Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson announced his pick for V.P. — Judge Jim Gray. As The Daily Caller reports:
Libertarian presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has picked California Judge Jim Gray, a prominent pro-marijuana legalization advocate, to be his running mate, The Daily Caller has learned.
The decision to run with Gray “puts pot front-and-center in the campaign,” one Johnson adviser told TheDC, before adding that Johnson’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan will likely remain the campaign’s defining issue.
But Jim Gray is no pothead; he’s serious, conservative minded libertarian who has never used illegal drugs. His arguments aren’t frivolous.
I interviewed Jim Gary a couple of years ago. Here’s part of the that interview — decide for yourself.
I have a lot of liberal friends on my Facebook timeline and I noticed that a few days ago, many of them were sharing the following graphic courtesy of MoveOn.org who called it The Controversial Graphic That Is Popping Up Everywhere.
The MoveOn promo is a ploy to get guilty white liberals (everyone I saw who shared it on FB was as white as I am) to sign a pledge to stop Stand Your Ground laws (that are also used to defend black people, by the way) and to stir up completely false racial divineness over the Trayvon Martin shooting.
I had just been watching the Michael Nutter speech I referenced in this post. The line in the MoveOn graphic about being black kids being hated and feared for no reason at all REALLY pissed me off. It’s a lie. I repeat — in 2012 America, that is a lie. The reality is a LOT more complex that than the guilty white liberals want to pretend it is.
Let’s dig into some of that complexity. Here’s a summary clip with highlights from the Mayor Michael Nutter speech with a newscast to provide some context for his remarks. Again; Nutter is a black, Democratic Mayor talking to an all black audience. He’s not booed. He is cheered for telling the truth. It comes at about the 5 minute mark in the video.
“If you want all of us — black, white or any other color — if you want us to respect you, if you want us to look at you in a different way, if you want us not to be afraid to walk down the same side of the street with you, if you want folks not to jump out of an elevator when you get on, if you want folks to stop following you around in stores when you’re out shopping, if you want someone to offer you a job or an internship somewhere, if you don’t want folks to be looking in or trying to go in a different direction when they see two or 20 of you coming down the street, then stop acting like idiots and fools out in the streets of the city of Philadelphia. Just cut it out.”
So, that MoveOn graphic struck me as worse than wrong. It’s counter productive and frankly dangerous. It presents the illusion that there ISN’T a real problem in the black community with violent crime is tied into the breakdown of families. A black conservative friend pointed out this article to me, discussing the real and very troubling numbers and how the media is covering the issue of violence in the black community:
It is once again promoting falsehoods—that the criminal justice system is racist and that blacks are under assault from racist whites. (To the contrary, young black males are under assault from other young blacks, who commit homicide at ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined. White-on-black killings are negligible compared with black-on-white killings and are a minute fraction of the over 6,000 blacks mowed down every year by other blacks. Blacks kill whites and Hispanics at two-and-a-half times the rate at which whites and Hispanics kill blacks, though blacks are only one-sixth of the combined white and Hispanic population.)
Add to this that I’d recently interviewed C.L. Bryant about his upcoming film Runaway Slave and that my friend David Webb had just been attacked (for the umpteeth time) as an Uncle Tom — and I’m just sick to death of the way black conservatives are treated.
So I made this…
I ran it by some black conservative friends of mine and got some great feedback. Then I released it on Twitter and Facebook and it took off — as of this writing, about 1000 likes and over 650 shares on Facebook plus some interesting discussions.
I’m white. I wrote it. Is that weird? I don’t think so — I based it all on points I’d heard from black conservatives and they have given me very positive feedback on it. I don’t hear the left complain that the Trayvon Martin petition that is posted under the name of Trayvaon’s parents was written by a white dude who is even paler than me. I have no idea who created the MoveOn graphic or who’s in the picture. I saw something that I felt need to be said, I saw a format to parody MoveOn’s awful message and I did it.
Feel free to share, use, email or whatever the parody I created. Or make your own. Or do something entirely new. But this is 2012 and we have a black President; we sure should be able to have black conservatives — so please say SOMETHING. The most marginalized black voices in America right now are black conservatives and especially pro-life black conservatives. If you believe in freedom of speech, speak up to support them.
A slickly produced video from leftist ‘racial justice’ groups Applied Research Center and their publication Colorlines that was promoted by both Media Matters for America and Moveon as part of the Drop The I-Word campaign uses deceptive editing techniques to order to give viewers a false impression that hate crimes against Hispanics are on the rise. By deliberately leaving out data that doesn’t help bolster their case, the video paints a factually incorrect picture in order to create a sense of danger. Both Drop The I-Word campaign coordinator Mónica Novoa and ARC Executive Director Rinku Sen need to explain why they allowed an intentionally deceptive video to go out on such an important national topic.
Here’s the video they released about a year ago, although the promotion by MoveOn took place recently and was featured on Fox News.
You’ll notice that towards the end of the video Colorlines and ARC are making a connection between violence and the use of the term ‘illegal alien’ to describe illegal aliens. This charge of ‘violence’ is even in the group’s graphic asking people to sign a pledge to oppose the term illegal to describe any human being, including illegal aliens. .
At one point, the video quotes professor Robert Smith from Baruch College. He’s the fellow making the claim in the spot that..
“Illegal” functions like a racial epithet. It’s a way of legitimizing violence against a particular group of people because of what they are. That’s the very definition of a hate crime.
The graphics to go along with this show police cars and an arrested (white) suspect. Then the video shows an animated chart with where hate crimes against Hispanics are going up and up.
The graph starts at 2004:
And then animates higher and higher:
But something interesting happens, although most viewers are unlikely to notice. Even though the video was apparently produced in 2011, the data on the chart ends at 2007. I looked into the data using the FBI Uniform Crime Report source cited in the video and discovered why they stopped the animation at 2007; the number of Anti-Hispanic Hate Crimes went DOWN in 2008. And then DOWN again in 2009. Then they increased slightly, although not to previous levels.
This is a serious breach of viewer trust; it is lying with statistics and editing and it speaks to the level of desperation that these groups have to push their agenda on the public.
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