Happy Birthday Mr. President!

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See that picture of Obama up there*? He sure looks different doesn't he? Well, it's his birthday, and I want to join the rest of A-merry-ca and wish him a happy 49th year on earth. Field, that's not Obama, that's Will Smith in that picture... I know it's not Obama, but I figured Will was close enough. Don't laugh, the folks over at Radio Rwanda do it. Seems my girl Greta Van Frankenstein and her producers thought that it would be cool to put up Shirley Sherrod's picture instead of Maxine Walters for their news story about girlfriend. Come on folks, don't we all look alike?

"During a segment about the ethics violations California Democrat Maxine Waters is accused of, "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" producers actually showed footage of another black woman in the news: Shirley Sherrod.

Van Susteren took to her blog immediately after the show to apologize for the mistake and to say that she and her staff were "sick over" it.

"OOPS...we so screwed up on this one and we are sick about it..." the blog post was titled.

"Right now we are trying to console ourselves with the fact that, while we did a doozy of a mistake, at least it was unintentional, we noticed it immediately and scrambled to fix it immediately," she wrote. "And yes, even with telling ourselves that, we still feel horrible! (and we should feel horrible!)"

Van Susteren acknowledged that it was "a very bad mistake and a painful one for which we are very apologetic.

"We really don't know what to say and there is nothing that you can post to make us feel better (not that we deserve to feel better!) This mistake was bad, very bad and we are immensely sorry," she concluded." [Article]

Yeah right! I would believe any other news organization and the sincerity of their apology except this one. Let's just say that they have a history. You only have to look here, and here and here....you get the picture.

I guess I can't really blame them, it's not like they know many of us folks over there. And when they do have us on, it tends to be a little fishy if you get my drift. "We report you decide" is one of their sayings. I guess this takes it to a whole different level. Picture of Flavor Flav, story on Kendrick Meek. Picture of Morgan Freeman, story on Eric Holder. Picture of Michael Jordan, story on Colin Powell. Nice. Still, I guess it's easier to do these things when you are "FOX NEWS." Why? Because the typical Fox viewer wouldn't know the difference in the first place.

Andrew In Wonderland.

His O ness won a couple of big legislative victories today, but thanks to his fear of the white...I mean the right it was drowned out by news about Shirley Sherrod, my new heroine, and a true field Negro. Girlfriend refused to appear on Radio Rwanda, and she slammed Ailes and company in an interview she did with Media Matters.

"Not before they reported it," she said of Fox's negligence. "They have called me today and initially I had said yes (to an interview), but I thought about it and I did not think they intended to be fair in their reporting. They are going to say what they want to say regardless of what I say."

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.

"I think they should but they won't. They intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said of Fox. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."

Still, Fox continued to push for an interview with her, Sherrod said. "

See that O man? That's how you handle the Radio Rwanda folks. I have said this before, but it is worth repeating: The people who tune in to Radio Rwanda are never ever ever going to vote for you. Never! So please, stop trying to be their friend; it will not work.

But what a difference a day makes. Now, all of a sudden, everyone is Shirley's friend. And everyone is doing their mea culpa, dance. Everyone, of course, except the man who started it all in the first place; Andrew Breitbart. That scumbag low life who, if he isn't a pedophile, sure looks like one. (BTW, Andrew thinks the farmer's wife was a plant. There is a mental hospital short of a patient out there.) Hell even Russel Simmons is getting into the act. Come on Russell, throw some of those Def Jam dollars behind Ms. Sherrod so that she can take a shot at a lawsuit against some folks. Or, organize those folks in Zoo York to get a protest permit and march outside of the Radio Rwanda studios. That would be far more effective than just penning an oped on Huffington Post.

Anyway, once again, we have a teachable racial moment in A-merry-ca. Black pundits are all over the cable networks, and they are telling the rest of A-merry-ca how black folks really feel. They hope that A-merry-ca will care. They wont. It seems everybody got the memo except black folks: There is no more racism in A-merry-ca.

Meanwhile, over at Radio Rwanda, it's business as usual: O'Reilly made a weak apology tonight on his program, but in the very next sentence he declared that Sherrod should be fired for violating the Hatch Act, and maybe, just maybe, she does see the world through a racial prism. Yes Bill, when your daddy was killed by a white man who wasn't even charged, your view of race tends to get a little skewed. I am just sayin.

I can't wait for this latest little racial dust up to end. I am dying to talk about my friend Hip Hop Mike and his latest little problem over at the RNC. Now there is a Negro who could use some support from the rest of you. Shirley will be fine, she has already been offered a job. Mike, on the other hand, just might be on his way out.

The Reverse Race Card.

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Ms. Sherrod, I go to an excellent cleaner here in Philly. They will do a great job of getting those tire marks off the back of your beautiful dress. Still, I bet that bus must have been pretty heavy.

Don't worry, your back will recover. Just ask some of the other Negroes who found themselves under the O bus what they used to make themselves feel better.

Seriously, have you all ever seen a brother so afraid of appearing racial than his O ness? No wonder the wingnuts over at Roger's (You remember Roger, right? He gave A-merry-ca Willie Horton) propaganda station are having so much fun playing the race card with him. Every time he tries to distance himself from you Negroes and be the president for all A-merry-ca, they pull him back in.

"Conservative media, particularly Fox News, have finally picked up on the item and are trumpeting it as another example of President Obama's Machiavellian hand silently pulling strings behind the scenes to protect those groups who might have helped steer votes in his direction during the 2008 race for the White House. If this sounds familiar, that's because you've heard it before -- back when it was known as "The ACORN Scandal." If you can't immediately see what the members of the New Black Panther Party and the people who were generally helped out by ACORN have in common, you need to have your eyes checked.

For the record, the New Black Panther Party is a fringe group that's actually been denounced by the original Black Panthers. Its leader, the artist formerly known as Paris Lewis who now goes by the amusingly generic hyper-African moniker "Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz," is the kind of clownish caricature Fox News loves to trot out at regular intervals. This is because he's guaranteed to say something mindlessly inflammatory that will scare the hell out of the network's demographic of lily-white, middle-American doofs, confirming all their worst fears about the encroaching "Negro threat." As former Washington Post columnist Dave Weigel beautifully put it, Shabazz is to Bill O'Reilly what the KKK or GG Allin was to Donahue: Somebody who makes for great TV and whom your core audience can feel comfortable disliking intensely.

If you haven't been watching Fox News lately -- and I can't in good conscience suggest that you do -- the Panthers "story" has been obsessively, breathlessly beaten into the ground by one network personality in particular: Megyn Kelly. She's taken it upon herself, bless her little heart, to be the avatar for every freaked-the-fuck-out white Christian soul convinced that he or she is losing this great country to minorities or illegal immigrants or whatever, and that it all started with the election of the Great Kenyan Socialist Usurper. She's like Elizabeth Hasselbeck with an actual associates degree and a shit-ton more professional ambition. Kelly is Fox's rising star du jour, even going so far as to get an official canonization from none other than Sarah Palin via her overworked Twitter feed -- and the reason for this is that she knows exactly when to crinkle her face into that lemon-sucking look of smug skepticism, and just what buttons to press and what open-ended questions to ask of her viewers."

Last night I said I would start sending my money to the NAACP again. Well, I might have to rethink my position. If these Negroes aren't smart enough to vet an entire video before they make an important statement, how can I trust them to advance the cause of civil rights?
Come on people, this is a serious propaganda war you are fighting with the folks over at Radio Rwanda, you can't just let them dictate the terms each battle. You have to fight fire with fire.
And, speaking of fire, the story of how this poor woman got fired is unbelievable. Because the administration was afraid that her story was going to be on Captain Jack's show? (You might have to think about that one for a minute, but it will come to you) Shame!

"Sherrod said she first heard of the possible controversy when someone e-mailed her Thursday to taunt her about her comments. She immediately forwarded the e-mail to the USDA so the agency would be aware. She was told that someone would look into it.

She said it wasn't until Monday that she heard back, and by then, she was being asked for her resignation.

Sherrod said she got four calls Monday from Cheryl Cook, the USDA rural development undersecretary. In the first, she said, she was told she was being put on administrative leave. In the second, she said, she was told she needed to resign.

Asked if she felt she had an opportunity to explain, Sherrod said, "No, I didn't. The administration, they were not interested in hearing the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth."

Ms. Sherrod, to steal a quote from a movie I saw once: They "can't handle the truth."

*Pic from Baliksambayanan