Eideard

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.

To get to Brandon, you have to drive across the Pearl River, a boundary that seems to separate black Mississippi from white.

In the town’s center, a monument stands honoring the confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

This mostly white town in mostly white Rankin County is about a 30-minute drive from Jackson, Mississippi. It’s here in Brandon that some residents say a gang of teenagers expressed their strong racial prejudice — sometimes through violence.

These residents say the teens were friends with and often led by Deryl Dedmon, now 19 and facing capital murder and hate crime charges for the killing of James Anderson, a black man, who died after he was beaten and run over by a truck in Jackson, according to police. Dedmon has pleaded not guilty and his attorney has refused to answer CNN’s repeated requests for comment…

Parents and students who knew Dedmon tell CNN it was widely known that he expressed a hatred for blacks, white people who had black friends, and anyone he thought was gay. And they say he had a history of harassing teens at his high school.

CNN has learned that Department of Justice investigators have uncovered two other possible incidents where groups of white Rankin County teens, including Dedmon, have sought out and attacked a black person.

But police and school officials told CNN that there were no warning signs, no concerns about Dedmon or his friends before James Anderson’s death this summer. Brandon’s Assistant Police Chief Chris Butts described Anderson’s killing as “an isolated incident” that has been blown out of proportion by the media.

RTFA. It’s long. It’s just as I remember a lot of white Mississippi, White Louisiana.

It wasn’t the same in Black or integrated communities. The balance may have changed by now. The results of official racism obviously haven’t.

Heathrow counter-terrorism officers regularly put passengers with Arabic names on a security database to make it appear as though they had been busy, a tribunal was told.

Former Det Con Kevin Maxwell said Metropolitan Police detectives would routinely sift through landing cards of foreign nationals and randomly type their details into a police database, without ever seeing the passengers.

The former officer, who is black and homosexual, was giving evidence at an employment tribunal, where he is suing the force for homophobic attitudes and racial discrimination. The case is expected to last six weeks.

He said colleagues working with him in the counter-terrorism unit at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 would take the landing cards, filled in by visitors, from an unmanned Border Agency desk. They copied the details into the police’s database. It was claimed that the practice was widespread throughout the counter terrorism unit at Heathrow, to keep up the Metropolitan Police stop figures…

He said counter-terrorism officers would target black and Asian people for random stops in a queue at the airport.

To avoid being seen as racist another officer would also talk to a white person directly in front of them. However, the white person’s details would not be entered into the police database, Det Con Maxwell said.

Cripes, I hope this tale hasn’t made it to TSA here in the States. All they need is a suggestion for yet another way to game the system.

A black ASPCA employee who found a noose in the organization’s Queens garage claims officials blew off her complaint and told her the hanging rope was for “operational purposes.”

Sanoy Fleming, a part-time clerk in the records department, made the shocking discovery on Sept. 11 and used her phone to snap a photo.

Fleming, who has hired a lawyer, said a black colleague told her the noose had been hanging for several days in the garage of the spay and neuter clinic, which opened last June in Glendale.

“I was very upset, and it made me uncomfortable that no one thought it was inappropriate,” Fleming, 40, told the Daily News.

“I explained to my supervisor that nooses were used to hang slaves, and I explained how insulting that is to African-Americans.”

Fleming’s supervisor apparently reported the incident to ASPCA higher-ups – four days later she was put on a conference call with the human resources department.

A man who identified himself as “George” warned Fleming that her work was not up to par.

“At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘I heard you were upset about a rope found in the garage,’ and he said that it was used for ‘operational purposes’ to lift things,” the Brooklyn woman recalled.

New York City, eh? So, if someone working at City Hall wore a swastika to a meeting chaired by Mike Bloomberg it would go unnoticed? Hogwash!

Symbols of racist lynchings are brought to the workplace for only one reason. To intimidate Black workers. The culprit may be a white dodo-bird. More likely the culprit is a bigot who enjoys the racism game to prop up his tiny, limp self-image.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A former Department of Agriculture employee who was forced to resign last year after the posting of a misleading video has filed suit against Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who posted it.

Shirley Sherrod’s suit was filed in District of Columbia Superior Court on Friday, her attorney confirmed. The civil suit accuses Breitbart of “defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress,” according to a statement issued by the law firm representing her.

Sherrod, who is African-American, was forced to step down as the department’s director of rural development for Georgia in July after video of a speech she made was posted on the internet and reported on by the media. In the video, Sherrod seemed to suggest that she did not do her utmost to help a white farmer. It later was clarified that Sherrod’s remarks were taken out of context and that she told the story to illustrate the importance of moving beyond racial considerations.

Rightwing hypocrites will rally to defend Breitbart’s sleazy behavior and tactics. After all, they embrace and endorse crap like this on a daily basis. Just another reason why they resent not only principled journalism; but, traditional American conservatives who reject racism as a political principle.

You wouldn’t expect today’s Republicans to let truth or facts get in the way of their ideology.

Black farmers remind Congress for the umpteenth time to fund the settlement
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The U.S. Senate approved a $1.15 billion measure Friday to fund a settlement initially reached between the Agriculture Department and minority farmers more than a decade ago.

The 1997 Pigford v. Glickman case against the U.S. Agriculture Department was settled out of court 11 years ago. Under a federal judge’s terms dating to 1999, qualified farmers could receive $50,000 each to settle claims of racial bias.

“This is much long overdue justice for black farmers,” said John Boyd, founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association…

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called the settlements “a major milestone in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s efforts to turn the page on a sad chapter.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, also said the vote gives “long-suffering Americans … the closure that they deserve. The agreement that we reached shows what can happen when Democrats and Republicans come together to do the right thing,” he said.

Of course, Democrats and Republicans “came together” to support racist practices against non-white farmers for only a bit more than a century.

The measure will now have to be approved by the lame duck House before moving to Obama’s desk to be signed into law.

We hope so, anyway. Certainly there wouldn’t be much hope of achieving justice against bigotry when Republican control of the House arrives in the next Congress.

Three men have been charged with burning a cross in the western Pennsylvania yard of a black teenager last year…

Federal officials charged Michael Bealonis, 18, and Kenneth Stiffey Jr., 20, both of Robinson, Pa., and Michael Bracken, 22, of Bolivar, Pa., with conspiracy to interfere with the housing rights of another, interfering with the housing rights of another, and using fire in the commission of a felony.

The teenager was not identified by federal officials or in the indictment issued Tuesday. But the boy’s guardian, Joe Walbeck, confirmed…that the charges related to a cross burning at their rural Bolivar home in November. Walbeck said the three men charged were white and that one of them lived just a few houses away…

Walbeck, who is white, said he and his wife took in 16-year-old Shaq Howard as a foster child about four years ago because he was having problems with his family. They live in a predominantly white community about an hour east of Pittsburgh and are now legal guardians of the boy.

The Walbecks have taken in about 16 foster children during the last six years at their home in West Wheatfield Township, Indiana County. They’ve had a couple of biracial foster children, but Shaq is their first black child.

Walbeck said Shaq wasn’t friends with the men charged, but he does know who they are.

“He never dreamt that they would do something like that to him,” Walbeck said of the 6-foot-tall cross he found charred on his lawn last year.

If convicted, all three could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison and fined up to $750,000.

Throw away the key!

Shimon Peres, now president of Israel, and P W Botha of apartheid South Africa

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.

The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted…

RTFA. Once again, the truth will out.

Israel’s willingness to support one of the most violent, racist governments since Hitler’s Germany is something that most scholars of international policy already know about. It’s only our government that lies about the fact – and the gullible who believe the lies.

They are third-rate political campaigners, though

The British National Party (BNP) failed in its efforts to break into the political mainstream when it suffered a succession of defeats in its key target seats.

The far-right party, led by Nick Griffin, was wiped out in its east London council stronghold of Barking and Dagenham, where its entire complement of 12 councillors lost their seats. In the parliamentary constituency of Barking, Mr Griffin came a poor third. The party had claimed it was on track to win 24 seats on the council, as well as win its first Westminster seat there.

…In the general election, the extremist group increased its share of the national vote to 1.9 per cent (562,979 votes) but it failed to gain a single MP from 300 candidates. In Stoke South, its other key parliamentary target, its deputy leader, Simon Darby, came in fourth. The party’s nationwide tally of 34 councillors also fell – from 34 to 12…

The BNP leader was pushed into third place in Barking by Margaret Hodge, the tourism minister and Labour incumbent, who doubled her majority to more than 16,000 votes. She told Mr Griffin to “pack your bags and go”. The 65-year-old added: “The message of Barking to the BNP is clear: get out and stay out. You are not wanted here and your vile politics have no place in British democracy.”

Bravo!

I’m surprised they didn’t follow the American model and just takeover the Tory Party.

Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a brutal struggle that pitted American against American and sometimes brother against brother. And while major military conflict ceased with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, the underlying conflict has continued to simmer from Reconstruction and Jim Crow through the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

Astonishingly, it continues still.

The most recent skirmish has broken out in Virginia, where Gov. Robert McDonnell issued a proclamation decreeing April as Confederate History Month. According to the proclamation, it is important for the people of Virginia “to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War,” which the decree refers to as “a four-year war between the states for independence.”

As many have pointed out, the proclamation makes no mention whatsoever of slavery, no mention of its central role in causing the war, no mention of the fact that the Civil War ended with the liberation of millions of African Americans from generations of bondage. McDonnell’s preferred version of history is, plain and simple, white man’s history…

To pretend otherwise is to distort history for political purposes that are themselves suspect.

Playing to his racist gallery – whether it be Southern Strategy Republicans or teabaggers or just your friendly neighborhood bigot – the governor of Virginia clarifies the direction of today’s Republican Party. Their response to defeat by a Black American in the 2008 general election – is to become more of a racist party than they have been – publicly – since the days of Richard Nixon.

No surprise in this neck of the prairie.

UPDATE: Too little, too late.