Last Call For Hypocrisy General

Republicans really can't help being both crooked as a snake oil salesman and stupid enough to think they'll never get caught, so they're always shocked when they get busted.  Today's contestant: the GOP candidate for Arkansas Attorney General, Leslie Rutledge.

Officials have cancelled the voter registration of Arkansas candidate for Attorney General Leslie Rutledge (R) for being registered to vote in multiple places, according to the Blue Hog Report. 

The implications: "First, for the AG candidate of the party who likes to scream about voter fraud to be registered in two (or three) places at once is ironic and amusing on its own. However, the bigger implication is Article 19, section 3, of the Arkansas Constitution, which states: 'No persons shall be elected to, or appointed to fill a vacancy in, any office who does not possess the qualifications of an elector.'" 

"The qualifications of an elector" include this that the person must be "Lawfully registered to vote in the election."

Reminder: the only voter fraud out there seems to be perpetrated by Republican politicians registering to vote in multiple precincts.  But this time it may cost the GOP a election.  Here's hoping Rutledge's opponent, Democrat Nate Steel, can turn this into an easy win.

We're Hip To The Kids, Man

The College Republicans try to "stay relevant" in the 2014 election with an ad from 1974.

The first ad in a nearly $1 million campaign, "Say Yes To The Candidate," is based on TLC's "Say Yes To The Dress" and compares the Florida gubernatorial candidates to wedding dresses.

The ad opens with a woman explaining that she's on a budget. She first tries on the Republican Rick Scott dress.

"The Rick Scott is perfect," she says. "Rick Scott is becoming a trusted brand. He has new ideas that don’t break your budget."

He's dreamy and listens to records and drives a Dodge Dart.  He may even own a Timex!

The woman's mom prefers the Democratic Charlie Crist dress. She tells her daughter, "It’s expensive and a little outdated, but I know best." 

But of course, the Crist gown "comes with additional costs" like taxes, debt, and tuition increases, and the woman ultimately chooses the Rick Scott. 

CRNC national chairman Alex Smith told the Wall Street Journal that the ads are geared toward experiences young people have every day. 

"How do you reach the generation that has their earbuds in and their minds turned off to traditional advertising?" she said. "It's our goal to start the conversation by presenting ourselves in a culturally relevant way."

Culturally relevant being relative, with dialogue written by by Lifetime.  Also, the entire concept of marriage isn't relative to Millennials at all, especially since  Millennials are getting married far later in life, it at all.  In fact, numbers show 1 in 4 Millennials will never marry.

So why would they be worried about what wedding dress to choose?  Oh yeah, that's what Republicans think women want to be: married to some douchebag like Rick Scott.

StupidiNews!

• Mexican Army troops have arrested alleged drug cartel leader Hector Beltran Leyva in a seafood restaurant in Guanajuato state.
• The grand jury investigating the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is itself being investigated for jury misconduct as one juror may have discussed proceedings outside of court.
• White House fence jumper Omar Gonzalez is pleading not guilty and has been ordered to undergo a mental competency review as his lawyer argues the veteran suffers from PTSD.
• Hong Kong police are warning pro-democracy protesters that they will be forcibly removed from government buildings if they try to occupy them as street protests continue.
• Verizon has killed plans to throttle data of unlimited users of cell phones who download more than 5 GB a month after FCC chair Tom Wheeler criticized the move.

Last Call For The Service's Dirty Secret, Con't

US Secret Service Director Julia Pierson is out.  There was just no way she was going to keep her job after the fence jumper incident.  And then the White House shooter incident 3 years ago.  And then lying about how far the fence jumper got into the White House.  And then the armed contractor getting into an elevator with President Obama.

Julia Pierson, the first female director of the Secret Service, resigned her post Wednesday after a fence jumper gained access to the White House on Sept. 19 and a subsequent congressional inquiry uncovered other security lapses. 

Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson announced the resignation in a statement. He also announced that the DHS would take over an internal inquiry of the Secret Service and that he would appoint of a new panel to review security at the White House. 

Joseph Clancy, formerly a special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division of the Secret Service, was named Interim Director, Johnson said in his statement. 

Calls for Pierson to leave her post grew after a poor performance during her testimony on Capitol Hill and another bombshell revelation that the an armed contractor was allowed to get into an elevator with the president during a recent trip to the Centers for Disease Control.

Her head had to roll.  I almost feel like the incredibly lax security around the President may have been done on purpose.

The review of the Secret Service needs to be thorough and complete.  Significant new security measures need to be in place.  The next person that tries to physically harm President Obama or his successor needs to be the absolute last, and this person needs to be subdued in such a way that nobody ever even considers testing the USSS again in my lifetime.

Ever.

Out With The Blackout

The FCC has finally moved to get rid of the ridiculous "blackout rule" in an era where people on the web watch the NFL on their tablets, phones, and PCs along with their TVs.

The FCC dumped the sports blackout rule Tuesday, dealing a blow to the NFL at a time of growing scrutiny for the league in Washington. 

In a unanimous 5-0 vote, the commission eliminated the decades-old regulation, which prevents cable and satellite TV from airing games that are blacked out locally when the team fails to sell enough tickets to fill its stadium. The NFL has defended the rule as a tool to ensure robust attendance, but a growing number of regulators and lawmakers say it unfairly punishes football fans.

Perhaps NFL venues should lower ticket prices, parking fees, and do away with seat licenses in order to increase attendance.  Not even the lowliest teams like the Raiders or  Bucs are hurting for money these days where the league has a multi-billion dollar contract after contract with networks, and they even have their own cable outfit showing games 24/7.

“It’s a simple fact, the federal government should not be party to sports teams keeping their fans from viewing the games — period,” said Democratic FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “For 40 years these teams have hidden behind a rule of the FCC. No more. Everyone needs to be aware of who allows blackouts to exist, and it is not the Federal Communications Commission.” 

The league’s defeat on blackouts comes at a time when it’s taking heat in Washington on everything from how it handles domestic violence to the impact of concussions on its players to the name of the Washington Redskins team. As the negative publicity mounts, some lawmakers say they want to examine the NFL’s tax status and antitrust exemption — a move that threatens to damage the league’s business model. 

The sports blackout rule applies to all professional sports teams, but it’s become closely linked to the NFL, which uses it the most and has fought hardest to keep it in place. 

“We’ll review the FCC’s decision on the blackout rule, which has worked for decades to make our games available,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said in a statement Monday ahead of the vote. “With or without the rule, the league will continue to work to find new ways to bring more people to the game, and bring the game to more people.”

The tax exemption for sports leagues has to go, not just for the NFL.  The big four pro sports leagues make tens of billions of dollars every year on tickets, merchandising, TV contracts and stadium naming rights.  Pretty sure they can stand on their own two feet and start putting money into the cities that host these teams instead of demanding tax breaks and sweetheart deals through extortion.

I think you'll see that happening in the next 5-10 years. Sports franchises are billion dollar plus businesses.  Time to tax them like it.

Loco En La Cabeza

Latino advocacy groups aren't even being subtle about their disappointment with President Obama on the push from Senate Democrats to leave immigration until after Election Day.  The message from those groups: if you lose because we don't show up to vote, blame someone else.

Disenchanted with President Barack Obama for delaying executive action on reforming the nation’s deportation system, apathetic about Democratic candidates that for the most part haven’t made a direct appeal to Hispanics and without a galvanizing bogeyman on the right to vote against like Mitt Romney in 2012, Hispanic voters are poised to let Democrats lose Senate races and state houses they could otherwise win, key Hispanic advocates said Monday during a briefing at the National Council of La Raza. 

The preemptive blame-shifting comes as Democrats across the spectrum – from Mr. Obama on down – fear diminished turnout from the base in November’s midterm elections. Gary Segura, a Stanford University professor who is co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, said Latino voters would show their influence by letting some Democrats, like Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, be thrown out of office. 

In any instance where a Latino-preferred candidate loses and that Latino community turned out in smaller numbers because of the disillusionment, Latinos did make a difference. The decision not to vote is still a political decision and is not necessarily irrational,” Mr. Segura said. “If you’re a Latino in North Carolina and the president delayed his decision to help Kay Hagan in her election, why would you go vote for Kay Hagan? … Latinos can have influence by letting people lose, just as they can have influence by helping people win.”

If this sounds familiar, it's the same tactic far left liberals have been using for years.  To which I will say this:  abdication of voting is cowardice, plain and simple.  If you make the political decision to stay home and not vote in order to punish politicians, you are a coward, and you deserve no voice at all in our political process.

Too many people have fought and died for women, African-Americans, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and other minorities to be able to vote.  Walking away from that is not only irrational, despite what Gary Segura says, but suicidal.  If you feel that you are voiceless, why make yourself voiceless by not voting?

I can respect voting for the other candidate in order to punish the one you're angry with.  That's at least still exercising the right people bled for.  But to stay home and do nothing?  Insanity.  You only assure that you will not be taken seriously in the future and that your concerns will be ignored.

Why should politicians care about those who do not vote at all?

StupidiNews!

• A man in Dallas visiting family from Liberia is the first recorded case of Ebola in the US, he is in critical condition at a Dallas area hospital.
• The death toll in last month's eruption of Japan's Mt. Ontake has reached 48 as officials are only now reaching remote areas of the volcanic mountain where hikers were overcome by gas, smoke, and ash.
• Another day of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as China's National Day holiday meant even larger crowds were on hand to demonstrate against Beijing.
• Pro-Russian rebel forces continue to violate Ukraine's cease fire agreement as fighting cut power to several areas near Donetsk.
• Microsoft has unveiled Windows 10, slated for release in mid-2015 as the company attempts to boost flagging sales with an OS that combines Windows 8.1 with the features Windows 7 users want.

Last Call For A Minimum Of Logic

Republicans seem to think Americans making more money is bad for America.

New Hampshire Republican Congressional candidate Marilinda Garcia dismissed raising the minimum wage as a "wedge issue" by President Barack Obama's administration that actually wouldn't help people and instead is just a "petty, short-sighted type of little issue."

Garcia, considered a rising star among conservative Republicans, made the comments Monday evening during an interview with Chris Ryan on his Pints and Politics show on WKXL in Concord, New Hampshire. The comments were flagged by the opposition-research shop American Bridge. 

"I voted against increasing the state minimum wage when I was in the legislature," Garcia said. "It seems to be sort of a petty — not punitive is the wrong word — but kind of just a petty, short-sighted type of little issue that the President's administration decided to champion for a time to then use as a wedge issue." 

Garcia goes on to say that a minimum wage increase would be slight for the recipients but would be "catastrophic" for the job market. She also calls a hike "trite." 

"Every employer I've talked to says —about deals with the minimum wage says 'look I will literally be laying people off.' Now I ask you, is giving someone a dollar, $1.15 increase helpful or better for them than actually not losing that job to begin with?" Garcia continued. "So what you're doing is you're forcing people to choose between laying people off completely and losing their job or having a somewhat trite and meaningless wage —excuse me raise, and your wage that doesn't do in fact do anything to make your life more affordable, allow for the cost of living, help you heat your home, fill your car, and all these other —afford your healthcare— and all these things we're dealing with. So yeah, I'm opposed to raising it."

There's three problems with Garcia's argument: First, in a country where corporations continue to earn record profits, they have the money to invest back into labor costs. Her assumption that a raise in the minimum wage would have to immediately be compensated by firing people doesn't make fiscal sense.

Second, when multiple businesses increase wages for their lowest-paid employees, these employees have more money to spend into the local economy and all indications are that this is exactly what happens when there's a minimum wage hike.  More money in the economy means growth, and growth means there's more business coming in to pay for these wage increases.   Garcia doesn't make basic economic sense either.  Imagine that.

Finally, her argument doesn't hold water from an empirical standpoint either.  Washington State had up until recently the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.32 an hour.  If Garcia's correct, then Washington State's unemployment rate should be well above the national average.

It's not.  August 2014 it was 5.8%, below the country's 6.1% national average.  Meanwhile, states that had the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour like Kentucky and North Carolina have higher than average unemployment, NC at 6.5% and KY at 7.4%.  If raising the minimum wage is bad for the economy, then Washington State should have the worst unemployment in America.

It doesn't.  The argument is silly.

But so is the Republican Party.

These Victims Are Professionals

GQ's interview with George Zimmerman and his family simply isn't as awful as you probably think it would be.  Instead it's much, much worse, as if the Bluths from Arrested Development met the Duck Dynasty clan on the set of The Sporanos. Writer Amanda Robb visited the "most hated family in America":

It was Grace, the little sister, who first grasped how all their lives were about to change. "We need to get guns!" she screamed when she saw the first news report pop up on her phone. The brief story didn't even have George's name—the shooter was still publicly unidentified—but that was no comfort. It was only a matter of time. 

The Zimmermans already owned a lot of guns—at least ten altogether, between Grace and her fiancé, her two brothers, and her parents. Still, Grace bought herself a new Taurus pistol. 

They had good reason to believe they might be in danger. Soon after Reuters published George's name on March 7, 2012, the New Black Panthers put out a $10,000 bounty for his "citizen's arrest." #Justice4Trayvon became a popular hashtag, and violent threats came in a flood. "All I can and will say I pray to God that your son geroge [sic]and Robert both choke on a sick dick and the mother and father both choke off a dick," someone posted on Bob and Gladys's website. "[I]t's not over we will have the last lol."
The family decided they could no longer stay put. George and Shellie holed up with a friend who was a federal air marshal, so they were reasonably safe. But for years, George's name had been on the deed to the house where his parents lived. Someone would find them. Bob worried about the large window that faced the street at the front of the house. "That's my mother-in-law's room," he said. Gladys's mother: 87 years old, Alzheimer's-afflicted. "I could just see somebody shooting into the bedroom or throwing a Molotov cocktail or something." 

Robert, who bears a strong resemblance to George, was seen as particularly vulnerable. At the time of the shooting, he was living in suburban Washington, D.C., and in March, shortly after his thirty-first birthday, he got a call from a special agent at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who told him, Robert recalls, that "credible yet nonspecific" intelligence had identified him as a "target": "Anyone who wants to harm him will make no distinction between you because of the physical similarity. You need to go, and you need to go now." He left, joining the family on the run in Florida.

The Zimmermans believe to this day that they will never be free, that they are hunted by millions of angry liberals, and they are all completely paranoid and armed to the teeth and ready to shoot to kill in order to defend themselves.

Before I leave, we Skype with the rest of the family, minus George, who are all at home in Florida. The connection is choppy. Bob, Gladys, and Grace are in the kitchen, and all three of them look tired. Both of the family's lawsuits—their best hope at financial salvation—are going nowhere fast. A federal magistrate bounced the case against Roseanne Barr back to a state court. And a circuit-court judge just tossed out George's case against NBC. 

But that's not what they want to talk about today. They want me to understand that the world is aligned against them and that what sustains them is their closeness as a family. George texts all the time. He even called recently. He wanted to know the name of a recent pop song, one with a chorus that goes la la la. 

Bob tells me that George's big fear right now is that he'll be charged with federal civil rights violations for the Martin shooting. 

"He's worried," Bob says, "that if FBI agents come and kick in his door, he's probably gonna shoot a few of them."

The interview is comically awful, because the Zimmermans are awful people. The Zimmermans have family codes for situations.  They fear pretty much 90% of America is trying to kill George and that they'll have to spend decades living like a bored family full of former mobsters in exile.  Most of all they want you to know they have guns.  Lots and lots of guns.

Oh, and George is still being a "concerned citizen" out there in Florida.  But the family of course fears he's a little jumpy on the trigger.

Trayvon Martin could not be reached for comment.

Cash Rules Everything Around Them

The annual list of Forbes's 400 richest Americans is out, and you'll be glad to know that President Obama's evil communist socialist anti-colonialist views and his massively overregulated uncertain business climate ended up making these Masters of the Universe about $270 billion last year.

Thanks to a buoyant stock market, the richest people in the U.S. just keep getting richer. That has made it harder than ever to join the ranks of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The price of entry to The Forbes 400 this year is $1.55 billion, the highest it’s been since Forbes started tracking American wealth in 1982. Last year it took $1.3 billion to score a spot. Because the bar is so high, 113 U.S. billionaires didn’t make the cut. 

Bill gates, still #1 at $81 billion.  Rich enough to every single person in America 200 bucks and still have $16 billion or so left over.

All together the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a staggering $2.29 trillion, up $270 billion from a year ago. That’s about the same as the gross domestic product of Brazil, a country of 200 million people. The average net worth of list members is $5.7 billion, $700 million more than last year and a record high. An impressive 303 of the 400 saw the value of their fortunes rise compared to a year ago. Only 36 people from last year’s list had lower net worths this year. Twenty-six people fell off the list; another six people died, including businessman and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer.

And of course, Obama's making it so very hard to join this list.  Obamacare is destroying the medical industry, you know.

There are 27 newcomers to the Forbes 400, including Elizabeth Holmes the youngest woman on the list, and the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. Just 30 years old, the Stanford University dropout has built blood testing company Theranos into a firm that venture capitalists have valued at $9 billion. She owns 50% of it.

So hard out here for a pimp.  We should probably cut Social Security just in case.

StupidiNews!

• Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong continue to clog the streets of the city demanding the resignation of city Chief Executive C.Y. Leung, but Leung says he will not step down.
• US Secret Service director Julia Pierson will face House lawmakers from both parties demanding answers to why several security breaches have happened in the last three years.
• US airstrikes in Syria targeted Islamic State fighters near the town of Manbij in northern Syria as Kurdish forces on the ground attacked IS areas near the Turkish border.
• Ukrainian forces again faced heavy fighting one day after suffering the worst casualties since last month's truce was signed as pro-Russian rebels shelled government positions near Donetsk.
• New York state regulators have delayed a vote on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger to November after recommendations that both companies have poor customer service.

Last Call For The Brothers Very Grim

Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone expose on the Koch Brothers is your long read tonight.

Since Koch Industries aggressively expanded into high finance, the net worth of each brother has also exploded – from roughly $4 billion in 2002 to more than $40 billion today. In that period, the company embarked on a corporate buying spree that has taken it well beyond petroleum. In 2005, Koch purchased Georgia Pacific for $21 billion, giving the company a familiar, expansive grip on the industrial web that transforms Southern pine into consumer goods – from plywood sold at Home Depot to brand-name products like Dixie Cups and Angel Soft toilet paper. In 2013, Koch leapt into high technology with the $7 billion acquisition of Molex, a manufacturer of more than 100,000 electronics components and a top supplier to smartphone makers, including Apple. 

Koch Supply & Trading makes money both from physical trades that move oil and commodities across oceans as well as in "paper" trades involving nothing more than high-stakes bets and cash. In paper trading, Koch's products extend far beyond simple oil futures. Koch pioneered, for sale to hedge funds, "volatility swaps," in which the actual price of crude is irrelevant and what matters is only the "magnitude of daily fluctuations in prices." Steve Mawer, until recently the president of KS&T, described parts of his trading operation as "black-box stuff." 

Like a casino that bets at its own craps table, Koch engages in "proprietary trading" – speculating for the company's own bottom line. "We're like a hedge fund and a dealer at the same time," bragged Ilia Bouchouev, head of Koch's derivatives trading in 2004. "We can both make markets and speculate." The company's many tentacles in the physical oil business give Koch rich insight into market conditions and disruptions that can inform its speculative bets. When oil prices spiked to record heights in 2008, Koch was a major player in the speculative markets, according to documents leaked by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with trading volumes rivaling Wall Street giants like Citibank. Koch rode a trader-driven frenzy – detached from actual supply and demand – that drove prices above $147 a barrel in July 2008, battering a global economy about to enter a free fall.

Only Koch knows how much money Koch reaped during this price spike. But, as a proxy, consider the $20 million Koch and its subsidiaries spent lobbying Congress in 2008 – before then, its biggest annual lobbying expense had been $5 million – seeking to derail a raft of consumer-protection bills, including the Federal Price Gouging Prevention Act, the Stop Excessive Energy Speculation Act of 2008, the Prevent Unfair Manipulation of Prices Act of 2008 and the Close the Enron Loophole Act.

And these two charming gentlemen have spent hundreds of millions on Republicans for the Senate in 2014, and millions more lobbying Congress to help them make even more money.  These are the guys who really run the country.  They're also one of the largest polluters in America, dumping 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every single month.

But hey, America.

House Of Pain, Con't

A grim reminder that most likely the GOP will gain a few seats in the House in November, and the incoming people in January will be even more batshit insane than the current crop of Gohmerts, Bachmanns and other assorted lunatics already infesting the House GOP.

One nominee proposed reclassifying single parenthood as child abuse. Another suggested that four “blood moons” would herald “world-changing, shaking-type events” and said Islam was not a religion but a “complete geopolitical structure” unworthy of tax exemption. Still another labeled Hillary Rodham Clinton “the Antichrist.” 

Congressional Republicans successfully ended their primary season with minimal damage, but in at least a dozen safe or largely safe Republican House districts where more mild-mannered Republicans are exiting, their likely replacements will pull the party to the right, a move likely to increase division in an already polarized Congress. 

“Congressman Hall is a very genial and well-liked guy, and I hope that eventually I’m perceived that way too,” said John Ratcliffe, who in the Texas Republican primary defeated Ralph M. Hall, a 91-year-old with nearly 34 years in the House. But, he added: “The district that I will represent is far more conservative than most districts. Leadership will or should understand what the people in my district want — more conservative approaches and more conservative stands.”

More fights with President Obama.  More blanket opposition to anything Democrats try to do.  More shutdown threats over the debt ceiling, the budget, and everything else.  The GOP will only get worse because the voters voting in GOP primaries are all, well, your typical GOP primary voters.  They want Democrats eliminated from the country, period.

Where are the moderates?  Too busy being purged out of the party I guess.

For the House speaker, John A. Boehner, the newest crop of conservatives will present at best a headache, at worst a leadership challenge. Many, including Mr. Ratcliffe, have refused to commit to voting for him to serve again as speaker, lending potential votes to rebellious conservatives who nearly defeated him in 2013. 

And if Republicans take control of the Senate, the group will probably compound the difficulties House and Senate Republican leaders will have finding legislative unity. 

“Obviously I’m interested in the House going forward with the Senate, and I think there are going to be a lot of challenges,” said Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama, who will retire in January and likely be replaced by Gary Palmer, who has helped lead the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. “A lot of the people who have sat down to solve problems are leaving, those like me that are concerned about the dysfunctionality.” 

As for their replacements, Mr. Bachus said: “I think they love their country every bit as much as we do. I think maybe they’re not as pragmatic.” Mr. Bachus is one of 26 House veterans who are retiring or running for the Senate or were defeated in the primaries.

They love "their" country alright, and the people like them in it.  Everybody else?  Well, you know the drill.  Block them, punish them, hurt them, and there's always Second Amendment Remedies(tm).

2014 will bring a new batch of crazies.  And that will only get worse as the GOP gets worse.

A Black And White World

Normally Hot Air's Jazz Shaw is a pretty reasonable guy for a conservative and regularly resists the kind of overt wingnut impulses of the rest of his compatriots. I say normally, because he greatly disappoints me with this Sunday article where he finds enough "evidence" to indict the media on mentioning black people by race in criminal cases only if they are the victims, and never the suspects.

In all these instances we see a pattern which deserves an explanation from the nation’s media gatekeepers. If America’s reporters are so concerned about race relations in the country that such descriptions are included immediately when discussing a case where a white person is charged with injury to an African American, how is such discussion less valid when the roles are reversed? Violence takes place all the time, and the fact is that both attackers and victims cover the full spectrum of skin tones. If it’s an important question for us to ponder as a nation, are not all examples pertinent to the discussion? As much as some of these news outlets may hate to admit it, black people do, on occasion, commit acts of violence. And sometimes the victims of that violence are white.

But somehow that’s not a story. When reporting those types of crimes, there is an embargo on The B Word. You never read a headline where “a black man” or ” a black cop” stands accused of this or that crime against “an unarmed white man” or “a young white woman.” I was reminded of this yet again watching all the coverage of the arrest in the disappearance of Heather Graham. Read this thirty paragraph story at HuffPo about the arrest of Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., a suspect in the case. If you open that page and place your hand over the picture of Heather you would have no clue as to the races – or even general descriptions – of the persons involved.

Why? Of course, even posing the question immediately brands me as a hopeless, hateful racist in the minds of half the nation and the conversation immediately shuts down. But a responsible media, if they truly wanted to have a frank conversation about racial conflict in America, would be honest enough to tackle this issue.

Note what Shaw has done here: accused the media of being too political correct for his taste, protests that he "can't find any examples" of the media naming the race of the victim and suspect in a crime when the suspect is black and the victim is white, and then preemptively deflects all criticism of his extraordinary claim as accusations of racism, pretty much the Wingnut 101 on race relations.  It boils down to "I'm right, liberals are wrong, and anything they say otherwise is them accusing me of racism."

Frankly, I expect better from Shaw, but I guess I no longer should.

The funny part is Shaw is making the same argument that groups who are very much proud of their racism make, the argument of a somehow unreported epidemic of "black on white crime" in America and that there's a massive conspiracy to keep it that way.  Of course, these white supremacist groups are very eager to push such a narrative:

On Stormfront, a popular white supremacist Internet forum, one poster recently asked people to join in a planned rally against black crime in Knoxville, Tennessee, scheduled for June 2012. The purpose of the rally would be to protest against new trials for black assailants who allegedly tortured and murdered a young white couple in that city in 2007. At that time, the incident mobilized the white supremacist community, which held rallies and distributed flyers that accused the media of ignoring what they considered to be a heinous hate crime. Police in Knoxville who investigated the crime said that the victims had not been targeted because of their race.

In May 2012, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) announced that it would investigate a number of alleged incidents around the country in which whites were reportedly the victims of crimes committed by black youths or other minorities. In particular, the NSM mentioned an alleged attack against two white reporters by black youths in Norfolk, Virginia, and assaults against white men in Mobile, Alabama, and Baltimore, Maryland. The NSM has called for hate crime charges to be filed in these cases and wrote on its Web site that "if the roles had been reversed and it was a White mob that had attacked a Black citizen, it would have been labeled a 'lynching' by the major media…We have discovered a disturbing pattern of the systematic cover up and refusal of prosecutors to prosecute offenders under these [hate crime] statutes when the perpetrators are Black and the victims are White."

That same month, the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan posted "a warning for white Americans" on their message board that claimed that there has been a significant rise recently in violent black-on-white crime across the country and that "this new racially motivated pandemic is mostly ignored by the liberal news media." The group asserted that it will organize a national distribution of fliers across the county "warning White Americans of the dangers to them and their families when approached by large groups of blacks." They added: "The Liberal Government jew [sic] media refuse to report fairly on these hate crimes so it our duty war our fellow Kinsmen of the violence being perpetrated against our Great Race."

On May 11, 2012, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) posted an article on its Web site that claimed that a New Jersey newspaper had "censored" the race of the alleged assailants in what it called "savage mob attacks" on five white concertgoers in New Jersey. The CofCC dismissed both the newspaper and police accounts portraying the incident as an "isolated event." According to the CofCC, "almost as alarming as the epidemic violent crime being perpetrated against white people is the blatant media censorship and black-out of the racial element of the incidents."

I'm not racist.  I just make the same argument popular with racists.  Oh sure, maybe I am dismissing his argument because of the very big implied racism message.

Maybe there's a valid reason for that if you sound like Stormfront, WorldNetDaily, the NSM and CofCC?

You're better than this, Jazz.

StupidiNews!

• In Miami, 15 people, ages ranging from 11 to 25, were shot at a nightclub early Sunday morning, no arrests of any suspects have been made.
• An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times has found African-Americans are six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession in Florida than whites.
• Hong Kong riot police have pulled back after a night of protests in the center of the city's financial district as demonstrators continue to demand democratic reforms.
• Evidence of another round of consolidation in the energy industry as Canada's Encana Corp. will buy Athlon Energy for $7.1 billion, moving the company towards shale oil and away from gas.
• A new study suggests driving while using Google Glass is as distracting as texting while driving, although researchers found it was easier to recover from distractions to retake control.