New evidence suggests that white supremacists are taking advantage of lowered recruiting standards to enter the armed services.

from Racial Extremists Are Infiltrating the Military for the Chance to ‘Kill a Brown’

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives.

Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

But neither Rumsfeld nor his successor, Robert Gates, launched any sort of systemic investigation or crackdown. Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.

from Rick Warren? Shame On You, Obama!

Via multiple sources (Greta Christina, Pam Spaulding, Glenn Greenwald, Americans United, as well as others), this unpleasant news: President-elect Barack Obama has apparently chosen megachurch pastor Rick Warren to give a speech at his inauguration day.

If you’re not familiar with Rick Warren, or if you only know him as the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, here’s a few of his greatest hits:

• Warren has been a dedicated enemy of marriage equality, equating gay rights to incest and pedophilia (source), and was a fervent supporter of the pro-bigotry Proposition 8. He is against civil unions for gay couples. He has even, arguably, given his support to African Christians who want homosexuality to be illegal (source).

• He’s also rabidly anti-choice, comparing abortion to the Holocaust (source).

• Just for good measure, he’s said that atheists are not qualified for the presidency:

  “I could not vote for an atheist because an atheist says, ‘I don’t need God,’... They’re saying, ‘I’m totally self-sufficient by [myself].’ And nobody is self-sufficient to be president by themselves. It’s too big a job.”

• And, oh yes, he’s a creationist.

If Warren seems more approachable or more reasonable than the hate-spewing religious right leaders we all know, it’s only because he presents his bigotry in a kinder, gentler facade. His church does occasionally discuss other issues, such as AIDS in Africa or global warming, but it takes more than that to earn my respect when he still spends so much time and energy pounding the religious right’s standard causes.

to top it all off, US balks at backing condemnation of anti-gay laws

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Alone among major Western nations, the United States has refused to sign a declaration presented Thursday at the United Nations calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality.

In all, 66 of the U.N.‘s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration — which backers called a historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with any-gay discrimination. More than 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality, and in several of them homosexual acts can be punished by execution.
...
According to some of the declaration’s backers, U.S. officials expressed concern in private talks that some parts of the declaration might be problematic in committing the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In numerous states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military.

and there you have it… signing the declaration would make our own position on homosexuality questionable.  and we wouldn’t want that.  better to side with extremist muslim nations, because democracy?  it spells “totalitarian religious fascism”  :O

The greatest favor the white race did Obama this year may have been to stay home. That’s a far cry from Martin Luther King’s dream, but it’s a start.

read What We Didn’t Overcome On Election Day

It is America’s family secret.

Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions. They drove thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.

In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that remain almost exclusively white, according to the most recent census.

The expulsions were violent and swift, and they stretched beyond the South. But they remain largely unacknowledged in standard histories of America. While it is impossible to say exactly how many expulsions took place, computer analysis and years of research conducted by the Washington Bureau of Cox Newspapers, which owns the American-Statesman, reveal that they occurred on a scale that has never been fully documented or understood.

Leave Or Die: America’s Hidden History of Racial Expulsions

update: ultimately, who cares?  my thoughts on the subject don’t amount to a hill of beans.

this may be a rather rambling entry, as it’s an issue i’m working through…

first note: my only real concern is that which is considered “hate speech”

british philosopher john milton argued:

• “that a nation’s unity is created through blending individual differences rather than imposing homogeneity from above;
• that the ability to explore the fullest range of ideas on a given issue was essential to any learning process and truth cannot be arrived upon unless all points of view are first considered;
• and that by considering free thought, censorship acts to the detriment of material progress.”

milton seems to believe that if the facts are put out there, truth will win out; however no one person is able to act as a censor for all people.

read on...