The Bigots Are Stirring Again

My Spidey-senses are tingling. The bigotsphere is in the midst of another full-court press, with the media skids being greased for both overt (to the converted) and covert (to those they want to convert) forms of racism to be sent America’s way. It’s the only way that they can hope to make any gains in next year’s elections.

Which makes this a good time to review a few things:

— Sorry, Confederate fetishists seeking to pretend that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery: There were no such things as “loyal black Confederate soldiers”. For one thing, this myth was debunked over eighty years ago in the June 1915 issue of The Confederate Veteran. The only reason it’s getting any traction now is because no Confederate veterans are around to debunk it in person. (See also here and here.) For another, there are too many surviving Confederate documents and speeches that show that the whole reason for the South’s seceding from the North — and triggering the Civil War — was slavery. (To quote what slave dealer and mass murderer Nathan Bedford Forrest himself told a Southern belle in deep denial about The Cause: “Madam, if this war isn’t being fought to preserve slavery, then I don’t know what it’s about.” )

— Speaking of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the drive to whitewash his reputation — even as he supplants the “nice” Robert E. Lee in the hearts and minds of Neo-Confederates — is apparently kicking into high gear. This is part and parcel of the Neo-Confederates’ drive to rewrite the truth out of America’s history books.

— An outfit calling itself “the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker” is trying to subtly use anti-Hispanic racism to pit labor lefties against other lefties, while pretending to be “for” black workers; they have run ads in recent print editions of The Nation and The New Republic claiming that Hispanic immigrants take jobs from black and other workers — a claim that study after study has debunked. Too bad for them that the guy behind the group, Roy Beck, has a long and well-documented history of bigotry, including running anti-black racist ads against people like Harold Ford in Tennessee last year. And organized labor isn’t buying into their nonsense, either: As this Drum Major Institute study shows (h/t Nathan Newman), the best way to protect all workers in America is to raise the wages paid to immigrant workers and give them the legal tools they need to fight back against exploitative employers.

Ban Food Imports from China

Because of this little detail in an article about the Chinese companies that added melamine to gluten so tests would show a higher protein level:

[China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine] said the two companies, named by the FDA as Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd. and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd, evaded quality checks by labeling their products as exports not subject to inspection.

If China doesn’t require exports to meet safety standards, we shouldn’t be buying from them.

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the Bush Administration to do anything about this issue, however.

Progressive Blogging: Past, Present, Future?

I did a longish rumination on blogs and blogging over at MyDD. I’m reposting it here:

I’ve been online since 1995. I have my own blog, Mercury Rising, which has been around Blogspot and now WordPress since December of 2004; before that, I’d spent a number of years hanging around Eschaton, DailyKos, Hullabaloo and other first-generation progblogs; before that, I spent a lot of time at Salon’s “Table Talk” message boards, from whence a number of progbloggers (TBogg, Atrios (who posted as “Kurt Foster”), etc.) apparently got their start. Recently, I was invited to be a part of Fire Dog Lake’s guest crew of posters.

I’m writing this because I wanted to make some (deeply subjective) observations on the pre-progblog era (1995-2001), ProgBlogs 1.0 (2002-2004), ProgBlogs 2.0 (2004-present), and ProgBlogs 3.0 (now?).

Follow me past the jump, if you will.