Ryan Braun, Cheater, Scumbag

The details:

Former National League MVP Ryan Braun was suspended without pay for the rest of the season and the postseason Monday, the first penalty from baseball's investigation of players reportedly tied to a Florida clinic accused of distributing performance-enhancing drugs.

The Milwaukee Brewers star accepted the 65-game penalty, 15 games more than the one he avoided last year when an arbitrator overturned his positive test for elevated testosterone because the urine sample had been improperly handled.

"I am not perfect. I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions," he said in a statement.

I must say I find this situation more exasperating than I would have originally thought. After all, I am a Cardinals fan and I lived through the Mark McGwire years. However, when that whole era was going down there already was the sense that something wasn't exactly right. When it exploded as a drug fueled myth no knowledgeable fan could be exactly surprised.

But that was all in the past, right?

When Ryan Braun signed his huge contract extension, choosing to stay with the small market club that established his name rather than chasing big money in a bigger market, I bought into the "feel good" storyline of it all. As a result I feel like nothing but a sucker today.

But really it is worse than that. Braun, in attempting to cover his ass nearly two years ago when he failed a drug test, absolutely trashed the reputation of the poor technician who handled that test. Basically Braun accused the tech of tampering with his urine sample. We now know Braun had a wider history of attempting to skirt baseball's drug policies. In the light of today's admission of guilt by Braun, the sumbag quality of that earlier denial has become unavoidable.

Braun should apologize to everyone whose integrity he so cynically attacked.

Spending Too Much Time With The Stupids

A quick show of hands: Who believes, along with super-genius James Fallows, that Pete Hoekstra knows how to code HTML?

I should know better than to be spending any time on The Atlantic.

I apologize.

It won't happen again.

UPDATE:

Ah, I see from another site, Fallows and his fellow sleazeballs got their "evidence" by selectively editing out the parts of the HTML they didn't like. So, they aren't just scumbags, they are frauds to boot.

Excellent.

(And, yes, I checked. There is no correction on the Fallows story.)

Gravy Train Time

From the "It's crap like this that make me want to tear my hair out" file:
Loophole lets union officials claim big teacher pensions

Last fall, Ed Geppert, then president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, co-wrote a scathing public essay that alleged some politicians and pundits in Illinois were "waging a relentless war against public employees over state pensions."

The "claim that the state pension shortfall was caused by overly generous pension benefits paid to state employees and teachers is provably false," stated the essay.

What Geppert didn't mention during that debate is that he personally was already getting an annual pension of roughly $185,000 — far more than most working teachers make in salary — through that same struggling system.

Geppert taught in the Metro East for seven low-paid years in the 1970s before leaving teaching and rising through the union ranks for three decades. Thanks to a little-noticed loophole in the system, he was allowed to apply the regular state teachers' pension formula to his much higher union salary.

The formula is based on an average of the retiree's highest four recent years of salary. For many teachers, that average may be around $50,000. For Geppert, it was more than $200,000 because of his union salary, which was six figures through most of his IFT tenure. That average was helped along by a salary spike of about 15 percent, to $260,000, just before he formally retired in 2004.

There was nothing in the law to prevent him from continuing to collect that pension after he returned to the union as its president three years later.

When asked last week about the arrangement, Geppert's combative tone from the essay had become more pragmatic. "I followed the law," he said. Using the system as it was available to him "was only the prudent thing to do."

Prudent, eh? Geppert stopped working as a public employee in the pension system in 1977, back when his average pay was only $12,100. Now he is drawing $186,000 a year from that same pension fund. That is patently absurd. If Geppert continues to draw his pension for another ten years we will have taken out over $3 million dollars out of the fund.

And Geppert is not alone:

Among former Metro East teachers who went on to boost their public pensions through union positions, the Post-Dispatch review of records found, was Terry Turley, a former East St. Louis schoolteacher. Records show Turley left teaching in 1995 to work for the IFT, making a union salary of between $90,000 and $157,000, then getting a final-year spike to $184,000 in 2005. Turley's resulting pension annuity through the Teachers' Retirement System is about $129,900.

That list also includes ex-teachers such as Andrea Baird, who taught in Carrollton for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s, topping out at a salary of $17,300. After joining the staff of the IFT, her salary roughly doubled, then continued to climb, to $165,000 by 2003. She retired a year later, with a $32,000 final-year raise to $197,000 — setting up a $140,700-a-year pension annuity through the teachers' pension system.

Neither Turley nor Baird could be reached for comment despite messages left last week and on Tuesday.

While some pension recipients spent most of their careers as union officials, others actually did teach for most their careers, then were able to substantially boost their pensions with just a few high-paid years with a union.

That was the way it worked for Martha Bowman, who spent 33 years teaching in Marion, climbing to a salary of about $62,000, according to records. She then spent her last six years before retirement with the Illinois Education Association, the state's second major teachers union. There, her salary rose to $143,500 in five years — $24,000 of that coming in a final-year boost — setting up a retirement annuity of about $100,000 annually, more than twice what it would have been for her teaching service alone.

It's crazy. It also, it must be noted, is not a loophole. "Loophole" suggest an unintentional ambiguity in a law or regulation. This was very clearly intentional, and a legalized fleecing of Illinois taxpayers and the rank and file teachers the unions are supposed to be supporting. It amazes me liberals can bitch and moan about CEO pay for Fortune 500 companies while at the same time signing off on the pillaging of millions, if not over a billion dollars nationwide, from the pension funds of rank and file teachers.

And make no mistake, these unions officials want this "system" to carry on forever, because, they say, they work hard not like those lazy-layabout-all-summer teachers:

Bowman said she doesn't agree with the move in Springfield now to prevent union salaries from being applied to the teacher pension system. "Most teachers work nine months out of the year. When you're a union leader, you're on call 24/7. You don't have time off. There are a lot of weekends and evenings."

Geppert, the former IFT president, also is opposed to the legislation.

"I think it's a sad thing to occur," he said. He predicted it will be difficult to lure high-quality people into union service without allowing them access to teacher pensions.

That's right. What could possibly induce a teacher making $35,000 a year from taking a job making over $100,000 a year? Hmmm.... I wonder.

I'm sorry, but there is no rational reason why highly paid union officials should be in the teachers pension funds. By all means, set up your own pension fund for union officials, and even apply for a teacher's pension if you are properly vested in it. However, that pension must be based solely upon your work and salary as a teacher.

That's how it would work in the real world.

Justice Done.

This is a quick update on a case I noted here on The Iconic Midwest back in 2009: Pa. judge gets 28 years in 'kids for cash' case

A northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered Thursday to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive bribery scandal that prompted the state's high court to toss thousands of juvenile convictions and left lasting scars on the children who appeared in his courtroom and their hapless families.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for taking a $1 million bribe from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids for cash."

Ciavarella, who denied locking up youths for money, had no reaction as the sentence was announced. From the gallery, which was crowded with family members of some of the children he incarcerated, someone shouted "Woo hoo!"

In the wake of the scandal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

Ciavarella, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering earlier this year. His attorneys had asked for a "reasonable" sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he'd already been punished enough.

Convicted felon Ciavarella was an ass right up until the end:

Then, in an extraordinary turnabout, Ciavarella attacked the government's case as well as the conclusions of the state Supreme Court and the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, a state panel that investigated the scandal. Both said Ciavarella engaged in wholesale rights violations over a period of many years.

Ciavarella denied it.

"I did everything I was obligated to do protect these children's rights," he said….

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2 million in bribes from Robert Mericle, the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers, and of extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Robert Powell, the facilities' co-owner.

Ciavarella, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, pocketed the cash while filling the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families.

Here hoping someone “misplaces” the key to felon Ciavarella’s cell.

Bernard Henri-Levy Embraces His Inner Rapist

Say hello to the new Marquis St. Evremonde, Bernard Henri-Levy:

I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York.

I do not know—no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question—if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, at the time, as was stated, he was having lunch with his daughter.

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

I'll break in here to emphasize this piece really begins this way. Evidently this is how a French "intellectual" writes. Henri Bergson he isn't.

I'll also note how strange it is that a socialist claims knowledge of how all the "grand hotels" of New York operate. It's odd that.

What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.

What I know is that nothing, no suspicion whatever (for let’s remind ourselves that, as I write these lines, we are dealing only with suspicions!), permits the entire world to revel in the spectacle, this morning, of this handcuffed figure, his features blurred by 30 hours of detention and questioning, but still proud.

Oh, the horrors of celebrity, power and privilege! It can so lead to the blowing out of proportion of one's arrest on the suspicion of rape. Why, in France one could commit three sexual assaults a day and still make it to the cafe in time to get in a few hours of Israel bashing with the right sort of people.

This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.

Oh my! They treated him like anyone else! Do they not know who he is? He is not some peasant!

I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime—and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact.

Yes, in America superior men are liable to be held accountable for their crimes! Even those committed by them against their obvious inferiors! It's maddening, no?

In case you cannot tell from the above, Bernard Henri-Levy is an imbecile.

UPDATED:

Just as bad as Henri-Levy's imbecility are the truly despicable efforts to paint those who believe that Strauss-Kahn should have to face potential charges without the chance to flee the country as being being against due process and the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Besides I have to really wonder about the sanity of someone who would write the following:

1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent guy with women, why didn't he ever get charged until now? If he has a long history of sexual abuse, how can it have remained no more than gossip this long? France is a nation of vicious political rivalries. Why didn't his opponents get him years ago?

Hmmm... how do the rich, powerful and politically connected get away with anything?

It's a mystery!

In This Instance It Ought To Be One Strike And You Are Out

Unbelievable:

David N. Cox says he was merely exercising his right to petition the government, but a state Department of Transportation official has raised allegations that Cox committed a misdemeanor: practicing engineering without a license.

Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.

After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners' Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own.

The eight-page document with maps, diagrams and traffic projections was offered to buttress their contention that signals will be needed at the Falls of Neuse at Coolmore Drive intersection and where the road meets Tabriz Point / Lake Villa Way.

It did not persuade Kevin Lacy, chief traffic engineer for the state DOT, to change his mind about the project. Instead, Lacy called on a state licensing agency, the N.C. Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors, to investigate Cox.

Cox says Lacy is trying to squelch dissent.

"All we ever tried to do was express our view about this," said Cox, a computer scientist. "We never expected something like this. We think it's wrong. We're just trying to make our neighborhood safe."

Lacy said his complaint "was not an accusation" against Cox.

"I'm not trying to hush him up," Lacy said.

The technical term for this claim by Lacy is "bullshit".

Lacy is a public servant and nothing more.

Lacy ought to be a former public servant starting today. He obviously is not interested in protecting the people of the state in their rights and liberties, but is interested in using the power of the state to silence dissent. As a result Lacy has forfeited his right to work for the people. Ever.

ADDING:

From Instapundit on this matter:

Stay in your place, proles, and don’t challenge your betters.

The Worst Thing About The Internet

There are so many hours of my life I can never get back, lost to mindless time sucks like this link: The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010

The kicker is you read the thing, a bile filled piece of all the human beings the writers would like to not-exist for the crime of not acting/thinking/being like the authors themselves, only to reach the #1 culprit. All of us.

Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority. You’re not in control of your life. You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief. You likely scrolled down to #1, without reading the rest, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time. You think Epic Beard Man is a national hero and that Bradley Manning might be Eli and Payton’s brother. You believe in American exceptionalism despite the contrary, compelling and overwhelming evidence. You tacitly partake in all manner of atrocity without batting a lash. You’re actively participating in our species’ extinction and you’re either in denial or you just don’t give a shit. You escape into every sort of mind-numbing distraction and ridiculous, convoluted fantasy, so you don’t have to face the bitter, terrifying fact that your life is utterly meaningless.

Yep, this is the modern "progressive" in a nut shell. The parousia would have been ours already if we only listened to our saviors - evidently that is supposed to be the authors of this priggish prattle, who lack only humor, humanity, humility, intelligence and common sense.

Otherwise they are perfect.

Thank God For Our Moral Superiors

Where would we be as a nation without godlike figures such as "Global Studies" professor Jonathan Weiler to show us the way? I mean, without Prof. Weiler how would we know that the conservatives and the Republican party, and presumably over 50% of the American electorate in the last election, were in reality the purveyors of a "sick political movement."

Evidently, and I'm basing this upon his writing, we are supposed to trust Weiler's judgement because he has no idea what the ecological fallacy is.

Fabulous.

More Krugman Dishonesty (Or Incompetence)

This makes my day: James Taranto nails Krugman's intellectually dishonest backside

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls "the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties":

Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

"What Democrats believe," he says "is what textbook economics says":

But that's not how Republicans see it. Here's what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning's position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

Krugman scoffs: "To me, that's a bizarre point of view--but then, I don't live in Mr. Kyl's universe."

What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called "Macroeconomics":

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker's incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of "Eurosclerosis," the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl's "bizarre point of view" is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.

Krugman is right about one thing, Republicans are living in a different moral and intellectual universe from Krugman; Republicans still seem to believe lying one's ass off if dishonorable. For Krugman, lying is standard operating procedure, no matter how stupid it makes him look.

The Rise Of CYA "Scientists"

Gee, what are the chances? Professional Discourtesy By The National Climate Data Center

The professional courtesy when researchers collect data is to permit them first opportunity to publish. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has written up this policy. The NIH writes in their section on timeliness of data sharing

“Recognizing that the value of data often depends on their timeliness, data sharing should occur in a timely fashion. NIH expects the timely release and sharing of data to be no later than the acceptance for publication of the main findings from the final dataset.”

The NIH writes with respect to their grantees

“In general, grantees own the rights in data resulting from a grant-supported project.”

NIH has just written down what is the professional courtesy with respect to data.

In the case of the site data that Anthony Watts has collected at considerable effort on his part and that of his outstanding volunteers, the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is not recognizing this professional courtesy. They already earlier have posted a (flawed) analysis of a subset of Anthony’s data. Simply recognizing Anthony’s pivotal role in identifying the current site characteristics of the USHCN sites, as listed in the Acknowledgements of the Menne et al (2009) paper (and the new JGR paper), is hardly adequate.

What this boils down to is Anthony Watts and his volunteers are in the process of creating a dataset to examine the poor siting of ground temperature stations in the United States. In an effort to preempt the feared findings, the NCDC have basically ridden the coattails of the work of another researcher (i.e Watts) before that researcher has had a chance to publish his findings. That the NCDC research is flawed can hardly come as a surprise since their obvious intent had nothing to do with actual science. It was an exercise in "damage control" pure and simple.

I guess all is fair in love, war and climate "science."

The U.N. Is A Fascist Organization

Watch this and tell me it isn't.



You have to step up to fascists when they arise. It's too bad these "scientists with values" have thrown their lot in with these enemies of human freedom.

My God.

Literally, My God. Here is what I have come across in the CRU email dump. In a "conversation" between Mike Mann and Phil Jones we get the following series of emails:

First up Mann:

Phil--thought I should let you know that its official now that I'll be moving to Penn
State next Fall.

I'll be in the Meteorology Dept. & Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and planto head up a center for "Earth System History" within the institute. Will keep you updated...

Jones responds:

Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.

We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. [emphasis added]

Mann responds:

Thanks Phil,
Yes, we've learned out lesson about FTP. We're going to be very careful in the future
what gets put there. Scott really screwed up big time when he established that directory so that Tim could access the data.

And these people are supposed to be scientists. They are disgraces.

There is also evidence they have been "gaming" peer review, attempting to ensure papers they do not like are not published, by poisoning the well, or simply making sure papers were sent to "reviewers" who would reject them out of hand. There are suggestions that some of these papers were in fact never even read before they were rejected, though I cannot say for certain.

But, hey, at least Mann cashed in on new career opportunities. Probably got a big pay raise as well. Isn't that swell?

ADDING:

The incestuous nature of these "scientists" using so-called "journalists" as their personal Public Relations officers also comes through here. Note this comment by Mann:

The Passoti piece is remarkably bad for a Science "news" piece [i.e. doesn't say exactly what Mann wants it to say] ,it would be worth discussing this w/ the editor, Donald Kennedy who is quite reasonable, and probably a bit embarrassed by this.

Nice to know who is pliable I guess.

I Did Not Know That

Evidently if one is an artiste one gets to anally rape children with immunity.

Who knew?

How To Be A Scumbag: 101

Unbelievable:

First Big Business, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, the Religious Right, the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell, and Karl Rove came for ACORN, and the Democrats did not speak out -- because they were not ACORN.

So, now Acorn, an organization that has racked up over 30 fraud convictions in the last three years alone AND has scores under investigation at this moment, is the moral equivalent of the victims of the Holocaust!

What sort of moral pygmy could make such a claim? Surprise, surprise, it's a tenured academic.

What were the chances?

Enemies

Words of idiocy from Harry Reid:

"The public option is something that the vast majority of Americans want. They know that the enemy is the insurance industry," Reid said.

Actually, the "enemy" of the American people would be supposed legislators who neither read the laws they want the people to live by (but not the legislators, of course), nor do they even write the laws they are "proposing." Which begs the question as to who these Representatives are actually representing, because it isn't the American people.

We have met the enemy and it is a Democrat controlled Congress.

Shocking!? Uh...Not Really

News flash! Corrupt Illinois machine politician corrupt. Blagojevich, chief of staff arrested and taken into custody

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiring to get financial benefits through his authority to appoint a U.S. senator to fill the vacancy left by Barack Obama's election as president.

According to a federal criminal complaint, Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper's editorial board who had been critical of him fired.

Blagojevich also was charged with using his authority as governor in an attempt to squeeze out campaign contributions.

Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, also was arrested.

This all begs the question, is it even possible to be Governor of Illinois and not be arrested? Current trends indicate otherwise.

I wrote this back in February:

The sad thing is you could see this coming from day one. Oh, the particulars of how it would go down were unknown, but the politics of Illinois, and especially the Chicago Democratic party, are so inherently corrupt it was only a matter of time. It is a shame for the voters of Illinois who went from a corruption plagued Republican Governor, in George Ryan, to the Democratic equivalent in Blagojevich, but they always knew it was coming.

The crazy thing is that was all predicated upon Blagojevich being up to his eyeballs in Tony Rezko illegalities. Since that time Rod has felt comfortable enough to engage in a whole host of new illegalities, which has led to this arrest.

Amazing.

Yet Another Reason Barack Obama Will Never Be President

Fundamentally, the worst thing about the Obama campaign is the fact his supporters are simply filled to the brim with moronic drivel. Case in point, this excrementally vile "analysis" offed by Ruben Navarrette Jr.: No racism in the presidential election?

In claiming victory in West Virginia last night, Hillary Clinton reiterated her last best argument as to why she should be the Democratic nominee: because only she can win in November.

Don't confuse that with what Clinton said in a debate just a few weeks ago about how she was confident that either she or her opponent could win in November.

How's that for chutzpah? She's arguing that the same person who couldn't win enough states in the spring against Barack Obama can win enough states in the fall against John McCain.

Oh grow up. Every battle for the presidential nomination there has ever been in the history of this county is at some level an argument about who is more electable in the general election. To believe otherwise displays a shocking level of ignorance and stupidity.

At least in West Virginia, Clinton chose her words more carefully than she did last week when she blurted out to USA Today that "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again" and how whites who had not completed college were supporting her.

Clinton sounded less like George Washington and more like George Wallace. Imagine a presidential primary where, after more than 16 months, almost two dozen debates, hundreds of speeches, millions of dollars, and countless chicken dinners, the rationale for electing someone boils down to this: Vote for me. I'm white. I can win because other whites will vote for me.

It's funny, but for those who constantly decry "code words" at the drop of a hat, they don't mind dishing that sort of crap out themselves. That's right, Clinton's assertion that Obama is having trouble attracting support from working class voters (which is true) and white voters (which is also true), is the equivalent of George Wallace's campaign for a segregated America.

Mr. Navarette have you no shame? And, yes, I mean that with all of it's McCarthyite implications, because the idea that everyone who chooses not to support Obama is a racist, closeted or otherwise, is immoral and deeply antithetical to the premise of a democratic society.

And, let us not be coy here, that is exactly what Navarette means:

Meanwhile, some white Americans are turning themselves inside out to come up with excuses for why they're not supporting Obama.

Yes, by all means let us have an inquisition to sort out this "problem."

Some want to know why it isn't racist when 70 percent of African-Americans vote for Obama but it is when 70 percent of whites vote against him.

The answer has to do with history. Over the decades, black Americans have had plenty of opportunities to vote for white people for president. And they have done so. But this is the first time that white Americans have a chance to vote for an African-American with a shot at the presidency. And what are they doing?

Many are responding quite well. Obama won the votes of many -- to borrow a phrase -- "hardworking white Americans -- in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. But, elsewhere, as Obama said in a recent interview, people may need to get their head around the concept of an African-American even seeking the presidency, let alone winning it.

See, if you are white and live in Wisconsin you are deemed acceptable by the Inquisition, but if you are white and live elsewhere, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, or Rhode Island you must be a racist cracker.

God knows no one could have come to the conclusion that they don't feel like voting for one of the most liberal Senators in Congress, who offers only a thin resume and lots of empty rhetoric, for any other reason than they are racists.

There is a racist here and his name is Ruben Navarette, and don't feed me any post-modern, neo-Marxist, "post-structuralist," bullshit about how that isn't possible. Common human decency is fundamentally a question of, surprise, how we treat our fellow human beings. By that standard Mr. Navarette is decency deficient.

What is truly scary is that this type of garbage will only get worse.

UPDATE:

Lookee here! More garbage:

Because of proximity here in Maryland we get occasional exposure to Appalachian stuff. I know it’s not nice to say but as a black man in the 21st century it isn’t exactly a region I think should be having much say about the future of America. And it isn’t.

Remember, he's talking about Democratic voters.

Who is it exactly who would like four years of this?