Race Issues

Egotistical musicians often exaggerate their political influence, none moreso than the nattering, narcissistic rapper Kanye West. He has compared himself in global stature to Apple founder Steve Jobs, and has titled his latest album “Yeesus.”

Rolling Stone magazine has posted part of a West song titled “I Am a God,” where West raps that Jesus is the “Most High,” but he’s a “close high.”

Amid the debate over immigration reform and media predictions that the Republican Party will never again win a national election due to demographic shifts in the country, correspondent Tom Costello appeared on Friday's NBC Today to eagerly promote a new study: "You know, by 2043, just three decades from now, the Census Bureau says whites will be a minority....a changing complexion that will have huge, social, political and economic implications for the entire country."

Costello remarked: "Far from the 50s, a new kaleidoscope of color....For the year ending July 2012, the Asian population expanded by 530,000 people, African Americans added 560,000, and the Hispanic population grew by the most, 1.1 million people. Non-Hispanic whites, long the dominant demographic group in the country, added only 175,000 people to their ranks, and for the first time, deaths, by a slim margin, out-paced births for whites..."

The laziness from the folks at NBC News has reached a new low for their sister network MSNBC. On Tuesday June 11, All In w/ Chris Hayes featured an on-screen graphic labeling arch-segregationist Governor George Wallace (D-Ala.) as a Republican. Alerted to the error via Twitter, Hayes apologized this morning.

In a segment marking the 50th anniversary of Governor Wallace personally attempting to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, host Chris Hayes showed 50-year-old video of Wallace opposing integration, his name appearing onscreen tagged with (R) denoting him as a Republican. Hayes’ analysis of Wallace was correct, labeling him “obviously the villain in this story” but the sloppiness at the “Lean Forward” network minimizes his important point by falsely allowing his already liberal audience to believe Gov. Wallace was a Republican, when in fact he was a Democrat. [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.]

Jury selection in the second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman began today and there’s no doubt that some people cannot wait for a circus to begin for both political and ratings reasons.

While much attention has been paid to the role of long-time race-baiter Al Sharpton and his employer MSNBC in trying to inflame people, another leader in trying to get justice to miscarry is the cable channel Black Entertainment Television which since Barack Obama emerged as a candidate for president in 2007 has made occasional forays into news coverage. On Friday of last week, the network aired a 30-minute special called “Justice for Trayvon: Our Son Is Your Son” trying to hype up the trial.

During the Wednesday edition of his show Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who once called former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin “profoundly stupid,” appeared not to know that there are two current U.S. senators who are of African descent.

“We don’t have any African Americans in the United States Senate, which I think is a disgrace,” Matthews said before being corrected by a producer and one of his guests. Before his mistake was fixed, Matthews also disclosed that he, as a resident of Maryland, voted for Republican Michael Steele when he ran for Senate in 2006 because he was black.

CNN's Piers Morgan continues to find every way he can to boost his gun control agenda. On Tuesday night's Piers Morgan Live, he compared the Newtown shooting photos to the open casket of Emmett Till in the 1950's and implied that America would need to see the gruesomeness of the shooting in order to change its mind on guns.

Till was a black teenager who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, whose mother insisted on having an open funeral casket to show the country the barbarity of the racism and hatred behind the killing. Newtown parents have objected to the publication of photos of their slain children, and Morgan insisted he would "respect" their views. However, he went on to cite Michael Moore and argue that America would need to see the pictures: [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Just when you thought the folks at MSNBC couldn't go any lower in defending the current White House resident, someone there stoops to new depths.

On the Martin Bashir show Wednesday, the host actually said that Republicans are using the acronym "IRS" as the latest dog whistle in their "war against the black man in the White House" (video follows with fuller transcribed highlights and commentary):

Politico's headline didn't even proclaim that Republicans are "racist" and "old-fashioned," but CNN's Carol Costello had no problem touting the invective of some GOP critics while putting it all under Politico's name.

Costello tweeted on Monday, "Politico: GOP closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned." The Politico article was titled "Report: How GOP lost young voters" and described the findings of a report by the College Republican National Committee on how the party was viewed by young voters after the election.

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio won't be subject to a recall election. It wasn't even close, though two press reports, one at the Associated Press and another at the Los Angeles Times, failed to accurately convey how seriously organizers failed. Both reports also trotted out an "if only" excuse which doesn't pass the stench test, let alone the smell test.

Neither outlet gave an accurate impression of how seriously the recall drive failed. Organizers needed 335,317 valid signatures, but Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times (in a "Feathered Bastard" report, no less) reported earlier in the week that the recall movement's manager "estimates that the recall now needs 90,000 more signatures to have a cushion in addition to the 335,317 necessary to force a recall." In other words, the magic turn-in number, unreported by both the AP and the Times, was really 425,000 and change.

Earlier this afternoon, Matt Sheffield at NewsBusters noted that "The owner of Newsweek, the troubled liberal weekly news magazine, has confirmed reports that it is trying to unload the money-losing operation even despite the fact that it jettisoned its print edition last year."

A Tuesday morning puff piece on poor, besieged, downtrodden, regretful Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder posted by Daniel Klaidman at the Daily Beast, Newsweek's online umbrella, perfectly illustrates why the operation continues to shed readers and contributed mightily to a reported $8.8 million loss last quarter. Get out the waist-high-boots for this one:

Jason Richwine -- who recently resigned from the Heritage Foundation over objectively observing, in the words of a Fox News report, "that Hispanics had a lower IQ than American whites, and that their descendants would too" -- call wherever your new office is. Or maybe go left and apply for a job at Mother Jones.

At that the arch-liberal rag, Erika Eichelberger, in objecting to a congressional proposal relating to the Food Stamp program, has reacted hysterically and predictably. But in the process, she also acknowledged a sad reality, which is a really dangerous thing to do in LeftyLand (HT Twitchy):

MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson on Saturday called Virginia Republican lieutenant governor nominee E.W. Jackson a "black puppet...His mouth is moving but white supremacist ideology is floating through it."

Such occurred on the Ed Show (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On his May 23 program, the Rev. Al Sharpton’s PoliticsNation panel turned to the thorny issue of race in politics. As could be expected, it was not a balanced discussion as Sharpton’s panel was an Amen pew of liberal pundits: the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and left-wing XM Radio host Joe Madison.

For his part, Milbank snarked that the GOP is made up of “a coalition of white southern men,” but even more outrageously, Madison railed that Republican leaders “really don’t know people who look different than they are.” Sharpton, a Baptist minister, did not rebuke his guests for bearing false witness.

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.