Rep. John "Double Down" Lewis

I'm not going to condone, apologize for or justify the innuendo games McPalin have been playing lately when it comes to 'raising questions' about Barack Obama's past and his fitness for office.

It's a typical tactic played because it works. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

But shame is being cast, at this very moment, from Cleveland down to the Peach State...home of Representative John Lewis (D).

Yesterday, the Rep., who was a big student organizer during the 60s Civil Rights movement, is now playing some pretty ugly cards, not only comparing McPalin to George Wallace, but drawing allusions to firebombings in the South, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing that killed the little girls.

Everyone plays dirty and, in the aggregate, I find McPalin's campaign lest tasteful than Obama's, but Lewis didn't need to go there. As McCain cheapens the service he gave this country by using it as a campaign trick, Lewis does the same to the Civil Rights movement. He should know better.

An Interesting Note on Obama's NAACP Speech Tonight

Barry will be down in Cincinnati tonight speaking to the NAACP, which is having its annual convention down there this year.

(You'll remember that W dissed them in the run-up to the 2000 election after they ran an ad in Texas basically blaming him for the horrific dragging death of James Byrd, but that's another story.)

Anyway, he's giving his speech at the Duke Energy Convention Center.

That name of the venue chosen by the NAACP jumped out at me and, as best I can figure, Duke Energy is somehow related to what used to be known as Duke Power.

"Who cares, Dan?" you ask...

Well, that company was part of the landmark Civil Rights case, Griggs v Duke Power.

Argued in 1970, the Supreme Court ruled against Duke's hiring and placement strategies as it came to race. They ruled that if you are going to use educational achievement or aptitude tests, said measures must be reasonably-related to job performance. Until then, regardless of the intent of the practice, it had been resulting in disparate impact against African-Americans.

This leads to a much longer discussion I might post on here someday (I spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about things like this in a past life up in the frozen tundra), but I wonder if anyone else will make note of this little connection.

You're So Old Skool

I'm not linking up the most original thought in the world...I, as well as all three of my loyal readers, knew this before the Rev had his castration fantasy spread all over the news.

But the Chicago Boyz put Jesse Jackson's comments in perspective...

The Party of Lincoln

The Neocon Express kind of got under my skin with a posting yesterday that relied on a very annoying rhetorical device.

After relating how his grandfather, who lived in the deep south during the 1960s, refused to tolerate even light-hearted racial jokes in the household and was ahead of his time in terms of hiring black workers (both of which are admirable given social mores of the times), he jumps to a claim of confusion about why blacks tend to vote almost monolithically Democrat.

This is a widely known trend and, to be clear, I have my own problems with why it is. It's ridiculous and without merit to believe that the GOP has it out for blacks as a whole.

However, Neocon's argument, that since the Civil Rights movement in this country was helped more by the Republican Party of that time, and impeded by Demo/Dixiecrats at the time, blacks should remain loyal.

While not a moral equivalant, it would be employing the same logic to say that we should treat the current German government exactly as we would if they still endorsed a Nazi platform.

Parties and individuals change over time and they don't always change in the same direction. While the GOP likes to sing the praises of our 40th President and his co-opting of the so-called Reagan Democrats, they like to pretend that they're still the same party that pushed
through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Little hypocricies are a beautiful thing, but I've seen better out of Neocon man.