Month: August 2010

Notice in the video of this tea-bagger style rally against the Park 51 Islamic center near City Hall in Manhattan, that one of the few — if not the only African American in the crowd is harassed and even threatened.

They will say he provoked them by daring to wear a white Muslim-ish cap where the crowd could see it. But given the tea baggers’ record on race, why should they be given the benefit of a doubt?

To their credit, no one spat on him or called him a “nigger” loudly enough to be heard on the video.

Here’s a play by play of the incident in the video, via TPM LiveWire :

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Wow, it almost seems like the ground is collapsing under the anti-Islamic hate movement that Republicans had manufactured to help get out their base in the mid-terms this November.

First, on Sunday, George Will, perhaps the leading regurgitator of conservative conventional wisdom in Washington, declared the fervor over Park 51 “an August story, that is, it’s a slow news time … And you can always tell a fundamentally weak story because it turns on sensitivity.”

Yesterday, Dr. Ron Paul chastised the tea bagger base for buying into Republican spin demonizing Islam.

And now Newt Gingrich, the biggest rat in the GOP-Tea Party, has jumped ship, reneging on appearing at an anti-Park 51 rally planned for Sept. 11 — just one week after he raised the hopes of the GOP faithful by comparing the liberal, peace-seeking Muslims behind the Park 51 Islamic center with Nazis:

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RonPaul.com:

Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable.

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I hope independent and liberal voters in California will take note that the California Republican Party — which is having trouble attracting voters who aren’t old straight white men — chose to hold its convention at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego, which is owned by Doug Manchester, who is famous for providing the seed money to get Prop 8 off the ground.

It was his donation of $125,000 to anti-gay activists early in 2008 that made it possible for them to pay professional petitioners to gather the required number of signatures to put Prop 8 on the ballot that year. When asked why he made the donation, Manchester was the soul of holier-than-thou piety, saying he was motivated by “my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church.”

You can guess what happened about six months later, but here it is anyway:

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