SedanChair posted:

Who says "hondel"?

This is the William F. Buckley school of "the more archaic words I make you look up, the smarter I am."

Intel&Sebastian posted:

Some people just cannot conceive of a police man being the bad guy.

But....he's dressed like a good guy

Dr. Faustus posted:

http://cnn.it/go
Mayor: City will pay insurance for pregnant wife of officer charged in killing until baby is born. Watch CNNgo.

Intel&Sebastian posted:

I still do a double take every time I'm reminded that SC re-elected Mark Sanford.

zoux posted:

Monaghan posted:

I have no real objections to this?

Radish posted:

I think only the mega racists are going there. I think your average conservative will be using this as an example of how the system works and is fine, ignoring that the cop totally would have gotten away with it without the video and the local media was ready to believe the police story without any real skepticism.

icantfindaname posted:

Turns out the mega racists are a very hefty, multiple double digit chunk of American society

quote:

Mary Ann Twitty, the former top clerk in Ferguson, Missouri’s municipal court who was fired for sending racist emails revealed by a Justice Department report, said this week that she was far from the only Ferguson government official who traded racist jokes.

“They would have had to shut the doors [if everyone involved was fired] because they went through the whole station, trust me,” Twitty said in an interview with St. Louis' KMOV. “It went on all the time.”

Twitty described herself as “the sacrificial lamb” to be fired after the Justice Department's investigation into Ferguson's police department and municipal court. She said she felt like she’d been “raped” and “thrown under the bus.” She also said that she had received emails that she considered too offensive and that she did not forward those to her colleagues.

Several other Ferguson officials resigned in the wake of the Justice Department report, including the police chief, two other high-ranking police officers, the municipal court judge and the city manager.

Twitty was also interviewed this week by Fox 2 in St. Louis and said she hadn’t meant to hurt anyone with the emails. She was only passing along jokes, she said.

“Sure they look racist, but even when I’d looked at them, I’m thinking, 'God, yeah, that is racist.' But they were jokes. I meant no harm to anyone,” Twitty said.

Twitty told Fox 2 that she regretted her emails “got out, because it made me look terrible,” but she said she “treated everyone fairly.”

"It's not like I personally sent them out or forwarded them to the police officers to hurt anyone or be racist, because I’m not racist. I have a black sister, so I mean I am not racist,” Twitty said.

She said she is having trouble finding another job.

“There are municipalities that need people, court clerks -- everyone’s afraid to hire me,” Twitty said.

Intel&Sebastian posted:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/ferguson-racist-emails_n_7026568.html


This lady is beyond stupid and the attitude is pretty demonstrative of how pervasive and accepted this racist bullshit was. She really doesn't understand how "Sending racist as gently caress emails" on your gov't job account is grounds for 1) being fired and 2) being declared a racist. I don't know how much more clear those two things can be.

She's seriously saying to a reporter "I laughed about and sent people racist emails, emails that I read and thought "drat that's racist"...but I'm not a racist". The ending is the real kicker for me though, she thinks people are "afraid" to hire her. Like "oh yeah normally we would definitely hire someone who got caught sending emails about black mothers who abort their children getting crimestoppers checks...but we just can't have this as a PR issue right now."

Whaaaat the fuuuuuck

Intel&Sebastian posted:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/ferguson-racist-emails_n_7026568.html


This lady is beyond stupid and the attitude is pretty demonstrative of how pervasive and accepted this racist bullshit was. She really doesn't understand how "Sending racist as gently caress emails" on your gov't job account is grounds for 1) being fired and 2) being declared a racist. I don't know how much more clear those two things can be.

She's seriously saying to a reporter "I laughed about and sent people racist emails, emails that I read and thought "drat that's racist"...but I'm not a racist". The ending is the real kicker for me though, she thinks people are "afraid" to hire her. Like "oh yeah normally we would definitely hire someone who got caught sending emails about black mothers who abort their children getting crimestoppers checks...but we just can't have this as a PR issue right now."

Whaaaat the fuuuuuck

site posted:

Because people still think cops are good guys :/

Nonsense posted:

Will Twitty get a gofundme page as well now?

Ralepozozaxe posted:

It's not as if there are any prevalent racial issues happening in Ferguson Missouri.

PhazonLink posted:

Cops are the bad guys when they stop them for speeding or doing the non killing-blacks part of their job.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Of course, all the other officers who saw him drop the taser, didn't report that the report falsely stated CPR was given, etc., are apparently getting away with murder. Should all be charged with conspiracy and with filing false police reports.

Zwabu posted:

Yeah, when he drops the Taser at the dead man's feet, isn't it in plain view of the black cop? What did THAT cop's report of the incident say?

I actually think the culpability of the cops who helped shore up the shooter's story is a very important element because making these guys culpable would illustrate in a most stark way how much of an institutional problem this is.

Flaggy posted:

Its in the works.

Honestly though, I think I should start a gofundme for myself for having to listen to all the bullshit from right wing media. Send help. And Pizza.

Von Sloneker posted:

Daniel Larison in the American Conservative" posted:

Cotton’s Blithe Warmongering
By Daniel Larison • April 8, 2015, 10:52 AM

Gage Skidmore / Flickr

Earlier this week I wrote about how hawks mislead the public about their support for illegal wars. Tom Cotton just offered up a perfect example of this:

Cotton said any military action against Iran would not be like the Iraq War and would instead be similar to 1999’s Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq ordered by President Bill Clinton.

“Even if military action were required — and we certainly should have kept the credible threat of military force on the table throughout which always improves diplomacy — the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case,” Cotton said.

One couldn’t ask for a more misleading presentation of the costs and dangers of military action against Iran. First, no one seriously believes that a bombing campaign against Iran would take only a few days. It would very likely take several weeks at least, and that probably underestimates the difficulty. Starting a war with Iran will last longer and cost more than anyone anticipates. That has been true of all other U.S. wars of choice over the last two decades, and there’s no reason to think that a war with Iran would be easier or less dangerous than any of those. Assuming that Iran retaliates, the conflict would escalate and go on much longer than Iran hawks are claiming.

All that Iran hawks promise is that the nuclear program would be set back by a few years. However, the attack would push Iran to acquire the weapons that the hawks don’t want them to have, and it would drive them to make the nuclear program less vulnerable to future attacks. If Iran hawks were intent on destroying Iran’s nuclear program permanently through military action, they probably would have to argue for an invasion of Iran at some point. When the time came, Cotton would probably be among the first to tell us how cheap, quick, and easy that would be, too.

Like most hawks, Cotton minimizes the costs and duration of military action, he ignores the likely consequences, and he treats an attack on Iran as cavalierly as possible. The comparison with Desert Fox is laughable. That operation took place years after the U.S. had already destroyed Iraqi defenses, which clearly isn’t the case with Iran. Cotton further misleads the public to think that the only thing that can qualify as war with Iran is a scenario involving “150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground.” It is the Iran hawks that want the public to think that a major ground invasion is the only thing that can be called war, which allows them to advocate for a different kind of war against Iran while pretending that they don’t favor war. They don’t want to face the potential political cost of warmongering, so they pretend that they are advocating for something that isn’t “really” war. But, of course, war is exactly what they’re demanding.

Scott Mcconell in the American Conservative" posted:

How the GOP Became the Israel Party
Bill Kristol and John McCain have replaced Robert Novak and Pat Buchanan in Republican foreign policy influence.
By Scott McConnell • April 8, 2015

Speaker John Boehner / Flickr

When the unexpectedly detailed P5+1 framework agreement with Iran was announced last Thursday, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk made a bizarre comment. “We all know” said the senator, that this is going to end with “a mushroom cloud somewhere near Tehran”—a result of Israel having to go to war to “clean up the mess” made by American and European negotiators. A few days earlier John McCain had expressed the wish that Israel “go rogue” and attack Iran in order to upend the Iran negotiations.

It would have been one thing if such comments had come from backbench congressmen. But McCain is a former GOP presidential nominee, one of his party’s most prominent foreign policy spokesmen. Kirk is the co-sponsor of what was, until recently, the major Senate legislation intended to scuttle the Iran negotiations—a leader in GOP “pro-Israel” circles. Yet neither remark sparked a repudiation, or even any reaction at all. They were what one expects from the GOP these days, recklessness about war and peace fused with a passion for Israel. It was if all the diffuse sentiments which once fueled American nationalism and militarism were concentrated into a tight stream and displaced onto Israel, turning the country into the fantasy surrogate of American hawks. The conservative belief in American exceptionalism is like Zionism, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol boasted. Kirk and McCain may know that Americans have little enthusiasm for another Mideast war; the U.S. Army understands perfectly well that no occupation of Iran could be sustained, and America would have zero international support if it tried. But no matter, they have Israel.

Even 20 years ago some Republican senator would have signaled some collegial disagreement with Kirk and McCain. A Bob Dole or Dick Lugar or a Mark Hatfield would have let on that this sentiment wasn’t the only opinion in the party. Now if there are any who dissent, they dare not speak. Benjamin Netanyahu has become the symbolic leader of the GOP, and even he is probably not as aggressive as most in the party would like him to be.

How did this transformation occur? How did the party of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan come to this? The New York Times published two recent pieces exploring this subject. The first, by Peter Baker, takes off from observing Jeb Bush very quickly disassociating himself from former Secretary of State James Baker’s moderate speech at J Street; the second, by Eric Lipton, explored the rapid growth in ties between hawkish pro-Israel donors and the Republican Party.

Baker’s piece fills out the basics: the top realist foreign policy voices of the 1980s and ‘90s GOP, Baker, and Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have no influence anymore. Jeb Bush threw James Baker under the bus at the first squawk from Sheldon Adelson; support for the Israeli right has become a Republican litmus test. To explain this, Baker mentions the new donors, the rise of right-wing evangelicals within the party, the vague sense emerging from 9/11 that Israel and the United States faced the same enemy in Islamic terrorism, and the pro-Israeli leadership of George W. Bush, who repudiated the foreign policy realism of his father.

Lipton focuses on the new money stream. He shows that Adelson, Paul Singer, and other right-wing, pro-Israel donors, their spending unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, have pushed the GOP past the Democrats as recipients of “pro-Israel” PAC money. He uncovers some fairly shocking facts, such as the rapid infusion of “pro-Israel” funds into Arkansas freshman senator Tom Cotton’s campaigns. This detailed reporting about Israel-related money in a widely read centrist publication is an important and welcome development: until recently, it was subject hidden in whisper and awkward euphemism, as when two election cycles ago, retired general and possible presidential candidate Wesley Clark referred to “New York money people” pushing for war with Iran. Clark had to be walked through an apology with the assistance of Abe Foxman.

But important as the finance angle is, the subject has other important dimensions. If Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer had tried to purchase the Mideast policy of the Republican Party 20 or 30 years ago, they would have failed, even under the new campaign finance rules. I am not persuaded by the evangelical argument: my rough sense is that Christan Zionism may have peaked 15 years ago within the evangelical movement; increasingly there are prominent evangelical voices calling for justice in Israel and Palestine. In any case, evangelicals hardly make up a decisive segment of the Republican electorate.

But the ground for Singer and Adelson and their cohorts has been prepared over 20 years. Several events from the 1990s were critical in the process. During the Reaganite 1980s, Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak were probably America’s most popular media conservatives. Neither was a big Israel backer (though Buchanan had been earlier in his career). Both saw Mideast conflicts through the lens of those in the American foreign policy establishment who knew the region: Israel had done deep wrongs to the Palestinians, which could and should be practically addressed; American had profound strategic needs to get along with the Arab world.

But in a sustained and fairly well documented strike, the neoconservative media establishment began a campaign against Buchanan, who had been far more polemical about Israel than Novak. Buchanan survived the attacks, but they damaged his standing as a Republican. Younger activists got the message that if you were ambitious about advancing in the conservative movement, better just leave the Israel subject alone—or better still, become a passionate Zionist. The attacks took someone who used to be at the core of the conservative polemic industry and essentially neutralized him. Buchanan eventually left the GOP, but the party was not better for it.

Another step in setting the stage for Adelson and Singer was Rupert Murdoch’s starting and funding of The Weekly Standard, perhaps the most successful political magazine in history. Before the Standard, National Review was the most important conservative magazine, pro-Israel but hardly obsessively so, and open to an array of perspectives. James Burnham, the magazine’s principal strategic thinker through the 1970s, was highly skeptical of the Israel-U.S. alliance. But by the 1990s, Burnham was dead and NR had a wealthy competitor, one which could count on a reported $3 million annual subsidy from Murdoch (while Buckley had labored for years to keep NR afloat with four- and five-figure donations). Leading neoconservatives, including editors of the Standard, played the anti-Semite card against key National Review figures: aggressively in the case of Joseph Sobran, with more subtlety in the case of John O’Sullivan and Richard Neuhaus. By the late 1990s, National Review had capitulated, becoming indistinguishable from Commentary or The Weekly Standard on the Mideast and most other issues.

One should also mention the proliferation of hawkish pro-Israel conservative think tanks. There is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Hudson Institute, AEI, and dozens of others: if you are conservative, interested in foreign policy, and want a think tank job in D.C., being hawkishly pro-Israel is the way to go. Pro-Israel hawks have done more in 20 years than create a fundraising apparatus designed to impose pro-Israel litmus tests upon Republican politicians; they have forged an entire ideological party inside the Beltway, comprised of think tank staffers and ideological journalists, all of whom can be reliably counted on to advocate for some version of a right-wing Israeli perspective whenever circumstances require it. These forces weren’t in place when George H.W. Bush faced off with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir over Israeli settlements in 1991, but they rule in Republican circles now.

I am pessimistic about the Republican party’s short term prospects to overcome and reverse this takeover, but not about the issue overall. All my senses tell me that President Obama, and what remains of a centrist and liberal foreign policy establishment, will succeed in persuading the country that the deal with Iran is a large net-plus for American interests; it helps enormously that what was agreed upon in Lausanne seems to have surpassed expectations, which has been remarked upon by quite a few observers who expected far less. Republican politicians will move on to other subjects if they sense the public is not with them in opposing the Iran deal, Sheldon Adelson notwithstanding. In the medium term, the defeat of Mark Kirk next year—altogether possible—would signal that blind obeisance to a foreign country can be a loser politically.

Finally, there are underlying dynamics in the Middle East which all of Sheldon Adelson’s money cannot overcome. Most important is that Iran has clearly become one of the more stable, modern, and democratic countries in the region. Another is that Israel is becoming a harder sell to Americans. As David Shulman put it in the New York Review of Books, “What really counts is that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases protofascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace.” Information flows quite freely in the age of the Internet, and these Mideast realities are slowly seeping into the American consciousness. The same factors which now make divestment from companies doing business with Israel an important issue on many American college campuses cannot forever be ignored by a large political party competing for power in a free society. The process, however, is going to take a while.

SedanChair posted:

But are you a racist though? This is key to your marketing plan. Or can you at least act like a racist, with utter shamelessness and abandon?

The bar isn't too high:

FuzzySkinner posted:

Chuck C. Johnson is currently gloating about the UVA rape case and is proclaiming he's allowed to use the word "fag" now because he has gay friends and South Park.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

Did he provide names, or is it like having an anonymous black friend to excuse racism?

Gravel Gravy posted:

Like any black person would be caught dead with the guy.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

Did he provide names, or is it like having an anonymous black friend to excuse racism?

VideoTapir posted:

Uh, on South Park you had to be gay to say "fag."

FuzzySkinner posted:

Charles C. Johnson ‏@ChuckCJohnson Apr 3
@BHVT I probably would say that.

Charles C. Johnson ‏@ChuckCJohnson Apr 3
@BHVT Just like Chris Rock.

FuzzySkinner posted:

Brent ‏@BHVT Apr 3
@ChuckCJohnson Would you say you love blacks, and African Americans, but just don't like n-words? Why is it ok to say you hate fags?

Charles C. Johnson ‏@ChuckCJohnson Apr 3
@BHVT I probably would say that.

Charles C. Johnson ‏@ChuckCJohnson Apr 3
@BHVT Just like Chris Rock.

SedanChair posted:

But are you a racist though? This is key to your marketing plan. Or can you at least act like a racist, with utter shamelessness and abandon?

The bar isn't too high:

Dr. VooDoo posted:

No that was the n-word episode. Terry and Matt said it's totally cool to use fag and queer as everyday language cause really no one uses it to mean gay people or mean gay people are bad anymore so it's not a big deal and gay people who get upset about it are making a big deal about nothing. See it's cool cause two straight guys said that there's nothing negative associated with gay people in those words anymore so it's a-ok to use!