Rachel Maddow – Hank Kalet

Race and the birth-certificate non-issue

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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The president did something he should never have had to do: Release his birth certificate. As this amazing commentary points out, this is about his citizenship as determined by race. The right is apoplectic over this issue because it believes that someone who looks like Barack Obama should not be allowed to be president. He is not a full citizen, the birthers believe, for no other reason than his race.

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Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Sherrod controversy in context: The uses of racism by the right

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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Rachel Maddow last night offered the best summary of the larger meaning of the Shirley Sherrod controversy — one that demonstrates how it is part of a larger narrative the GOP has been using since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the fleeing of southern whites from the Democratic Party.

There are a number of interesting things that could be said — about Fox News’ bias and its infection of the mainstream media, about the weakness of national reporting, the ease with which black women continue to be scapegoated and the capitulation of the Obama administration to Washington’s consensus narrative — but the Maddow point, that the GOP is using lingering white fear of black advancement to fan the flames of resentment in the hopes of recreating the Nixonian southern strategy, is perhaps the most important. I’ll let her explanation stand on its own.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The liberal media — finally

There’s a good review of the new “Rachel Maddow Show” in Slate, but I think this short blog item from Matthew Yglesias (by way of Andrew Golis) sums up why Rachel hosting a show on MSNBC matters:

As of last week, had a liberal journalist like Ari Berman broken a news story like this it would have been published on The Nation, picked up in some blogs, and then it would have died.