz2Dr9Tlzqp

A racialist history of the USA

Keeping it classy

In Virginia.

Adding the "n-word" epithet was a defining touch, showing how deeply this vandal's love of humanity extends.

Blank page

Here is an interesting article, pretty much suggesting that this may be the last hurrah for dog-whistle race-baiting Presidential campaigns. 

What is it with these white men? What are they seeing that ordinary people don't see? What accounts for this ... secession of theirs, from the rest of America? John Sununu, Romney's campaign co-chair, responded to Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama by saying, "I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States—I applaud Colin for standing with him."

Sununu was trying to be snide. But there he is, standing with Mitt Romney. Just like Donald Trump and Clint Eastwood and Buzz Bissinger and Meat Loaf—one aging white man after another. It's a study in identity politics.

White people don't like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American default.

Yet Mitt Romney's election strategy depends on the notion that the white vote is separate from the rest of the vote, and can be captured as such. Back in August, National Journal ran a report on campaign math headlined "Obama Needs 80% of Minority Vote to Win 2012 Presidential Election":

Romney’s camp is focused intently on capturing at least 61 percent of white voters. That would provide him a slim national majority—so long as whites constitute at least 74 percent of the vote, as they did last time, and Obama doesn’t improve on his 80 percent showing with minorities.

Again, why are "minorities" treated as a bloc here? The story mentions no particular plan by the Obama campaign to capture the nonwhite vote. Instead, it discusses how the Romney forces hope to get a bigger share of white voters than John McCain did—by "stressing the increased federal debt" and attacking "Obama's record on spending and welfare."

Welfare, yes. Let's come back to "welfare." But first, how's the strategy been doing? A recent ABC/Washington Post poll found Romney leading Obama 65-32 among white men and 53-44 among white women, giving him a 59 percent share of the white vote overall—"a new high," and closing in on that 60 percent target.

This has been the foundation of Republican presidential politics for more than four decades, since Richard Nixon courted and won the votes of Southerners who'd turned against the Democratic Party because of integration and civil rights. The Party of Lincoln became the party of Lincoln's assassins, leveraging white anger into a regional advantage and eventually a regional monopoly. It's all very basic and old news, but it's still considered rude to say so, even as Republican strategists talk about winning the white voters and only the white voters.

And so we have two elections going on. In one, President Obama is running for re-election after a difficult but largely competent first term, in which the multiple economic and foreign-policy disasters of four years ago have at least settled down into being ongoing economic and foreign-policy problems. A national health care reform bill got passed, and two reasonable justices were appointed to the Supreme Court. Presidents have done worse in their first terms. In my lifetime—which began under the first term of an outright thug and war criminal—I'm not sure any presidents have done better. (The senile demagogue? The craven panderer? The ex-CIA director?)

In the other election, the election scripted for white voters—honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the story is. Republican campaigns have been using dog-whistle signals for so long that they seem to have forgotten how to make sounds in normal human hearing range. Mitt Romney appears to be running on the message that first of all, Obama hasn't accomplished anything, and second of all, he's going to repeal all the bad things that Obama has accomplished. And then Romney himself, as a practical businessman, is going to ... something something, small business, something, restore America, growth and jobs, tax cuts, something. It's a negative campaign in the pictorial sense: a blank space where the objects would go. A white space, if you will.

The passion comes from what Romney is running against. For more than four years, without pause, Republicans have been campaigning and propagandizing against an imaginary Obama. At the most grotesque end of the fantasies, he is a foreign-born, anti-colonialist Muslim. In more reputable precincts, he is a power-mad socialist and a dumb affirmative-action baby, promoted all the way to the presidency by a race-crazed, condescending liberal elite. (As if the presidency of the Harvard Law Review were awarded to anyone but the hungriest shark in the shark tank.) This is the position of the party's mandarins and reputable spinners—that Obama was foisted off on regular Americans against their will, despite all those votes last time around.

Hence the baiting of Obama, throughout his term, for supposedly being unable to speak without a teleprompter. Republicans predicted, over and over, that the president would be exposed and humiliated in face-to-face debate with an opponent (Newt Gingrich especially fantasized about being that foe). Eventually this led to Clint Eastwood haranguing the empty chair. And then in the first presidential debate, Obama was slack and ineffectual against a sharp Romney. See? It was true!

And then Obama shredded Romney in the second debate, and kept cuffing him around in the third. Now Romney was the deflating balloon, wild-eyed and babbling and licking his dry mouth in desperation. From which Peggy Noonan—whose proudest credential is having written the scripts for a Republican president who couldn't function without being fed his lines—concluded in the Wall Street Journal that the only meaningful debate was the first one.

"Nothing echoes out like that debate," Noonan wrote, creating her own echoes. The president was "Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself." Full of himself. "[H]is failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him." ("He is not by any means a stupid man," she added.)

It's a strange, inverted world, the white-people's bubble, full of phantoms and rumors. Candidates are at the mercy of voter fraud, or the "urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine," according to the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio’s Franklin County. (Voter turnout is a bad thing.) Jobs numbers are being fudged. Polls are being skewed. The liberal media are trying to hide how popular Mitt Romney is.

Read it all. It's worth it.

More racism

Heh heh. Not.