http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSN2740059920080127

"With heavy support from black voters, Obama doubled Clinton's tally to win
55 percent to 27 percent. John Edwards finished third with 18 percent in a
state he won during his failed 2004 race, casting fresh doubt on the future
of his campaign."

Spanked.

   Can he supply his own cheese?

Wow.

   Campaign going bankrupt, smoked this weekend in 4 states by the rookie,
and her campaign manager tanks.

   Ouch...

Greg, can you recap Hillary's wins today for us?

 Oh, and:

    "None of us give a sh.t.  Take your podium somewhere where people
care. This is a scuba forum."

Putin vs. Clinton

When Hillary Clinton said, way back in New Hampshire, that Vladimir Putin
"doesn't have a soul," I figured that would be the sort of thing the Russian
wouldn't be pleased about. But when I called the foreign ministry the next
day for comment, it was Orthodox Christmas, and I let it slide.

He was asked about the remark at his press conference yesterday, however,
and indeed wasn't pleased.

The former KGB lieutenant colonel appeared to lash out at U.S. Sen. Hillary
Clinton - a leading Democratic candidate for president - when one reporter
quoted her as saying that former KGB officers have no soul:

"At a minimum, a head of state should have a head," Putin said.

 http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0208/Putin_vs_Clinton.html

"Douglas W. "Popeye" Frederick" <Popeye@finalprotectivefire.com> wrote in
message news:...

Submitted without opinion, while ducking and running.  :-)

URL: http://www.salon.com/news/col/horo/1999/08/16/naacp

Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do

The NAACP's ludicrous idea to sue gun manufacturers is yet another attempt
by the left to avoid personal responsibility for some individuals' bad
behavior.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Horowitz

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
announced plans recently to file an injunctive class-action suit "to force
[gun manufacturers] to distribute their product responsibly," the NAACP
president, Kweisi Mfume, noted that gun violence takes a disproportionately
high toll among young black males.

According to an NAACP press release, African-American males between the ages
of 15 and 24 are almost five times more likely to be injured by firearms
than are white males in the same age group. "Firearm homicide has been the
leading cause of death among young African-American males for nearly 30
years," it stated.

Am I alone in seeing this as an absurd act of political desperation by the
civil rights establishment? What's next? Will Irish-Americans sue whiskey
distillers, or Jews the gas company?

That last analogy only works, of course, for those who think the Holocaust
was a self-inflicted wound. In fact, black leaders have already accused
white and Korean liquor vendors of "invading" black communities and
intoxicating their inhabitants. Boycotts have followed these charges, and
anti-white, anti-Korean race riots as well.

But who forces alcohol down reluctant throats? And who makes guns shoot in
ways that victimize blacks more than whites?

How can the NAACP even make the comparison between gun deaths of blacks and
whites, if not as a racist insinuation that whites are somehow the cause of
those "disproportionate" violent deaths, just as whites are the implied
cause of nearly every other social pathology that afflicts the
African-American community?

In the sociology of the left, including the NAACP, there cannot be a wound
the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the
responsibility of malicious whites. To think otherwise would be to "blame
the victim." Only mean-spirited conservatives (like me) would even think of
doing that.

The fact is that while blacks make up only 12 percent of the population,
they account for 46 percent of total violent crime and 90 percent of the
murders of other blacks. It is they, not whites or gun manufacturers, who
are responsible for the disproportionate gun deaths of young black males.

Firearms don't kill people. Sociopaths do. It takes a human brain to pull
the trigger. If young black males abuse firearms in an irresponsible and
criminal fashion, why should the firearm industry be held accountable? Why
not their parents? Why not themselves?

Unfortunately, as a nation we have become so trapped in the melodrama of
black victimization and white oppression that we are in danger of losing all
sense of proportion. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a
black exodus? Why do all those black Haitians want to come here? To be
oppressed?

In the grips of a politically inspired group psychosis, we find it natural
to collude with demagogic race hustlers in support of a fantasy in which
African-Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do,
even to themselves.

If blacks constitute just under half the prison population, for example,
that cannot be allowed to suggest that the black community might have a
problem when it comes to raising its children as law-abiding members of
society. Oh no. Such a statistic can only be explained by the racism of a
criminal justice system that is incarcerating too many blacks.

Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the civil
rights leadership from racist bloviator Al Sharpton to urbane Urban League
President Hugh Price. Against the intimidating atmosphere this consensus
creates, to suggest the obvious -- that too many blacks are in prison
because blacks commit too many crimes -- is to be identified as an apologist
for racism, and perhaps even a closet racist oneself.

The NAACP's anti-gun lawsuit comes on the heels of the crusade to defend
crack dealers because 90 percent of them are African-American and their
sentences are considered "too harsh." This insipid campaign was launched by
Jesse Jackson at the Washington rally of race-hater Louis Farrakhan.

That 90 percent of crack cocaine dealers are black cannot be seen, of
course, as a moral stain on those crack dealers or as a massive social
problem for the community that produces them. It can only be the result of a
white legal system that stigmatizes crack as a more dangerous and more
culpable drug than the powder cocaine it uses itself.

Forget that the heavier penalties were originally demanded by black leaders
who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black
community and the white criminal justice system did not care enough about
its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh.

That was then, this is now. And now, lessening the sentences that were
previously raised has become a crusade for "social justice" that overshadows
the need to combat the crime wave itself. Because racial oppression is the
main enemy, the villainy of the crack trade is transformed into yet another
symbol of white unfairness.

This kind of race baiting has now intruded into the presidential contest as
a means of smearing the Republican leader, George W. Bush, who is
distinguished by his outreach to minority communities and by his support
among blacks. Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy that sees Bush's black
support as a political threat?

Well, of course there is. It is precisely because Bush is perceived as a
candidate who can break the vicious stereotyping of Republicans as
anti-black that he has to be smeared. Bush was thus labeled Governor Death
in a Christopher Hitchens column.

The clear implication of Hitchens' attack was that Bush is collusive in a
racist justice system in Texas that executes blacks in disproportionate
numbers. "Perhaps you wonder if capital punishment is unevenly applied, as
respects race and class, in the state of Texas," wrote Hitchens. "Wonder no
longer. Just read the Amnesty report Killing With Prejudice: Race and the
Death Penalty in the USA."

Well, Christopher, I read the Amnesty report. Maybe you should, too. The
Amnesty report does not even mention racial or class statistics in Texas and
could not possibly be used to draw such a conclusion. Moreover, a perusal of
the report reveals no self-evident truths even nationally. Rather, it is a
slovenly produced, inflammatory document.

Under the heading "Racist Representation of Indigent Defendants," for
example, it offers this evidence: "Gary Burns, black, executed in Indiana on
20 November 1997, was described to the jury by his white attorney as an
'insignificant, snivelly little street person.'" End of example.

What is this supposed to prove? That someone else must have done the dirty
work because Burns was too weak to be guilty of it himself? Who can tell
from this example? Most of the report consists of unsystematic and
frustratingly brief snippets of cases like this, combined with a sprinkling
of unanalyzed statistics that are arrayed to serve a partisan agenda.

It is true that the number of blacks executed in Texas (and nationwide) is
greater than their proportion in the population. But it is also true that
the proportion of black murderers far exceeds the proportion of blacks in
the population at large. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1996
report (released May 1999), blacks commit 54 percent of the homicides in
America even though they constitute only 12 percent of the population.

An individual black male is eight times more likely to commit murder than an
individual white male. Thus, in the most equitable system imaginable, a
black male would be eight times more likely than a white male to be executed
for murder.

In fact, however, convicted white murderers are more likely to be executed
for their crimes than convicted black murderers. In 1996-97, whites
accounted for 62 percent of the convicted murderers executed in Texas.
According to statistics provided by the Justice Department, the proportion
of whites presently on death row compared to the total white population is
almost four times that of the comparable proportion of blacks on death row
in terms of the total black population.

Whatever these statistics prove, it is not that justice in America is
systemically biased against blacks. But the desperation to prove white
turpitude is so great that instead of celebrating this as a triumph of civil
rights reform in the law, the race baiters merely shift their focus to the
victims of capital crimes.

Thus the statistic with which Amnesty opens its case is this: "Of the 500
prisoners executed between 1977 and 1998," according to Amnesty, "81.8
[percent] were convicted of murdering a white person, even though blacks and
whites are the victims of homicide in almost equal numbers nationwide."

No attempt is made of course to explain how the criminal justice system
might systematically discriminate in favor of white victims but not against
black defendants (except by this indirect method). What the report's raw
statistic fails to take into account is that the death penalty is only
imposed in aggravated circumstances, which can include the violence of the
crime, whether it is committed in the course of another crime or whether the
perpetrator has a prior criminal record of violent crimes.

All these factors are ignored in the Amnesty report. It so happens that
black felons commit 43 percent of aggravated assaults, 66 percent of armed
robberies, 27 percent of rapes and 85 percent of interracial crimes of
violence, mainly against whites (this last figure from a Justice Department
report for 1993).

Since juries generally don't demand the death penalty for crimes of passion,
where the victim is known to the killer, and since blacks are far more
likely to commit violent crimes against whites than are whites against
blacks, the disparity that offends Amnesty may not imply a racial bias on
the part of prosecutors and juries at all. The report does not even
acknowledge this as a problem.

The defense of criminals as a civil rights cause is only an extreme
manifestation of what has apparently become the very essence of the civil
rights movement. Do black children fail to achieve in school? White
oppression explains their failure. (Nothing else could without blaming the
victims.)

Poor black academic performance cannot be seen as a failure of black
families to educate their children, or of the black community to support
educational values, which are often referred to derisively as "thinking
white." Black failure can only be the result of some lingering residue of
the white perfidy involved in slavery and segregation. Call it
"institutional racism."

Of course, those who invoke the phantom of "institutional racism" are too
sophisticated to claim that there are actual racists lodged in our liberal
education establishment who refuse to admit black children to legally
integrated schools or refuse to teach them when they get there.

Instead, the concept of "institutional racism" is made to encompass an
entire system of oppression that invisibly conspires to keep black children
down. It may do so through culturally rigged tests; or through the failure
to provide black role models in positions of authority; or by providing only
underfunded schools to black neighborhoods; or as a result of the pervasive
negative pressure exerted by an environment of poverty that cannot be
countered with a mere six hours of school. (And, indeed, compulsory
preschool is already being proposed by Al Gore and the left as a new social
cure-all.)

In reality, the failure of African-American children to make the educational
grade cannot be explained by any of the above factors. Statistics analyzed
by the New York Times (July 4, 1999) dispel the poverty argument by
establishing that impoverished white children whose parents earn less than
$10,000 a year score higher on standardized SAT tests than black children
whose parents earn more than $70,000.

None of the above arguments, moreover, can explain why Vietnamese children
who are poor and discriminated against, whose schools are underfunded and
who are culturally at a greater disadvantage than blacks, and have even
fewer "role models" to inspire them, still manage to be educationally
competitive.

While the oppression theme dominates public discourse, no attention is paid
to the real problems that hold African-American children back. There is a
symbiosis, in fact, between the political mumbo jumbo of the Kweisi Mfumes
and Jesse Jacksons (abetted mightily by patronizing white liberals) and the
seemingly intractable social problems of the black community.

The myth of racial oppression, invoked to explain every social deficit of
blacks, is an exercise in psychological denial. Crying racism deflects
attention from the actual causes of the problems that afflict
African-American communities. Its net result is to deprive people and
communities who could help themselves of the power to change their fate.

Nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. A child raised
in a single-parent, female-headed household is six times more likely to be
poor than a child of any color born into a two-parent household. Seventy
percent of youth violence is committed by males from female-headed
households, regardless of race.

If the NAACP and other black leaders want to end the terrible scourge of gun
violence committed by young inner-city blacks, they should launch a campaign
to promote marriage and family formation in the African-American community;
they should issue a moral plea to the community to stigmatize fathers who
abandon their children and parents who have more children than they can
afford.

Instead of waging war against law enforcement agencies and supporting
destructive racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, they should support the Rudy
Giulianis and other champions of public safety, whom they now attack. They
should campaign for a tripling of police forces in inner-city areas to
protect the vast majority of inhabitants who are law-abiding and who are the
true victims of the predators among them.

But to take these remedial steps would require rejecting the bogus charge of
white oppression. It would mean abandoning the ludicrous claim that white
America and firearms manufacturers are the cause of the problems afflicting
African-Americans. It would mean taking responsibility for their own
communities instead.
salon.com | August 16, 1999

http://www.salon.com/news/col/horo/1999/08/16/naacp/print.html

Throw Grandma Under the Bus
by Ann Coulter

Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He
apparently believes we're not talking enough about race. This is like
hearing Britney Spears say we're not talking enough about pop-tarts with
substance-abuse problems.

By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry
has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John
Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his
USO tours.

But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race.
How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all
marinate in the angry resentment of black people? Continued

As an authentic post-racial American, I will not patronize blacks by
pretending Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is anything other than a
raving racist loon. If a white pastor had said what Rev. Wright said -- not
about black people, but literally, the exact same things -- I think we'd
notice that he's crazier than Ward Churchill and David Duke's love child.
(Indeed, both Churchill and the Rev. Wright referred to the attacks of 9/11
as the chickens coming "home to roost.")

Imagine a white pastor saying: "Racism is the American way. Racism is how
this country was founded, and how this country is still run. ... We believe
in white supremacy and black inferiority. And believe it more than we
believe in God."

Imagine a white pastor calling Condoleezza Rice, "Condoskeezza Rice."

Imagine a white pastor saying: "No, no, no, God damn America -- that's in
the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our
citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like
she is God and she is supreme!"

We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper
tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will
not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial
American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the
right to be permanently ill-mannered.

Obama tried to justify Wright's deranged rants by explaining that "legalized
discrimination" is the "reality in which Rev. Wright and other
African-Americans of his generation grew up." He said that a "lack of
economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that
came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the
erosion of black families."

That may accurately describe the libretto of "Porgy and Bess," but it has no
connection to reality. By Rev. Wright's own account, he was 12 years old and
was attending an integrated school in Philadelphia when Brown v. Board of
Education was announced, ending "separate but equal" schooling.

Meanwhile, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in University of
California v. Bakke in 1978 -- and obviously long before that, or there
wouldn't have been a case or controversy for the court to consider -- it has
been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of
their race.

Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the
day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against
white people. In many cases it's not just legal, but mandatory, for example,
in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations.

So for half of Rev. Wright's 66 years, discrimination against blacks was
legal -- though he never experienced it personally because it existed in a
part of the country where he did not live. For the second half of Wright's
life, discrimination against whites was legal throughout the land.

Discrimination has become so openly accepted that -- in a speech meant to
tamp down his association with a black racist -- Obama felt perfectly
comfortable throwing his white grandmother under the bus. He used her as the
white racist counterpart to his black racist "old uncle," Rev. Wright.

First of all, Wright is not Obama's uncle. The only reason we indulge crazy
uncles is that everyone understands that people don't choose their relatives
the way they choose, for example, their pastors and mentors. No one quarrels
with idea that you can't be expected to publicly denounce your blood
relatives.

But Wright is not a relative of Obama's at all. Yet Obama cravenly compared
Wright's racist invective to his actual grandmother, who "once confessed her
fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one
occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Rev. Wright accuses white people of inventing AIDS to kill black men, but
Obama's grandmother -- who raised him, cooked his food, tucked him in at
night, and paid for his clothes and books and private school -- has
expressed the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse
Jackson has.

Unlike his "old uncle" -- who is not his uncle -- Obama had no excuses for
his grandmother. Obama's grandmother never felt the lash of discrimination!
Crazy grandma doesn't get the same pass as the crazy uncle; she's white.
Denounce the racist!

Fine. Can we move on now?

No, of course, not. It never ends. To be fair, Obama hinted that we might
have one way out: If we elect him president, then maybe, just maybe, we can
stop talking about race.