Tag: Racism

ABC News, Breitbart Now Squabbling over His Role as Election Night Commentator

Jon Ponder
Shirley Sherrod’s attorney’s likened Breitbart’s ABC invitation to “giving a Klansman an award for burning a cross on Shirley Sherrod’s house.”

ABC News’ misguided plan to use racist blogger Andrew Breitbart as a political commentator on election night continues to backfire.

First, ABC News got an earful about it from the likes of, well, us and many others, which forced them to relegate Breitbart from the main news set to online coverage.

Now, predictably, Breitbart and ABC News are exchanging angry emails about his role tomorrow night:

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Breitbart Hosts Tea Bagger Rally in Beverly Hills and Racism Breaks Out

Jon Ponder

Yeah, big shock. I know.

In August, the RNC abruptly canceled a fundraiser in Beverly Hills that was to be headlined — not by GOP top-draw candidates like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina — but by one of the new lead GOP race-baiters, Andrew Breitbart.

Man with tea bags stapled to hat photographed by Los Angeles Times at Beverly Hills tea party rally in September 2010
Man with tea bags stapled to hat photographed by Los Angeles Times at Beverly Hills tea party rally in September 2010
Breitbart was all over the news at the time because his fingerprints were all over the racist scandals confronting the GOP and its Fox channel on cable, including particularly the video that had bee deceptively edited to portray Shirley Sherrod, a civil rights activist and federal employee, as being racist toward white people. The RNC insisted then that the fundraiser would be rescheduled, but, as I predicted then, “…it’s safe to say the RNC is rescheduling its Breitbart fundraiser for either the 12th of Never or possibly the 14th of Not-Gonna-Happen.”

It wasn’t a fundraiser, but last weekend, Breitbart did attend a tea bagger rally in Beverly Hills. There were a few celebrities there — if you define “celebrity” down to people lower in Hollywood claim to fame than the Kardashians, by which I mean Pat Boone and Victoria Jackson.

(And this was literally a tea bagger rally, as the Los Angeles Times photographed one attendee with tea bags stapled to his headgear.)

Breitbart spoke, of course, as did serveral others but the white people on the stage stood aside to allow one of the few African Americans in the crowd of 200 get to the heart of what animated the tea party movement from the outset and what drew them all together in Beverly Hills that morning:

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Verbatim

Trish

This is obviously scaring white people. What they have done is essentially try to put off-limits any parts of the city where these main tea partiers believe you might be able to encounter, dare I say, black people.

–– Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on MSNBC, describing a post by tea bagger Bruce Majors, which Majors said was intended as informational to participants in Glenn Beck’s “Million Moron” rally. The post listed subway lines and neighborhoods to avoid (diverse ones), and warned that most cab drivers are Arab or African. It also included a map showing the “safe” areas, which were mainly around the Washington Mall. City leaders countered that millions of tourists visit happily every year, and that Majors is out of touch with the times, since many of the areas he said to avoid are the hippest and trendiest.

Martin Luther King is the Farthest Thing from Glenn Beck’s Mind

Trish

It was not my intention to select 8-28 because of the Martin Luther King tie. It is the day he made that speech. I had no idea until I announced it.

— Glenn Beck, talk radio and FOX News personality, stating the obvious. No one doubts that the date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was outside Beck’s frame of reference when he planned his “Restoring Honor” tea bagger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s world-changing speech.

Am I Illegal? Are You?

Trish

LibertyIf “birthright” citizens, as anti-immigrant Republicans and tea baggers call them, are declared illegal, how far back will we go? Will I, and other descendants of illegals, become retroactive non-citizens?

My mother’s father came to this country illegally from Italy in the World War I era wave that brought most of the people who later produced such cultural touchstones as the Godfather epics, Little Italies in major cities, pizza as fast food, and the reality show Jersey Shore.

On his first attempt to become an American, my teenage grandfather spent the crossing in the hold of the ocean liner George Washington alternately trying to memorize the identity on the papers he purchased illegally and vomiting from seasickness. When the boat finally landed, he was held at Ellis Island and found to be without papers — a WOP — and shipped back to Italy.

There is no point in trying to figure out who is worthy of a piece of the American pie

Many months later, after earning enough money to try again, he made a second crossing, studying his illegal papers until he had his false I.D. down perfectly. He had also made connections with Italians in this country who vouched for him at Ellis Island by telling the authorities that he had both family and a job here.

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Tea Baggers Exposed Gaming the Digg System

Trish

digg

Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg and many similar sites, you can vote for the stories you want to see featured prominently, or in this case, those you want “buried.” As AlterNet reported:

It’s easier to tell you what the group is against than what it’s for: Obama, progressives, diplomacy, health care reform, immigrants, science, the separation of church and state, acknowledgment of human-induced climate change, the government, pro-choice protections, public schools, and higher education. They also claim to believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, and that he was born in Kenya.

Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content).

The immensity of the impact is commensurate with the reach of Digg. Again, according to Alternet:

It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site…Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

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Epic Fail: Race-Baiter Breitbart Keynotes Tea Bagger ‘Diversity’ Rally – Even Whites Fail to Show

Jon Ponder

Tea Baggers held a “Uni-Tea” (get it?) rally in Philadelphia last weekend for which the main draw was Andrew Breitbart, the newest racist phenom in tea baggery since, well, two weeks ago when Mark Williams was forced to resign from the Tea Party Express, the Republican Party group that astroturfed the tea party bus tours, after he exposed his own virulent racism in his infamous “Colored People” letter.

So, hosting a rally against racism that starred Breitbart, the David Duke of new media — how do you think that worked out?

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RNC Beverly Hills Fundraiser to Feature Race-Baiting Tea Bagger Andrew Breitbart

Jon Ponder

Beverly Wilshire Hotel, viewed from the north on Rodeo Drive
Beverly Wilshire Hotel, viewed looking south on Rodeo Drive
Talking Points Memo has obtained an invitation being circulated by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele for a fundraising event in Beverly Hills next month that will feature Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing propagandist behind the doctored videos in the ACORN and Shirley Sherrod scandals:

invitation-rnc-breitbart-eventThe fundraising event, billed as an “Election Countdown,” will take place from August 12-14 in Beverly Hills, California, and will also feature other politicians such as California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, and Nevada Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Sandoval. Steele and Breitbart are scheduled to co-headline a welcome reception on the first evening, August 12…

RNC spokesman Doug Heye confirmed to TPMDC that the event is going on, but declined to comment further on the nature of fundraising events…

The Four Seasons hotel company, which owns the Beverly Wilshire, has also confirmed to TPMDC that the event is booked for those days, but was unable to confirm a guest list.

I guess the RNC figures, what the heck, we weren’t going to get votes from blacks and others who oppose racism in California anyway, so why not bring out the David Duke of new media to raise money for the party in the heart of the Southern California liberal enclave.

(And it’s fitting somehow that the event will be held in the hotel that was the setting for “Pretty Woman,” the Disney movie that sent a powerful message to young girls that all they had to do to find fulfillment in life was become a street whore and and then fall in love with a wealthy john.)

It will be interesting to see how the city fathers and mothers of Beverly Hills deal with their city being tarred by association with an event featuring a notorious racist, not to mention the protest rally that is sure to be scheduled for the street in front of the hotel, at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, on August 12.

Case Closed: Tea Party Ex-Chair Issues Racist Rant in ‘Colored People’ Letter to Abraham Lincoln

Jon Ponder

photo-black-faceOn Wednesday, Mark Williams, the outgoing chairman of Tea Party Express — the astroturf group operated by the Republican Party PR firm Russo Marsh & Rogers that organized the three, secretly corporate-funded nationwide tea party bus tours last year — made headlines by calling the NAACP “professional race baiters” and a “vile racist group.” On Thursday, he upped the ante by posting a satiric letter (available, at least for now, on his blog at marktalk.com) from the “Colored People” of today to Pres. Abraham Lincoln:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

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