From Media Matters: Following are Sherrod’s remarks at the March 27 NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet (the section in bold is what Breitbart’s video included — the rest was omitted):

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[11:50] SHERROD: I made the commitment on the night of my father’s death at the age of 17 that I would not leave the South, that I would stay in the South and devote my life to working for change. And I’ve been true to that commitment all of these 45 years.
[...]

[16:34] SHERROD: God is good. I can tell you that. When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people — and to black people only. But you know God will show you things and he’ll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people –

AUDIENCE: All right. All right.

SHERROD: — you know. The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me — I knew what he was doing.

AUDIENCE: All right.

SHERROD: But he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed that the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me; either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the training that we had provided ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer, so I figured if I’d take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

That’s when it was revealed to me that y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not — you know, it opened my eyes, ’cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands, and said, OK, I’ve done my job. But, during that time, we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and — so, they couldn’t foreclose on him. And I want you to know that the county supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they’ve done to any other farmer, black or white. And what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine — I’m thinking he’s being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of ’87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I’ll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer’s office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there — he had been paying this lawyer, y’all. That’s what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, “Well, y’all are getting old. Why don’t you just let the farm go?” I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer — I told him, I can’t believe you said that. I said: It’s obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I’ll do whatever you say — whatever you think — that’s the way he put it. But he’s paying him. He wasn’t paying me any money. You know, so he said — the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. And that’s when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see — help me find the lawyer who would handle this. And finally, I remembered that I had gone to see one just 40 miles away in Americus with the black farmers. So, I –

[VIDEO CUT*]

SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t.

AUDIENCE: That’s right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think it helps to — you know, when I learned this, I’m like, oh, my goodness. You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black — there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other — nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.

But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying — you know, the people with money — you know, they started — the poor whites and poor blacks — they — you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it — you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.

So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when the put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they — it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we’ve come up on something here that can last generations — and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.

The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power.

[APPLAUSE]

[...]

[25:03] SHERROD: I couldn’t say 45 years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I’m saying — what I will say to you tonight. Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we’d probably be dead now.

But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together and — you know, it’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks here tonight ’cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point as Tony Morrison said race exists but it doesn’t matter. We have to work just as hard — I know it’s — you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive — you know, our children won’t have the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and have a good life if we can’t figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.
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* According to Jake Tapper, “NAACP says the tape was changed at the 21:00 mark. no edits, just a tape change.”

I think I’m just a little too old to believe in that many coincidences.

Anyway, though…

Apparently when others were piling on Shirley Sherrod yesterday, or running away from her, Lizardoids and Johnson consistently stood up for her, without even knowing what the rest of the story was. They just knew Breitbart and his tactics and what a liar he is (my addition) and figured there WAS a rest of the story.

Cole seems to think they were just about the only ones, but I am not sure about that – I didn’t hear about any of this until this morning, so most of the (non-right wing) reactions I’ve found are to the proven Breitbart lies.

One thing I didn’t know, brought out by one of LGF’s commenters, teh mantis, last night:

The whole story is BS. Brietbart has conveniently edited out the context of this story, but he forgot one crucial detail. Notice where she says that the story took place just after Chapter 12 bankruptcy was established for family farms? Andrew really should have edited that out. You know why? Chapter 12 was so established in 1986. What was Shirley Sherrod doing in 1986? She was running the New Communities black farm coop in Georgia. She was not employed by the government in any way. Some white farmer called a black coop looking for help. She helped him, but not as much as she “could” if, you know, he were a black farmer and thus would have some interest in the coop. They also gave farmers help restructuring their loans and whatnot, so she referred him to a lawyer who could help him, despite his condescending attitude.

I should also note that the her coop and the associate RDLN recently won a $1 billion+ settlement for black farmers after they were systematically denied loans provided to white farmers in the early eighties, complements of Ronnie Reagan (Pigford v. Glickman). But we all know it was those black farmers banding together in their cooperative farming blackness that are the real racists.

I don’t know why this story hit me so badly. I guess because this woman could be any one of the older Black women I know, have known - the ones who have toiled for years, taken all the spit, all the insults, all the sexism, all the racism, all the people refusing to stand by them, all the comments about being “welfare queens”, or “lazy” or having 10 kids, and all the suspicious glances when *anything* at all goes wrong, and working daily with the knowledge that should something major go wrong, it’s likely you’ll be the first gone, last rehired  – and to get through all of that to a place where you are looked up to, where you are doing good, where are where you deserve to be because you paid your dues - only to have some lying cretin with a history of targeting relatively powerless Black folks swoop down and blithely pull everything you’ve worked for away from you in the effort to get that guy, over there…

Shame. Shame on Breitbart, his supporters, the dissiminators of this nonsense, limp pickle Vilsack and the Obama admin, too, if they don’t restore this woman’s life.

The full video and transcript, at TPM

TPM (emphasis mine)

Shirley Sherrod, an appointee to the USDA, was forced to resign yesterday after Big Government posted a video of a speech Sherrod gave in March. In the video, Sherrod, who is black, recounts how, 24 years ago, she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could.

In the speech, given to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP, Sherrod recounts a time when, while she was working for a land assistance fund, a white farmer came and asked her for help.

“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” she said. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

[...]

But Sherrod told first to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and then CNN that her comments were taken out of context. She says that the anecdote was part of a larger story, one in which she explains how she overcame her initial prejudice.”The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race,” she told the AJC, adding that she went on to help other white farmers.

Big Government has not posted the full speech.

[...]

Wilkerson also told us that the full speech is exactly as Sherrod described, and that she goes on to explain learning the error of her initial impression and helping the farmer keep his farm.

[...]

Sherrod identified the white farmer as Roger Spooner. CNN today interviewed his wife, Eloise Spooner, who said Sherrod had helped her and her husband save their farm.

“She’s a good friend … she helped save her farm,” Spooner said, adding that Sherrod did all she could to help them. “They have not treated her right.”

At first, the national NAACP released a statement supporting Sherrod’s resignation.

So this Breitbart cretin (part of the collective that also produced the falsely edited ACORN videos that not only got people fired, but were responsible for the demise of a nation-wide community organizing group), now is so stung by the NAACP asking teabaggers to repudiate the racists in their party that he has doctored a video in order to “prove” that the NAACP condones racism, too. Against whites.

I can just imagine how long and hard this woman worked, what she put up with in order to make it to the place where she was – only to have it all burned to the ground by in moments by the actions of some puny little man whose ethics apparently can only be spied with a magnifying glass. Disgusting. What kind of person do you have to be to just one day arbitrarily decide to ruin someone’s life? For a political victory? Though, hopefully, a very transient one as even political allies start to realize what a dishonest person you are.

Even more disgusting is wimpy Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack running her out of town on a rail (so to speak) before the full story is even known – even knowing the dubious reputation of Breitbart and his site. And the NAACP rushing in to condemn her as well (though they have now retracted that, promising to investigate.) And maybe, or maybe not, the Obama Administration. Even if they didn’t push for her firing, someone needs to restore this woman’s life.

I will probably clean this up later so that it makes more sense (and is grammatically correct and all that!) but right now I am just so angry I don’t even care what it looks like.

(Update to add links to people who say it much better than I do)

What Willis said: Barack Obama Cedes Presidency To Glenn Beck

Surprise! Sherrod Video Was Heavily Edited [Fox Update]

The WH’s reward for caving to a Fox smear

Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.

Don’t speak too soon: I’ve been reading this clown for months now and this is probably the only time he doesn’t soak a discussion about Civil War history with melodrama about slavery.

Dog forbid one should clog up discussions of Civil War history with “melodrama” about slavery.

No link. I did some looking around the forum where I found this (following a link from a link to something I was interested in) and it’s not a place I would send either of my two readers to, or anyone else.

Oh, the “clown” he is talking about is Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who has been having some amazing discussions on his blog about Civil War history, the characters… and what I think makes these folks hopping mad – the primary cause.

This innocence does not exist. As horrific as it is, and as many images and associations it brings up, the comparison of this law to 1930’s/40’s Germany is a cop-out. We don’t need to reach across oceans, time, and cultures to find parallels for the egregious actions being taken now in Arizona and contemplated in other states. We have many parallels much, much closer to home.  Most of which we, as a nation, would prefer to ignore.

The Arizona Republic

Since the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz by a suspected illegal immigrant in March, politicians and the national press have fanned a perception that the border is inundated with bloodshed and that it’s escalating.

In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that the failure to secure that border between Arizona and Mexico "has led to violence – the worst I have ever seen.”

******

Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.

"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."

******

Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today’s rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality.

"This is a media-created event," Dupnik said. "I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure."

Fox News (via)

the Arizona Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state that critics say currently advocate separatism and racial preferences.

The bill, which passed 32-26 in the state House, had been approved by the Senate a day earlier. It now goes to Gov. Jan Brewer for her signature.

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”  (via)

******

Frederic Mitchell at Jack and Jill Politics

The WSJ is reporting that the Arizona Department of Education is also pressuring principals to remove teachers who speak English with an accent to students who are learning English.

Arizona’s enforcement of fluency standards is based on an interpretation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. That law states that for a school to receive federal funds, students learning English must be instructed by teachers fluent in the language. Defining fluency is left to each state, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education said.

“The teacher obviously must be fluent in every aspect of the English language,” said Adela Santa Cruz, director of the Arizona education-department office charged with enforcing standards in classes for students with limited English.

 

You’ll notice that no one is providing ANY type of empirical evidence supporting the utter ignorance that believes accents or pronunciation has anything to do with learning ability.

But this is even worse:

That poses a dilemma for Ms. Agneessens, the principal. In kindergarten, three of four classes are for English-language learners. Two of those three classes are taught by immigrants whose English didn’t pass muster.

Ms. Agneessens said she was trying to find a way to retain those two teachers by shifting them into classrooms not designated for English-language learners, even if that meant teaching a different grade. Both teachers declined to comment for this article.

Recently, she informed one experienced kindergarten teacher that she would have to be reassigned to a mainstream class in a higher grade in the fall, if she wished to remain at the school.

“We both cried,” she said.

Astonishing as the authors and supporters of these policies may find it, there is just no way that this can work as easily as it did before, for a few reasons:

1. Sunlight. People, to this day, still think that the reason Black and other of color folks don’t live in certain areas, or at least not in any numbers, is because “they don’t want to”, or “it’s too cold there”, and so on, as opposed to the fact that they were chased/forced/threatened out – and there was no media to report it, or anyone to care if they did. What is going on in Arizona, though, cannot be done in darkness.

2. Power. Latinos of today have far more political power than African Americans of yesteryear even thought of. They are a large and growing constituency, with buying power and voting power, who most sensible politicians do not want to cross.

3. The Civil Rights Movement. Though the Republican party itself is a sort of backlash against the Civil Rights movement and its still incomplete results, most people – and particularly most businesses – do not like to be seen as being on the wrong side of a discriminatory policy because of the gains made by those individuals at that point in time.

4. Arizona was successfully boycotted before – not surprisingly, again over issues with race, when they refused to declare a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Because of these things, among others, Arizona’s message is being heard, loud and clear, and not just by the usual suspects…

Frederic Mitchell again:

Arizona: Don’t come here if you’re not white.

“Don’t worry, there’s only a few of them and they’re with us on the big stuff.”

Good luck anyone trying to pull that one on again.

Liz Cheney ratchets up the disgusting campaign led by Senator Chuck Grassley to impugn DOJ appointees who represented Gitmo detainees. Ackerman:

You know, [the lawyers who] provided the representation that the Rehnquist and Roberts Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled those detainees are entitled? And which even the military commissions provide for? Instead, there’s this McCarthyite tactic of calling Justice Department lawyers the “Gitmo Nine,” a name that oh-so-cleverly suggests that those lawyers were themselves detained at Guantanamo.

Of course the "Gitmo Nine" isn’t devious enough for Cheney, so she goes with the "Al-Qaeda Seven." Not only does she presume that all suspected terrorists are guilty before due process, but she ignores the reality that only a fraction of the detainees held at Gitmo were even accused of Al-Qaeda ties in the first place.

There are more examples there, go read.

I don’t really like blogging about politics but it’s stuff like this that makes me realize how important it is, sometimes, to just take a public stand against these odious people.

via

Craig Silverman at CJR has this somewhat odd story:

Dr. Aaron Sell, a researcher at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, has been hearing from a lot of old friends and colleagues over the past couple of weeks—and he’s not happy about it.

The calls and e-mails are flowing in thanks to a January 17 article published in London’s Sunday Times that prominently featured Dr. Sell’s research. Headlined “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses,” here’s how it started:

IT really is a case of blonde ambition. Women with fair hair are more aggressive and determined to get their own way than brunettes or redheads, according to a study by the University of California.
Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way — the so-called “princess effect”.
Even those who dye their hair blonde quickly take on these attributes, experts found.

The story quotes Dr. Sell as saying, “We expected blondes to feel more entitled than other young women — this is southern California, the natural habitat of the privileged blonde. What we did not expect to find was how much more warlike they are than their peers on campus.”

Here’s the problem: Dr. Sell’s research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PDF), had nothing to do with blondes.  It dealt with attractiveness and anger, and found that women who consider themselves to be more attractive are more prone to anger, among related findings.

I’m actually not sure if the real study conclusions are much better, but it’s interesting that the reporter thought that either “attractive = blonde”, or that his readers somehow needed to believe it does.

The author of the article seems to also be a bit of a fabulist:

In regards to the Times piece, Dr. Sell told me that the paper didn’t just misinterpret his data. That quote from him about southern California being “the natural habitat of the privileged blonde”? He said it was “fabricated.”

Good grief.

Anyway, I got the Phantom Blonde comic book cover at the top from Swanshadow’s blog. Here is what he has to say about it:

As for the Blonde Phantom, she’s something of a pioneer herself.

The Blonde Phantom — in everyday life, secretary Louise Grant — was one of the "second wave" of superheroines introduced in the post-World War II era, as the mostly male heroes of the war years began to decline in popularity. Based on the physical attributes of such wartime pinup queens as Betty Grable (whom the Blonde Phantom resembles), these heroines — including Phantom Lady, the Black Canary, Venus, and Sun Girl, — were designed to appeal both to the returning servicemen and to female readers.
Most of these characters, sadly, were short-lived, though interest in many of them (especially Black Canary and Phantom Lady) has picked up in recent years. The Blonde Phantom remains largely forgotten. But you have to love a woman who could fight crime wearing a floor-length, slit-skirted red dress and high heels.

Fun stuff.

But it’s not entirely my fault. It usually goes something like this:

News breaks! I am full of outrage (or the even more furious poutrage) and sit down at my computer to start to send my displeasure clattering away through the intertubes, I’m really into a groove, just getting ready to -

“Grandma! The baby has a plastic bag on his head!”

I rush over, remove all plastic bags from heads and wherever else they are not supposed to be, get things calmed down and then sit down to recommence my rant, getting to the heart of why -

“Nanette! NANETTE! Can you get me a cup of coffee?”

I go refill my mother’s coffee cup, getting the creamer and sweetener just right and heating it up to the perfect temperature and then make sure her water glass is filled before getting back to expressing, in unambiguous terms just how angry –

“Grandma! We’re hungry! And the baby’s trying to smother the cat!”

I run to save the cat, then slap together something tasty and nutritious – or, at least quick – for everyone to eat, make sure more food winds up in the toddler’s mouth than on the floor, swipe a cloth over the counters, get the kids down for a nap, then get ready to really delve into the finer points of -

“Nanette! NANETTE! Can I get my cigarettes now?”

I check the time, go and hand mom her cigarettes for the time period, then walk slowly back to my computer – at which point, it seems like a good idea to check the original story so I can remember what I was writing about – only to find out that the whole thing has changed anyway, that what was reported wasn’t the whole thing and that there really is little to be outraged about after all. Or maybe more, but different reason.

So. I may miss out on good rants (and who doesn’t enjoy one of those from time to time?) but I find it easier and less time wasting just to wait for a bit before spouting off.