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Credit: Media Matters

Don't look now, but the stock portfolio you used to have before you sold it after you got laid off is now worth a lot less. As of this posting the Dow is down another 200 points from yesterday's horrible plummet of over 500 points. It's the market's way of telling the GOP their idea of focusing only on their short-sighted petty game of Pin the Bad Economy on the Democrat is actually hurting the entire world's economy.

So here's the trick: when the markets freak out as a direct result of Republican policies they throw a tea party. There's a pattern: bad economic forecasts - Republicans in tri-corner hats waving pocket-sized Constitutions. It's the Republican costume indicating they just completely botched the economy again. Remember the economy in '08? Remember all the Republicans with Medicare pacemakers dressing up like Thomas Jefferson and decrying socialism? Uh huh.

The other trick? Point out scary black people! The new Black Panthers! Hip-Hop! Obama! Hussein Obama! Muslim Brotherhood!

And nothing captures this more than the screen capture above. See the little breaking news bar? The economy added some jobs last month and the unemployment rate is down. But not the stock market. So therefore on Fox Nation - LOOK OVER HERE POTUS IS BLACK WITH BLACK FRIENDS!

See: Southern strategy.

H/T Media Matters

I know we posted the Dr. Laura Schlessinger story on C&L a few days ago, but I wanted to make another significant point, if I may. In our book, 'Over The Cliff," we talk about how the Southern Strategy was used by the Republican party and how it evolved from outright racism to using code words to get the same points across. Chapter Six:

In 1981, political scientist Alexander P. Larris sat down for an interview with an anonymous Reagan strategist who outlined for him how the strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.

But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

It later emerged that the strategist was a young South Carolinian and Strom Thurmond protégé named Lee Atwater, a former chief executive of the College Republicans who had worked on the Reagan campaign under political director Ed Rollins.

What we have happening now is that the extreme right wingers like Dr. Laura and Breitbart are actually throwing their dog whistles in the garbage because they figure that if they yell "nigger " enough times out loud to the world and hold their breaths then that vile word will no longer hold the same despicable meaning that symbolized Jim Crow in American history to the media and their acolytes. Cheap Labor Conservatives do hate to be called racists and they have been trying to shed their racist past, but now with the economy down, conservative propagandists are reverting to a pre-1954 mindset on racism. It's sad and sickening, but it's happening. I actually never thought that in less than two years, the right wing noise machine would be as emboldened as they are now over race. Limbaugh's openly racist rants began as soon as President Obama took office and then FOX News immediately jumped on the bandwagon to promote every phony New Black Panther type smear they could find. All Cheap Labor Conservatives better start loading up their Ipods with the top 100 songs of 1954. Can you name the number one song? It has something to do with the time of day.

And don't forget to buy our book.

[Derek Black, right, and his dad Don Black, January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.]

White supremacists have been trying to reinsert themselves back into the mainstream (where once upon a time they were common) for a long time now. One of the chief avenues for this effort has for years been the Republican Party in the South, particularly in places like Louisiana, where David Duke operates, and Mississippi, where the Council of Conservative Citizens has a friend in Gov. Haley Barbour. It's all part of the legacy of the Southern Strategy.

In Florida, Republicans are now being confronted with the legacy of the Southern Strategy in the person of Derek Black:

Derek Black says "of course" he will attend a meeting Wednesday for new members of Palm Beach County's Republican Executive Committee. Never mind that the party chairman says Black's "white supremacist" associations are not welcome and he will not be seated.

"I was elected," Black, 19, says.

Sporting a black hat, the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black was seated last week in a restaurant off Southern Boulevard. Sitting next to him was one of his supporters: David Duke, former Louisiana state legislator and another former KKK grand wizard.

"We're going to fight," Duke said. "I know Derek Black is going to fight for his constitutional liberties. That's why I'm here, because I want to assist Derek."

Sorry, says county GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein. In the qualifying period in June, Black didn't sign a loyalty oath pledging he would not do anything injurious to the party. And that's not the only problem.

"He participates in white supremacist activities," Dinerstein said. "We're the party of Lincoln. We're the party that says we don't judge anybody by the color of their skin."

There's a familial connection between David Duke and Derek Black: Derek's mother, Chloe Black, was previously married to Duke, and their son is Derek's half-brother. But there's also a strategic connection, in that Duke did the same thing himself in the 1980's and '90s in Louisiana, largely taking advantage of the Republicans' Southern Strategy.

In his book on the Southern Strategy, Joseph Aistrup describes this (cited here):

Continue reading »

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Immigration Prof Blog: Business is fighting tough measures on immigration. Who didn't see this coming?

Ice Station Tango: If Karl Rove isn't in prison by then, he and John Edwards will have a debate at the University of Buffalo on on September 26.

The KC Blue Blog: Looks like the ol' Southern Strategy is alive and well in Missouri

Calculated Risk: More trouble in bank paradise

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: The Media brought me donuts...A sterling example of why Mr. Sheri Annis is such an important 4th Estate Lawn Jockey...ABC: Agent Backs Cheney...Fighting the shock-jocks...The Atlantic Monthly continues to decline...Journalism without journalists...The ubiquity of inanity...At Last! A good, issue-driven Health Care Story...And NPR did one, too!...Taken for a ride in Miami...Fox moves from eccentric to weird...This explains a lot...CBS aired a portion of Floyd Brown's attack ad, failed to report Obama is not a Muslim...

Bob Herbert of the NY Times jumps into the Reagan argument between Krugman and Brooks:

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nix .

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you...read on

In the new issue of the Washington Monthly, T.A. Frank argues that New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is “boring.”

I can’t say whether Herbert saw the Washington Monthly piece or not, but I can’t help but notice that the veteran columnist has been a lot less dull lately. Today, for example, Herbert notes that he’d like to see “a million angry protesters marching on" RNC headquarters because, he argues, the GOP has demonstrated “just how anti-black their party really is.”

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities. […]

[The Republican candidates] won’t be there. They can’t be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to black Americans. After all, they’re Republicans.

This is the party of the Southern strategy — the party that ran, like panting dogs, after the votes of segregationist whites who were repelled by the very idea of giving equal treatment to blacks. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. (Willie Horton) Bush, George W. (Compassionate Conservative) Bush — they all ran with that lousy pack.

“Boring” this is not. Indeed, Herbert’s column reads a bit like an indictment of a party that’s been on the wrong side of the racial divide for far too long. Take a look.

Bush & Bob Jones