Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP President and CEO, July 10, 2010:

….And there are, there is once again an insurgent movement in this country to tear this country apart. And if we pull off the veneer what we see behind them are wealthy law firms and fancy lobbyists like Dick Armey, this faux populist rage represented by the Tea Party. There is nothing new, and what is new  is that this group of people is smaller than they have ever been in our society, smaller than the White Citizens Council, smaller than the Klan of the nineteen-twenties, but divisive and dangerous….

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, NAACP National Convention, July 11, 2010:

….And I thank you professor very much. I’m going to be engaging you with those very powerful numbers that you have offered on what the tea party recognizes, uh, or is recognized as. Might I add my own P.S.? All those who wore sheets a long time ago have now lifted them off and started wearing [applause], uh, clothing, uh, with a name, say, I am part of the tea party. Don’t you be fooled.  [voices: “That’s right.”, applause] Those who used to wear sheets are now being able to walk down the aisle and speak as a patriot because you will not speak loudly about the lack of integrity of this movement. Don’t let anybody tell you that those who spit on us as we were walking to vote on a health care bill for all of America or those who said Congresswoman Jackson-Lee’s braids were too tight in her hair had anything to do with justice and equality and empowerment of the American people. Don’t let them fool you on that [applause]….

Reverand Al Sharpton, NAACP National Convention, July 14, 2010:

….You cannot have people who are now trying to have tea party for state’s rights coming and celebrating the day that asked the federal government to overrule where states were segregating and allowing segregation to go forward. There clearly is some racial leaves in their tea bag, but this is not just about race. This is about how you see government….

Well, this is interesting (via Think Progress):

2010 Multi-state Survey on Race & Politics

….the 2010 Multi-state Survey of Race & Politics examines what Americans think about the issues of race, public policy, national politics, and President Obama, one year after the inauguration of the first African American president.

The survey is drawn from a probability sample of 1006 cases, stratified by state. The Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics included seven states, six of which were battleground states in 2008. It includes Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio as the battleground states. For its diversity and its status as an uncontested state, California was also included for comparative purposes. The study, conducted by the Center for Survey Research at the University of Washington, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent and was in the field February 8 – March 15, 2010….

….Since the public has become aware of the data, several people have come forward to challenge our initial findings, specifically, that supporters of the Tea Party appear racially intolerant. A principal charge, one not without intellectual merit, is that the observed relationship between support for the Tea Party and racial resentment is more about the relatively conservative politics of Tea Partiers than racism. Indeed, conservatives tend to believe in a small government, one that doesn’t do much to help people who, they believe, should make an effort to do for themselves. This is certainly a legitimate view; it’s one to which many Americans have adhered from the beginning of the Republic. In short, some of our critics charge that, instead of the racism we observe associated with support for the Tea Party, we’re merely observing Tea Partiers’ conservatism at work. In other words, support for the Tea Party, they suggest, is simply a proxy for conservatism.

To address this issue, we turn to regression, a statistical technique that allows analysts to tease out how one variable affects another. This is important because it permits us to account for the presence of other variables that may also affect the outcome while isolating the impact of the effect of the variable of interest on the result. So, in this case, if support for the Tea Party is truly a proxy for conservatism, the relationship between racial resentment and support for the Tea Party should evaporate once we control for conservatism. Otherwise, there’s something else going on with support for the Tea Party; it’s not just conservatism. To make things a little easier, we combined all of the items (questions) that comprise racial resentment, making them into a scale.

As the figure shows, even as we account for conservatism and partisanship, support for the Tea Party remains a valid predictor of racial resentment. We’re not saying that ideology isn’t important, because it is: as people become more conservative, it increases by 23 percent the chance that they’re racially resentful. Also, Democrats are 15 percent less likely than Republicans to be racially resentful. Even so, support for the Tea Party makes one 25 percent more likely to be racially resentful than those who don’t support the Tea Party….

Obviously not everyone, but a few. Wasn’t that the point of the NAACP resolution?

Welcome to post-racial America.

Obama took the fight to McSame on Monday, kicking off a two-week campaign tour of battleground states, and he came out swinging, attacking the economic policies of John Walker McBush, and making the economy the central theme of this leg of the general election campaign.

In his most pointed and sustained attack on Mr. McCain’s economic agenda, Mr. Obama said that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of President Bush’s faltering economic policies. And he highlighted his own proposals to aid economically beleaguered Americans: tax cuts for middle-income families and retirees, a $50 billion economic stimulus package, expansion of unemployment benefits, and relief for homeowners facing foreclosure.

The speech was made at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, the heart of red country, a state that hasn’t gone to the Democrat since fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Obama is ceding nothing, instead he is going into the heart of the fever swamp and throwing down the gauntlet. He went to North Carolina with a message not of limiting government, but of effective government. He drew sharp contrasts between himself and the republican nominee, especially on issues of economics, where by McCain’s own admission he is ignorant as dirt.

Obama spoke of hard working people, hard pressed to buy food and gasoline, and he laid the blame where it belongs, at the feet of aWol bu$h and his rubberstamp cornies in the congress, chief among them McCain, who, when he has bothered to cast votes in the Senate over the last year has voted the way bu$h wanted him to 100% of the time. He highlighted More-of-the-Same’s insistence that tax breaks for corporations are what will get us out of trouble, because as we all know, applying the same thinking that got you into trouble always gets you out!

“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history. This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long,” Obama told a crowd of about 900 people. “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. We’re not going back.”

Congress dealt up a dissing of the squatter that currently occupies the oval as well, announcing that they would work with Barack Obama to craft solutions to palliate America’s ills, bypassing the current president and moving on to the next one. Illustrating this fact, the House Democrats said they intended to force a separate vote this week – possibly Thursday – on extending unemployment benefits for those whose aid is running out. The extension is opposed by bu$h and many congressional republicans, and bu$h has threatened a veto. The Democrats are drooling over the political hay they could make out of a veto, and are all but daring him to do it.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that our media isn’t talking about McSame’s inability to seal the deal with a significant number republican voters in the republican presidential primaries?

For instance, last night in Indiana:

McCain 317,837 77%

Huckabee 41,018 10%

Paul 31,481 8%

Romney 19,480 5%

tiny URL

That’s 23% of the voters casting their ballot for someone else.

Then there’s North Carolina:

McCain 381,138 73%

Huckabee 62,917 12%

Paul 40,275 8%

No Preference 20,305 4%

tiny URL

“No preference” did quite nicely, especially since they didn’t spend any money.

And finally, of recent presidential primaries, there’s Pennsylvania:

McCain 587,210 73%

Paul 128,483 16%

Huckabee 91,430 11%

tiny URL

Wow. Over 200,000 republican primary voters in Pennsylvania didn’t vote for McSame. What’s he going to have to do to get their votes?

Tweety and the other cable network talking heads haven’t brought this up, have they? I wonder. It must not fit their selected narrative.

It’s going to be a long slog to November.