Boris' 'Kenyan ancestry' slur has UK roots

When Boris Johnston's Sun column appeared earlier today attacking President Obama and a storm blew up I assumed one thing - he'd got the idea from the American kook-o-sphere.

After all, there were plenty of snake oil salesmen making money off the US right from the exact same, well, racist premise.

Boris Johnson - or Dinesh D'Souza? https://t.co/SyPZgfO7OW pic.twitter.com/Fm96MMLA2l

— Paul Canning (@pauloCanning) April 22, 2016

I was wrong. Steve M, who blogs at No More Mister (and is IMO the best blogger on the US Presidential race) found otherwise. Reblogged with permission.

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The Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has dredged up a couple of old slurs against President Obama in an opinion piece calling for a British exit from the European Union:

Boris Johnson has criticised the US president Barack Obama and suggested his attitude to Britain might be based on his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

Writing a column for The Sun newspaper the outgoing Mayor of London recounted a story about a bust of Winston Churchill purportedly being removed from White House.

“Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire -- of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” he wrote.

In fact, the Churchill story is Johnson's lede:

Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009.

Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why.

It was a bust of Winston Churchill -- the great British war time leader. It was a fine goggle-eyed object, done by the brilliant sculptor Jacob Epstein, and it had sat there for almost ten years.

But on day one of the Obama administration it was returned, without ceremony, to the British embassy in Washington.

No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision.

Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire -- of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.

Actually, plenty of people could "explain why" the bust "vanished from that room." Here's a fact check Glenn Kessler wrote for The Washington Post early last year, when Ted Cruz brought up the subject:

The Winston Churchill bust in question was originally provided in July 2001 by then Prime Minister Tony Blair as a loan to President George W. Bush. The bust, now almost 70 years old, was made by English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and Bush said he would keep it in the Oval Office. Various news reports at the time said the bust will be returned once Bush left office.

The White House residence, meanwhile, has another bust of Churchill, also sculpted by Epstein, which was given to President Lyndon B. Johnson on Oct. 6, 1965, (Here’s Lady Bird Johnson’s diary entry about the gift, which was facilitated by Churchill’s wartime friends, including Averell Harriman.)

Following along so far? There were two Churchill busts. One was always scheduled to be returned at the end of George W. Bush's term.

It's not completely clear why it was given to Bush in the first place:

In 2012, the Obama White House said the gift in 2001 occurred when the residence bust “was being worked on at the time” but The Fact Checker did not find a reference to that in news reports. Still, at the news conference accepting the gift, Bush told reporters it came about because he lamented to the British ambassador that “that there was not a proper bust of Winston Churchill for me to put in the Oval Office.” So one could wonder why the president would say that when he already had virtually the same bust sitting in the residence.

In any case, the bust given to President Johnson remains in the White House. Here's a photo of President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron -- Johnson's fellow Tory and political frenemy -- examining the bust in July 2010:



But what's up with that bit in Johnson's op-ed about "the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire"? Is Johnson channeling Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D'Souza?

Probably not. In fact, it's likely that this idea originated with the British. Here's a Telegraph story about the return of the Bush-Blair Churchill bust, written when Obama had been in office less than a month:

Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather.

In a 2010 New Republic article, James Mann stated flatly that this was a British idea:

... the idea started with the British, those former colonialists, who have repeatedly invoked Kenya to explain every perceived slight from the Obama administration.

... I first ran across the Kenya paranoia a few weeks after Obama was sworn in. Gordon Brown, then the British prime minister, was coming to Washington, and a British television reporter asked to interview me about Obama’s views of the world. “He has different roots than all other presidents,” the reporter said. “He doesn’t have ties to Europe.”

... “Revealed: Why Obama Loathes the British” screamed one article in the Daily Mail a few months ago. The article rehashed the history of British colonials and the Mau Mau rebellion.

... You can’t get more exalted than Sir David Manning, who was Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 2003 to 2007. Yet earlier this year, in testimony to a House of Commons foreign affairs committee, he reached low by warning that Obama “comes with a very different perspective” from other presidents.

“He is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia, and who had a Kenyan father,” Manning said. “We now have a Democrat who is not familiar with us.”

The reference to the Mau Mau is particularly absurd, according to David Anderson, an Oxford professor and author of Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.

To portray the Obama family as being part of Mau Mau is stir-fry crazy. Let me explain why: The Obama family come from western Kenya, which is about as different from Nairobi and the Kikuyu area as Utah is from New York City. And it’s almost as far way. They come from an area where there was no rebellion, there was no Mau Mau. So while his father and his grandmother may well have been nationalists -- I’m sure they were -- they weren’t directly involved in the Mau Mau rebellion.

The other thing is, if you’ve read anything about Churchill, you’d know that, although he was the head of the government at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion, he was trying as best he could to get the British in Kenya to negotiate and to end the fighting. Churchill was not supporting or condoning the violence. He is actually one of the few British politicians who comes out of this smelling of roses.

James Mann notes that the Daily Mail story (“Revealed: Why Obama Loathes the British”) actually raised the question of whether Obama's anger at the BP oil spill was the result of familial contempt for the British -- as if a massive oil spill isn't reason enough for anger. A Kenyan relative of the president was actually asked about this. She assured the Mail interviewer that Anglophobia wasn't the source of Obama's anger. The quote was buried near the end of the story.

So, no, Johnson is unlikely to be echoing American bigots. He's far more likely to be echoing British bigots.

World’s main security issue today is Russian poisoned public opinion

Picture from a July Racist @Redbull Obama event in Russia

Crosspost from Little Green Footballs.

I have posted before about how Americans seem to be unaware just how much Russians are being told to hate them.

In this article Andreas Umland, a Kyiv based analyst and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, explains further how what we see in the West of Russian propaganda is just the tip of a very dangerous, nuclear armed iceberg.

Russia’s more and more neurotic collective mind represents a critical challenge to the integrity of the European and even world security system. Russian electronic mass media has turned from a platform of relative pluralism of interpretation and opinion, in the 1990s, into a dangerous propaganda and manipulation instrument. Over the last 15 years, Russia’s major TV channels, radio stations and newspaper have been resolutely re-designed to prolong as long as possible the rule of the kleptocratic clique around Vladimir Putin. Kremlin-controlled mass media achieves this aim through purposeful inception and radicalization of a fortress mentality among the Russian population. The Russian people are told, on a daily basis, that Russia is under a deadly attack from the US and its underlings across the world, ranging from far-away Australia and Canada to neighboring Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. The propaganda machine’s constant repetition that NATO, the EU and their allies are after Russia’s lands and resources has made, for many Russians, the idea that they have to stick together for securing the physical survival of their nation a common place beyond dispute.

So far, the West has largely failed to address the core issue in its confrontation with Moscow - the deeply poisoned Russian public opinion. It does not systematically counter-act the constant spread of Manichean, conspirological and rabidly anti-Western misrepresentations of international affairs, by the skillful manipulators of Kremlin-controlled mass media. For instance, the English-language RT (Russia Today) state TV channel has, since 2005, been allowed to become a noteworthy factor in the formation of North American as well as West European public opinion, on the Wests contemporary domestic and foreign affairs. RT’s largely unchallenged pseudo-pacifist stance has only started to loose cloud, even among political radicals, with the start of the all-to-obvious Russian “hybrid war” against Ukraine. Especially, the downing of Malyasian flight MH17, by a Russian rocket on 17 July 2014, has dealt a blow to RT’s and various other Russian outlet’s international propaganda campaign strategies designed to muddle the waters of Western public opinion on the escalation in the Donets Basin. The Kremlin’s project to subvert the integrity of the West from within has largely failed.

Yet, a far more consequential and complicated challenge remains unmet - the ever stronger anti-Western infection of public opinion, inside Russia, by state-directed domestic television.

More: Neither ISIS, Nor Climate Change: The World’s Main Security Issue Today Is the Russian People’s Poisoned Public Opinion

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

"Think of Bane, the would-be dictator of Gotham in Batman, who promises an end to democratic corruption, weakness and loss of civic pride. He sought a revolution against the prevailing elites in order to gain total power unto himself."

[Crossposted from Little Green Footballs]

I posed this question to a few of my American friends because I had noticed that no one seemed to be asking it.

It seemed like it was verboten to even consider. Libertarian author Jeffrey A Tucker has thought it through though and his essay on the question got republished by Newsweek.

[Trump’s] speech was like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground and died grim deaths. I kept thinking of books like John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, especially Chapter Ten that so brilliantly chronicles a form of statism that swept Europe in the 1930s. It grew up in the firmament of failed economies, cultural upheaval and social instability, and it lives by stoking the fires of bourgeois resentment.

Since World War II, the ideology he represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.

Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should. It is still real. It exists. It is distinct. It is not going away. Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.

You would have to be hopelessly ignorant of modern history not to see the outlines and where they end up. I want to laugh about what he said, like reading a comic-book version of Franco, Mussolini or Hitler. And truly I did laugh as he denounced the existence of tech support in India that serves American companies (“how can it be cheaper to call people there than here?”—as if he still thinks that long-distance charges apply). But in politics, history shows that laughter can turn too quickly to tears.

More: Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Writing for Free Press Houston Nick Cooper notes that:

Right-wing, anti-immigrant fear mongering is quite familiar around the world, from parties like France’s National Front, The U.K. Independence Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Northern League, and Germany’s National Democratic Party. These European parties are associated with neo-nazism and other forms of fascism, whereas Donald Trump is perceived by many Americans as a blow-hard who says some wacky things.

And, says, Cooper:

The historical precedents are being ignored. These two myths are familiar from fascist propaganda: a dead national dream can be revived by a heroic white male leader darker-skinned outsiders are coming to rape the women

Could be why a European like me looks at Trump and thinks 'Fascist'!  

H/T Steve M

Bernie Sanders' black problem

The rest of the world loves to laugh at America's never ending election process. Heck, Americans laugh at it. Jon Stewart for one. But those vaguely playing attention, especially those reading The Guardian, will have had their ears prick up at the campaign of one Bernie Sanders.

Senator Sanders is that rarest of things in the good ol'USA, an actual socialist. His rallies for the Democratic party's nomination have been massive so of course a Guardian writer, Mary O'Hara, is waving to get Brits attention yelling that "it’s invigorating to witness what’s happening in the US." My friends at Shiraz Socialist are no less dizzy saying that the Sanders' campaign is "probably the most exciting development in US politics since the 1930s."

Oh my.

Thing is the Sanders campaign just got knocked sideways by black activists. So much so that one of the largest grassroots progressive groups, Democracy for America, has now changed its nominating process. They "will ask how candidates will support the Movement for Black Lives and confront racism and our "culture of white supremacy"." Other groups are certain to follow. That is, that all the assumptions about why a self-proclaimed socialist would automatically win progressive endorsement have been changed. For ever.

Sanders has consistently polled low numbers with minority voters but things came to a head when he did not react well to a stage invasion by #blacklivesmatters activists at the Netroots Nation conference, a big leftwing shindig. Those theatrics drew the attention but the warning signs were already there, as Tommy Christopher points out in this analysis of an earlier interview with George Stephanopoulos.

Says Christopher:

Sanders decided to tell Stephanopoulos that black voters would love him if they just understood things better, an idea that is uncomfortably similar to the conclusion reached by the Republican Party’s infamous 2012 “autopsy report,” and an echo of the GOP’s point man on minority outreach, Rand Paul.

Sanders’ argument, that the policies he advocates for everyone should also be particularly attractive to black and Hispanic voters, is an approach that is favored by politicians who take minority votes for granted, as well as those who take for granted that they won’t get those votes. Sanders’ problem is that Hillary Clinton supports all of the policies he cites, but he has not taken up any of the issues that Hillary Clinton has used to solidify her support with the Obama coalition.This is no accident; Sanders has long emphasized winning white voters by deliberately avoiding what he considers “demographic stuff” in favor of economic issues.

Sanders problems are not just presentational, they're political. As one of the biggest black websites bluntly puts it "a job isn’t going to stop a bullet". Christopher:

Substantively, Sanders’ philosophy misses the point that many of those “demographic” issues are economic issues. For black Americans, the criminal justice and policing reforms that Hillary Clinton has advocated are directly tied to their economic well-being, or that of their close friends and relatives. And while Sanders decries the role of money in politics, the Obama coalition is much more urgently concerned with whether they’ll even be allowed to vote in the next election.

The political problem for Sanders is underlined in another area in this article by Jesse Berney on abortion access, which is a enormous issue in America where access remains under constant attack.

In an interview with Rolling Stone a few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders spoke about the economic populism driving his campaign. “Once you get off of the social issues — abortion, gay rights, guns — and into the economic issues,” he told writer Mark Binelli, “there is a lot more agreement than the pundits understand.”

This formulation isn’t uncommon, even among progressives like Sanders. It’s easy to ascribe the fierce debates on issues like abortion and LGBT rights to cultural differences, and to wish we could just push them aside and finally convince rural white voters to vote for their “economic interests.”

But putting abortion rights in a box separate from economic issues ignores the reality of the women who find it increasingly difficult to obtain an abortion in this country. Abortion is an economic issue: wealthy women will always have access to abortion, while restrictions and obstacles affect low- and middle-income women disproportionately.

Berney explains how Clinton is getting it right.

Sanders puts economic inequality and corporate power at the top of his agenda, and deliberately excludes reproductive rights from that list.

In a recent event in Iowa where she shared the stage with Sanders and the other Democratic White House candidates, Hillary Clinton made a point to say traditional “women’s issues” are actually “economic issues.” Clinton has mostly stuck to issues safer than abortion – like family leave and child care – when talking about the economic impact of issues that have traditionally been “women’s issues.”

But she’s doing the work to erase that distinction, while Sanders draws that line ever more clearly. These priorities matter, and the candidates’ words matter.

Berney warns that Sanders risks losing a whole other part of the Democrats base, the majority, women:

Abortion rights are under severe threat in this country, and exiling them to an imaginary “social issues”category necessarily relegates them to second-class status. 

Immediately after the Netroots Nation fiasco the Sanders campaign made some tweaks, as Imani Gandy notes in her fabulous, excoriating piece 'You’re White and Marched With Dr. King: So What?' - But Sanders' supporters are giving a very good impression of learning nothing at all from the exercise.

Progressives are complaining that the protesters were disrespectful and rude. They’re whining that interrupting a speech isn’t an “invitation for solidarity.”

I’ve seen some white folks complaining that they no longer feel safe at Netroots because—you know—unruly Black women. The horror! Still others don’t think the protest “looks good.” (Because as we all know, change comes when you politely ask for it, not when you disrupt and demand it, which, by the way, is what Dr. King did. White people tend to forget that Dr. King was a disruptor when they are using him as a Pokémon to shut Black people up.)

Rather than support these brave Black women activists in what is quite literally a fight for the lives of Black people, there you are in all your pearl-clutching glory talking about how disrespectful the activists were, and how it’s such a shame that the uppity Black people were being so rude to an obvious ally, and how the #BlackLivesMatter movement is so disorganized and is protesting the wrong things at the wrong time in front of the wrong people.

    “Why are you alienating allies?”

    “Don’t you know how much Bernie cares for you?”

    “What’s wrong with you people?”

    “Hillary would be worse!”

    “What are you going to do, vote for Donald Trump?”

    “Why won’t you ever be satisfied?”

    “You’re doing it all wrong!”

    “You’re going to make us quit caring about Black lives if you don’t shape up and act the way we want you to.”

Most Black voters want the answer to one question: What is Sanders’ plan to address the police brutality crisis in the Black community?

And the answer to that question is never: “Bernie marched with Dr. King.”

I can vouch for this reality because even I got whiny tweets after retweeting Gandy, who tweets at @AngryBlackLady.

And it is not like there aren't black people trying to patiently explain what Sanders' may be doing wrong. Here's Roderick Morrow, who got so fed up with reaction from so-called 'progressives' that he started the joke hashtag. #BernieSoBlack.

It's like they're almost trying to outblack us. "Oh, you're a black person, what could you possibly understand about our candidate? He was marching before you were even born!" Okay, that's cool, but you gotta stay on top of it. So I made a joke that's like, "Bernie's blacker than us! Bernie's SO BLACK!" That's how it feels when they come into our mentions and tell us that we don't know what we're talking about, and even though [Sanders] doesn't talk about #BlackLivesMatter right now, we should just kind of shut up. So I was just like:

Honestly, the joke is not even on Bernie Sanders. That's what's so funny — the joke is on the defense of him, which is, if you extrapolate to the furthest extent, he can do no wrong on race. Like, we should not even expect anything of him, he put in his time already, we need to just shut up.

I'm sure it does happen, but I can't imagine people doing this to other constituencies, because you do rely on those votes. At Netroots Nation, you're going to be addressing a very diverse but very black-centric audience, and to not really be prepared to talk about race there is a little bit of a slap in the face. So for us — and when I say "us," I just mean black people, I'm not any level of an activist or anything — for us to just say, Hey, you kind of did a bad job, hope you do better in the future, and then get bombarded with "He marched in 1968!" it's like, All right, man, I don't know what to tell you.

That. That right there.


Edited to add: @BobFromBrockley has pointed out this socialist response, not to this but to the entire movement (I think)! A progressive I have followed for years, Martin Bowman, has also written despairingly here, comparing the movement to a marriage and fearing that we're heading for divorce.

I won't Fisk either but I would point out one thing. I'm a white gay man and I'm from the generation that lived through HIV/Aids. So there is a connection I have to a 'crisis' of people dying and there is also a connection to having to yell and scream to get attention - from everybody. So we had Act-Up and Peter Tatchell invading pulpits, but then we also had lobbyists and McKellan having tea with John Major. Movements always piss people off. From what I can tell the people supporting Sanders are pissed off and from my perspective, as another minority, then I don't know why that's a bad thing.

Edited to add: It's also worthwhile noting these comments (via Nancy LeTourneau) from Dara Lind:

There is a legitimate disconnect between the way Sanders (and many of the economic progressives who support him) see the world, and the way many racial-justice progressives see the world. To Bernie Sanders, as I've written, racial inequality is a symptom — but economic inequality is the disease. That's why his responses to unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore have included specific calls for police accountability, but have focused on improving economic opportunity for young African Americans. Sanders presents fixing unemployment as the systemic solution to the problem.

Many racial-justice advocates don't see it that way. They see racism as its own systemic problem that has to be addressed on its own terms. They feel that it's important to acknowledge the effects of economic inequality on people of color, but that racial inequality isn't merely a symptom of economic inequality. And most importantly, they feel that "pivoting" to economic issues can be a way for white progressives to present their agenda as the progressive agenda and shove black progressives, and the issues that matter most to them, to the sidelines.

So Sanders' performance at Netroots confirmed the frustrations that his critics felt. And Sanders' supporters' reaction to the criticism was just as predictable.

Edited to add: Here is an excellent critique of #blacklivesmatter by Oliver Willis.

Willis argues that as with Occupy Wall Street the demands of the movement are unclear and they need to be. He says that history shows us that demands must be concrete.

Where's Bayard Rustin's statue?

Mug shot of Bayard Rustin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is especially pleasing to see as part of the remembrance of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the rehabilitation of Bayard Rustin, a lost gay hero or a lost hero full-stop.

As, of all people, Robert Turner of Log Cabin Republicans put it in the Washington Blade:

It is important that we in the gay community observe and honor our heroes of all nationalities, races, and genders. Rustin deserves a place in the annals of history right next to Frank Kameny and Harvey Milk.

Rustin was a gay liberationist, a socialist, a civil rights leader and a pacifist. And he was the March's organiser. A week after the March it was he who was on the cover of Life Magazine, not MLK.

His leadership almost didn't happen. After being jailed as a 'conscientious objector' in World War II, and jailed again in the 1950s after being caught having sex with two men in a car, and having briefly been a communist, it is to their credit that MLK and other civil rights leaders overruled objections to Rustin as organiser. This was despite three weeks before the March on Washington, segregationist senator Strom Thurmond entering into the congressional record a picture of "pervert" Rustin talking to King while King was in a bathtub.

Gary Younge, who has a new book on the March (I've posted video of a fascinating interview with Younge after the jump), quotes Roy Wilkins of the NAACP saying:

I don't want you leading that march on Washington, because you know I don't give a damn about what they say, but publicly I don't want to have to defend the draft dodging. I know you're a Quaker, but that's not what I'll have to defend. I'll have to defend draft dodging. I'll have to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality, it's going to be promiscuity and I can't defend that.

In 1960, shamefully, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem, had threatened that he would say King was having an affair with Rustin unless he cut him out of the top civil rights leadership, his inner circle. King complied.

According to John D'Emilio, author of 'Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin', Rustin had expected that he would be defended.

When he wasn’t defended, it was — it was painful. It was very painful. And he spent a couple of years, mostly — in the early '60s, mostly involved in the peace movement rather than in the civil rights movement because of that rupture. And it's the March on Washington that brought him back into the center of things.

It was Rustin that had schooled King in organisation, says D'Emilio. Rustin began organising 'Freedom Rides' in the 1940s: "Rustin, with 15 years of experience, you know, breaking the law nonviolently, went down to Montgomery, Alabama, introduced himself to Dr. King, and began a process of mentoring and tutoring someone who was clearly destined to be a great leader."

Rustin, with A. Philip Randolph, had wanted to organise a 'March for Jobs and freedom' in 1941, 23 years before the 1963 March. This was canned after FDR ordered an end to discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies.

Edited to add: A correction from Stuart Elliott:

The 1941 march was simply "The March on Washington." After getting FDR to agree to integrate defense plant employment, Randolph continued with the "March on Washington Movement" during the war and until 1947, which voted to use non-violent action to integrate the military, which might have been the first adoption of civil disobedience in the US. Rustin was involved in those trainings and those of the organizations formed after the war to concentrate on ending Jim Crow in the military. (The MOWM had a broader agenda.) When Randolph succeeded and Truman issued an executive order, Rustin was critical of Randolph and avoided contact for a year or two.

MLK was not the only one though to have trouble with Rustin's remarkable, for its time, open homosexuality. According to Michael G. Long, editor of 'I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters': "Even A.J. Muste, the great pacifist of the twentieth century and a man deeply influenced by the principles of love and justice, advised Bayard to sacrifice his gay relationships for the sake of the peace movement."

Economic justice

Rustin was one of many socialists involved in the March and it is disappointing to see much of the anniversary coverage focused solely on King's 'I have a dream' speech, forgetting that the March was just as much about economic justice as it was for equality. Four of the March's ten demands were about economic justice, such as a national minimum wage, and also "a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers, Negro and white, on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages." Video of Rustin reading the demands at the Lincoln Memorial is after the jump.

Adds Long:

Bayard was often asked whether the modern civil rights movement led by King really changed anything in America. And he would sometimes reply by saying that had the questioner lived through Jim Crow, with its segregated restrooms and swimming pools and schools, he or she would know beyond a doubt that life had become far better for African Americans. But he was also quick to point out the unfulfilled dream of full employment and adequate health care and education for all Americans.

Picture by @batmanWI from March on Washington anniversary

Although, writes Gene Demby, a report released by the Census Bureau for the March's anniversary shows enormous progress for blacks in income, poverty levels and education:

Despite those dramatic gains, the economic picture over the last 50 years for blacks has been a mixed bag: incontrovertible, substantial progress — a lot of it due in part to policies the march helped enshrine — while some troubling disparities remain stubbornly in place.

Aisha C. Moodie-Mills and Preston Mitchum of the Centre for American Progress argue that Rustin offers another legacy, one for the LGBT movement, that economic justice should be as central as equality, just as it was at the March on Washington:

Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, the LGBT community is economically insecure. After controlling for other factors known to influence the likelihood of being in poverty, same-sex couples and LGBT people are more likely than their non-LGBT counterparts to be poor. Within the LGBT community, women, couples with children, and black LGBT people have been shown to be particularly vulnerable. Women in same-sex couples, for example, are nearly twice as likely as married different-sex couples to be among the working poor.

They point out that in 2013:

Black men in same-sex relationships are more than six times as likely to be in poverty than white men in same-sex couples—18.8 percent to 3.1 percent, respectively—and black women in same-sex relationships are three times more likely to be poor than white women in same-sex relationships—17.9 percent to 5.1 percent, respectively.

Rustin's grand vision

Rustin's central role as a philosopher in the movement insisting on Ghandian non-violence and on the need for integration, not segregation, is shown in him being the one who took the debate to Malcolm X, video of which I also post after the jump. Says Long:

Bayard certainly had a grand vision. As an openly gay, African American, pacifist, socialist activist with roots in communism, he could see the interconnections of sufferings caused by various prejudices and discriminations. And because of this, he insisted on practicing coalition politics. While he understood the frustration and anger of individuals wanting to “go it alone,” he also believed that “frustration politics” does nothing constructive. What we need to do, he said, is to start building coalitions with like-minded people, including those in power, around the grand ideas of equality and justice for all. Bayard was the first to encourage King to build coalitions with labor and political liberals. And he was right about this — coalition politics centered on achieving rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone is the path to achieving our unique goals. As he put all this, we need to move “from protest to politics.”

According to Arch Puddington (who worked as an aide to Rustin) from Freedom House, for which Rustin worked during his last two decades, because of his opposition to linking the civil rights movement to the anti-Vietnam war cause, Rustin became "a pariah to the new breed of radical black personalities, who increasingly turned away from nonviolence, integration, and coalition-building while embracing black nationalism, Black Power, and (at least rhetorically) the use of violence."

Gay Liberation

It is also disappointing to see little mention in anniversary coverage of Rustin's role after the 70's, in his last two decades, as a supporter of the Gay Liberation Movement, although he wasn't really publicly outspoken until the 1980s: In 1986, just before his death, he gave a speech 'The New Niggers Are Gays':

Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.

Regarding his late joining in such public statements, Michael Bronski, in his interview with Long, points out that Rustin was a product of his times, seeing sexuality as a 'personal issue', and compares Rustin to Susan Sontag who was lesbian, and not closeted, "but never really came out and had little to say about LGBT rights". As Long points out though, Rustin did influence the Gay Liberation movement, because it was so heavily influenced by the civil rights movement Rustin had helped shape.

Rustin said of the Stonewall riot, where some reportedly chanted "We shall overcome!":

That was the beginning of an extraordinary revolution, similar to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in that it was not expected that anything extraordinary would occur. As in the case of the women who left the Russian factory, and in the case of Rosa Parks who sat down in the white part of the bus, something began to happen, people began to protest. They began to fight for the right to live in dignity, the right essentially to be one’s self in every respect, and the right to be protected under law. In other words, people began to fight for their human rights. Gay people must continue this protest.

As Turner puts it the documentary about Rustin, 'Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin', "should be required viewing for everyone in the [LGBT] community, right along with 'Before Stonewall' and 'Milk'."

Rustin's rehabilitation will continue as he has been posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor by President Obama. He is the last of the main civil rights leaders to receive this honour. Rustin has a few memorials. There is a plaque in a New York City park and schools in New York and West Chester named after him. He is on the walk in Chicago of gay leaders. A University gives out an award in his name. But despite his stature, no statue. Maybe that will now change.

Breaking: 'Asylum seekers not immigrants' says no one

Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia being marched away by British police at Croydon airport in March 1939 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seeking asylum from repression, war and horror is a basic human right which almost every country is signed up to. This right was created in the shadow of World War Two and the then recent shameful memory of the treatment of Jewish refugees before that war.

Asylum seekers are not the same group as 'immigrants'. Neither are they the same group as 'refugees'. People apply to a country to allow them to become immigrants. People are given refugee status in one country, usually next to the country they fled from, and some other countries then select them, usually many years later, to come to them.

Anyone can apply for asylum in another country once they're there, whether by plane or by boat or walking over the border, and they do for all sorts of reasons. People apply because they're being persecuted on account of their ethnicity -- like Chechens. Or their sexuality, or, in one American case, because they cannot home school their children in Germany. Americans have applied for asylum in Canada and, famously, many got it in Scandinavia during the Vietnam War.

There are some basic rules, international law, on asylum seekers but different countries regard them in different ways. In Russia they get sent to a camp in Siberia and in Australia they're all automatically detained. Also in Australia asylum applicants get security checked if they're fleeing, for example, Sri Lanka.

In the United States they get security checked too if they're from certain places. One of those places is the Caucuses -- Chechnya, Dagestan. The Boston bombers were the children of parents originally from Chechnya who were accepted as asylum seekers. They claimed asylum after arriving on tourist visas.

So Senator Rand Paul is either ignorant in calling today for something which is already happening -- security checks -- or willfully stirring slash hot button pressing.

There's more of this and they'll be more to come, from all sides.

Media #fail on asylum seekers ≠ immigration

In the Daily Beast a former Bush official bangs on, like Paul, about double checking 'immigrants' and like this doesn't already happen and, sigh, like this would have made any difference when the bombers were teens when they came to America. In the Boston Herald there's the impolitic version, this full-on anti-immigrant/refugee/whatever rant by Howie Carr.

On Twitter I exchanged with an immigrant advocate, Matthew Kolken, who is countering this nativist ranting by pointing out that one of the guys who helped save the life of the guy who identified the bombers is an immigrant (pictured right, with the big hat).

But if America is now going to have a debate on immigration reform informed by the Boston bombings then it ain't going to be very informed if the media track record thus far keeps up. Because I have now seen a series of stories in major media outlets, including ones making the liberal case, which are confusing asylum and immigration and which contain startling inaccuracies. Startling? Yes, because two seconds thought would have spotted the logical flaws.

Like in this CNN story, or this USA Today one which thinks US cities look at asylum applications, or Weigel at Slate who thinks the US accepts Chechen refugees from Kazakhstan (as does Jason Dzubow, who should know better) which short research disproves or the New York Times which repeats that the family "emigrated to the United States from Kyrgyzstan" ...

Here's The Atlantic getting it right and explaining the bombing suspects status via talking to an expert.

America is not going to un-sign the Refugee Convention, not even the looniest are suggesting that, so will continue to accept asylum applications. Thus, the status of the Boston bombers has sod all to do with immigration reform because asylum seekers ≠ immigration.

Kolken tells me this (ignorance) is normal from journalists, but as with the detailed and extensive criticism over other flaws in the media's coverage of Boston ignorance is no excuse. Basic research, heck, bothering to think it through, would produce better coverage on asylum vs immigration than I am seeing.

One other note. Advocates of immigration reform are blasting -- see this ILW.com editorial 'Terrorist Enablers On The Right' -- those using the bombing and how they are using it. Why don't they point out the complete difference between asylum and immigration?!

America's shame in one photo

This photo is of some of the families of the Newtown shooting victims yesterday at the White House. This is their reaction on learning that the US Senate had rejected expanding background checks for gun purchases.

It should shame America.

Last month the BBC's Panorama showed how easily anyone could buy a gun when a British reporter got one. It's called straw purchasing and it feeds guns to criminals and that's what the vote was about.

America is so far gone that checks to stop terrorists buying guns are rejected by the gun industry lobby and thus politicians*. Anything that resembles gun control is rejected because the country is caught up in an insane culture of worship to an ancient text and a belief that a cycle of violence, guns begetting guns, is a good thing.

Yesterday I saw the former Conservative MP Louise Mensch expressing exasperation at the country. Last year the conservative former Australian Prime Minister John Howard wrote in the New York Times of how Australia united for gun control after a massacre. He did this following Newtown, to show how the rest of the world has managed to control guns and gun violence.

America's friends want to help. But how to stage an intervention with a 1000lb gorilla?

This photo shows that America wants to be different from the rest of us. It refuses to join civilisation. It will pompously talk of its culture and history so if the rest of us can show cultural relativism elsewhere, to say, 'well, actually, our way of doing things is better than yours' to other people's backwards and antidiluvian cultural practices, then we should do it to Americans as well.

This photo is not the result solely of 'gun nuts' or the 'gun industry lobby'. It's because America won't make it stop, enough won't get angry enough to make sure this never happens again. Most of America doesn't see this picture as shameful.

The liberal Ana Marie Cox writing today in The Guardian tries to explain the vote. It is because the 'NRA culture' is dominant, then she relates that culture to her own experience.

It is a bizarre read. She talks -- I am not kidding -- of a zombie apocalypse and how best to prepare for it and who she would want to be with should a 'tyrannical government' take over, like that's something which even crosses the minds of citizens of normal countries.

Cox cites her Texan upbringing and I am well aware of how this psychosis is well rooted in the US, and not just in 'flyover country'. It's all excuses. Cox and her fellow liberals needs to grow out of it. Other countries (Serbia, Germany) have done far worse and changed.

I floated shunning as something friends might do on a liberal blog I read and most thought Americans were so far gone it wouldn't work, though I do recall a time last decade when American tourists would pretend to be Canadian, so the idea does have form. But one person wrote this:

Please shun us. Try our politicians for war crimes. Issue ongoing travel advisories to our major cities. Advise tourists to our states to take out special medical insurance for acts of violence.  Caution against eating our genetically modified food.  Refuse to work alongside our election observers until we get our own in order. Really, make us feel like a pariah among Western democracies.  Nothing else has worked.

Worth a try?

Watch video from the Rose Garden yesterday after the jump:

Boston: If you read only one thing ...

Boston bombing victim (Photo credit: Ninian Reid)

Something about American sports reporting seems to produce great political writers. I am struggling to think of a British equivalent.

This sprang to mind as I learned that a writer I really like, Charles P. Pierce, who never has bad copy, and who has three must-reads on the Boston bombing as of now, is a sports writer too.

This sweeping arc over the scene yesterday is rooted in his Bostonian longitude:

That is how the news spreads today, when two bombs go off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and at least three people die and north of 100 are injured, some brutally. The shock is sudden but its ripples fade quickly as the knowledge of what happened goes out into the ether and then back through thousands of personal mobile devices. Horror has no shelf life anymore. Everybody knows already. Everybody's a newsman. Everybody's in showbiz.

First draft reporting at Leica level:

Back by the stone fountain, a woman in a silver blanket told a Providence TV station that she'd been unable to find a ladies' room after the race because all the restaurants and hotels had been locked down and she had to come all the way down to Park Square to find facilities that would deign to accommodate her. She was not happy at all, and she was telling greater Providence about it. "And I needed TO PEE!," she told some undoubtedly astounded Rhode Islanders.

There was something comfortingly mundane in how truly angry she was.

To the idiot parade -- e.g. 'Tingles' -- crowing 'but we know not if it was political!':

The cruel strife between brethren is waged daily by individuals, and by governments. We must recognize that we do not love in excess as easily as we hate in excess. In Boston, in Baghdad, in Mogadishu, all of this is political because we are all political. We are fated to be tied to each other in our politics. We are fated to kill each other for them or not to kill each other for them. It is entirely our choice, and always has been. We must decide not to slaughter each other. Or not. This is also a political choice we make.

For "the folks who dropped by from Glennbeckystanstan":

The sun came up this morning on a garrisoned city. Some people think one thing about that, and some people think another. But too many people think something completely insane, and that scares the hell out of me. In our politics, we must we must look the real monster in the eye, and not create phantoms because they are more easily killed. We have lost faith in that in which we cannot lose faith and survive. As investigators crawl over Copley Square, they might as well be looking for the democratic soul of a nation gone a bit mad.

I started reading Pierce (at Esquire of all places) during the election. Perhaps you can tell why.

Olbermann is an obvious companion great communicator to Pierce but, heck, even Bob Costas has better expressed political thoughts that any UK comparison crossing my mind. I wonder why that is?

The wunderkid fighting creationism

The panels on Bill Maher's show can often be boring. Last Friday's wasn't with a real fight between Socialist Senator Bernie Saunders and right wing blowhard Stephen Moore.

The highlight though, the point where I spit out my tea, was when the 19-year-old science activist Zack Kopplin joined the panel. After Moore made yet another stupid statement on basic science research ('why are we funding this ridiculous project! chortle, chortle ..') Kopplin shot back with "but we've already established that you are not a scientist." (Clip after the jump).

Kopplin is an amazing character. His fight against the spread of creationism in the school voucher programme in his home state of Louisiana has attracted the support of dozens of Nobel Laureates and has spread to other states. He started when he was 16.

The Louisiana Science Education Act allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing 'politically controversial' topics like evolution or climate change. It has led to some teachers removing established science textbooks altogether.

Kopplin has become a leader in the anti-creationist movement, exposing the fact that it isn't just a 'deep south' problem but a national one. He says:

So far, I have documented 310 schools, in nine states and the District of Columbia that are teaching creationism, and receiving tens of millions of dollars in public money through school voucher programs.

There is no doubt that there are hundreds more creationist voucher schools that have yet to be identified. The more than 300 schools I have already found are those that have publicly stated on their websites that they teach creationism or use creationist curricula.

Voucher schools are a conservative argument and have found favour here too in the UK, as 'free schools', where some have also been caught teaching creationism. Says Zack:

Advocates for vouchers argue that private schools and more competition would offer a better education for American students.  Schools that teach creationism and do not meet basic science standards will fail our students and do not deserve taxpayer funding.

We must speak out to prevent funding these creationist schools with our public money.

Watch Zack on Bill Maher and also a longer interview on Bill Moyers' show after the jump:

Here's a website which deserves more attention: 2

Here's a website which deserves more attention.

No More Mister Nice Blog is a great read on American politics. Written by liberal New Yorker Steve M. (and he seems to have hidden his surname well) it's a wry take with occasional verges into a bite on liberal shibboleths and general faffing about, specifically Democrat waffling.

His sometimes hilarious writing reminds me of another discovery of mine from the last election campaign, the comical stylings of Charles P. Pierce at Esquire magazine.

On a simple blogger template, his 20 (?) posts per page is mainly text, so an easy load and a ripping long read, if you're at all interested in what the cousins across the water are up to.

Just to pick a couple of recent posts at random, he analysed a cover story from the National Rifle Association (NRA)'s magazine titled 'How and When Obama Will Come for Your Guns'. He does this quite often, fisks something from 'wingnuttia', poking fun but usually with a serious edge.

The story reads like something from the 'Left Behind' best-selling series of 'rapture' novels, or as he calls it apocalypse porn.

It imagines a future where Obama wins the Presidency again, a pretext arrives and through executive orders he manages to 'come furyer guns'. Insane then and even more insane looked at now, when the slaughter of twenty small kids looks like producing no change on gun policy.

This is as crazy as birtherism or 9/11 trutherism. It should be the sort of thing that gets published and read only on the fringes of society. And yet the organization that publishes this is the organization that determines America's gun agenda.

Imagine if no election law could be passed in this country without the imprimatur of a powerful lobbying organization led by Orly Taitz [birther leader]. Imagine if the Centers for Disease Control were powerless to respond to any epidemic in a way that ran afoul of [anti-vaccine former Playboy model] Jenny McCarthy.

That's where we are on guns.

In another post ('Testing whether barrel has a bottom') he discusses the rather remarkable news that Tony Perkins is being floated as a Republican candidate for the Senate from Louisiana.

Perkins runs a Christianist outfit called the Family Research Council, designated a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. He has a history of associating with white supremacists and defended the former Republican Missouri Senate candidate Todd "legitimate rape" Akins.

Perkins regularly appears on TV opposing gay rights, something which various groups have protested given that his more outrageous statements off camera are never brought up so he's allowed to appear vaguely normal.

Steve wants Perkins to get the nomination:

I hope the 2014 Senate field for the GOP is literally 100% nutjobs. I hope they're all as far right as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I hope it's Steve King and Paul Broun and Joe Miller and this guy. I hope some teabagger beats Mitch McConnell in the primary by dubbing him a liberal. I hope this happens coast to coast.

I know that even this probably won't work, but if anything could get the Beltway establishment, and thus the general public, to grasp that maybe, possibly, the Republican Party as currently configured is a menace to American society, it would be the systematic replacement of all of its arguably within-the-pale politicians with the most batshit-crazy extremists.

And yeah, I know that some of these clowns could win in their states, including Perkins. But the only way it might become clear to the establishment and public that the GOP is crazy is if there's no one left in the party's front ranks to provide a veneer of respectability, because they've all been replaced by lunatics.

More here.

'Papers please' for trans people?

My friend Jim Burroway has something to share: "I live in a total freak-show of a state".

Jim lives in Arizona, whose infamous 'papers please' law about having to constantly prove you're not one of those illegal brown messicuns to authority figures is currently being judged on its constitutionality.

Arizona is now considering, Jim reports, a 'papers please' law for bathroom use. This 'save us from the transgender people' proposition is that only those with the right birth certificate can use the right, gendered, bathroom.

So, ladies, if you are caught in mile-long queues and slip into the gents? The slammer for you!

Apparently there is an emergency, the proposal has an "emergency" clause. “This is about the person who will use gender identity or expression as their ruse to gain access to opposite-sex facilities,” says its proponent, who is from a group it will shock you to learn has 'family' in their title. A "ruse" you say? My, those trans people are forever plotting like some fifth column to "gain access" to your bathroom!

The reality is that trans people and anyone who doesn't fit in can face harassment and violence around bathrooms.

Here's a comment on Jim's report:

I was the victim of a sever beating for entering a men’s restroom with the wrong gender presentation. Paradoxically I was using the men’s restroom because on a previous occasion a police officer had warned me that should I use the female restroom I could be arrested on sexual deviance charges because a mother had complained about me using this restroom before. Now then this fine young college student who outweighed me by almost a 100lbs got off on the gay panic defense.

So from this we can determine that when a person enters the restroom displaying the wrong gender this can instill panic in young adult men, so shouldn’t it behoove the Arizona government to not write legislation that will result in the panic and distress of our young college age men?

I only ask it this way because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m asking for special rights, but please someone think of our heterosexual college age youths.

Here's a web resource which find locations that are, the answer's in the URL, safe2pee.org

Why is this Arizona proposal happening? Locally it is kickback because Phoenix passed anti-discrimination which included the 'T' in 'LGBT', but nationally it's because of media attention on trans kids, little kids, like a six-year old in Colorado (pictured), whose bathroom use has been the focus of bigoted parental reaction to them.

That despicable attitude to kids with a condition they obviously are born with is so reminiscent of the reaction to kids living with HIV/AIDS in the eighties and nineties.

These people don't just merit mockery -- very easy to perform mockery -- but disgust. They are obvious bigots, just like those who drove Ryan White from his school and vandalised his grave.

'Fairweather friends' and palpitating queer/ns

Today, Hillary Clinton announced her support for marriage equality in a video (see it after the jump). On any LGBT website below the line, in the comments, you will read - presumably - L,G,B or T people condemning her.

It is too late, why didn't she do it before, she's no real ally - you can guess the script.

When the first serving Republican Senator came out for marriage equality last week similar things were said. Same with the conservative British Prime Minister. And the sharpened poison aimed at President Obama by gays on his supposed inauthentic support for gay rights is everywhere.

In her video, Clinton notes her work on LGBT rights whilst she was Secretary of State. In particular, Clinton gave a powerful speech, introducing new policy, in Geneva in 2011 defending LGBT human rights, which she talks about today.

Following her speech, I published an explanation by Doug Sanders of how Clinton's new policy and outspokenness was actually a 'catch up' on the work of numerous other countries well before the US finally got to work. Yet that critique of Clinton is noticeably absent from any of today's criticism of her. The insularity of American gays who are today criticising her, and actually of those citing her State Department work in her defense as well, is telling.

What distinguishes Obama from Clinton is that he has been explicit on numerous occasions in acknowledging that, horror, he is a politician and that it is pressure from below, from movements, which moves him towards, say, openly supporting marriage equality. I've written about this numerous times, particularly in the context of the 2008 fight for the Democratic Party nomination where his statements on this subject contrasted sharply with Clinton's.

During the campaign he gave one interview to an LGBT publication in which he said the following:

Anybody who’s been at an LGBT event with me can testify that my message is very explicit -- I don’t think that the gay and lesbian community, the LGBT community, should take its cues from me or some political leader in terms of what they think is right for them. It’s not my place to tell the LGBT community, "Wait your turn." I’m very mindful of Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he says to the white clergy, "Don’t tell me to wait for my freedom."

A year after Obama's election he addressed the Human Rights Campaign and here is what I posted at the time:

Here's my tweets as I listened to his speech.

pauloCanning: #hrc dinner "I love you Barack" "I love you back"
pauloCanning:#hrc dinner Obama: "It is a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady GaGa"
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner He's referencing Stonewall as 'inspiring'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner simple message "here with you in that fight"
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'it's not for me to tell you to be patient' - as with civil rights - now I'm teary
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'you know - and I know - we don't want to be defined by one part of us that makes us whole'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'Do not doubt the direction we're heading +the destination we will reach'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we will put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we're pushing for a employee non-discrimination bill. we're ging to put a stop to it.'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we are rescinding the ban on entering US based on HIV status'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'I will end DADT, that's my commitment to you'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'I've called on Congress to repeal DOMA'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'It's about our common humanity, our ability to walk in someone else's shoes'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner now he's talking about PFLAG 'that's the story of America'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'tonight somewhere in America a young person ... ' THAT'S leadership
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner brilliant rhetoric, worried by the look on his face

The speech was amazing. Historic.

Like the audience, who spent most of their time on their feet, I was really moved to hear a US President say what he said. His last flourish, which stuck progress of LGBT equality firmly into the mainstream of the 'American dream', I couldn't capture quickly enough. It was his classic rhetorical end flourish and he stuck it firmly onto the LGBT cause.

My friend Tobias Grace, who edits New Jersey's LGBT newspaper, said: "Paul: I cried - not so much on my own behalf but thinking of all the young people who will grow up in a world shaped by this man's words and leadership."

But, but ... perhaps that's why I noticed the look. He wasn't smiling. He knew that outside the cheering crowd he faced weren't just pissed LGBT at the lack of actual progress on issue after issue but a mountain of opposition to everything he'd pledged.

Remember, this was the day on which he'd been awarded the Nobel. On what he represents he'd got that acknowledgment and that's a f*cking heavy burden.

I wish I'd captured that exact look as he walked off the stage because it seemed to me one of a man who believed what he'd said, every word, but understood fully what 'change' actually means.

A bitter, bitter fight lies behind "don’t tell me to wait for my freedom". As always, it's accompanied by the background/backroom faint (to some) buzz accompanying it in the LGBT movement between those who would be inside and those who'd be outside, demanding.

Tomorrow's LGBT march on the Capitol is for the demanders and something tells me Obama is with them.

Watch Clinton's video released today after the jump:

Hacking worse than rape: America

An American court has just sentenced a 'grey hat' computer hacker who exposed corporate security flaws to more jail time than another court sentenced a group of rapists.

Andrew Auernheimer, aka 'Weev', got three and a half years, more time than two teenagers just found guilty of infamously raping a girl in Steubenville, Ohio.

Auernheimer's prosecution was vicious. That he went after the failings of telecom firm AT&T was used against him, was the reason to demand a long prison term.

Auernheimer likened his actions to walking down the street and writing down the physical addresses of buildings, only to be charged with identity theft. He later sent an e-mail to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, blaming AT&T for exposing customer data, authorities say.

“AT&T needs to be held accountable for their insecure infrastructure as a public utility and we must defend the rights of consumers, over the rights of shareholders,” he wrote, according to prosecutors. ”I advise you to discuss this matter with your family, your friends, victims of crimes you have prosecuted, and your teachers for they are the people who would have been harmed had AT&T been allowed to silently bury their negligent endangerment of United States infrastructure.”

But prosecutors say his interest went beyond concern about the security of customer data.

According to the criminal complaint, a confidential informant helped federal authorities make their case against the two defendants by providing them with 150 pages of chat logs from an IRC channel where, prosecutors said, Spitler and Auernheimer admitted conducting the breach to tarnish AT&T’s reputation and promote themselves and Goatse Security.

'Tarnishing' corporate reputation is the real reason this guy is in jail. Apparently, the guy is a troll and a bit of a pain, a "discordian .. into throwing apples .. a right mouthy bastard". Is that why America threw him in jail?

John Koetsier explains how what the illegality of what Auernheimer did to expose the security flaw makes everyone a potential criminal.

You could be charged with unauthorized access to a computerized device, for instance, simply because you clicked on the link that brought you to this article. Oh, and Google, one of the most successful corporations in the world, is the root of all evil. A Get request is simply a note from a browser computer code asking for a resource. You issue thousands of them every day all by yourself. Google issues billions.

Whether the receiving server responds to that request in any way, shape, or form is entirely at the discretion of the developers and system administrators who control that server.

The CFAA [relevant US law] does not define the phrase “unauthorized access,” so according to Auernheimer, the government essentially told the jury that his access to the server was unauthorized because they said it was. Which, if true, means that whether you commit a legal act or an illegal act is at the discretion of anyone who runs a webserver, who can change their mind at any time without you knowing.

Good luck following the straight and narrow.

There's a lot of anger from the kidz. Writes Asher Wolf:

Putting Weev behind bars is pointless and tragic. Jailing the most outspoken men and women amongst our generation won’t stop the leaks, the hacks, the news revelations, the whistleblowers – and most of all it won’t stop the rage of the malcontent, dispossessed youth from eventually tumbling down upon the heads of the bureaucrats who sold us out and then tried to lock us up when we complained.

.. they can’t shut us all up. Fuck ‘em.

American politics' Rosetta Stone: Found?

Bill Maher on Realtime Friday night nailed how tiny, loud conservative groups have an outsized impact on American politics.

Maher (watch the NSFW video after the jump) pointed out that polls consistently show that Americans do have far more liberal views than 'Beltway' thinking assumes they do.

Earlier, he pointed out that although the budget put forward by the Republicans and especially that of their Tea Party caucus has media attention, the budget put forward by the House's Progressive caucus has zero attention. And yet the Progressive budget when given the 'blind taste test' treatment has been found to be overwhelmingly favoured by ordinary Americans.

Last week on Up w/ Chris Hayes (video after the jump) a new political science study (PDF) was discussed which shows just how misread America is. The study, discussed on the show with one of its authors on the panel, finds, writes Sal Gentile on the show's Tumblr, ..

.. that politicians tend to overestimate just how conservative their constituents are. Conservative politicians are especially bad at gauging their constituents’ beliefs — they underestimate support among their constituents for policies like universal health care and same-sex marriage by as much as 20 percentage points. 

These findings explain so much about the state of modern American politics. There seems to be such a larger appetite for conservative policies like war and austerity among politicians than among actual voters. In the latest budget fight, for example, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been insisting on the need to cut spending and “entitlements.” But polls show consistently that Americans believe spending cuts are bad for the economy, that they want to reduce the deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts and that they want to preserve funding for cherished social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. 

This disconnect between politicians and constituents has, arguably, gotten worse over the past three decades. As shown in the graph above, the share of Americans describing themselves as “conservative” has remained largely unchanged since 1976, even dipping considerably in the 1990s. House Republicans, meanwhile, have become more conservative than ever before,according to the DW-Nominate scale, a system of rating the ideology of lawmakers devised by political scientist Keith Poole. 

The striking divergence between how conservative Congressional Republicans have gotten and how conservative the American people are explains so much about how broken and dysfunctional our politics are.

Watch the Bill Maher (NSFW) and Chris Hayes segments after the jump: