Eideard

Click image to enlarge – yes, such enlargement is NSFW

Thanks, Motley News

A landlord wants the Ohio Civil Rights Commission on Thursday to reconsider its finding that she violated the law by posting a “white only” sign at her swimming pool. Jamie Hein has asked the commission to reverse its initial ruling that found she violated the Ohio Civil Rights Act by putting up a sign that read “Public Swimming Pool, White Only” at her Cincinnati duplex.

The commission, meeting this week in Columbus, concluded last year that the sign “restricts the social contact between Caucasians and African Americans as well as reinforcing discrimination actions that are aimed at oppressing all ‘people of color.’”

The case was brought by Michael Gunn, a white man who said had unrestricted access to the pool area for himself and his guests during the nearly two years he lived in the duplex, he said in a December interview.

Gunn, a software engineer, said he and his girlfriend, who is also white, lived upstairs; their 31-year-old landlord lived downstairs. However, he said their relationship soured in May 2011 when he invited his 10-year-old biracial daughter to visit and swim in the pool…”Days later, the owner posted a sign on the gate to the pool which read, ‘Public Swimming Pool, White Only.’”

Hein said she received the sign from a friend and posted it in early May, the summary says. Several people interviewed by the commission staff confirmed that they had seen the sign, it added.

Hein did not respond to a request for comment at the time. But she told ABC News in December that she collects antiques. She said the sign, which was dated 1931 and from Alabama, was a gift from a friend…

It’s as American as apple pie. Collecting historic memorabilia for racism and bigotry.

Meanwhile, they reminded every employee of the cultural heritage of bigotry in Louisiana every day of the week. One of my closest friends there – a Black man of Jamaican heritage – arranged our own daily ritual when I would pee in the colored restroom and he would pee in the whites restroom. Then join to applaud the venture immediately afterwards. Laughter at backwards fools always helps.

 
Kid video of the year. Tea Party/GOP Presidential candidate and national-class bigot Michele Bachmann doing her money-making book tour in South Caroline falls into an exchange – and a reminder from this8-year-old child, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.

Rock on, Elijah!

A central Texas gun dealer ran radio ads advising “Socialist” liberals, those who voted for President Barack Obama, Arabs and Muslims that they need not apply for his concealed gun license class.

Crockett Keller, who owns Keller’s Riverside Store, ran the ads on the radio station in his rural hometown of Mason, Texas, which is 120 miles west of the state capital of Austin…

Keller said he is simply exercising his freedom to teach concealed handgun license classes to whomever he wants. He said he has received “hundreds” of calls from Americans who support his stance…

Is anyone surprised there are hundreds of bigots in Texas?

He said he was not joking when he put the lines about socialists in his commercial, because he knows some socialist liberals and did not want them to enroll in the class.

“I didn’t want them to show up and have to tell them no,” he said.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the concealed carry program, and licenses instructors, said in a statement that “certified instructors are required to comply with all applicable state and federal statutes, and conduct by an instructor that denied service to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion would place that instructor’s certification at risk.”

I wonder how often the state of Texas enforced that compliance?

The department said it had begun an investigation into the matter, and would “take appropriate administrative action based on the findings of from the investigation.”

Adults in Texas are allowed to carry concealed weapons if they have completed a class such as the one Keller teaches.

Keller wrapped up his radio by saying: “With no shame, I’m Crockett Keller. Thank you, and may God bless.”

Need I make special note here to my Christian friends and visitors to this site that this is an illustration of why I take the time to point out idiots who are Christian fanatics?

I’m well aware of sensible decent human beings who profess a faith, who practice one or another religion with leanings towards human beings instead of dumbos like Crocket Keller. But, parallel to the Kool Aid Party bigots and reactionaries who now own the Republican Party, there is an even longer history of crap-brained and superstitious ignoranuses who shout to the world they are the mainstream of American Christianity. It’s hard not to take them at their word when they’re the only ones hollering.

Reenactment honor guard of the 173rd Regiment N.Y.S.V.

With their riders dressed in pressed shirts and denim, sleek, shiny horses clip-clopped through quiet residential streets in East Austin on Saturday, headed for the starting point of the annual Juneteenth parade.

But at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Comal Street, the serenity of a weekend morning soon gave way to an ebullient street party. There, rainbow-colored candies rained from the sky, and children rushed the street to snatch them. From the back of a convertible, a teen beauty queen in a pink gown and silver tiara waved royally. Two dozen line dancers shook their hips, and seven men slapped African drums to a pulsating beat. In his parked cruiser, a police officer rocked and swayed in his seat to the bass-heavy thump of “Billie Jean,” and some of those same early-rising horses pranced in place for the thousands lining the streets.

These were just a few of the sights, sounds and rhythms of Juneteenth in Austin.

Juneteenth commemorates the bittersweet anniversary of the day — June 19, 1865 — when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed at Galveston to deliver the news that the Civil War had ended and that blacks were free from slavery. The news was old. President Lincoln had delivered his Emancipation Proclamation some 2½ years earlier, but slavery continued in Texas and the South.

Commemorating the struggles of forefathers and the slaves is the cornerstone of all Juneteenth events, festive or otherwise, said many lining the parade route.

“I think it’s important that we remember our history. Therefore we can always face the future,” said Rudy Hicks of Pflugerville, who with Judy Connor and her 6-year-old granddaughter Jasmine, watched from the shade of a tent outside a family member’s home. Hicks said he has attended the parade since he was a child.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
One of the more enjoyable forms of non-violent protest. Directed in this instance upon one of the leading bigots in the Republican Party.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said on Monday that he would “love to know more” about where President Obama was born and claimed — falsely — that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya…

Mr. Huckabee’s comments were prompted by the conservative radio host Steve Malzberg, who asked Mr. Huckabee: “How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth certificate — why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate?”

The former governor responded: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.” Mr. Huckabee, who is now a Fox News host, then talked repeatedly about his concerns that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya…

“If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” Mr. Huckabee said.

First I’ve heard that the Brits weren’t imperialists. They had the honesty to brag about it – instead of crap lies about regime change.

Mr. Obama did not grow up in Kenya. According to his official biography, the president was raised primarily in Hawaii by his mother and maternal grandparents and spent several years in Indonesia when he was a young boy.

In a statement released Tuesday evening, Hogan Gidley, the executive director of HuckPAC, Mr. Huckabee’s political action committee, said that Mr. Huckabee “simply misspoke” and that “he meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia…

Mr. Obama’s father was from Kenya, but in his first book, Mr. Obama wrote extensively about the fact that he spent almost no time with his father, who left his mother and saw Mr. Obama only once, in Hawaii…

Face it. The amount of time Republicans spend playing kissy-kissy with the KoolAid types confirms they have turned over political strategy and tactics entirely to the nutball wing of the party. Yes, they’ll keep hold of the pursestrings, control of the legislation really important to the corporate backbone of the Party of NO.

But, TV time, ideology and insanity are in complete control of the bigots, birthers and balmy.

Obvious threat to Arizona Anglos

The leader of an anti-illegal-immigrant group has been convicted in a home invasion that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead in what prosecutors said was an attempt to steal drug money to fund the group’s operations.

A Tucson jury found Shawna Forde, 42, guilty of murder in the May 2009 killings of Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia at their home in Arivaca, a desert community 10 miles north of Mexico…

Forde is the leader of the Minutemen American Defense, a small border watch group. Prosecutors argued that she planned the attack to help fund its anti-immigrant operations.

Forde, formerly of Everett, Wash., and two men dressed as law enforcement officers forced their way into Flores’ home then shot him, his daughter and wife, Gina Gonzalez, who survived her injuries after getting into a gun battle with the attackers, authorities said…

A 911 recording released by the Pima County sheriff’s office captured Gonzalez pleading for help after her husband and daughter were shot. She was heard crying out in pain from a gunshot wound then becoming frantic as the attackers returned.

The sound of nine gunshots was heard as Gonzalez engaged the intruders.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe they killed my family,” Gonzalez said on the recording.

Police said Gonzalez shot and wounded one of her attackers, Jason Eugene Bush, who officers believe was the gunman.

Another man, Albert Robert Gaxiola, is accused of providing information about the area.

Bush and Gaxiola go on trial in the spring.

Like many rightwing vigilantes. Forde preferred 2nd Amendment Justice instead of the real deal. I guess some of that was her own tweaked mental imbalance. Some just the product of absolute belief in the ideology of bigotry and fear.

Like most political cowards, she tried to weasel out of responsibility at the end.

The campaign to allow gays to serve openly in the US military will gain momentum today when the Pentagon releases a report on the impact a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy would have on morale. It will be sent today by the defence secretary, Robert Gates, to President Barack Obama and to Congress.

Officials told the Washington Post last month that the report, a survey of opinion among soldiers, other military personnel and their spouses, found an overwhelming majority either supporting or, at least, not opposing the reform. A majority said it would have no impact on morale…

Gates and Mullen back the change, as does Obama, but repeal of the existing policy, in which gays can serve but not openly, needs to be done by Congress. The House has voted in favour of repeal of the existing law but the Senate is stalling.

The Senate is to hold hearings on Thursday and Friday and its Democratic leader, Harry Reid, has promised a vote before Christmas. However, senators such as the Republican John McCain are holding out, saying there has not been sufficient scrutiny…

Supporters of reform fear that if the vote, which would be part of a defence spending bill, is delayed until next year, the new Congress will have even more Republicans, possibly making reform tougher. Several Republican and Democratic senators have said they would not make up their mind until they had read the Pentagon report…

The survey is based on responses by some 115,000 troops and 44,200 military spouses to more than a half million questionnaires.

Everyone knew the report was coming – with a positive response. Hypocrites like John McCain have already been working out revisionist recasting of their original objections – which were based on waiting for the report.

Principles – and civil rights – be damned.

The Southern white Democrat, long on the endangered list, is at risk of being pushed one step closer to extinction.

From Virginia to Florida and South Carolina to Texas, nearly two dozen Democratic seats are susceptible to a potential Republican surge in Congressional races on Election Day, leaving the party facing a situation where its only safe presence in the South is in urban and predominantly black districts.

The swing has been under way since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that his fellow Democrats would face a backlash of white voters that would cost the party the South. It continued with Ronald Reagan’s election and reached a tipping point in the Republican sweep of 1994, with more than one-third of the victories coming from previously Democratic seats in the South…

And, uh, Nixon’s decision to make the Republican Party the official party of racism in the South.

The vulnerable Democrats across the South have moved to distance themselves from the party’s agenda and President Obama. Several candidates have declared they would not support keeping Nancy Pelosi of California as House speaker if the party holds its majority…

There are 59 Democrats in House seats across the South from the 11 states of the old Confederacy, totaling 43 white representatives and 16 black ones. Of those seats in predominantly white districts, nine are leaning Republican, eight are tossups and at least five more are competitive, according to the latest rankings by The New York Times, creating the prospect of the biggest Democratic losses since 1994, when 19 seats fell…

Former President Bill Clinton, who spent his career navigating between his party’s liberal sensibilities and the far more centrist instincts of Democrats in his home region, visited the district last week, passing through Batesville and Paragould before arriving for a rally in Jonesboro. He warned voters, “You are being played,” and urged people to cast ballots with their economic self interest in mind…

Except that Democrats who are afraid to vote for bread-and-butter issues in Congress are even less likely to confront them on the campaign trail. Republicans would destroy populist left-wing ideals like social security, medicare, public education. Democrats are too spineless to defend the issues that would show they have principles which respond to working families’ needs.

Read the rest of this entry »