All posts tagged Brown v. Board of Education

Remarks And Asides

Dear God,

Please talk Donald Trump into running for president. I take back everything I’ve ever said about Your Party, about Michele Bachmann, about Sarah Palin, even about Anson Burlingame.  Just please let him run and let the GOP pick him as its nominee.  Pretty please?

Prayerfully,

Duane

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Everybody’s making a big deal out of Newt Gingrich’s egregious flip-flop on what to do in Libya. First he can’t wait to go in, then when Obama goes in, he says he shouldn’t have gone in.  If a man can’t make up his mind about which woman with whom he wants to live happily ever after, why should anyone think he can make up his mind about which dictator we should bomb?

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A new Pew poll shows that “nearly half (47%) of registered voters say they would like to see Barack Obama reelected, while 37% say they would prefer to see a Republican candidate win the 2012 election.”  The overview of the Pew survey, though, says,

In part, Obama is benefitting from the fact that the GOP has yet to coalesce behind a candidate.

All the more reason, God, to get Donald Trump to run.  Please?

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Speaking of Republican candidates for president, Herman Cain, famous for broiling Whoppers for Burger King (actually, he’s somewhat famous for running Godfather’s Pizza), attended a rally of home-schoolers yesterday in Des Moines. 

Along with other candidates present, he, of course, trashed the public school system, obligatory behavior for anyone wanting to be the GOP nominee.  But Cain, an African-American Tea Party favorite from the South, said something I found interesting. He reportedly denounced all government involvement in education and then said this:

That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.

The “old-fashioned way“?  Hmm.  Was he talking about the real old-fashioned way, back when there were no schools, no books, and no teachers?  That far back?

Or was the 65-year-old Herman Cain, who admits to a working-class pedigree, talking about the old-fashioned days in the 1950s when he would have spent his formative years in Georgia public schools?  

The old-fashioned way in those days in the South was to segregate-then-educate kids like Herman Cain, and despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, some parts of Georgia did not even begin to integrate the schools until 1970.

According to Professor Michael Gagnon,

In defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, The Georgia School Board required public school teachers to sign a pledge that they would not teach in integrated schools in 1955 or they would lose their teaching license.

Is that the old-fashioned way the GOP candidate for president pines for?

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Finally, James O’Keefe, the scoundrel whose creative video edits have killed ACORN and wounded NPR, while simultaneously giving Sean Hannity a Viagra-like boner, is in debt.  In fact, he claims he’s in debt up to $50,000.  Fifty G’s.  He has sent out a fund-raising email to supporters, saying he had to finance much of his wonderful work on the credit card:

We made a lot of sacrifices—personally and financially —because we fight for what we believe in.

It’s not clear to me how he can both claim he has sacrificed financially and yet beg others to pay his bills, but in any case, I am setting up the James O’Keefe Relief Fund here at The Erstwhile Conservative.  Just send in your donations and I will be sure he gets the money. No amount is too small.

Trust me at least as much as you trust him.

by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/remarks-and-asides-18/

Missouri Is Fast Becoming Part Of The Old South

In 2009, the Missouri legislature passed something called the Big Government Get Off My Back Act, which essentially was a small business-friendly law that banned for four years some user fee increases and prevented new regulations on businesses with less than 25 employees.

This year, the very first bill approved by the House side* of the Missouri legislature was an amendment of that law, which given the nature of one of the new provisions, we can now call the Barack Obama Get Off My Ass Act.

The BOGOMAA will contain, if the new breed of quasi-secessionist Republicans have their way, the following nullification provision:

(1)  Specifies that any federal mandate implemented by the state must be subject to statutory authorization of the General Assembly;

As Rudi Keller, writing for the Columbia Daily Tribune said, “Missouri isn’t alone in attempting nullification,” and there are other statutes that assert “state authority over federal law.” 

But this one is obviously designed to open up old and ugly wounds in our recent national history.

The theory of nullification—that states can invalidate any federal law they consider unconstitutional—is remembered these days due to its use in the South as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated schools.  Several southern states claimed they had the power to ignore the decision, notwithstanding the Civil War, which seemed to settle the matter for most sober observers. 

In any case, the Supreme Court eventually and unanimously slapped down the South again—without the necessity of 600,000 dead Americans—and declared that the segregationists would have to find other ways to discriminate against black folks, since Supreme Court decisions constituted the law of the land. 

Addressing the  “illegal, forcible interference…with the continuance of what the Constitution commands,” Justice Frankfurter wrote:

What could this mean but to acknowledge that disorder under the aegis of a State has moral superiority over the law of the Constitution? For those in authority thus to defy the law of the land is profoundly subversive not only of our constitutional system, but of the presuppositions of a democratic society. The State “must . . . yield to an authority that is paramount to the State.”

All of that, as I said, is painfully obvious to the sober-minded.  But the Missouri legislature these days is peopled by a number of anti-government junkies, who have succumbed to secessionist smack out of a fear of The Kenyan Socialist.  One of them, Sen. Jim Lembke said this, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune:

“I look at it the same way I look at bad precedents. Why isn’t the Constitution the supreme law? It is not who won a war or bad decisions in a court. I can read the plain language. I don’t need nine justices to tell me what it says,” he said.

Maybe you don’t need them to tell you what it says, Mr. Lembke.  But when they tell you what it means, you have to listen. 

No matter how many BOGOMAAs you pass.

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* Joplin’s Bill White voted for the bill, as did, unfortunately, a number of Democrats.

by R. Duane Graham on January 31, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on January 31, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/missouri-is-fast-becoming-part-of-the-old-south/