You can't make this stuff up. John McCain to the San Francisco Chronicle on February 18th, 2000 (via Daily Kos):

Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and held him captive during the war.

"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."
"
McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, was questioned about the language because of a story last month in the Nation magazine reporting his continued use of the slur.

Because what this country really needs is an avowed, unrepentant racist as President.

Update: A phone statement from Councilman John C. Liu:

"This was highly offensive in 2000, and it's offensive today. For a would-be President, the statute of limitations for a slur like this is longer than eight years. I think everyone can understand how a POW comes to hate his captors. Hopefully, however, he's come to understand that "gooks" is one of the most offensive terms anyone can possibly use about Asian-Americans."

Yesterday I wrote the following about Hillary Rodham Clinton :

Shameless.

Despicable.

Unfit to be President of the United States.

My words hit the front pages of both Daily Kos and The Moderate Voice. By evening Keith Olbermann had the following to say about Hillary Clinton's latest "gaffe" :

The most important part of the transcript is after the jump :

Get used to it Democrats. Whether we run a woman or a black this year, the nastiness from right wing idiots will get pretty bad. Look to what the Republicans did in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006 and you'll get some idea what we are in for.

Georgia is leading the way. Seems a bar owner in Cobb Co. Georgia who thinks he's so clever made up T-shirts with a picture of Curious George (registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) eating a banana with the caption "Obama '08." When confronted by some uppity civil rights groups the bar owner insisted he wasn't racist. From a Daily Kos article because the original newspaper article keeps crashing Firefox:

The T-shirts are being peddled by Marietta bar owner Mike Norman at his Mulligan's Bar and Grill in Cobb County. They show a picture of Curious Georgie peeling a banana, with the words "Obama '08" underneath.

...

Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey.

The three police officers on trial for killing Sean Bell were acquitted today.

As someone who had inside information during the trial of four police officers in the Amadou Diallo case, I was unsurprised by that acquittal eight years ago. I lack the inside information this time, but having followed the case in the papers I am again not surprised by the acquittal.

The problem here is that we have a built-in racism in our society. It does not help that the vast majority of so-called "progressive" organizations are all, or nearly all, white. It does not help that the few groups that consist primarily of people of color (oh, screw being PC -- make it "consist primarily of blacks or Hispanics") are portrayed in the media as violent or potentially violent.

It does not help that those relatively few cases when violence erupts are

Well, if this isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is. The Stop the Madrassa Group (SMG), the organization responsible for the attack on the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) before it even opened, is now calling for the closing of the school on the grounds that it has become “chaotic.”

The group issued a press release yesterday calling for an “immediate investigation into chaotic conditions at Arabic Public School.” The Group is correct in stating that there is chaos at the school. What it fails to explain is that this chaos is a direct result of their spreading vicious lies, resulting in the loss of the school’s founding principal and the continued failure to support the school by the DOE.

Pam Spaulding alerted me to the demotardic shenanigans of Andrew Cuomo. My quick response is ending up being a larger piece on race, so let me just get the news out first.

Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General for the State of New York and Hillary Clinton supporter, has earned not just a culturekitchen Demotard award. He also gets to hang on his door a Reappropriate "Racism Fairy" badge and enjoy a video prelude from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing :

Andrew Cuomo (who could easily be played by John Tuturro, the italian guy in the video clip) said of the primary process that, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference ... all those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”

His response to criticism for the quote? Well, what he really meant was "bob and weave" your way through a situation. That it was never meant as a reference to Barack Obama.

Yes, because "shuck and jive" is really all about bobbing and weaving.

Geezus.

I have more respect from Klansmembers than from Europeanoid liberals with repressed racist tendencies that get manifested in curiously inappropriate moments like, you know, when they're talking up their white candidate who's poised to lose the nomination to a black man.

When you read about the Jena 6, it feels like you must be reading about something that happened more than 50 years ago before the Civil Rights Movement. It's hard to believe that it is happening in 2007.

There is some good news, but the battle is not over yet.

Background Info for those of you not yet familiar with the Jena 6

The Jena 6 incident started at Jena High School when some black students sat under a tree that had been traditionally reserved the white students. The next day, nooses painted with the school colors were hung from the tree. The students responsible for hanging the nooses were expelled but the School Superintendent later reversed their expulsions referring to the noose hangings as a “prank.”

In bullfights, to get a bull to charge, the matador waves a red cape in front of it. Supposedly, when the bull sees red, it becomes enraged. Similarly, among humans, certain words cause people to “see red” and become enraged. The words that evoke this response differ among different people. The word “intifada” is one of those words that leads certain people to “see red.”

When people “see red,” they often become so caught up in their emotions that they are blind to anything other than the red-caped word in front of them. This is because the red triggers their instinctual fight-or-flight reaction. Physiologically, when we are in fight-or-flight mode, our focus is narrowed to what we see as the source of danger. Looking thus through tunnel vision, we are unable to see all of the other data that is available. We frame the situation through the narrowed context of the angry and fearful emotions triggered by the word.

Yesterday, supporters of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) (KGIA) and Debbie Almontaser held a rally in front of the Tweed Courthouse. It was an attempt to set the record straight as well as to make sure the DOE knows that community support for the School and for Debbie is strong.

I was asked to speak because I was a member of the KGIA Design Team. And, both as a member of the KGIA Design Team, and as a white Jewish parent from Brooklyn, I wanted to make clear that the stated mission and purpose of the school is the opposite of what it’s opponents are making it out to be.

The other speakers at the rally were: Rabbi Michael Feinberg, Executive Director of the

A travesty of justice has taken place in Brooklyn. Debbie Almontaser, the woman who created the vision of a dual-language Arabic-English school in Brooklyn has been forced to resign from her position as the principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) as a result of a smear campaign carried out by an organization known as “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” (SMC) with a great deal of support by the New York Post and a surprising dearth of support by the Department of Education.

Debbie is a woman who personifies peace and interfaith connections, yet articles in the Post and statements by the Stop the Madrassa group have portrayed her as supporting violence and wanting to create an Islamic school. Nothing could be farther from the truth.