Monthly Archive for June, 2007

An Open Letter to White People

Published 2 years, 8 months ago in politics. 1 Comment Tags: .

Dear White People,

Please enlighten me. At what point did the shoe move onto the other foot and turn you all into an oppressed racial minority? That seriously has to be the reason that you people keep insisting on pressing forth these lawsuits that state that any sort of racial preference in making any sort of decision regarding anything that the government touches is unfair. For you. And now that we’ve seen that the Supreme Court agrees with you, I can only assume that you will all continue on your quest to remedy the injustices done against you until every last reference to racially motivated screening or selection is stricken from this land.

Forgive my confusion, but things already seem to be pretty much in your favor racially. Thanks to a decades-long pattern of white-flight, selective gentrification, de facto segregation in housing, and ever more aggressive voting rights prosecution, you’ve already managed to widen the race gap in public education by leaps and bounds, even if it’s no longer on the books. Given all of this, how is that the whites are now the oppressed and on the wrong end of unfair laws and practices? Seriously, explain it to me. I like to think I’m a smart guy, but I can’t wrap my brain around this concept. Seems like you people keep holding all the cards. What’s left?

Maybe some of you are right, and this most recent decision will let this country move forward and solve its education problems in a different, more constructive way. Say, for instance, rewriting funding laws for public schools that ensure that poorer districts receive enough money so that they can spend the same amount of money per pupil that rich districts do by default? Oh that’s right, because that would oppress you, and you all would sue that once again, race is a factor in the public sphere.

But, seriously, in that case, who can we blame for that?

Sincerely yours,
The confused half-brown boy

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Un-American

Published 2 years, 8 months ago in culture and politics. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Last night I watched a piece on 60 Minutes about Joe Darby, the Army guy who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib scandal. Maybe I’m a little too sentimental or naive or something for my own good, but watching that report disgusted me. Basically, the guy who blew the whistle was just a stand up soldier from Cumberland, MD, who felt that he needed to do the right thing. Now, ordinarily, you would think that they would reward such a stand-up kind of guy. What happened next should be enough to sicken anyone.

After his name came out publicly, first the Army had to move Darby to another unit so the members of his unit wouldn’t come after him for blowing the whistle. Frankly, that’s nothing. The real kicker is that his home town of Cumberland completely turned on him, and I mean completely. For example, there was this:

The commander of the local VFW post, Colin Engelbach, told 60 Minutes what people were calling Darby.

“He was a rat. He was a traitor. He let his unit down. He let his fellow soldiers down and the U.S. military. Basically he was no good,” Engelbach says.

Asked if he agrees with that, Engelbach says, “I agree that his actions that he did were no good and borderline traitor, yes.”

As a result of all of this, Darby and his wife have had to settle elsewhere (they didn’t say where for obvious reasons) and start all over, because the Army did a security assessment of his home in Cumberland, and decided it would not be safe for him. A lot of the people in Cumberland wanted to kill this guy for doing the right thing. On top of that, they celebrated the soldiers accused of the torture of those Iraqis.

And that’s the thing that gets me. I would like to think that as Americans, we are better than the stuff that went on at Abu Ghraib. Not doing those things made us better than the terrorists and all of those people we say are our enemies. Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently, being an American these days means humiliating brown people at any opportunity, and threatening anyone who would point it out to the rest of us. Apparently, we are the culture of torture and humiliation. These are the new American values, not truth, justice, freedom, liberty. And in the end, that’s sad that we’ve so easily given up everything that makes us Americans, and better than the totalitarian regimes of the world and the terrorists of the world, just so we can say that we have the right to do whatever we want to the people we say are our enemies.

It truly is a sad world we live in now.

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Frontlines

Published 2 years, 8 months ago in politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Bush Administration:

Q: Are there any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war?
SNOW: Yeah, the President. The President is in the war every day.
Q: Come on, that isn’t my question –
SNOW: Well, no, if you ask any president who is a commander in chief –
Q: On the frontlines, wherever…
SNOW: The President.

This, frankly, is what you get when you base your vote for someone based on who they want to let marry, and what they want to let a woman have the right to do or not do to herself. Aren’t you proud?

Hat tip to Kos for that one.

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An Agenda Observed

Published 2 years, 9 months ago in politics. 0 Comments Tags: , .

You don’t need to look very far to see the ways in which BushCo wishes to exert its agenda on this mostly unsuspecting country by whatever means necessary. We already know all about PlameGate (where fostering the right political agenda is more important than keeping the identity of one of our covert spies secret) and the US Attorney scandal (where causing Democrats consternation matters more than actually upholding US law). Now, in an article in today’s New York Times, we have the Justice Department redefining what “Civil Rights” are:

  • Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.
  • Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.
  • Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

All of this comes, as one might expect, at the expense of what the Civil Rights Office in the Justice Department was meant to do, actually protect the rights of minorities and women who will otherwise be discriminated against at will. Not only that, but like in the USA scandal, career civil rights lawyers are being pushed aside for lawyers that come from religious schools whose missions are to prosecute religious cases.

All of that rings superbly foul to me. This is the problem with the Bush Administration. They have an agenda and they will stop at nothing to push it. Everything is political, and everything is ideological. Very much uncool.

The fact of the matter is that this is an abuse of the system. There are other means in place to protect religious freedom. Part of the article also mentions that some of what they’re trying to sue for isn’t even covered under current law. This just just one more affront to minorities and women, and it’s one of those things we almost feel powerless to stop.

P.S. – Isn’t the justice department supposed to be a non-partisan servant of the country and its constitution?

Ms. [Rigel, a University of Missouri law professor] Oliveri and several other law professors said placement officers and faculty at their schools found that graduates seeking work at the Justice Department had a better chance by cleansing their résumés of liberal affiliations while emphasizing ties to the Federalist Society, a Washington conservative group, or membership in a religious fellowship.

This, my friends, is the honest to god new life in America, where the color of the skin and the content of your character do not matter, nor do any practical qualifications. All that matters is that you have the right bona fides and promise to work all the right cases. Sick.

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Small Steps

Published 2 years, 9 months ago in politics. 0 Comments

It’s just a small step, and it will very likely meet stiff resistance by the Bush Court (aka the Supreme Court, but let’s face it, it’s packed in his favor right now), but the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. cannot hold a civilian man in this country legally as an enemy combatant. This represents a fairly big blow to the Bush administration, as you might expect, but I won’t be surprised if they suddenly decide that they’re not really subject to the jurisdiction of this court. After all, they’ve already decided they’re not really subject to the Constitution or any laws Congress passes, so why be subject to the court? Still, it’s nice to see that somewhere, a decision is being made that the rule of law must prevail.

My favorite part of the ruling? That would have to be this:

The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention. Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them “enemy combatants.â€

Hopefully, we can use this, as well as a few other recent court decisions, to begin the long trek back to a nation of laws, where reason and rights prevail.