After telling a hometown audience that he and his wife were born in local hospitals he added, “nobody has ever asked to see my birth certificate.”
This wasn’t an inadvertent slip; it was a carefully considered attempt to ingratiate himself with people who think Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who pals around with terrorists. Writing in Mother Jones, Adam Serwer put it this way:
This is a necessary device for a Republican politician who wants to rile up the base without seeming like a lunatic, because the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States is still held by nearly half of self-identified Republicans even after the very public release of the president’s birth certificate. Birtherism remains the most frank and widespread evidence of racial animus among some of the president’s critics. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes inThe Atlantic this month, the birthers, strapped in their waxen wings, aim for nothing less than the sun: “If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.”
And here’s the beauty of it all. If a leftist or a representative of the lamestream media accuses you of questioning the authenticity of the president’s birth certificate you can issue a simple denial. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was just telling the crowd where I was born.
If they press the issue, you tell them that you have never questioned the president’s Born in the USA claim.
Will journalists accept this explanation?
Not necessarily. Moderate reporters, fearful of having the L-word branded into their foreheads, may give the Republican presidential candidate a pass. They will ask the question, “Did he just make a birther joke?” But they won’t commit to an answer.
Conservatives, not wishing to discredit a still-useful birther movement, will try to shift the discussion to more “substantial” matters, like the deficit.
Nothing is more substantial than character. By pandering to the ignorance and bigotry of the most fearful segment of the electorate, Governor Romney has raised the character issue.
There is a simple reason why no one has ever questioned Governor Romney’s birth certificate–he’s a white Republican male.
If Romney was a black Democrat (hard to picture, I know) he would be derided on the Right as a Mexican national who wears funny underwear and worships a guy with magic glasses.
Everyone is vulnerable to urban legends and racist myths if people are inclined to invent and propagate them . . . except those of the Caucasian persuasion.
Several years ago it was reported that a document was circulated without identifying its source, and people were asked what they thought of it. Many thought that it was anti-American propaganda, probably circulated by Communists. The document in question was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
I don’t know of any survey or poll concerning the American Civil Liberties Union, but if one were taken my guess is that the ACLU would not fare terribly well in public opinion for much the same reason that the Bill of Rights was suspect in the minds of a considerable percentage of those involved in the aforementioned informal survey. The Bill of Rights provides protection for people who might otherwise be subject to a harsh majority. The ACLU seeks to apply the Bill of Rights to all residents within our borders, popular or not.
The ACLU defends religious liberty. The ACLU has defended the right to freedom of expression of the very unpopular—justly unpopular in my opinion—Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS. In a case that began in Plano, Texas in 2003, the ACLU defended the right of an elementary school student to distribute candy canes with a religious message on them. More recently, in 2011, the ACLU defended the rights of school children, again in Plano, to wear rosaries or other clothing with a religious message. The ACLU vigorously opposes, on the grounds of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, government sponsored prayer in public schools.
The ACLU has defended other unpopular causes, probably most notable the right of the Ku Klux Klan to peaceably assemble.
My first personal involvement with the ACLU came in 2000 when Will Harrell, then Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, called me regarding my take on the Tulia Drug Sting. I described my take on events and what I had learned of the activities of the undercover agent. Will Harrell’s response: “We’re gonna get that [expletive deleted]. Excuse the language, Rev.”
In subsequent months and years, I developed camaraderie with Will. Patricia and I made numerous trips to Austin working with ACLU of Texas people in lobbying for a bill to require more than just the testimony of a single witness to convict someone of a crime. We were amazed that we could actually go in representatives’ and senators’ offices. Rarely could we speak with a representative or a senator, but we were always cordially received by the staff person associated with our particular concern. With our cooperation the ACLU of Texas began quoting the Bible in some of its brochures! “A single witness shall not suffice to convict a person of any crime or wrongdoing. Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be sustained” (Deuteronomy 19:15). Both Jesus (Matthew 18:16), and Paul (2 Corinthians 13:1) alluded to the passage from Deuteronomy. One representative that I did get to talk to in person was what I would call a “law n’ order” person. She was also one who wore her religion on her sleeve, had a Bible visibly on her desk, and was fond of quoting it. She was in legislative session, but a staff person told her that a minister would like to speak with her. I was surprised that she came out of session to meet me. I told her that I hoped for her support on the bill to require more than a single witness, and cited the Bible verses above. She said, “Oh that was for those days. Things are different now.” Of course things are different now! But she was very selective in where she acknowledged the difference. She is a situation ethicist without knowing it! She did not support the bill.
I had opportunity to appear at a legislative hearing on the bill. I cited the above verses and commented, “Moses, Jesus, and Paul: seems like pretty good company to me.”
The police union had an army of paid lobbyists opposing the bill, but an amended version, exempting police officers but including so-called confidential informants did pass and was signed into law by the governor. That “Tulia bill” as it was called was influential in the overturning of the Dallas sheetrock scandal in which confidential informants turned in gypsum powder representing it as powder cocaine.
I subsequently became a member of the governing board of ACLU of Texas. I first filled a vacancy created by the retirement of a board member before his term had expired, and then was elected to a full four year term. I had a very good relationship with Jews, agnostics, secularists, Christians, and some Muslims on the board. I was known as “the Rev.” On one occasion Will Harrell was going through some troubling times, and readily accepted my offer to pray with him. The chairman of the board, a practicing Jew, came into the room where we were, saw that I was praying with him, and quietly left.
The quarterly travel to board meetings, usually in Austin but sometimes in other cities, became just too difficult for me, and I resigned my position on the board near the end of my elected four year term. The meeting where I tendered my resignation was in El Paso. When we had completed an afternoon session, we visited the fence. I saw children come running to the fence, hoping someone would slip a dollar or whatever between the chain link mesh. Then that evening we dined at a sumptuous restaurant within little more than shouting distance from the fence. I was conscience stricken by our opulence contrasted with the poverty no more than a few hundred yards from where we dined. At our session the next morning, I was given a few minutes to say farewell and took the opportunity to reflect on Biblical justice which is a part of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Do I agree with every position that the ACLU takes? Do I agree with every sentence in either the Republican or Democratic Party platforms? Do I agree with every position of the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, or any other religious organization?
This post is part of Dr. Kiker’s life story which is currently appearing in weekly installments in a Tulia paper.
Lubbock County Judge Tom Head wasn’t looking for national publicity when he set up an interview with the local Fox affiliate. Head just wanted to plug a 1.7% tax increase that would fund an expansion of the sheriff’s department and put more money at the disposal of the DA’s office.
But Tom Head is now famous, for the moment at least. Perhaps the County Judge thought the voters needed a really good reason to open their wallets. How about this scenario. There’s a good chance that Barack Obama will get himself elected (God forbid), and if that happens we’re gonna have as an old time insurrection, right here in Lubbock County. And Obama, he’s not gonna like that so he’s just likely to call in UN troops, an army of foreign occupation, and force his will on the good people of Lubbock County at gunpoint. And if that happens, I’m gonna stand boldly in front of those UN personnel carriers and say, “You ain’t comin’ in here!
I am paraphrasing. You can find Mr. Head’s exact words here (and in several thousand other places). His paranoid screed went viral.
Lubbock attorney Rod Hobson (who helped shut down the ill-famed Tulia drug bust) was so impressed by the judge’s rhetoric that he hung a UN flag outside his office. “When I saw the story I thought, once again, Lubbock is going to be the laughingstock of the entire nation,” Hobson told a local TV station. “What makes it so sad is he is our elected county judge, who is in charge of a multimillion-dollar budget. That is scary. It’s like the light’s on, but no one is home. … I’d just like to think he’s off his meds.”
A few days ago, Fort Worth columnist Bud Kennedy expressed his relief that Missouri’s Todd Akin was deflecting attention from notorious Texas weirdos. This morning he admitted that the prurient interest of America has returned to the Lone Star State. To put things in perspective, Kennedy offers a little background on Mr. Head.
Folks, please understand. In Texas, we don’t choose our county judges or commissioners based on any qualifications besides who’s good at dominoes.
In the orchard of targets for TV joke writers, Texas county officials are low-hanging fruit.
Head, 63, is an administrator with only a psychology degree. He worked first in law enforcement as a Texas Tech University campus officer and city marshal, then as an elected county justice of the peace.
He moved up to county judge in 1999 and led his own mini-rebellion against Obama in 2009, posting literature and cartoons mocking him on a hallway bulletin board before commissioners removed them.
One of the posters showed jail book-in photos of nine arrestees in Obama T-shirts. Seven were African-American.
Asked to explain himself to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Head boldly shared his Christian witness:
I cannot divorce my theology and my philosophy from my office. I’m pro-life, I’m pro-gun rights and if you’re gonna vote for me and if you’re not for gun rights, then you probably don’t want me in office.
In other words, this isn’t a story about a single Loony-Tunes (check out his tie in the picture above) judge in West Texas–the voters of Lubbock County like this guy.
But wait a minute here, what possible connection could there be between Mr. Head’s “theology” and his paranoid take on Obama and the United Nations?
The judge is likely referring to Agenda 21, an uncontroversial fluff-document signed by 178 world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush, in 1992. The idea was to encourage the efficient marshaling of scant natural resources in times of famine and natural disaster. Or that’s what we originally thought. Listen to Glenn Beck’s dispassionate take on Agenda 21:
Those pushing … government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight, and then just dismissing it as a joke. Once [internationalists] put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it, we will not be able to survive.
Under Agenda 21, these activists argue, the expansive American way of life, in which everyone can aspire to the dream of owning a house with a big yard and two cars in the driveway, will be replaced by one in which increasing numbers are crammed into urbanized “pack ’em and stack ’em” apartment complexes, and forced to use mass transportation and live according to a collectivist ethos. Once the UN’s radical utopia is achieved, gun ownership will be forbidden and the UN will raise an army intent on terrorizing the populace in the name of social order and equality, sustainability and smart growth — all words that anti-Agenda 21 activists believe signal the true intent of the UN’s plan.
The tattered remnants of the John Birch Society are all over this stuff, which would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that Tim LaHaye, author of bestselling “Left Behind” series, is a proud JBS stalwart. LaHaye and co-author Jerry Jenkins sprinkled Agenda 21 paranoia throughout their end times thrillers. I distinctly recall sitting in a well-attended Sunday School class in Tulia, Texas (70 miles north of Lubbock) in which Mr. LaHaye’s eschatology was embraced as the gospel truth.
But this isn’t just about West Texas. Texas is riddled with Anti-UN nuttiness. Ted Cruz, the man expected to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison as Texas Senator, is mad as hell about the imminent UN destruction of American sovereignty. In the mind of Ted Cruz, the Antichrist is George Soros, but the general thrust mirror’s the views of Beck. Cruz recently printed this rant on his personal blog:
Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. Everyone wants clean water and clean air, but Agenda 21 dehumanizes individuals by removing the very thing that has defined Americans since the beginning—our freedom.
Cruz is particularly concerned that the UN plans to abolish the game of golf.
All of which explains how a simple-minded Texas judge could see opposition to a US president and an innocuous (and largely meaningless) UN document as theological issues. When the saints of God are raptured to heaven and the Antichrist (known as Nicolae Carpathia to Left Behind enthusiasts) comes to power, United Nations troops will spring to his assistance.
How do we explain this craziness? Or maybe it isn’t crazy. When the majority of people in a given locale (say, Lubbock, Texas) share a common delusion maybe it’s the unbelievers who are crazy. Who gets to define normal?
Tom Head’s fears about Barack Obama reflect the deep dread many Americans feel about the future. Where are we heading? What is happening to America? What’s it all about, Alfie?
How else do we explain the Tea Party’s undimmed enthusiasm for free market fundamentalism? After the financial industry lied and swindled the world to the brink of financial catastrophe, how can anyone believe in the natural goodness of unregulated markets?
Because it’s all we have. If the free market won’t save us, who will? If the free market won’t save us, the glory that was America disappears. It’s Ichabod time!
How do we explain why a great nation like the United States of America has a crumbling infrastructure and can’t pay its bills when the folks in collectivist dystopias like Canada, Norway and South Korea seem to be faring so much better?
We could blame the fact that we spend more on defense than all the other nations of earth combined. We could point to our bloated prison system. We could acknowledge that America is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a consortium of international corporations.
But that doesn’t sit right somehow.
How much better to believe that America has been hijacked by ultra-liberal socialist big-spenders like Barack Obama who give their true loyalty to Allah and/or a One World dictatorship. That way, we simply turn the reins over to pro-business folks like Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz and an unregulated market will gradually drag us back to prosperity.
As things presently stand, Mitt Romney can count on 60% of the white vote, 33% of the Latino vote and 0% of the African American vote.
Not 5% . . . 0%. There may be a few thousand black Republicans nationwide willing to pull the lever for the white guy, but there aren’t enough of them to constitute a single percentage point.
I would have thought that a small but measurable contingent of black voters would be with the Republican candidate. He is the pro-life, anti-gay rights candidate, after all, and black evangelicals have a reputation for being pro-life and anti-gay rights.
And what about the small sliver of the black electorate wealthy enough to be helped by Republican fiscal policy? What’s with those guys?
According to the Washington Post, Republican candidates like George W. Bush and Bob Dole captured just over 10% of the black vote. Hardly a stellar performance, but an improvement on an absolute electoral vacuum.
The lack of Latino enthusiasm for Mitt Romney is understandable. A harsh anti-immigrant stance lay at the heart of Romney’s primary season strategy and the new Republican Party platform shifts to the right of their standard bearer.
Romney made a point of attending the NAACP conference in July where he claimed to be the candidate who would do the most for African Americans.
No one was fooled.
When the Republican candidate used his NAACP address to flay “Obamacare” it was obvious that the folks assembled before him weren’t his real audience. Romney’s cynical handlers were hoping that the sight of their man being booed and heckled, however politely, by a room of black opinion leaders would help his standing with the white electorate.
And we’re not talking about the conservative white voters who wouldn’t vote for Obama if you held a gun to their heads. The message was aimed at white swing voters; the folks on the fence.
This level of cynicism has characterized Republican political algebra since the notorious Southern Strategy was cobbled together in the late 1960s. Racial resentment runs so deep in America that a solid majority of white voters can be manipulated by a thinly-veiled racial pitch.
You can’t be too gross about it, of course, no one outside a few counties in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia wants to be accused of overt, “I love the Nigra, in his place” bigotry. But whenever Romney contrasts Obama’s entitlement nation with the personal responsibility America dear to the hearts of Republicans he’s fishing in the slough of racial resentment.
When white voters think welfare, they think black, and Romney’s handlers know it. The bogus complaint that Obama has scaled back work requirements in the welfare-to-work system doesn’t have to be true. To most white swing voters, sending out checks no-questions-asked is just the sort of thing a black president would do for his kind.
This is called “dog whistle” politics, the theory being that only conservative whites can hear the high-pitched whine of racial resentment. Although, from a Republican perspective, it hardly matters, the ears of African Americans have become highly attuned to dog whistle politics over the years, and for good reason. If you’re black, that ear-splitting siren always spells trouble.
This year the squeal is so loud and persistent that zero percent of African American voters fail to hear it. It’s white moderates, the kind who generally vote for Democrats, who remain deaf to the whistle, and so long as that’s true the Southern Strategy marches on.
Just when it appeared that Paul Ryan’s infatuation with Ayn Rand might be garnering the attention it deserves, Todd Akin made his “legitimate rape” remark. Suddenly the Republican National Committee was desperate to get Akin off the stage so he won’t ruin next week’s big show in Tampa.
But the Rand-Ryan connection may soon be staging a comeback. People like Paul Ryan didn’t learn to love the free market by reading hard core economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises or even Milton Friedman; they read novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Stories are far more captivating than stats and pie charts. In the relatively repressed 1950s, Ayn Rand was often a young person’s first brush with the pornographic imagination. (more…)
This video is from some time ago, but its message is as powerful today as it was when it first came out. How do prisons make money and how do anti-immigration laws ensure these private prisons’ profits?
Jan Brewer became a darling of the anti-immigration right by wagging her finger in the president’s face
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Joe “America’s toughest sheriff” Arpaio are accusing Barack Obama of granting illegal immigrants de facto amnesty. The immigration problem could be settled amicably, Arpaio says, if all the illegal aliens went home, but since that is unlikely to happen, earnest public servants must do what they were elected to do.
Jan Brewer grabbed the big headlines by announcing that the Dream Act young people Obama saved from deportation won’t be getting any state services in Arizona–and that includes drivers’ licenses. (more…)
Now that Paul Ryan is Mitt Romney’s choice for VP, you will be hearing a lot about Ayn Rand, probably not enough to impact the election, but a lot. Many will ask how a devout Catholic and family man can lionize a woman who despised God, rejected the “altruistic” teaching of Jesus, and called the family an artificial and unnecessary creation.
The easy answer is that Paul Ryan doesn’t really like Ayn Rand at all. In fact, he is now saying that he rejects her atheistic philosophy without reservation.
For the tiny handful of Christian conservatives who may have been concerned about a potential VP embracing the religion of Antichrist, that should suffice. There simply aren’t enough voters in our brave new America who know enough about Ayn Rand’s glorification of reason and selfishness, Roman Catholic ethics, or the teaching of Jesus to see a problem.
Ryan’s recent protestations of love for Rand’s economic philosophy were the stuff of romance. In 2005, Ryan told the Atlas Society:
There is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works . . . I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff . . . The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.
It’s hard to disavow an endorsement like that. Either he was lying in 2005, or he is lying now. Fortunately for Ryan, it doesn’t matter.
With every new election cycle, the Latino share of the vote in Texas rises by about 2 percent. If this trend continues, as it almost certainly will, Latinos will eventually dictate the shape of politics in the Lone Star State.
George W. Bush took the Latino vote seriously, both as governor and president. When Republicans reach out to Latino voters they can snare as much as 40% of the vote, enough to win easily in deep-red Texas. This is because the white middle class is overwhelmingly Republican; only 26% of white Texans voted for Barack Obama in 2008, (his fifth worst showing with this demographic behind Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana).
I attended the event described in this Star-Telegram article with my sociologist daughter, Lydia Bean. The day’s most telling quote didn’t make it into the paper. Gilberto Hinojosa, the first Latino Chair of the Texas Democratic Party, told the gathering that after Ann Richards lost the governor’s race to George W. Bush in 1994, Texas Democrats pinned the blame on the defection of conservative to moderate white voters. In consequence, it was decided that winning these people back was the key to electoral success. (more…)
My family immigrated to the United States on December 18, 1998 after years of socioeconomic hardships. In Dallas, my father found employment in a moving company, often working over sixteen hours every day of the week while my sister and I attended school and our mother helped the family settle. Eventually, my mother found employment as a babysitter. In Peru, my father owned a company and my mother worked as a television producer, for the Department of Education, and for Defensa Civil, the equivalent of FEMA in the United States. Both were successful individuals, but thanks to the instability of the Fujimori regime, my parents lost everything. Both of them held university degrees, but as is the case with many professional immigrants, Mom and Dad saw themselves relegated to unfulfilling work once settled in America.
On the day of our arrival, my sister and I spoke no English, and over the next several months, we would learn how to ask permission to go to the bathroom, how to tell a stranger where we had come from, and how to ask for directions so that we would not get lost. From the beginning, Mom and Dad placed significant emphasis on our education, and we quickly learned that the quality of schools depended on the geographical area where we lived. Armed with this knowledge, my father asked me to research better school districts in the Dallas area so that we could relocate.
Years passed and I excelled in my studies, got accepted to the Academy of Biomedical Professions at R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, TX, and, in 2006, I enrolled at Harvard College where I graduated with honors after completing my major in Social Anthropology, a minor in Ethnic Studies, and a Certificate of Language Proficiency in Portuguese. On the day of my graduation in 2011, I began to feel — truly feel — that I would no longer have to dance to obtain an avocado or peach, that my mother would no longer have to cry, wondering whether I would have to sell candy in the streets, that my father would never again be abducted at gunpoint while on his rounds as a taxi driver in the streets of Lima. I no longer wondered whether ever again my family would have to choose between rice and toilet paper. On that day — May 26, 2011 — I knew my future was a little more secure than it had been the day before. (more…)
Mitt Romney just made a birther joke. It’s a real knee-slapper.
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 