And Did You Notice He’s Black?

Obama isn’t letting any state go without a fight. This is from his campaigners in West Freekin’ Virginia:

“He is black” was the first thing Kenny Perdue, the state’s AFL-CIO president, said. “The gentleman that’s in the White House and John McCain — they’re white men. And I’m absolutely ashamed of what George W. Bush has done to this country.”

The president of the United Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, spoke after Perdue in a parking lot set in the flat plateau below the remains of a strip-mined mountain.

“I’d rather have a black friend than a white enemy,” he said. State Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey spoke, too. Casey, 57, grew up Irish Catholic in Charleston, and he said the bus was following John F. Kennedy’s bus route in the 1960 Democratic primary.

“There’s a lot of people out there think you’re a bunch of inbred, redneck racists,” he told a couple dozen people wearing union hats and jackets. “They say you won’t vote for a man who’s black.”

“The rest of the country thought when Kennedy ran we were a bunch of ignorant, inbred religious bigots,” he said. “They were wrong, and we made Kennedy president.”

And I’m also ashamed of what Bush & Co. have done to this country. I want Obama to restore the America we remember. I want him to get rid of the banana republic we have now. A reputation is hard to gain and easy to lose. Bush has thrown our national reputation away with both hands.

How Do We Know They Are Terrorists?

The answer is, we don’t. Nobody does.

You see, that’s what habeas corpus is for. You can’t drag someone off the street proclaim them to be a Bad Person and then take them away and lock them up for ever. We’ve been assured that Guantanamo is reserved for the “worst of the worst.” The question is, how do we know they are the worst?

We don’t.

Without lawyers, a trial, evidence, a judge and a jury, there’s no way to figure it out. Yeah, it’s true that sometimes bad guys go free and it’s true that sometimes innocent people go to jail. But the thing is, it works most of the time and we haven’t been able to figure out how to make it better.

Suspension of habeus corpus is the most terrifying thing BushCo. has done with our rights and freedoms. And if you think they are only doing it to foreign nationals, guess again.

I suggest you read this post:

New Evidence on Innocent Men at Gitmo
Over on Dispatches from the Culture Wars