Race Issues

She's been off the set of Starting Point for less than two months, but former CNN host Soledad O'Brien is stirring up controversy yet again. In a Harvard Institute of Politics video, O'Brien arrogantly lectured "white people" who want her to "just see beyond race."

O'Brien, now a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, gave her reaction to the "white" critics of her documentaries on race: "And I was like, again, 'okay white person, this is a conversation that you're clearly uncomfortable with. And I have no problem seeing race, and I think we should talk about race.'" [Video below the break.]

NPR's Scott Horsley filed an unashamedly slanted report on Thursday's Morning Edition about the former national field director for Obama's reelection campaign trying to boost voter turnout among Hispanics in Texas as a means of helping Democratic candidates. The only talking heads that Horsley featured during the segment were the former Obama campaign official, Jeremy Bird, and a fellow of the left-wing Center for American Progress.

The correspondent mentioned only in passing that "some Texas Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will be competitive in their state anytime soon."

At the Daily Beast on Sunday, liberal Peter Beinart called on Democrats and liberals to "strongly denounce" former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian's insult campaign against Palmetto State Governor Nikki Haley, or else "Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse."

It's too early to test Beinart's long-term prediction (such bigotry is bad enough already), but the denunciations he desires are nowhere to be found, even as Harpootlian has doubled and tripled down on his original wish to see Haley sent “back to wherever the hell she came from.” Meanwhile, the establishment press has virtually ignored Harpootlian's unhinged harangues.

There are times when I really think I live in different country than liberal media members.

Take Al Sharpton for example who in his most recent Lean Forward ad for MSNBC said that America isn’t living up to the Pledge of Allegiance’s creed of “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, noted a shameful anniversary for the paper -- the 10th anniversary of the Jayson Blair scandal -- but not without calling her paper as "world-class" as the scandal itself.

But to the paper's liberal readership, the more shameful mistake involved reporter Judy Miller's overly credulous reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction during the run-up to the Iraq War.

On Election Day in South Carolina, as Republican Mark Sanford seeks to regain his old congressional seat, Mika Brzezinski did her best to stop Joe Scarborough from mentioning an ugly slur that the Chairman of the state's Democratic party had made against Republican Governor Nikki Haley.

Former South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian was caught in controversy this week as he pledged to send Haley—daughter of Indian immigrants—"back to wherever the hell she came from.” According to the Morning Joe panel, Harpootlian has apologized for that remark.  But Harpootlian has never apologized for his 2012 remark, comparing Haley with Adolf Hitler's mistress Eva Braun.  When Scarborough began to cite that slur, Mika sought to silence him. Brzezinski actually resorted to the schoolkid technique of repeating "bah, bah, bah, bah" in order to drown Scarborough out, adding "we don't need to repeat it." View the video after the jump.   

In a web interview after his appearance on ABC's “This Week” yesterday, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who suddenly withdrew after being nominated by President Barack Obama to be his first Secretary of Commerce in 2009, was asked the following about freshman U.S. Senator Ted Cruz: "Do you think he represents most Hispanics with his politics?"

His answer (video is at link) follows the jump:

It's not often that yours truly visits Huffington Post. One of those rare occasions occurred early today as I was preparing the post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) about South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian relishing the idea that his party's candidate for Palmetto State Governor in 2014 might send current Republican Governor Nikki Haley "back to wherever the hell she came from."

In writing about Harpootlian's response to the controversy over his insensitive and arguably racist and nativist remark, HuffPo's Alana Horowitz, who serves as its Front Page Editor, wrote that Haley "is no stranger to scrutiny over her ethnic and religious background." To what sort of "scrutiny" did Horowitz refer involving Haley's "ethnic and religious background"? See after the jump:

Do you remember when the musician Prince changed his stage name to a symbol as a form of protest against his music label? Since no one could pronounce it, he was generally referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince”  in the press. 

The immigration debate took a similar absurd turn yesterday thanks to the Los Angeles Times which announced to the world that it would not only cease referring to people who had violated American immigration laws as “illegal immigrants,” it would also refrain from using the latest politically correct term “undocumented” to describe them as well.

You think it's tough being a white man in America today?

The next time you ponder that, consider a casting call advertisement placed on Craigslist Monday for a new kids show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation requesting interested actors be "Any race except Caucasian":

New York Times economics reporter Annie Lowrey's story on the front of Monday's Business section has a headline that just begs for the old joke ("World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit") on the Times's traditional knee-jerk liberalism: "Recession Worsened Wealth Gap For Races."

Millions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish recovery that followed. But the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute.

They must be paying by the word over at Politico. It's difficult to come up with another explanation as to why reporter Jonathan Martin would slog through about 3,100 words on an item entitled "Black pols stymied in Obama era." He could have easily summarized why this is the case in eight words: "Because Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama." Oh, he could have added a few more, namely "and everybody knows Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama."

Since he didn't limit himself, yours truly will note a few things Martin still left out, identify a few interesting points that were made, and then quote certain naive and/or inflammatory statements contained in Martin's mess.

On Thursday for Friday's print edition, the New York Times carried a weakly headlined but well-written story entitled "U.S. Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination" on its front page. Written by Sharon LaFraniere with the help of three others, it laid out how what began in 1997 as a class-action suit by black farmers (Pigford v. Glickman) claiming they had suffered discrimination at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture "became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms." Moreover, LaFraniere covered how the scope of the litigation grew "to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers" to the tune of over 90,000 claims and potential ultimate taxpayer cost of over $4.4 billion, in the process morphing into a vehicle for the Obama administration to unjustifiably dole out taxpayer money to as many people and constituent groups as possible. It is worth reading the entire story, though it will make just about anyone concerned about the financial and cultural future of this nation shudder.

The Times coverage indeed "vindicates" the late Andrew Breitbart, whose Big Government blog exposed the fraud associated with Pigford, but that vindication is hardly satisfying. We're supposed to be impressed that the paper finally got around to substantively covering it, and that the paper even noted the "Public criticism (which) came primarily from conservative news outlets like Breitbart.com and from Congressional conservatives like Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who described the program as rife with fraud." I don't see why.

Salon's David Sirota, who on Tuesday wrote a column called "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American" and doubled down on Wednesday with "I still hope the bomber is a white American" (respectively noted by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters here and here), has predictably continued his incoherent rants. In a subsequent column, he wrote about how the "Boston aftermath brings out America’s worst prejudices." In his latest offering, with no sense of irony, circus clown Sirota tells readers that "we can't let ourselves get swept up in the media circuses that follow" (I'm not going to link to either example of dreadful dreck; readers with strong stomachs can plug the items in quotes just noted into a web search).

Apparently attempting to poison the national discussion in multimedia fashion, Sirota tweeted his belief on Thursday that any conservative who sympathizes with and supports the people of Boston and Massachusetts during this difficult time must be a hypocrite (HT Twitchy.com):

Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song.

Paisley performed the song as a dialogue with rapper LL Cool J, now a star on the CBS drama "NCIS: LA." He says he wrote the song when he felt he had to defend wearing a T-shirt celebrating the country band Alabama, a shirt with the Confederate flag on it. In the song, he tries to suggest to a black man he met that the flag just says he's a fan of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

There comes a point when one has to wonder if Bill Maher is willing to say anything, no matter how disgusting or controversial, to attract viewers to his HBO program.

On Thursday, Maher published a piece wherein he stated, and I quote, "It turns out that Ben Carson is as stupid as every other conservative hero...Remember, this is the Great Black Hope of the GOP."

Music critic Jon Caramanica reviewed country star Brad Paisley's latest album "Wheelhouse," in "Taking Country Less Conservative" for the Arts section of Wednesday's New York Times. Caramanica gave Paisley backhanded compliments for "openmindedness" while insulting the genre of country music as rigidly conservative (Caramanica has previously given backhanded praised to country music itself, for not being as homophobic as some people think).

These are country music’s postmilitarization years. A decade ago, there were songs about strong soldiers and a just war, weeping soldiers and unimpeachable ideology -- the genre latched onto the political moment and held fast like a remora.

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others.”

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain responded to this nonsense on Fox News's Hannity Tuesday stating, "It's laughable what Chris Matthews is saying...Maybe he doesn't have enough black friends who's telling him the truth" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Dr. Benjamin Carson made a comment on the Mark Levin radio show Monday guaranteed to invoke scorn from media members across the fruited plain.

When Levin asked, "A lot of white liberals just don't like it, do they," Carson responded, "They’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Civil rights attorney and talk radio host Leo Terrell got into quite a heated exchange with Sean Hannity Monday evening.

During a segment about the double standard by which African-American conservatives and liberals are treated by the media, Terrell called Dr. Ben Carson Hannity's "puppet" telling his host, "You created a monster" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews seems to think that only white people can be racist.

On Monday’s Hardball, he actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At the Weekly Standard's blog today, Daniel Halper relayed a pool reporter's notes from the Easter service President Barack Obama and his family attended this morning. The highlights from the Rev. Dr. Luis Leon's sermon" included the following statement: "It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back ... for blacks to be back in the back of the bus ... for women to be back in the kitchen ... for immigrants to be back on their side of the border."

What follows the jump is the report on the event from Stacy A. Anderson at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press (produced in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

How quickly might a writer be fired or reprimanded for mocking the appearance of a group of minorities as they celebrated their team's victory at a professional sporting event?

Consider that as you read sports website SB Nation's "White People Celebrate Heat Loss in Exceedingly White Fashion."

We've come to expect this sort of thing from MSNBC, but the Associated Press should be ashamed of itself. In a story about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) signing into law a new voter ID law requiring a photo ID to vote-- which may be provided free-of-charge to indigent Virginians, by the way -- the AP strongly suggested the bill is an attempt by Virginia Republicans to prevent a Democratic presidential candidate from winning the state in 2016.

"Republican majorities in the Virginia House and Senate pushed the bill to passage one year after a more modest GOP-sponsored voter identification law failed to prevent President Barack Obama from winning Virginia for the second presidential election in a row and a Democratic U.S. Senate victory," the AP noted in the fourth paragraph of their March 27 story. As you can see in the full story pasted below, this was in the context of hyping a liberal Democrat's charge that requiring voter ID is akin to Jim Crow-era  disenfranchisement efforts (story accessed via FoxNews.com, emphases mine):

MSNBC’s Toure Neblett last weekend mocked Dr. Benjamin Carson as a token “black friend” to Republicans admired only to “assuage their guilt” for past racial indiscretions.

On Fox News’s America Live Tuesday, Carson struck back at his liberal media critics saying that he’s no “Uncle Tom” (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Chris Matthews’ week of hateful speech concluded on March 23 with the liberal MSNBC host going after Tea Party favorite Rep. Michele Bachmann. 

Speaking on Friday, Matthews disgustingly, albeit all too predictably asserted that Bachmann’s criticism of President Obama was motivated by racist beliefs.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]