April 29, 2011

1.  “Obama Declares Manning Guilty Before Trial
Can Military Officers Judge Him Impartially and Contradict Their Commander-In-Chief?”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/04/29/veterans-for-peace-obama-declares-manning-guilty/

2.  “Birth Certificate just Jim Crow all Over Again
There isn’t actually any mystery about the phenomenon of birtherism, the denial that Barack Obama is a US citizen and has a right to vote and hold office, or why obnoxious billionaire Donald Trump is resorting to it in his farce of a presidential bid.

Birthers are concentrated in former slaver, former Jim Crow states, which were forced to stop legal discrimination against African-Americans by the intervention of the Federal government from the 1960s, but many of whom retain a commitment to race and caste hierarchies as a way of ordering their societies.

53% of Southerners aren’t sure Obama is eligible to be President.  The South can be defined as: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and South Carolina, which, save for Texas, Florida and Virginia, is still distinctive in having very low rates of interracial marriage despite having high minority populations

…

African-Americans marrying whites accounts for 11% of interracial marriages nation-wide, but the South clearly lags here.

Low rates of interracial marriage despite high rates of racial diversity map on to prejudice and concerns about racial status. And it is precisely the intersection of these two things that predicts where birthers will be found disproportionately.

Let us compare this geography of the denial to an African-American of the right to vote and hold office on grounds of unclear ‘citizenship’ to the remarks of James M. Nabrit, Jr. in his 1939 journal article, “Disabilities Affecting Suffrage Among Negroes,” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 8, No. 3, (Jul., 1939), pp. 383-394, this quote on p. 384:

‘It is interesting to note that the states which enjoy the most unhampered exercise of the right of suffrage and impose the fewest number of restrictions are the states which are furthest advanced economically, educationally, and socially; whereas the ten states, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, which have hinged the right of suffrage around and about by numerous restrictions such as reading and understanding tests of state and national constitutions, property qualifications (both real and personal), racial discriminations in registration‘

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Trump has gone on now to question Barack Obama’s intellectual credentials, which is sort of like Woody Allen questioning whether Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually physically powerful. He now wants undergraduate grade transcripts.

Late night talk show host David Letterman called this tactic what it is, racism.

Questioning whether an African-American can vote and hold office based on his academic accomplishments is again a way of pandering to residual Jim Crow sentiments.

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Trump is following the Karl Rove handbook, wherein you don’t smear your opponent where he is weak, you demean him where he is strong. Obama is the most cerebral president since Woodrow Wilson, so Trump-Rove (TRove?) decries him as an undeserving affirmative action baby. But where it gets really ugly is that Trump is playing to Old South conceptions of racial discrimination in voting and office-holding.”
http://www.juancole.com/2011/04/birth-certificate-just-jim-crow-all-over-again.html