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This is the first in a what I am pretty sure will be lengthy series documenting the Far Right’s hatred of President Barack Obama.  Many of them such as Rex Rammell, Republican candidate for governor of Idaho,  just want to see him killed.

The first report comes from Timothy Egan’s blog for The New York Times:

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”

In the Idaho of the past, jokes about shooting a president could sometimes be dismissed without consequence.  Indeed, the comment was buried in an initial news story about the gathering, and Rammell sloughed it off later, saying on his Web site that “Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington, D.C.”

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes.  And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it? 

Idaho is known for it’s crazy, gun-toting bigots, so this report isn’t too surprising.  But a Republican candidate for governor jokes about buying a tag to hunt and kill Obama like a wild animal?  Really?  Wouldn’t any serious candidate respond by saying something like, “I think your comment is way out of line.  Likening President Obama to a wild animal that should be hunted and killed is extremely distasteful.  I disagree with his policies, but joking about killing him is not funny.  Next question?” 

I’ll bet you are thinking the next quote will be about how he apologized for making such a stupid, hate-filled remark.  Not gonna happen.

“I will not apologize for making an innocent comment,” said Rex Rammell, Republican candidate for governor of Idaho.

NewWest: “….why won’t you step up to the plate and say I never should have said that?”

Rammell: “I’ll tell you the main reasons why I won’t apologize, it’s because of the over the top comments by the GOP leaders. That infuriates me. They’re the ones….because of their condemnation of a simple comment taken out of context I refuse to apologize. If you want to blame someone for me not apologizing, you blame Otter, Simpson, Crapo, Risch and Batt.”

TV reporter: “So you haven’t apologized.  I’m not sure where you’re at on this, you did say you were sorry…”

Rammell: “I am not sorry for saying the comment; I am sorry that everybody took it incorrectly.”

You see, Rammell says it wasn’t his fault.  It was the Republican Party’s fault, and he’s not apologizing to anyone for “joking” about how he’d like to buy a tag to hunt and kill Obama.  So what does Rex Rammell, a man of “courage, integrity and honor” think about all the attention he’s received since his hateful comment:

“Hopefully, if there’s people in Idaho that didn’t know me, then they’ll know me now. I think I’ll come out of this much better off.”  (link)

Well I hope that the people of Idaho are smart enough to send this wacko on his way so that after the primary election, instead of hunting for Obama, he’ll be hunting for a job.

It’s HOT in Seattle.  Today’s high will be in the nineties again, and tomorrow’s high is projected to climb over one hundred degrees.  We Seattleites are not used to extended hot, dry spells.  Most people don’t have air conditioning in their homes, because it’s not something that would get much use.  I would have appreciated having it last night though, and I’ll wish I had an air conditioner tonight.

Because this isn’t really a weather blog, I must have some other point to make.  Oh yeah… I watched Do the Right Thing last week.  That is a movie that I highly recommend.  The movie takes place on a very hot day in Brooklyn, and as the day gets hotter and hotter, race relations heat up.  

Race relations has been one of the ongoing topics of fervent discussion since Henry Louis Gates was arrested for being agitated in his own home.  So maybe if you are so inclined, what you ought to do today is read Eugene Robinson’s column and then later this evening go find a cool spot in your house to watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Stanley Fish wrote the best column about the two big stories last week:  Henry Louis Gates getting arrested in his own house, and the ”birthers” ludicrous claims that Obama was not born in the U.S. and is illegally occupying the White House as president.

Yes, it’s about race.  This country is still full of racists, and we still have a problem. 

Here’s an excerpt from the column that ties together the two incidents:  No matter how convincing the evidence of Obama’s Hawaiian birth is that Chris Mathews waves in the face of the birthers, it will never be enough to convince them of his authenticity; and it couldn’t be the white cop that was wrong for arresting a black man at his own house, it had to be the irritable black man’s fault because he doesn’t really belong there anyway.

Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers.  The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Read the whole column here.

In some cases, yes:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white – or a rape.”  Richard Nixon, January 1973.

Right… Rape comes in second to a baby conceived by the interracial union of a black and white couple.  You know… like the union that begat Barack Obama.

See?  In some circumstances, even Republicans can support abortion.

Read about the newly released Nixon tapes in The New York Times.

While watching this morning’s news I saw a clip of Rush Limbaugh calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist.

Media Matters has the full quote from Limbaugh’s radio show:

“…she’s an angry woman, she’s got a — she’s a bigot. She’s a racist. In her own words, she’s the antithesis of a judge.”

Really?  Of all the people who could attempt to get away with saying something like that, Limbaugh would be last on the list.  I guess that kind of makes him the antithessis of an informed political commentator.

The Conservative Political Action Committee has chosen a Big Fat Idiot as the recipient of their Defender of the Constitution Award.  Tomorrow night at their annual conference Rush Limbaugh, the bigoted hardline-conservative mouthpiece for the GOP, will deliver the closing speech and then receive his prize.  They couldn’t have picked a nicer guy.  I mean really, only a great statesmen and defender of the Constitution can come up with stuff like this:

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

“The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt comes with less fruit.”

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”–on an ad by Michael J. Fox endorsing Claire McCaskill for Senate for supporting embryonic stem cell research.

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation…I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?” –on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

“I’m just watching Sen. ‘Dick Turban,’ ah, Dick Turban is doing his — from Illinois — he of Club G’itmo fame. Ha! I wish Roberts would have shown up in the Club G’itmo T-shirt today.  Maybe, maybe a Club G’itmo java coffee cup, just for Dick Turban. Ah, but anyway, Dick Turban.”

“It’s called Operation Chaos. The dream end, I mean, if people say what is your exit strate… strategery, the dream end of this is that if this keeps up to the convention, and we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that, that’s the objective here.” — On the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James.  Godspeed.”

“Let me leave you with a thought that most honestly summarizes my sentiments: I love the women’s movement…especially when I am walking behind it.”

Thinking ahead to next year… Who would want the award after it was given to Rush Limbaugh?  Ann Coulter is the only other person I can think of that would be worthy of such a “prestigious” award.

And I thought that the writer of the first comment on the post below was a racist.

Well I guess there are sick racist sons of bitches and their are professional racist sons of bitches.  Sean Delonas gets paid for the offensive stuff that gets published in the New York Post.

And if you are overly generous with your giving of “the benefit of the doubt” and think maybe Delonas is making fun of Congress, the “author” of the Stimulus Bill, the New York Times points out that:

The cartoon was on Page 12 of Wednesday’s edition, next to the paper’s Page Six gossip column. On Page 11, the reverse side, was a photograph of President Obama signing the stimulus bill into law in Denver.

If you want to see some more of this man’s fine work go here.

Oh, and Sean Delonas’s website is “temporarily unavailable” for some reason…

According to the latest Pew Research poll they are:

The good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.

Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your Wall Street investments evaporate. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are very happy, according to new survey results published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.

The partisan happiness gap — unbroken for nearly 40 years — is impervious to electoral ups and downs. It has something to do with worldview.

“I’m very happy,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and a Republican. “When I was 12, I realized the world was not organized around my desires and wishes. The problem with guys on the left is they never figured that out at age 12. And they’re just irritated the world is not organized around their vision. This makes them grumpy.”

Chris Lehane doesn’t sound grumpy. The Democratic consultant is on the phone from San Francisco: “My guess is if [Pew] checked the cross tabs out in California, we’re all pretty happy out here. The wine is still good, the food is fresh, the people are beautiful.”

But seriously, Lehane said, if Republicans are more happy, it’s because they care less.

“The typical Republican is happy coming home to a 62-inch television, pulling out a fine bottle of cognac or scotch, putting his feet on the table and enjoying the fruits of his labor, but not caring what’s going on in the world outside their living room … and their gated community.”

Hard-core liberals are the happiest liberals, and hard-core conservatives are the happiest people on Earth. Self-certainty is like a happy pill. The bumper sticker may declare, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” but the guy behind the wheel is overjoyed.

Check out this video of hardcore Republicans lined up for a McCain rally.  Watch this ignorant, racist, lying throng of Republicans wallow in their happiness as they accuse Obama of being a Muslim terrorist baby killer:

“The Old Viking” forwarded me a viral email today.  I did a quick Google search and found that it’s up on quite a few sites.  I get a lot of these from both sides and I don’t usually post them, but I really like this one, so here it is:

What if the resumes of Obama/Biden and McCAin/Palin were switched around?  Think about it.  Would the country’s collective point of view be different?  Could racism be the culprit?

Ponder the following:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn’t read from a Teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does.  It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)

John McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester

The billionaire whiteys that control the U.S. media and thus the political discourse in our country called out Obama to defend offensive remarks delivered in sermons made by his longtime pastor and, instead of crumpling like a shamed puppy, he delivered a brilliant speech in Philadelphia today.  I would say it’s right on par with the speech he gave at the 2004 convention.  Excerpts:

…

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

…

On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

…

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

…

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

…

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

…

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

…

(link to transcript of speech)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president that could organize his thoughts into eloquent prose and then deliver that prose in an emotional, inspiring speech?  Now that would be change in a dramatic fashion. 

Read it all here.