MERGED--> all discussion of Sen. Allen incident

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U2Bama said:
I am VERY familiar with this hate organization, as I campaigned AGAINST a Lieutenant Governor candidate in Alabama (George Wallace, Jr.) in part because he has frequently spoken at their events.
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www.cofcc.org
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the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor organization to the segregationist White Citizens Council
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Bama, are these the people who run the academies? Those smallish, "budget" private schools that are whites-only or as close to it as possible? I'm not really recognizing anything I'm seeing on their website (which doesn't mean much, I've lived outside the South for 18 years now--though I see they have some Midwestern chapters, too), but for some reason my mind wants to associate their name with this organization I remember that used to fund those schools. Probably there aren't as many of them now as when I was a kid, but back then at least it seemed like there was quite a network of them.

:up: Good for you for campaigning against them, in any case--I don't know how often this happens in AL, but from what I can tell from talking to old friends as well as browsing various message boards, it seems that way too many Mississippians are still stuck in that stage where they personally loathe this kind of crap, yet can't be bothered to protest when their politicians endorse it.

This is "the" George Wallace's son, I take it? I thought his father had repudiated all that stuff...if so, it's pretty sad that his son's still pursuing it.
 
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Burns Says Terrorists Drive Taxis by Day
Aug 31 2:06 PM US/Eastern

By MATT GOURAS
Associated Press Writer

BELGRADE, Mont.



Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, whose recent comments have stirred controversy, says the United States is up against a faceless enemy of terrorists who "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

During a fundraiser Wednesday with first lady Laura Bush, the three- term Montana senator talked about terrorism, tax cuts and the money he has brought to his state. Burns is one of the more vulnerable Senate incumbents, facing a tough challenge from Democrat Jon Tester.

He has drawn criticism in recent weeks for calling his house painter a "nice little Guatemalan man" during a June speech. Burns, whose re- election campaign is pressing for tighter immigration controls, also suggested that the man might be an illegal immigrant. The campaign later said the worker is legal.

At the campaign event with Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a "faceless enemy" of terrorists "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."
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yolland said:


Bama, are these the people who run the academies? Those smallish, "budget" private schools that are whites-only or as close to it as possible? I'm not really recognizing anything I'm seeing on their website (which doesn't mean much, I've lived outside the South for 18 years now--though I see they have some Midwestern chapters, too), but for some reason my mind wants to associate their name with this organization I remember that used to fund those schools. Probably there aren't as many of them now as when I was a kid, but back then at least it seemed like there was quite a network of them.

:up: Good for you for campaigning against them, in any case--I don't know how often this happens in AL, but from what I can tell from talking to old friends as well as browsing various message boards, it seems that way too many Mississippians are still stuck in that stage where they personally loathe this kind of crap, yet can't be bothered to protest when their politicians endorse it.

This is "the" George Wallace's son, I take it? I thought his father had repudiated all that stuff...if so, it's pretty sad that his son's still pursuing it.
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I'm not sure if they operate any schools themselves, but I think they do raise money to contribute to "academies" that fit their doctrine.

Yes, it is the son of "the" george Wallace. "The" George Wallace waivered on his views and political positions simply as a trait of opportunism. As a "populist," he was racist when it was politically "popular" in this state. His son attempts to be a populist these days. I can see through it.

~U2Alabama
 
Irvine511 said:
^ apparently, in the South, it's an aspersion to call someone Jewish?
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I would say it's perhaps a bit harder for a Jewish candidate to get elected in the Bible Belt, but certainly not impossible. We had a Jewish Congressman for ten years.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/19/AR2006091901141_pf.html

"Some Jewish leaders said that Allen's angry reaction to the question about his Jewish heritage bothered them.

"He was visibly uncomfortable and called it an 'aspersion,' " said J. J. Goldberg, editor in chief of the Forward. "What is it that makes him so uncomfortable with it? It raises more questions about who the guy is."

"How does one not know that his grandfather was a Jew?" asked Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Heilman called it a "tempest in a teapot" but said it would be a big story to American Jews.

"It is the case that for many people who are so much a part of blue-blood America, it's hard to imagine there is a Jew in their cupboard there," Heilman said.

But other Jewish leaders defended Allen's reaction, saying he was clearly upset not about being called a Jew but at what he considered to be the negative tone of the questioner.

"This was an 'I got you' question -- 'See, you really are a racist,' " said Rabbi Irwin Kula, author of "Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life." Kula said there are many people who have been raised Christian and are not aware that they have any Jewish heritage. "I felt tremendous empathy for George Allen. It is 100 percent possible."
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


Are you being serious? You really don't see the difference?
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There IS no difference. Let us call a spade a spade: Racism is racism, no matter who spews the garbage. I don't find anti-White jokes funny, at all. There's no purpose in Black people spewing offensive 'jokes' at Whites just because of history.
 
Devlin said:


There IS no difference. Let us call a spade a spade: Racism is racism, no matter who spews the garbage. I don't find anti-White jokes funny, at all. There's no purpose in Black people spewing offensive 'jokes' at Whites just because of history.
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That post is over a month old, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this one.

I've never seen a Black comedian crack white jokes, just because of history.:huh:

I've seen comedians who were equal oppurtunity when it came to make jokes about all races, including their own. And they were just jokes, they weren't demeaning guestures or slurs...
 
INDY500 said:
"In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking."
--Joe Biden 2006

Hillary Clinton introduced a quote from Gandhi by saying, "He ran a gas station down in St. Louis."
--Hillary Clinton 2004

When someone slips and utters a racial slur in the act of ad-libbing a joke it doesn't necessarily make them a racist...unless, apparently, he or she is a Republican.

Attempting to label Senator Allen as a racist can only mean one thing...he's winning.
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You make a valid point, but if a black Dem senate candidate quipped in a speech something along the lines of,"Like whitey over there" the lynching ropes would be whipped out.
 
While I was also puzzled about what Allen meant by "making aspersions about people because of their religious beliefs," I did feel the reporter's line of questioning was inappropriate in the context of a campaign debate. There was nothing for Webb to debate him on in those questions.

On a side note, I'm really starting to detest the casualness with which journalists throw around phrases like "Jewish leaders," "Muslim leaders," "black leaders," etc., particularly in the context of potentially polarizing issues. So often these labels get applied to (minority) folks who are merely something more than a random off-the-street individual, which is not what "leader" implies, and that can both attach misleading weight to their perspectives and encourage sweeping assumptions about how the people they supposedly "lead" think.
 
yolland said:
While I was also puzzled about what Allen meant by "making aspersions about people because of their religious beliefs," I did feel the reporter's line of questioning was inappropriate in the context of a campaign debate. There was nothing for Webb to debate him on in those questions.

On a side note, I'm really starting to detest the casualness with which journalists throw around phrases like "Jewish leaders," "Muslim leaders," "black leaders," etc., particularly in the context of potentially polarizing issues. So often these labels get applied to (minority) folks who are merely something more than a random off-the-street individual, which is not what "leader" implies, and that can both attach misleading weight to their perspectives and encourage sweeping assumptions about how the people they supposedly "lead" think.
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I completely agree, but what I find interesting is that he says religious beliefs shouldn't be relevant but then adamantly claims he and his family are Christian...:huh:
 
Allen's Mother Revealed Jewish Heritage to Him Last Month

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post, September 21

RICHMOND -- Henrietta "Etty" Allen said Wednesday that she concealed her upbringing as a Jew in North Africa from her children, including Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), until a conversation across the dining room table in late August.

She said Allen asked her directly about his Jewish heritage when he was in Los Angeles for a fundraiser. "We sat across the table and he said, 'Mom, there's a rumor that Pop-pop and Mom-mom were Jewish and so were you,' " she recalled, a day after Allen issued a statement acknowledging and embracing his Jewish roots as he campaigns for a second term in the U.S. Senate.

At the table in Palos Verdes, Calif., Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States. She said that she and the senator's father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II. Her father, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis. "What they put my father through. I always was fearful," Etty Allen said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want my children to have to go through that fear all the time. When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.' He said, 'Mom, I respect you more than ever.' "

Allen's heritage became an issue in the Virginia Senate campaign Monday, when television reporter Peggy Fox raised it at a televised debate in front of 600 business executives in Fairfax County. Allen repeated what he has said in the past: "My mother's French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian."

In fact, Allen had just recently learned about their Jewish roots when he made those comments. Allen declined to comment, but his mother said she had sworn him to secrecy. "I said, well, I just didn't want anyone to know," she explained. "I had said, 'Please don't tell your brothers and sister and your wife.' The fact this is such an issue justifies my actions, and my behavior."
............................................
Allen's Jewish heritage has been a subject of low-level political speculation for years, in part because the former governor and first-term senator often refers to his grandfather's incarceration by the Nazis in political speeches. But Allen has always said Lumbroso was a member of the Free French resistance movement and insisted that he and his mother were raised as Christians.
...............................................
Etty Allen said Wednesday that she had never used the word "macaca" before and had to go to a dictionary to look it up when she heard of the controversy. She said the word did not exist in her dictionary. "I swear to you, I have never used that word," she said. "I must have used a lot of bad words, but not that word."
..................................
Allen's mother said she first began concealing her Jewish roots after meeting her future husband, afraid that she would not be accepted by his parents and fearful that her religion could harm his budding coaching career, which started at Whittier College, a school in Southern California founded by Quakers. "He didn't want me to tell his mother," she said of the elder George Allen. "At that time, that was a no-no, to marry outside the church." Allen died in 1990.

Leo Mugmon, 92, a longtime friend of Allen's mother who knew her as a Jew in Tunis, recalled her decision to hide her faith when she came to the United States. "She did not say anything to her mother-in-law or her family," Mugmon said. He added that Etty Allen's father, Felix Lumbroso, traveled from Tunis for the Allen wedding. "Mr. Felix didn't say anything about it. In silence, he sort of condoned it."
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/24/allen_football/

Sep. 24, 2006 |Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.

"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."

A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the n word to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the n word though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. "My impression of him was that he was a racist," the third teammate said.

Shelton also told Salon that the future senator gave him the nickname "Wizard," because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
 
(AP) Sen. George Allen on Monday denounced as "ludicrously false" claims from a former college football teammate that he frequently used a racial slur to refer to black people.

Dr. Ken Shelton, now a radiologist in Hendersonville, N.C., also alleges that Allen, a former University of Virginia quarterback, once stuffed the severed head of a deer into a black household's oversized mail box.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, Allen vehemently denied the allegations Shelton made in an article published Sunday in the online magazine Salon.com and an AP interview Sunday night. His campaign released statements from four other ex-teammates defending Allen and rejecting Shelton's claims.

"The story and his comments and assertions in there are completely false," Allen said during an interview with AP reporters and editors. "I don't remember ever using that word and it is absolutely false that that was ever part of my vocabulary."

Questions about racial insensitivity have dogged the Republican throughout his re-election bid against Democrat Jim Webb. His use of the word "macaca" in referring to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent in August prompted an outcry. The word denotes a genus of monkeys and, in some cultures, is considered an ethnic slur.

Shelton, a tight end and wide receiver for the Cavaliers in the early said Allen used the N-word only around white teammates.

During a deer hunt with Allen in the early 1970s, Shelton said, Allen asked whether black families lived in the area before stuffing a female deer's head into the mail box of a black household.

"George insisted on taking the severed head, and I was a little shocked by that," Shelton said.

"This was just after the movie "The Godfather" came out with the severed horse's head in the bed," Shelton told the AP.

Doug Jones, who said he roomed with Shelton at Virginia, said in a statement that he never saw or heard anything from Allen that supports Shelton's claims.

"I never heard George Allen use any racially disparaging word nor did I ever witness or hear about him acting in a racially insensitive manner," Jones said.
 
Larry Sabato, a political analyst from UVA was on Hardball tonight and he said that Allen did use the n-word, and he went to school with Allen. :tsk:

It's all about the pattern...one incident after the next. If it were one isolated incident I'd give him the benefit of the doubt, but it's not just one, it's several.
 
I just read about that on Yahoo

"Christopher J. LaCivita, an Allen strategist, said Allen and Sabato were not friends nor did they associate with each other in college.

"Larry is obviously relying on words he heard from someone else," he said. "We believe it's completely inaccurate."

Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, would not tell The Associated Press how he knew Allen used the n-word. He told Chris Matthews on MSNBC that he did not know whether it was true that Allen used the word frequently while in college.

"I'm simply going to stay with what I know is the case and the fact is he did use the n-word, whether he's denying it or not," Sabato said."
 
U2democrat said:
I have other sources that can confirm Sabato's side of the story...Allen is in deep trouble.
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well, considering Allen's ethusiastic support for the Virginia marriage amendment which would outlaw any and all rights for gay couples, i don't think it's too much of a stretch to think he's a racist idiot as well. the two seem to go hand-in-hand. :shrug:

sooooooooo glad i get to vote in VA in 2006.
 
Irvine511 said:




well, considering Allen's ethusiastic support for the Virginia marriage amendment which would outlaw any and all rights for gay couples, i don't think it's too much of a stretch to think he's a racist idiot as well. the two seem to go hand-in-hand. :shrug:

sooooooooo glad i get to vote in VA in 2006.
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Vote against Allen because of his believes on same-sex marriage, vote against him because of his strong support of Bush (a.k.a. BeelzeBush) and the war in Iraq, hell, vote against him because he's the incumbent. But this macaca and "may of used the N word 30 years ago in college." Please. Who cares?
 
INDY500 said:


Vote against Allen because of his believes on same-sex marriage, vote against him because of his strong support of Bush (a.k.a. BeelzeBush) and the war in Iraq, hell, vote against him because he's the incumbent. But this macaca and "may of used the N word 30 years ago in college." Please. Who cares?
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well, the whole deer head incident goes well beyond using the N-word -- it's akin to burning a cross on a lawn.

but, i'm not voting against him solely because he's a racist (or was a racist), but this is simply another piece of the overarching narrative of Allen: a mean, dumb, jovial idiot who represents the absolute worst in Southern culture.
 
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