Category: Moore Award Nominee

"Do you think "liberals…" would demand I celebrate deaths of mass murderers like Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon & Gabi Ashkenazi?" – Ali Abunimah, on the applauding of Qaddafi's death.

"[I sent a copy of my book to] the last [Pope], not this Nazi one we have now," – Susan Sarandon. Elizabeth Tenety sets the record straight.

"Syria has been a mukhabarat (intelligence) state since the redoubtable Abdel-Hamid Al-Serraj ran the intelligence services as the deuxième bureau in the 1950s. The authoritarian state which developed from the time former Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad took power in 1970 has crushed all dissent ruthlessly. On occasion it has either been him or them. The ubiquitous presence of the mukhabarat is an unpleasant fact of Syrian life, but as Syria is a central target for assassination and subversion by Israel and Western intelligence agencies, as it has repeatedly come under military attack, as it has had a large chunk of its territories occupied, and as its enemies are forever looking for opportunities to bring it down, it can hardly be said that the mukhabarat is not needed," – Jeremy Salt, Counterpunch.

A reader writes:

I have to admit being horrified at how horrified people are at Lawrence's interview with Herman Cain.  He treated Mr. Cain far more politely than I or virtually any other African-American I know would have given the circumstances. And the circumstances are these.  My father attended the University of Texas roughly during the same time period.  UT was desegregated at the time, but he has no fond memories of the school, even though any troubles he experienced there were minor in comparison to others.  He would eventually go on to Rice University (where he teaches today) for his PhD as the first Black man ever to attend that institution.  His admission was delayed a year because White Alumni sued Rice to prevent his entry.  He also had to deal with a Professor in Applied Math who publicly vowed that any Black student who enrolled in his class would start at a "C" and head downward.

Still, as angry as he remains to this day over what relatively little happened to him during his stays at both Texas schools, he still found time to test restaurants, because he knew it was his about him and his future children. 

He was doing it for me.  He also met another student at the time who was also testing restaurants while attending Texas Southern University.  Her name was Claudette Smith. I know her today as Mom.

You may argue that Herman Cain had a right not to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, and that may be true.  But here's the problem: he's holding himself up as an example of, if not the very pinnacle of, the black community.  (Just ask him, he'll be glad to tell you).  He has gone so far as to suggest that Black People who do not support him (not give him a fair hearing, mind you, but out-and-out support him) have been brainwashed by the Democratic Party.

May I suggest that my Father and Mother were not brainwashed?  May I suggest that they saw with their own eyes who was supporting Civil Rights and who wasn't; and their allegiance forevermore was aligned with the Democratic party.

And for the record, yes, there were Southern Democrats who voted against the 1965 Civil Rights Act.  They long ago switched parties and joined Herman Cain's party, the Republicans.  I'm sure even Mr. Cain remembers Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, and saying he was delivering the South to the Republicans for the next 40 years.  He was wrong.  Try 60-70.

The horrific part of the interview which apparently did not catch your eye, was Lawrence's first asking Mr. Cain if he wanted to back off that "brainwashing" statement.  Mr. Cain did not.  With him questioning my intelligence as a African-American, I had a right to know where he stood in relation to the community he was questioning  I had a right to know what kind of African-American he was, and yes that is something I can judge given the questions Lawrence O'Donnell asked rather haltingly.  I had a right to know what he had given to the cause.  Because if he had stood with my parents, if he had marched with my parents, then African-Americans as a whole would have shrugged when he called us "brainwashed".  At least, we would have decided, he earned the right.

But he didn't.  He didn't march. He didn't sit-in.  He didn't test.  He didn't want to get involved, because frankly, it was probably more important to him to ingratiate himself to his white oppressors.  I'm sorry to come off sounding like a member of the Black Panther Party, but we see people like Mr. Cain all the time in the African-American community.  The ones who think they're better than the rest of us, smarter, and the only ones fit to lead, the only ones fit to be heard from.

"Mr. Cain, you were in fact in college from 1963 to 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, exactly when the most important demonstrations and protests were going on. You could easily as a student at Morehouse between 1963 and 1967 actively participated in the kinds of protests that got African Americans the rights they enjoy today. You watched from that perspective at Morehouse when you were not participating in those processes. You watched black college students from around the country and white college students from around the country come south AND BE MURDERED, fighting for the rights of African Americans. Do you regret sitting on those sidelines at that time?" - Lawrence O'Donnell, in a pretty horrifying interview.

"I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn't help, then being beheaded," – Roseanne Barr, to Russia Today, apparently without irony.

"I voted for the black guy and what we got was the white guy," – Michael Moore.

"Religious conservatives loved the HPV virus because it killed women. Here was a potentially fatal STI that condoms couldn't protect you from. Abstinence educators pointed to HPV and jumped up and down—they loved to overstate HPV's seriousness and its deadliness—in their efforts to scare kids into saving themselves for marriage. And they fought the introduction of the HPV vaccine tooth-and-nail because vaccinating women against HPV would "undermine" the abstinence message. Given a choice between your wife, daughter, sister, or mom dying of cervical cancer or no longer being to scream "HPV IS GOING TO KILL YOU!" at classrooms full of terrified teenagers, socially conservative abstinence "educators" preferred the former," – Dan Savage.

by Chris Bodenner

"And as far as I'm concerned, the Tea Party can go straight to hell," – Congresswoman Maxine Waters.