PHB Mobile

News Tips? Calendar Info?

Public Calendar

Press/media, organizations, and individuals send your time-based event info to: calendar@phblend.net

Full size PHB Calendar

About
-- The Blog
-- Pam | My home page
-- Autumn
-- Daimeon
-- Julien
-- "Radical" Russ
-- Terrance

Contact the Baristas









The Blend Blogrolls

Activism

Best of the Blend
Blog Posts

Special Events and Interviews

Blend-o-licious endorsements...


The Christian Civic League of Maine's Mike Hein calls Pam's House Blend:
"a leading source of radical homosexual propaganda, anti-Christian bigotry, and radical transgender advocacy."

He is "praying that Pam Spaulding will "turn away from her wicked and sinful promotion of homosexual behavior." (CCLM's web site, 10/15/07)

Ex-gay "Christian" activist James Hartline on Pam:
"I have been mocked over and over again by ungodly and unprincipled anti-christian lesbians."
(from "Six Years In Sodom: From The Journal Of James Hartline," 9/4/2006, written from the "homosexual stronghold" of Hillcrest in San Diego).

"Pam is a 'twisted lesbian sister' and an 'embittered lesbian' of the 'self-imposed gutteral experiences of the gay ghetto.'" -- 9/5/2008


Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality heartily endorses the Blend, calling Pam:

A "vicious anti-Christian lesbian activist."
(Concerned Women for America's radio show [9:15], 1/25/07)

"A nutty lesbian blogger."
(MassResistance radio show [16:25], 2/3/07)

Pam's House Blend always seems to find these sick f*cks. The area of the country she is in? The home state of her wife? I know, they are everywhere. Pam just does such a great job of bringing them out into the light.
--Impeach Bush


who monitors yours Bevis ?? Just thought I would drop you a line,so the rest of your life is not wasted.
--"Joe"
Content © 2004-2008
Pam Spaulding

House Blend logo © 2005
Melissa McEwan

Photo of Pam Spaulding
© Judy G. Rolfe
All Rights Reserved.

SITE TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Support the Blend

An Online Magazine in the Reality-Based Community.

CBS.com shuts comments down on Obama stories

by: Pam Spaulding

Sun May 06, 2007 at 08:30:00 AM EDT


What was that about racism rapidly becoming an ugly memory... (CBS.com):
Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

..."If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he said.

Nice. CBS hasn't had to turn comments off for any other candidate. I wonder why.

Meanwhile...

* Barack Obama has received the earliest Secret Service detail of any presidential candidate in history.

* Obama been the target of smears about his name and his faith (Faux News spread a source-free, now-debunked report about his being schooled at a Muslim madrassa). Obama is actually a Christian (he attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago) has never been a Muslim, The Indonesian school in question, located in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.

Even Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein, has been invoked by right wingers as a slur, a hat tip to anti-Muslim sentiment.

Of course this isn't happening in a vacuum.

* A government study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms that police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter.

* Groups linked to the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-Nazis are growing and significantly more active, holding more rallies, distributing leaflets and have sites proliferating on the Internet.

And then we have:

* Don Imus, who thought calling the Rutgers women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy-headed hos" was just a joke. After all, he's not a Klan Night Rider terrorizing families and burning down homes.

* Rush Limbaugh putting swill on the air like Obama The Magic Negro and think it's A-OK. After all, he's not placing a bomb at a black church that will kill innocent people.

* Radio host Neal Boortz uttering that then-Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) "looks like a ghetto slut," with hair that looks like "an explosion at a Brillo pad factory." After all, he didn't call her n*gger, right?.

* Bill O'Reilly, in a conversation with a caller about disproportionately how the majority of New Orleans reconstruction contracts and jobs didn't go to locals, said: "[T]he homies, you know ... I mean, they're just not going to get the job."  After all, he didn't deny them a job because of their race.

* And Michael Savage is priceless -- he said that "civil rights" are a "con" and asserted: "It's a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males' birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn't qualify for it." After all, he didn't bash the crap out of someone..

Those are examples of The Plausible Deniability Bigot.

In the minds of Plausible Deniability Bigots, racism is only defined by heinous acts by people such as the convicted felons in Jasper, TX who James Byrd behind a truck until his limbs fell off, or folks in Klan sheets burning a cross on the lawn of a minority family that moves into a white neighborhood.

More after the flip.
Pam Spaulding :: CBS.com shuts comments down on Obama stories
If you joke about how oppressed you feel about not being able to freely slur minorities (or women or gays) for entertainment's sake without any impact, you can go ahead and do so to show how you're sticking it to the PC Man. Look -- Don Imus thinks that's why he was hired -- to stoke the fires of bigotry by pushing the race and misogyny envelope -- otherwise he wouldn't be suing CBS for $40 million. His attorney said that in Imus's contract with CBS, the network specifically implored Imus to cover "extraordinary," "irreverent" and, most important, "controversial" topics on his syndicated radio show, which was simulcast daily on MSNBC.

Hmmm...I didn't realize that the Rutgers women's basketball team's perceived hair texture and status in Imus's mind as whores was a newsworthy "controversial" topic to the I-Man. 

If you are a New Plausible Deniability Racist and happen to foment racism, misogyny or homophobia among the sheeple in the process, that's just a side bonus -- and you can deny that you really meant what you said, or now say "that's what I'm paid to do" as a defense.

Dave Neiwert hits the nail on the head:

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

These are the same old sentiments wrapped up in a nice new package. Dave continues, noting that this is the right's new way of
staking out positions that, if not overtly racist, at least seek to resurrect some of the hoary mythology of the era of white supremacy. As with most of right-wing race rhetoric of the past twenty years, it's all done with a certain level of plausible deniability, couched in "jokes" or abstrations that let the speakers feign indignation when the racism is pointed out; the current trend is only slightly more overt in its racism, but the underlying sentiments aren't hard to read.

It's a step beyond wink-and-nudge racism -- or, perhaps, more like that point in the winking and nudging when the winker begins nudging harder and harder.
Tags: , , , , , , (All Tags)
Bookmark and Share
Print Friendly View Send As Email
CBS.com shuts comments down on Obama stories | 11 comments
A great, great chunk of blogging.
It's a pity you're not paid more for doing what you do, Pam.  I think if the right people read this piece, they'd hire you to be a fulltime journalist. 
I gotta hand it to you
Pam, you've articulated exactly what the problem is.  I can only hope that someone who can really make a difference (besides little old us) reads it!
[ Parent ]
Urgh, this is obviously where all the racist trolls...
...that used to stink up the Yahoo messageboards have migrated to. Any story that featured a black issue or personality used to attract literally tens of thousands of the most disgusting abusive posts imaginable. AIDS in Africa; a film featuring Will Smith, a shooting in Detroit; Desmond Tutu; Hurricane Katrina; every one was followed with grosss epithets of the kind with which we are all too familiar.

And don't get me started on what they used to say about homosexuals.

Here I go again...................
CBS should not have shut down the comments section. "Sweeping under the rug" that racism, bigotry, homophobia etc. exist is NOT going to make things any better!

The only benefit that I can see is that some peoples sensibilities' aren't going to be offended because they won't have to see what SOME people really think!

By making "Hate Speech" miraculously disappear isn't going to make "Hate" disappear!
It will just become more subversive. Minorities will still be affected by prejudices' they just won't be able to prove it since NO ONE will be talking or writing Hate Speech anymore.

This strategy IS NOT going to eliminate HATE. It's not even going to help, (in anyway) to eliminate HATE! It only builds a protective little delusional shell around "us" sensitive people.

IF you really want to eliminate HATE, (and not just use it as a power tool) then someone smarter than ME, needs to figure out a way to stop it were it REALLY begins. That would be the impact made on children by their families. "Grandpa saying all (n word)'s are monkeys and should be killed." "Mom saying all (f word)'s are going to rape and molest you." THAT'S where HATE starts and that's the only place we have a hope of stopping it. IMO

AND, it REALLY PISSES me off the I have to use (f word)/(n word) to make my point. Absolutely ridiculous!!!

      "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither"

Thomas Jefferson

"The mob is the mother of tyrants"

Diogenes

Hate is never going to die - we're hard wired for it.
It's part of the primal make-up of humankind.  Anyone who says they've never hated someone or something is lying.

Societal prejudices take years to go away - basically those who hold the prejudices as unyielding truths die off, and those prejudices as truths go to the grave with them.

Example (and this will be a little long, so forgive me):

In my hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, back in the 1910's or 1920's a group of wealthy men founded a country club where they could do the golf thing, etc.  One of the rules was that no Catholics could join.  You had to be a true Christian to belong to this club, so Jews were also not allowed.  Blacks were not allowed either.

The result was that the Catholics formed their own country club several miles away.

The status quo continued, with proper WASP families admonishing their children not to date Catholics, etc.

Fast forward to the 1950's.  One of the four Catholic parishes was looking to relocate and build a church on the main street of town, or at least that was the rumor (there was only one parcel of land suitable to the purpose).  Some upstanding citizens decided it would send the wrong message to the rest of the world to have a Catholic church on the main street of Oak Park.  Suddenly the library board decided it needed new digs, and bought up the only viable property to build a new library (it had to be demolished and rebuilt 30 years later, due to poor design).

But it was also in the 1950's that there was large influx of Irish Catholic families into Oak Park.

As Protestants, Catholics and Jews went to school together, socialized together, etc., the prejudices of their elders began to be seen as absurd.  It was also at this time that some black families began to move into the village, which caused even more friction and revealing more prejudices.  http://www.oprf.com/....

But after several years, common sense prevailed and racial integration was successful and the village served as a type of model for it, although work remains to be done.

----------------

Today, racial and religious prejudices are not something to be proud of, and most sane people disavow themselves of them, but they persist at some levels among some, if not most people.  Most decent people are intelligent enough to keep their personal prejudices to themselves.  The CBS comment board issue is probably an issue caused by the relative anonymity of the internet.

However, at least it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a person of color can make a viable run for president, which would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago.  Or a Mormon (despite how much I disagree with his politics).

I think we're moving in the right direction, just not at the speed we'd like.  Are we ever going to obtain perfection in this area?  Only  when human beings are perfect.


[ Parent ]
Exactly.
One can only hope that the new openness about what conservatives have always been all about will drive them out of power. People may be susceptible to casual racism when they don't think about issues, but when conservatives bring their true ugliness out in the open people won't want to be associated with it. One can only hope that every racial slur about Obama leads to another person turning away from conservatism.
[ Parent ]
CBS did the right thing
CBS has every right to enforce their policy against hate speech. I would have preferred that they pre-screened their comments. Surely CBS could afford to pay a few moderators, if only to moderate articles about Obama. But that is their decision to make. My only beef with this is what about homophobia as well as the anti-Latino racism that is fueling the revival of groups like the KKK?

I don't buy the "sweeping under the rug" argument at all. People used to argue against civil rights laws saying you can't legislate morality and that attitudes needed to change before laws. They were wrong. Attitudes changed because laws changed, especially in succeeding generations. Laws (and company policies like CBS') are a way for society to say what is not socially acceptable. You may not be able to eliminate hate but you can marginalize it, relegate it to the fringe. That was happening until the anti-pc movement started to make it acceptable again. Now we are seeing a backlash to that, which itself was a backlash to the excesses of the left in the 70s. Is there a danger this backlash will go too far and the pendulum will swing too far in the other direction? Of course, but if that happens then there will be a backlash to that. That's the way society works. Right now, though, the Pendulum is going in the right direction and I for one am glad that legitimate minority concerns are being taken seriously again.

[ Parent ]
And yet...
There are still black people getting in bed with Republicans over gay rights.

Do they not realize that they are a half-step from being back in the same boat as us queers?

So, is Obama black enough yet?
Believers in the one drop rule (bigoted CBS blog posters, etc.) have certainly seen him as black enough all along.  Black enough to hate, that is.  Or should that be too black to respect.  Same difference, I guess.

Click HERE and sign up: Campaign For Military Partners.

Lurleen on Twitter.
I don't know if CBS did right or not.
All I have to say is that it's disgusting that the comments threads are so overwhelmed by raw bigotry that they feel it's necessary!
This does not surprise me in the least
Anyone whose stomached even a cursory glance at the "message boards" attached to news stories knows what knuckle dragging mouth breathing troglydytes inhabit them. Yahoo recently canned theirs altogether.
CBS.com shuts comments down on Obama stories | 11 comments
Menu

Make a New Account

Username:

Password:



Forget your username or password?


Join the Blend Chat Room


Report TOS Violations

Premium Sponsors


BlogAds





Search the Blend
Current site


PHB 2.0 Web
Search Blend 1.0 Archives
Ad Networks


BlogSheroes BlogAds

Miscellany

RSS Feeds

Subscribe with Bloglines

Visit NCBlogs

frontpage hit counter

Stats

Powered by: SoapBlox