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Beck fan and 9/12 protest attendee explains why Obama will oppress ‘white America.’

By Lee Fang on Sep 12, 2009 at 9:23 pm

Despite the tea parties’ ostensible purpose of opposing taxation, many of the signs today at the 9/12 march attacked President Obama using explicit racial and ethnic smears. Glenn Beck, who helped initiated the idea for the rally, has come under fire for similarly stating Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” ThinkProgress documented some of the hate at the protest, and also spoke to one attendee who shared Beck’s views. The attendee, like Beck, thought Obama hates whites, but also believed he will oppress the white race with communism. We asked him about the sign he was holding up, which showed Obama riding a white baby:

ATTENDEE: Barack was the name of the horse that Mohammed rode to heaven, alright a white horse.

Q: What does the white baby represent?

ATTENDEE: White America, because I do believe our President is a racist [...] But I think it’s mainly communism that he’s going to want to tell us what to wear, what to do, have his little red book like Mao because he really is a communist.

ThinkProgress’ Victor Zapanta produced a video from the rally today, and ThinkProgress reader Vikrum Aiyer submitted several photographs. Watch it:

There were several hate groups among the various corporate and Republican organizations paying FreedomWorks to help finance the rally. The National Association for Rural Landowners, a bronze sponsor, references the incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge to call for attacks on “government entities” and liberals. In a YouTube video posted in July, the group makes the case for a secession, followed by a violent civil war. Another 9/12 cosponsor, FreeRepublic, is a forum for various radical right causes and as ThinkProgress reported, the shooter at the Holocaust museum found a welcome audience for his writings on the website.

Yglesias

The New Libertarians

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 12, 2009 at 5:26 pm

Kevin Drum’s confused by this bizarre Nancy Pelosi sign at the Tea Party:

Blog_912_Protest

I’m more interested in the Benjamin Franklin quote. Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. Indeed, the very same people who spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday complaining that Barack Obama’s “czars” are a threat to liberty not only weren’t worried about czars in the Bush years, they spend Tuesday and Thursday worrying that Obama’s not doing enough to ensure that intelligence operatives can break the law with impunity.

Jonah Goldberg, it seems to me, was the real pioneer in this brand of hypocrisy-driven hysteria—holding captives in secret where they’re hung by shackles from the ceiling and occasionally beaten to death is fine by him, but efforts to curb smoking are “liberal fascism.” And now this line of thinking seems to have completely taken over the right.

Politics

Radical, Racist Signs Featured At 9/12 March

By ThinkProgress on Sep 12, 2009 at 4:29 pm

This morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) embraced the protesters at today’s 9/12 March in Washington, DC, saying that he was “glad they’re here to take back their country.” He characterized the attendees as nonpartisan, adding that “it’s not about President Obama. It’s not about the Democrats.” Several other Republican lawmakers, including Reps. Tom Price (GA), Mike Pence (IN), Marsha Blackburn (T), and Phil Gingrey (GA) planned to attend and speak at the event.

Members of ThinkProgress attended today’s march and the signs carried by these protesters were hardly nonpartisan — and were often racist, radical portrayals of Obama, despite DeMint’s claim. Some examples of what we saw:

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In an interview with the Washington Independent, DeMint claimed that the attendees at the march were “a cross-section of the population.” When it was pointed out to him that almost everyone there was white, DeMint simply said, “It’s probably just the time and organization and the media that promoted it.”

Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign, has warned conservatives from embracing events like the 9/12 March. “It’s bad for Republicans because in the absence of any real leadership, the freaks fill the void and define the party,” McKinnon said.

Update

More signs from the event here, including ones that say, “Thank ‘God’ 4 Fox” and “Ayn Rand was right.” Other signs showed Obama as a “Democratic Socialism” and called him a “bloodsucking…alien.” More offensive signs here and here and here.


Update

,At today’s march, DeMint repeated his Waterloo remarks, announcing to the crowd, “Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to Waterloo!” He claimed that the health care debate is “a critical battle for the heart and soul of America, and for freedom itself. Freedom fighters are outnumbered in congress, but not in America. If you continue to stand up and speak out, we will save freedom in America.”


Update

,Birthers also showed up today:

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Update

,We saw another protester wearing a t-shirt calling himself a “freedom rider.” The real freedom riders were civil rights activists who rode buses into the segregated South in the 1960s:

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Update

,DeMint told Fox News that today’s attendees were “informed” and “outraged.” “I’ve never been so proud to be an American,” he said.

Related Posts

Yglesias

Tea Party Patriotism

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 12, 2009 at 3:58 pm

I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:

confederate 1

Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:

diversity

As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Politics

Jim ‘Waterloo’ DeMint: ‘If We Lose The Health Care Battle, I Think We’ve Lost It All’

By Amanda Terkel on Sep 12, 2009 at 3:48 pm

demint434 Yesterday on Glenn Beck’s radio program, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) outlined the state of America under President Obama in apocalyptic terms, saying that health care was a must-win battle for Republicans, otherwise all would be lost. When Beck said that we are seeing “a fundamental transformation into a new system where the executive branch is almost if not all powerful,” DeMint replied:

DEMINT: We’re just, we’re coming down to a matter of days. If we lose the health care battle, I think we’ve lost it all. [...]

And that’s why I’ve said strong things like Waterloo and other things. This is, the nation has to focus on this because the czars and other things are secondary in a way if we lose health care, the president’s going to be so emboldened, we’re going to see so much more of the growth at the executive branch level that, I don’t think we’ll be able to stop it. But if we stop him on health care then I think we have the opportunity to maybe realign the whole political system in our country.

DeMint then said that he doesn’t “care which party it ends up being,” but quickly added, “I hope it’s the Republicans.” Listen here:

DeMint has been one of the leading lawmakers using hyperbolic rhetoric in the health care debate. Most famously, he said that health reform would be Obama’s “Waterloo” because it “will break him.” He has also said that the current debate was “a real showdown between socialism and freedom” and compared the U.S. government under Obama to Nazi Germany under Hitler: “We’ve got national socialism.”

Left out of all of DeMint’s exhortations is any acknowledgment of why health care reform is so necessary. As President Obama has responded, “What they don’t recognize is, this isn’t about me; it’s about the American people. And things have gotten worse since 1993.” New census numbers released this week showed that in 2008, the number of Americans without health insurance grew from 45.7 million to 46.3 million. Since 2000, the number has increased by 7.3 million.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Message Discipline

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 12, 2009 at 3:04 pm

Echoing a problem familiar to any liberal who ever tried to go to a rally to protest the occupation of Iraq only to find a bunch of guys with Free Mumia signs or Trotskyite sandwich boards extolling the virtues of the DPRK, an awful lot of today’s tea parties seemed to want to talk about obscure fringe causes that have nothing to do with health care or 9/11 or anything:

parentalrights

These guys, for example, are crank opponents of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Thanks to their tireless labor the US and—wait for it—Somalia are the only countries that haven’t ratified the convention. And Somalia has no functioning government.

Yglesias

How Much Do Arguments Matter?

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 12, 2009 at 2:28 pm

150px-Seal_of_the_United_States_Supreme_Court.svg

Jeffrey Rosen has an odd comment on the Supreme Court’s apparently looming evisceration of campaign finance regulation:

But Kagan may have conceded too much. Everyone expects the Court to rule against the government’s effort to regulate Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute, anti-Hillary Clinton video funded with minimal corporate funding; the bigger question before the Court is whether it should also gut the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law by overturning two cases that allow corporate campaign expenditures to be regulated more intensely than expenditures by individuals. By focusing on the possibility of corruption, Kagan stressed the justification for campaign finance regulations that has appealed to the greatest number of justices in the past–but it’s a weak argument in cases like this, where truly independent ideological corporations aren’t interested in making corrupt quid pro quo deals with the candidates they’re supporting. It’s possible, however, to defend the regulation of corporate speech in a way that respects the First Amendment–and that does not make implausible assertions about quid pro quo corruption or constitutionally questionable claims about the need to level the playing field for rich and poor speakers. When citizens believe that they have no ability to influence public debate because the free speech market is so unfairly dominated by wealthy corporations, individuals may lose faith in their ability to participate meaningfully in politics. By emphasizing this argument–which has less to do with equality than democratic legitimacy–Kagan might have made it harder for the conservative majority on the Court to issue a radical ruling that could reverse decades of precedent and threaten restrictions on corporate speech that have been embodied in federal law for more than a century.

There just seems to be a misunderstanding here about what arguments can and can’t do. Rosen may think that an alternative argument is a better argument—and his theory sounds reasonable to me—but it’s very hard to see how an alternative argument would actually “have made it harder” for the conservative majority to reverse decades of precedent. What would prevent the conservative majority from reversing decades of precedent would be if either Justice Thomas or else Justice Scalia or else Chief Justice Roberts or else Justice Alito or else Justice Kennedy didn’t want to gut campaign finance regulation. Insofar as they do want to do that, Elana Kagan can’t stop them with the sheer force of her argument.

Of course it’s possible for one or more Justice to enter oral arguments with a genuinely open mind. But the whole reason people are now assuming that the court will overturn precedent is that at oral arguments the Justices gave the impression of having already made up their minds.

Politics

War on Christmas begins: Texas conservatives protest inclusion of Hindu holiday in school curriculum.

By Amanda Terkel on Sep 12, 2009 at 2:05 pm

The Texas State Board of Education is currently considering a proposal that would ensure sixth-grade students learn about at least one religious holiday from each of the five major world religions. Currently, students learn about more Christian and Jewish holidays, and Hinduism is excluded. The new proposal would replace Christmas and Rosh Hashanah with Diwali. “It’s outrageous that the war on Christmas continues in our state and in our nation,” said Jonathan Saenz, a lobbyist for the conservative Free Market Foundation. Some more details on the proposal:

The standards currently instruct sixth-grade students to be able to explain the significance of religious holidays such as the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The proposal, which is set to be debated during a hearing next week, removes the words Christmas and Rosh Hashanah. Diwali, a Hindu festival, is added.

In a note explaining the change, members of a review committee wrote “the examples include the key holiday from each of the five major religions.”

Sixth-grade social studies in Texas “is focused on world geography and cultures,” and Hinduism is the third-largest world religion, following Christianity and Islam. However, one Republican activist serving as an “expert” advising the board said that including more Christian and Jewish holidays “simply acknowledges with accuracy the religious culture of America as it actually exists that these holidays have been awarded their place in the culture by the people themselves.” (HT: TP reader Sergio)

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Economy

Anti-Labor Alliance For Worker Freedom Joins Attempt To Scuttle Labor Department Nominees

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 12, 2009 at 2:00 pm

awfAs I noted last month, the Labor Department is trying to ramp up its fight against wage theft without two key nominees, whose confirmations have been delayed in the Senate. One of these nominees — Patricia Smith, who has been tapped to fill to position of Department of Labor Solicitor — is being opposed personally by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), who sent a letter to President Obama demanding that her nomination be withdrawn.

And Enzi is no longer alone in his quest. He’s getting an assist from the conservative, anti-labor Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF), which is sending this to other Senators:

[AWF] urges you to support Senator Mike Enzi’s (R-WY) call for President Obama’s withdrawal of Patricia Smith’s nomination for Solicitor at the Labor Department…Smith has shown an inherit bias towards labor through her management of New York’s Hour Wage and Hour Watch program.

AWF describes itself as an organization “dedicated to combating anti-worker legislation,” but its idea of “anti-worker” is pretty skewed, since it opposes minimum wage laws and the Employee Free Choice Act. AWF also expelled workers attempting to attend a panel that it organized on Capitol Hill last month.

AWF is actually a “special project” of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the organization formed by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. But Norquist is also virulently anti-union, saying that one of his goals is to “crush labor as a political entity.” Norquist will not disclose AWF’s funders, but ATR itself is funded by Philip Morris and the ultra-conservative Scaife foundations, among others.

And while Enzi and his cohorts are holding up these nominations, wage theft has become an increasing problem. 68 percent of the low wage workers report being subjected to pay violations in their previous work week alone. Of these, 26 percent were paid less than the minimum wage and 76 percent didn’t receive legally required overtime pay.

This rampant wage theft translated into an overall 15 percent loss of pay. Meanwhile, during her time with the New York State Labor Department, Smith helped win more than $20 million in back pay for thousands of low-wage workers, including a record $2.3 million settlement with the owner of Ollie’s Noodle Shop and Grill in Manhattan.

As AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka said, those in Congress who are holding up the nominees are doing so “because they don’t want those positions filled.” And for the agenda that AWF is pushing, it makes a lot of sense for the Labor Department to have a lot of vacancies.

Climate Progress

Much ado about not much: New Ag Chairwoman may not change Senate dynamic on climate bill push

By Joe Romm on Sep 12, 2009 at 1:16 pm

Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has taken over as chair of the Senate Agriculture committee from Tom Harkin (D-IA).  The NY Times (via Climate Wire) reports, “the new chairwoman said she does not expect her panel to hold a markup on any contributions to the climate bill.”

Nonetheless, since Obama is on a seeming down swing, the media herd have been stampeding to write the obituary for the clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill. Hence the excitement over any potential bad news, as in the Politico’s “Lincoln casts doubts on climate bill” or Newsweek‘s, “Musical Chairs in the Senate Present Worries for Enviros“:

…. it will be in her political interest to hold up climate-change legislation until after the election. Environmentalists hoping the Senate will strengthen the House’s Waxman-Markey bill should start readjusting their expectations.

The latter comes from the too aptly named blog of Newsweek‘s political reporters blog, “The Gaggle,” which they define as “a flock of reporters pecking at a politician.”

Note to Newsweek:

  1. Why must you insist on framing this issue of paramount importance to all Americans, all humans in fact, as something only enviros care about?
  2. I don’t think any enviros were hoping the Senate will strengthen the bill significantly (certain not ones likely to read The Gaggle).
  3. Small point, but it looks like you got the entire story wrong.

The NYT via CW has a much more detailed and savvier analysis of Lincoln’s stance, which I’ll excerpt, since she is a major swing vote:

Read more

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