The final American election thread?

[SpursFan1902]

Wow, amazing!

[Kezza]

[faceless]

haha, I'll keep that in mind

[faceless]

click HERE for full size original...

[Aja]

Oh Lawd !!!! I wont show this to Colin

[faceless]

haha, I'm sure he'll realise it's a pisstake - and if he doesn't, give him a comedy slap!

the 'Flesh eating immigrants at the BBC' leader at the top is just one of the quality details that I liked. "Rags Malone" seems to the person who made it, and well done to them - it's a cracker.

[Twirley]

Yippee, Obama won in NC...!!!!

[faceless]

Nice one Twirley - now I just want to see Al Franken win in Minnesota and it will be a royal flush!

Here's an interesting video about the small Scottish publisher who spotted Obama's skill well before he was popular... I'll put the 2 audio books in the streaming audio section tonight.

[luke]

[luke]

is this what fox would call a 'terrorist fist jab'?

[faceless]

Obama win prompts wave of hate crimes
By Hannah Strange
The Times

Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president has unleashed a wave of hate crimes across the nation, according to police and monitoring organisations. Far from heralding a new age of tolerance, Mr Obama’s victory in the November 4 poll has highlighted the stubborn racism that lingers within some elements of American society as opponents pour their frustration into vandalism, harassment, threats and even physical attacks.

Cross burnings, black figures hung from nooses, and schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama” are just some of the incidents that have been documented by police from California to Maine. There have been "hundreds" of cases since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

The phenomenon appears to be at its most intense in the Southern states, where opposition to Mr Obama is at its highest and where reports of hate crimes were emerging even before the election. Incidents involving adults, college students and even schoolchildren have dampened the early post-election glow of racial progress and harmony, with some African American residents reporting an atmosphere of fear and inter-community tension.

In North Carolina, four students at the state university admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head." Mr Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

Marsha L. Houston, a University of Alabama professor, 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," Ms Houston said. Second and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

Meanwhile in Snellville, Georgia, Denene Millner, an African-American, said a boy on the school bus told her nine-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human faeces outside the front door, Ms Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear. "I can't say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property because one or two idiots did it," Ms Millner said. "But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."

But the incidents have not been restricted to areas of high anti-Obama sentiment. Even states and cities which leaned heavily towards the Democrat have seen their share. In New York, a black teenager said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted “Obama”, while 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."

In the north-eastern state of Maine, customers at a general store in Standish were placing $1 bets on when the president-elect would be killed. A sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," it said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."

Black figures were hung by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported, while crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, New Jersey, and Apolacan Township, Pennsylvania. In Massachussetts, a nearly-finished church belonging to a black congregation was burned to the ground just hours after Mr Obama's victory was declared.

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.

Mr Potok, who is white, said he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them." Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change. If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries". "Someone once said racism is like cancer," Mr Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out - it's in remission."

The day after the vote, Barbara Tyler, a black high school student in Marietta, Georgia, said she heard hateful comments about Mr Obama from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about his victory. Ms Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the civil rights body NAACP which discussed complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school on November 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia. The student's mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: "Whether you like it or not, we're in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision."

Sociologists said African-Americans suffering attacks and intimidation were essentially proxies for the frustrated emotions of some whites. "The principle is very simple," said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book 'A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.' "If I can't hurt the person I'm angry at, then I'll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race. We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country. We saw it happen after the Rodney King verdict, when Los Angeles blacks erupted in rage at the injustice perpetrated by 'the white man.' It's as stupid and ineffectual as kicking your dog when you've had a bad day at the office," Mr Gallagher said. "But it happens a lot."

[luke]

Who is Black America’s Moral Emissary to the World?
by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

"Dr. King and Obama represent opposing moral and political camps."

The global reputation of Black America has suffered greatly under George Bush, who deployed Black faces as fronts for his vicious brand of U.S. imperialism. Barack Obama's silence on the Israeli assault on Gaza suggests that his honeymoon with the planet won't last long. So who is to represent the progressive values of African Americans on the world stage? ...

The two days touch: Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday observance and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration, January 19 and 20, respectively. To many, the juxtaposition is self-evident confirmation of the intersection of the two men's missions on Earth. Dr. King's journey, which ended with his murder, and Obama's ascent to the presidency, are seen to merge as the dates approach to form a perfect, tragic-glorious symmetry - a 48-hour revelation.

The coincidence of the calendar makes for good copy and grand sermons, but in fact reveals a great moral and political dissonance. It is true that there could have been no Obama presidency had Dr. King and the movement he sprang from not existed, but that simple fact of history does not amount to a King benediction from the grave for Obama's moral character and political policies. Indeed, Dr. King's life and words are indelible evidence that he and Obama represent opposing moral and political camps.

Tens of millions of African Americans - who did not choose the little-known Obama to be their champion, but supported him near-universally at the polls once his candidacy had been made "viable" - will celebrate vicarious attainment of power when Obama is sworn in. Yet when confronted on Obama's political agenda, enough of which has been put in motion and otherwise made plain since Election Day, few Black Obama supporters can mount a cogent defense. "Better than McCain" doesn't cut it, anymore.

When the New York Times describes the emerging Obama administration as "center-right," there is not much for an honest progressive to defend - and most African Americans are progressive on economic issues and questions of war and peace. Beyond a ritual counting of the president-elect's African American appointees, most African Americans seem oblivious to the political nature of his Cabinet, his policy pronouncements and shameful silences. More likely, they pretend to be oblivious so as not to lose that once-in-a-lifetime feeling that happened when the Black man won.

Blacks who have taken on the task of defending Obama, often wind up revealing themselves as persons of little moral or political substance, in the process. New York's Dr. Leonard Jeffries is one of the more prominent Obamists, a self-styled Pan-Africanist. In my second debate involving Jeffries, in Baltimore, December 20 (the first was the week before, in Harlem), he repeated his mantra, that Blacks should "study Obama-ology." I asked him to define this area of study. "Obama-ology," said Jeffries, visibly exasperated by my questioning of the obvious, "is the study of Obama. How he raised so much money...how he used the Internet...."

Dr. Jeffries' response revealed his position to have no political or moral content. He genuflected before Obama because the candidate raised hundreds of millions of dollars (from whom and in return for what?) and created an Internet network (to what end, beyond Election Day?). Most importantly, Obama was a hero because he won. What else is there to know or say?

At the Harlem debate, an Obama defender kept shouting into her mic, "Obama won! Black people have spoken!" - as if any discussion of his political positions was extraneous, or racially subversive, on its face. The woman was a leader of the group that organized the debate, but like others in her organization clearly did not really want a debate. None of the Obamites were even minimally capable of defending their guy's record on the bailout, his retention of George Bush's defense secretary and plans to expand U.S. military manpower, his positioning of bankers at the controls of his new administration's economic machinery, his support for AFRICOM, his key advisors' advocacy of "humanitarian" military intervention - on not one point did the Obama camp offer anything that could reasonably be called a defense, coherent or otherwise.

It is not simply that the Obamites failed to muster a defense in Harlem or Baltimore or other venues; admittedly, it is difficult to defend the indefensible. What is most shocking - maddening - is their rejection of any political or moral standard for evaluating the soon-to-be Black president. All that remains is the fact of Obama's power and the delusion that Blacks somehow share in that power. There is no thought of speaking Truth to Power, and certainly no place for a moral compass in such a valueless void.

We can understand, then, how such people would imagine Obama and Dr. King to be soul mates. The fact that one of these men fought his whole life against the forces of militarism and economic exploitation, while the other empowers, and is empowered by, bankers and militarists, does not register on their anaesthetized moral and political sensors.

If the Obamites had more presence of mind, they would avoid comparisons with Dr. King, which can only redound to Obama's great detriment. King's break with his onetime ally, President Lyndon Johnson, set the standard for both political and moral behavior. When it became clear that the War on Poverty was doomed by the war in Vietnam, which acted "like some demonic destructive suction tube," devouring all available resources, King publicly declared against the war. In doing so, he severed what had been the most productive relationship between an American president and a Black leader in U.S. history. But the war gave him no choice, since military expenditures made "rehabilitation" of the American poor impossible. Both morality and politics led to the same conclusion: the Movement could not coexist with war.

The lesson is directly applicable today, but Americans, Black and white, find it difficult to recognize the characters. Obama is Lyndon Johnson. National revitalization, including redress of historical African American grievances, is impossible unless military expenditures are dramatically reduced. But Obama is committed to putting 100,000 new pairs of Marine and Army "boots on the ground," an expanded war in Afghanistan/Pakistan, a beefed up AFRICOM, and a generally bigger U.S. military footprint on the planet. This, in the midst of global economic collapse.

Dr. King would find creative ways to confront President Obama's militarism, and to actively resist further diversion of public wealth to the bankers. Were he to survey the current political scene, King would be most impressed, not with the Obamas party plans for the night after his birthday, but with the way that a daughter of Georgia salvaged Black America's moral reputation at the beginning of Israel's assault on Gaza.

Cynthia McKinney's attempted voyage of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza on the medical relief boat Dignity, rammed and almost sunk by Israeli warships, reminds the world that not all African Americans have morphed into warmongering clones of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Thanks to the presence of the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate on the mission, millions of Arabs have been made aware of a different Black America, one that is not silent, like Barack Obama, in the face of a purposely inflicted human rights catastrophe.

Cynthia McKinney is Black America's moral emissary to the world. She exemplifies the Black America that consistently opposes U.S. military adventures abroad, a people that recognize organized racism when they see it, and therefore condemn Israel's treatment of Palestinians - the Black America that Martin Luther King came from.

Some of us are still in our right minds. Hopefully, most of the others will recover, sooner rather than later.

[faceless]

I'm just watching the build-up to Obama's inauguration and it struck me that I can't remember any time when so many Americans have got off their arses to do something. But does this mean that all these people didn't care enough about all the other stuff which required taking to the streets over the past few years, such as the lies about the war in Iraq, or the imposition of fascist laws under the guise of 'stopping terrorism'? The majority of people here don't get off their arses for much either, of course...

I don't want to sound entirely like a wet blanket though, and I'm sure it will be a great day for everyone there.

[faceless]

I'm watching this all live now - nationalism, religion, rhetoric and Arethra Franklin singing out of tune in a big daft hat... smashing!

[Kezza]

As someone who lives minutes from Washington, DC (and am comfortably watching from home, since my office was closed today), I can tell you that this is a wonderful day in the DC area. I was out last night and the vibe is fabulous: the whole city is buzzing!!!