Two weeks ago, Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx made national headlines when he called President Obama “Our lord and savior.”
While hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live this weekend, Foxx joked about how in his new film “Django Unchained,” “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
JAMIE FOXX: My name is Jamie Foxx. Give it up, give it up, New York City, Saturday Night Live. Come on, make some noise, man. New York City, New York City, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, it’s crazy. I’m black, and I’m dressed all black cause it’s good to be black. Black is the new white. I’m telling you, how black is this right here? Nice fly, I’m saying. You know how I know black is in right now? Cause the Nets moved to Brooklyn. How black is that? They got black jerseys, black court. I mean, how black is that? And Jay-z is the owner, a rapper. How black is that? And Jay-z only own about this much of the team. But he act like he own all of New York. How black is that?
And I got a movie coming out, “Django,” check it out. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson. “Django Unchained” I play a slave. How black is that? And in the movie I had to wear chains. How whack is that? But don’t be worried about it because I get out the chains, I get free, I save my wife, and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that? And how black is that?
But I’m going to tell you right now, speaking of blackness, my President, President Obama is back up in the White House four more years. How black is that? And not only that, he’s so black, he was playing basketball during the Election Day. How black is that? But he was also late for his acceptance speech. Okay, all the white people, this is your turn – how black is that?
But he going to be extra black this next four years. He going to get everything black, and white people, don’t get nervous about that because he is mixed. Now the first four years was the white side of him, because I don’t know if you saw him on Ellen when he was dancing and everything. I don’t know what this is. That wasn’t President Obama, that was President Barry Gibb Obama. But the next four years he’s even changing his name from to President Barack Dikembe Mutombo Tupac Mandela Hussein Obama X. How black is that? And the next time you see him dancing on Ellen, he gonna be dancing like this. – newsbusters.org
Two suspected robbers believed to be targeting an alleged home-based marijuana growing operation were killed in a shootout on the first day of legal marijuana in Washington state, authorities said.
The 35-year-old homeowner told detectives he shot the masked intruders Thursday after they broke into his home near Puyallup, Pierce County Sheriff spokesman Ed Troyer said, according Komonews.com. Troyer told the news outlet that the masked men most likely sought to grab the pot and maybe cash.
The Associated Press reported the secluded, luxury home had a security system, a private driveway and that the homeowner had motorcycles, boats and nice cars.
The homeowner and his 9-year-old son were not hurt. The homeowner, whose name was not released, was detained, at least pertaining to an illegal growing operation, Troyer told the wire service. He has since been released.
The marijuana at the home was of large quantity, much more than one would need for medicinal use, Troyer said.
The shooting occurred on the first day of legal marijuana in the state. The law, which voters approved in November, allows those 21 and older to possess an ounce or less of pot.
Backers of the initiative hope the law puts an end to the black market marijuana industry, such as the alleged growing operation where the shooting took place.
At the moment, it is still illegal to buy, sell or grow marijuana. The state’s liquor control board is now tasked with drafting a framework for licensing growers, handlers and retailers. – LA Times
Here comes the fly-by media. Preliminary use of diminutive drones is under way among those who see the potential of drones in news gathering, not to mention invasive “gotcha”-style journalism. Deadline Detroit — “a homegrown media revolution” manned by former veteran journalists — has already used footage made by “Tretch5000,” an anonymous hobbyist who used a camera-mounted drone to peek inside abandoned housing and old civic buildings, producing a telling video vignette.
“There’s a part of me that finds this kind of creepy and fraught with ‘big brother is watching’ issues. While we might trust public radio journalists and academics, there were rumors earlier this week that TMZ had purchased a drone to assist in its paparazzi-style coverage of celebrities,” says Vince Duffy, chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association.
“But why wouldn’t they get one? Could websites that cover celebrities resist the urge to fly drones over celebrity weddings, outdoor red carpets, and beaches where starlets might be caught topless?” Mr. Duffy asks.
The University of Missouri has awarded a $25,000 grant to public radio station KBIA to explore drone journalism in places “reporters can’t go or reach,” while the University of Nebraska has won $50,000 from the Knight Foundation for a new Drone Journalism Lab.Mr. Duffy points out that the Federal Aviation Administration requires unmanned aircraft systems to be within the operator’s line of sight, cruise below 400 feet during daylight hours and avoid airports, among other things.
“Journalism organizations would certainly have many reasons to fly drones far from the person controlling it, or on some type of preprogrammed autopilot course,” Mr. Duffy says. “The FAA is looking into how it can regulate the coming ‘drone age’ safely. They expect to have new rules by 2015. The ethical issues for using drones for journalism will probably be up in the air much after that.” – Washington Times
While Obama carried the youth vote overall, his support declined from 2008 among all young voters and among key subgroups. In particular, Obama lost ground among young whites, men and independents.
Only 44% of white voters under 30 backed Obama, while 51% voted for Romney. This is a substantial change compared with 2008, when Obama carried the young white vote by 10 points (54% to 44%). Far more young blacks and Hispanics backed Obama than Romney, and there was little fall off in his support among these groups from 2008.
Obama also lost support among young men. Overall, 53% of men under 30 supported Obama, down from 62% in 2008. Fully 66% of young women voted for Obama, similar to the 69% who voted for him in 2008.
However, Obama lost support among both white men and women. Overall, 41% of white men supported Obama while 54% supported Romney. In 2008, Obama won the vote among white men, 52% to 46%. While white women voted for Obama over McCain by a 56% to 42% margin four years ago, they were divided this year (48% voted for Obama, 49% for Romney).
Surprisingly, Obama’s vote also declined among young black men, by 14 points, while holding steady among young black women. – Pew Reasearch
Move over, “Everything is bigger in Texas.” The Lone Star state has a new favorite bumper sticker and it’s a simple one-worder: “Secede.” Yes, it appears that “secession fever,” as some columnists are calling it, has taken over the red-leaning state following the post-election petitions — and sales of the stickers are just one sign. Among others, a perennial GOP candidate named Larry Scott Kilgore has announced he’s running for governor and will legally change his name to Larry SECEDE Kilgore — yes, with “secede” in all-caps. His web page also declares, “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”
Meanwhile former Florida governor Jeb Bush met Monday with a group of his former staffers at the J. W. Marriott hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just steps from the White House. Bush, a potential 2016 presidential contender, spent an hour in the hotel’s Cannon room, reminiscing and entertaining questions about his political future.
In an interview with NRO, Bush did not rule out a presidential run. “I am here to catch up with folks and promote education reform,” he said, smiling.
When asked again whether he will issue a Sherman-type statement about his future, Bush remained coy. “We have an alumni group that I like keeping in touch with,” he said. “I’m here to focus on educational reform, and that’s what I’m going to tell people.”
Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney’s campaign pollster, was at the meeting, as were several veteran Florida operatives.
On Tuesday, Bush will host a national summit on education reform. Education secretary Arne Duncan, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and Indiana governor Mitch Daniels will speak at the event.
Will Jeb be the man to stay in the Union? -msn.com/nationalreview
Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American “sin.” That’s according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a “white-supremacist holiday.”
Jensen’s opinion piece “No Thanks for Thanksgiving,” appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the “European invasion of the Americas.” He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?” he asked.
According to Jensen, Thanksgiving is “at the heart of U.S. myth-building. “But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin — the genocide of indigenous people — is of special importance today,” he explained.
Jensen has a long career in both working journalism and academia, including work as a copy editor at The St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Petersburg Times, as well as “volunteer editing and writing for the Texas Triangle, Austin (weekly statewide lesbian/gay paper).”
This wasn’t the first time Jensen has bashed America. He does so on a regular basis. Other Alternet pieces include headlines like “The Painful Collapse of Empire: How the ‘American Dream’ and American Exceptionalism Wreck Havoc on the World” or “What White People Fear.”
Alternet is part of the George-Soros-supported Media Consortium. It is one of 58 left-wing media operations that aim to create a progressive “echo chamber.” – CNSNews
The United States used U.S.-Israeli spy software to hack into the French presidential office earlier this year, the French cyberwarfare agency has concluded, according to the newsmagazine l’Express.
The magazine reported late Tuesday that the computers of several close advisers to then-president Nicolas Sarkozy – including Chief of Staff Xavier Musca – were compromised in May by a computer virus that bears the hallmarks of Flame, which was allegedly created by a U.S.-Israeli team to target Iran’s nuclear program. Anonymous French officials pointed the finger at the United States.
“You can be on very good terms with a ‘friendly’ country and still want to guarantee their unwavering support – especially during a transition period,” an official told the magazine. The alleged spying attack took place a few days before the second round of the French presidential elections, which Sarkozy lost to Francois Hollande, a socialist.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano reportedly did not deny the allegations when asked point-blank about them.
“We have no greater partner than France, we have no greater ally than France,” Napolitano reportedly answered, at the opening of an interview with l’Express. “We cooperate in many security-related areas. I am here to further reinforce those ties and create new ones.”
In the interview, Napolitano also said that the Flame and Stuxnet viruses had “never been linked to the U.S. government.”
The White House did not return a request for comment from The Hill.
Parts of this article have been translated from the French. Read the original here.
Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed to support Israeli security on Tuesday while calling for a quick de-escalation of Gaza fighting that raged on unabated amid signs of an emerging truce deal.
The top US diplomat flew in for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as efforts continued across the region to refine an elusive accord to end a week of violence that has cost 136 Palestinian and five Israeli lives.
The Israeli army confirmed its first fatality from rocket attacks on Tuesday, and a defence ministry official was also killed, while another missile landed harmlessly just south of Jerusalem on a day of continued strikes from Gaza.
The unrelenting violence also claimed the lives of 26 more Palestinians and witnessed an Israeli strike on a Gaza City building that houses foreign media organisations including AFP — the third such strike in three days.
Clinton told Netanyahu — a right-winger who has had strained relations with US President Barack Obama’s administration in the past year — that Washington’s commitment to Israeli security was “rock solid and unwavering.”
But she also stressed that this “is why we believe it is essential to de-escalate the situation” in the Palestinian territory.
Clinton further indicated that any truce announcement may not emerge until after she completes visits to the West Bank capital of Ramallah and Cairo for talks with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
“In these days ahead, the United States will work with our partners here in Israel and across the region for an outcome that bolsters security for the peace of Israel, improves conditions for the people of Gaza and moves toward a comprehensive peace for all people of the region,” said Clinton.
Optimistic negotiators had initially said a deal could be announced in Cairo later Tuesday following days of negotiations brokered by Egypt’s new Islamist leadership.
“There will be a joint press conference between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Egyptian mediators tonight to announce the truce,” an Islamic Jihad source told AFP in Gaza City. A Hamas source separately backed up the report.
But Hamas later said in a statement that there was no truce accord, stressing that it could only be announced by Egypt and calling on Palestinian armed groups to “continue to riposte against Israel’s crimes.”
And an Egyptian official told AFP in Cairo that “the truce announcement is not expected tonight because we are still waiting for a response” from the Jewish state.
A meeting was held between Egypt’s intelligence chief Rafat Shehata and top-level delegations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but it wound up with no agreement being reached on a ceasefire, a source close to the discussions told AFP in Cairo.
“Hamas and Islamic Jihad told the Egyptians they weren’t in a hurry, and it was Israel that had asked Egypt for a truce,” the source said.
“Hamas says it has not yet received a reply from Israel and asks all the media not to rush. It is the Egyptian presidency that will announce a truce if an accord is reached. Any declaration before that, or different from that, is irresponsible.”
An Israeli diplomatic source told AFP that negotiations were ongoing.
“We are working very hard using our diplomatic channels. We are working continuously. But I cannot give you an estimated time of arrival (of a truce),” the source said.
The bloodshed meanwhile showed no signs of abating as the military pressed on with its bombardment of northern Gaza positions from which most of the militants’ rockets have been launched.
Netanyahu told Clinton he was ready to agree to a “long-term solution” as long as the rocket attacks from Gaza stopped.
“If there’s a possibility of achieving a long-term solution for this problem by diplomatic means, we prefer it. But if not, I’m sure you understand that Israel will have to take every action necessary to defend its people,” he said.
A senior Hamas official told AFP in Cairo that a key sticking point was whether Israel would begin easing its six-year-old blockade of Gaza coinciding with the truce or at a later date.
“A compromise solution is for there to be agreement on lifting the siege, and that it would be implemented later at a specified time,” he said.
Netanyahu and his key ministers decided in a closed-door meeting late Monday to place “a temporary hold on a ground incursion to give diplomacy a chance to succeed,” a senior Israeli official told AFP.
The move came as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met Netanyahu and again urged all parties to end fire “immediately”.
A delegation of more than 10 Arab foreign ministers and other senior representatives also visited Gaza in a symbolic show of solidarity with the Palestinians — the latest in a string of regional leaders’ visits to the impoverished coastal enclave.
“The real problem is not a truce,” Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi told reporters in Gaza City.
“The real problem that the Arab and Islamic countries and all friendly countries in the world must focus on is ending the occupation,” the organisation’s secretary general said.
Hamas is understood to be seeking guarantees that Israel will stop its targeted killings and end its blockade.
Israel for its part is believed to be looking for a 24- to 48-hour truce as a buffer to work out a more permanent arrangement.
The Security Council held talks late Tuesday to discuss a demand by Arab nations that it hold a public meeting on the crisis.
Western diplomats had expressed fears that comments made at an open meeting could harm efforts to reach a ceasefire, but they agreed to hold the meeting on Wednesday at 2000 GMT. – AFP
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Monday that secession was a “deeply American principle,” amid a growing number of people petitioning the White House to let their states secede from the U.S.
“Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession. Some felt it was treasonous to secede from England, but those ‘traitors’ became our country’s greatest patriots,” the former presidential candidate wrote in a post on his House website. “There is nothing treasonous or unpatriotic about wanting a federal government that is more responsive to the people it represents.”
He continued: “If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it.”
Since President Barack Obama was reelected earlier this month, a flurry of secession petitions from states were created — most notably from Texas, which with more than 115,000 signatures far exceeds the 25,000 signatures needed for an official White House response. Critics have said it’s disgruntled voters upset that former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost.
Paul wrote that secession must still be an option to be used as leverage to make sure the government doesn’t “encroach” on Americans’ liberties.
“In fact, the recent election only further entrenched the status quo. If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it.”
Paul wrote that secession is a form of American freedom.
“At what point should the people dissolve the political bands which have connected them with an increasingly tyrannical and oppressive federal government?” Paul wrote.
He added: “And if people or states are not free to leave the United States as a last resort, can they really think of themselves as free? If a people cannot secede from an oppressive government, they cannot truly be considered free.” – politico.com
Republicans did not win in 2012 because we are too white, too male and too old. Some still don’t want to face the truth that we lost because the fastest-growing sectors of our population are entrenched in the Democratic Party. We did not win because Republicans failed to acknowledge this reality and move forward fearlessly. If that doesn’t change, we will not just be committing political malpractice. It will be political suicide.
This does not mean we should abandon our conservative principles. As the chairman of the American Conservative Union, I understand that we are a center-right country. We conservatives do not need to change our beliefs, but we do have to change the way we market and talk about them.
The 2008 losses were expected. We had had eight years of a Republican administration, the wear and tear of division within our ranks, and a Republican nominee whose strength was not the economy. The economy predictably was the focus after an unprecedented meltdown occurred in the final stages of that election.
Up until Election Day 2012, we fully expected to win. After a dismal four years economically, President Obama seemed to be the most vulnerable incumbent since Jimmy Carter. But the Nov. 6 elections resulted in one disappointment after another, leaving conservatives angry, bewildered and unsure about where we go from here.
Postelection analyses by some leaders in the GOP are almost as troubling as the demographic realities we are facing in 2016.
We heard from high-profile GOP guests that the “far right” — code word for conservatives — was at fault. Really? How did voters respond to a conservative message in 2010? Taking back the House speaks for itself. Moreover, a reading of the RNC’s platform showed a clear conservative consensus. For many in our camp, even that was not enough to unite us.
“Establishment” members of our party blamed conservatives for our failure to reach out to the “middle.” In that case, why did Mitt Romney win the majority of independent voters? Republican divisions could be partly to blame, but the question still remains: Why did we really lose?
Mr. Obama is the only incumbent in American history to have been re-elected with fewer votes than in his initial election. His weak standing should have created an opportunity for a GOP-Romney win in spite of all the self-praise Democrats are heaping on one another. The reality is that Republicans failed to recruit voters from growing demographics and concentrated too heavily on the old, white and male populations.
Mr. Romney received 59 percent of the white vote on election night. That’s the highest percentage of any Republican candidate challenging an incumbent president in U.S. history — including Ronald Reagan — according to exit-polling data. That reliably Republican constituency will continue to decrease rapidly as a percentage of the overall vote. In fact, whites are projected to be 68 percent of the vote in 2016 and to become the minority vote in our country by the 2020s.
There were not enough conservatives, establishment Republicans and a majority of independents — combined — for us to win in 2012 — and that won’t change in 2016 if our party maintains the status quo. We need support and votes from a larger share of youth, women and minorities.
The greatest gains to be had are with Latinos — the fastest-growing voting bloc in our country. In fact, 23.7 million Hispanics were eligible to vote in 2012, and most of them were young voters. When you consider that 1 out of 5 Americans today and one-fifth of all children in public schools are Hispanic, it is easy to recognize the importance of this community in discussions about electoral politics.
A demographic breakdown of this community is promising to conservatives: More than 3 million Hispanics are small-business owners, more than 120,000 are serving in our military, and a majority bring with them a strong faith — including an evangelical Christian and Catholic support system.
The Republican message has resonated with Hispanics before. Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush received more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. This was not by happenstance. They worked at it, and they respected our community. Reagan and Mr. Bush also were the last two presidents to make immigration reform a priority, an issue on which the conservative movement and Republican Party need to take a lead in order to open the gates to a waiting constituency.
Many in our conservative movement see the 2012 elections as the beginning of the end of American exceptionalism and the dawn of the sure decline of our civilization. I disagree. Far too many Americans have given the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our nation and move the great American experiment forward. I am not giving up — and neither should you. America is changing. While we must stay ever fervent in our values, our conservative message and tone must evolve. The future of our movement and our country depends on it.
Al Cardenas is chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said the Republican Party “got whiter and more male” while the Democratic caucus is “majority minority and female.”
“Take a good look when the House convenes after this next Congress is sworn in at what our side of the aisle looks like versus what the Republican side looks like. I mean they got whiter and more male, and we now have a majority minority and female Democratic caucus – first time in history,” Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said Wednesday at a discussion hosted by the Emily’s List, a group known for supporting pro-abortion female candidates.
She said when women run for office, “Democrats win.”
“We have to double down in 2014. We’ve got to make sure we recruit more women for office, because It’s not just a slogan that when women run, women win. They do, and when women run, Democrats win,” Wasserman-Schultz said.
The new Congress will consist of 20 women senators and 81 congresswomen – an accomplishment she credited to the efforts of the Emily’s List.
“There is no longer an all-male state legislature anywhere in the country,” she said, adding that “40 percent of the U.S. population now has at least one woman senator.” CNSNews.com
Less than a week after a New Orleans suburbanite petitioned the White House to allow Louisiana to secede from the United States, petitions from seven states have collected enough signatures to trigger a promised review from the Obama administration.
By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.
A petition from Vermont, where talk of secession is a regular feature of political life, was the final entry.
Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.
The Texas petition leads all others by a wide margin. Shortly before 9:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, it had attracted 94,700 signatures. But a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday afternoon that he does not support the idea of his state striking out on its own.
“Gov. Perry believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it. But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.
A backlash Monday night saw requests filed with the White House to strip citizenship rights from Americans who signed petitions to help states secede.
And in a similar nose-thumbing aimed at Texas’ conservative majority, progressives from the liberal state capital of Austin responded Monday with a petition to secede from their state if Texas as a whole should decide to leave the Union.
Late Tuesday a second group of Texans, this one from Houston, lodged their own White House petition. Secession-minded Texans, they wrote, “are mentally deficient and [we] do not want them representing us. We would like more education in our state to eradicate their disease.”
Houstonian “Kimberly F” — The White House does not provide last names — submitted the petition. She told TheDC in an email that ”[w]e need both sides presented, or we all look like a bunch of fools.”
A group from El Paso, too, wants no part of an independent Texas. “Allow the city of El Paso to secede from the state of Texas,” their petition reads. “El Paso is tired of being a second class city within Texas.”
But smaller petitions like theirs are a political side show of a political side show. One effort, aimed at Missourians, called for a nationwide catered pizza party to celebrate when the Show Me State left the U.S.
States whose active petitions have not yet reached the 25,000 signature threshold include Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
In a Pew Research study from March of last year, a full 64 percent of Black Americans said that state and local governments should be allowed to pass laws restricting handguns. Only 38 percent of whites agree with that statement. Over the years, Blacks have become all too aware of the damage handguns can unleash on communities, which is why they’ve become major proponents of gun laws. But a new book about the history of American gun regulation shows how ironic Black support of widespread gun restriction actually is.
While doing research for Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler discovered that, contrary to modern America, there was a time in U.S. history when African-Americans were actually fighting against gun regulation.
Starting as early as the Dred Scott decision in 1857, the American federal government made a point to keep guns out of African-American hands. When then-Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote his decision that Blacks couldn’t be considered full citizens, he noted that if they were, they would be allowed “full liberty of speech … to hold public meetings on political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Taney and others were terrified of a full-scale Black revolt, which meant they were completely in favor of keeping Blacks unarmed.
After the Civil War, the Southern states created so-called “Black Codes,” laws that restricted the rights of newly freed blacks. Can you guess what one of the main oppressions was? Blacks couldn’t own guns. Even when Blacks did get their hands on weapons, the nascent Ku Klux Klan would frequently go on raids of Black homes and take away their weapons, making them even more vulnerable to Klan attacks.
These kinds of arbitrary restrictions on gun ownership traveled all the way to the civil rights era, when the archaic Black Codes continued to prevent African-Americans from arming themselves. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a gun permit after his house was firebombed. Despite King being a respected community leader and a man of the cloth, the Alabama police denied his request.
Nowadays, things have obviously turned around drastically. Blacks have won the right to own guns, but awful gun violence has also wreaked havoc on Black communities from coast to coast. The Klan was wrong: Rather than attacking them with guns, some African-Americans started attacking each other over gang territory and drug battles. It’s no wonder today’s African-American leaders herald gun restrictions. And one has to consider whether winning the right to carry handguns everywhere was really that wonderful of a victory. – bet.com
Leave it to Ann Coulter and the like to conquer the ever-vexing issue of race relations, unequivocally internalize the volcanic plight of blacks and other minorities everywhere, rather than simplistically merge theories relative to both to the point of irrefutable resolution— all in a matter of a less than a minute TV sound bite.
In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting tragedy, the incorrigibly bombastic, right-wing activist took to the Fox News airwaves and the “Bill O’Reilly Show” recently to expound upon and defiantly reaffirm her dangerously hot-headed and shortsighted views regarding the one singular instrument that has truly proven to be a weapon of mass destruction in minority communities everywhere.
“We don’t know all the facts yet,” Coulter later wrote in a blog post chronicling the deadly encounter that left the 17-year-old Martin mortally wounded at the hands of volunteer neighborhood watchmen George Zimmerman. “But let’s assume the conclusion MNSBC is leaping to is accurate: George Zimmerman stalked a small, black child and murdered him in cold blood, just because he was black.
“If that we’re true,” she continued, “every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America’s oldest and most august civil rights organization.”
Alas, with allies like Ann Coulter and her Republican counterparts, who can afford to have enemies? Indeed, it’s funny how those who know the least sometimes reveal the most. Coulter’s words are a clear illustration to one and all of an approach and road best less traveled. They harken to a society and atmosphere that only further propagates a war among races in which no group can truly win.
What Coulter seems to remain blind about and oblivious to— conveniently so I might add— is the fact that an eye-for-eye way of being ultimately only comes to leave us all blind. And statistics speak to that darkness, with the free-flow of more handguns almost automatically leading to more deaths and shootings in each and every instance.
Beyond the mere numbers, one need look no further than my childhood hometown of Chicago— the South Side’s Englewood neighborhood for an even more exact locale— to painfully bring those words to heart.
During the St. Patrick’s Day weekend preceding the Martin shooting and only days before Coulter was making her rather reckless proclamation, 49 people were shot, at least 11 of them fatally, across the city. Overall, murders were up by more than 60 percent over the first three months of 2012 compared to the year before, with Englewood’s 15 homicides nearly doubling those committed in any of the city’s other enclaves.
In Englewood, since 1960 the community population has dipped from a high of 100,000 to just 30,000 and falling, with more and more families still desperately seeking to get out. More than 4,100 abandoned buildings now riddle the neighborhood, as the gang-laden, arms-packing residents grow more brazen and deadly in their dealings.
Harsh realities such as those are why Coulter’s words aren’t so easily dismissive. When has violence, or setting the course for it, ever led to anything other than more violence? Given all that, is there anyone among us, Ann Coulter included, that can truly advocate for such a society and rest in good conscious?
Count the Rev. Al Sharpton, the NAACP and the parents of Trayvon Martin among those who have come to an equally raised level of understanding. On the 20th anniversary of the deadly race riots that saw much of Los Angeles go up in flames following the Rodney King acquittal, it’s why they all convened in the city Thursday night to plead for greater tolerance and an end to all the violence.
“There are Trayvons all over the country,” boomed Sharpton. “What kind of world are we living in that we can put a black man in the White House, but a black can’t walk through a gated community?”
Thing is, in the kind of world Ann Coulter is calling for, neither may truly have the chance to reach their destination. – blackamericaweb.com
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