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Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Saturday asserted that a Phoenix program to hire more black and Latino lifeguards at public pools was the "same rationale that propped up Jim Crow for 80 years."

NPR last month reported that the city of Phoenix had set out to hire more minorities because more than 90 percent of the swimmers at some pools were black or Latino, but a majority of lifeguards were white.

On Saturday, Crystal Wright, editor of ConservativeBlackChick.com, snarked to Fox News that "if you're downing, you want to relate to a lifeguard that's going to save you, right guys?"

"Is there any social science evidence that shows that people don't want to be saved by people who have a different melanin content from they do?" Carlson wondered.

Wright said that Phoenix "would rather have people drown or risk drowning in our pools all in the name of diversity. It's the most perverse thing I've ever seen."

Co-host Alisyn Camerota pointed out that Phoenix had not said that children would be put in danger by diverse lifeguards, but that the program would help overcome a language barrier for Latino children with poor English skills.

"I'm a black American, I have no language barrier with a white person," Wright replied. "I'm talking to you and Tucker right now, we seem to be speaking English."

"This is the same rationale that propped up Jim Crow for 80 years, right?" Carlson opined. "You want to swim in a pool with people who look like you. You want to sit in the same bus or the same movie theater or use the same water fountain as people who look like you. It's diversity."

"Segregation," Wright agreed. "My parents grew up during segregation and they didn't really like to be on the beach and at pools and seeing white people be able to use a different beach. Phoenix is making no sense, and they're forcing some kind of segregation."

Wright added that the Phoenix program was not like former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's so-called "binders full of women," which she said was "common sense."

"Hispanics and blacks tend to not be as good swimmers as whites, and many more black Americans and Hispanics, actually those kids don't know how to swim," Wright concluded. "This is just putting -- it's not good."

(h/t: Media Matters)

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MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry had a few words for old Fat Tony after the remarks he made during this week's Supreme Court hearing on the Voting Rights Act -- Voting is no ‘racial entitlement,’ Justice Scalia:

Dear Justice Scalia,

It’s me, Melissa.

By now, we know you well enough that there’s not much you can say or do that would come as a surprise. We can set our watches by your decisions that, predictably, will be in alignment with the Court’s most radically conservative reasoning. We know that unlike your friend Justice Clarence Thomas, who has a permanent mute button on, you will always voice an opinion, and it will be heavily influenced by your political agenda..

But even given all of that, what you had to say during Wednesday’s oral arguments still came as a genuine shock.

Commenting on Congress’s nearly unanimous re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, you said, “I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

You went on to say, “I am fairly confident it will be re-enacted in perpetuity…unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution…It’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress.”

Racial entitlement? Not a question you can leave to Congress? Even for you, Justice Scalia, this is a particularly willful misreading of the Constitution you claim to adore.

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Conservative columnist Ann Coulter asserted on Sunday that Democrats were making a mistake by "dropping the blacks" in favor of Hispanics because rights for LGBT people and immigrants are not true civil rights.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Coulter what she meant in her lasted book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama," when she wrote that feminists, LGBT activists and immigrants rights groups had "commandeered the blacks' civil rights experience."

"The way that liberals have treated blacks like children, many of their policies have been harmful to blacks," Coulter declared. "We do have a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. We don't owe the homeless, we don't owe the feminists, we don't owe women who are desirous of having abortions or gays who want to get married to one another. That's what 'civil rights' have become for much of the left."

"Immigrant rights are not civil rights?" Stephanopoulos pressed.

"No, I think civil rights are for blacks," Coulter insisted. "What have we done to the immigrants? We owe black people something, we have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven't even been in this country."

Univision's Jorge Ramos pointed out that if Republicans continued to refuse to embrace Latinos, "they're going to lose not only this election, they might lose the White House for a generation."

"That's why Democrats are dropping the blacks and moving on to the Hispanics," Coulter explained. "There are a larger group of Hispanics now."

"You can have open borders or you can have a welfare state. You cannot have both," she added. "When you have a big government giving out all sorts of things then you have to care very much who the immigrants are -- and it ought to be for something other than who lives within walking distance."

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Fundamentalist Christian radio host Bryan Fischer says that the white supremacist who massacred six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin must have been a liberal because he hated former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and had a "a left-wing political philosophy."

On his Tuesday American Family Association radio show, Fisher said that Wade Michael Page could not be connected to the tea party because he had threatened to leave the country if Cain was elected president. But the conservative radio host failed to mention that Page's hate for African Americans may have trumped any desire to support the Republican candidate.

"The tea party [is] primarily made up of white people, of evangelicals, people of faith," Fischer explained. "We loved Herman Cain. He was a black guy. We loved him. We would have been happy to have him be our presidential candidate. This guy despised Herman Cain."

Fischer then made the claim that Page's identification as a neo-Nazi meant he also must have been a liberal.

"You know what the Nazi Party stands for? It's the National Socialist Party. What about the word 'socialist' do you not understand? They were the National Socialist Party - that is a left-wing political philosophy," he insisted.

Fischer continued: "And you think even here in the United States, who was the part of racism? It was the left, it was liberals who were the part of racism. It was Democrats that supported and defended the institution of slavery. It was Democrats that resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was Democrats that instituted Jim Crow laws. It was Democrats that created the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s."

While Fischer often recounts the Democratic Party's opposition to rights for minorities, he always fails to mention that Democrats surpassed Republicans on civil rights when Democratic President Harry Truman became the first president since Abraham Lincoln to address civil rights issues in the 1940s. After attempting to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Southern Democrats have largely joined the national party in support of civil rights issues. Many of those that didn't agree with the party's civil rights agenda, defected to the Republican Party.

Earlier this week, televangelist Pat Robertson also attempted to disassociate Page with conservative Christians by suggesting that atheists were to blame for the shooting.

“What is it?” the TV preacher wondered. “Is it satanic? Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God? And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.”

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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A group of pastors in Alabama says that they are not racist even though only "white Christians" were invited to their three-day conference, which will include a cross burning and be attended by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members.

Residents in Guin, Alabama became outraged earlier this week after they noticed flyers posted around the town that read, "Annual Pastors Conference All White Christians Invited." The groups Christian Identity Ministries and the Church of God's Chosen told WIAT that they just didn't have the "facilities" to accommodate non-whites.

"We're seldom ever have been invited to black Muslim events and we never have been invited to NAACP events and we never have been invited to join Jewish synagogues events and stuff," Christian Identity Ministries Pastor William J. Collier explained.

"It has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of racism or hate or anything like that," he added. "And anybody who would brand it as that would be a racist and a hater themselves, you know."

Collier insisted that the "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony" to be held on final day of the event symbolized an "opposition to tyranny."

"We are not burning a cross, look at the word is says it says light a cross," Christian Identity Ministries Reverend Mel Lewis told WIAT. "If you light a light in your house do you burn down your house. We often use fire. Our ancient fathers said fire was a cleansing element. Even the Bible says the earth will be purified with fire what purer element can we use as a symbol of our worship."

But the president of the NAACP's Birmingham Metro Chapter could not recall any past cross burning that had not been associated with racism or hate.

"The only context that I'm familiar with is one that is not very positive," Hezekiah Jackson said. "And one that really symbolizes an era that many of us have hoped to put behind us. And that is this whole era of Jim Crow, this whole era of white supremacy, this whole era of discrimination and racial hatred."

"I think it's really hard to clarify what's going on, but it seems to be some vestiges of what we call white supremacy here in Alabama. We just have to be honest about it."

The "Annual Pastors Conference All White Christians Invited" event ends on Friday. It is the fourth year that the whites-only conference has been held in Lamar county.

(h/t: Think Progress)