That’s Right Nate

Rand Paul has been under attack lately since he was the victim of Rachel Maddow’s particular brand of Gotcha Journalism.   This new style of reporting ignores what your guest has carefully prepared to say on your show and instead of listening to his answers like a responsible journalist would, you throw a whole lot of facts at him so that when his statements fail to hold up to your crazy suppositions, you can say “gotcha” and make your guest look like an idiot.

In the Maddow/Paul fiasco Miss Maddow asked Paul if he believed that government should get involved in matters involving private businesses and their rights to refuse service or set their own rules for their establishment.   Being a strict libertarian of course Rand Paul said “No”.  Maddow immediately pounced on him by asking if that meant he was against the civil rights act.  Suddenly, Rand Paul’s answers seemed racist.  Nothing is further from the truth.

Rand Paul is not saying that black people should all go to the back of the bus—not all buses anyway.   What Rand Paul says is that public transportation, which is paid for by city tax dollars should allow black people to sit anywhere they please.   Meanwhile, a private bus company like Greyhound should in theory be allowed to have a black seating section on the back of the bus.   It may seem rather unreasonable to turn back the clock on civil rights 50 years, but alas that is the price of living in a Constitution Republic like ours.  Let us not forget that Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal witlessness.”

Desegregation and integration would work the same ways in other areas of society.   Jim Crow laws would only be applicable in private settings and not in public buildings:

• Restaurants: Restaurants would again be allowed to refuse service on the basis of race unless they were in a publicly funded building like a museum.
• Schools: School integration would continue pretty much unchanged with charter schools being allowed to continue to exclude minorities, while public schools could not.
• Bathrooms: For minorities, find a bathroom they could use would be as simple as heading to the nearest public building.

This may seem oppressive, but remember there are sacrifices to be made for true liberty.   It may be tempting to restart the protest segregation all over again, but I hope that reasonable people will wait until we have enough time to figure out where the public police department’s jurisdiction ends and the private police department’s begins.  We certainly don’t want police trying to arrest police anymore than we want both the private and public fire departments showing up at the same time.

Back in the first part of the 20th century in a time before Jackie Robinson, baseball in this country like all sports was a segregated game.   Some of the greatest players of the time played in what was then called the Negro Leagues.   Players like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell played for teams like the Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh Crawfords, and Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars.  What did all those teams have in common?  Not a single white face.   The shameful secret of the Negro Leagues is that they had a color barrier that kept white players from playing.   Could white stars like Joe DiMaggio, Dizzy Dean, and Lou Gehrig have excelled playing against the best black ballplayers?  Most probably.  Unfortunately, racism prevented them from ever having the chance.

Basketball has a similar ugly history.  While the Washington Generals have a long history of allowing white ballplayers, The Harlem Globetrotters do not. Even though the Globetrotters were founded in Chicago, they chose the name Harlem Globetrotter because of the African-American connotations of Harlem.  Seth Franco didn’t break the Globetrotter color barrier until 2006.  Today, the number of white players in the basketball remains extremely small.

A group of pioneers led by Don “Moose” Lewis is seeking to rebreak the color barrier by starting an all-white basketball league mostly centered in the South.   Soon teams like the Knights and Wizards can be playing all over the South playing that type of fundamentally sound basketball that white players like Jason Williams and Chris Dudley have made famous.  Lewis stressed that he’s not racist, but merely “what we’re stressing here is a more fundamental basketball, which blatantly fits white players better.”

We here at thatsrightnate.com salute Don Lewis.   There comes a time to say, “We refuse to sit on the front of the bus”.  That time is now.

For many years, whites were not allowed to be Pullman porters

Like many Americans I had believed that racism was a thing of the past.   I had believed that if it hadn’t been ended by Bill Cosby and his constant parade of jazz musician friends on the Cosby Show, it most certainly had been ended by the election of Barack Obama.  I can see now that just below the surface of our color blind society was racism ready to rear it’s ugly head.

Racism in this country has a long and ugly history going back at least 100 years if not longer.   At first, racism was mostly something that happened to black people and other minorities, but as times changed racism has primarily been against white people.  For years, African Americans had their own baseball league called The Negro Leagues where whites were not allowed to play.   In literature, the entire Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s and 1930s excluded white people.   In more recent times, record labels like Motown in Detroit and Chess in Chicago all but ignored white artists.

I believe this recent spate of racism starts at the top.   Barack Obama is the most racist against white people President we have had in this country since Chester A. Arthur.   One need only look at poor Joe Wilson who has been lynched by the media for his supposedly racist act of yelling “You lie” at the President during his speech to congress last week.   I don’t see how that can possibly be considered racist.    Joe Wilson’s son defended his father.   “There is not a racist bone in my dad’s body,” said Alan Wilson, an Iraq veteran who is running for state attorney general in South Carolina. “He doesn’t even laugh at distasteful jokes. I won’t comment on former President Carter, because I don’t know President Carter. But I know my dad, and it’s just not in him.”

Joe Wilson is an honorable man.   He would never have been allowed in the Sons of Confederate Veterans if he wasn’t.   This is not the type of person who would do anything racist.  Joe Wilson has always honored our country’s troops and veterans, which is why he’s championed flying the Confederate flag over Southern state capitals in support of the brave sacrifices made by our country’s brave Confederate veterans.

I long for the days when different races can live together in peace.  I’ve mentioned before that my father marched with Martin Luther King in Chicago and while King got all the headlines for his speeches, it was my dad and his friends who patrolled the streets armed only with baseball bats  to make sure no race riots occurred.   I know that if he were alive today John Peele would make the plea to all of us, “can’t we all get along?”

The signs have been out there for some time now.   The sales of mayonnaise are stagnant in this country while salsa is flying off of grocery shelves.   Michael Jackson gets a huge funeral in Los Angeles, while Karl Malden gets a brief mention.   Even white youth are listening to hip hop and playing basketball.   The white male anchor is nearly extinct on local television as stations team up minority males and white women on their anchor teams.  We are losing the culture war.

It gets worse.   Being a white male used to insulate you from tough economic times, but now white men are barely making 20% more than the rest of society.  Even our country club swimming pools are no longer safe from mulit-culturalism.   We are soon to control only75% of the Supreme Court. You call that justice?

We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on our lawn.   Lately, it seems Pat Buchanan is the only one who gets this.  If we are going to survive in America as a people, it is important that our culture not disappear, but just as important is ecnomic empowerment.   If we support white owned businesses, they  can take that money and reinvest it in our gated communities.   By doing this, we can lift us all up.   This is going to be difficult and there are times we will have to live without.   You know I love good bbq as much as anyone, but I’m going to start shop only white owned businesses myself.  We all have to be in this together because white empowerment will lift us all.

When Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a reverse racist today, a bunch of lefties got their panties all in a bunch.   They had never known there was such a thing.   Racism is an irrational prejudice or dislike of another person because of their race.   For example, black people are lazy therefore I won’t hire you or Mexican people are all illegal immigrants so I don’t like you.   Racism of this type has been eradicated from this country I am happy to say.   Now some minorities will deny this because they are trying to get special privileges for being a minority.

Reverse racism is an irrational prejudice or dislike of another race for equally silly reasons like your ancestors owned my ancestors or your race wiped my people off the face of the map or you pay your white self storage employees more than the rest of us. I am sorry to say that reverse racism is thriving in today’s society. You can look at the career of Donovan McNabb or Lebron James who were elevated to superstar status simply because their respective sport wanted an African-American star. Why is it that white men supposedly have no rhythm? It is because reverse racist record producers insist on using African beats.

Now, Rush Limbaugh calls Obama the greatest reverse racist around, “Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he’s appointed one — you getting this, AP?” and he may well be. I say this not because he is especially vitriolic, but because he is from a mixed race family and at the same time he looks down on blacks for not being as white as him, he also looks down on whites for not being as black as him. What’s worse he won the election because whites saw him as one of their own and so did blacks. If you take off the white votes he got for being white and his black votes for being black and discount the Mexicans who are still made at the Republicans for immigration policy, McCain wins in a landslide.

I’m afraid as Limbaugh points out, “And the libs of course say that minorities cannot be racists because they don’t have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power.” Sadly, that isn’t true anymore. Blacks are making over 70% what whites make now, if Sotomayor gets picked for the Supreme Court women will control 16.6% of the votes on the highest court in the land, and salsa outsells good old American ketchup in this country even when you add its sales to the sales for catsup. Welcome to a brave new world. I don’t think I care for it much.

I leave you with the words of that old white spiritual that eased the burdens of so many of our ancestors as they took the long drive to their office from the suburbs:

“There’s a summer place
Where it may rain or storm
Yet I’m safe and warm
For within that summer place
Your arms reach out to me
And my heart is free from all care

For it knows
There are no gloomy skies
When seen through the eyes
Of those who are blessed with love

And the sweet secret of
A summer place
Is that it’s anywhere
Where two people share
All their hopes
All their dreams
All their love”
Theme from a Summer Place, The Lettermen, 1965

Were the BYU Cougars robbed of the National Championship?

A recent article in the Washington Examiner has stirred up a bit of controversy.  In it the commentator Byron York claimed that Obama’s support was inflated in polls because of his extremely high popularity with African-Americans.  Some on the left have called York’s argument racist in that he seeks to discount African-Americans, but I see a lot of merit to it.  I wanted to look at the effect of African-Americans on one poll in particular.

In the College Football Polls at the end of the 2009 season, Florida ended the season ranked number 1, Brigham Young was only ranked 23rd with a 10-3 record.  However, Florida had a considerably larger portion of their team made up of African-Americans.  Whether Cougar QB Max Hall was handing off to Harvey Unga or passing downfield to Austin Collie, the Brigham Young team showed they could win without all but a handful of  African-American players.   Florida, however, chose to stuff their roster full of players of color.  Tom Tebow may be white, but he’d have a hard time moving the ball without his black teammates.   Most of the best players on Florida are all African-American.

Now, just like Byron York, some people on the left are going to accuse me of racism.  There is nothing wrong with football players of color.   My point is, when teams are so stacked with African-Americans, the work of many gifted white players is overshadowed just as the overwhelming support of blacks is making Obama look much more popular than he really is among Americans.  The obvious answer in political polls is to simply count black opinions for less.   Perhaps we could count them for 3/5 what we count white opinions for.   However, fixing the final football polls is much tougher.  I have several good suggestions though.

• Increase the importance of kicking and punting in football.   These are areas that white people traditionally excel at.
• De emphasize speed in the game by requiring players to wear weighted shoes if they run a 40 yard dash in under 4.7 seconds
• Reserve 4 of the 8 BCS  slots for majority white teams

Until we take steps like these, white teams will continue to be deprived their place at the table.  Who is the greatest white running back in American football?  I honestly can’t say.

I’ve received a number of comments and questions about St. Jing-Tao-Wow Day and I thought I’d answer them all at one place.

What is St. Jing-Tao-Wow Day? Saint Jing-Tao-Wow Day is a new American holiday that was created after listenning to Lou Dobbs.  The day celebrates the ethnic stereotypes that unite our country and will be celebrated on Tuesday March 31st.  To hear Lou Dobbs’ comments on the holiday try this link .

Why ethnic stereotypes? This country has long been under the belief that we are great because we are a melting pot of all the immigrant groups already in this country.  However, the next immigrant group whether it be Irish, Italians, Asians, or Mexicans are the ones who will really mess this place up.  This attitude has led to a lot of ethnic jokes, slurs, and stereotypes and I think it is good for us to remember exactly what was said about our own people because it reminds us not to be so quick to stereotype other cultures. It is basically an ethnic version of a gay pride parade.   I am sure this is what Lou Dobbs meant when he called for a “We’re all the same day”

How can I participate? Like all great holidays, I expect that everybody will come up with their own way to keep it in their heart, but spreading the word will help spread the holiday.  If you have a blog mention it.  If you post on a forum please mention it there.  The only way a holidy can take off is through word of mouth.   Join the Facebook event group started by Richard Wang (Thanks!) and check out some of the great posts about the holiday on the internets at Zenyenta 2.0, Just My Little Piece of the World, and Fair.org.   Of course there is the Saint Jing-Tao-Wow Day video on the Youtubes also. When the day comes, celebrating is as simple as picking an activity that is stereotypical for your ethnic group and doing it whether that means playing basketball, building a submarine with a screen door, or driving poorly.   Then come here and post about it.

What kind of food is served for the holiday? Any ethnic food is appropriate, but even more appropriate is Americanized ethnic food like Olive Garden, Panda Express, or Taco Bell.

I don’t have an ethnic group.  Can I still participate? Wasp is still an ethnic group you goof.  Go oppress some minorities and then dance really poorly.

Does Lou Dobbs know about this? Lou is very busy right now defending our borders, but I’d like to think that if we all believe in Saint Jing-Tao-Wow hard enough, Mr. Dobbs will know.

I’m really pushing this holiday folks.  I don’t know if my little blog has the gravitas needed to give this idea the push it needs, but over the next 12 days, I’m going to be pushing hard for Saint Jing-Tao-Wow Day wherever I can on the internet.  I think Lou Dobbs has inspired me  and I feel compelled to act.  Let’s spread the word.

Did the NBA give Michael Jordan special treatment because they wanted a black star?

I had thought we put this whole race thing behind us when Barrack Obama was elected President of the United States, but apparently the topic refuses to die.  Race is obviously a very important topic to me as my own father marched with King when he was in Chicago.   Unfortunately, despite all the progress that has been made in the area, we still have people like Attorney General Eric Holder who refuse to let it go.  According to a speech Holder gave yesterday that “we are a nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing the “awkward and painful” subject of race relations in our country.

Like many of my colleagues on the right, I take umbrage at what Mr. Holder says.  I have always been forthright about race relations and I stood up to the principal of my high school when he refused to let the school newspaper run the article I wrote about the only reason Michael Jordan was getting so much attention was because the NBA wanted a black star.  Nobody in this country knows more about racism than white people do.  We first came to this country in 1492, while African-Americans didn’t start making the journey in large numbers for nearly 200 years.  That meant that we had time to establish the beginnings of American civilization before adding another race into the mix.  That allows us to see the issue of race with greater clarity. And let me say that we white people are not cowardly.

It was none other than former Republican Senator George Allen who spoke at the Capital Hill Club (An integrated club I might add) today and said, “I grew up in a football family.  In sports, what you have is a level playing field…you don’t care about race, all you care about is who can help you win.  Team America has to have that competitive spirit!”  I believe the Republican party is the steroids that can help take us to the next level.  African-Americans need to look at why they’re so accepted in sports and entertainment and then try to apply those qualities to other areas of life.  Perhaps, a friendly game of basketball or a musical number could be the key to that next promotion.

What white America is concerned about is the Department of Justice.  Under President Bush, the department has spent the last 8 years protecting conservative values and made fighting voter fraud a top priority.  This approach led to an astounding 13 convictions in just 8 years of time.  Now Holder is talking about using the Department of Justice to “lead the nation to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our greatest President.”  I have a feeling that Reagan may have been taken out of context, but regardless that kind of talk is frightening.   Fox News’ Megyn Kelly rightfully says, “that strikes fear down the spines of many conservatives in this country.”

Like many conservatives, she fears that Obama will bring us back to the time when decisions like Brown vs. the Board of Education put the federal government into states rights issues.  If every perceived slight or systematic segregation leads to a Department of Justice lawsuit, where will we be.  As the lovely Miss Kelly put it, “a lot of us thought that the Bush Justice Department sort of got us back to the point where we were being reasonable.”  I couldn’t agree more.  It doesn’t matter where you’re sitting on this bus, we’re all going to the same place.

Make no mistake about it, a monument like this says a lot about Roland Burris

They say politics makes strange bedfellows and as I sit here campaigning hard for the Democrat controlled US Senate to seat Roland Burris to replace Barrack Obama.  However, that is exactly what I am doing.  I’ve made no mystery of my fondness for Governor Blagojevich despite our differing politics, but the important thing here is that as governor of Illinois Blagojevich was doing his Constitutional duty.  Therefore, Burris  should be seated.

On top of his past in statewide office, one of the things that makes Burris so qualified is like great leaders of the past such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Roland Burris has a monument.    I have noticed that throughout the world it seems that the greater the man is the greater her monument.  Burris is no exception.  Not content to wait for his posterity to honor him after his demise, Burris has taken the mantle of honoring himself by the horns and the results are spectacular.

We could wait until there was a special election in Illinois or until the Lieutenant Governor appoints somebody, but what are the odds that anyone will ever build them a monument let alone one this nice.  The other problem of course is that he is African-American so by not seating him isn’t the congress just engaging in racism?  It sure seems that way.  As Burris calls himself on his monument, he is indeed a Trail Blazer.