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Jon Stewart wasn't the only one this week that let Sen. Rand Paul have it for his failed attempt at minority outreach at Howard University, where he assumed the students there didn't know anything about their own history and were treated to him attempting to gloss over that whole era where Southern whites joined the Republican party because they were opposed to civil rights legislation passed by the Democrats.

As Harris-Perry explained: African Americans don’t need a history lesson from Rand Paul:

I read a lot of letters this week, but don’t worry–I also found time to write one. This one inspired by an especially awkward lecture at Howard University. And since my dad and two of my sisters attended Howard, I feel a little possessive of it and paid careful attention to Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s address.

Dear Sen. Paul,

It’s me, Melissa.

Apparently, you had a bit of trepidation about your visit to the land of the Bison this week. You said that some thought you were “either brave or crazy” to speak on campus.

Really?

Because it strikes me as precisely the mission of a university to give students an opportunity to hear dissenting viewpoints, to interact with political leaders, and to address the major issues of our day. I wouldn’t characterize it as brave or crazy, just part of Howard’s mission. But maybe you were nervous because as a libertarian you know your ideology stands opposed to the impulse that gave birth to Howard in the first place.

Howard University was established by the federal government. Following the Civil War, Congress recognized our nation’s collective responsibility to offer educational opportunities to the Freedmen and the subsequent generations of children that would be born into freedom. So Congress, in an act of collective responsibility toward young people, established Howard and later authorized an annual federal appropriations for its construction, development, improvement and maintenance.

But you left out that story of big-government Republicanism in your fascinating revisionist history. This moment was a gem, though: “I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans did champion citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient because they wanted economic emancipation… The Democrats promised equalizing outcome. Everybody will get something. through unlimited federal assistance.”

Um, OK: so your theory is African American voters left the Republican Party because they didn’t get enough free stuff.

Let me offer a different take.

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After giving his viewers a little reminder of what the Republicans sounded like during the 2012 Republican presidential primary race and their blatant race baiting and fearmongering over "illegal immigrants" Jon Stewart took Sen. John McCain and his buddies to task for their "craven political calculation" to try to "squeeze out enough votes" to make states like Nevada competitive again with their flip-flop on passing some sort of immigration reform.

Stewart brought on his correspondent Al Madrigal for his input as to whether the Republicans are going to be successful in their endeavor and Madrigal wasn't too optimistic, given that they appear to be holding their noses while doing what's obviously just politically expedient rather than something they actually support and due to the length of time that "Latinos hold grudges" and who are not going to forget any time soon the way they've been treated by Republicans.

When Stewart asked if there was another demographic they might have any more luck with in the future, like African Americans or women, Madrigal's fellow correspondent Jessica Williams interrupted the segment and put in her two cents about the fact that Republicans aren't going to have any luck there either, especially after remarks like those from "legitimate rape" Todd Akin and the House Republicans deciding to hold their annual retreat -- where they were supposed to be focusing on minority outreach -- at a former slave plantation.

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After pointing out that Republicans are no longer having success running on issues like inner city crime and opining over New York's Time Square becoming "a Disney-fied, bubble gum, wimp company" where "the worst that could happen is one of those giant M&M's tries to flash you his peanuts," Colbert opined over the fact that
this disturbing lack of violence isn't just a problem for our cities" but for the Republican party as well.

As Colbert noted, in this last election Republicans lost the blacks, the women, young voters, Latinos by 44 percent and "even more surprising, they failed to get 100 percent of the white male vote." Colbert had a suggestion for a new wedge issues if Republicans want to turn the voter tide back in their favor -- white male patriarchy.

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Chris Hayes and his Story of the Week on the predicament for Republican party and conservatives who are "creating their own electoral enemies" with "its visceral appeal to anxieties and fears of white Christians."

After listening to Republicans discussing their some of their losses after this last election, I'd say they're more than aware that they've got a problem, but are unwilling to admit they need to do more than put a little nicer window dressing on their policies. And I don't see them giving up on the fearmongering any time soon. It's all they've got left.

White identity politics doomed 2012 Republican effort:

Of all the surprising and revealing results from Tuesday night, there is one relatively small bit of exit polling data that I think is the key to understanding the entire evening.

You’ve probably heard by now that Mitt Romney won white voters by a sizable margin, while Barack Obama ran up huge margins among African-Americans and Latinos.

In fact, he won Latinos by 71% to 27%, an even wider margin than in 2008 when he won them 67% to 31%. But almost no one has noticed what to me is the most shocking result, and that’s how the two candidates did with Asian-American voters.

Now, Asian-Americans made up a very small sliver of the electorate, just 3%, so a presidential candidate’s performance within that group doesn’t necessarily carry with it massive electoral consequences.

But Asian-Americans are also, according to the latest census, the fastest growing racial sub category in America. In fact, the census projects that by mid-century they will make up 9% of the country. And as it happens, Asian-Americans are also the nation’s highest earning ethnicity, with median incomes even higher than those of whites.

So you might have predicted that Mitt Romney would do well with them, since he won among voters making more than $100,000 a year.

But he did not. He got creamed, losing Asian-American voters 73% to 26%. This is a shocking result not only because just 20 years ago George HW Bush carried Asian-Americans comfortably, or because the margin is so wide,but because the entire category of Asian-American is so obviously a construction there’s little reason to suspect members of the group would vote with each other in any discernible pattern.

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Former President Bill Clinton is warning that President Barack Obama's edge in the polls may not be enough to defeat GOP hopeful Mitt Romney because the Republican Party was using voter suppression techniques to target traditionally Democratic voters like African-American church members and the elderly.

"How much will the vote be lessened or reduced by the fact that in Florida except for four counties, the pre-election voting -- advanced voting -- has been cut down to and doesn't include the Sunday before the election?" Clinton told CNN's Fareed Zakaria in an interview that aired on Sunday.

The former president added that the tactic was "an arrow aimed straight at the heart of the African-American church, who pull up the church busses on the Sunday before the election and take elderly people who have no cars or people that are disabled to the polls so they can vote."

"How much will those things work in Ohio, where the legislature eliminated advanced voting unless the local election council voted for it?" he continued. "In the Republican counties, the three Democratic commissioners -- because they're not hypocrites -- voted with the Republican to allow advanced voting. In Cleveland, the three Republican commissioners voted against the Democrats so they can't have advanced voting."

"How much is all that going to affect the turnout? In my lifetime, nobody's ever done anything quite this blatant. So, I think you have to assume it's going to be close race, assume it's going to be a hard fight, and then fight through it."

As we already know, Pat Buchanan has been out there pushing a new book of his Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Buchanan showed up on Hannity's show earlier this week where he was treated to the softball interview I posted about here -- Pat Buchanan: America is Disintegrating Because White America is an Endangered Species.

Needless to say, he didn't get quite the same treatment when he appeared as a guest on Thom Hartmann's radio show this Thursday. The relevant portion of the interview starts at just over three and a half minutes into the video above and the portion quoted below is about eight and a half minutes in.

From Media Matters -- Pat Buchanan Won't Disavow Idea That Minorities Have Inferior Genes:

Yesterday, radio host Thom Hartmann challenged guest Pat Buchanan over his recent writing about minorities and test scores. Hartmann said that "a lot of people are taking what you're saying as code for inferior genes" and twice pressed Buchanan to disavow that theory. Buchanan did not, instead claiming that he doesn't "know anything" about the topic.

From The Thom Hartmann Program:

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While discussing presidential candidate Herman Cain's assertion that the black community has been brainwashed into supporting Democrats, MSNBC's resident racist and bigot in chief, Pat Buchanan came to Cain's defense on Martin Bashir's show this Thursday.

BUCHANAN: John McCain got the same share of the African American vote as David Duke got for running for Governor of Louisiana. Anybody think John McCain is a racist or an ex-klansman? That's ridiculous.

I think the African American community has embraced Great Society liberalism which has proved devastating for the African American families.

Seventy one percent of African American kids are born out of wedlock. Half of them drop out of high school. I think the whole welfare state mentality, I think has been deeply devastating to all of America, especially including the African American community. And I admire Herman Cain for standing up and going against if you will the conventional wisdom and being a tough African American businessman who's succeeded in a tough world and I admire him in that regard.

BASHIR: But, Pat, brainwashed? That's a fairly strong term.

BUCHANAN: I think what he’s saying is they bought an awful lot of liberal propaganda on the liberal plantation and think he’s right.

BASHIR: On the liberal plantation. Wow.

BUCHANAN: That's right.

It's so nice to see Pat Buchanan speaking out in support of a party that would be happy to take us back to the days of Jim Crow laws if they had their way and who have used racial divisions and not so subtle dog-whistles as Buchanan did here with inflammatory rhetoric to divide the electorate and convince them to vote against their own self interests pretending that Republicans and not those who embrace liberalism have had their best interests at heart.

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During the panel discussion on this Sunday's This Week, Donna Brazile got to make a point we don't hear discussed often enough in our corporate media, and that is the horrible level of poverty and the income disparity that minority communities are facing in the United States. And when you look at these numbers she pointed to, it's little wonder we've got members of the Congressional Black Caucus like Maxine Waters speaking out after hearing many legitimate complaints from her constituents as we saw this past week.

BRAZILE: When Maxine Waters, who I have enormous respect for, says to members of the black community (inaudible) she's not saying, I want to attack the president. She's saying, look, we want a strategy. We don't want another plan. We know that the Republicans want to prove the president's plan. We want a strategy, a long-term strategy to bring jobs back to the inner cities, black wealth, just -- not because I'm black, but because I'm an American.

But over the last four years, 53 percent of black wealth has just disappeared. The average -- for white families, the median income is $113,000. For black families, $5,000, $5,000. It has dropped.

So these families are hurting. They want help. They want relief. They don't want to hear about Congress. They don't want to hear about the Tea Party. They don't want to hear another plan. They want jobs.

Here's more from a recent article from CBS News with some more details on those numbers -- Wealth gap between whites, minorities widens:

The wealth gaps between whites and minorities have grown to their widest levels in a quarter-century. The recession and uneven recovery have erased decades of minority gains, leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics, according to an analysis of new Census data.

The analysis shows the racial and ethnic impact of the economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring. It offers the most direct government evidence yet of the disparity between predominantly younger minorities whose main asset is their home and older whites who are more likely to have 401(k) retirement accounts or other stock holdings. [...]

The median wealth of white U.S. households in 2009 was $113,149, compared with $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Those ratios, roughly 20 to 1 for blacks and 18 to 1 for Hispanics, far exceed the low mark of 7 to 1 for both groups reached in 1995, when the nation's economic expansion lifted many low-income groups to the middle class.

The white-black wealth gap is also the widest since the census began tracking such data in 1984, when the ratio was roughly 12 to 1.

And regardless of the points made during this segment by ABC's Jeff Zeleny that it's unlikely that the Republicans will cooperate with President Obama to get anything passed in the Congress, which is true. And regardless of George Will's whopper on the amount of stimulus spending we've already had and him continually lying that the government can't do anything to improve the economy which I wish she'd pushed back harder on, Brazile's points on some of the other things the president can do were spot on -- like making sure the government spending the Executive Branch does have control over enacts policies that hire Americans.

And as she noted, when you're looking at the severe levels of income disparity we're seeing in minority communities that she described here, the members of those communities and their representatives in the government have every right and obligation to speak out. We can't maintain a democracy in America if we continue to destroy what's left of our middle class and continue to allow that many of our citizens to be living in abject poverty.

Transcript below the fold.

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The president of the NAACP condemned the New Black Panther Party Sunday but said there was really no comparison with the Tea Party.

On Tuesday, the NAACP voted to approve a resolution calling for the Tea Party to repudiate racist elements within their movement.

Since then, the nations's oldest civil rights group has been criticized for ignoring the racism exhibited by a small group called the New Black Panther Party. Conservative outlets like Fox News have pointed to a video where a member of the New Black Panther Party called for African-Americans to "kill cracker babies."

David Webb, co-founder of Tea Party 365, confronted NAACP president Ben Jealous about the New Black Panther Party Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation.

"I have a serious objection with is his selective condemnation of racism when he will not condemn the New Black Panther Party for saying that they want to kill crackers and kill cracker babies, whereas he would condemn the KKK or any element that shows up in and claims that they are a part of the Tea Party," said Webb.

"The reality here is that the New Black Panther Party is like 12 people, 13 people," responded Jealous. "They don't say these things at the NAACP. If they did, we would take them on."

"I said three times on a show with you last week so hear me this time. You know, bigots come in all colors. We absolutely denounce the New Black Panther Party. But they aren't in our group. These folks are in your groups," said Jealous.