Tag: hate

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Democracy

Why Are We Debating Hate?

Finally, the president has united much of the country. Unfortunately for him, most of the country opposes what he stands for.

Yes, there are still many people who support the president and believe that his equating violence on both sides was appropriate, but a larger majority sees the danger in his saying that the Nazis and the counter-protesters in Charlottesville were morally similar. That the opposition to his words came from around the world and across the political spectrum tells you that this was no victory for Trump. And his decision to stay away from the Kennedy Center Honors program this year is not just a tactical retreat; it’s a rout. He’s not the first president to skip the ceremony, but the reason is different from why other presidents didn’t go: because his appearance would be a major distraction.

At this point, the president has been rebuked by corporate leaders, members of his arts council, and even James Murdoch, who is so afraid that American Jews, and even Israel, will see the president’s words as doing major damage, that he threw a million dollars at the Anti-Defamation League to stanch the bleeding. And where is Benjamin Netanyahu? The right-wing protector of Israeli and Jewish values has been remarkably silent on Trump’s atrocious choice of words. The company you keep, you know.

The point is that Charlottesville will likely be one of those turning points in our history. It will lead to major changes across the political spectrum and in the way that ordinary people view and talk about race. They will have to do this without moral leadership from the White House unless Trump decides that he needs to be more magnanimous and makes a prime-time speech calling for a more united country. OK, I’ll wait until you stop laughing. But I do really wish it would happen.

It is clear that we cannot expect President Trump to act presidential or to stand up and defend all of the citizens of this great country. In such a leadership vacuum, we run the risk that other noxious voices will try to fill the silence. And we also run the risk that violence will be seen as the tactic of choice.

Don’t let that happen. Be the moral voice that says the right words, the courageous words, the words that embrace instead of repel. Do not equivocate. And of course, agitate, agitate, agitate.

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Featured Racism

Our President: The Hate That Keeps on Hating

With all that Charlottesville means now and will mean in the future, this much is clear: Donald Trump is probably the most genuine president we’ve ever had.

  • He is a genuine racist.
  • He is genuinely ignorant of United States History.
  • He genuinely believes that there is a moral equivalency between those who hate and those who want to stop the hate.
  • He is genuinely a terrible businessman.
  • He genuinely thinks that he, and only he, can have a correct opinion on an issue.
  • He has genuinely done damage to the office of the president of the United States.
But we should have known, shouldn’t we? After all, Trump ran on a white nationalist platform that blamed the country’s troubles on President Obama, immigrants, foreign countries, multiculturalism, political correctness and amorphous values that it’s clear Trump does not value. The far right-wing groups that include members of the KKK and Nazis are lauding his remarks from Saturday and Tuesday, remarks that placed equal blame for the violence on civil rights, justice and anti-hate groups. He claims to have seen footage and watched it closer “than anybody else,” (I’m not sure how you do that), then determined that it showed an equivalence that ignored reality.
Because people walking down a street chanting “Jews will not replace us” is that same as…people walking down the street in 1935 saying the same thing. In German.
And that brings up another trope of the Trump catastrophe. He says that he’s not racist or anti-Semitic because his daughter married Jared Kushner, who is Jewish and Orthodox, and then she converted. This is, and please pardon the disconnection, hogwash. I married into a Catholic family and while both parents seem(ed) to like me, they both harbor(ed) terrifically ugly anti-Semitic attitudes. They both deny(ied) their prejudice, but it was there just below the pleasant surface. So when Trump talks about his bona-fides, I don’t believe him for a second. And clearly, he has little regard for Kushner’s feelings as evidenced by his refusal to paint racist hate group violence for what it is.
As for history, the president seems to think that Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Stonewall Jackson are morally equal to George Washington because, after all, they all owned slaves. Never mind that the first three allied themselves, as treason, with a government that wanted to break up the United States, enshrine slavery as a constitutional right, and to rip up the laws that George Washington fought to establish and then helped to create. And after the Civil War was over, Forrest and others decided that they could not live in a country where the freed slaves had the same rights as white men. They then created a legal system that ignored the constitution and brutally killed African-Americans for more than a century.
The consequences are already unfolding. CEOs, you know, the people Trump said would help him rebuild the economy, have already left the Manufacturing Council and the Policy Forum as a protest over his remarks. And I’m sure more will follow.
But the real damage he’s done is embolden some frightening sociopaths who want to do damage to me, my relatives, and my friends and acquaintances, who encompass a multitude of races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual choices. He’s said that Nazi ideology is equivalent to civil rights activists.
The President of the United States believes all of this. Think about that!
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Categories
Climate Change Domestic Policies Donald Trump Donald Trump Immigration Reform Politics

Denying the Climate of Fear

It was certainly bound to happen. After all, one of Donald Trump’s earliest backers hosted the same crowd when she was running for national office. This is what happens when a politician plays into the anger with more anger and blame and bluster and racism and Islamophobia and, above all, ignorance.

Look, Bernie Sanders has some angry Democrats at his rallies, but Sanders is a responsible, thinking adult who knows that the way you channel anger is to turn it into positive energy and constructive policies.

But the Republican Party has denied climate change for so long that they didn’t see the political climate shifting underneath their Gucci loafers. And now that both the planet and the right-wing are heating up to the point that there’s no turning back, we have our first political super storm. And it’s ugly. Trump has fed the storm for years with his claim that President Obama was not a citizen and that Ted Cruz should be barred from the GOP race. He’s also claimed his own reality when it comes to his finances, his bankruptcies and, in the aftermath of his canceled Chicago rally, the claim that if he hadn’t brought up immigration, it wouldn’t have been an issue in this campaign. Of course it would have: the difference is that maybe we could have had an adult conversation about it, not a white-hot ethnic slur-fest that’s resulting in more Hispanics applying for citizenship so they can vote against Trump (shudder) in November.

The motley crew’s endorsement of Trump – from the Klan to the Illinois Nazi Party to Chris Christie to Ben Carson – makes it quite clear that his message is dangerous and that he needs to be careful about stoking emotional outbursts. Trump needs to rebuke all of this in a national statement, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, the deniers will ensure that the atmosphere just gets hotter.

Categories
Politics

Republicans to Iran – We Could Undo Your Deal with Obama

Congressional Republicans are tired of blocking domestic policies. They are now openly engaging in foreign and international obstruction of the President’s policies, and they don’t care who sees their obvious and sickening hate for this president.

Republican U.S. senators warned Iran’s leaders on Monday that any nuclear deal with President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remains in office, an unusual partisan intervention in foreign policy that could undermine delicate international talks with Tehran.

The open letter was signed by 47 senators, all but seven of the Republicans in the Senate, and none of Obama’s fellow Democrats, who called it a “stunt.” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif dismissed it as a “propaganda ploy” from pressure groups he called afraid of diplomatic agreement.

In the letter, the senators said Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements. Noting Obama will leave office in January 2017, they said any deal not approved by Congress would be merely “an executive agreement” that could be revoked by Congress.

The White House said the letter was a partisan effort to undermine Obama’s foreign policy by lawmakers who oppose a deal. “Congressional Republicans are ready to fast-forward to the military approach before the diplomatic approach has been given the opportunity to succeed,” spokesman Josh Earnest said.

A Western diplomat said the action was “without precedent.” “It’s 100 percent an American issue, but obviously it could become a real problem,” the diplomat said.

Iran’s Zarif blasted the Republicans. “I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement ‘with the stroke of a pen’ … it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law,” he said in a statement.

Categories
Barack Obama Politics Racism

For Obama, It’s Not The Content of His Character, it’s The Color of His Skin

Why all the hate? Why so much venom? What is it about this particular president that has Republicans so angry?

Throughout our history we have had both Democrats and Republicans in the White House, and these two groups have always, despite their differences, despite their hate for each other, they have found ways to come together to work on issues that will benefit the American people. So why is that so hard for these Republicans to work with this president?

What is it about Barack Obama that has Republicans turning their backs on policies they originally authored the moment Barack Obama adopted those policies?

What’s different?

It’s not because he’s a Democrat, like I said before, we have already had Democratic presidents in the White House. And it’s not because of his policies, in fact, much of the policies Obama has worked on and implemented, are policies that previous Democratic and to some extent, Republican presidents have tried. These policies are not new. Health care reform for example, was a top agenda item for both Democrat and Republican presidents for decades. And the basis of the law that Obama finally signed into law, was the brainchild of a Republican think tank.

So the difference clearly is not his party or his policies.

The only difference I can see between with this particular Democratic president and previous presidents, is the fact that he is a black man. Which would mean that the hate and the venom this president is facing is based on nothing else than the color of his skin, not the content of his character.

If he was a white Democratic president then the usual ideological bickering from the Republicans would happen. That’s what they have done historically. Democrats and Republicans will state that differences on issues, they will debate and even filibuster once in a while. But eventually, a consensus will be reached and… progress. Just like the Founding Fathers envisioned.

But he is not a white man. He is the first African American to hold the highest office in the land and some Republicans just cannot accept that fact.

And the Supreme Court said that racism was dead. How laughable is that?

Categories
Military Politics troops

THE REPUBLICAN SCUM FILES: HOW THEY HATE OUR TROOPS

By Mike Caccioppoli

As seen on America The Not So Beautiful

When it comes to either supporting our troops or hating Obama the Republicans overwhelmingly choose the latter. Oh boy do they ever. The party who loves jingoistic phrases and loud macho alpha chest beating just couldn’t wait to bash the soldier that our President bravely rescued. Yes it is very brave to actually take action. And that’s what our President did. To fuck with the consequences of more bashing and phony scandal and impeachment talk from the right wing scum. Obama actually did the right thing!

Yes the Republicans love to talk big. “Support our troops”…”Semper Fi.. do or die..gung ho..gung ho…gung ho!” But when it comes to taking action all they can do is sit back and be Monday morning quarterbacks. Now many Republicans were caught erasing tweets they had sent out before Bergdahl’s return which said they were in favor of doing whatever was necessary to get him back. You see that was before Obama did what they never expected him to do..actually get the dude back. Republicans, since they are the party of do nothing, or do nothing unless it fucks most people over, figured Obama wouldn’t have the balls to actually make the deal to bring Bergdahl home.

But he did exactly that. And now they are against what they were for. Not the first time the ballsy black President has done something they actually wanted, to only bash him once he pulls the trigger. It’s commonplace. It’s not surprising at all. Not surprising because the Republican party couldn’t care less about our troops. They have been using our troops as pawns for decades. They send them to die in needless, useless wars. They destroy families in the name of power and money and greed and oil.

When the troops come back home all fucked up mentally and physically they cut funding to VA hospitals and know they can just blame the next Democratic President for it. “Never leave a man behind” they shout and pound their bloated chests, yet when the black President brings one home, the last one, they immediately try to destroy the soldiers reputation. Why? To just get back at the black President.

They destroy the soldiers father. Irish big mouthed right wing pricks on television call him “Taliban” because he has a long beard yet those same pricks give a guy like Phil Robertson a pass, because he is just a good American with a long unwashed beard. Old decrepit, senile Senators forget they were just on television saying they were in favor of the soldiers return by any means necessary. But now they are against it because they are fucked up in the head and forget what they just said. But they often do this, even when they were younger. Maybe they were always good for nothing mental midgets.

The Republicans love to “pray” for the troops. Pray for them oh lord! Just don’t let the black President actually bring them home. Let’s keep them in captivity until a good white male Republican is President..like in fifty years if they are lucky. Lip service is all these good for nothing Republican scumbags are actually good for. When they have to take action they shit their pants, and just criticize those who actually take that action.

On issue after issue. Guns. Health care. Veterans rights. Immigration…on and on and on. They are on default mode. Wait for Obama to make his move then attack, attack, attack. Even if it means attacking our troops and their families. Erase those tweets, make up lies about soldiers dying trying to save the guy Obama saved without one lost life, go on Fox News and make shit up!

Republicans are a disgusting lot that grow more and more disgusting by the day. By the event.

To hell with the truth, with facts. Just destroy. Destroy our men and women in war and then continue to destroy them when they get home.

Scum doesn’t get any scummier.

Mike.Caccioppoli@yahoo.com

@CaccioppoliMike

 

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Categories
Education Foreign Policies Jews News Politics Racism

Mazel Tov Laos

Whatever they’re doing in Vientiane to combat antisemitism, the rest of the world needs to take notice.

According to a poll just released by the Anti-Defamation League, 26% of the world’s adults harbor some form of anti-semitic attitude. From the article:

The highest concentration of anti-Semitic attitudes was found in the Middle East and North Africa, the survey showed, led by the West Bank and Gaza, where 93 percent of respondents held such views, followed by Iraq at 92 percent, Yemen at 88 percent and Algeria at 87 percent. The areas where anti-Semitic attitudes were least prevalent were Oceania, the Americas and Asia.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the findings or the fact that most of the hatred seems to come from areas where there are conflicts between Jews and other populations. But then comes this:

In Laos, less than 1 percent of the population held such views, the lowest anywhere, the survey said.

What is the Laotian secret? Is it that they remember the horrors of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide that followed and are making sure that ethnic hatred is banished from the country? Do they have an especially tolerant attitude towards their Jewish population (I couldn’t find the Laotian Jewish population, but approximately 300 Jews live in neighboring Vietnam)? What programs are they teaching in schools that are so effective that only 0.02% of the population is anti-semitic? We need to find out and copy it immediately.

In the meantime, thank you Laos for being a beacon of openness.

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Categories
Politics

Even at National Day of Prayer, Republican’s Dirty Politics Still Prevail

James Dobson
James Dobson

The National Day of Prayer turned overtly political when a Republican Teaparty speaker stood at the podium and called President Obama the “abortion president.”

The occasion of course, was supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan. That is why James Dobson, Founder of the Conservative Christian advocacy group called Focus on the Family was ask to take part in the activities.

But anyone who knows James Dobson, knows that any and every occasion – even a religious activity – could be easily transformed into lunacy and right-wing propaganda. And the intended religious activities of the National Day of Prayer was no match for Dobson’s politics.

“President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president,” Dobson said, in an apparent lie at the National Day of Prayer. “This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense is the abortion president.”

Dobson’s speech was so vile and disrespectful, Democratic Representative Janice Hahn walked out in the middle of his speech. In an interview with The Huffington Post Rep. Hahn called Dobson’s speech “inappropriate” and a violation of the nonpartisan Day of Prayer.

“He goes on about healthcare and providing abortions,” Hahn told HuffPost, “and at that point I stood up and I point my finger at Dr Dobson and I said, ‘this is inappropriate!’ And I walked out.”

They are some people who respect the significance of a National Day of Prayer, a day when both sides put away their politics and commune as one people. And then there are those who just don’t know when to stop. Who don’t respect the boundaries even as laid out in the religious context of a National Day of Prayer. We’ll call those disrespectful people “Christian Conservatives.”

Christian conservatives… how ironic…

Categories
Featured

Almost 100 Hate Crime Killings Linked To One Website: Report

Stormfront.org is linked to close to 100 killings in the last five years, the Southern Poverty Law Center found.

From the Guardian:

The White Nationalist web forum Stormfront.org says it promotes values of “the embattled white minority,” and its users include Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 massacre in Norway, and Wade Michael Page, who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.
The SPLC said ten murderers had links to Stormfront.

“It’s pretty clear that websites like Stormfront are breeding grounds for people who are just enraged at their situation, it’s there that people find the reasons their lives aren’t as they had hoped and Stormfront helps them find the enemy that is standing in their way – whether it be Jews, African Americans, immigrants and so on,” Heidi Beirich, report author and a director at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project told the Guardian. “Unfortunately it’s not very surprising that people who live in this kind of stew of violent racism eventually pick up a gun and do something about it at some point.”

NBC News reports that Frazier Glenn Cross, the man accused of killing three people at two Jewish community sites in suburban Kansas City on April 13, was barred from Stormfront because of disagreements with the site’s founder.

The report calls Stormfront the “murder capital of the Internet.” SPLC’s research shows the site typically only gets about 1,800 visits a day, half of which are people outside the U.S.

But the site has a core group of very active users, and Stormfront’s “bias-related murder rate” accelerated significantly after Barack Obama became president, the report found.

Earlier this week, CNN reported that, in America, people who follow far-right wing ideologies have been responsible for more killings than Islamic extremists since September 11.

CNN notes that, according to a count by the New America Foundation, “right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11” whereas “terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.”

 

h/t – huffington

 

Categories
Politics Republican

Republican’s Hate for Obama Is Not About Policies, They Hate The Man

When you see a graph like the one shown above it makes you wonder: what is it about this president, this particular president, that would make Republicans hate him so much?& A hate soo strong, that they’ve decided to do everything they can, even bringing the country to its knees, to make sure this president fails.

Their excuse is always the same – we are against the policies and the direction the president is taking the country. Yes, that would be admirable, but it’s not true.

The fact is, the policies Mr. Obama have implemented are not the left winged, Democratic wet dreams that Republicans must fight against. No, on the contrary. The president’s policies – maybe by design or purely unintentionally – are more center or right of center.

Take the Republican hated Obamacare for example. The idea of Obamacare was first instituted in Massachusetts by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney. And the dreaded “individual mandate” Republicans hate so much, was the brainchild of a right winged think tank called The Heritage Foundation.

But Obamacare was not all. There are more policies previously supported and even proposed by Republicans, that lost Republican favor when the president embraced those policies. A fact that even the President noticed, when he, on many occasions, called Republicans out for turning their backs on their own policies because those policies gained his support.

So if it’s not about policies, then it has to be about a man. What is it about the man that has Republicans so pissed off? So consumed with hate that they’re happily pushing the country over the edge hoping to point their finger to the man in charge and say, “see, he did it!”

It’s not Obama’s family that they hate, or his policies or even his party. And it’s not the president’s beliefs. What’s fueling the Republican’s hate is nothing more than the color of the President’s skin.

The graph above tells the whole story. All American presidents, a mixture of Democrats and Republicans. But the black dude on the left has seen more of his court nominations filibustered by Republicans than all the other presidents combined.

Republicans want you to think that they’re all for the Constitution. They’re the first to quote selected texts and point out what the Founding Fathers intended when they put the document together. But I’m sure they can’t find a passage in the Constitution that says one branch of government must do all they can to make sure the other branches fail… especially if the head of one of those branches is black.

Categories
Immigration Immigration Reform Pat Buchanan Politics

Pat Buchanan Warns – Immigration Reform Will Break Up America

Pat Buchanan has said some… dumb and questionable things at times. His apparent hatred for other races has come out on many occasions. So hearing him say again that immigration reform would be the end of America, the collective response is oh, there goes Pat again. Like it’s expected. But at what point do we stop giving these hate mongers a mic?

Pat’s has been attributing immigration reform to America’s destruction for quite sometime now. Back in 2007, he lamented that the America where most immigrants came from European countries “is gone forever.” He questions why “third world countries” are now becoming a major source for new immigrants.

And keeping true to form, Buchanan continued his be-afraid-of-the-immigrant warning, saying that America will break up just like the Soviet Union did.

The Daily Caller posts a clip of Buchanan warning that if “you put 100 million Hispanic folks in the United States,” the southwest will become “as much a part of Mexico as it is of the United States.”

“If they have a different language, different culture, different faith, basically you get two peoples and two peoples eventually become two countries,” he said.

Buchanan went on to offer an alternate history of the United States, which he said became “one nation back around 1960, when all the immigrants who had come from eastern and southern Europe 1890-1920 had been assimilated and Americanized” through the Depression, World War II and television programming. “That brought us all together, and now we’re falling apart,” he said.

What you get is a growing disintegration of the country, a fragmentation into different parts. And we see this happening all over the world in the last few decades, where ethnic groups and linguistic minorities, ethnic minorities, cultural minorities, given the pressures of ethno-nationalism, are breaking up countries all over the world. It’s happening all over the Middle East; it happened in the Balkans, where Yugoslavia broke up into seven countries; the Soviet Union broke up into 15 countries.

You put 100 million Hispanic folks in the United States, and say 70 million of them on the southwest border, that becomes as much a part of Mexico as it is of the United States. If they have a different language, different culture, different faith, basically you get two peoples and two peoples eventually become two countries.

This is what I see as the future of America is the balkanization and disintegration of the country that had become one nation back around 1960, when all the immigrants who had come from eastern and southern Europe 1890-1920 had been assimilated and Americanized. We’d all gone through the Depression together, heard radio together, went through World War II together, and American television together. That brought us all together, and now we’re falling apart. – See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/buchanan-immigration-reform-will-cause-us-break-soviet-union#sthash.RABfrSaR.dpuf

Categories
Featured

Another Republican – Arrested For Threatening The American Elected President

Another post for the insanity that’s brewing and overflowing in the Republican party. They still cannot accept the fact that Democracy worked and the best man won the presidential election.

Christopher Castillo threatened the president on his Facebook page.

“That’s the last straw, if he gets re-elected I’m going to hunt him down and kill him watch the life disappear from his eyes.”

Castillo’s father, Frank, defended him:

“A lot of people say things on Facebook that they don’t mean, and I understand the Secret Service has to do what they have to do, it’s their job,” said Frank Castillo of Tyler, Texas. “I would imagine they would find some people out there that really are loose cannons. Christopher is not one of them.”

The younger Castillo’s tone didn’t improve when he talked to the authorities.

When officials went to Christopher Castillo’s home Nov. 8, Castillo said “he made the comments out of severe anger towards [sic] the President for his views on health care and said ‘we’re all going to be screwed,’ ” the affidavit reads.

Christopher Castillo made further threats to the president in the interview with investigators, calling the president a terrorist and threatening to beat him up, according to court documents. When investigators told Castillo his statements violated federal law, he replied “it did not matter,” according to the affidavit.

Castillo is in custody, but will be released with a GPS monitor.

h/t Alan

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