I do not wish I was in Dixie. Not now.

Don't you just love some of my white friends in the South?

Now comes the following from the great state of Alabama:

"Alabama is currently celebrating Confederate Heritage Month with a state-wide holiday and a series of public events aimed at remembering and honoring those who fought on the side of southern, slave-owning states during the Civil War. At one such event this week, organized by the Ladies’ Memorial Association, Alabama’s Secretary of State John Merrill lamented recent calls to remove Confederate symbols from government buildings.

“The next question that has to be asked is so what’s the next thing you are going to do,” he asked, “are you going to take a bulldozer to the monument and forget what people fought for to preserve a way of life that makes us special and unique?”

Civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, slammed the remark as “shameful.” But in a follow-up conversation with ThinkProgress, Merrill explained that the “way of life” he celebrates is based on Confederate soldiers’ independent spirit, not their advocacy for slavery.

When we have things happen in our state, we don’t rely on the federal government to come take care of us,” he said. “We take care of ourselves. For example, after the tornadoes in 2011, or after the massive flooding we had. That’s who we are. That’s who these people were. I’m proud of that.”
Alabama, however, is the ninth most reliant on federal aid out of the 50 states, taking far more in aid than the state pays back in taxes. As for the 2011 tornado damage Merrill mentioned, an auditor recently found that the state improperly received about $1.2 million in federal aid that it now must pay back. Antebellum Alabama’s “self-reliance,” meanwhile, depended from its founding on the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of slaves.

Merrill explained to ThinkProgress that he wanted to participate in a “celebration of the heritage of the south” because he believes young people need to “to be respectful of those historical traits we hold dear.” Those traits, he emphasized, are “not related to race, divisiveness, or a heritage of fighting.” Rather, they are “pride in our work and in our communities.”

He repeatedly assured ThinkProgress that he personally has no racial biases, noting that he owns a signed photo of Alabama civil rights icon John Lewis, and touting the diversity in his agency.
“We’ve got two African Americans that work in the lobby area of our office here,” he said. “None of them are working here because they’re black, but because they’re highly-qualified, trained professionals. I judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” [Source]

Wait....let me stop this right here. Did he really say  "We've got two African Americans that work in the lobby"? What do they do? Give directions to the offices? As the old church folks like to say: "Jesus take the wheel."

Think about that for a minute. One of the states in this great union is celebrating Confederate Heritage Month. Imagine if you will a Nazi History Month being celebrated in Germany. That is a fitting analogy to what is being done in Alabama.

Look, we get it, this is America, and you rejects from the 19th Century should be free to let your flag fly on your own personal property and for whatever protest you want to launch. But when you declare such a month as an official month of a state that has a huge population of African Americans ---many of whom had ancestors who were slaves--- it sends a chilling and shameful message.

Finally, did you hear the one about the GOP fundraiser who was busted for allegedly running a meth lab out of her home?

I am serious. You can't make this stuff up.

"A fundraiser for Arizona Republican Senator John McCain was arrested along with her boyfriend Tuesday in a major drug sting.

Emily Pitha, who also worked for former Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl, is accused of running a meth lab and a drug shipping operation out of her Phoenix home. Police were tipped off when a package containing a large quantity of ecstasy was shipped to her home from the Netherlands. Pitha and her boyfriend were arrested after he signed for the package." [Source]

If I were Emily I would have saved all that meth for the  republican convention in Cleveland.
Just a hunch, but I suspect that they will be wanting a lot of drugs to get through all the festivities.


*Pic from onlineathens.com

Meridian "taxi service".

The Field Negro education series continues:

"Police officers in Meridian, Mississippi, were spending so much time hauling handcuffed students from school to the local juvenile jail that they began describing themselves as “just a taxi service.”

It wasn’t because schools in this east Mississippi town were overrun by budding criminals or juvenile superpredators—not by a long shot. Most of the children were arrested and jailed simply for violating school rules, often for trivial offenses.

One 15-year-old girl, for example, was suspended and sent to the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center for a dress code violation. Her jacket was the wrong shade of blue. A boy served a suspension in the juvenile lock-up for passing gas in the classroom. Another landed behind bars because he walked to the alternative school instead of taking the bus.

For many kids, a stint in “juvie” was just the beginning of a never-ending nightmare. Arrests could lead to probation. Subsequent suspensions were then considered probation violations, leading back to jail. And suspensions were a distinct possibility in a district where the NAACP found a suspension rate that was more than 10 times the national average.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit to stop the “taxi service” in Meridian’s public schools, where 86 percent of the students are black. The DOJ suit, still unresolved, said children were being incarcerated so “arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.”
We should all be shocked.


The reality, though, is that Meridian’s taxi service is just one example of what amounts to a civil rights crisis in America: a “school-to-prison pipeline” that sucks vulnerable children out of the classroom at an alarming rate and funnels them into the harsh world of police, courts and prison cells.
For many children, adolescent misbehavior that once warranted a trip to the principal’s office—and perhaps a stint in study hall—now results in jail time and a greater possibility of lifelong involvement with the criminal justice system. It should surprise no one that the students pushed into this pipeline are disproportionately children of color, mostly impoverished, and those with learning disabilities.
The story of Meridian is more than an example of school discipline run amok. It’s a key to understanding how the United States has attained the dubious distinction of imprisoning more people—and a larger share of its population—than any other country.

It’s one reason why the United States today has a quarter of the world’s prisoners—roughly 2.2 million people—while representing just 5 percent of its total population. And it helps explain an unprecedented incarceration rate that is far and away the highest on the planet, some five to 10 times higher than other Western democracies.

As the managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office, I’ve seen firsthand the devastation wrought by the school-to-prison pipeline, and the senselessness of it all.
When SPLC advocates began interviewing children at the juvenile detention center in Meridian in 2009 we were investigating children being pepper-sprayed by guards when they were in their cells and posing no threat. But we kept hearing stories from students who were pushed out of school and into cells for noncriminal, minor school infractions. These stories would eventually spark the DOJ lawsuit and a thorough examination of how the “pipeline” operated in this town.

***

The origins of the school-to-prison pipeline can be traced to the 1990s when reports of juvenile crime began to stoke fears of “superpredators”—described in the 1996 book Body Count as “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters” with little regard for human life. The superpredator concept, based on what some critics have derided as junk science, is now known to be a complete myth. Former Princeton professor and Bush administration official John DiIulio, the Body Count co-author who coined the term, admitted to The New York Times in 2001 that his theory of sharply rising juvenile violence had been wrong.

But the damage had been done. As these fears took root and mass school shootings like the one at Columbine made headlines, not only did states enact law laws to increase punishment for juvenile offenders, schools began to adopt “zero-tolerance” discipline policies that imposed automatic, pre-determined punishments for rule breakers.

At the same time, states across America were adopting harsh criminal laws, including long mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes and “three strikes” laws that led to life sentences for repeat offenders. The term “zero tolerance” was, in fact, adopted from policing practices and criminal laws that focused on locking up minor offenders as a way to stem more serious crime.

Somewhere along the way, as local police departments began supplying on-duty “school resource officers” to patrol hallways, educators began to confuse typical adolescent misbehavior with criminality. Schools became, more or less, a part of the criminal justice system. With police officers stalking the halls and playgrounds, teachers and principals found it easy to outsource discipline. Almost overnight, a schoolyard scuffle could now land a kid in a jail cell. "[More]

Politico is not one of my favorite online magazines, but this article was on point.

And yes, we need to have this discussion.  

*Pic from Politico.

Would you like to be my neighbor?

I live on the East Coast of the United States, but I am not one of those people who happens to believe that racism is exclusive to the South or Southwest.




This is why the story about a group of white supremacists setting up shop right next door does not surprise me.



A white supremacist group who call themselves "Advanced White Society" now make their national headquarters in Birmingham, New Jersey. (As if New Jersey doesn't have a bad enough national reputation.) Birmingham is a very small town, I think that there are 33 people living there. (One of them- poor person- happens to be black.)




This creates an interesting dilemma for the political types of Burlington County where the township of Birmingham is located. They want the group out, but if they (AWS) have broken no laws, and are not being a nuisance to their neighbors, they, like everyone else, have every right to be there.




New Jersey, like so many other Northern states, attracts a lot of these hate groups, because racism and ignorance does not have any specific geographical boundary or a preference for a particular region.




The good news is that these groups are declining nationally in numbers. The bad news is why they happen to be declining according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.




"The highest number of hate groups were found in California (77), Texas (57) and Florida (58).


Although the SPLC has documented a decline in the number of groups in existence throughout the country this year, it has also measured a “disturbing dynamic at play,” according to Potok.


“At the same time that the number of extremist groups is dropping, there is more mainstream acceptance of radical-right ideas,”




It makes sense; the more mainstream these groups become the less there is a need for them to organize under a more radical and extreme umbrella.




Why join groups like the Klan and the aforementioned Advanced White Society when you can find like minded people who are better organized and have more funding in groups like the Tea Party?

A white segregationist group that calls itself the Advanced White Society lists its national headquarters as Birmingham, N.J., a woodsy, little-known hamlet on the edge of Pemberton Township.
The Burlington County community had 33 residents, including one African American and one Latino, in 2010, according to a U.S. Census report. It has its own post office and is also home to a chemical plant and a cabinetmaking business. The Fort Dix military base is several miles down the road.
The Advanced White Society is one of five active hate groups in Burlington County, according to the Southern Poverty

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_jersey/20140518_Hate_groups_prompt_push_for_Burlco_commission.html#q2YDRkwO9e8ygBCl.99

Eating with the enemy.

So I am having dinner with this so called black conservative this evening and he is doing his best to convince me that the republican party and the right is best for black folks in A-merry-ca. Of course, I was not having it. What followed was a lively discussion about politics,race, and the problems of urban A-merry-ca. Like certain people who frequent this blog he thinks that the dems have tried and failed the inner cities. And while I agree with that to an extent (ultimately, it won't be dems or repubs who save us, we will have to save ourselves) there is nothing that he told me that made me believe that right wing or republican rule would be better for black folks in A-merry-ca.

Besides, I just don't want to be under the same tent with those people. Sorry, there is just too much bad blood between us at this point. I will take republicans on a one on one basis like I did with my man tonight, but there is no way in hell that I will co-sign with them as a group.

One thing about us black folks; our gut feelings are always true to us, and I bet every one of you -black folks-reading this get that gut feeling when you are around folks on the right. You know the one. The one that says that this person is not comfortable in this space. It's why I wonder how black conservatives survive in that environment. Don't they get the gut check? Or do they get it and ignore it? I was going to ask my man but he was getting the check, so I wanted to be nice.

He ended his pitch by telling me that he was going to make a conservative out of me yet. And I politely told him that if they were the last group of people on earth I would be living like Will Smith in "I Am Legend" until I go to join that big Saved By the Bell rerun in the sky. Still, I thought about what my man said; but then, unfortunately for him, I came home and read something from the Southern Poverty Law Center site:

These are just a sampling of quotes from some of our right wing friends.

"[T]he Talmud is full of moral filth. … [Evangelical leaders are] carefully concealing the Jewish identity of those who corrupt Christian culture."— Rev. TED PIKE, director of the National Prayer Network, in a June 21 essay that attacks Jews, the Jewish holy book, and alleged Jewish dominance of pornography, Hollywood and the media

"[L]et them fast until they starve to death… . Go make a bomb where you came from."— Host MICHAEL SAVAGE, on the July 5 edition of his Talk Radio Network show, on "illegal alien" students on hunger strike to back a bill allowing some immigrants to become citizens

"This is a dry run against free speech in America by the Islamists and the illegal aliens. … Lady Liberty … is being raped by the illegal aliens."—Host MICHAEL SAVAGE, on the Aug. 14 edition of his show, attacking a resolution by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which finally passed unanimously on Oct. 2, that condemned his July 5 comments as "hate speech" that is "defamatory … against immigrants"

"Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sort of like cockroaches."— Host NEAL BOORTZ, on the Aug. 14 edition of Cox Radio Syndication's "The Neal Boortz Show," discussing dietary restrictions during Islamic holy days.

"[T]he NAACP …. [i]s a sad joke that should be shut down."— MSNBC host TUCKER CARLSON, on the Aug. 24 edition of "Tucker," attacking the anti-racist organization as "a faithful arm" of the Democratic Party

"Barney Frank … had a fellow running basically a full-service whorehouse in his basement."— MSNBC commentator PAT BUCHANAN, on the Aug. 29 edition of "MSNBC Live With Dan Abrams," repeating allegations about the openly gay Democratic congressman from Massachusetts that were specifically disproved in a 1989 House Ethics Committee investigation.

"Would I exclude foreign Muslims from settlement in the U.S.A.? Yes, I would."— National Review Online columnist JOHN DERBYSHIRE in a Sept. 20 column.

"They wanna fight the white devil. … Black devils stalking their streets every night … can't go fight that. That would be snitching."— Fox News Radio host JOHN GIBSON, on the Sept. 21 edition of his show, criticizing black anti-racism protesters in Jena, La.

"Media Matters is a gay, fascist website. … They're utter vermin."— Host MICHAEL SAVAGE, on the Sept. 26 edition of Talk Radio Network's "Savage Nation," discussing a website that publishes transcripts of his controversial remarks quotes on this page were compiled from media accounts, web pages, e-mail groups and media matters for america, a website that monitors the far right." (Link here)

Yep, I think I will be sticking this progressive thing out.

These republicans aren't helping the republic.

I was looking for some interesting reading on the web when I found the following article from David Neiwert. Now he is telling us what most of us already know, but he still makes some very interesting points. Especially when he writes about my friends in the re-puke-lican party.

"Recently the New York Times carried a report on the "noose incidents" that have been occurring with rising frequency around the country, inspired seemingly by the protests over the "Jena 6" case.The report came complete with a graphic showing where the incidents have occurred.

Remarkably, it isn't just happening in the South: the incidents are also being reported in places like Minneapolis; Cicero, Ill.; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Newark; Baltimore; and New London, Conn. Equally striking was the analysis from Mark Potok, the SPLC's Intelligence Project director, who wrote: These incidents are worrying, but even more so is the social reality they reflect. The level of hate crimes in the United States is astoundingly high - more than 190,000 incidents per year, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study. And the number of hate groups, according to the annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has shot up 40 percent in recent years, from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006. It seems that the September rally in Jena - much as it was seen by many civil rights activists as the beginning of a new social movement - signaled not a renewed march toward racial and social justice, but a surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.Indeed, as Digby observes, "The racist beast is clamoring to be set free." The old once again is new: there's a "new racism" that pretends to be daring new thinking, dashing the molds of political correctness, but really is just the same old shit recycled. And it's not even relegated strictly to the right: Witness, for the most recent example, William Saletan's sally into the rancid fields of eugenics. That this is happening is acutely clear for African Americans, historically the chief victims of racist hate in America, as the noose episodes suggest. But it's also becoming true on a broader scale as well, with a rising tide of openly espoused ethnic bigotry manifesting itself in myriad ways, particularly on the immigration front, where Latinos are increasingly targeted by rhetoric emanating from the very highest levels of Republican leadership that manifests itself in a tide of hate crimes; and in the "war on terror," which has provided for an opening for a variety of right-wing figures to spew hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric, with similarly predictable consequences. One kind of hate feeds another; one open expression of bigotry without significant consequence only provides permission for many more to follow, and the inherent violence of such talk inevitably gives permission for people to act it out. Thus this shifting social tide has, just as predictably, brought the broader result of a significant increase in bias crimes of all kinds across the country.And the breadth of the tide also tells us that this is not really about blacks or Latinos or Muslims specifically, but is about the people who fear and despise them: white people.

It's about defending white privilege.And there has been one primary driver for this gravitational shift: generically, the conservative movement, and specifically, its wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.You can hear the push to defend "white culture" from nearly every sector of the right, from Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.Patrick Buchanan: I think America may exist, but I'll tell you this: I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable. If we do not put a fence on that border ... you're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico, which believes that belongs to them. What's going to happen to us, Sean, in my judgment, is what is happening right now: We are Balkanizing. We are dividing and separating from one another politically, morally -- on issues like abortion or Terri Schiavo -- racially and ethnically, when you get Jena and then you get Don Imus, and all of these things ripping us apart. All the things that used to pull us together and hold us together no longer do.Michael Savage: But basically, if you're talking about a day like today, Martin Luther King Junior Day, and you're gonna understand what civil rights has become, the con it's become in this country. It's a whole industry; it's a racket. It's a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males' birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn't qualify for it.This is nothing new, of course.

The defense of white privilege has been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral appeal ever since the its ardent adoption of the Southern Strategy, dating back to Goldwater and Nixon and continiuing through the Reagan and Bush years. Even Republican strategists acknowledge this to be the case.Joseph Aistrup, in his book The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South -- a text written primarily to influence GOP politicos -- observes the following: When a GOP presidential candidate's campaign strategy emphasizes racially conservative appeals, he identifies not only himself but his party as the one that protects white interests.

The identification of the GOP, instead of the Southern Democrats, as the protector of white interests, combined with the large infusion of blacks into the Southern Democratic parties, opens the door for Southern whites to abandon their historic ties to the Democrats.It's critical to understand, however, that the Southern Strategy wasn't geared simply toward winning votes in the South -- it also is aimed at white suburbs and rural areas where the defense of white society remains a significant cultural issue. Its reach ran well beyond the South.One way of seeing this clearly is by examining the history of "sundown towns". As James Loewen details (excruciatingly) in his study Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, there are literally thousands of towns across America -- relatively few of them in the South -- who for much of the 20th century forbade minorities, blacks especially, from living within their communities. Many of them placed signs at the town limits warning "Whites Only After Dark" or "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here" -- that all nonwhites were to be out of town by sundown. In many cases, especially suburbs, no signs were visible, but all-white covenants provided the same effect.Most of the "sundown towns" and "sundown suburbs" that Loewen documents were in the Northeast, the Midwest and West -- the same places where we're seeing "noose incidents," as well as attempts to pass laws aimed at driving out Latinos.These same "sundown towns" have, unsurprisingly, a history of following racial election appeals, including broad support for George Wallace in 1968, and Republican presidential candidates in the ensuing years, all of whom made use of the Southern Strategy's core appeal to white racial interests. As Loewen notes: As a result of such leadership, Republicans have carried most sundown towns since 1968, sometimes achieving startling unaninimity. ... So the "southern strategy" turned out to be a "southern and sundown town strategy," especially in sundown suburbs. Macomb County, for example, the next county north of Detroit, voted overwhelmingly for Wallace in the 1972 Democratic primary. Wooed by Nixon, many of these voters then became "Reagan Democrats" and now are plain Republicans. The biggest single reason, according to housing attorney Alexander Polikoff, was anxiety about "blacks trapped in ghettos trying to penetrate white neighborhoods." [pp.372-373]Take a look at where the nooses are appearing, where the anti-Latino and anti-Muslim hate crimes are occurring. If you look through the incidents, it's clear that many of them are occurring in precincts that, historically, were all-white by design. It's part of the continuing defense of that status quo in those communities that engenders so much of the nation's current racial divide -- with bias crimes, as always the on-the-ground manifestation.

I know that Democrats have been tempted to try to tap into this tide to their short-term electoral advantage; witness Rahm Emanuel and Co.'s attempts to advance an immigration plan that's absurdly enforcement-heavy and reform-light.Before they take that step, they need to stop and think about the consequences. Not just the electoral calculus, considering what it would cost Democrats in terms of the votes of blacks, Latinos, and Muslims who are flocking to them now because of the GOP's increasingly inchoate bigotry, but the real-life results. They need to think about those nooses, and where they come from, and simply do what is right."

And people wonder why I will vote for the dumb-ocratic candidate no matter who it is.