After the National Review’s John Derbyshire penned an unbelievably offensive and racist screed in Taki’s Magazine advising white Americans to stay away from black Americans, a firestorm has predictably erupted over whether his views will be sanctioned by the larger conservative movement. Derbyshire told ThinkProgress that his column urging the majority of Americans to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally” was not satire, but in fact a “social commentary.”

On the National Review’s website, editor Rich Lowry called Derbyshire’s column “appalling” and asserted that “no one at National Review” shares his views. But Lowry did not indicate whether Derbyshire would continue to be employed. Does the National Review have a no tolerance policy for racism?

For the National Review, which has frequently complained about unfair accusations of racism, this ugly moment provides an opportunity to demonstrate leadership. As National Review contributor Josh Barro writes in Forbes:

[T]his is the problem for Lowry and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously by broad audiences when they write about racial issues. Lowry wrote a column containing advice for black Americans. Why should black Americans take him seriously while he’s employing Derbyshire? If Lowry wants NR to be credible on race, he should start by firing John Derbyshire.

National Review staff have been taking turns trying to distance themselves from Derbyshire. Here’s senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru:

I know I don’t. RT @ObsoleteDogma Does @NRO want to be associated with someone who publishes racist trash like this? bit.ly/Ht4hmz

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) April 6, 2012

And National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg said a similar thing (National Review contributor Robert George retweeted this):

For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire’s piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn’t written it.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) April 6, 2012

The New York Daily News’ Alexander Nazaryan writes, “An editor at the supposedly esteemed National Review, [Derbyshire] is a perfect poster boy for what conservatism has degenerated into.” The National Review can begin to change this perception if it takes action.

According to a recent lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Orleans Parish Prison is a hellhole. “Rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace. Violence regularly occurs at the hands of sheriffs’ deputies, as well as other prisoners . . . . People living with serious mental illnesses languish without treatment, left vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.” Which is why former inmate Josh Hobson says he went to the press while he was incarcerated on a domestic violence charge that was eventually dropped. According to Hobson, prison guards soon found out he was speaking to reporters, and they retaliated with violence:

The guards took him off his bunk in the middle of the night, he said, dragging him outside and viciously beating him, pounding his kidneys so hard he urinated blood the next day.

“The night they smacked me around and dragged me out, all I could think of in my head was, ‘Great, I’m a f—ing dead man.’ They were already telling me they were going to kill me so I figured that’s it. This is a wrap. Lights out. When I got the knee to the head, I figured it was a done deal.” . . .

When the guards were beating him, Hobson said they warned him between punches, “This will teach you to talk to people.”

Neither Mr. Hobson’s allegations, nor those in the SPLC lawsuit have been proved in a court of law, but there is good reason to believe that allegations of widespread abusive conditions in the New Orleans prison are credible. The U.S. Marshall’s service recently removed all federal inmates from the prison, and the Department of Justice released a report in 2009 detailing unconstitutional conditions such as widespread violence and neglect of the mentally ill.

Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racist screeds (and sexist rants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race — and he’s outdone his own racism with this one.

Derbyshire wrote the column in the second person, as a list of lessons to his kids about race. The lessons are his response to “the talk” that black parents have with their children — conversations they are forced to have because of real, persistent racism. After spending a few minutes bemoaning that he can’t say a racist slur (“What you must call ‘the ‘N’ word’ is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks”) and opining on the hostility he believes all black people feel toward white people like himself (though he says he isn’t white before calling himself white several times), he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

While they are not included in the quote above, Derbyshire peppers the post with links to news stories of crimes, a few random videos, and his own columns. The only “fact” included in the entire piece (and just a small image, at that) is from the offensive book The Bell Curve. Every other hateful, racist claim is based on a one-off story or his own foregone conclusions.

Software company Intuit, the makers of programs such as Turbo Tax and Quicken, announced today that they will join Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Kraft as the fourth company to end their partnership with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council this week.

The Center for Media & Democracy, which launched ALECexposed.com last year, broke the news:

A stampede seems to be on the way as more and more groups break ties and dump ALEC. Intuit, Inc. (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks accounting software) told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that Intuit also decided not to renew its membership after it expired in 2011. That comment came from Bernie McKay, Vice President of Government Affairs. He gave this response when CMD identified that Intuit was no longer listed on the board and contacted the company. CMD began its effort to spotlight Intuit and other corporate funders and tie these corporations to the ALEC agenda when it launched ALECexposed.org in July 2011. … Intuit’s McKay explained to CMD that the company doesn’t “usually issue statements about membership in any organization” and declined to comment further.

Although Pepsi quietly left ALEC as recently as last January, the growing exodus of companies’ from ALEC’s began earlier this week when the progressive group Color of Change announced a petition and boycott campaign targeting ALEC’s corporate supporters. Other corporations that have not yet publicly renounced their support of ALEC include Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Reynolds American, Altria/Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil and British alcohol firm Diageo (makers of Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker).

As a recent Center for American Progress report explains, ALEC is one of the leading proponents of so-called Voter ID legislation that potentially disenfranchises millions of low-income, minority, student and elderly voters in an effort to exclude groups that tend to vote Democratic from the franchise. ALEC is also linked to state “Stand Your Ground” laws that can potentially enable accused murders such as Trayvon Martin’s accused assailant George Zimmerman to remain free.

The harm from Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law has been obvious for months: children denied benefits and scared away from school, families denied water in their homes, crops left to rot without enough workers. The clear damage from HB 56 should have spurred officials in Alabama to work to change the far-reaching immigration enforcement provisions soon after the law went into effect last fall. Lawmakers in the Alabama House and Senate opened the legislative session in February by proposing changes to HB 56, to no avail.

Now, months after they should have acted, Alabama legislators finally introduced a rewrite of HB 56 to address the immigration bill’s severe flaws — only to add another provision that makes the bill even worse:

Long-promised revisions to the state’s controversial immigration law were filed Thursday afternoon, with one significantly expanding provisions allowing officers to detain those they have “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country unlawfully.

Under the current law, police could apply “reasonable suspicion” to the individual arrested or cited during a traffic stop. The new bill would allow law enforcement to detain anyone else in the vehicle.

Police would only be able to ask about a person’s immigration status during traffic citations or arrests instead of at any stop, but this is still an invasive addition to the law to allow police to question anyone in a car, not just the driver. Todd Stacy, spokesman for House Speaker Mike Hubbard (R), said law enforcement officials requested the expanded interpretation of “reasonable suspicion.”

To be fair, the rewrite of HB 56 also revises two of the most troublesome provisions of the original law. The rewrite changes a “business transactions” provision that had been used to prevent people who could not prove their legal status from receiving utilities like water and gas. Under the revised bill, people will only be asked to prove their citizenship when applying for a car tag, business license, or driver’s license. The changes also eliminate a provision that required schools to collect enrolling students’ immigration status, which had scared children into not going to school when the law first went into effect.

But taking out the worst of the enforcement measures in HB 56 — provisions that courts have already suspended — does not change the damage the state has already seen because of HB 56. One study estimates that Alabama could lose more than 100,000 jobs and billions in GDP because of the immigration law.

Despite the problems, Republican officials yesterday emphasized that the tweaks would not change the purpose of HB 56. “The essence of the law will not change: Anyone living and working in Alabama must be here legally,” Gov. Robert Bentley (R) said. And Hubbard scoffed at the idea of removing such a harmful law from the books entirely. “Some activist groups don’t have a problem with illegal immigration and will only be happy if the law is repealed,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”

HB 56 is hurting the state’s residents as well as its image to the rest of the world. Fully repealing the bill would be the best option — several lawmakers introduced a bill to do just that — and taking out some of the most harmful provisions helps. But adding another layer to HB 56 that puts more people at risk of being profiled is a big step backwards.

Justice Antonin Scalia is no stranger to partisanship — he spent much of last week’s hearing on the Affordable Care Act touting Republican talking points about “broccoli” and “cornhusker kickbacks” rather than examining his very own opinions that establish that health reform is constitutional. Yet, when given an opportunity to echo Republican Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith’s partisan effort to undermine President Obama earlier this week, even Scalia seemed to think that was a bridge too far:

He declined to answer a question about President Barack Obama’s Monday remarks that it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” for justices to overturn the challenged federal health care law.

“We don’t respond to criticism,” Scalia said. “Judges use what’s known as the rope-a-dope trick. It’s judicial tradition.” When the questioner pressed Scalia on who would provide checks and balances to the president, he said that, “We have three branches. They check and balance each other.”

Obviously, Scalia’s comparison between judicial silence and Muhammad Ali’s tactic of tricking his opponent into tiring himself out is not intended to paint the Court’s critics in a favorable light. Nevertheless, it is telling that even the Court’s most strident conservative will not mimic Smith’s transparently partisan tactics.