After all, the overwhelming majority of the GOP base -- and Americans in general -- are supportive of the philosophy of colorblindness enunciated by one of the greatest members of our party.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We are ready, willing, and eager to live that philosophy as a nation NOW, as we do in our day to day lives as individual citizens. Unfortunately, a host of racial set-asides, special programs, and affirmative action schemes make that impossible, for government classifies Americans by race and ethnicity for the purpose of distributing benefits to them -- and forces private industry to do the same.

That is why the people of Michigan passed the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative -- despite opposition by the party establishments of both major parties.

On Election Day, when Michigan easily re-elected a Democratic U.S. senator and governor, a ballot measure to end such programs in college admission and state government hiring and contracting won by an even larger margin.

But virtually every major GOP official and organization, including the gubernatorial candidate, opposed the measure, as did Democratic leaders and candidates.

Yet the proposal won overwhelming support from Republicans and independents, and almost all demographic groups.

But how deep does support run for such a colorblind policy? Pretty deep, if the polling data can be trusted.

The ballot measure won majorities among virtually all demographic groups except blacks, self-described liberals and Democrats. It passed 64-36 percent among whites who were 85 percent of the electorate, and lost 86-14 among blacks, who were 12 percent (roughly the national average) of the electorate.

Other than a 50-50 split among the 15 percent of the electorate with incomes of $15,000-$30,000, the measure carried every income group and every age group.

Interestingly, the only group of voters, when classified by education, among whom it lost was the 16 percent of the Michigan electorate with post-graduate degrees. And it received 49 percent from them.

Do we have the guts to stand up as a party and push for true equality? Do we have the guts to stand up as a party and push for colorblindness? Do we have the guts as a party to truly embrace the notion that distributing benefits and burdens based upon race and ethnicity is morally and constitutionally reprehensible and must end?

Or will we be cowed by those who would call us racists for following such a strategy for equality -- and who would call us racists even if we did not?

The very future of America depends upon our willingness to stand for principle.

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But in doing so, they need to seek the overturn of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the recently approved Prop. 2. After all, the ballot initiative took its language straight from that landmark civil rights legislation.

In the wake of a decisive Nov. 7 vote to prohibit race- and gender-based preferences in employment, education and contracting, leaders in government and academia who fought to preserve affirmative action are now hurrying to assess the impact. Officials said the response is likely to start with a court challenge.

Business and civic leaders who opposed the anti-affirmative-action measure are gathered here on Friday to develop a strategy. The University of Michigan Board of Regents is also meeting, with announcements expected soon. At City Hall, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D) is drafting an ordinance that would favor companies based in the city, which is more than 80 percent African American

"The voters went to the polls and Proposition 2 passed, and we have to live with it now," said Matt Allen, the mayor's spokesman. "As of December 22, there can be no more gender or race preferences."

The first attempt to block the new law in court was filed soon after the election, although courts have upheld a similar California law.

"There will be both offense lawsuits and defensive lawsuits filed to understand what this actually means for Michigan," said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the Michigan office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I do think it's necessary for the courts to slow this thing down and . . . interpret some of the language."

But really, how much is there to interpret -- or object to -- in a law that declares that state and local government entities "shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting"?

After all, the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination based upon "any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin". After more than four decades, how can an enactment like the MCRI even be controversial -- unless one supports discrimination or preferences based upon one or more of those categories?

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My only objection is that this 18-year-old punk will get a shot at parole when he turns 48. Life ought to mean life -- especially since this scumbag has spent three of the last four years in jail because of race-based assaults on others.

As a fifth-grader, David Henry Tuck had punched and kicked his teacher, leaving the woman with broken glasses and a black eye. A few years later, he beat a man unconscious because of his ethnicity. When a deputy tried to arrest him for that attack, he kicked the officer in the hand.

After listening about the violent past of the 18-year-old, jurors sentenced him Friday to life in prison for beating another teen so severely that the youth still requires medical attention for internal injuries caused when Tuck kicked a plastic pipe into the youth's rectum.

On Thursday, a Harris County jury convicted Tuck of aggravated sexual assault for the April incident, in which a witness said he shouted "white power!" and racist epithets while assaulting the Hispanic youth.

The jury sentenced Tuck to the maximum under the law, including a $10,000 fine. He will be eligible for parole in 30 years. The jury deliberated for less than an hour. It declined to comment afterward, court officials said.

Why the attack? Because the Hispanic victim had allegedly kissed a white girl.

Now some want the Legislature to pass a new "hate crime" law because of this incident. I disagree. It seems pretty clear to me that the statutes that exist right now are more than adequate to deal with such offenses -- just as the legal system adequately dealt with the killers of James Byrd (two death sentences, with life in prison for the third perp for his testimony against his co-defendants). The question comes down to one of the will of prosecutors to pursue the cases with the tools they have -- tools that offer the maximum punishments available under state law for any crime.

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All but the most stunted of moral midgets recognize that the two great evils of the twentieth century were Communism and Nazism. Just as the former still holds some attraction for the Mercedes Marxists on college campuses and in Hollywood, so, too, does the foul ideology of Hitler attract those with hate in their hearts.

They have scurried out of the sewer in Germany.

German neo-Nazis, some shouting ``Sieg Heil,'' rampaged in the eastern city of Frankfurt on Oder and destroyed wreaths placed to mark the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogrom against the Jews, police said on Friday.

A police spokeswoman said the group had launched an attack on Thursday evening, shortly after a memorial service by community and Jewish leaders at a monument where a synagogue once stood.

She said the neo-Nazis trampled floral wreaths placed at a memorial stone to the synagogue in the Polish border city that was destroyed 68 years ago in the Nazis' Kristallnacht or ''Night of Broken Glass.''

They threw away candles left at the memorial, which had been attended by about 200 people. When police arrived, some of the neo-Nazis shouted ``Sieg Heil,'' police said. Authorities stayed on guard at the memorial site through the night.

That this malignant mindset still holds sway over any minds after the documented evil perpetrated in its name is rightening. And the choic of the anniversary of Kristalnacht is clearly intentional, showing that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe.

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A former head of the KKK is dead -- too bad it is of natural causes.

Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers, who was convicted eight years ago of ordering the 1966 bombing death of a civil rights leader, died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82.

He died of cardio pulmonary arrest, said Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth.

Bowers was convicted in August 1998 of ordering the assassination of Vernon Dahmer Sr., a civil rights activist who had fought for black rights during Mississippi's turbulent struggle for racial equality. He was sentenced to life in prison.

"He was supposed to stay there until he died. I guess he fulfilled that," Dahmer's widow, Ellie Dahmer, told The Associated Press on Sunday. "He lived a lot longer than Vernon Dahmer did."

Booth said that the Klansman died at approximately 11:30 a.m. in the Mississippi State Penitentiary Hospital in Parchman, a sprawling prison carved out of the cotton and soybean fields in the impoverished Mississippi Delta.

Here's hoping that not even Bowers' family mourns this creep's death -- though I'm sure that I'll hear from at least one of his fans on this site.

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The junior senator from Illinois and presidential hopeful proves that even election to high office doesn't guarantee that one knows or speaks the truth.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Friday urged hundreds of blacks not to vote along racial lines next week in Maryland's Senate race.

Obama, the only black U.S. senator, came to the state to rally support for Democratic Rep. Ben Cardin, who is white. Cardin's Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, is the first black candidate ever elected statewide and has been courting black Democrats.

"Listen, I think it's great that the Republican Party has discovered black people," Obama said to laughter from students at the rally at predominantly black Bowie State University. "But here's the thing. ... You don't vote for somebody because of what they look like. You vote for somebody because of what they stand for."

Let's give this man a quick history lesson.

If one goes back to the birth of the GOP, it was a party that had the rights of blacks as its primary issue. Remember, the GOP was the party of abolition -- and that among those who were a part of its founding meeting was Frederick Douglass. At a time when the Democrats believed every black should be a slave, the Republican Party was co-founded by black men like Douglass -- an escaped slave. While they could not vote because they were women, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were also active supporters of the Republican Party. The Democrats, on the other hand, fought tooth-and-nail to keep blacks from voting in general elections -- or participating in party primaries, until the Supreme Court told Texas Democrats in Fort Bend County (and, by extension, Democrats in the rest of the country) that such actions violated the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment.

When the Civil War came to an end and the black slaves of the solidly Democrat South achieved the freedom guaranteed them by Republican President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Republican Congress' Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Republican controlled legislature of Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels to be the first black United States Senator (filling the seat left vacant by the resignation of Democrat Jefferson Davis -- President of the Confederate States of America. He was later succeeded in the Senate by Blanche Bruce, the first black United States Senator to serve a complete term. At the end of his term, the Democrat-controlled Mississippi legislature replaced him with a former Confederate officer who had helped draft and sign the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession.

Incidentally, the next black man to serve in the US Senate was Edward Brooke of Massachusetts -- another Republican, from 1967-1979, at a time when the Democrat Party was still fighting against civil rights and trying to determine if blacks should have representation at Democrat nominating conventions. On the other hand, should the Democrat Party regain control of the US Senate next week, they will choose a former leader of the KKK, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, to be the president pro tempore of the Senate, placing him third in line for the presidency of the United States.

Republicans were active in their defense of the rights of African-Americans for the next century -- and every significant piece of civil rights legislation passed during that time was the product of GOP authors and/or an overwhelming number of GOP votes in Congress. Democrats, on the other hand, fought against civil rights every step of the way, writing and enforcing Jim Crow policies. It took a Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to craft a decision to overturn such segregation.

It was a proud Republican who, in 1963, gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial that clearly enunciated the Republican position on civil rights and racial equality -- of an America in which all people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Today the GOP continues to stand for the vision of our brother Martin Luther King, Jr., while the Democrats continue to seek to divide and balkanize along racial lines.

So you see, Senator Obama, it is pretty clear that neither party needed to "discover" black people. The problem is that one of them is the party of Ol' Massa, Jim Crow and the Klan, while the other is the party of emancipation, civil rights, and equality. Michale Steele is a part of the latter -- and any African-American should be ashamed to vote for or serve in office as part of the former.

OPEN TRACKBACKING AT Samantha Burns, Pirate's Cove, Third World County, Bullwinkle Blog, Adam's Blog, Clash of Civilizations, Right Nation, Uncooperative Blogger, World According to Carl, People Are Idiots, Cao's Blog, Stop the ACLU, Conservative Cat, Amboy Times, Blog-O-Fascists, Church & State, Woman Honor Thyself, Right Wing News, Blue Star Chronicles, Echo9er, Wake Up America, Pursuing Holiness, Dumb Ox, Is It Just Me?, Jo's Cafe

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