Category — Civil Rights

First, from the people who just booted John Howard. The good side is that the meat looks great on the red Christmas Spode, and it really sets off the mint sauce. I’m told The Lop-Eared Dwarf is especially tender. Key chain ferules available for the feet at my blog address. The rabbit is probably grill-ready. I’m not sure.

Second, from the people whose Sceptr’d Isle will soon be the Scimitar’d Isle, and Hyde Park corner turned into a hangman’s scaffold. What’s that refrain I hear? “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, teachers leave them kids alone….allinallyerjustanutherbrickinthewall!”

Third, from a nation where The War on Poverty produced this grub; he will certainly end up tenured at some squalid Northeastern academic sinkhole. He seems to have attended night courses at the Eldridge Cleaver School of Hair Styling & Tablecloth Design as an H Rap Brown Scholar. America. What a country!

They “dropped out” by dropping into a counter-culture which was itself a creation of the capitalism they claimed to despise, and considered themselves courageous for having done so.  Except for some skirmishes in the Civil Rights struggles,  they never fought anything that posed a real danger, and only won where their opponents were too squeamish to resist.  

They rode the wave of post-war prosperity into professions and material ease as no generation before them, and believed they had something to do with it.  Act II, Scene III is upon them, and their play is almost over.   Their goals and expectations and  lingo are embodied in the person of Hillary Clinton.   Show them the exit, and consider the following:

Excerpt from “The Art of Non-Conforming” (1953) by British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. 

If I were to write…. the Confessions of a Non-Conforming Man, they would begin with an assertion that the mid-twentieth century, far from being a period of enlightenment, has been notable for credulity and servility to a quite exceptional degree.  It would be necessary, I should go on, to go back at least to the Dark Ages to find a generation of men so given over to destruction, supersitition, and every variety of obscurantism….

Questioning, thus,the basic assumptions of the age, the Non-Conforming Man cannot but find its pretensions particularly derisory.  Ironically, ignorance seems to grow with education and freedom seems to decay to the accompaniment of protestations and devotion to its cause.  Charlantanry, he observes, flourishes as perhaps never before…when the outworn and outmoded conclusions of a Karl Marx provide a dogma, and the partial, and mostly superficial observations of a Sigmund Freud have, like Marx in the field of history and economics, been furbished up into a philosophy of life which they were in no wise intended to become…

Civlization presupposes the integrity and inviolability of each separate human being, and it is contemporary neobarbarisms like Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, which have sought to destroy the individual in favor of the collectivity…the materialists, the power-worshipers, the demon-demagogues of our time, insist that individual men and women are of no account, and have no destiny of their own to work apart from mankind’s.

Against such a trend, the impulse not to conform constitutes a kind of resistance movement, whose practitioners, as the claims of collectivism augment, are liable to to be forced to become maquisards, living cautiously on the fringes of society, and only occasionally and discreetely disclosing their true attitude of mind.  Yet how important, how necessary they are! Without them, collective assumptions may pass unchallenged, and there may be no one to puncture the pretensions of established authority.

The basic failure of our time, future historians may well decide, has lain in the too ready acceptance of current orthodoxies, whether through fear of being suspected of rebelliousness and consequently punished, or just as a result of succumbing to mass persuasion.   The independent, non-conforming mind is visibly become rarer.  Conformity is more and more the order of the day, inevitably bringing with that subservience to prevailing fashions of thought, values and behavior, which prepares the way for - to use the sombre expression originated by Belloc more than four decades ago - The Servile State.

To a civilized and free mind any enforced orthodoxy must be abhorrent.  It is inconceivable that the last word should ever be said about anything, or that history should reach any sort of finality.  Non-conforming is a recognition that Man and all his works are inherently imperfect, and therefore susceptible to criticism, if not ridicule.  It is tremendously invigorating….As a habit of mind, it is greatly to be recommended.

…There is one last aspect of non-conforming which, naturally, appeals to me personally.  Non-conforming is the basis, the very fount, of all humour.  A totally non-conformist society never laughs - laughter itself being a kind of criticism, an expression of the immense disparity between human aspiration and human performance.  As such, it is intolerable to all orthodoxy-enforcers, from Torquemada to Stalin.

 The circus clown is made to look different from his fellow-performers.  He falls over, he stands on his head, he grimaces and rides absurd bicycles.  Yet what would a circus be without him?…..It is worth noting, too, that Shakespeare’s fools are given some of his most sagacious and poetic lines.  The non-conforming Fool proved, in the end, King Lear’s most tender, understanding, and faithful friend, when all the conformists had abandoned him to his fate.

The liberal implosion over the Supreme Court’s conservative direction continues unabated. Liberals lament Chief Justice Roberts’ lack of “consensus” building and note the proliferation of 5-4 opinions. However, Justice Breyer provides the liberal definition of “consensus” when he says Chief Roberts can “do better” by joining “his dissents.” In simpler terms, the liberal wing wants agreement and could care less about unifying the Court. A 5-4 decision upholding race based school admission policies would have been lauded by liberals with little thought given to the 4 dissenters or past precedent.

Although liberal hypocrisy is unsurprising, Justice Breyer’s thoughts on discrimination are:

“I think the color-blind view is very wrong, I think it’s never been in the law, it’s never been accepted by a majority of this Court, and, my goodness, if ever there was a decision that should be made locally, it’s this one.”

Does Breyer think the Equal Protection Clause only applies to minorities? Or is it just when the Court decides to engage in a little social engineering? I don’t see anything in the Constitution that remotely empowers the Supreme Court to impose its social mores on the country.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Justice Breyer. Justice Harlan, as the only dissenting justice in Plessy v. Ferguson, provides an excellent counter argument:

“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law….”

That means everyone Justice Breyer and not just the groups you feel worthy of the Court’s protection.

The first matter in this introduction is to thank my host at New England Republican for the opportunity to contribute to his blog.  He’s taking a risk.  I’ve commented here promiscuously for about four years under the foreshortened given name with the Celtic “H” (Rhod), and now NER is allowing me in the door without patting me down.

It’s been said here that I’m a knuckle-dragger.  My ear is pressed to the radio, pencil in hand, recording my talking points from Limbaugh.  I’m an “unpatriotic right-wing hooligan”, a “despicable winger”, and a drug-addled, baby-killing villain from the Vietnam War.  There’s more, but these are just a few of my favorites.  Still,  it hasn’t been all fun.

I plan to divorce that careless entity Rhod from the responsible contributor I plan to be, with the grand conceit of calling myself “Hotspur”.  Hotspur is one of Shakespeare’s most interesting characters.  He’s not a good guy in every way, but I like the ring of the name.  That other guy can live down to his reputation elsewhere.

I was born a long time ago, into a Scots-English New England family of carnival-mirror Republicans.   We had so many ideological distortions, I still don’t know if we were conservatives, liberals, or something else.  Furiously anti-FDR, derisively anti-Eisenhower, sniffily anti-JFK, vaguely pro-Stevenson, peace-loving, pro-military flag wavers, business owning foundrymen, clannish and skeptical civil rights supporters, church-going without piety; that kind of stuff.  It’s impossible to rebel in such a family.  You can’t ditch one set of parental values without projecting its approved opposite.

As a child I lived for long periods in the pre-integration South as well as in industrial Connecticut, and will never vilify either region for unenlightened racialism or smokestack landscapes.  America is wonderful in countless ways, with nothing that is permanently sullied by our mistakes.

An early 1950’s summer morning on Georgia’s Route 17 can’t be made vile by segregation.  And the smell of burning coke (vacuum-burned coal) and the tunes of a forge and train whistle at night in Connecticut, are evocative of strength, purpose and hard work.  This country is the sum of its parts, and the bad things are washed away by the dazzling light of the good.

Between 1962 and 1971, I obtained a college degree, served in Vietnam as a combat radio operator; worked at a series of white, blue and gray collar jobs, two of which called upon similar resources.  School teacher and clown.  I prospered more as a clown, and I’m still contemplating the intelligence I gained the very day I gave up that job.  A nasty little boy of about four years of age snarled at me and said “You’re not a REAL clown, you’re just a man in a clown suit!”

Barely past the simian stage of boyhood, that kid was on to something important.  Even if there’s no such thing as final truth, we need to assert the nearly real and spurn the fake, the fantastic and the imitative.  The greasepaints of self-deception, of untruth and prejudice coat and smear our insights.  Our first responsibility is to be REAL clowns.

 Today I’m self-employed.  I live in the lower Connecticut River Valley, am married and have three sons in the military, all of whom are combat veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  One is a paratrooper, an airborne combat engineer; another is a Cavalry Scout turned Ranger currently in Special Forces training, and the third is involved with security and judicial matters for figures like the very dead Saddam Hussein and the temporarily alive Chemical Ali.  We have all been fortunate beyond measure. 

State Representative Byron Rushing is making news by proposing height and weight be added to Massachusetts’s anti-discrimination laws:

The bill, which would make Massachusetts the second state in the United States to offer such protections, applies mainly to the workplace but also covers landlords and real estate interactions.

Rep. Byron Rushing, a Boston Democrat who is sponsoring the bill, said it is a question of civil rights.

“This is one of the last physical aspects of people that you can acceptably laugh about,” said Rushing, who is black, slim and of average height. “You can be a shock jock on the radio and talk about fat people for a solid week and no one would ever think of having you lose your job. It’s still acceptable.”

My first inclination was to dismiss this as another pie-in-the-sky attempt to add regulation where it simply isn’t practical; however, it does present an intriguing possibility. Clearly the voters discriminated against Grace Ross based on her height, weight, and orthodontics (A new basis for discrimination I’d immediately add to the bill):

Governor Patrick’s wealth clearly granted him an unfair electoral edge by giving him access to health clubs and dentistry that other candidates did not. Ms. Ross deserves immediate relief. I’ll leave it to the courts to decide if Ms. Ross is awarded the governor’s office outright, or if another election is held to see if the voters can overcome their bigotry.

The Boston Herald gives us some more examples of what we can expect under a Deval Patrick administration:

Democrat Deval Patrick has championed the constitutional “rights” of convicted rapists and murderers, demanding they be given juice, clean sheets, cold tuna sandwiches, white underwear and properly inflated basketballs, records show.

While working as President Clinton’s top civil rights lawyer in the mid-1990s, Patrick sent letters to prison officials in several states, alleging violations from inadequate air conditioning and insufficient recreation time to denying cons juice or milk at lunch and requiring inmates to make $2 medical co-payments

In one 1994 Department of Justice letter, Patrick chastised correction officials in Syracuse, N.Y., for not providing “sufficient sporting/recreation equipment to afford prisoners the opportunity to participate in large muscular activity.” Among the injustices cited by the DOJ were “under inflated basketballs” and “only 1 operative basketball hoop.”

Here are some more “violations” that Deval Patrick deemed cruel enough to spend federal manpower and tax dollars trying to rectify:

• Denial of ‘recreational or educational programs’ and equipment
• Food being served ‘lukewarm or cold’
• Inmates being forced to make a $2 medical co-payment for non-emergency doctor visits
• Failure to provide inmates white underwear in Virginia
• Failure to serve prisoners ‘juice or milk’ with lunch in a Georgia jail
• Failure to provide cons with clean linen and clothes three times per week in a Mississippi prison.

Which politician had the following quotes used to describe his time in office?

• “Gestapo tactics”
• “tyrannical”
• “running ‘roughshod over citizens, over communities.’”
• “endorsed the most extreme form of racialism”
• “relentless crusade”

If you guessed that I was listing quotes from moonbats with Bush Derangement Syndrome, you would be wrong. They were used to describe Deval Patrick’s stint as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration. Heck one of them even came from a genuine moonbat, Carol Moseley-Braun.

Check out Howie Carr’s latest column to see what we could expect under a Deval administration.

Others Blogging about this story:

Hub Politics

Fortunately, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 went down:

The Senate yesterday dashed efforts to give indigenous Hawaiians some of the same powers of self-governance granted to American Indians, with critics warning that it could lead to race-based privileges in a state known for its diversity.

A procedural vote fell four short of the 60 votes needed to keep the bill on the Senate floor. The legislation, promoted by Senator Daniel Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, over the past seven years, is now effectively dead for this session of Congress.

The vote was 56-to-41 in favor of proceeding with the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act. All 41 opposing votes were cast by Republicans. Thirteen Republicans and one independent joined 42 Democrats in supporting further action on the bill.

Thirteen Republicans voted for a bill described by the US Commission on Civil Rights thusly:

The US Commission on Civil Rights, in a May report, recommended against passage, saying it “would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups.”

John Fund has an excellent article describing the dangers of this bill:

The potential dangers of approving the Akaka bill–which has already won House passage in a previous Congress–are immense. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee warns that establishing “a new sovereign nation within the United States based solely on race . . . could turn the United States into the United Nations.” Linda Chavez, a former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warns that other groups could use the precedent of a new Native Hawaiian government to lodge their own demands. She notes that a group of Hispanic separatists in Arizona once tried to get legislation passed that would have barred anyone whose ancestors were not living in Arizona at the time of the 1848 Mexican War from living in most areas of the state.

You can probably guess the 13 voting for discrimination without too much trouble:

Cochran (R-MS), Coleman (R-MN), Collins (R-ME), Domenici (R-NM), Grassley (R-IA). Hagel (R-NE), Kyl (R-AZ), McCain (R-AZ), Murkowski (R-AK), Smith (R-OR), Snowe (R-ME), Specter (R-PA), Stevens (R-AK)

No surprise John McCain is the leader of this pack.  I shudder to think what a McCain presidency would be like.  McCain abhors free speech.  He supports tax cuts only grudgingly.  He supports racial spoils systems.  If you are even remotely conservative, I have no idea how you support a McCain nomination push outside of Hillary Clinton fear.

Is the illegal immigrant movement analogous to the civil rights movement of the 1960s?

Immigrant leaders defend their use of civil rights language, saying strong parallels exist between the two struggles. And they argue that their movement will ultimately become a powerful vehicle to fight for the rights of all American workers, regardless of national origin.

The immigrant demonstrations and the civil rights movement could not be more different. African Americans are US citizens, and they have every right to demand the same treatment that other citizens receive.  Illegal immigrants are criminals demanding rights for breaking the laws of our country.  Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, and other black leaders should be ashamed of themselves.  They know the difference between the movements, but they sold out to the Democratic Party a long time ago.

The other thing worth noting is how the illegal immigrant movement characterizes its goals.  You rarely hear them speak about their desire to become Americans.  The goal expressed in this snippet seems very representative: they want rights and citizenship to raise wages.  You have to wonder if the businesses clamoring for legalization realize that it will wipe out the cost advantages they currently enjoy.

More Abu Ghraib photos are coming:

The Defense Department has withdrawn its appeal challenging a district court order requiring it to turn over to civil rights groups 74 photographs and three videotapes depicting images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, officials said Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the department in October 2003, before the release of the first images from the prison nearly seven months later, looking for documents related to abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad.

The media pursue and publish any Abu Ghraib photos with religious zeal despite the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testifying he felt release could incite violence against US forces in the Middle East. On the other hand, they refused to publish the Danish cartoons because doing so would have been insensitive to Muslims and might have escalated the violence. Why the dichotomy?

Last week I pointed out what a hypocrite Harry Reid is. Now it’s Jimmy Carter’s turn (emphasis added):

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.

“Under the Bush administration, there’s been a disgraceful and illegal decision — we’re not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we’re spying on the American people,” Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.

“And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act,” he said.

The next day at Mrs. King’s high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the “secret government wiretapping” of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.

The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men’s rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the “inherent authority” to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is “conducted ‘primarily’ for foreign intelligence reasons.”

That description, some Republicans say, perfectly fits the Bush administration’s program to monitor calls from terror-linked people to the U.S.

The Truong case, however, involved surveillance that began in 1977, before the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a secret court for granting foreign intelligence warrants.

Democrats and some Republicans in Congress say FISA guidelines, approved in 1978 when Mr. Carter was president, are the only way the president may conduct surveillance on U.S. soil.

Administration officials say the president has constitutional authority to conduct surveillance without warrants in the name of national security. The only way Congress could legitimately curtail that authority, they argue, is through an amendment to the Constitution.

The administration’s view has been shared by previous Democrat administrations, including Mr. Carter’s.

These older politicians need to be reminded that all of their past actions and statements are easily acccesible via the Internet. The days of having three liberal networks and a few liberal newspapers protecting them are long gone. The sooner they realize that and start thinking before they speak, the better off they will be.

It’s time for Carter to stop embarrasing himself and go back to building houses. He is already one of the worst presidents this country has ever had. If his administration hadn’t sat by and watched while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and radical Islamists took over Iran, we might not be in this War on Terror to begin with.

Dear Sen. Reid:

I want to thank you for your efforts to protect my right to free speech. Filibustering the Patriot Act was a noble cause if you truly believe in civil rights. That said, as leader of the Democratic Party, stopping the culture of corruption starts with you. Please return Abramoff’s dirty money. You took money from a man’s client who has forever tainted the system. It would be criminal not to return it.

Sincerely - the Northeast Dilemma

Contact Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and let him know what you think of keeping money from crooked clients.

I caught this headline story this morning from USA Today. I seriously cannot stop laughing. My favorite line:

One activist has called Sheehan “the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement,” a reference to the civil rights heroine who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955.
What happens in Iraq the next weeks and months may determine whether the “Peace Mom” finds her own place in history, or becomes a footnote.

I would argue Sheehan won’t be a footnote. Once the right wing base ties her anti-democracy rants and lies around the neck of the Democratic Party, you can bet Ms. Sheehan will be a household name. Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing.

Left-wing “IT” boy, Barak Obama, puts his foot his mouth big time in an interview for Time mag:

“I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator,” [Barak] Obama said. “As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African-American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice.”

This, coming from a man who raised over a million dollars for a former Klansman who drops n-bombs on tv. Obama obviously wouldn’t know a good civil rights leader if he fell on one which makes him the perfect Democrat.

I am really starting to think that the GOP does have the votes to change the rules. Sen. Frist (R-TN) laid a big N-O on an impressive compromise by the moderates:

Under the proposal, circulated in writing, Republicans would have to pledge no change through 2006 in the Senate’s rules that allow filibusters against judicial nominees. For their part, Democrats would commit not to block votes on Bush’s Supreme Court or appeals court nominees during the same period, except in extreme circumstances.

Democrats would also clear the way for final votes on William H. Pryor Jr. for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and Janice Rogers Brown for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Both are among the nominees most strongly opposed by organized labor as well as civil rights and abortion rights groups and others that provide political support for the Democratic Party.

AND it looks like Sen. Ben Nelson is looking to 2006 (McCain grandstanding alert!):

Nelson’s spokesman, David DiMartino, declined to confirm the details of the compromise offer. He declined to say which other Democrats were willing to pledge to support the proposal, but a spokesman for Sen. Mark Pryor, Rodell Mollineaux, said the Arkansas lawmaker was “the No. 2 Democrat on this” effort at compromise.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Trent Lott, R-Miss., have both been vocal advocates of compromise.

I am starting to wonder if Democrats will filibuster at all. If the GOP changes the rules, that’s it. This story goes away and liberals start talking about Bush’s court packing scheme (Janice Rogers Brown gets a special guest spot in the Fahrenheit sequel). If they hold off until summer, they still have the right to filibuster Renqhist’s replacement and keep the story in the headlines. AND if Frist doesn’t have the votes, this compromise will pass regardless. Maybe Frist should bring up Rogers first and see if Nelson and McPain can break a filibuster….