The Negro threat.

I swear you can't make this stuff up. Did Jan Brewer really say that she felt " a little threatened" by Obama?

 “I was in the middle of a sentence and he walked away. I wasn’t angry at all. I felt a little bit threatened, if you will, in the attitude that he had.” [Source]

"Threatened"?!!! Let's see now, he is the President of these divided states. Those football player looking dudes with the earplugs in their ears are protecting him, not your drug addicted looking ass.

Republicans no longer have any respect for the presidency because they don't respect the person currently holding the office. It's that simple. That's sad, because I thought that republicans loved A-merry-ca and what the office of the president represents. *shaking head*

Then there is this new study out of Canada which confirms what I have suspected all along.

"There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100."

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science." [Source]  *h/t to Greg Fuller for the pic and story.*

I bet Jan Brewer doesn't have a very high IQ. 

Still, the moral of this story is that racism is just a bad thing all around for everybody.

Finally, shout out to David Honig and the folks at MMTC who are once again hosting a wonderful summit here in D.C.

David, I promise that I will try to attend all of the sessions tomorrow.