Respect

The whole "birther" claim has been utterly ridiculous, and I'm personally embarrassed to be an American when this kind of lunacy reaches a global audience. No one asked John McCain to prove he wasn't born in Scotland. Nor is anyone harassing Sarah Palin to these extents to see if her son Trig is really her daughter's son. But when it's the President, does all sense of what is sane and rational go out the door? Apparently.

Some wonderfully intelligent responses to today's shameful acknowledgment of America's latent racism...

"With President Obama's Birth Certificate, Klansman Trump Reminds Blacks They Will Never Be American" by The Onion's Baratunde Thurston:

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From Jonathan Blank's http://blanksslate.blogspot.com/2011/04/crash-course-in-black-history-new-nr.html

That Obama should have been expected to file a waiver to get an obscure document that no one else has had to produce and make it public to dispel a rumor based on absurd conjecture and outright lies is clearly a New Nigger Rule.

From "An embarrassment to the country" by Adam Serwer at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/an-embarrassment-to-the-country/2011/03/04/AFQk22xE_blog.html

Sadly, those who fostered doubts about the president’s citizenship are unlikely to relent in the face of factual proof, because birtherism was never about the facts. For its most ardent proponents, it was and is about their inability to accept the legitimacy of a black man in the White House. Nothing about the decision to release the president’s birth certificate can change that.

From "Afterbirthers Demand To See Obama's Placenta" by The Onion at http://www.theonion.com/articles/afterbirthers-demand-to-see-obamas-placenta,6866/

WASHINGTON–In the continuing controversy surrounding the president's U.S. citizenship, a new fringe group informally known as "Afterbirthers" demanded Monday the authentication of Barack Obama's placenta from his time inside his mother's womb. "All we are asking is that the president produce a sample of his fetal membranes and vessels—preferably along with a photo of the crowning and delivery—and this will all be over," said former presidential candidate and Afterbirthers spokesman Alan Keyes, later adding that his organization would be willing to settle for a half-liter of maternal cord plasma. "To this day, the American people have not seen a cervical mucus plug, let alone one that has been signed and notarized by a state-certified Hawaiian health official. If the president was indeed born in the manner in which he claims, then where is his gestation sac?" Keyes said that if Obama did not soon produce at least a bloody bedsheet from his conception, Afterbirthers would push forward with efforts to exhume the president's deceased mother and inspect the corpse's pelvic bone and birth canal.

From DRUNK HULK at http://twitter.com/#!/DRUNKHULK

STUPID AMERICA! HE PRESIDENT! NO CABBAGE PATCH KID!

Blame where it's due

From http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/02/06/the-disastrous-legacy-of-ronald-reagan-in-charts/zfacts-reagan-bush-national-debt-3/

From NPR Obama To Business Execs: 'Ask Yourselves What You Can Do For America'

Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation. That's what I want to talk about today — the responsibilities we all have to secure the future we all share.

From Reuters Obama urges overhaul of "burdensome" tax code

Obama's visit to the powerful business lobby group is his latest effort to improve relations with the corporate world and shift to the political center, following big losses for his Democrats in November elections.

From  USA Today Polar bear seeking ice floes swam 426 miles non-stop

"If we continue to see declines in the extent of Arctic sea ice, it's hard to imagine that a bear would be capable of swimming much farther than that," Durner tells the AP. "I'm not saying that's the limit, but it just boggles my mind."

Obama as Luke Skywalker

Oh the Daily Show, you never fail to be awesome.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/stewart-obama-is-skywalker_n_804051.html?ref=tw


While the media is calling Obama "the comeback kid." Stewart had a better analogy for his success, a three-trilogy analogy.

"He's not a kid," Stewart said. "He's Luke Skywalker"

He began with a general comparison that like Luke Skywalker of "Star Wars," Obama is also a "skinny kid with a funny name who came out of nowhere." Stewart then launched into a lengthy analogy spanning "New Hope," "Empire Strikes Back", "Return Of The Jedi" and even one of the prequels.

Aside from flexing his nerdy knowledge of "Star Wars," Stewart made detailed comparisons including Sarah Palin to a Wampa, Democrats to Wookies and Storm Troopers to Republicans.

America, on the other hand...

http://nymag.com/news/features/69791/

Stop the scare tactics

From Salon:

News flash: Deadly terrorism existed before 9/11
We've been dealing with the same threats for decades. But we used to be a lot calmer about it, less self-defeating
BY PATRICK SMITH

Here's a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane's occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That's a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989. 

....

If nothing else, it demonstrates how quickly we forget the past. Our memories are short, and growing shorter, it seems, all the time. Our collective consciousness seems to reinvent itself daily, cobbled from a media blitz of short-order blurbs and 30-second segments. There will be a heavy price to pay, potentially, for having developed such a shallow and fragile mind-set.

With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn't exist prior to that day, when really we've been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?

Well, have a look at the debased state of airport security today. We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower. We have implemented many important changes since Lockerbie, it's true (actually, many of the new protocols are post-9/11), but much of our approach remains incoherent. Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs.

And what of our rights as citizens? Body scanners are in the news this week. If a decade ago people were told that a day was coming when passengers would need to be looked at naked before getting on a plane, nobody would have believed it. Yet here we are, and what might be next?

....

Look again at that list above. All of those tragedies, in a four-year span, with some of the attacks actually overlapping. Try to imagine a similar spell today. Could we handle even a fraction of such disaster?

In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet self-defeating.

This time, thanks to the wholly unhealthy changes in our national and cultural mind-set, I fear it will be different.

A worthy news item

You are no longer free to move about the country

It's not difficult to envision the day where anyone wishing to take mass transportation in this country will have to first submit to a government checkpoint, show ID, and answer questions about any excess cash, prescription medication, or any other items in his possession the government deems suspicious. If and when that happens, freedom of movement will essentially be dead. But it won't happen overnight. It'll happen incrementally. And each increment will, when taken in isolation, appear to some to be perfectly reasonable.

For the full video, click here.  Thanks to Boing Boing for the catch.

Ich bin Berlinerin

No, I'm not German, but I could be. As an American, it is important to remember that we all came from somewhere else. Anyone proclaiming loudly "I was born here!" or even "my grandparents were born here," has too short a memory. White Americans on the whole suffer from a short term memory problem, it would seem. But is that just an excuse?

In his article "Red Brown and Blue," Ray Suarez discusses the changing face of who is white in this country. Too soon people forget, willfully, that to be Italian, Irish or Jewish did not always mean white. Celebrated immigrants were the pilgrims on the Mayflower, but some seem to think America ceased to be a nation of immigrants after 1776. How ridiculous would it have been for the travelers on the Mayflower, upon arriving, to turn to the succeeding ships with guns and declare them illegal? How silly this notion of "who has the right to be here" is.

Certainly don't ask Native Americans how they feel about immigration problems. I can only imagine the derisive laughter. But maybe their memory is short as well? I had a boss once whose heritage was half Cherokee and half European descent. She said she felt nothing for the plight of Native Americans in this country today; she had no feelings of loss over her people's heritage. How sad is that? Everyone who calls themselves white is so assimilated into the system that we have no history.

Kevin Powell writes an impassioned article for Huffington Post on how Black America has responded to the rising tide of Latino immigrants. It's a sad case of cycling marginalization that perpetuates closed societies and class distinctions. As Americans, we hold ourselves above the caste system of India; we claim to be better than the culture of monarchy and feudalism we escaped in Europe. But is today's immigration battle not simply the very same entitlement rebranded?

How can we be so shortsighted as to tell hundreds of thousands of people they've come to America two centuries too late? Perhaps it's a problem of space. The Louisiana Purchase was a gamble in its day, but one President had enough foresight to see that people were not going to stop coming to America, and there had to be a place for them all to spread out. Maybe we should look into buying Canada? </sarcasm>

Sarcasm aside, of course a country with a system of taxes based on nation-status must require a system of processing new arrivals. Why does it take months and years to process people? This may be a naive question, but I would counter that the responses on how to deal with a large group of undocumented (I will not say illegal. I did nothing to earn my right to citizenship in this country except be born) people has been equally naive, if not misguided at best to hateful at the worst.

What do laws like the one Arizona has proposed do to a society?

1. Crimes go unreported & drug dealers operate unopposed due to upstanding community members fears of being caught & deported. Chris Burbank for Huffington Post.
2. Police officers who walked the line before on venting their frustrations or prejudices on marginalized persons now have free reign to do so. Felipe Calderon in The Guardian.
3. Businesses that rely on the cheaper labor source that undocumented workers provide suffer. Undocumented workers are not taking away jobs from any legal citizen of America. As Martin Kaste for NPR writes, Americans don't want these jobs. 

The pecking order of race in this country has to stop. Change will come when a bigger crisis unites us, or a catastrophe changes the dynamic enough to allow for attitudes to shift. We could hope for voters to write their Congressperson to vote for tolerance & rewrite the laws that make the path to citizenship such a turmoil. We could hope a mixed race President will signal an attitude shift. Sadly we will probably just have to wait for the earth to fix our problems for us. Bring on the zombies.

Links

Famous American Immigrants

Ellis Island & Port of New York Arrivals

Get this poster:

Love America's history of immigrants? Watch the waves of immigrants settle here in this interactive map from the NY Times.