The Fourteenth Amendment Guarantees Birthright Citizenship To All

Since Donald Trump is totally unaware of anything he doesn't learn from tv, he cannot know that his immigration plan is pure racism. The tip-off comes from right-wing websites and Ann Coulter, who have this strange idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee US citizenship to anyone born in the US. They cite Judge Richard Posner as the most authoritative holder of this view. (It's amazing how all these websites and right-wing pundits use exactly the same language and arguments, isn't it?)

The American Civil Liberties Union disagrees:

Citizenship under the 14th Amendment includes those born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens. This was clearly established over 100 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Fourteenth Amendment states it clearly:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

Someone reading this Amendment should logically conclude that anyone born in the US, regardless of the nationality of his parents, is a US citizen. But Trump's lawyer friends say that, no, the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment intended it to apply to slaves and their children, not to the children of immigrants. Because, they say, the Congress in 1868 didn't have an immigration problem.

As with almost everything to do with racists and their beliefs, this opinion presents a false idea of history. That's how they operate. In fact, immigration was a huge issue in 1868, much bigger than slavery in the North and West. There was no concern about illegal immigrants in 1868 because immigration was uncontrolled. Whoever wanted to emigrate to the US was welcome. Even the Chinese--who were widely regarded as an inferior race--were allowed to freely immigrate because their labor was necessary for the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Between 1880 and 1920, 20 million people immigrated to the US. All of their children enjoyed birthright citizenship.

Why should we change the law now, if it has worked so well in the past? There is only one answer. Many people who declare that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't mean what it says are avowed racists who believe that Latinos are incapable of governing themselves.

The first court test of the 14th Amendment was US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The Supreme Court ruled that Wong was a citizen of the US by virtue of his birth in San Francisco and could not be prevented from entering the country. Since that time, numerous court rulings have upheld this ruling and concurred that the 14th Amendment does, indeed, make all children born in the US American Citizens, regardless of who their parents are. In the early days, the acceptance of birthright citizenship was essential, since about 15% of the population came from other countries and their children were only citizens by virtue of their being born here.

Judge Posner states his viewpoint in Oforji v. Ashcroft, 354 F.3d at 621 (2003). Posner concludes that the courts cannot outlaw birthright citizenship, but the Congress may, simply by passing a law. Posner unaccountably gives as one of his arguments against birthright citizenship that the 

Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR] estimates that 165,000 babies are born each year in the United States to illegal immigrants and others who come here to give birth so their children will be American citizens

This figure is pure fiction. Factcheck.org concludes that, while it is true that there are millions of immigrants who have children in the US, Mexicans come to the US to work, not to have babies. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Federation for American Reform (FAIR) is a hate group whose sole purpose is to severely limit immigration into the United States. Its members include avowed racists and eugenicists like FAIR founder and Board Member John Tanton, who wrote

I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."

— John Tanton, letter to eugenicist and ecology professor Garrett Hardin (now deceased), Dec. 10, 1993

and FAIR President Dan Stein, who claimed that the 1965 immigration act 

was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it's a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line. 

These are not just the views of racial supremacists, although they are that. These are the views of eugenicists, people who believe that inferior people should be eliminated to make way for superior ones. They view Latinos as both inferior and expendable, since they want to maintain an Anglo-Saxon majority by any means possible.

Judge Posner should have known the racist basis of FAIR and he should have realized that statistics provided by them could not legitimately be relied on. Did he intend to incorporate the racist, eugenicist views of that group into the legal record? If not, he should apologize for his actions. If he did, then all of his judgments should be reviewed for racist bias and expunged from the record if necessary.

Bill Maher debates Ben Affleck on Islam

Recently Bill Maher caused a sensation on the internet by claiming that Islam is more like a criminal enterprise than a religion. What other religion, he asked, threatens to kill you if you don't agree with their religious practices?

Maher and his guest, Sam Harris, then brought out a laundry-list of complaints leveled at Muslims: they subjugate women, they execute apostates (Muslims who renounce their religion), and they execute people who defame Islam or the Prophet Muhammed.

Ben Affleck responded by calling Maher's comments racist. The definition of racism is the application of a set of stereotypical characteristics to an entire race. So, when you condemn Islam because ISIS commits atrocities in Iraq, you are spreading racism. In fact, it is people with microphones, like Maher, who do the most damage by spreading racism. Reza Aslan, a scholar of middle eastern religions, says that Maher has been attacking Islam for a long time but people have just started to notice the damage he is doing.

Maher doesn't see it that way. For him, as also for Sam Harris, Islam is an evil religion. Muslims may reject the actions and beliefs of ISIL, 

but hold views about human rights, and about women, and about homosexuals that are deeply troubling.

Harris says that Islam is the Mother Lode of Bad Ideas.

Is Islam as bad as all that?

We need to understand that this debate is not just about Islam, but religion in general. Harris and Maher are not just critics of Islam, they are famous atheists who are making money from attacking religion. Harris, in particular, has made a career by attacking religion.

So we have to ask, would people be likely to approve this attack on Islam if they understood that the attackers, Maher and Harris, have said similar things about Christianity? The circumstances would be quite different if Maher had said, Christianity is a terrible religion, but Islam is even worse.

To his credit, Affleck pointed out the absurdity of the attacks on Islam. You can't judge a religion with a billion adherents all around the world by the actions of a few extremists in Iraq. The US Constitution made a good rule, that religions should be allowed to practice their beliefs without interference from the government.

Affleck admitted that ISIL had committed some atrocities. So what do you want to do about it? He asked Maher. Kill more people? Hasn't there been enough killing already?

Affleck may have struck a nerve with that question, because Harris first came to prominence as an Islam basher after the 9/11 attacks. His views provided a rational basis to go to war against Iraq. They still provide an excuse to start yet another war in the Middle East, and there are plenty of people who planned the last one still hanging around, urging Obama to send in the troops.

This program went viral, probably because Affleck was on it. Affleck was sandbagged by these two professional muslim-haters.

Racist Omertá Exposed in Ferguson

The Heritage Foundation recently posted on Google Plus that Mississippi should cut its corporate income tax. I pointed out in a comment that Mississippi ranks 50th among states in education, 50th in health care, and that its failures in these areas were race-based, since the poor who are affected by lack of education and health care are predominantly African American. I don't think there is any doubt about that statement. But one person, I'll call him Jack, commented that Mississippi may have been racist in the 1960s, but not any more.

Southern whites were embarrassed by the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills in the late 1960s. Their response to these exposures of racist government was not to work to end racism, but to conceal it (and in this they are joined by northern Republicans). They have done this through a policy of omertá--a rigid code of silence about racial matters imposed on southern whites. Under the policy of omertá, white southerners pretend that racism is dead, that there is no discrimination against African-Americans, and that what happened in the bad old days just doesn't matter any more.

The 5 conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) recently endorsed this fiction by striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because, they claimed, it wasn't needed any more. The Court ruled that the law made sense because of past violations of voters' rights, but is no longer valid because today African-Americans can vote without any problems. SCOTUS thus let themselves be convinced by Southern omertá that everything is fine now and the federal government does not need to keep watching the southern states for potential violations.

Naturally, the first thing that Republicans in state legislatures (not all of them in the South) have done is to enact laws to restrict voting rights--Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arkansas have tried this. One of their favorite techniques is to require state-issued id (generally a driver's license) to be able to vote. This immediately disenfranchised all elderly black voters who no longer drove cars, even if these people could prove they had been on the voting rolls for 50 years--since the voting rights law of 1965 was enacted. Another way African-Americans have been disenfranchised is to gerrymander them all into one district instead of letting them exercise their votes in several districts--Alabama has tried this.

Political commentators, including Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, have bought into the idea that racism is dead. O'Reilly goes so far as to say that those who accuse others of racism are the real problem because they would create a nation of haters.

All of these arguments against racism have been exposed by events in Ferguson. There, in a town that is two-thirds African-American, the white police chief has refused to arrest a police officer on suspicion of homicide after the officer shot times and killed an unarmed youth. The lines between white and black are being clearly drawn by the suppression of demonstrators in Ferguson, a town outside Saint Louis, Missouri. Rather than acceding to the reasonable requests of law-abiding citizens that the officer in question be arrested, the police floated rumors that the boy was high on drugs, or had recently robbed a convenience store, or was attacking the officer when he was shot.

All of the excuses given why the officer should not be arrested and arraigned for murder are irrelevant. They are arguments with which a defense attorney might try to sway a jury, but they are not reasons why a trial should not take place. The rift between black and white in this country is as deep as it ever was, fueled by the toxic flames of racism that have been kept hidden by white southerners for the last 50 years. But no longer. Ferguson has exposed the true state of race relations in this country. Let's all call for something more than silence--omertá--in response.

Rand Paul advocates segregation, Paul Ryan advocates decimation.

Adherents of libertarian philosophies enjoy wide-spread popularity these days. Their views coincide generally with American ideals. Patrick Henry summed up his animus against the British crown in 1775 by saying, "Give me liberty or give me death." America's schoolchildren conclude each pledge to the flag with the words, "With liberty and justice for all."

As much as Americans idealize liberty, they seldom offer a realistic definition of the word, which means many things to different people. So Rand Paul, a self-identifying libertarian, has stated that liberty means the freedom to refuse service to African Americans at lunch counters and hotels. This comment has endeared him to the crypto-racists of the Republican heartland. I call them crypto-racists because they refuse to admit their own obvious racism and steadfastly maintain, contrary to all available evidence, that white racism no longer exists.

Rand Paul's extreme views place him in the forefront of Republican presidential hopefuls, largely because billionaire David Koch is an ardent libertarian. Koch is likely to spend $100 million or more of his vast fortune to insure the election of a libertarian Republican president. For David and his brother Charles, liberty means the freedom to pollute the environment and endanger the future of the planet by denying the influence of humans—especially himself—on global warming.

Paul Ryan, another Republican politician with libertarian ideals, has attacked the federal government for giving lunch money to disadvantaged children. He says this practice feeds their bodies but starves their souls. The soul, however, cannot be separated from the body except by death.  Whatever benefit a child may gain from refusing a subsidized lunch will be destroyed by malnutrition and ultimate starvation.

Here the philosophy of libertarianism jumps the tracks and starts gnawing at the roots of our democracy. Ryan is apparently applying the views of Patrick Henry, since he unequivocally states that a child would be better off dead than enslaved by free food from the government. Ryan does not betray an iota of satire here, as did Jonathan Swift when he proposed a similar solution to the problem of poverty. He is deadly serious when he advocates helping poor children by refusing them food.

Wealthy businessmen have been the core of Republican power since the party's inception. Their philosophy has always been that whatever is good for business is good for the USA. The Kochs have added a new wrinkle to this self-serving attitude, for they maintain that whatever is good for the Kochs is good for the world. They express this belief repeatedly, by their public pronouncements and their secret donations to organizations and candidates that happily envisage the death of civilization rather than pay an extra dime to protect the environment.

Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013: Just as dumb as the Controlled Substances Act of 1970

The sponsors of the "Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013" may be forgiven for succumbing to the temptation to label their bill--and by association, themselves--as "smarter". A label does not change the nature of a bill, however. This labeling attempt should have been preceded by an attempt to make all our drug laws smarter.

Admittedly, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) was one of the stupidest laws ever written, unless the intent of the law was to imprison millions of Americans and give the prison industry an unfunded subsidy. CSA gave a subsidy to the prison industry by increasing the number of prisoners geometrically. The prison population of U.S. federal prisons (the prisons directly affected by CSA) has increased by 800% in the last 30 years. There are now 8 times as many people being held in federal prisons as there were in 1983, or about 2.3 million people total.

The authors of the Smarter Sentencing Act must have analyzed CSA and drawn the following conclusions:

• CSA was stupid because the determinate sentencing rules it established were too severe.
• CSA was stupid because the number of potential prisoners created by the law was higher than the number of prisoners who could be accommodated by federal prisons.
• CSA was stupid because it costs our citizens too much to put 2.3 million people in prison and keep them there year after year. Annual costs are now about $80 billion.

These conclusions are obviously valid; they are the issues addressed by the "Smarter" Act of 2013. The authors of this bill should not consider themselves "smarter" because they recognize these facts, however. The facts about prisons and incarceration are freely available to anyone who can read. They have been available for years. The statistics have gotten much worse, but the underlying facts remain the same.

True or false: CSA was stupid because the determinate sentencing rules it established were too severe

The sentences handed out under the determinate sentencing rules were too severe, but that wasn't the only problem, or even the most important problem. The law itself was fatally flawed. The rules required judges to sentence non-violent offenders to terms of many years in prison. Many of these offenders were not the habitual criminals that the law was intended to catch. Instead, they were individuals caught up in criminal activities because of ignorance, poverty, and lack of opportunity. Imprisonment did not help these people. In many ways imprisonment made their problems worse, because citizens returning from incarceration find it more difficult to find employment, housing, and opportunity than they ever did before.

These fundamental issues are not addressed by the new "smarter" act. Reducing determinate sentences by 50% may save money but it is a cruel hoax perpetrated on people who need our help.

True or false: CSA was stupid because the number of potential prisoners created by the law was higher than the number of prisoners who could be accommodated by federal prisons.

The intent of the supporters of CSA was to put more people into prison. They knew this would cost more money, but they were pleased by that because they would be beneficiaries of the money spent on housing more prisoners. The stupid people were the backers of the law, who did not foresee the problems associated with it. These same people are now backers of this new, "smarter" law. They believe that they improve the law by tweaking it. They can't.

Meanwhile, the people who benefit from mass incarceration will still oppose any change to existing conditions.

True or false: CSA was stupid because it costs our citizens too much to put 2.3 million people in prison and keep them there, year after year. Annual costs are now about $80 billion. 

Undoubtedly true. Whether we will see fewer people in prison by reducing their determinate sentence rules is not clear, however. If a person serves two years in prison instead of five years, will he or she have a better chance of staying out of prison? Returning citizens will face the same barriers to living normal lives as before, under the "stupid" CSA. They will still find it harder to get a job. They will still find it hard to pay off the extravagant fines imposed by CSA which are untouched by the "smarter" bill.

Under the CSA, a crime that deserves 15 years incarceration carries a fine of $25,000. Where will a returning citizen acquire such a sum? Only through more illegal activities, beyond doubt. CSA is stupid because it forces returning citizens into a life of crime to repay the fines it imposes on them. The "smarter" law does not address the issue of these fines and therefore is no smarter than CSA.

Racism in CSA and "Smarter" law.

Fifty percent of prisoners in the US are either African-American or Latino. An African-American male is 7 times as likely to be in prison as a white male. A Hispanic male is 2 1/2 times as likely to be imprisoned as a white male. These statistics strongly argue that there is a racial disparity in our justice system. A smarter sentencing law would recognize this disparity. A law that does not take into account this disparity cannot reasonably be considered smarter, no matter what its proponents call it.

ACLU support for "Smarter" law.

The ACLU supports the new, "smarter" law. This is a compromise position, no doubt. There is no compromise position between right and wrong, however. The ACLU should not support half-way measures, such as this  one, that only delay the institution of real reform.

Racism and racial profiling in the District of Columbia

Racism is a disease that infects our whole society. This infection has caused our laws to change so that prison terms are vastly longer than they ever were before. Our prisons and courts are filled with non-violent drug users whose primary offense is the color of their skin.

Approximately as many whites use illegal narcotics as African-Americans, but 90 percent of people arrested for drug offenses in DC are African-American.¹ In DC, an African-American is nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for drugs as a Caucasian. This is no accident. When Metropolitan Police officers go looking for arrests, they don't go to Georgetown, they go to Anacostia, even though as many people use drugs in one area as in the other.

To their credit, the DC Council has been addressing this problem, most recently by decreasing the maximum jail-time for first-time marijuana offenders and proposing to legalize possession of marijuana. They now continue their efforts by proposing the Record-Sealing for Non-Violent Possession of Marijuana Bill. This bill is necessary because many people are currently permanently handicapped by their criminal records, which make it difficult for them to find employment, rent an apartment, or get a job. This bill seals the criminal records of people whose only arrest was for possessing marijuana. I am particularly gratified to see that the Record-Sealing bill has seven co-sponsors. These lawmakers are willing to stand up be counted in the fight against racism. The D.C. National Lawyers' Guild strongly endorses this bill.

I can only find one fault with these bills. They don't go far enough. The epidemic of racism has thoroughly infected our justice system for years. The effects of this epidemic are insidious and far-reaching.

Anti-drug laws, combined with determinate sentencing laws, still prescribe preposterously long sentences of up to 30 years in prison for non-violent offenders.² The laws also exact enormous fines. When they are released from prison, ex-offenders—returning citizens—often have huge debts and no way to repay them.

The plight of our fellow citizens goes beyond drug offenses, however. The same study that found African-Americans accounted for 90 percent of drug arrests in DC also found that they accounted for 80 percent of disorderly behavior arrests, 70 percent of traffic arrests, and 80 percent of arrests for "other assaults", a category that includes the least serious kinds of assaults.³

Legalization of a behavior does not automatically lead to fewer arrests. Instead, it appears that police find new causes for arrest. For example, in 2010 the Council removed "loud and boisterous" behavior from the "disorderly conduct" statute. In 2011, "disorderly conduct" arrests decreased by 16%, but there was no discernible decrease in overall arrests, suggesting that police officers may have found other pretexts to make arrests.⁴

These arrest figures strongly suggest that African-Americans are being targeted by police on the basis of racial characteristics, so-called racial profiling. To counteract racial profiling, we need to do more than pass this one bill affecting one small category of non-violent crime. We should extend this bill to all those who have criminal records for minor crimes. We need to give returning citizens a chance to rebuild their lives and support their families.

The entire War on Drugs has attacked the problem of drug use by treating the symptom—drug use itself—instead of the causes. Sealing arrest records, while a good idea in itself, only treats one symptom of the problems caused by racism. The problem starts with selection of targets for questioning by police—racial, or bias-based, profiling.

While police regulations contain a definition of bias-based profiling⁵, the D.C. Code does not. The Code lists only “discriminatory treatment” as a cause for investigation by the Police Complaint Board. This vague description should be amended by adding a detailed definition of bias-based profiling, as well as by providing a private right of action for any citizen who feels he or she has been victimized by it.⁶

Finally, the District of Columbia should work toward better relations between the community and the police department by establishing an independent Inspector General of Police, similar to the office of Inspector General created by New York City.

We cannot prevent every injustice caused by racism. But we can limit the number of injustices. The D.C. Council has the opportunity to do so. Will they take advantage of their opportunity?

1 Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Racial Disparities in Arrests in the District of Columbia, 2009-2011: Implications for Civil Rights and Criminal Justice in the Nation's Capital 13 (2013).

2 D.C. Official Code §48-904.01.

3 Id., 18, 20, 22.

4 Id., 21.

5GO-OPS-304.15 (March 19, 2007).

6See NYC Local Law 71 for an example of how NYC has dealt with the problem of bias-based profiling.

Detroit Bankruptcy: Blaming The Victims

The once-great city of Detroit has declared bankruptcy, and the search for scapegoats has begun. Many are blaming the sky-high pensions of city employees for the debt of $15 billion. This theory blames the victims of the disaster. These teachers, policemen and firemen did not make the decisions that let Japanese automobile companies compete with Americans. The  city employees did not decide to spend millions promoting the auto industry's new cars as better, bigger, safer, and sexier than last year's models.

No, the people who made those decisions were the owners and managers of the automobile industry. They're mostly retired now, safely ensconced behind the high walls of privilege with their millions, or even billions of dollars in wealth. Now that Detroit is in receivership, Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager, will not be looking for a piece of their profits because, you see, the 1% never pays for the harm they do.

Orr has his sights set squarely on the recipients of Detroit City pensions. The workers who earned these pensions by working at jobs that kept the city running for decades are being blamed for demanding too much money. The average pension is $1600 a month, hardly an amount that seems greedy.

The pensioners did not decide what their pensions would be. The city fathers did. Those people, the mayors and aldermen of years past, decided back in the 1950s to give the city workers increased pension benefits instead of raises. The workers had little choice but to accept the generosity of their bosses. Now their savings are exhausted, their homes are worthless, and their pensions are under attack.

The politicians who ran Detroit were not entirely to blame, either. The pensions they managed were toys for Wall Street to play with. Two pension systems lost $1.5 billion that they had invested in the stock market in the crash of 2008. Detroit and numerous other cities found themselves floundering in the wake of that catastrophe.

A large share of the blame for Detroit's troubles rightly belongs to the entrepreneurs of the late 1900s, who kept the price of oil low and kept Detroit's cars from needing to compete with the Japanese and European car manufacturers. These people made billions by selling gasoline for America's gas-guzzlers. The corporations who made money this way, like the billionaire Koch brothers, excuse themselves by saying their companies were just maximizing profits. This is not true. Their companies also bribed lawmakers with huge campaign contributions to keep the federal government from demanding higher gas mileage from American cars. They used their superfluous profits anonymously to convince people that burning oil in the atmosphere was healthy and global warming was a myth invented by liberals.

The people who made huge fortunes by selling oil and by gaming the stock market and by swindling investors in sub-prime housing now have the money that the city of Detroit should be using to pay the pensions of its workers. But emergency manager Kevyn Orr will not be looking for bailouts from them.

Another group of people, much larger than the others, also must share the blame for Detroit's decline. The white workers in the auto industry were frightened of the African-American workers. They decided to leave the city, first creating all-white suburbs, and then taking their wealth to retirement states like Florida and Arizona, where today they continue to infect the American people with their bigotry and racism.

Eighty-five percent of the people who remain in Detroit, about 700,000, are African-Americans. Since before World War II, white residents of Detroit have harbored racial animus against their neighbors. Other industrial cities, like Chicago, New York, and Boston, learned to thrive as multi-cultural communities. Detroit never figured out how to do that. Needless to say, Kevyn Orr will not be looking for bailouts from the millions of white people who fled from their neighbors instead of learning to live with them.

Kevyn Orr will look for money by taking it from poor people who earned their pensions by years of hard work in service to the community. He has even said he intends to sell off artworks owned by the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA). Some Detroit residents, who believe the DIA contains only works by European artists, favor this plan. But the most valuable artworks in the museum are not European at all, but murals painted by Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist. Rivera's murals celebrate the workers of Detroit, not ancient kings or white aristocrats. Detroit needs those murals to help keep its priorities straight. The workers are not to blame for the decisions of managers. The people of Detroit should not be punished for decisions made by the rich and powerful.

Note: My father was born and grew up in Detroit. He and my mother met while attending the University of Michigan. My despair at the fate of the city is real and heartfelt.

Our Decrepit Constitution: Slavery by Another Name

During the last days of the Civil War, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment. This amendment freed all the slaves in perpetuity, including those not yet freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments followed within a short while.

The Constitution was not strong enough by itself to protect the newly minted rights of freedmen. The government posted federal troops in the states of the former Confederacy to enforce the law. Freedmen--former slaves--voted in elections for the first time. African-Americans were elected to state offices, helped by laws that made former Confederate office holders ineligible to run.

The freedom and justice promised by the Fourteenth Amendment was short-lived. The Ku Klux Klan began intimidating and murdering Republicans and African-Americans in 1868. The Klan murdered Republican organizer George Ashburn in Columbus, Georgia, on March 28, 1868. The Klan published a pamphlet intended to slander Ashburn and intimidate anyone who might try to take his place as an organizer. The pamphlet charged that Ashburn was living with an African-American woman and described the place of assassination as a brothel.¹

Nine men, described as prominent citizens, were arrested and brought to trial before a military tribunal. Before they could be tried, the Georgia legislature accepted the Fourteenth Amendment, which was the condition set for reentering the union. The military government was dissolved and the prisoners released. No one was ever tried for Ashburn's murder.

A group of African-American Republicans marched from Albany to Camilla to attend a political rally in September, 1868. White southerners ambushed them in Camilla's Courthouse Square, killing 12 and wounding many others. The white men kept on attacking the group as they retreated along the road back to Albany. Other similar massacres occurred in South Carolina and Alabama.

Some political leaders were intimidated or imprisoned. T. G. Campbell described how he argued before the Georgia Legislature that he and other freedmen should be allowed to speak. While he was speaking, the white legislators put their hands on the butts of their pistols and made threatening gestures at him. Campbell gave up after eight days of argument. Later he took office as justice of the peace and organized a group of 300 African-American horsemen to protect himself from the Klan.

Campbell could perhaps protect himself from violence within the enclave of freedmen he organized along the Georgia coast, but he could not protect himself from miscarriage of justice perpetrated by his white enemies. Campbell was charged with malfeasance in office and brought before a local judge. He was convicted and immediately jailed. Campbell spent the next year and a half being shuffled from jail to jail. His wife tirelessly worked to free him, but nothing she did was of any use. Judges avoided him. New trials were arranged, but with each new trial came demands for new documentation that had to be found and delivered to the court.

Finally, Campbell's wife secured an order from the U.S. Attorney General that the case be moved to a federal court. Campbell believed that he was about to be cleared, but his lawyer failed to file the proper papers and his case was dismissed. After the dismissal in federal court, Campbell was sent to a prison camp where the prisoners were worked from dawn to dusk and beaten if they fell behind the other workers. This system of forced convict labor replaced slavery to a certain degree. Campbell's wife interceded for him with the camp overseer and succeeded in getting him a job more suited to his age. He was sixty-three when he entered the camp in 1876.²

Following the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Congress passed several Civil Rights Bills to protect the civil rights created in the amendments. The Supreme Court set about methodically destroying these rights in a series of decisions that ran counter to the spirit and the letter of the amendments.

In Blyew v. United States (1871), the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act (1866) did not affect the witnesses in a case. The Bill specifically states that all persons born in the United States are citizens and that citizens have a right to give evidence in court cases. In Blyew, two African-Americans were denied the right to testify by Kentucky state law. The Court construed the Civil Rights Act to apply only to principals in court cases, not witnesses, despite the clear intent of the law, and affirmed the ruling of the Appellate Court. In this case, the principal, a blind, 75-year-old African-American woman, was the murder victim. Since she was dead, the Court ruled, the federal court had no jurisdiction in the case.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 was only binding on state actions, not individuals. Using this logic, the Court overturned the convictions of two white men who had joined the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, when over 100 blacks were murdered by a white militia. The Congress had intended this Act specifically to address the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, so the Court ruled exactly counter to the purpose of the Act. The Court's action left the freedmen in the south at the mercy of the Klan and numerous other private militias. Their action returned African-Americans to their pre-War status, when an African-American could be raped, murdered, or tortured by a white with impunity.

In the Civil Rights Cases (1880), the Supreme Court ruled likewise that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to private citizens, like railroads, hotels, and the operators of public amusements. These individuals, said the Court, had the right to choose the people they wanted to associate with, regardless of what the Fourteenth Amendment said. Justice Harlan, the sole dissenting voice in these five decisions, reminded the Court that private railroads were by law public highways, that innkeepers had long been held to be public servants of a sort, and that public amusements are maintained under a license coming from the public. No state, said Harlan, nor any corporation or individual acting under state authority for the public good, can discriminate against freemen or citizens. These rulings put an end to efforts by Congress to ensure civil rights for African-Americans and ushered in an era of segregation and second-class citizenships.

In U.S. v. Harris (1883), the Supreme Court once again ruled that federal courts had no jurisdiction in cases of murder or assault. These cases were matters for the states. It did not matter that the persons assaulted were African-Americans and the assailants were a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. In Harris, the Klansmen dragged four African-Americans from their jail cells and beat them, one of them to death. Although Federal Law intended to stop such violations of African-American civil rights, as authorized under the Fourteenth Amendment, the law was unconstitutional because it usurped the rights of the states. Harris also ruled that the sheriff who had custody of the African-Americans who were beaten could not be held liable under federal law because he was liable only for his actions, not his inactions. Under this ruling, depriving a person of his life is not the same thing as depriving him of his Constitutional rights, and inaction is not a form of action.

Not until the 1960s did the Supreme Court repudiate the extreme racism inherent in all these rulings (and others besides). The Constitution failed to protect individuals from crimes committed against them, even when Congress explicitly created laws saying that it should.

___________

1 Radical rule : military outrage in Georgia: Arrest of Columbus prisoners (Louisville, Ky., 1868), http://books.google.com/books?id=QEwTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=george+ashburn+murder&source=bl&ots=u4jYy1SKzI&sig=csGygOILiQ6j5e-RfFFGKQ-9Ha0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_Hh9UcibCpTG4APiooDgCg&ved=0CHoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=george%20ashburn%20murder&f=false. Since this pamphlet declares in its preface that its intent is to convey the proper impression of military despotism to the northern mind, its content must be treated as completely unreliable.

2Campbell, T.G., Sufferings of the Rev. T. G. Campbell and his family, in Georgia (Washington, 1877), http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22894692M.

With charity for none, with malice toward all who are different...

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Abraham Lincoln, 2nd inaugural address.

You guys just don't get it. My objection to the piece is this:

Hall hits every one of the touchstones of white supremacy. He attacks African-Americans, who he claims are lazy and stupid. He attacks Latinos, who he says are criminals and welfare recipients. He attacks Muslims, who he says are murderers. He attacks scientists who study global warming because he says they suppress debate. He attacks Democrats because they caused the financial meltdown and the mortgage crisis.

In brief, Hall strikes a strong chord with Republicans because he names nearly every prejudice they have and says he shares them. Every one of his statements is false, every one of them is inflammatory.

I published the letter that Hall sent me that explains what was wrong about my original post. I don't see that it alters the original thrust of my post, which was to show that he was lying when he said he couldn't retire. For example, he says he doesn't get social security or Medicare. But he is definitely qualified for them and could use their income to retire. I'm glad to know that he doesn't have military benefits or benefits from the Massachusetts Senate. He reaffirms for me that it is not personal poverty that prevents him from retiring, but personal choices that have nothing to do with African-Americans, illegal immigrants, or global warming.

Hall has a degenerative disease and supports his adult daughter in a separate household. He will definitely retire when his disease prevents him from working. At that time his medical bills will be covered by Medicare and part of his living expenses will be covered by Social Security. In addition he has an IRA and he owns at least one house.

Contrast that with the situation of my friend, Lee, who has only a high-school teacher's pension and a small house in a rural area of California. Lee believed that Hall shared the same problems as he does, but Hall was lying. By Lee's standards, Hall is well-off. He has been earning a good income at steady jobs for 40 years.

Instead of considering himself well-off, Hall pretends he is persecuted, and names all the groups that he believes should be persecuted instead of him. His anger at these people show he is perfectly willing to do that.

We will not be able to solve the problems of this country by blaming the victims of failed social policies, or by pretending that global warming will go away if we ignore it. We will not be able to confront an inconvenient truth if we turn to Fox News for comfortable falsehoods.

Instead of stoking the fears of his fellow true-believers, Hall should be seeking solutions that are acceptable to all. He and the rest of the Republican Party are using fear and hatred to splinter our country and make us unable to work together for the future.

Robert A. Hall Sends Out Scary Email

Hi, Hon--

Robert A. Hall at 73

Thank you for sending me the forward from Robert A. Hall. I'm assuming, based on the fact that you sent it to me, and to your children, that you feel the email accurately reflects your own feelings and beliefs. Since I've recently sent you a fair amount of info about MY feelings and beliefs, I'm glad you want me to know what YOU feel, as well.

At the same time, Hall's email presents me with what is quite simply a not-to-be-missed opportunity.. because it is a perfect example of what is most pernicious about the way the Republican Right is manipulating voters. That entire email is a masterpiece of propaganda... carefully crafted to play upon your fears, speak to your life experience. What it is NOT... is sincere. Not in any way, shape, or form. He isn't who you think he is... and he doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Let's start with Robert A. Hall himself. I asked Allan to do some research on him, and the first thing he found is that the two photos on the email are NOT of the man who wrote it. They're both of the ACTOR, Robert Hall, from C.S.I. The dramatic picture in the email that shows a man covered with blood, facing what appears to be a brain... that man is NOT Robert A. Hall. And while that picture IS actually labeled truthfully, the other is not... and the juxtaposition of the photos with the email is DECEPTIVE. It creates the impression that the man writing the email IS the man in those photos.

The next thing Allan found out is that while Robert A. Hall claims to speak for the common man-- you know, the ones like YOU, who worked hard for 40 years and then couldn't afford to retire-- he actually has almost nothing in common with ordinary people. Though Hall claims he is being hurt by the policies of the federal government, he actually is not. In point of fact, he's been supported by government assistance (and hence, taxpayer's money) most of his life. He is eligible for Medicare, possibly receives Social Security, and enjoys an enviable lifestyle, due in part to his taking advantage of military benefits, serving as a public servant in the Massachusetts Legislature, and taking advantage of the educational system that is heavily subsidized by state and federal governments. (I'm just going to put in most of what Allan wrote here, and add in my own bit at the bottom...)

Hall neglects to add that he served as a Republican in the Massachusetts State Senate. This might explain why all his complaints are about Democrats, and why his intention is to demoralize voters during this off-year election.

When Robert A. Hall pretends he doesn't have enough money to retire, he's lying. By my count, he has at least 4 pensions, as a lieutenant in the Marines, as a former Massachusetts State Senator, as a worker in the private sector (Social Security), and, as executive director of non-profit associations since 1982, a 501(c)3 pension. We all wish we had that much retirement income. He owns his $250,000 condo free and clear. As a State Senator, he was able to shelter a portion of his salary from any taxes to invest in retirement instruments. His salary, as president of the American Association of Cosmetic Dentistry, from 2002 to 2007, was likely more than $150,000 per year, although he doesn't come clean about that. He also qualifies for federal health plans, Medicare and VA hospitalization.

Hall has also been writing right-wing articles for his blog and other publications. He's not saying how much money he gets for these, though others who do the same thing are not hurting.

Many of us are not so lucky as he. For example, those who had their retirement money in 401k equity accounts saw the accounts lose 50% of their value in 2008-2009. It will take years to recoup those losses, but of course people who are retiring don't have years to wait. But the people who lost their retirement funds are not to blame. They are the victims. The ones whose greed caused the financial meltdown are responsible for the suffering of millions. One of these, AIG, has donated $18 million to the U.S. Chamber of commerce since 2003. They still owe $50 billion to the U.S. taxpayers for their bailout. The CoC uses their donations to finance attack ads against people who voted to regulate the financial industry.

Hall's email contains a hodgepodge of false and prejudiced claims (... if you have favorite ones, pick them and I'll address them in detail-- otherwise, it would just be too time-consuming... and many of his complaints are too general). Its viewpoints about race and ethnicity are similar to those of white supremacist and other hate groups around the country. Hall hopes that he can get away with stoking hatred as long as he isn't wearing a sheet or a nazi uniform.
What Hall does NOT do is offer any solutions. He stirs up anger. He echoes frustration. But he leaves his readers with a feeling of hopelessness. It's quite clear his intention is to stop you from voting by piling up lie upon lie, prejudice upon prejudice, none of them backed up by facts, until you decide it's just not worth it to go to the polls.
The superwealthy heads of corporations, such as Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, have been spending millions of dollars to buy this election, through front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and willing stooges like Beck and Rove. The banks and stockbrokers are upset by the current administration's success in financial reform. The insurance industry is upset by the passage of health care legislation. The energy companies are concerned that their subsidies may be re-routed to renewable energy sources and companies looking for environmentally sensitive solutions. The New York Times reports that half of the $50 to $70 million the Chamber will spend to buy this election will ome from just 45 corporations, many of which received billions of dollars in bailout money from TARP. These 45 corporations are managed by just a tiny handful of superwealthy executives, like Rupert Murdoch. When asked whether stockholders would be consulted about his $2 million in contributions to Republican candidates, Murdoch replied no, that if the stockholders didn't like his actions they could vote him off the board, otherwise he would do exactly as he sees fit.
Hall's role in this election is an important one. If all the voters who would benefit from the decline of corporate influence stay home, the corporations will win and take back the government. Then, the hundred or so executives of those 45 corporations will make all governmental decisions from now on.

Robert A. Hall isn't tired... and he could retire if he wanted to. He just doesn't WANT to. He's wealthy, he's successful, and he's having fun, doing what he likes. Why would he retire? Frankly, I think he's more likely to run for another office... and accrue another pension.

Hall's task is to make you feel frustrated, powerless, and hopeless. So you won't bother to vote.

Don't succumb to despair. Vote.

Lee-- I'm sure you know all about propaganda. I also understand that this is a brother Marine... but I feel certain that not ALL Marines, in your memory, were worthy of that name. This one is NOT... because this one is STROKING you.

If you doubt anything that Allan has said, or feel that any of the statements put forth by Mr. Hall in his email deserve a further answer, please say so-- and be specific. I will be happy to produce documentation (which, I assure you, Mr. Hall will NOT) for any statement that I or Allan has made here, so that you may judge for yourself who is telling you the truth.

Love, always--
Holly

Robert Hall responds

Ann Coulter: The Case of the Malicious Maven

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With her new book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America, Ann Coulter returns again to attack her favorite targets, liberals. The biggest problem with trying to counter her assaults is that she brings a large array of disinformation, half-truths, and right-wing mythology that takes time and energy to debunk. Then, too, is her protean wit: when she is confronted by an obvious error or outright lie, she responds that she was only making a joke and attacks the targets of her barbs as “pussies” because they can't take a joke. Then there are her obscenities and her snide attacks, calculated both to make her fans laugh and to irritate her critics to the point where her books are unreadable.

So why bother? Why make the effort to criticize someone who is so illogical, so disorganized, and so ignorant?

Ann Coulter is a charismatic individual. She has a flamboyant personality that appeals to many people. She becomes more important as the void in Republican Party leadership spreads. She needs to be understood and refuted.

Beyond Dictionary Definitions

The first thing you notice about Ann Coulter's universe is that it resembles the fantasy worlds of Lewis Carroll. Many of the key words that are a part of normal discourse have been redefined. The most conspicuous of these is liberal, which Coulter redefines to mean “any person who is not a religious conservative or a Republican. An example of this is her fantastic claim that

every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.[258]

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan were all, she claims, liberals. This list is helpful in deciphering Coulter's language, because she clearly believes that Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and Arab Nationalists are all liberals.

Another curious word usage is racist. Coulter accuses Jeremiah Wright of being a “racist” on the basis of anti-government rhetoric. But listen to what Wright said to a young African-American woman who wondered whether she should marry a white man:

Racial divisions [are] unacceptable...no matter how great or prolonged the pain that caused them. God would not want us to assess or make decisions about people based on race. The world could make progress on issues of race only if people were prepared to break down barriers that were much easier to let stand.

Are those the words of a racist?

Now listen to the words of Nathan Hoss Rager from the pages of the Citizen Informer, newsletter of the Council of Concerned Conservatives (CCC), an organization of which Coulter says “there is no evidence on its Web page that it...supports segregation”[24]:

Whether you're a troubled stripper, disadvantaged and forgotten by society; or you're black in LaSalle Parish where white students enjoy the company of their own people, and David Duke carried over 62% in a US Senate race, society is always to blame. Maybe if we let some more non-White immigrants come in, and the government pays its welfare queens to have more illegitimate children, and the schools teach students about how bad white people made this country, then maybe we can move past our differences and live in brotherhood in our “new America.” After all, isn't south Africa better off?

Though Rager doesn't mention segregation, he does imply that South Africa was better off under apartheid, its version of segregation. Yes, this article is on the CCC web page, and yes, I'm sure that Coulter understands all the code words on the site.

But Coulter defends this organization even as she attacks Reverend Wright's church. She says that

Republican politicians who had given speeches to [the CCC] were branded sympathizers of white supremacists because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group...[24]

The rhetoric of Coulter bears a strong similarity to that of Rager; the names are sometimes different but their targets remain the same. She calls daughters of single mothers “future strippers”[36] , while Rager just calls them strippers.

Rager talks about someone “disadvantaged and forgotten by society”; Coulter spends her first chapter talking about victims.

Instead of attacking “welfare queens”, Coulter attacks single mothers, saying “single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.”[38] She attacks single mothers for 38 pages, mostly trying to convince us that single mothers are phony victims who don't deserve our sympathy because they brought it on themselves.

The CCC statement of principles takes special exception to mixed marriages :

We believe in the traditional family as the basic unit of human society and morality, and we oppose all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents (italics mine).

So it comes as no surprise when Coulter criticizes African-Americans like Halle Berry, Alicia Keyes, and Barack Obama, who all had white mothers, for

representing themselves simply as "black"--the better to race-bait their way to success. [7]

She accuses Berry of "wild race-baiting" to win her 2002 Oscar, but doesn't offer a word of proof for her charge, other than briefly citing a line from Berry's acceptance speech:

claiming her award was "so much bigger than me." [7]

Coulter says that Obama's statement, "this election is bigger than me," is evidence of his "race-baiting" as well. But look at the context in that speech:

I still believe this election is bigger than me, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain. It’s bigger than Democrats versus Republicans. It’s about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this country, at this moment, will continue to stand by while the wealthy few prosper at the expense of the hardworking many, or whether we’ll stand up and reclaim the American dream for every American.

There is no reference to race, no racial language, no attempt to incite or intimidate, any more than there was in Berry's acceptance speech.

Race-baiting is "an act of using racially derisive language, actions or other forms of communication, to anger, intimidate or incite a person or groups of people". Therefore, the actions and words of Obama and Berry are not race-baiting, since they do not use racially derisive language and they are not directed at any person or race.

The CCC newsletter, the Citizens Informer, used to be edited by Sam Francis, a gifted propagandist who was fired from the conservative Washington Times for advocating slavery, as reported on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) website. The ADL also says the CCC

Advances its ideology by inflaming fears and resentments, among Southern whites particularly, with regard to black-on-white crime, non-white immigration, attacks on the public display of the Confederate flag, and other issues related to "traditional" Southern culture.

But Coulter finds nothing wrong with the CCC's endless recital of black on white violence:

apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes--the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media--the is little on the CCC website suggesting that the group is a "thinly veiled white supremacist" organization, as the New York Times calls it...[24]

Liberals as Victims

Coulter begins her book by asserting that liberals use victims to manipulate the soft-hearted American people into unwise political decisions. Liberals, says Coulter, are always pretending to be victims. They do this so that they can oppress the rest of us. She never explains exactly what mechanism they use to oppress us, other than that they arouse our sympathy to promote government programs for the victims:

But often the victims are nameless, faceless victims of repellent liberal policies that are promoted on behalf of counterfeit victims, such as single mothers or "the poor." [2]

Coulter starts by giving a examples of people who falsely claim to be victims. John Edwards was a "phony victim" who tried to get sympathy for his wife's cancer. Of course, there was nothing phony about her cancer. Coulter appears to argue that no one should feel sorry for Edwards' or his wife because he was having an affair at the time, which exempts him from the category of “victim”. Since Edwards' wife actually had cancer, she had no reason to conclude.

Democrats dredge up victim after victim, but it's hard to find one real story. [4]

If liberals need victims to increase the size and scope of government, conservatives like Coulter need enemies to attack. Coulter doesn't shy away from revealing her enemies by continuous attacks. They are the blacks, the Jews, the weak (whom she calls "pussies" or “women”), the poor, single mothers, atheists, liberal journalists, homosexuals who won't stay in the closet, Democrats, and liberals, a term she expands to include every presidential assassin in history [258].

Denying the existence of racism, she charges that the left is

constantly trying to gin up phony racial crises in a nation where none exist. They were finally willing to take a stand against racism at the precise moment that no one was for racism. [8]

Her language is a little vague here, because she doesn't explain what she means by "racial crisis". Nor does she explain what it means to be "for racism". But there are plenty of statistics to show that many racially motivated crimes are committed in the US annually. In 2007, the FBI reported 2,658 anti-black and 969 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in the US. The Anti-Defamation League also tracks incidents of anti-Jewish racism, reporting a total of 1,554 in 2006.

Hate crimes are the public, verifiable manifestations of racial hatred and do not give an indication of how widespread or well-organized racists may be. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists 888 active hate organizations, the majority of them anti-black.

But Coulter is also making another charge altogether, against the Democratic party and not liberals in general: That the Democratic party had advocated Jim Crow laws and other racist policies, but stopped doing that after no one was "for" them any more. This is a distortion of the historical record.

While it's true that southern Democrats were the main proponents of racism, the northern democrats, called "liberals", had opposed them for a long time before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thanks to the liberals, led by Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic party platform in 1948 had a strong Civil Rights position in it, so strong in fact that many southerners bolted the party to run their own candidate, Strom Thurmond, on the Dixiecrat ticket.

The irony of Coulter's position here, and her support for Thurmond elsewhere[1], is that southern segregationists who left the Democratic party eventually found their way into the Republican party. Thurmond himself officially switched parties in 1964. Nixon enlisted the segregationists in the Republican party in 1968 with his "southern strategy", one of whose intentions was to delay integration and the granting of Civil Rights to southern blacks.

The Murder of Kirsten Brydum
In its 26 January 2009 blog, under the headline, "Kirsten Brydum: She died for your Stupidity!", the CCC "news team" describes the murder of a young woman in New Orleans on September 27, 2009:

Kirsten Brydum was an avowed Marxist and political activist from San Fransisco. She was so brainwashed by multicultural propaganda that she traveled the country by train to campaign for Barack Obama.

Fresh from protesting the evil GOP at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Kirsten arrived in New Orleans by Amtrack[sic] with just a suitcase and an old bicycle.

That’s when her naive idealism caught up with her. Kirsten was shot in the head while riding her bike through a black neighborhood. Her corpse sprawled on the sidewalk for several hours. None of the residents would even call the police. Police were finally notified by construction workers in the area the next day.

The press reported the murder as an “attempted robbery” even though nothing, not even her bicycle, was stolen. “Attempted robbery” is a common media decoy phrase for a racially motivated attack on a white person by a non-white.

What came next was even more shocking. Her own Marxist friends posted online memorials, but would not even mention how she died. The enlightened San Fransisco Chronicle ran a column insulting Kirsten instead of talking about rampant black on white violence and murder. The San Fransisco Chronicle wanted to make sure more idiot whites, drunk on the cult of multiculturalism, keep following in Kirsten’s fatal footsteps.

This article is similar to others that Coulter calls “aggressive reporting”. But since some of the details are incorrect, perhaps intentionally so, and there are a number of racist code words, the article is not reporting at all. It is a propaganda piece intended to arouse racial anger and support the contention that this was a racially motivated, black-on-white crime.

• Marxist is the code word used by the CCC to describe anyone they wish to attack. Coulter uses the word liberal in the same way.

• Kirsten was visiting anarchist cells around the country, not working for Obama. Both because he is African-American and because he espouses a liberal philosophy, his name arouses the ire of the CCC's target audience. In addition, white campaign workers had flooded the south to campaign for him.

• The bicycle was borrowed from a friend in New Orleans, not brought on the train. Amtrak and bicycle are words that arouse hostility of the target audience, who see them as part of a liberal assault on the automobile.

• Since the he bicycle was not found with her, so she probably was not shot while riding it.

• Kirsten's wallet was not found with the body and police were unable to identify her for two days.

• Neighbors notified police that shots had been fired at 8:30 AM. Since the police found her shortly thereafter, she had not lain unnoticed for hours. This falsehood reinforces negative stereotypes about blacks.

• The column run in the Chronicle is a tender memorial to Kirsten, ending with a touching quote from her diary.

• Kirsten's friends posted moving memorials to her. More than 77,000 people have visited the main website.

• There is no evidence that Kirsten was killed by an African American, nor is there any indication that the crime was racially motivated.

• Cult of Multiculturalism is any attempt at racial reconciliation. According the the CCC Statement of Principles,

We believe that education should inform and build the mind and character, not brainwash children with political propaganda or “liberate” them from the traditional values and loyalties their families have taught them. We therefore oppose all “sex education” as well as so-called “multiculturalist” and “Afrocentric” curricula, “Outcome-Based Education,” and similar radical indoctrination in the schools.

The sources for the actual facts of the case and the memorials can be found here.

This particular article was not on the site when Coulter looked at it, but there are many, many others like it that she did see.

Trouble With Statistics

Coulter has difficulty with statistics, both in saying where she found them and understanding them. Without giving a source, she estimates the membership of the Ku Klux Klan at less than 1,000. [8] Organizations who make it their business to track such things place the number at 5,000 to 8,000.

In a section attacking Barbara Ehrenreich, Coulter claims that

domestic abuse is virtually non-existent for married women living with their husbands [58]

To support this claim, Coulter cites a US Justice Department (DOJ) survey that apparently shows the rate of abuse for married women was just 0.9 per 1000 in 2005, while the rate was 49.0 per 1000 for women who were separated. [57]

But this is a complete distortion of the actual meaning of the survey statistics. The survey interviewed women who may have been abused and noted what their marital status was at the time of the interview, not at the time of the abuse. In order to draw the conclusion she did, Coulter had to ignore the text accompanying the statistics:

it is not possible to determine whether a person was separated or divorced at the time of the interview or whether the separation or divorce followed the violence.

Common sense should tell you that separated and divorced couples will have fewer incidents of spousal abuse, if only because they no longer live under the same roof.

A key to good statistical analysis is the selection of valid studies, usually from peer reviewed journals. To support her attack on single mothers, Coulter takes statistics from a 2002 article in the Village Voice, which in turn had taken them from an organization called Fathers' Rights and Equality Exchange. The article's author says the group is "admittedly probably not entirely unbiased". Coulter reports the statistics without commenting on the unreliability of their source.

But even if the statistics are valid, they still don't prove anything, primarily because they rely on the logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc. This type of logic assumes that whatever happens must have been caused by something that preceded. Using this logic, you could prove that a rooster crowing causes the sun to rise. A child's lack of a father is only one indicator of possible problems; there are many others.

When Coulter looks at studies that do consider other indicators, she concludes

Controlling for socioeconomic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. [37]

But at least one of the studies she cites as a source does not at all support this statement. Instead it concludes in its abstract,

a sizable portion of the risk that appeared to be due to father absence could actually be attributed to other factors, such as teen motherhood, low parent education, racial inequalities, and poverty.

While concluding that father-absent homes still accounted for elevated risk of incarceration, the same study goes on to say that

The adolescents who faced the highest incarceration risks, however, were those in stepparent families, including father–stepmother families.

Both of these findings directly contradict Coulter's conclusion:

Look at almost any societal program and you will find it is really a problem of single mothers. [36]

Taking her bogus statistics at face value, Coulter assumes that, if we could just get rid of single mothers, we could get rid of all those criminals (who, remember, are not just products of fatherless homes, but also poverty, discrimination, teen pregnancy, and parental ignorance). So she gushes,

Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, 63 to 70 percent fewer teenage suicides, and 70 to 90 percent fewer runaways... [38]

This conclusion too has no merit. Since many other factors affect the incidence of juvenile delinquents, teenage suicides, and runaways, even eliminating all illegitimate births would only reduce these statistics by a small amount.

So how does Coulter suggest that we solve the problem of single mothers?

Keep your knees together before marriage and graduate from high school. [41]

In other words, give young women abstinence-only sex education and our problems will be solved. But abstinence-only sex education programs have been shown to increase the incidence of pregnancy. The lowest adolescent pregnancy rate in the world belong to the Netherlands, whose sex-education program is characterized by “sex education, open discussions on sexuality in mass media, educational campaigns and low barrier services.” In other words, the exact opposite of abstinence only training combined with expensive or nonexistent medical services.

Single Mothers

In support of her attacks on single mothers, Coulter enlists Charles Murray, whom she calls "the eminent social scientist" [37]. But Murray could better be described as the author of a controversial book, The Bell Curve in which he asserts that, based on intelligence tests, African-Americans are inferior to white Americans and that this inferiority cannot be helped by education. Therefore, he concludes (as reported in Slate Magazine)

Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence.

Coulter makes yet another unsubstantiated attack against liberals:

While liberals go around physically assaulting conservatives, they pretend to live in terror of jack-booted racist thugs. [9]

She doesn't list any examples to support her charge. Although there are many racially motivated attacks, against both whites and African-Americans, there is no evidence that liberals are systematically attacking conservatives.

Insults

Coulter also interweaves her text with racist slurs and offensive epithets. Her similes often have crude sexual contexts. She says Monique De Wael, a writer who pretended to be a holocaust survivor

did everything she could think of to sound more Jewish but complain about being seated too close to the air conditioner.

Although De Wael is not a Democrat and never lived in the US, she still becomes an example of someone who makes herself a victim, something that Coulter claims is a universal characteristic of liberals.

Coulter calls Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor Clift a "braying left-wing slattern" partly because Clift named Bill Clinton the Biggest Winner of the year on the McLaughlin Group.

She describes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as "eager to win his presidential knee pads" [185] and describes him numerous times as a cross-dresser.

Hypocrisy

Another word that Coulter has trouble defining--along with racism, race-baiting, and segregation--is hypocrisy. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC criticized Larry Craig as a

cultural warrior of the right,...exposed as both a sexual deviant and a world-class hypocrite[29]

Coulter replies

Naturally the media claims Larry Craig was a hypocrite because he opposed gay marriage—and yet he propositioned an undercover cop in a public bathroom.[29]

But here she purposely misses the point that Matthews was making, that being simultaneously gay and a cultural warrior of the right is hypocritical. Coulter later says

Only liberals consider it offensive for a gay person to have strong morals.[31]

Matthews's point is that claiming to have a moral code that you personally ignore is the definition of hypocrisy. Coulter denies this definition. For her, “strong morals” is a code word, along with “family values”, which describes a certain set of beliefs and policies. Therefore, you can only have “strong morals” if you support “family values”. If you do that, you may behave immorally, but you still support family values, and therefore you can't be hypocritical. For her, it doesn't matter if you are homosexual, so long as you keep it a secret, get married, and support legislation that discriminates against gays.

Defamatory Attacks

Coulter criticizes Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for referring to the Franklin sex scandal as an example of "conservative-hypocrisy", since the Franklin sex scandal turned out to be a hoax. She pounces on Alter like a vulture on a carcass, even though his entire reference to the crisis consisted of the phrase,

the Franklin child-sex ring, which ensnared more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

That's it, no names, no details, no nothing. But Coulter declares this

the most vile lie ever spread by the establishment media. No right-wing radio host has ever propagated such a fraud.[30]

Coulter cites a 15 Dec 1988 New York Times article as the source of the hoax and concludes by saying

Even the Times must have smelled a rat because after one story mentioning the investigation there were no further articles on foster child sex orgies until July 1990, when the Times reported that the story was a hoax.[30]

Alter had hist facts wrong, but he was only using the scandal as background for his article. Contrast this with the 29 June 1989 front-page, six-column, banner headline story in the conservative Washington Times. If Alter's 19-word reference is “the most vile lie ever spread”, what would Coulter call the article in the Washington Times? What about the more than 15 other articles about the scandal run by the Washington Times between 20 June 1989 and 2 February 1990?

In fact, Coulter ignores the Washington Times smear campaign. By this time, we recognize the pattern. Coulter attacks liberals for a variety of reasons. The same acts, when performed by conservatives, she either praises or doesn't mention. She inhabits a Manichaean world, where people are either all good or all bad. An action like rumor mongering, as in the case of the Washington Times, becomes good if it was done for a good reason, such as electing a Republican. A minor slip, like Alter's, becomes the “most vile lie ever spread.”

The single article that appeared in the New York Times was only tangentially about the sex scandal. It made no accusations, instead questioning the whole sex-abuse aspect of the case:

The various investigators, their efforts barely begun, decline to speak of them in detail. Mr. Chambers himself says he wants to disclose just enough to encourage those with information on the affair to give testimony before the legislative committee.

As a result, there are these large gaps in public knowledge about the case, among others:

* If child prostitution was involved, how vast was it?
* If foster homes were involved, which ones?

No contrast could be more dramatic than between the restraint of the New York Times and the sensationalism of the Washington Times. Yet it is the New York paper that Coulter accuses of bias.

Coulter rehashes the Alger Hiss case. She states that John Dean, in Blind Ambition, his memoir of the Watergate scandal, claimed

he overheard Nixon saying the "typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case."[124]

This, says Coulter, was proved a "bald-faced lie about twenty years later", referring to Soviet documents that implicated Hiss. But Dean wrote that Charles Colson had given him the provocative Nixon quote, not that he had "overheard it". So Coulter's statement is false and her accusation against Dean has no merit.

One aspect of Coulter's style is her habit of making things up, quotes from newspapers or individuals, usually giving vent to her sarcastic wit. For example, she states that Reagan's budget director, David Stockton, intended to write a book called, "The Internet Will Never Take Off". It's a funny title for a book but it has nothing to do with Stockton, anything he said, or anything he did. It comes in the middle of a passage where she criticizes the book he did write, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed.[125]

Coulter frequently uses sarcastic asides instead of reasoned argument to attack her victims. In the next sentence, Coulter criticizes Stockton for misusing the word "literally", instead of addressing the truth or falsehood of the statement in which the offending word appears.

She goes on to comment

Damn that Reagan! What a crafty, mildly retarded, evil-genius, yet senile bad guy he turned out to be![125]

Most of her humor, like Reagan's, may amuse her target audience, but offend many others. It also serves the function of annoying political adversaries, who might otherwise read her books and publicize her falsehoods and distortions.

Coulter does not recognize her internal contradictions, so eager is she to attack her chosen enemies. At one point, she attacks media personalities for being taken in by frauds, as when Dan Rather accepted a story about G. W. Bush's National Guard service at face value, only to discover it was based on a forged letter. This, she says, is an example of the liberal bias of the media. She doesn't mention that Rather lost his job as a result of his poor judgment, an indication that CBS executives may not have a liberal bias, and are quite willing to punish those who do.

Fox News Frauds

Coulter makes the startling claim that "Fox News has never been caught promoting a fraud" [15] the way CBS, ABC, and CNN had been.

Media Matters records an incident where Steve Doocy found a school prank on the internet and reported it as fact.

Another, more serious case of Fox propagating a fraud was reported in a PBS documentary. The fabricated story that Obama is a Muslim and hiding it appeared first in a 16 January 2007, article on the website of Insight, a sister publication of the conservative Washington Times. The article was entitled, "Hillary's Team Has Questions About Obama's Muslim Background", and claimed that Obama had attended a madrassa as a young boy in Indonesia.

Fox News took up the story the next day on its morning program, Fox & Friends.

Gretchen Carlson: Something that he left out of his book, that apparently when he was a young boy, he attended a Muslim school.

Later that day it was picked up by Fox News:

Announcer: What we have heard about, coming out of the madrassa schools over in Indonesia...This is huge!

The next day Hillary's campaign denied any connection to the story and called the piece a "right-wing hit job.” Nevertheless, Fox's conservative host John Gibson reported the story again on 19 January 2007. Four days later, while admitting that right-wing host Glenn Beck had reported the rumor as fact on CNN Headline News, CNN took a camera crew over to Indonesia and showed the school that Obama attended to be an ordinary public school, not a madrassa.

Nevertheless, as PBS reported, seven months later the “madrassa” lie was used to smear Obama in an email campaign in South Carolina.

A slightly different form of confusion of fact and fiction occurred when Fox personalities confused the fictional tv series "24" with reality. Speaking of the fictional character Jack Bauer, Gretchen Carlson said, "All he does is tell the truth," when the show's plot called for him to testify before Congress about torture. Other people on the show agreed with her, but the only person cited as an "expert" on torture was Jack Bauer, who is not even a real person.

Coulter accuses the New York Times of bias by claiming that the Times did not list the charges against Mike Wooten, Sarah Palin's brother-in-law, in their coverage of the incident. This charge is false. Although the article reporting the findings of a legislative investigation did not enumerate the charges, the Times did list the charges in an article on 29 August 2008:

An internal police investigation conducted in 2005, prompted by complaints from Ms. McCann and her family, eventually resulted in Mr. Wooten’s being suspended for illegally shooting a moose and using a Taser on his stepson, although most of the complaints were dismissed...the findings of a private detective the family had hired to investigate Mr. Wooten...accused him of a variety of transgressions, including drunken driving and child abuse. Mr. [Todd] Palin told the newspaper that Mr. Wooten had made threats against his wife and her family.

This does point out one interesting aspect of Coulter's attack on what she calls liberal establishment media. She does not claim that the liberal media never report facts that favor the conservatives, but that they do not keep on reporting them often enough. Fox news/talk shows frequently repeat the same sound bytes, which they consider damaging to liberals, over and over again. Coulter seems to require repetition.

During the 2008 campaign, Fox radio commentators used this tactic by playing a clip of one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons, which was supposed to prove that Obama was racist and unpatriotic, over and over again. They could not have believed that they were informing people of something they didn't know. Instead, they had to believe that if they played the clips often enough, their listeners would come to believe the associated charges to be true. This is not fair and balanced, nor even journalism; it is propaganda.

Coulter also criticizes the New York Times for not publishing allegations against John Edwards after the National Enquirer broke the story. She seems oblivious to the fact that the Enquirer publishes stories without bothering to investigate them. The facts of the Edwards case were in doubt until the Edwards released a statement and appeared on ABC to make his confession. The Times published the entire statement, plus a statement that his wife made, on the same day, 8 August 2008. Coulter claims the timing of the story is an example of media bias, since the Olympics held their opening ceremonies that day. It was no coincidence that Edwards chose a moment when attention would be focused elsewhere, but the timing was chosen by him, not ABC News or the Times.

Coulter claims

The Bush campaign did not spread rumors that John McCain had a black illegitimate child during the 2000 GOP campaign [192]

The source she cites for this is an article in the National Review, a prominent right-wing publication. The original source of the story was the McCain campaign, not a left-wing media source. A PBS documentary interviewed several South Carolina political insiders on dirty politics in the state, evincing this comment from Will Folks, who writes a blog about South Carolina politics:

David Brancaccio: Who do you think was the author of that attack on McCain?
Will Folks, political consultant: (laughs) Everybody knows who the author was. Warren Tompkins.

Other experts on South Carolina smear campaigns spoke in the same documentary:

Scott Huffmon, Political Science Professor: People calling and saying did you know John McCain had a black baby out of wedlock?...

Rod Shealy, longtime South Carolina politico and disciple of Lee Atwater: Your challenge as a campaign is to damage your opponent without getting caught doing it...

Will Folks: They scorched the earth to win that primary.

Jay Carney, former Washington Bureau Chief for Time Magazine, wrote in a blog entry,

The Bush campaign -- including Tompkins -- claimed no complicity in the slander, an assertion taken at face value by exactly no one with any experience in South Carolina GOP politics.

Finally, a New York Times article reported that

A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000...had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question.

The same PBS documentary reported that, by the time of the 2008 South Carolina primary, Warren Tompkins was working for Mitt Romney, but the techniques were still the same. A web site called “PhoneyFred” appeared containing disinformation about Fred Thompson, including pictures of Thompson in costume with labels like “Pimp Fred”, “Moron Fred”, and “Playboy Fred”. The site was taken down after the Washington Post traced it to a firm run by Tompkins.

Two Minute Hate

In his dystopian classic, 1984, George Orwell describes a technique called “two minute hate”. The citizens of Oceania were required to gather every day to renew the hatred they felt for their rivals in a perpetual war.

For her part, Coulter can't get enough of 9/11. She criticizes the New York Times for growing bored with the anniversary. Idoes she believe there something new to be said or learned about 9/11? Coulter explains that

liberals are not merely bored with 9/11, they fear that reminders of 9/11 will anger Americans and reawaken their fighting spirit.[183]

The idea that playing the gruesome scene over and over again may be somehow beneficial is macabre, to say the least. But Coulter goes even further.

Continuing her theme, Coulter says of 9/11,

I think it should be mentioned at the start of each school day...On Every anniversary we should have wall-to-wall TV coverage of the savage attack lest anyone, ever, anywhere, forget what those animals did to us.[183]

Note that Coulter deliberately dehumanizes the perpetrators of 9/11. Her idea of indoctrinating children can only be understood in the context of a never-ending war that our children and their children will be fighting a generation hence.

Clinton's Pseudoscandals

Contrary to Coulter's belief in a liberal bias in the media, the media scandals of the Clinton era--Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card gate, and the trashing of the White House by Clinton staffers when they handed over the premises to the Bush administration—were all covered ad nauseam by the media. Coulter notes that Paul Krugman called these "pseudoscandals", but she claims that each of them is "a far more serious scandal than anything the media ever managed to produce against the Bush administration." She also claims, predictably, that none of these scandals "could be described as having received overwhelming media attention."[184]

Here again her appetite for repetition must be enormous. Media Matters reports

A Nexis search yields 539 hits for "Clinton and Whitewater" in the The New York Times between January 1 and October 26, 1996 -- nearly two per day.

But that wasn't enough for Coulter. She argues against Krugman's calling this a "pseudoscandal" by counting up the number of felony convictions associated with the Whitewater development company.

But Krugman was referring to the Whitewater issues as they related to the Clintons, for there were thousands of articles and a $60 million investigation which all ended up showing that the Clintons had no criminal liability. It was a pseudoscandal because the press covered it as a scandal but ultimately the Clintons had no criminal exposure.

The Whitewater controversy began with an article in the New York Times, supposedly a newspaper with a liberal bias. The Times continued to carry a hundreds of articles about the land development deal. One of the main forces behind the media obsession with Whitewater was a little-known organization called Citizens United. According to a May 1994 article by Trudy Lieberman that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review,

The character issue can be turned on the press, which has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization, with revenues of more than $2 million a year, without identifying the group as the source of their information.

Filegate was another investigation by the special prosecutor's office, and again the Clintons were exonerated of all wrongdoing. Coulter compares this incident, where a White House employee illegally obtained 900 confidential FBI files, to the confidential FBI file that Chuck Colson leaked to the press, intending to smear Daniel Ellsberg, saying

if that's a pseudoscandal, someone owes Nixon Aide Charles Colson three years of his life back. [188]

The problem here is that Colson was not accused merely of possessing an FBI file. He plead guilty to obstruction of justice for using the contents of that file to deny Ellsberg a fair trial. Colson actually served seven months in prison for this crime, not three years. In addition, he had the opportunity to avoid going to jail at all, but refused to cooperate with the Watergate special prosecutor. So the comparison is not even remotely accurate, yet another example of how Coulter cherry-picks historical details to support her attacks.

Inventing History

In her last chapter, Coulter revs up her attack on what she calls “liberals” by claiming that

every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.[258]

This statement is not just an error; it shows a complete disregard for historical scholarship. In the first place, the modern American concepts of liberalism were not established by Herbert Croly until 1908. In her ignorance, Coulter evidently assumes that the same relationship between the political parties existed in the 19^th century as exists today. Also, she believes that Theodore Roosevelt was serving a third term as president when he survived an assassination attempt in 1908[258].

Notwithstanding the difficulties inherent in the task, here is my partial list of American assassins. (Left-wingers: 0; right-wingers: 5; other: 1; insane: 6)

• John Wilkes Booth (assassin of Lincoln) was a pro-slavery secessionist and States-Rights advocate. Through the years, those positions came to be identified with southern conservatives. He also belonged to the Know Nothing Party, which opposed immigration, a position more closely identified with the Republicans of today. So Booth was definitely a right winger.

• Charles Guiteau (assassin of Garfield) was a political chameleon whose opinions changed with each new obsession. Coulter describes him as having “a long relationship with a Utopian commune called the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practice.” [258] Far from being a liberal group, the Oneida Community was a theocracy, basing its practices on a unique interpretation of Christian scripture. Their idea of free love resembled a group marriage or polygamy. After failing to be accepted by the Community, Guiteau became a Republican and a strong supporter of President Garfield. He was definitely a right-winger.

• Leon Czolgosz (assassin of McKinley) was interested in socialism and anarchy, but he was a registered Republican who had voted in the Republican primary in Cleveland. He tried to join an anarchist group in Chicago or Cleveland, but the anarchists rejected him as a possible spy. Since the anarchists rejected him but the Republicans did not, he was a right-winger.

• John Schrank (attempted to kill Theodore Roosevelt) was also a Republican and a profoundly religious Bible scholar. He was definitely a right-winger, since he claimed the ghost of Republican President William McKinley had advised him in a dream to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt. [258]

• Giuseppe Zangara (attempted to kill F. D. Roosevelt; killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead) was convinced the President of the United States was supernaturally causing him pain. Since he wanted to kill both Hoover and Roosevelt, and because he raved against both kings and capitalist presidents, Zangara seemed too incompetent to form a coherent political idea. Insane but politically neutral.

The Most Magnificent Campaign Ads In Political History

Coulter makes a number of statements that she says “over and over again, conservatives are forced to remind people”. Among these is the claim that “the Bush campaign did not spread rumors that John McCain had a black illegitimate child during the 2000 GOP primary”[192][see above for comments]. Another is that

The Willie Horton ads were the most magnificent campaign ads in political history.[192]

The Willie Horton ads, featuring a dark-skinned African-American and other ethnic minorities being released from prison, frightened white Americans and placed the blame for violent crime on liberals in general and Michael Dukakis in particular. Dukakis lost so badly that it's hard to credit his defeat to any one factor, but the ads were effective. They were, however, a vicious smear with racial overtones of the kind that epitomized the career of Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush's campaign manager at the time (1988).

Such ads “play to the base” of Republican support. They energize their supporters and help ensure a large turnout. They demoralize their opponents and keep their supporters away from the polls.

There are several problems with these kinds of ads. If you continue smearing your opponents using racial attacks, you will alienate black voters and others who identify with their struggle. Republicans may complain that African-Americans seldom vote for them, but they have only themselves to blame.

Furthermore, the deceit and arrogance of these tactics have a cumulative effect, which has resulted in the Republican party losing support among independents. One reason Obama's “high road” campaign worked in 2008 was because the electorate already identified Republicans as the practitioners of dirty politics. They remembered “the most magnificent campaign ads” and associated them with McCain, even though he himself had been victimized by Atwater's disciples in South Carolina.

But Coulter's tactics are all slash and burn. She doesn't care that many people would find her attacks on single mothers heartless and cruel. She thinks it acceptable to attack celebrities because their fathers were African-American. Perhaps she should remember what Lee Atwater himself said of his own career.

Lee Atwater, the godfather of Republican disinformation campaigns and mentor of Carl Rove and Walther Tompkins apologized for his activities in politics, which included the Willie Horton ads that Coulter calls the best ever. When he knew he was dying with incurable cancer in 1991, Atwater said in a Life Magazine article:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

[Note on Kirsten Brydum: Far from appearing to be a "black-on-white" crime, this crime is reminiscent of the murders of freedom riders in the deep south in the 1950s and 1960s. Note that the writers assume that she was working for Obama, one of many young white people who came south to work on the Obama campaign. Note also, as is indicated in actual newspaper articles, that she left a club alone at 1:30 AM but was not killed until 8:30 AM the following morning. This raises the question, what was she doing in that time? My guess is that she may have been interrogated by her captors before being assassinated for her political beliefs. I suggest that the U. S. Attorney in New Orleans should investigate this crime as a Civil Rights violation.]

Allan Masri has a blog at MasriZone.BlogSpot.com.