Tom Horne Rides Again

You can't help but... well, since "admire" doesn't quite ring true here, let's go with "notice," so *ahem* You can't help but notice former Superintendent of Education and brand-new Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne for his ability to stick to his guns.

Exhibit 1: The Combover.

While he was still the head of the worst educational system in the US, Horne went Don Quixote (English-language translation only, por favor) on the windmill of the Tucson Unified School District's ethnic studies program, in particular its Mexican American Studies program. Now that he's the state's top lawyer, Horne has vowed to make it his top priority to enforce Arizona's new anti-ethnic studies law (really) by jabbing the windmill with his lance, blowing it up, stomping on the rubble, and bonking dissenters in the head with any bricks that are left over.

The law, which went into effect Friday, prohibits courses that:

• Promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.

• Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

• Are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group.

• Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of students as individuals.

Horne was the author of the first draft of the statute, which was amended in the Legislature.

Never mind that TUSD is largely Hispanic, or that Tucson sits smack-dab in the middle of a hunk of the landscape that actually was Mexico until the US bought it in 1854, or that quite a few of the families whose kids might like to take a Mexican American studies class have been living in Tucson for a couple hundred years longer than Tom Horne has been living in America. You know, since he was born in Canada to Polish parents who--in a strangely familiar story--immigrated in search of security and a better life for their children.

No word on whether proficiency in White Privilege Studies will now be required in order to graduate from Arizona high schools, or if it will simply continue to be assumed.

I Stand Corrected

In the last post I waxed concise about being able to write about the human condition due to a fundamental belief that bullshit is not immutable.

I apparently forgot I was living in Arizona.

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of [epithet for Blacks] and [epithet for Hispanics]."

Thanks, I guess, to K for the Wonkette tip; the comments there are the only thing keeping my gallows humor over this fucking state alive, which in turn is about the only keeping me sane.

Uhhhh.

Well, this is lovely.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere! Won't someone please think of the oppressed white people for a change?

Never-ending Nightmare Never Ends

Ever had a nasty 24-hour stomach bug? The kind where you feel increasingly miserable and then puke and feel much better, but then have your blissful, blessed relief cut short by another wave of nausea, and then another, until you are certain that you will be vomiting every 20 minutes for the rest of your life?

Welcome to Arizona, where the legislature and governor have just heaved our collective shoes into the bucket with a prohibition against ethnic-studies curricula that don't meet Tom "the most fun chant for me was 'drill, baby, drill' used by three separate speakers" Horne's approval.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill limiting what kind of courses schools can offer in the name of cultural diversity Tuesday.

Without comment, Brewer signed the controversial legislation, which declares students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.''

The law, aimed specifically at the ethnic studies program at Tucson Unified School District, is far more complex than that goal.

It makes it illegal for public schools to have any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people. It also bars any programs "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group."

My 7th grade social studies teacher would be in deep shit on this one, given how his World War II lectures made me resent the hell out of the Nazis. And my son's Native American Literature teacher made the class read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee this semester, which left him feeling not that great about--gasp--the United States government! Well. That's a bit of hyperbole. Tom Horne isn't going to march in and string up teachers who might give white students a moment of pause when they consider the atrocities perpetuated by governments on this continent and in Europe, but if you get the Mexicans riled up, you're toast. Oh, and by the way, if you're trying to teach the Mexicans to speak English, make sure your accent isn't too thick. Because Arizona doesn't like that either.

You'd be perfectly justified, at this point, to ask who the fuck thinks all this is a good idea. There's an obvious and troubling answer, and now, this morning, a less obvious and possibly more troubling answer. First, the no-brainer: the white supremacists, of course, think this is all kinds of awesome. But it's more than just them, and that keeps me from my rest. Large chunks of the country are going nativist now, or at least large chunks of slightly more than a thousand registered voters with landlines who happened to answer their phones and take part in a poll are, and that should give us all pause.

A strong majority of Americans support Arizona's controversial new immigration law and would back similar laws in their own states, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll found.

A separate Pew Research Center poll on the Arizona law released Wednesday found similar sentiments.

In the McClatchy-Ipsos poll, 61 percent of Americans - and 64 percent of registered voters - said they favored the law in a survey of 1,016 adults conducted May 6-9.

Strikingly, nearly half of Democrats like the law, under which local law enforcement officers are tasked with verifying people's immigration status if they suspect them of being in the country illegally.

Swell. And here's the best part:

In addition, about 69 percent of Americans said they wouldn't mind if police officers stopped them to ask for proof of their citizenship or legal rights to be in the country; about 29 percent would mind, considering it a violation of their rights, and about 3 percent were unsure.

Hell no, I wouldn't mind if a nice police officer stopped me and asked me for proof of citizenship! People who say this are people who have never been hassled by a cop in their entire lives for having the wrong skin color or wrong kind of clothes for the neighborhood they're walking in or the car they're driving. It's very, very easy to hit play and blast out the title track from Unexamined Privilege's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: If You're Not Doing Anything Wrong (You Don't Have Anything To Worry About), until the day comes when you really aren't doing anything wrong and get busted anyway. If you're white enough and not screaming in Farsi at the top of your lungs, no, you probably don't have to worry about it, and if for some unfathomable reason you were stopped and questioned and didn't have your ID or birth certificate (long form, please) on you, you could talk your way out of it. And hey, if you don't have to worry about it on a personal level, you get a pass from having to worry about it on a conceptual level. It's not just the Arizona way any more. It's the American way, bucko, and don't you forget it.

Pass the pepto, if you please. Every time I think it's got to be over, another wave comes.

Want More to Chew On? We Provide.

Well, "we" here means our excellent friend K, who keeps us busy thinking about the real world when we should be thinking about archaeology. Go here and read this, right now, and then show it to everyone around you. Especially if you're in the vicinity of an older white Republican male who just. wants. his. country. back, with or without Beckian tears.

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

Well, except that we all lose, but yeah.

Posting from the Last Bastion of Hope in Southern Pariahstan

Dude, the rest of the country hates us now. Well, at least the parts of the country that have yet to be overrun by racist, anti-government gun nuts, that is, and that hurts me where I live. Fuck. Since I can't go more than a few sentences at a time on the Brown Star Law without completely losing my shit, here is Jon Stewart to lose it for me in a much more controlled and constructive fashion.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Law & Border
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Further required reading is available at the MaddowBlog; to wit:

But if you want to meet the guy who's taking credit for writing the new law, that would be Kris Kobach, a birther who's running for secretary of state in Kansas. His campaign Website brags, "Kobach wins one in Arizona." He's also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an immigration group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, who's still listed as a member of FAIR's board of directors. Seven years after he started FAIR, Tanton wrote this, "To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?"

For nine of the first years of FAIR's existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as based "in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement." For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people. The group's original mandate was to promote the genes of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution."

Arizona has turned into the wettest of right-wing dreams. A bona fide problem (drug smugglers--hello, US drug habits and drug laws--and human traffickers--hello, US economy--kidnapping and shooting people) has become prima facie for every nativist, supremacist, exceptionalist fantasy they can cook up. No no no, the tea partiers have protested, it's not racism, we just want to take our country back. Well, hell yes they do. They fucking want to take the country back to April 12, 1861, and the pretenses are fast falling away.

Sunday in Southern Racialprofiletia.

Nicked from a friend's Facebook, offered without comment.

This Post Brought to You Courtesy of Relpax

The weekend came cloaked in the fog that boils up out of a migraine and the various combinations of chemicals that are then required to be something resembling functional, so it almost snuck past me. But even in an elitriptan hydrobromide-and-Excedrin haze, I managed to notice healthcare reform, such as it is, passing the House; Obama using women this time as the prop in his kabuki caving to Bart Stupak; and the teabaggers showing their true colors (white, starched, and pointy, natch).

Healthcare, yes. I am still hugely disappointed that the putative party in power relented on the public option, but most of the other provisions in the bill--like, say, covering 36 million people who would otherwise be screwed, and eliminating pre-x denials, and closing the donut hole--are long overdue. So good start, there.

But let's talk about abortion and religion and executive orders, shall we? In a sop to Bart Stupak and his band of unnamed, unnumbered holdouts, Obama signed an executive order that double-dog promises to keep federal funds from paying for abortions for all but the standard, if cognitively dissonant, rape/incest/mother's life exemptions. On the plus side, the order simply reaffirms the odious, now-in-its-third-decade Hyde Amendment. On the downside, it extends the reach of the Hyde Amendment into the to-be-created health insurance exchanges, requiring abortion funds to be completely segregated from all other funds moving through said exchanges, effectively making abortion coverage so complicated and cumbersome to manage that most exchanges and involved companies will decline to offer it. Maybe the additional level of healthcare that will now be available to more women--assuming it encompasses increased contraceptive education, availability, and affordability, along with enhanced prenatal and postpartum care--will result in fewer unplanned or unsustainable pregnancies. That would be good. Obama blithely affirming Hyde, when even Stupak said the votes were probably lined up to pass the bill without him? Not so much. Not so much at all. More in-depth discussion is over at Jezebel, and is required reading.

The classiest endnotes to the healthcare debate came from (1) the House floor, where an as-yet unidentified but presumed Republican screamed "baby killer!" at Bart Stupak when he indicated he'd support the slightly more incremental encroachment on reproductive liberty represented by the XO instead of his own, more intrusive, amendment, and (2) outside the Capitol when protesting teabaggers (a) called Barney Frank a faggot, (b) spat on African-American Representative Emanuel Cleaver, and (c) called Rep. John Lewis a nigger.

Let that last one soak in. They screamed "nigger" at John fucking Lewis.

That's your tea party movement right there in a nutshell. There's a black guy in the White House who wants a slight increase on affluent people's taxes so that everyone in the country gets at least some basic level of healthcare and doesn't have to die from an unfilled cavity, instead of the current system of the uninsured poor waiting until a treatable condition morphs into an acute, catastrophic condition before showing up at the emergency room, resulting in everyone pitching in at a considerably higher rate and everyone's care levels being compromised. The black guy wants everyone taken care of, so they're losing their shit and screaming about the end of the world and, now, letting the pointy white hats slip out a little too much so that anyone who's paying attention can see it, can hear it when they scream nigger at a man who nearly lost his life during the civil rights battles of the 1960s. Because in the end that's all they are, all they have left. Fuck off, teabaggers. You got yours. Now it's time for everyone else to get theirs.

A Marriage Parable for Our Time

Keith Bardwell is a justice of the peace in a state where, despite contentious debate and strong public sentiment opposing such pairings, a formerly banned type of marriage is now legal. He recently refused to issue a marriage license to a local couple, the law be damned, citing concerns for any children the couple might wish to raise and his certainty that their kinds of marriages don't last. In fact, he's done this four times in the past two and a half years.

Sigh. We've heard this plenty of times in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California, haven't we?

Except that we haven't. The couple in question is straight and male-female, and the state in question is Louisiana. So what about these two people triggered JP Bardwell's won't-someone-think-of-the-children lobe, with a touch of you-people-can't-stay-married palsy? Oh. The woman is white. The man is black. And no way in hell are they getting married under Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell's watch.

But don't get the wrong idea about Bardwell! He's not a racist! Look, he says so himself:

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told The Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

See? He has piles of black friends! He even lets them use his bathroom! How can you call him racist?

Bardwell clarified that conversations with both black and white people, and his own observations, have led him to conclude that mixed-race children aren't accepted by either blacks or whites. And that their parents don't stay married for long. The only thing lacking in his argument is the citation of the passages from Leviticus forbidding interracial marriage; otherwise, it's a spot-on simulation of arguments we've heard from other people--including, sadly, county clerks and other people whose job descriptions include "issue marriage licenses to qualified couples"--who rail against gay folk seeking marriage equality.

Hey, I have gay friends. I just don't want them to be allowed to get married because gays screw everything that moves so they'd probably just get divorced anyway and oh dear god people will make fun of their kids.

Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, the most recent couple to be denied by Bardwell, plan to file a discrimination suit. I suspect the repercussions will be very, very interesting should the court find that perceptions about a certain class of people's ability to form lasting pair-bonds, and predictions about society's treatment of any children they might raise, have no bearing on those people's rights to enter into a marriage contract. I only wish Bardwell had tossed in a religious objection as well, but we can't have everything.

One Step Forward, Two Million Steps Back

Meanwhile, in the What The Flying Fuck Department, we have this amazing and distressing story about prevalent, pernicious racism in America in the wake of Obama's victory.

Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

● At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written, "Let's hope someone wins."

● Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray-painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

● Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted, "Assassinate Obama," a district official said.

● University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. "It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork," Houston said.

● Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.

● Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

● A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on Election Night by four white men who shouted, "Obama!"

● In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying, "Now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

Seriously? Seriously, what the fuck? "Let's hope somebody wins" a fucking assassination pool? I am at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to dealing with drooling mouthbreathers like this, much as I am at a disadvantage in dealing with anti-gay bigots, because I don't understand them, and by don't understand I mean I don't have the first fucking clue of how people can actually think this way in 2008. I'm not blind to their existence--that's not the part I'm having trouble conceptualizing--but I can't begin to wrap my brain around what it means to think that way about fellow human beings. Like to the point that you think the world is ending and hope that a man, a husband and father, will be murdered just because he's black and happens to hold the highest office in the country. I freely admit to having biases of my own--Mormons are tops on that list these days--but I don't wish death and destruction on them, and still manage to evaluate individual people as people first, with my main criteria being do you treat other people well and are you honest and reliable? Utter vitriol and hatred are things I reserve for individuals I know personally and for whom I have indisputable evidence of being shithead blackguards.

Hanging effigies? Burning crosses? Leaving boxes of shit on somebody's doorstep? Encouraging little kids to chant for a murder? All because... the black guy won. And/or you suspect the person you're targeting voted for the black guy for president. All across the fucking country.

Way to go, America. At least I'm not just fixated on the gay thing when I get depressed about the state of the nation now.

Homer Says

This is one of Homer's best posts ever. Go read.

The Only Shock Is That It Took This Long

Round about the :40 mark, a woman in the crowd finally gives us the Michael Richards Moment that was bound to happen at a Palin rally sooner or later.

He's a n****r! Think Palin didn't hear that? Was the little stumble, the little stammer in her speech just a coincidence? It must have been. I mean, if John McCain can grab the mic back from his own Crazy Rally Lady and tell her that Obama is not actually Arab, you'd think Sarah Palin could take just a sec to say ooooh, now, we shouldn't be sayin' things like that, dontcha know.

Now that two white supremacist knuckleheads have been arrested for plotting to off a bunch of African-American kids as a warmup to killing Obama (whilst dressed in white tuxes and top hats? are sheets and hoods that declasse now in Appalachia?), can she credibly continue to pretend she just doesn't hear these things, or that people are yelling Trigger for her baby, or that... what? It was satire?

Yes, the ATF caught Mssrs. Cowart and Schlesseleman and foiled their long-on-ambition, short-on-reality plans to wreak murder and mayhem. That's the upside. The downside is that these two guys are complete idiots. If they were out there seriously contemplating assassination, how many others of a similar mindset but with actual intelligence and tactical capabilities are mulling their own shots at infamy, tacitly egged on by increasingly id-free rally attendees whose epithets have gone unchecked by the candidates they're shouting to? Does this disturb you? It disturbs me.

Arizona Legislature Notices Differences Between US and Turkey, Springs Into Action

Academics and artists in Turkey have been having so much fun with their country's laws prohibiting the denigration of Turkey or Turkishness that the Arizona statehouse decided to jump on that hot bandwagon, passing a bill yesterday that eliminates state funding for schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization."

SB 1108 also would bar teaching practices that "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious toleration. Schools would have to surrender teaching materials for review by the state school superintendent, who could withhold state aid of districts that broke the law.

Mercy. Could there possibly be more to this, some undercurrent that might explain the rush to adopt such convoluted language that simultaneously lauds pluralism and tolerance whilst quashing dissent? Why, yes. Yes there is.

Another section of the bill would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if they are "based in whole or in part on race-based criteria." Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said that provision is aimed at MEChA — Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán — a student group he described as racist.

And there it is. Bye-bye, American Indian Studies Graduate Student Council! Later, Armenian Student Association! Never mind that nondiscrimination policy you're required to have in your club constitutions! You just happen to be in the way of us getting rid of the Mexicans!

The stunning thing, really, isn't so much that Pearce crafted this legislation with the sole aim of eliminating a Hispanic-pride student group and TUSD Raza studies coursework he and his Tucson allies find distasteful, as that they're being so amateurishly open and klutzy about it. Even their quote mining sucks.

Tucson resident Laura Leighton read lawmakers sections of some books used in classrooms. She said the sections promote hatred...

Leighton had specific problems with a text titled "Occupied America," a book touted by its publisher as examining Chicano history from the coming of the Spanish in 1519.

She read one line that said "kill the gringos." Another talked about a plan to take back the U.S. Southwest and deport all the Europeans. A closer look at the book, though, showed the line about the gringos was a quote from someone who was referenced. And that plan to take back the area was not urging current action but instead describing one pushed by Mexico in 1915.

Feh. 1915? Details, details! I wonder if Laura Leighton equally opposes teaching the history of the US westward expansion, particularly the bits about the federal policy of exterminating Native Americans, or that whole African slave trade thing, or if "promoting hatred" only counts when it's done by people who are not European-Americans. Of course, that begs the question of whether anyone pushing this dreck has given it a second's critical thought. Another Valley of the Sun Republican weighs in with the answer:

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, said lawmakers are entitled to regulate the use of tax money taken from Arizonans and "demand that our publicly funded education teach and inculcate our youth, our children, with the values that make America what it is, the greatest and most free nation in the world."

So long as you don't try to talk about issues not on the approved Free Thought List, that is. Or run a club based in part on race-based criteria, of course. Keep it classy, Repubs!

Dick, Dick, Dick

Two heartwarming moments from the assassination attempt on VP Cheney at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan: Well, the first technically wasn't a moment since it didn't actually happen. That would be Cheney expressing regret at the loss of life (23 at last count) directly resulting from his presence at the base. It must be especially heartwarming for the family of the lone American killed that Cheney couldn't muster the decency to recognize the sacrifice of one of the guys standing guard to protect his sorry ass that afternoon.

The second moment was this:

"I think they clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government," Cheney said during a brief interview in a luxury-cabin mounted inside the cargo bay of the C-17 military transport, dubbed "The Spirit of Strom Thurmond," that had carried him in to Pakistan and Afghanistan and out again.

The Dark Lord is flying around in a plane named after Strom Thurmond--no, wait--not just the man Strom Thurmond, but the fucking spirit of Strom Thurmond. They named the plane in honor of segregationism, racism, and servant impregnation. Why the hell didn't they just name it "Massa Pokin' Slaves Out In The Barn And She Oughta Be Grateful For It?"

Jesus. You go, Dick. Take your trip in your grand coach and don't even notice the bodies under the wheels unless they spatter your fine boots. The plane's name could not have been more apt.