GOATMILK: An intellectual playground edited by Wajahat Ali

US Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he is weighing a challenge of the new Arizona immigration law. The law professor who helped write the bill defends it.

Opponents of Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law protest outside the state capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona, Sunday. Critics of the law say that it will encourage racial profiling by law enforcement and endanger civil rights in the state.
(Newscom)

By Warren Richey, Staff writer
posted April 27, 2010 at 8:13 pm EDT

Washington —

As the Obama administration considers a potential legal challenge to Arizona’s tough new immigration law, a professor who helped draft the bill is defending the state measure as supportive of existing federal statutes.

“I think the critics who are claiming the bill will not withstand legal challenge need to read the bill,” said Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“The bill will withstand any preemptive challenge,” he said, because it reinforces existing federal immigration laws and creates no new immigration crimes.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.cinematical.com/2010/04/23/is-he-kidding-mickey-rourke-as-…

One of the most infamous cases of the practice of Yellowface the equivalent of Blackface for Asians in Hollywood is the portrayal of the warlord Gengis Khan by John Wayne in the film, The Conqueror. Five decades later one would think that attitudes would have changed and the practice of casting white actors for historically Asian or ethnic characters would have changed let alone altering them with makeup to fit caricatures of a people but sadly it hasn’t. The same story is playing out now as Mickey Rourke has been cast in a retelling of this story. Unlike the John Wayne film Mickey Rourke will be filming in China, Mongolia, and India for the role undoubtedly with people who could claim to be descendants of the Khan’s as background roles and arrow fodder while Rourke plays their cultures hero. This is far from Sin City or Iron Man rather this is an iron clad cinematic sin. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the media has squeezed every last eyeball from the year of frenzied interest in health care reform,  it appears that Crazy Republicans are, at the very least, the interim replacement. A supporting player in the health care drama, it looks like they have become the story now.

On the heels of racial and sexual slurs, spit and brick attacks,  and death threats, a new Harris poll that’s making the cable news rounds cements the notion of the scary conservative who believes that President Obama is, among other things, a Nazi-esque Muslim Antichrist.

The poll has been fairly ubiquitous on cable news shows the past few days. The numbers are scary, indeed. 67% believe the President is a socialist, although Harris didn’t do anything to verify that respondents knew what that word meant.

The real sizzler, though, is the 45% who believe he wasn’t born in the US, and the 24% who say he “may be the Antichrist.” There’s no way to tell if there’s any overlap, so it could be that up to 69% of Republicans believe the President was either born in another country, or that he was born here, but of a jackal. Read the rest of this entry »

25 April 2010

By Tim Wise

Ephphata Poetry

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama. Read the rest of this entry »