Candice Bergen is quoted, “The “kill Obama” and “he’s an Arab.” I mean, just the worse sort of illiterate, uneducated, ignorant hate mongering.” Be careful, racism cuts in all directions. As always, I have a story to tell. Early this year I elected to test a number of websites for bias and bigotry. I did not plan to test for racism. Being an English professor, I am well trained at language usage and having a degree in Earth Science, I am well trained in good Scientific Method. I will briefly recount experiences at two websites. One is Black Star News and the other is The Daily Voice freshly created by Keith Boykin, of whom most know. For each website, my first article was an honest advisory I am visiting to test for bias and bigotry. All my written articles were deliberately well written, professional and firm but fair. Some were straight forth political commentary, some were subtle tests of cultural mores. At Black Star News, I abandoned testing after several days. If not a black person or perceived to not be black, Black Star News proves to be very hostile, highly racist and even threatening, both on the part of the editors of this website and on the part of their participants. I decided risks are too high to continue participation; this Black Star News scares me. I am being sincere. Keith Boykin’s site was a much better experience at first. I even enjoyed helping Keith and Malcolm straighten out some programming problems they were experiencing, I even provided programming which cured a crash of their site taking them offline for a full day. My private dialogs with Keith and Malcolm reveal both men are professionals and simply nice men. Being brief, over a course of about two months, at Boykin’s site, responses to my professionally written critiques of Obama became increasingly angry. I mixed in some questioning of cultural mores, such as the AIDS epidemic amongst Black America and the 70% rate of single mothers. During early month two, responses became openly hostile. Nearing month three, almost all responses ranged from very vile racial slurs to overt threats of physical violence, including participants searching out and providing what participants believed to be my true name and our family home address. Providing quotes of unpleasant remarks would serve no good purpose. Bottom line is my personal experience is, significantly more racial slurs, threats of violence and other inappropriate commentary, significantly more came out of Black America than White America. This type of activity on the part of Black America took place on a daily basis. I need to qualify in fairness. Blogs are known for hostile participants. Blogs are known for attracting the fringe. Much of this could be and I believe this is blogs present a much higher percentage of people who are openly hostile. Other words, blogs are skewed to hostility. Nonetheless, my discovery of 85% to 90% of participants at specific websites being highly hostile is well beyond any skew present; this is a percentage so high to include and exceed the fringe people. Racism cuts in all directions. Does not matter the skin color, all cultural groups display a degree of racism, some more than others. Black, white, red, brown, yellow, makes no difference. Racism will be found. This focus on bad remarks made by the few at McCain events or Palin events, is a display of bias and in some cases, bigotry. The same type of remarks are coming out of all camps, again, regardless of skin color and regardless of political party leaning. For America to fault only McCain and Palin, in my personal opinion, borders on racism. This is a “political” racism with overtones of skin color racism. This specific election year, I can, in good conscious, declare our American mainstream media displays bias, displays bigotry and in some cases, our American mainstream media displays racism. I will be quick to write the same about our American peoples, verbatim. I am more offended by those who blame only one camp, blame only one segment of our society, than I am offended by the racism and hatred directed at me during this election year. As a red skinned woman, I know how to and can deal with our various bigotries ranging from sexism to racism. Contrasting, I will not deal with people who refuse to acknowledge reality; I am simply not interested in those people. Racism cuts in all directions. This is reality. Okpulot Taha Choctaw Nation

Here’s a link to some great news, via a terrific organization, Codepink. You folks may have heard about this: http://www.nytimes-se.com/# I think this takes precedence over anything politicians can sling at each other.

Dear citizens of the United States of America, I am indeed with Liz here and will add this: until each and every single one of you understands that the MESS our country is in has nothing to do with who we put into the white house to “save us”; we are never going to get anywhere! The mess we are in can and will ONLY be cleaned up by the people who got us into it in the first place: ourselves. Until EVERY single individual in this country starts reaching out to other people, starts SAVING money and paying off their debt, you could elect a chair to be President - and I hope you will all agree on the color - it isn’t going to change things. Watch the documentary IOU for starters. People - we are over 70 trillion dollars in debt as a country! This is not going to change in four years. But what can easily change in four years in every household in this country is how each of us buckles down and addresses our own individual responsibilities and liabilities in making this country great again. So now go fight amongst yourselves on that one! I’m sure you have plenty to say. Debt is not a color or a party or anything other than what it is….we collectively EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US have spent more than we make. And therefore my friends we are in debt and need to get out of it as quickly as we can. I’ll be the first to tell you that hope is great. We need hope, I suppose. What we need more than anything is discipline! And I didn’t hear that as a campaign rhetoric. We need to get back to the basics this great country was founded on and stop looking so pathetically like victims to the leader of this country to “save” us. WE ARE THE LEADERS OF THIS COUNTRY!