Free Republic

<p>Former Florida Rep. Allen West had some harsh words for nationally known civil rights activists like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who have remained silent on a video showing black teens beating a white boy on a school bus.</p>

In a radio interview in which he lamented the GOP filibusters and a gridlock in Congress, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he hopes Republicans who oppose the president do so “based on substance and not the fact that he’s an African-American.” The comment came Friday during the Nevada lawmaker’s appearance on Las Vegas-based National Public Radio affiliate KNPR (http://bit.ly/16AheWv), and drew swift response from Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, who is black. “I hope Sen. Reid will realize the offensive nature of his remarks and apologize to those who disagree with the president’s policies because of one thing...

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he hopes Republicans who oppose the president do so “based on substance and not the fact that he's an African-American.” The comment came during a wide-ranging interview Friday with Las Vegas-based National Public Radio affiliate KNPR, in which Reid lamented Republican filibusters and claimed opponents do everything they can to make Obama fail. … Reid’s comments went unchallenged by the program’s moderator, but not by Newsmax contributor and Conservative African-American columnist Clarence V. McKee, who said there was no reason for Reid to bring up the race issue during the interview. … He...

"There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House...They hate not just his politics but him," says Chris Matthews. Let me finish tonight with this. I said it before and am now saying it again. There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House. It grates on them, just as it thrills – even now – tens of millions of others. They hate not just his politics but him. Think about all the days we have...

I love how the words just casually roll off his tongue, as if he had been saying them all his life. Which he has. But there is no such thing as black racism, don't you know? Using a racial epithet to describe one's political opponents is accepted behavior. Or at least it must be because the only people saying anything about it are those on the right. But even at 83, dressed in a blue bow tie and crisp gray suit, Rangel is relentless toward those who he feels are slowing the forces of progress. House Republicans? Have done more...

The 2012 killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin has led to various rallies, boycotts, and even songs. Now, the NAACP is leading the way in an effort to force legal changes across the United States in an attempt to prevent another similar situation. The NAACP created "Trayvon's Law," a series of legislative policies that aims to "end racial profiling, repeal stand your ground laws, form effective civil complaint review boards to provide oversight of police misconduct, improve training for community watch groups, mandate law enforcement to collect data on homicide cases involving non-whites, and address the “school to prison pipeline,...

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday accused Rev. Jesse Jackson of insulting Floridians with a series of reckless and divisive statements about the state and its “stand your ground� self-defense law.While visiting the state Capitol Tuesday, Jackson talked about efforts to repeal the law and used the phrase “Selma of our time� — a reference to civil rights marches in Alabama that helped prompt change in the 1960s.In a July 18 exchange on CNN, Jackson talked about an economic boycott to “isolate Florida as a kind of apartheid state given this whole stand your ground laws.� Scott denounced both...

Obama threatened the GOP this week that “racial tensions may get worse” if he does not get his way with the economy.The White House Dossier reported: President Obama said that if economic prescriptions of the type he supports to increase economic growth and reduce “income inequality” are not adopted, then race relations in the United State may deteriorate further. “If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” Obama said in an interview published Sunday by the New York...

In a recent article I called for economic sanctions against Florida to compel business and political leaders in that state to change the “Stand Your Ground Law” that provided the basis for the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. There are times when there is a convergence of ideas, a meeting of minds, such that a particular strategy has the potential to galvanize a movement. This appears to be one of those times. The idea of boycotting Florida is not a Ron Daniels idea or Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) call. Rather,...

TALLAHASSEE - Florida Gov. Rick Scott sharply criticized Jesse Jackson on Wednesday over comments he made this week while joining a Capitol protest. Jackson spent time with a group upset with the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. They've refused to leave the Capitol until Scott calls a special session and asks legislators to overhaul the state's "stand your ground" self-defense laws. Scott has refused the request. Jackson, the veteran activist, criticized Florida as the "Selma of our time," referred to it as the "Apartheid State" and made a comparison of Scott to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace. Selma, Ala.,...

President Obama, America’s first half-black, half-white president, went to the White House podium last week to address the nation’s most racially divisive case since Rodney King. But he wasn’t there to calm the country. And he certainly wasn’t there to start some “conversation” on race — he doesn’t find those “particularly productive,” he said, what with all the listening. Instead, he came out unannounced to the briefing room to talk about “how people are feeling.” Not all people, mind you, just black people — and especially, as always, himself. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said the...

President Barack Obama movingly spoke of the “pain” most African-Americans felt at the acquittal of George Zimmerman. But Obama didn’t speak solely because he felt obliged to make a generic observation about the anger of most blacks toward the verdict, or even out of remembrance of the fight he led in the Illinois state legislature more than a decade ago to get a bill passed that put law enforcement on notice that racial profiling won’t be tolerated. It took many tries and four years to get the bill finally passed. He spoke from a well-documented personal experience. He bluntly noted...

ORLANDO — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. strongly condemned so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws here Tuesday in a speech to the NAACP that addressed the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. The laws “sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” Holder said, by “allowing – and perhaps encouraging – violent situations to escalate in public.”

On Saturday, the left wing blog Politics USA called former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a racist for criticizing Barack Obama as "lackadaisical." According to the liberal site, "lackadaisical" is a "Jim Crow stereotype," but Webster's online dictionary defines it as "lacking life, spirit, or zest." Jason Easley said that Palin used a question about the way Obama has handled the Edward Snowden affair to attack Obama.

The Senate majority leader said, “It's significant that 150 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, we are still considering in film, in photo, in art, and activism how to eradicate slavery's unsavory successors.” Reid was speaking at a ceremony unveiling Rosa Parks' statue in the Capitol...

The Rev. Al Sharpton has made his mark fighting for the “voiceless.” For that — and much more — BET is honoring him with its Humanitarian Award at the cable network’s annual showcase, the Daily News has learned. Recent examples of his activism include the fights he helped wage with the families of a pair of slain teenagers, Trayvon Martin, of Florida, and Ramarley Graham of the Bronx. The Harlem-based civil rights activist has also led the charge against the NYPD’s controversial street interrogation practices, which have been used disproportionately in the black and Latino communities, and he’s marched for...

On June 3rd, Jesse Jackson held a pre-recall election rally for a small gathering of people in Racine, WI. And although he spent some time leading the attendees in the mantra, “June five, we vote, to revive, our democracy,” his central point was a silly and unrelated contention that gun control creates jobs. Seriously: he told the people who attended the rally to mark their calendars for the recall vote on June 5th and for a march on gun stores on June 16th. His mantra for the march on gun stores lacked the cadence of his mantra for the recall...

Last night in Racine, Wisconsin, while demanding jobs for the unemployed, Jesse Jackson decided to slam job creating gun dealers and called for a march on gun shops all over the country. h/t Katy Abram "Guns out, jobs in." Jackson wants to get rid of the very thing that has kept the economy afloat during Obama's presidency. The firearms industry has not only created jobs in the past three years but has also provided the government with a steady revenue stream. NSSF today released a newly commissioned report detailing double-digit gains in jobs and other data showing the industry has...

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., addressing Wisconsin voters ahead of today's recall election on Gov. Scott Walker, compared the embattled governor to Alabama's late Gov. George Wallace. Jackson, speaking at a voter rally Monday in Milwaukee, said the election is a big moment in the history of democracy, according to a report by the Journal-Sentinel newspaper of Milwaukee. Jackson, the newspaper said, used his 10-minute speech to compare the vote to defining moments in U.S. history like Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 speech in Washington, D.C., the lynching death of 14-year-old Emmett Till and Barack Obama's nomination as the Democratic...

On Thursday, MSNBC's Al Sharpton took the race card to a whole new level by falsely claiming Republicans are like Hitler, and are prepared to kill African-Americans en masse. "It seems like they [Republicans] act as though, some wiping out of people, some of the right-wing, is all right, it’s not all right to do to any innocent people. If you had war and people that’s one thing, but to wipe out innocent people just because of who they are like what was done in Hitler’s Germany or what was done to Native Americans is not justifiable," he said....

Rev. T. Ray McJunkins of Springfield's Union Baptist Church and USAction's William McNary engaged in violent rhetoric to rile up a union crowd of thousands just yards away from an Illinois appearance by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. McNary challenged Walker to "knuckle up" while McJunkins said they're going to "cut off his head," likening Walker to Goliath.

FACT SOURCE--EDITED EXCERPTS New York Times report: Lawmakers generosity on big corporations' tab. Copyright 2012 stltoday.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/article_dfea2768-b95b-11df-bd41-0017a4a78c22.html#ixzz1rfgdnEAe NARRATIVE Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif 43rd) has achieved near celebrity status in his suburban LA district, as much for his record of giveaways — turkeys, scholarships, boots for firefighters — as for anything he has done in the US Congress. Baca's generosity is made possible by The Joe Baca Foundation, a so-called "charity" he and his family set up circa 2008 under the pretext of "aiding" local organizations....

1) If one suggests that there may not be, at least as yet, enough evidence to overturn the initial police decision of not charging Mr. Zimmerman with a crime, then one is a de facto racist. In other words, the liberal position of letting all the evidence be reexamined in a dispassionate fashion is now illiberal. And the illiberal one of charging someone with a felony without established probable cause is liberal. But just arresting and charging a suspect to let a judge or jury post facto decide whether there was ever probable cause for such an arrest is neither...

Today, race-baiter Al Sharpton, who was most recently seen threatening the city of Sanford, Florida over the Trayvon Martin case, attended the White House Prayer Breakfast. The White House stated that the breakfast invitees included “heads of major denominations, non-profit leaders and prominent mainline, Evangelical, Orthodox and Catholic leaders from across the spectrum.” Sharpton obviously has a history of racial rabblerousing – and a history of lying about cases (Tawana Brawley) or making accusations without evidence (Duke rape case) or blowing them up into violent incidents (Crown Heights riot, 1991). He’s certainly used his dog-eared racialist playbook on the Martin...

Posted to Crown Heights News on August 25 2011 Yankel Rosenbaum's Brother Sets the Record Straight About Al Sharpton Daily News The Rev. Al Sharpton's recent reflections on the Crown Heights riots were egregiously sanitized. On Sunday, Rev. Al Sharpton gave his version of what happened 20 years ago in Crown Heights. But although he purports to have reflected on and learned from the riots, the truth is his recollection is egregiously distorted and sanitized. Sharpton's motivation for expressing his opinion at this time is unimportant; the fact that he has chosen to do so bestows a responsibility on us...

"Blacks are under attack," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, irresponsibly turning the Florida shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, at the hands of Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman into a barometer of black-white "race-relations." President Barack Obama, three years past his inauguration as American's first black president, weighed in, too. As when he accused the Cambridge police of "acting stupidly," Obama injected race, but this time a little less directly: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." The implication, of course, is that race undoubtedly played a role in the death of Trayvon Martin....

In a profanity-laced tirade, a Memphis DJ last week used an on-air interview to berate a local Republican congressional candidate -- calling her a "token negro" who is doing the bidding of "white folk." DJ Thaddeus Matthews called Charlotte Bergmann, who is black, "stupid." He referred to her as a "curly-haired nigga." When she walked out of the interview, he refused to shake her hand, saying he didn't want to get her "whiteness" on him. The outrage? The fury? In Memphis, you can hear the crickets. Bergmann told FoxNews.com that, while the web video of the interview has gotten a...

Jackson: Heated GOP rhetoric puts presidents at risk

Those who are professional media enemies of the Republicans are having a fine time catching the elephants lying. The only problem to me is that they do not always follow the same rules when a supposedly oppressed group proves that it, like all others, is a contradictory bundle of human realities. Yet Rachel Maddow, for one, is remarkable when it comes to proving in high quality intellectual detail how often the elephants do and say irrational things for the sake of pure ideology. Her proof that President Ronald Reagan did things contrary to what he supposedly believed is perfectly executed...

We all know Al Sharpton has a history of not reading the teleprompter correctly on his MSNBC tv show. The latest flub? Saying the Republican party has rushed to "white" wing extremism. (VIDEO) Can you imagine what would happen if Sean Hannity "accidentally" said black wing extremism?

<p>West said Holder’s use of race as a way to attack his critics is “the most insidious thing I ever heard.”</p> <p>West: Holder’s race card is the ‘last card in the deck’</p>

Is it racist to require people to show a photo ID when they vote? You need a photo ID for nearly any meaningful transaction, such as cashing checks, including government checks. If this simple requirement “suppresses� the vote, maybe we need to ask why it’s such a great idea to push for universal suffrage for every adult who is merely breathing. Of course, even this latter requirement would suppress the vote in Chicago and New Orleans, where dead people get to vote all the time – and do so cheerfully! In a speech Tuesday at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library...

Worst. Administration. Ever. The Justice Department today released a statement insisting Attorney General Eric Holder was not playing the race card when he played the race card in an article published yesterday in The New York Times. Clearly this incompetent Obama official thinks we’re all stupid. Eric Holder needs to go. They won’t own up to their incompetence and think we’re stupid.

Buried in a recent New York Times profile of Attorney General Eric Holder is this revealing tidbit: But Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light. Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme...

You know he’s getting desperate. (NYT) — For nearly three years, Republicans have attacked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on national security and civil rights issues. For months, they have criticized him over a gun-trafficking investigation gone awry, with dozens of leaders calling for his resignation. Last week, more than 75 members of Congress co-sponsored a House resolution expressing “no confidence” in his leadership. [...] In the interview, Mr. Holder offered a glimpse of how he viewed the criticism. He said he thought some critics — like Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who favors allowing the military...

For two years conservatives indulged themselves in unheard-of dogwhistle campaigns against this young African-American President while enlightened liberals pointed it out in a mild, somewhat derisive fashion but with little outrage. Now, in the aftermath of the midterm 'shellacking', a New Confederacy is rising with the assistance of the tea party and John Birchers, and it's getting enough traction in Congress to do real damage. The scary part? It's working. Fact: We are NOT living in a post-racial society. Not on the liberal side, and not on the conservative side. As nice as it is to think that we've transcended...

Janeane Garofalo: "Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same. "People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say 'Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.'"

While speaking with Tavis Smiley of PBS, Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee said conservative bloggers should "shut up" and "stop playing racial politics." This from a member of the caucus that does little else but play the race card. Seconds later, Jackson Lee went on to say that buy American should be "buy African American." She also said that if Obama's jobs bill is passed, that contractors who "do not look like" her need to make sure that if they get federal money, their workforce "better be reflective of those suffering double-digit unemployment." "I don't consider it discrimination, I don't...

As you watch the following short speech from Black Panther National Chairman Malik Shabazz, consider that, while you may disagree with his solutions to the problems or where he places some of the blame, his core message is very similar to those of others that are fed up with what’s going on in this country. Our message to the State Department, our message to the CIA, our message to Homeland Security, our message to the government today, is that your enemy is not our enemy. Your enemy in Afghanistan, your enemy in Iran, your enemy that you are bombing in...

The Rev. Al Sharpton did not particularly care for the (your adjective here) comments about late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner by Rush Limbaugh, which I blogged here earlier in the day: "The statements made by Rush Limbaugh about George Steinbrenner were repugnant and offensive whether they were intended to be facetious or tongue and cheek. The fact that he could make these comments less than 24-hours after Mr. Steinbrenner's death makes it even more offensive. For the last 20-years I have known George Steinbrenner and we have quarrelled over diversity and community programs but I always found him fair, direct,...

HOWARD FISCHER / CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICESMaricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox and the Rev. Al Sharpton lead a march wearing "Los Suns" jerseys of the Phoenix Suns basketball team.PHOENIX - Invoking the image of the civil-rights movement of a half-century ago, the Rev. Al Sharpton promised Wednesday to re-create it in Arizona if a new immigration law takes effect, filling the jails here with protesters engaged in civil disobedience. Sharpton, in a speech to an overflow crowd at the Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, said the first effort will be to overturn the law, known as SB 1070, set to...

CNN’s Martin: ObamaCare Opponents ‘Probably Can’t Spell Communism And Socialism’

"You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, 'We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.' It's only them. Now, a black kid might shoot another black kid. He's not going to shoot up the whole school."

Last night while watching Obama address the country on health care, I was indeed shocked like everyone else when Lynn Sweet asked Obama what he felt about Skip Gates. I was both, disappointed that she was derailing the focus on health care and anxious about the potential answer. Obama has not talked much about violence or police brutality, even though during his administration there have been many incidents of violence between police and people of color. So what did he actually say? Watch the video below. (VIDEO AT LINK) (Transcript after the jump.) I never imagined that he would make...

Racism in the criminal-justice system is not a thing of the past, says Barack Obama, citing the recent arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates. (Snip) Yesterday President Obama spoke out about the incident: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us [in Gates’ position] would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this...

BY JESSE JACKSON New Haven, Conn., is a city in which African Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of the population; yet, by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, the city must be served --"as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination -- by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are rarely seen in command positions." Today's ruling is deeply flawed and should not be the law of the land. In assessing claims of race discrimination, "context matters." Grutter vs. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 327 (2003). In June 2003, the Supreme...

Around Christmas of 1973, a fellow sophomore approached Frank Reed, a leader of Princeton University's Chicano Caucus, to hand him a formal complaint she had typed up and to ask him to support it. Sonia Sotomayor was head of the other Latino organization on campus, Acción Puertorriqueña. And after a history of fruitless student talks with Princeton administrators over the lack of Hispanic professors and staff, Sotomayor believed the time had come to lodge a grievance with the federal government over the university's hiring practices. The written complaint, filed that April with what was then the U.S. Department of Health,...

DETROIT — The Rev. Jesse Jackson says helping Detroit's ailing auto industry is part of the NAACP's new role. The civil rights activist said Sunday that blacks are disproportionately suffering in the current economic downturn and car companies' failures. The reverend is scheduled to deliver the keynote address later Sunday at the 54th Detroit NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund dinner at Detroit's Cobo Center.

Don’t think for a second the election of a Democratic African American president would silence the Rev. Al Sharpton. He was his usual self Wednesday, ripping into the new administration. “They appear like smiling liberals, but they are all a bunch of condescending bigots,” Sharpton said while speaking on a education panel regarding the release of “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s schools.”

Clarissa Martinez De Castro, director of immigration and national campaigns for the National Council of La Raza, says that money inspires the anti-immigration rhetoric of talk radio hosts and CNN’s Lou Dobbs. She took part in a panel discussion at an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday. “People like Lou Dobbs and other similar folks, to go from a certain platform to a very shrill voice and persona that they have got, is they’re making money, folks, right?” Martinez said when an audience member asked how to “educate someone like Lou Dobbs? “The thing about Lou Dobbs...