If you get rid of it, it'll still be there

If flying the Confederate battle flag is outlawed, then only outlaws will blah, blah, blah:

Once you have this neo-Confederate mentality at some level of your consciousness, I don’t really have to tell you how to vote or give you a position on some issue — you’ll have this idea already, it naturally comes out of your consciousness. Neo-Confederacy forms American consciousness.

[...]

I’m interested to see whether this current reaction against Confederate symbols lasts more than three months because they’re going to organize a counter reaction. Even if you get rid of the license plates and flags through legislation, the movement’s still going to be there. And people might go home thinking a victory has been won.

Maybe they could go full Philly dogwhistle and fly Irish flags or stick little shamrock symbols on their vehicles.

Poking around a white supremacist constitution so you don't have to

Following some bouncing links the other day (seriously, don't ask), I stumbled across the "Constitution" of the "Northwest American Republic," a proposed white supremacist nation seeking to establish itself somewhere in Cascadia and currently operating out of, I believe, Port Orchard, Washington. The draft constitution's bill of rights contains the expected conservative wackadoo provisions ("The right to life of unborn children, beginning at conception, shall be respected and enforced by the state"; "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be qualified or restricted by any requirement of licensing, registration, fee, taxation, restriction on transportation, or other such impediment"), a couple of unexpectedly progressive provisions ("All residents and citizens of the Republic shall have the right to adequate and life-preserving medical care, free of charge"; "All citizens and residents of the Republic shall enjoy the right, free of charge, to all such education, technical training, vocational training, and instruction as shall be within their innate personal capacity to understand, assimilate, and apply in life"), and at least one hilairiously qualified provision ("All residents and citizens of the Republic shall enjoy the right to complete freedom of speech, freedom of artistic and creative expression, and freedom of the press. (This article shall not be construed as limiting or interdicting the right of the government of the Republic or competent local authority to control or prohibit expressions of obscenity and/or pornography.)").

Though of course I don't agree with the understood policy behind this particular enumeration of rights, I get it. The drafters are looking to promote education among the populace and to keep people non-broke and healthy, both for the better functioning of the republic. They also want everyone to have as many guns as possible and ban abortions and likely a lot of forms of contraception as well, because they're conservative wackadoos. And they want people to be able to say the n-word but not the f-bomb, because they're racist conservative wackadoos.

Now, I'm a lawyer, so I poked around the constitution's sections relating to lawyering and the judiciary. Interestingly, strangely, and/or bizarrely, the constitution refers to a judiciary but there's no actual judicial branch of the national government. That is, there are executive and legislative branches of the government, but no third-arm judicial check on them. The policy here is stated clearly in the constitution itself: they don't dig so-called judicial activism ("The courts and judiciary shall have no governmental or policy-making role whatsoever within the State; these powers are reserved to the legislative and executive branches"). Again, policy I don't agree with, but I understand the mindset it's coming from.

But then then constitution goes full-on "let's kill all the lawyers":

No resident, citizen, or other person charged with a criminal offense before the courts of the Republic shall be denied the right to counsel and advocate of his choice, provided such counsel or advocate shall accept no fee, reward, emolument in money or kind, property or thing of value, officially or unofficially, for the performance of such function, and shall affirm such on oath before the commencement of trial or other proceeding.

Emolument is a term that means simply "payment" but sounds classy because it's used in the U.S. Constitution and also that sneaky Hillary "Benghazi Vince Foster Whitewater" Clinton has run afoul of the Emoluments Clause not once but twice. Twice! More like BENGHOLUMENTS, amirite?

That distraction aside, the constitution goes further elsewhere as well:

No citizen or resident of the Northwest American Republic may charge or accept any monetary emolument, fee, gift, or anything of value for performing any service connected with law, legal processes, trial or litigation, or for speaking in defense of a defendant in any legal case.

I'm killin' myself here trying to understand the policy behind this provision. Lawyers can't get paid? For any lawyering work? I mean, never mind how this mechanism goes beyond merely discouraging "frivolous" lawsuits and effectively shuts down the courts as a meaningful institution. But no paying for a will, a power of attorney, a business transaction? No hiring someone to do some sabre-rattling for you when your insurance company balks at paying out a claim? How about notarizing documents? Isn't notarizing a "service connected with law"?

How do they expect to fill their judges' benches? I mean, banning compensation for lawyers is a disincentive to become a lawyer. Or even if you do become a lawyer, then it's a disincentive to become an experienced lawyer. And isn't it best to have judges who come from the ranks of experienced trial lawyers?

The constitution appears to restrict the courts to trial-level tribunals. Is there no appeal system? Does this constitution de-activist the courts to such a degree that it gives a magistrate the final decision power of a court of last resort?

At least the constitution doesn't abolish the writ of habeas corpus.

Finally, most importantly, and the real reason for why we need to adopt the Northwest Front's constitution as America's new, improved constitution, and I mean truly above all else, is that it enshrines dueling as a civil right for male residents and citizens:

In order to instill and maintain the highest standards of personal courtesy, deliberation, maturity, integrity and courage in the manhood of the Republic, the State President in his capacity as chief magistrate shall establish and supervise a National Honor Court. The said body shall in turn create and enforce all necessary regulations, procedures, and protocols for the resolution of personal differences between individual male residents and citizens of the Republic, up to and including private combat by mutual consent, in accordance with the ancient and historic traditions and practices of the European family of nations.

Ancient and historic! Also Spielbergian:

"This makes them immune to the Jew."

Vice.com reads 8chan so you don't have to:

Over the last couple of months, a motley crew of white supremacists, Latvian lawyers, and fertile women have heeded the call [to establish a white people's homeland in Namibia], in a last-ditch effort to save white culture. They have launched a project to found a new nation on the principles of "European Heritage," "Western Values," and National Socialism in the largely black country in southern Africa.

The article is good for a laugh, and I'm glad the author screencaps so much, so that I don't have to sully my own internet connection by going to 8chan.

Illegal immigrant parent to a citizen child? That's grounds for CPS to take your kid away

Fuck ICE, fuck Customs and Border Protection, fuck anti-"anchor baby" lunatics, and fuck everybody involved in separating a 4-year-old American citizen from her immigrant family and deporting her to her family's country of origin, Guatemala.

The Ruizes embody the difficulties of a family divided by citizenship. Mr. Ruiz, 32, was born and raised in a small village outside Guatemala City. He came to the United States illegally in 1996 because, he said, "we were in a very poor situation in my country."

He settled on Long Island, finding work tending lawns. He eventually married another Guatemalan, Brenda Dubon, and they had two children: Emily and Christopher, 3.

Mr. Ruiz said he and his wife sent Emily to Guatemala for the winter because they worried that the cold weather in New York would aggravate her asthma. They are distraught, he said, that the family has been kept apart.

"This is very unfair because she is a citizen," he said, "and she is a very little girl."

Ruiz went to the airport to fetch his daughter as she returned home from the trip to Guatemala. The flight was diverted to another state, where he was threatened with losing custody of his child to state authorities if he attempted to reunite with her. Because, apparently, being a hard-working, gainfully employed, tax-paying illegal immigrant parent to a citizen child is grounds for CPS to terminate your parental rights. So dad had Grandpa take the daughter back to Guatemala, where she remains so that her parents won't get deported attempting to reunite with her.

What the fucking fuck, Virginia, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and any other fascist son of a bitch official involved in this situation? They have separated a 4-year-old child, a U.S. citizen, from her parents and sibling and sent her abroad in a ploy to get the parents removed from the country. And do you think they'd do the same thing to a child of, say, Canadian or European parents? I'm an anchor baby child of two immigrant parents, but I "pass" for "American" because I have an Anglo name and my parents are both of European extraction. Do you think ICE and CBP would have tried to deport me to Grandma's after spending a summer on the farm there when I was a kid?

It's making me sick to think about the state this child's parents must be in. Oh, god, even though my daughter was born a dozen years ago I still can't watch that "Baby Mine" scene from Dumbo without shaking and almost throwing up. I hope every official involved in this case rots in hell, and I hope the § 1983 suit wins the Ruiz family millions of taxpayer dollars.

"Spiritual parrots"

"Whooping," CNN tells me, "is a celebratory style of black preaching that pastors typically use to close a sermon. Some church scholars compare it to opera; it's that moment the sermon segues into song." Here's what one scholar says about white pastors who whoop:

[Rev. Patrick] Clayborn, the [assistant] homiletics professor [at Methodist Theological School] in Ohio, says the fuel for the whoop grows out of the black perspective, the experience of being among "the least, the last and lost."

"When I see a white preacher do it, it feels like they went and learned it, just like a parrot can imitate the human voice," he says. "They're like spiritual parrots."

Wow! Did you catch his meaning? When white pastors try to preach in the black tradition, it's a pale imitation of the real thing.

White pastors can't be truly, deeply, and honestly spiritual? They shouldn't be allowed to use a traditionally black style of preaching? Turn that sentiment around and you have the same crap that the Daughters of the American Revolution said about Marian Anderson -- not to be too heavy-handed about it, but really. Here, Rev. Clayborn, have a "spiritual parrot":



The converse of Rev. Clayborn's statement would be hard to bring up in polite conversation. It's too bad that the CNN article didn't address it.

Edited to add: Leontyne Price's "O mio babbino caro" kicks Maria Callas's right in the ass.

Fireworks and minivans and lynching effigies, oh my!

Well, that was a relaxing vacation. I bathed only irregularly, I saw fireworks, I went out to the suburbs twice and came back alive, and I did laundry.

Happy New Year in Plains, Georgia!

South Philly High's principal: not good enough for New Jersey schools

LaGreta Brown, principal of South Philadelphia High School, was recruited for the Philadelphia School District even though her faculty at Atlantic City High School gave her a no-confidence vote when she was principal there. Furthermore:

The New Jersey State attorney general’s office also once tried to strip her of her administrative license after allegations that she had endangered children by ordering the fire alarm system of Atlantic City High School to be dismantled during a trash-can fire. The charges, however, were dismissed by the NJ Department of Education in 2007 after an investigation [PDF].

After the “no-confidence” vote, Brown was later transferred to lead an alternative high school. She was then sent to an elementary school in the district.

An article in the Press of Atlantic City on Nov. 4, 2006 said that the “no confidence” vote came after allegations that she "mistreated students and staff."

The Philadelphia Public School Notebook blog continues with an explanation of why Brown was considered unfit to lead a high school:

In 2000, shortly after she became the first female principal of Atlantic City High, a warrant was issued when she failed to appear in court for a harassment suit from a former cafeteria worker. In 2002 [ ... ] the city fire department found 63 fire violations in the building, with two counts of falsifying fire reports "that lead directly back to Brown," according to the Press. And a teacher who accused her of harassment after she denied him a day off to observe Passover resigned after he realized she would not be reprimanded.

Brown was suspended with pay in 2007 from her position at the New York Avenue school for unspecified charges of "insubordination."

The article paints a portrait of an autocrat with demonstrated insensitivity to cultural diversity and little respect for the courts. And yet the Philly public schools actively sought her out to lead South Philadelphia High School. Since giving lip service to Asian immigrant students before the school year began, she has "failed to meet with the Asian community groups" that she promised she would work with and has not had the courtesy or basic professionalism to return their phone calls.

Why the Philadelphia schools thought that someone who was barely fit to run an elementary school in Jersey should lead a troubled urban high school of over 1400 teenagers is beyond me.

The complaints from South Philly High's Asian students

Via Helen Gym at Young Philly Politics:

South Philadelphia High School is not a safe place for us.

We are targeted because we are Asian immigrants. Every day we face taunts and violence. It hurts when we are attacked by other students. It hurts more when school staff ignore, deny, or cover up the racial attacks against us.

For the last three days we have chosen to boycott our school in order to get a real education about how to ensure our safety. This is what we have found.

On Thursday, attacks against us happened throughout the day both inside and outside of school. Adults in the school are supposed to care for us and to make us safe. Instead this is what happened. School staff:

Allowed large groups of 15-20 students to wander through the building for over four hours. These students were reported to be looking into classrooms for targets of their attacks;

Overrode one security guard’s efforts to keep a large group of students from the second floor where they did not have classes and purposefully allowed them to go running through the halls;

Ignored Asian students’ fears about going to the lunchroom following these clear signs of trouble in the building;

Forced Asian students to follow a security guard to the lunchroom where they were attacked and beaten by a crowd of students in front of several adult staff;

Failed to call all the parents of injured students for several hours after the attacks;

Refused to allow some Asian students who were seeking shelter and safety in the school at the end of the school day to stay at the school, until community advocates called 911 and arrived on the scene;

Forced Asian students who had been assaulted to leave the school building even though they were hurt and frightened;

Discounted Asian students’ fears of walking home and to their transit stops;

Directed Asian students into the streets where crowds of students had gathered and where immediately afterward they were assaulted;

Neglected to call the students and families who were victimized by the attacks to either check on their well-being or to get a full report of what happened to them;

Failed to conduct a full investigation of what happened;

Downplayed the seriousness of the attacks until they were reported in the media;

Disregarded students’ and families’ fears and recklessly called on students to return to school before even investigating what happened on Thursday; and

Refused to accept responsibility for the mistakes of school staff and administration on that day and placed all the blame on the student attackers.

Most of the students at South Philadelphia High School – Asian, African American, Latino and white – are just like us. They are trying to get an education in a school where they do not feel safe or respected. We are calling on the adults in the school and in the School District to take responsibility for the unsafe environment of South Philadelphia High School that makes it hard for all of us to learn there.

I see knee-jerk black-against-Asian racism around town on a nearly daily basis. It's a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to Philadelphia race relations, I think. Arlene Ackerman, Ed.D., the CEO of the Philadelphia public schools, is quoted in the article there as saying, "In our rush to sensationalize this latest incident, let us not as adults criminalize or victimize any racial group of students with a stroke of the pen or careless words of blame and fingerpointing." With this comment, at best she's deliberately ignoring the racial foundation of the problem. (As a community member testified: "It is a racial issue not because of the race of the attackers. It is a racial issue because students were targeted for attack because they are Asian. Throughout an entire school day, Asian students were randomly attacked, and school staff failed to protect them.") Or, worse, Ackerman is denying the reality of the experiences that the Asian immigrant students at South Philadelphia High School have had, with the excuse that the incidents haven't been reported. But she can hardly claim plausible deniability when the victimized kids point out that the school's safety manager has systematically refused to file incident reports for the express purpose of minimizing the number of incidents recorded.

Where does the buck stop? Ackerman wants it made clear that it's not her fault, because she never heard about the problems. The school is saying that it's not their fault, because the "attacks" are mere roughhousing and the Asian kids are making a mountain out of a molehill, and anyway the Asian kids started it.

Got that? All the adults are blaming the children. The school and district leadership are refusing to own their failures, and instead they're alternatively blaming the victims and denying the truth of their experiences. When a parent does that to a kid, you end up with an adult who had a lousy model for parenting and will have some issues to overcome when they have their own kids. When a school does that to a community, you end up with a whole city of adults who perpetuate the violence, racism, and dysfunctional inter-racial relations that it taught them as children.

Racist-ass hardcore band to play the First Unitarian Church next weekend

One Life Crew, a hardcore band from Cleveland, is scheduled to play the First Unitarian Church on the 6th.

The First Unitarian Church and Rev. Nate Walker should know better. An all-welcoming stance that is tolerant of diverse views shouldn't include, you know, homophobia and racial hate. It's not "censorship" to refuse to rent the space to them. By the same token, it's not an opportunity to "create a civic process that will get us all talking about racism and homophobia." When people disagree with One Life Crew's message, the group's leader goes beats them up (incident starts about 1:38).

Anyway everybody knows that venues are for tools -- real hardcore bands play basements in South Philly.

Campbell children taken from home

Well, now here's an interesting development. The family who named their kids after the biggest celebrities in the Third Reich have lost their children to their state child protection agency.

(I'm sure you saw the story from December: These freaks complained to the media because their local supermarket, which offers custom-decorated birthday cakes, refused to decorate a cake using the son's name. Wal-Mart, ever classy, was happy to sell them one, though.)

Of course the aspect of the story most pertinent to this blog is that the state agency is glomarizing the incident:

The Division of Youth and Family Services would not confirm or deny the report.

A spokeswoman said the division doesn't comment on specific families.

You say "arrest," I say "kidnap," let's settle the whole thing in federal court

Here's another one to file under "You can't pay me enough to live south of the Mason-Dixon line": a 12-year-old African-American girl was arrested by plain-clothes police in Galveston, Texas, in August, 2006. Four officers leapt out of an unmarked van, beat the girl about the head with a flashlight (causing damage to her eardrum and throat), and threatened to shoot her puppy. One of them yelled, "You're a prostitute! You're coming with me!"

The raid's actual target was a white prostitute who lived 2 blocks away.

A few weeks later, police found the girl at school, where she is an honor student, and arrested her in front of her peers and friends for assaulting the officers and resisting arrest.

You better believe a federal suit has followed, if the document I've linked to there via courthousenews.com has actually been filed. I can't check on the website of the District Court in Galveston because I don't have a PACER ID. I also couldn't find a record of the pleadings via Lexis, which means either it's not on Lexis, or I don't have the Lexis skills I thought I did. In any event, § 1983 suits can be hard to win, even when the facts look outrageous like in this case.

New Orleans is scary and you can't make me go there

I've never been interested in experiencing Mardi Gras in New Orleans (or anywhere else, really, for that matter). To each his own, of course, but drunken street parties aren't my idea of a way to let the good times roll.

A dear friend of mine waxes rhapsodic about New Orleans on a regular basis. He's been there several times, mostly for business, and always adds a day or two of vacation onto the business trip so that he can enjoy the food and music. As a vegetarian I'll pass on the jambalaya and the andouille sausage, but I guess I enjoy a beignet and a cup of hickory-coffee as much as anybody else does.

That said, someone please explain to me why I should ever visit New Orleans, and do your explaining without sounding like an apologist freak. Dig this recent article by A.C. Thompson in The Nation:

Facing an influx of refugees [after Hurricane Katrina], the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Awesome. What's even more awesome is that nobody's been investigated or prosecuted, and the vigilantes were operating with the blessing of the police. The situation was treated as completely to be expected, and not a damn thing has been done about it since 2005. But wait, there's more:

"I'm not a racist," [one of the murderous white guys] insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Dude said that with a straight face, honestly believing it is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, believe, and kill people about. He doesn't want people who aren't of his class near him. Therefore, it is acceptable to shoot at people who aren't of his class when they appear in his neighborhood, even if they appear in his neighborhood because their homes have been destroyed in a hurricane. He probably calls himself a Christian, too. And another:

"I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

I'd quote more, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can read "I'm not a racist, but" statements only so many times before you want to take the dead fish from the barrel and start slapping the speakers with the fish. The article continues with white vigilantes acting out a Red Dawn wet dream on two African-Americans who were trying to find an evacuation bus:

After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen [. . .]. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer [. . .]. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

White residents of Algiers Point weren't much more friendly to the African-American neighbors who actually lived there:

Roughly twenty-four hours [after a neighbor threatened him with "you loot, we shoot"], as Bell sat on his front porch grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go." [Bell] was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out.

And where were the police? The ones who didn't skip out ahead of the storm or who weren't doing their own "foraging" are engaging in don't ask, don't tell. For the purposes of this article, The Nation had to sue the coroner to get autopsy records, many of which were missing or incomplete.

Oh, blah, blah, blah, New Orleans government is corrupt, racism is bad, tell us something we don't know, blah. Well, I still won't put it on my list of places I need to see before I die. Bleurgh.

What if you had a conference about the 14th Amendment but no black people showed up?

What if the American Constitution Society held a conference on the 14th Amendment and Reconstruction, and not 10 people of color attended?

Sakes.

I attended 2 panels Thursday afternoon, "Originalism and the Second Founding" and "Equal Citizenship and Alienage." I counted 5 people of color in an audience of about 40. Of those 5, 2 were ACS employees in town from D.C. At least 2 others appeared to be students at Penn Law, where the conference was held. Of Thursday's 9 panelists, 3 were women (1 of whom blamed the Slaughter-House Cases decision on Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes).

I didn't attend yesterday evening's event, because I had another commitment. Didn't attend any of the panels today because I had other work to catch up on.

Sakes.

Apropos of what else was going through my mind during the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin dialectic yesterday, you know who President-elect Obama should nominate to the Supreme Court? (I mean, not to hold anyone's funeral or anything.) Prof. Derrick Bell. The confirmation hearings would be a gas.

"extraordinary step forward"

In recent video from CNN, Secretary of State Rice begins a press briefing before leaving on another pointless trip to the Middle East -- looking as though she voted for President-Elect Obama on Tuesday.

Texas newspaper finds, interviews the state's (probably) oldest active voter

Photo: Larry Kolvoord, Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman

This is Mrs. Amanda Jones of Bastrop County, Texas. She's 109. Her father was born a slave; her mother was born just after the Emancipation Proclamation. The first time she voted in a presidential election, she voted for Franklin Roosevelt -- but only after she'd paid her poll tax. (Voters in Texas were subject to poll taxes for state and local elections until 1966.)

Because she's too frail to travel to her polling place, Mrs. Jones had two of her children help her complete and send off a mail-in ballot this week.

Mrs. Jones didn't vote for Senator McCain and Governor Palin.

Governor Palin: "go ahead and call Senator Obama the N word; I won't stop you"

Governor Palin at a rally in Iowa yesterday or the day before. She accuses Senator Obama of wanting to collectivize our property. When someone in the crowd helpfully yells, "And he's a n-----!" Palin hears (she loses a beat in her speech and stumbles for a brief moment) but doesn't disagree. She doesn't know how to react or what to say. She had an opportunity here to prove to America that she is not a racist, red-baiting, divisive, unprepared, anti-American religious extremist. Instead, she chose to let the word echo around the venue:



This video includes titles over the outburst. Someone else has posted a version without displaying the offensive word.

"Hiding Behind Subordinates"

Mithras has provided a thoughtful and detailed explanation of how the national McCain campaign bears more responsibility than they'll admit for the recent "local young, white, female McCain supporter beat up by scary black Obama supporter" hoax:

To sum up, the McCain campaign and the Republican party in Pennsylvania have implied that a vote for Obama is a vote for Hitler, and that black Obama supporters will beat, sexually assault, and mutilate McCain supporters. They have done it in a way that leaves all the heat on local operatives, and insulates the national campaign.

And wraps up:

The best part: I predict McCain will drop 5 points in the polls here over the weekend.

Disney's kidding me, right?

Next year, Disney will be releasing an animated musical version of the old fairy tale "The Frog Prince." The company's original plan was to (1) use the title The Frog Princess; (2) make the girl an African-American servant to a young white woman; (3) name the girl "Maddy"; and (4) set the film in 1920s New Orleans.

First of all, recall that the girl in Walter Crane's "The Frog Prince" was a king's daughter. She was the youngest of three daughters, and she was the most beautiful. While the Brothers Grimm don't include siblings, in both versions, it wasn't the princess who had frog-body-image issues. But Disney, which apparently has been living under a rock since Song of the South, the intervening year of 1964, and Condoleezza Rice's becoming Secretary of freaking State, modernized and improved the story by making the girl a black chambermaid and using the working title of The Frog Princess.

Imagine pitching that with a straight face. She's a servant, see, and she's Disney's first African-American princess. It worked for Cinderella, right? An evil stepmother keeping her stepdaughter from going to the ball is just the same as a young white American woman ordering around her black servant, right? It's not like we're setting this during the antebellum era or anything.

So someone fussed that the girl's name, "Maddy," was too close to "Mammy," and now she'll be named "Tiana." Someone else must have fussed that, in the source story, the girl starts as an actual princess, not a servant, so now rumor has it that Tiana will, in fact, be a princess. Only she'll be from another country, since we don't have titled nobility here.

Query why Disney imports royalty for its version of the story, rather than make Tiana the daughter of a wealthy Creole family in New Orleans. Or why not put our heroine in the Harlem Renaissance? (Though, of course, using the word heroine begs the question of whether Disney ever creates heroines, as opposed to princesses.)

Don't get me wrong. It's great that Disney, for the first time in its 85-year history, is giving the princess role to an African-American girl. I mean, leaving the issue of the character's anorexic-Barbie proportions for another day, it's nice to see the studio recognize the largest ethnic minority in the country, now that they've portrayed brunette, blonde, redhead, auburn, American Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern princesses. And then, when they've strayed into non-princess stories, they've gone with dysfunctional Hawai'ian sisters without parents, orphaned witches, and, and, well, I was going to reference The Emperor's New Groove, but not only does it have only a vague ancient Incan setting, but also it's about a prince, not a princess. I'm left wondering how many other ethnicities Disney was afraid to snub before they decided it was time to give an African-American girl a tiara.

If nothing else, imagine the economic opportunity loss in the past 10-odd years since the characters have been marketed as a group of princesses!

Apparently, the next princess movies scheduled to come down the Disney pipeline are Rapunzel and then some Scottish tale. No Latino or -- forgive me -- Jewish princesses in sight.

One last point. Disney also changed the film's title to The Princess and the Frog, because apparently The Frog Princess -- and remember, in the source story, it was never the princess who was turned into a frog -- is offensive to the French. Is it just me, or is that only offensive to the French if you think the French are too stupid to understand that the word frog in this context is referring to a fairly tale first published by Crane in 1874 -- and the Brothers Grimm in 1812? The French know the story as well as we do, after all. France, being right next to Germany, has had access to German literature since long before a German invented the printing press. They call it "Le Prince grenouille," and it's so commonly recognized a title that someone's even named their hotel after it.

But I digress. Dig the teaser trailer for The Princess and the Frog:




Jumping Jehosaphat on a pogo stick -- that firefly! It's the toothless love child of Jiminy Cricket and Uncle Remus! This is "respect and sensitivity"?

Turnabout is fair play

Guess which magazine's political writer isn't welcome on Barack Obama's plane during his tour of Europe and the Middle East this week (L.A. Times)?

Flesh and blood defense falls into the wrong hands

Tax protestors and other anti-government, black-helicopter, global conspiracy theorists have argued for years that the federal government doesn't apply to them. The seeds of their theory were planted during Reconstruction as a backlash against the Fourteenth Amendment. Fast forward to the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1933, federal marshals going to Little Rock in 1957, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After inflation and the oil crisis in the 1970s resulted in family farm foreclosures in the 1980s, the movement grew in numbers and influence. Their ultimate "victory," answering Waco and Ruby Ridge, was their terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The contours of the philosophy have changed somewhat in the past 120 years, but its underlying theory was and still is a fundamental belief of biblically based white supremacy. The least unclear version of the story goes as follows: The serpent seduced Eve after feeding her the apple. Then she seduced Adam. The result was Cain and Abel, who were actually twins. One type of people descends from Abel (the northern European type), and the other from Cain (the soulless beast of the field type). How this retelling squares with a literal interpretation of the KJV is not clear to me, but then, I'm not a Christian, and even when I was, I was a papist.

But in any event, like the NRA, the origins of the flesh and blood defense were in the Ku Klux Klan, and there it remains. Most famously, the defense depends on a claim that the Fourteenth Amendment was never actually added to the Constitution correctly because of procedural deficiencies. What the deficiencies are varies from theory to theory; the one I hear the most is that Congress did not properly adjourn in the session immediately preceding the final vote on the Amendment. There's also a circular argument that it is unconstitutional because it violates the Tenth Amendment.

Here's one particularly interesting vision of the coming secular end times:

[ . . . ] Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

It's just about all there, I think. It leaves out Barack Obama only because the Washington Monthly article it's from discusses a court hearing from January, when Clinton was still a viable candidate.

Tax protestors and other conspiracy theorists end up in federal court pretty often because they do a lot of illegal things, like not paying their taxes, buying real estate with fictitious checks, and blowing up day care centers. So they've developed a theory for their defense, largely based on the bizarre claim that there is a difference between you, the living person, and the fictitious entity that the government has created for you in a mysterious database of taxpayers and citizens, which will be turned over to the U.N. as soon as Barack Obama is elected, or the race war starts, whichever comes first. It's the "flesh and blood" defense: you are a sovereign person. Therefore, court documents that refer to you as "defendant" or that print your name in capital letters do not give the court jurisdiction over you. Rather, the documents give the court jurisdiction only over the fictitious entity that the government created in its database. Which may be in New York City or Washington D.C. or Yucca Mountain, depending on who you ask.

There are supplemental theories that include nonsense about the gold fringe on the flag behind the judge, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

So about that court hearing in the Washington Monthly article. It's a consolidated federal case against some African-American gang members and drug dealers in Baltimore. They're being prosecuted for various RICO offenses, drug offenses, and murder. The defendants were cooperating with their court-appointed counsel, all very competent attorneys (including one law professor), until recently. But out of the blue, or possibly from listening to tax protestors in prison, they've adopted the "flesh and blood" defense as their legal strategy.

The defendants filed a motion to dismiss their case based on lack of jurisdiction over their sovereign person. They cited to the Uniform Commercial Code, too, to further support their case. When Federal District Court trial judge Andre M. Davis denied the motion, he tried to explain that their arguments necessarily rest on "an ideology derived from a famously discredited notion: the illegitimacy of the Fourteenth Amendment." United States v. Mitchell, 405 F.Supp.2d 602, 606 (D. Md., Dec. 19, 2005).

In other words, they're arguing that the Amendment that granted them citizenship as African-Americans is no good. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Is it a case of the chickens coming home to roost -- black people using a white supremacist theory to escape the death penalty, presumably to the white supremacists' chagrin? Or is it just incredibly sad that these guys lack the education and the critical thinking skills to know what they're doing?

As the defendants were being removed from the courtroom after the January hearing, the judge heard one of them laughing and told the court reporter to put the laugh on the record. Their flesh and blood defense strategy wore down the prosecution enough that the government is no longer pursuing the death penalty, anyway.