The ACLU has been trying to get these photographs of US prisoner abuse released for years. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that the photos be released to the public last year, but then Congress enacted a bill allowing the Secretary of Defense to exempt the photos from FOIA requests, because Congress and the DoD are both terrible. So, in light of that new legislation, the Supreme Court has ordered the appeals court to reconsider their ruling. Which means probably no torture photos.

This is the victory of Political Correctness: racists across the nation have somehow vaguely internalized the lesson that racism is bad. But all that means is that they don't think anything they ever do is racist, because that would make them bad people.

CBS Atlanta's Michelle Marsh asked Lanzo why he put up the sign.

"I've been putting up signs for 22 years and I've put up all kinds of political signs," said Lanzo.

"Why did you use the N word?" Marsh asked.

"Well, I've used it most of my life. There are different ways to put your opinion up, but that's just the words I choose," Lanzo answered.

That's just the word he chose. "Nigger." He has used the word "nigger" all his life. You know, whatever. It's just his opinion. Once again: he is not a racist.

It is weird, right? That this man understands that it is a Bad Thing to be A Racist, but doesn't really get the rest of it?

Other self-avowed non-racists include all of these people and this guy and this winner.

Look, Rush Limbaugh ran over a carboard cutout of Al Gore, in an electric car, and then he backed up and did it again! COMEDY! AT TEN O'CLOCK! HAVE YOU EVER IN YOUR LIFE SEEN SUCH A THING??

(To be fair it is hard, but possible, to ignore both of them. It is actually much harder to ignore Jay.)

But to answer your question, Mr. Drudge: it is in part because he's black, yes. And it's also because he represents the emergence of an urban elite/black/immigrant/gay/poor coalition that poses a threat to the rural/suburban white Christians who've been told for a century that they are Real America, making this guy who is patently not a member of that group a False American.*

This is what Carter said:

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American," Carter told NBC in an interview. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans"

Continued Carter: "And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."

And, in reference to Joe Wilson's little outburst:

"I think it's based on racism," Mr. Carter said at a town-hall-style meeting at his presidential center in Atlanta. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."
[...]
"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."

It's funny because all of that is obviously true. But no one wants to hear it from Jimmy Carter! As Michael Tomasky explains, it is a Bad Idea in Politics to Tell the Truth, because it is called a "gaffe," and it seldom goes over well.

So this is the stupid state of our stupid discourse. To say the intensity of the opposition to Barack Obama indicates a deep vein of racial prejudice and the right is obviously purposefully stoking race-based paranoia as they have done more or less openly since Nixon is met with I can't believe you're calling everyone who opposes the President a white-hooded racist who wants to lynch him.

The best part is that even if you don't think Joe Wilson shouted "you lie" at Barack Obama because he hates black people, there's no way to spin the fact that the portion of the black man's speech that upset him so much was the imagined prospect of filthy Mexicans getting health care. Not that we'd accuse people who are completely obsessed with illegal immigration of being motivated by racism, but they sure do hate Mexicans a lot.

But, you know, no one wants Jimmy Carter to say anything, ever.

*We coastal elites do so enjoy repeating and mocking the "Real America" thing, all the time, in the sneering sort of tone that we are famous for, but for the life of us we cannot imagine liberals seriously calling anyone False Americans. Not Reagan, not Bush, not even Cheney. There was lots of "he's not MY president" and "not in our name" and "a village in Texas is missing its idiot" and even some half-hearted succession talk but everyone acknowledged that Bush was obviously, uniquely American in his own foul way. Which is both liberal inclusiveness (everyone gets to be a part of America!) and that jaded realism about America's history and make believe "innocence" that makes conservatives like Peggy Noonan gravitate to genial fools like Reagan. (We produce monsters too! They're not all born in Kenya!) Anyway this was neither here not there just something we were think about.

A 12-member group will start going through files, transcripts, piles of bullshit and other oddities to determine what could have been done differently during and after the infamous arrest. Said the group's leader, Chuck Wexler:

I'm just hoping to make sense of this thing. This is one of those cases where everyone has an opinion about it. It's almost like some kind of Rorschach test. People see it and they read into it what they want.
....
People want to know, 'How did we get here?' Our starting point is the incident, but the incident only took six minutes.

Jesus! Can you imagine a bigger waste of time? "How did we get here?" It's called slavery, which was fueled by racism, and led to stereotypes of burglarizing black men and general discrimination.

Seriously, the last thing this country needs is another deep, analytical look into the roots of race relations. Can't we acknowledge our ugly past and try to move on? Our never-ending rehashing of racism's origins obviously isn't helping. Maybe if we ignore it, it will just go away on its own.

The Kansas-based Republican made the off-color remark during a town hall last week, when she implored fellow conservative not to lose faith in the GOP, for they can — and will! — find someone to lead them out of the dark Obama days. From the horse's mouth:

Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope. I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington.

The phrase "great white hope" traces its origins back to 1908, when racist whites called on James J. Jeffries to beat the great, black boxing champion Jack Johnson. Jeffries ended up throwing in the towel. But, nevermind.

Since then, the phrase has become quite common, and we can definitely see how someone like Jenkins — or anyone — would use it in a ra-ra speech. So, we're not going to call her a racist, but we will wrinkle our forehead in wonder.

Jenkins isn't totally unaware of her comment's objectionable subtext. Her office insists she didn't mean to be offensive and issued an apology. It was, we're sure, from the heart, not a reaction to outraged masses.

First of all: Fresca. Come on. It was LBJ's favorite soda! He was not a chocolate milk man.

Second of all: "24-year-old LA lawyer." Ugh.

And thirdly: we just failed the Millionaire audition last week.

In what is probably a violation of ABC's game show audition policies, our mother signed us up for a Millionaire audition against our knowledge, emailing us after receiving a confirmation from ABC.com and then shipping us a copy of The World Almanac 2009.

And because we do not like to disappoint out mother, we schlepped out to West 66th last Friday afternoon. And we stood outside of one of ABC's many buildings on that street, in the oppressive heat, with a couple dozen 50-year-old ladies from Westchester, cantankerous retired men from all over the tri-state area, a couple mooks in from Scotia, and three or four tattooed young folk participating either as a sop to mothers who think they've always wasted their prodigious talents or because it would be funny.

The ABC employees eventually ushered us into a classroom with an unmarked door leading directly to the street, where we learned how incredibly terrible old men are at going through metal detectors. They have literally hundreds of pockets, in their old man trousers and shirts and coats, and each one of those pockets is filled with assorted things they've collected during their 70+ years on this earth. They spend ten minutes emptying these pockets of their paper clips, LifeAlert pagers, money clips, Buick keys, buffalo nickels, bits of twine, pocket knives, and Nazi gold, and then they still set the alarm off, either because their hips are made of titanium or because they forgot they're keeping some tin for the war effort in their shirt pockets. It was hot, and we were slightly hungover, and standing outside waiting for these old men did not make us happy.

But it did give us some time to chat with the old ladies! They were a more fun-loving bunch, though none of them have had anything to do with all the hours in the day for 30 years now. Which is why all the old ladies have auditioned for Millionaire multiple times. And not just Millionaire! One lady told a story that began "well, when I was on Hollywood Squares..." and who knows if she meant Paul Lynde Hollywood Squares or Whoopi Goldberg Hollywood Squares or even Shadoe Stevens Squares.

Once we finally sat down the two fresh college grads organizing the audition waited out the old guys still at the metal detector by asking us if anyone had traveled far for the audition ("62nd street," said an old man) and then one of them got into a flirty argument with the mooks from Scotia (she was from Troy) and once it became dangerously like the first day of camp or maybe rehab the test finally began.

Here's how the audition works: you sign up, you are sent an application with lots of pre-interview questions about whether or not you're an ABC employee and how you would convey an interesting but not too out-there personality during a four-second conversation with Regis, and then you show up and take a multiple-choice test. Your score on the test determines whether or not you move on to a super-quick interview with a producer, and that interview determines whether you will end up in the contestant pool. Once you are in the pool, they can call you up to be on a syndicated taping tomorrow, or never.

The old ladies who've auditioned a hundred times warned us that the test was hard. We didn't believe them! We did well on the SATs and the ACTs. Taking multiple-choice tests is precisely what years of urban public schooling taught us to do! And it wasn't that hard, honestly. But we still sucked.

It's a 30 question multiple choice test and you have ten minutes to complete it. It was not that difficult. It was a smidgen of pop culture and simple math, and the rest was maybe Thursday Times crossword puzzle subject matter and difficulty. We only completely guessed on two questions, and gave educated guesses on maybe two more. But we failed. And then everyone who failed (at least 80% of the crowd) was very quickly hustled out of there.

We were never told what the passing grade actually is, but from now on, whenever we find ourselves knowing, without lifelines, the answer to every single damn question on Millionaire, and we watch some idiot contestant struggle, we will feel even worse. And we are a disappointment to our poor, long-suffering mother. At least Leitch got the chance to lose on actual TV.

Why You Should Be Cautiously Optimistic About Health Care Reform

Because the "public option" is actually maybe more important symbolically than actually. Government subsidies, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, and strict regulation of insurance companies would achieve most of the same goals, and gradual expansion of Medicare and Medicaid are just as much stalking horses for single-payer as a public option would be.

Additionally, the Town Hall debacles and bubbling revolt of the citizenry are largely smoke and mirrors. August is a news vacuum, and health care opponents provided a story to get us through the slowest month for political journalists. Most members of Congress will not change their votes based on what crazy people shouted at them in town halls.

Now. Politically, when everyone gets back to work, all the momentum is still in favor of something passing. As Ezra Klein describes the process here, things actually look pretty good. Something decent will pass the House, something will most likely pass the Senate, and then, in the conference committee, liberal Representatives and hopefully liberal Senators will hammer out a compromise. This compromise will also pass the House, and while there may be a lot of grandstanding in the Senate, the odds are still against a filibuster.

Why You Should Have Given Up Hope Already

What the hell are these "co-ops"? They don't exist. They are non-existent. No one can explain what they are or what they will do except that they will not be run by The Government and so they will not Kill Grandma.

Meanwhile the Democrat charged with getting something, anything out of the Senate Finance Committee is committed to keeping his girlfriend Chuck Grassley involved in the negotiations despite the fact that Grassley openly acknowledged that he would not actually vote for a bill that he himself crafted.

The longer the misinformation campaign drags on and the more Obama appears to repeat and internalize criticisms against liberal health care reform, the more public polls slowly turn against any reform at all.

It seems reasonable to believe that whatever passes will be so limited in scope and yet so much of a political headache that, once again, actual universal coverage of Americans will be kicked down the road for yet another generation.

And someone will probably actually shoot up a town hall by the time this fucking month ends.

In Conclusion

It depends on whether you will be dispirited by seemingly lackluster reforms or heartened by some small step toward joining the rest of the developed world.

See, a blogger took a picture of anti-health care protesters outside a town hall. Their signs were hand-made, with markers and stuff! Then, to drive the point home, they show another picture of people advocating for health care reform. Their signs were printed professionally!

Thus something or other is proven beyond any possible doubt. If this group of people wrote things on signs by themselves, the Town Hall disruption campaign can't possibly be a coordinated media effort by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.

This vile fucking terrible woman is, obviously, a miserable liar and a political hack. The mad old people, though, are not Republican "plants." They are just angry old white men who believe crazy things because all their preferred media outlets lie to them relentlessly and shamelessly, and that is not their fault, really, except inasmuch as they're generally incapable of being reasoned with.

They did not even fire him. He is suspended with pay.

And his email to the Boston Globe reporter, which calls Gates a "monkey" four times, is decidedly super racist and insane.

But in Obama's America, being suspended because you said you would've pepper sprayed any banana-eating jungle monkey who dared talk back to you is a violation of your "civil rights," thanks to the liberal political correctness.

Barrett claims he is not a racist, and, testing credibility even further, claims he'd never even used the phrase "banana-eating jungle monkey" before the day he wrote it four times in one email.

His lawsuit claims his civil rights have been violated; Barrett's lawyer said the words referring to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. were misinterpreted.

"The choice of words were poor; but they weren't meant to characterize professor Gates as a banana-eating jungle monkey," attorney Peter Marano said. "They were meant in a response to behavior and characterizing the behavior. Not the person as a whole."

Yes, just something about the way Skip Gates was behaving suggested, to Barrett, a monkey, in a jungle, eating a banana. We get it. Totally not racist.

(Even if he's not a racist [he is a total racist btw] his email suggests he's a completely unhinged PTSD-case who will snap and shoot a child for stealing a magazine basically any day now, so he should probably not complain about the suspension with pay thing.)

And, you know, here's Malkin posting NBC's logo photoshopped with a hammer and sickle and here's Malkin printing Chris Matthews' phone number in order to encourage her deranged readers to harass him for the crime of not interviewing her (on a previous book tour) politely enough, here she is calling NBC a bunch of gay muslims or something, here she is accusing NBC of news-staging, etc. etc. etc. But hey, if they'll move some books she'll sit down on the Today show!

No, seriously, on the one hand, it is certainly commendable that NBC would allow a virulent critic of GE and their own news division to appear on their network. But on the other hand, they should legitimize critics with actual valid criticisms, and maybe not crazy morons known primarily for lifting pieces of discredited scholarship in the service of racist arguments.

As for what she said on Today, it is too stupid and full of lies to deserve a response. But here we go anyway: she says the president took a "local parochial law enforcement story" and tried to use it to "try to ensure some sort of moment of his racial authenticity," by which she means he was directly asked what he thought about the arrest of a personal friend of his and he said it was "stupid," because it was stupid. Also he is racist against white people.

Even Matt Lauer—even Matt Lauer—cannot quite believe her vileness.

[Photo: The Distant Past]

Oh, and meanwhile: some other crazies are planning a violent revolution! This is the best comment, from that Free Republic post about how one million of them will march on Washington and repeal the 17th Amendment:

First thing it would do is scare the crap of all the politicians. Could you imagine a speaker whipping the crowd into a frenzy? "They are not our rulers, they're our servants! We shouldn't fear them, they should fear us!"

Crowd stomps and chants "Fear us! Fear Us!"

Windows rattle. Chandeleirs sway. Bureaucrats huddle in basements in fear, aides cry in the corner.

"They do not own us. We will no longer remain silent. We shall be heard!"

It would be glorious. I expect the politicians would all be taking the day off. It would have to be on a weekday, the media would be able to ignore us completely on weekends.

It must be a very long event, a short rally will not cut it.

Forget the park or the mall, we will pack the entire federal district if we had millions. For one day, at least, we would own DC.

and *sigh* MSNBC anchors making sexual jokes.
and a paragraph about it would appear in the NY Times on page B-7.

IMO.

Don't be so down on yourself, little Freeper! If the overthrowing the government thing doesn't work out at least you have a rich career ahead of you as Glenn Beck.

See, back in May, the Senate voted 90-6 against paying to close the illegal overseas prison, because Obama planned to transfer some of the prisoners to the US. As the Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said, at the time:

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that none of Guantánamo's detainees should be transferred to the US to stand trial or serve time in prison. "We don't want them around," he said. "I can't make it any more clear … We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States."

This utter refusal by the President's own party to do something mildly politically difficult proved a bit of a setback for the Gitmo task force! Congress refuses to allow these people to come to the US, and so other countries may be a little reluctant to take them off our hands. It is hard to come up with a good plan to close the site now, right?

Oh, boo hoo, Democrats in congress say now, our own cowardice ruined your little task force?

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday had a message for the White House regarding President Barack Obama's insistence on closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: No plan for the detainees? No money.

"They will have no money available until we get a plan. It's that simple," House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) said. "It's my bill."

Yes, well, wanting a plan before you pay the money is understandable, but when you all had a competition to see who could play into bullshit Republican fearmongering the hardest last spring and proved that any Guantanamo-closing plan that involves closing Guantanamo would end up causing all of you to wet your pants, it is hard for us to take you at your word, here, Congress.

LAW/TODAY: Obama's Presidential Eligibility — Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionTOP
[Limited to the Northeast/Southeast] I need an expert in constitutional law to tell me why Obama *is* eligible to be the president of the United States. Many people claim he is not the president because he was born in Hawaii. I need an expert to explain the eligibility requirement. Contact: Alyse Knorr, [redacted]

Submitted by:Alyse Knorr
Organization:Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Deadline:Jul 15, 2009 01:30 PM EST(America/New_York)

Here are some funny things:

• Birthers do not actually believe that Obama isn't qualified to be president because he was born in Hawaii. They don't believe he was born in Hawaii!
• She sent out this query 30 minutes before her deadline. Hah.

Also, this Tweet. (Update: She deleted her account; screenshots next time.) The more you know!