Needlenose

…why are they pushing to ‘whitewash’ the history books?  ”remov[ing] references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners…”?  ”includ[ing] the exploration of the positive aspects of American slavery, lifting the stature of Jefferson S. Davis to that of Abraham Lincoln”?  ”study[ing] the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action.”?  What the Fuck?

A dispatch from the Department of Unintended Benefits, via TPM:

California Tea Party groups are calling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s boycott and raising him a … boycott.

The mayor raised the ire of California Tea Partiers this week when, in response to Arizona’s passage of a controversial immigration law, he announced a boycott of the state, barring San Francisco city employees from entering Arizona and threatening to cut off economic ties. Local Tea Partiers who support the Arizona legislation answered his actions with a boycott of their own — on the city of San Francisco.

“We are just tired of our representatives not representing our wishes,” said Bridget Melson, president of the group Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party, which called for the boycott on Wednesday. . . .

The group has encouraged its members not to patronize local businesses. . . . “Spend your money anywhere else…vacation elsewhere, dine elsewhere — if you protest here, bring your own food, coffee and water,” Melson writes in the boycott’s official call to arms.

As it happens, I live in the Bay Area.  I know San Francisco quite well, and have been to Pleasanton more than a few times.  Suffice it to say that Pleasanton is, um, not San Francisco — it’s more than 45 minutes’ driving time away across a bridge and through hills and valleys (not counting traffic), and in cultural terms the distance is probably measured in light years.

So I think I can say with some confidence that a threat by a Pleasanton-based group to stop spending their money in San Francisco most likely isn’t causing The City’s businesses to tremble with fear.  Especially given the propensity by members of this particular movement to be less than flush with cash and not exactly swift to embrace the diversity for which S.F. is famous.

In fact, for folks like me, the news that a bunch of intolerant, obstreperous suburbanites are doing their best to steer clear of San Francisco makes it seem that much more appealing as a place to spend my liberal, big-government-loving money.  Heck, if you ask me, whoever’s in charge of tourism for San Francisco should make an ad to make sure everybody knows about the boycott.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Wing-nut over at Redstate.com figures Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is ‘affirmative action’:

I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news.

WTF?  He’s getting the prize because he’s black – that’s your argument?!?

This is just another racist attack like the raft of other crap we’ve been seeing from the Wrong (e.g. watermelon-eatin’ emails, photoshopped pics of the President in turbans or tribal garb) that belies their indignation when called on this bullshit.

Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy

In the New York Times on Monday, pollster Stan Greenberg bade farewell to the infamous “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb County in Michigan:

For more than 20 years, the non-college-educated white voters in Macomb County have been considered a “national political barometer,” as Ronald Brownstein of National Journal described them during the Democratic convention in August. After Ronald Reagan won the county by a 2-to-1 margin in 1984, Mr. Brownstein noted, I conducted focus groups that “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans.”

I’m sure that the oh-so-honorable McCain campaign had no awareness of this when they ran this ad in the final week of the presidential campaign:

It’s not much of a mystery what unspoken attitudes Team McCain was hoping to evoke with that “JUST LIKE YOU SUSPECTED” line, is it?

I wonder if Mr. “Country First” was sad on election night that the racist vote didn’t come through for him, that many of them finally realized there was something more important than skin color of when it came to presidential candidates.

Check out what McCain’s ‘friends’ that he is ‘proud of’ are doing – Sacto & San Bernadino Repugs post sleazy racist attack pics on their website and in their publications. An excerpt:

In San Bernardino County, a Republican women’s organization sent a monthly newsletter to its members that carried a racially insensitive depiction of Obama. “Obama talks about all those presidents that got their names on bills. If elected, what bill would he be on? Food Stamps, what else!” read the caption above an “Obama Bucks” bill cartoon image in the latest edition of the Chaffey Community Republican Women Federated newsletter. The independent community organization is not a part of the state Republican Party, and its newsletter is distributed to a few thousand members in the county.

Next to the senator’s image was a bucket of fried chicken, a slab of ribs, a slice of watermelon and a pitcher of Kool-Aid. Diane Fedele, the organization’s president, took responsibility for the image and apologized “if it offended anyone.”

*Update* The Brown Shirts are vandalizing ACORN offices and making threatening the lives of staffers, following McCain’s B.S. anti-ACORN talking point in the debate.

These have kicking around the blogiverse for a few days (so you may have seen them already) but they finally filtered down to my bottom-feeding level of awareness and I figured I’d share them for anyone who was equally out of the loop.  First, from Ben Smith of Politico:

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I’ve heard a lot in recent weeks.

“What’s crazy is this,” he writes. “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.”

And, explaining the phenomenon, Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic:

Racism is a luxury that, at this point, a lot of white voters can ill afford. I think a crucial number of them know that.

The reactionaries haven’t yet lost this election but they are already acting like poor losers.  McCain rallies are becoming increasingly ugly as proto-brown shirts are increasingly calling for Obama’s blood:

Frustration at falling behind Mr Obama in opinion polls has begun to boil into anger at Republican rallies with Mr McCain and Sarah Palin.

Events this week have been marked by ugly outbursts from crowds. In Clearwater, Florida, shouts of “kill him!” could be heard amid a chorus of boos when Mrs Palin attacked the Democratic nominee over his links with 1960s radical, Bill Ayers.

Journalists were reported to have been taunted with obscenities or racial insults from members of audience when Mrs Palin blamed the “mainstream media” for what she described as her “less-than-successful” – and much-parodied – television interviews.

At a rally on Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mr McCain asked: “Who is the real Barack Obama?” A man in crowd screamed back the reply: “Terrorist!”

Among the wrong-wing is a really nasty core of folks who want anything but democracy.  These are the real ‘Bush Base.’  Case in point, I was wandering around the brownshirtosphere yesterday and blundered into a site called Stop The ACLU.  What a bizarre jihad!  What don’t they like – “American” or “Civil Liberties?”

I thought the reactionaries wanted to take us back to the 1890s, but these wackos want to recreate some sort of weird Puritan world where only a few like-minded individuals have rights and the rest of us be damned.  Worse, they’d be happy to sacrifice many of their own rights and replace our republic with a third-world style ‘strong man’ as long as said tyrant was willing to take away more of the rights of others.

Poor losers that they are, we can’t forget that they are armed.  Don’t expect these bastards to take their looming defeat with grace (as we all did when Gore conceded a stolen victory to Shrubya) – I fully expect the more excitable of their members to try to kill Obama.

And for the more gutless among them, I imagine that the venom and bile they will dish out for Obama will be 100x worse than they dished at the Clintons.

I have a hard time looking at their websites as it is – they flat out call us progressives ‘the enemy within’ in their very post categories!  You want to see the face of terror, go to one of these McCain rallies – if they let you in!

*Update* Biden agrees, calling on Caribou Barbie to condemn the rally haters

The babies on the McCain campaign are whining up a chorus along with Rush “Vicodin” Limbaugh over an Obama attack add that quotes ‘vintage’ Limpbaugh – they claim the ads are ‘race-baiting’ and ‘take Limbaugh out of context.’Â Curious as to what Limbaugh actually expelled, I found the Rush quote in a bit of reactionary apologia:

Railing against NAFTA in 1993, Limbaugh said, “If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine ’cause those are the kinds of jobs NAFTA is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I’m serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.”

The reactionaries argue that Limbaugh meant ” that NAFTA would mean that unskilled stupid Mexicans would be doing the jobs of unskilled stupid Americans” but that interpretation seems rather strained to me – almost as painful as watching McBush try to explain away his “economy is fundamentally sound’ comment as referring to the strength and efficiency of the American worker – mealy-mouthed backtracking.

Make no mistake, it’s xenophobia and out-and-out racism that underlies the reactionary anti-illegal immigrant platform. But in classic Rovian form, the McBush campaign just turns the attack on the opposition, screaming ‘Sexism! Racism! Elitism!” in the hope of confusing the less informed voter – at least until November 2nd.

But like a porker in a greased pig contest, they sure do squeal when you catch them in the act!

Via ThinkProgress and Media Matters, it seems that Fox News was miffed enough at a New York Times story on its declining ratings to not only do a video segment attacking the NYT, but also alter photographs it showed of the reporters:

It doesn’t take much knowledge of history to guess at the inspiration for Fox News here. Just like old times, apparently.

“They’ve tried to suppress black voting, they’ve ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina. And from top to bottom, the Republicans supported it. So I don’t see what they’re jumping on Trent Lott about… that’s the Republican policy. How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?”

(Full text of Clinton’s comments here)