Coverage of the Wisconsin Protests Is Unsurprisingly Lacking

Haven't written in a while. Been having a few of those "everything is so obviously awful that there's just no point in commenting on anything" weeks. Anyway, here's something short: the television news coverage of the Wisconsin protests. Well, actually, Digby already made the point pretty much as well as anyone can. (It's a short post with image and video, so I can't really quote it - just go check it out.)

Perhaps I should be surprised and outraged that two weeks of 70,000-100,000 protesters are ignored by the same CNN that for two years has breathlessly covered tea party rallies described by Fox News as "thousands strong." But in reality, it's not the least bit surprising. That's your "liberal media."

And because I feel this post is too short, I'll end with a "joke" I'm going to blatantly steal from reddit: A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies looks at the tea partier and says, "look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

Arizona's Racist, But Minnesota's Like Your Loopy Crazy Uncle

I'm amused. This week, we thought Arizona had the unconstitutionally crazy achievement award. But we might have to limit that state to the unconstitutionally racist award, because Minnesota just threw in its bid for the crazy award.

Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment Wednesday that would make Minnesota the first state to require a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature to approve federal laws affecting the state. “Minnesotans enjoy inherent, natural, God-given rights,” the bill states, and “Citizens of Minnesota are sovereign individuals, subject to Minnesota law and immune from any federal laws that exceed the federal government’s enumerated constitutional powers.”

Good luck with that.

(via The Debate Link)

Tea Partiers Are a Great Model of White Privilege

Tim Wise just wrote a post titled "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black." It's a long thought experiment that pretty well documents the meaning of white privilege, as he explains as the end. Here's a small snippet, but it's worth the read:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

An Attack on the Legitimacy of the State, Democracy, and the Law

(updated below)

Ok, so many of us either joke or cry about the Tea Party and the Great Republican Death Spiral. I've often personally speculated that eventually, this will shift us to two new parties - the Libertarians/Blue Dogs and the Progressives. But a couple of things have made me wonder whether the danger is greater than we imagined.

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?