Monthly Archives: October 2010

NAACP Report on Tea Parties

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Crooks and Liars predicts the trolls will be out in force on this one:

Cue the right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth: The NAACP has now fully backed up its accusations of racism within the Tea Party movement with a meticulously documented report on the Tea parties' multifarious connections to racists and various far-right extremists.

The report, “Tea Party Nationalism,” looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations — FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express — and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right “Patriot” extremists of various stripes.

“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment,” write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.

The heart of the report is the section titled “Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse, which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:

(There's lots more where that came from.)

Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

Surveillance and Resources

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

The St. Petersburg (FL) Times has a good story today by Jamal Thalji, Should authorities need a warrant to put a GPS tracking device on your car?.

I'm quoted towards the end:

Those conflicting rulings mean the U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide the issue.

The real issue is resources, said University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin. When the courts first gave the government the right to remotely track suspects, no one thought they'd one day have the money or technology to do so constantly.

“There was an unstated assumption behind a great deal of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in our history that says surveillance is expensive and therefore has natural limits,” he said. “That unstated assumption that people took for granted is no longer true.”

And therein, I think, lies the problem — we are working with doctrine that doesn't fit the new technical and economic realities.

Posted in Law: Privacy, The Media | 5 Comments

Is This the Best Political Ad This Year?

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Jerry Brown (D) casts Meg Whitman (R) as an echo of roundly disliked California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Could this be the best ad of this election?

Posted in Politics: 2010 Election | 1 Comment

Not a Witch. And Not a Constitutional Scholar.

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Wow.

Posted in Politics: 2010 Election | 4 Comments

My That Shirt Is Looking Brown Today

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

One of the things that is worrisome about movements like the 'Tea Party' is the potential for fascism. That's not to say fascism is part of the ideology, or an inevitable consequence of it, but there's a certain fellow-traveler feeling that is hard to ignore. Here's an example relating to the Tea Partyiod GOP candidate for Senate in Alaska: Miller security guards handcuff editor. Note that the guys imprisoning the reporter/editor are private security, not cops.

And from Florida (via Political Animal), where Florida congressional candidate Allen West (R) is running his nutty (and very successful) campaign against the estimable Ron Klein:

NBC News ran a report documenting West's background associating with a violent gang of criminals, which the Justice Department believes is involved in drug running, arson, prostitution, robbery, and murder.

Yesterday, things managed to get even worse, still. West spoke at a public park in the South Florida district, and a 23-year-old videographer was on hand to record the candidate's remarks, which is hardly an unusual modern campaign practice. But things got ugly when West's gang allies were caught on tape harassing and threatening the Democratic staffer.

As the local NBC affiliate noted, “Threats can be heard on the video tape. The West supporters forced him to get back into his car.”

The threats worked — the Democratic party decided to take “videographer off the campaign trail altogether yesterday” because they felt they couldn't protect him.

Posted in Politics: 2010 Election | 16 Comments

I Don’t Believe It

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Grant McCracken, my favorite contemporary ethnographer-provocateur, writes:

We are adding a new name to our blog roll. Please welcome Ruby Kariela. Ruby is 10 and I believe this makes her the youngest ethnographer working today. I like to think of her as “reporting from childhood” but she will have her own way of describing what she does. Please visit her blog at here.

Visiting the blog, you might see an extraordinarily precocious ten-year-old. Or not. While I just might buy most of it, I cannot believe that a ten-year-old would think to use one of my favorite bizzaro cultural incidents from 1986 as the title for a blog post. I suppose it is vaguely possible she heard the 2008 REM song, but I doubt it.

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on I Don’t Believe It