Day: June 5, 2008

Minnesota Teens Draped in Confederate Flags Instead of Caps and Gowns

Trish

The Minnesota Three

Three Minnesota teens learned a big life lesson on graduation day. They weren’t allowed to march with their classmates after sticking a huge Confederate flag in everyone’s face in the school parking lot.

A festering racism is oozing out of the cracks in our country, just as Barack Obama is emerging as a symbol of a new way, an America 2.0

Seniors Dan Fredlin and Justin Thompson, both 18, and Joey Snyder, 17, were suspended and restricted from the diploma ceremony after arriving at John F. Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minn., Tuesday with the flags affixed to their cars. One of the teens had a flag hoisted on a 20-foot flagpole attached to his truck…

The school’s principal, Ron Simmons, who is black, made the decision to suspend the trio and ban them from the commencement, a decision school district officials affirmed.

“What is not acceptable is driving through the parking lot and waving the Confederate flag for the purpose of inciting a response,” Rick Kaufman, a spokesman for the Bloomington Public School district, told ABC News.

Kaufman cited a pair of state laws to justify the discipline decision, including the students’ willful disruption of the rights of others to an education and their endangerment of students and school property.

At the same time, as Jon reported, plans were unveiled for a huge Confederate flag to be flown by the Sons of Confederate Veterans along the I-4 corridor near Tampa.

The modern-day symbolism of the Confederate flag is a hard concept to express. Jon ended his post, “Time to find a new logo for pride in the South” but the Minnesota teens were hardly demonstrating that. They say that see something non-regional — and much sexier.

Kellie Rezac, a friend of the three suspended seniors, helped organize the unsuccessful protest….

Both Thompson and Rezac acknowledged the opinion of some that the flag is a symbol of hate, but said that there is a group of students in the class who celebrate the Confederate flag as a symbol of some stereotypically Southern lifestyles. “It’s country music, we have a lot of fun, we go mudding,” she said, describing “mudding” as pushing 4x4s off-road.

In popular culture, the Confederate flag has been celebrated — as a hood ornamentation on the General Lee in the television show “The Dukes of Hazzard” for example — but also used to depict racism and racist characters.

“The whole racism thing is a bandwagon idea that everyone jumped on that has very loose wheels,” she said.

Actually honey, to say that flag represents anything but racism — and white privilege borne on the back of the most exploitive, illegitimate, and dishonorable system conceived since the dark ages — is to just skim the surface. The Dukes of Hazzard was a Hollywood image of a South that exists in the minds of people who don’t live here. It’s unfortunate this “makes a better story” version struck a cord with young people like these three in Minnesota.

A festering racism is oozing out of the cracks in our country, just as Barack Obama is emerging as a symbol of a new way, an America 2.0. It’s not surprising that these concealed and unaddressed resentments would work their way to the surface now. The big question is, do we do what we have always done, and bemoan (us) ignorant racist Southerners, or do we face our national shame, our nationwide failing? Only one of these paths leads to the way we all wish these Midwestern three teens had chosen.

Hey Wonk, Play VP Madness — the Game

Buck Banks

The folks over at Congressional Quarterly must have a lot of time on their hands. They’ve created a game called VP Madness that is just made for political junkies like my wonkish colleagues at Pensito Review.

The game is based on a bracket system similar to those used for the March Madness of the NCAA finals. The CQ experts have come up with 32 veep candidates for Barack Obama, paired them up and the rest is up to you.

Getcher game face on!

Poll: Canadians Would Elect Obama

Buck Banks

You know the campaign has entered the silly season (as if it ever left) when some outfit actually spends money to find out, if they were just for a miraculous moment, an American who Canadians would vote for in the U.S. presidential election. As if there aren’t enough meaningless polls already out there, U.K.-based YouGov surveyed a little over 1,000 of our neighbors to the north, and they overwhelmingly chose Barack Obama.
survey.jpg
According to the pollsters, Obama would take 47 percent of the Canadian vote with 17 percent going to Republican candidate John McCain. What about the other 36 percent of respondents? They either said they didn’t know who they would vote for or they got all mean-assed Quebecois and refused to answer.

It is this last segment of the respondent pool that concerns me. Hey, it’s a survey, Mr. Canuck, lighten up! What could they have been thinking? That if they chose the white guy, they’d appear to be racist? That if they chose the black guy, they’d appear — what? I bet if they had to choose between Neil Diamond and Neil Young as their country’s greatest living musical export, they’d have an opinion.

But the survey findings get even more sinister:

The poll also said 36 percent of respondents agreed the U.S. was a “force for good” in the world, 34 percent of Canadians called America a “force for evil,” while the rest didn’t know.

Wait, you’re telling me that one in three Canadians doesn’t have an opinion about whether their neighbors to the south are a force for good or evil? Come on, everybody has an opinion about that. Just ask the French or the Iranians (answer: evil, really evil).

Oh, they did:

The poll showed that the U.S. was described as a force for good by 25 percent of Germans, 28 percent of French, 33 percent of the British and 49 percent of the Italians.

Thirty-five percent of the British, 40 percent of the French, 27 percent of the Italians and 39 percent of the Germans called America a force for evil.

There seems to be something wrong with these pollsters. They can’t manage to get more than 70 percent of respondents to respond except in Italy, where 75 percent expressed an opinion. Every other country had a response rate in the 60 percentile region. Something ain’t right when more than 35 percent of your pool doesn’t respond.

But at least there was some consistency in the findings. Respondents in every country polled chose Obama over McCain. How little the Europeans want a president from George Bush’s party was evident in McCain’s numbers — from a low of 6 percent in Germany to a high of 15 percent in Italy.

Obama to Retain Dean as DNC Chair

Jon Ponder

Barack Obama is now the head of the Democratic Party, and the chairman of the DNC serves at his discretion. Officially, at least, he has decided to let Howard Dean stay on as chairman. Here is a statement from the Obama campaign:

“Senator Obama appreciates the hard work that Chairman Dean has done to grow our party at the grassroots level and looks forward to working with him as the chairman of the Democratic Party as we go forward.”

Dr. Dean is reviled by many Floridians because of the hamfisted way the DNC handled the Republicans’ manipulation of the primary date earlier this year. Greg Sargant at Talking Points Memo suggests that Obama is retaining Dean because “Dean has a power base built up among state party chairs across the country who love his 50-state strategy of investing in them.”

But when a presumptive nominee is not happy with a DNC chair’s performance, the nominee will retain the chairman while sending in a loyalist to run things. Sargent notes that Obama has “installed his man Paul Tewes to serve as his eyes and ears at the organization, a sign that Obama is moving quickly to re-shape the party in his own image. Obama’s party, it turns out, will include Dean at the top of the DNC.”

Or so it seems.

World’s Largest Swastika, Um, Confederate Flag to Fly in Tampa

Jon Ponder


When I was a kid growing up in North Carolina, I bought into the idea that the Confederate flag was a symbol of regional pride. The meaning of symbols can change over time, however, and whatever the flag may have stood for in the past is completely irrelevant now.

Today, like the Nazi swastika, this flag is an icon for 1) violence, 2) hatred and 3) failure. So why anyone would have this kind of pride in it is hard to fathom:

[…]

Gay Marriage Legal in California for At Least Four Months – Couples from Other States Are Welcomed

Jon Ponder

First the bad news: On Tuesday, the California Secretary of State’s office confirmed that supporters an anti-mariage ballot initiative had gathered enough signatures to place the initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot. If the measure passes, the state constitution would be amended to ban marriage for gay people.
Unlike Massachusetts, where gay marriage is also legal, California has no residency requirement for marriage, so gay couples from across the country are welcome to be married here.
Yesterday, however, the state Supreme Court denied an appeal by GOP-connected political operatives to stay its ruling legalizing marriage until the vote in November.

That means marriage will be legal for gay couples in California from June 16 at least until Nov. 4.

Unlike Massachusetts, where gay marriage is also legal, California has no residency requirement for marriage, so gay couples from across the country are welcome to be married here.

Marriage activists predict that couples from other states who get married in California will challenge the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibits states from recognizing gay marriages from other states. This appears to be an obvious violation of the Constitution’s “full faith and credit clause.”

Ironically, DOMA was the work product of a handful of powerful adulterers in Washington. It was written by thrice-married, then Rep. Bob Barr, who is the Libertarian Party presidential nominee this year. It was rammed through the Senate by Majority Leader Bob Dole, who left his first wife for a stewardess, and through the House by Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was concurrently having an extramarital affair — and signed into law by Pres. Clinton at the time of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Out of state political groups with connections to the Republican Party are thought to be behind the anti-marriage initiative, which they hope will increase turnout for John McCain.These groups paid over $1 million to workers who gathered signatures in supermarket parking lots in rural districts. A pair of polls on the amendment in the last few weeks offered precisely opposite results. A Los Angeles Times survey found that 54 percent of voters were in favor of the measure, while a Field Poll found that 51 percent of voters were against it.

Courting the Scots-Irish: Obama Kicks Off His Campaign in Southwest Virginia

Jon Ponder

The Obama campaign has underscored its intent to flip red state Virginia to blue in November this year by kicking off the general election with an appearance today in the state’s southwestern Appalachian region, courting the votes of the Scots-Irish, a group that voted against him in huge margins in Democratic primaries in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania:

Obama won the Virginia primary [on Feb. 12] by a 64-35 margin, but he lost overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton in the state’s rural Ninth Congressional District by 33 points, one of the first signs of a pattern of vulnerability among white working-class voters that continued to nag him throughout later primary states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

David “Mudcat” Saunders, the Roanoke-based political strategist who has advised prominent politicians on how to reach out to rural voters, said southwest Virginia is “a logical place for him to start” because Obama will need to appeal to those voters not just in Virginia, but in other crucial battleground states.

“If Virginia truly is in play, it’s a practical move for him because he can get the western Pennsylvania bunch, the southeast Ohio bunch,” Saunders said. “It’s the same region. It’s the same bunch of people, they just live in different states.”

“These are the people around the country who decide the president of the United States, and they are neglected,” he added. “The Republicans take them for granted, and the Democrats don’t try to come get ’em. God bless Barack Obama for for trying to go get ’em.”

Obama will be campaigning in Bristol with former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat who did well in Virginia’s southern mountains. Warner is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by John Warner, a Republican. No word whether Sen. Jim Webb, a leading advocate of Scots-Irish culture, will campaign with Obama.

Both Webb and Warner have been mentioned as possible running mates for Obama.