Santorum concedes...

Concedes his racism that is, but with this one he may as well concede the race. Seems fairly clear that he was about to say 'nigger' while criticising Obama's supposed Socialist Peacenik credentials:

The Young Turks have this interesting analysis:

One blog, Addicting Info, argues racism towards Obama has become apparent across the Republican board:

Gingrich has called President Obama the “food stamp President.” Santorum once said he didn’t want to make black people’s lives better. Rush Limbaugh has referred to the President as “Barack the magic Negro.” And conservatives have made efforts to pass birther bills all as a response to the color of our President’s skin. Though Santorum managed to stop himself, the damage has already been done. For any Presidential candidate to even come close to using such a word on the national stage is unacceptable. It not only reveals the rampant racism and feelings of white supremacy residing in Santorum’s twisted soul, it reveals the rampant racism and white supremacy feelings that have taken over the Republican Party.

Police are just another gang

Manchester Police

They may have the backing of the state but they act like just another street gang fooling around with guns.

A story today in the Daily Mail, the well known Hitler-supporting newspaper otherwise known as the Hate Mail, reports some armed officers in Manchester have been 'ordered to leave their unit after the discovery of a picture showing them fooling around with a shotgun'.

It has especially riled, according to the Hate Mail, the family of Pc Ian Terry who was killed, shot in the chest, on a training exercise with Manchester police. The BBC report of the time quotes Garry Shewan, Assistant Chief Constable of GMP:

Since Ian's death we have made a number of changes to the way in which we train officers to ensure that all firearm training exercises are carried out in the safest possible way by reinforcing procedures and existing policies.

Words which ring false today. No word from the Hate Mail as to how the families of non-police officers shot dead by this gang of state thugs might be feeling right now, especially when the supposedly 'independent' police complaints commission puts out grey and black propaganda about their fallen kin.

Snow sticks to what?

President Obama sings Sweet Home Chicago! In front of a camera! In a TV studio!

Well it looks like a TV studio. Apparently its the White House where a 'clearly reluctant' President sings.

Meanwhile, who knew the Hufington Post has a collection of Obama's most religious statements! That's like Letterman's Top 10, only even more likely to be boring this week.

Anyway, the earliest they could dig up implies it was the communitarian side of the religion which got Barack O's God-trance going:

From the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, 2009
"I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I've ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.
"I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose -- His purpose."

Of course this must be Obama's most famous religious statement.
As he tries to explain, what he was trying to do is defend McCain from accusations he insinuated Obama is a Muslim. But maybe Obama's faith encompasses a general Abrahamic perspective, revealed by the slip?

Fishing for approval

For years now I very much enjoy reading freewillastrology.com, horoscopes by Rob Breszny which, when he's on form, really delight with their unexpected angles and metaphors. His paragraph for Pisces this week uses a figure bound to make a reappearance on this blog: John McCain.

Pisces (February 19-March 20)
Gawker.com notes that American politician John McCain tends to repeat himself -- a lot. Researchers discovered that he has told the same joke at least 27 times in five years. (And it's such a feeble joke, it's not worth re-telling.) In the coming week, Pisces, pease please please avoid any behavior that resembles this repetitive, habit-bound laziness. You simply cannot afford to be imitating who you used to be and what you used to do. As much as possible, reinvent yourself from scratch -- and have maximum fun doing it.

Wondering what the joke is? It's not worth much. According to the gawker post in question, the joke invariably runs that as Congress' approval rating falls so low, "we're down to paid staffers and blood relatives."
Something about this must appeal to McCain. Check the NY Mag list of each quote. I guess it shows us who McCain thinks can be relied upon in adversity: the remunerated and the blood line - volunteers and in-law relatives never get included in the joke.

Gayness as a disability, newsreaders as ideological mouthpieces

I love this one because it shows how newsreaders are so often on auto-pilot, detectable from that special 'newsreader' tone of voice which appears to encode ideology through interpellation. The slip is made by the anchor on the left of your screen:



What is happening here is that a story about a blind man climbing a mountain is misreported as a gay man climbing a mountain. Its as if the newsreader drops in something from the stock mainstream categories of 'unusual' or 'disabled'. So, in this case, the auto-pilot slip allows us to speculate on how this mainstream media might regard homosexual love as an impairment, or at least as a category not normally associated with 'normal' enterprises like mountain climbing.

I think the key lesson here reminds us the media considers newsworthy abnormalities, even when they get it 'right', as part of a stock list, a social construction of conciousness. For once, the existence of ideology encoded in standard news speak is revealed by this slip, since both 'gay' and 'blind' appear to be on this list.

More twitter ye not - the #blackbusters affair

Well, twitter has exploded today thanks to Labour leader Ed Milliband's extraordinary slip up. It began when Diane Abbot, Labour MP, was having a Twitter conversation in which she tweeted, amongst other things:

White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Predictably, her words were used against her but, as 33Revolutions blogs, accusing her of racism for them doesn't convince in our Universe. The Labour leadership however was keen to get her to apologise; here's Diane in mid-interview about the tweet, taking (so it is said) the phone call from her leader:



So far, so boring. Then Bob Holness, a broadcaster well known in the UK for hosting 80's game show Blockbusters, died, and Milliband tweets:

Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters

Oh dear. Some feel this may have been a deliberate ploy to take the heat off Abbot. Most people view it as a typo, probably by someone who tweets (or used to) on Milliband's behalf. But coming as it does after the Abbot incident, it's a fascinating slip. The Telegraph argues "the slip-up suggests yesterday's 'race row', in which Miliband was compelled to rebuke Diane Abbott, is still weighing on the Labour leader's mind" - or the mind of his tweet-monkey. A reasonable argument given how difficult it is to mistake a for o on the keyboard, even on a phone. Let's try and unpick it a little more. It seems obvious to suggest a relationship with the Abbot controversy, and if that connection holds it does suggest unconscious racism on Milliband's part, having only 24 hours earlier himself 'busted' a well known 'black'. Another factor of interest is that Holness was a white South African, born there, raised in the UK, but returning there to begin his broadcasting career right at the beginning of the apartheid era. Did that obscure fact play into the slip too? #Blackbusters is now a trending topic on twitter, as well as people complaining of a storm in a tea cup. It will be interesting to see how much this damages Milliband in the long term, compared with say Gordon Brown's incident in which he was recorded describing a member of the public as a 'bigoted woman'. Will this embarrassment stick to Milliband, despite the voices of reason and calm? Can he live it down? An interesting test case for public slips.