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Ed Schultz spoke to the late Prof. Derrick Bell's widow, Janet Dewart Bell about the recent racist attacks on her husband and President Obama from the right wing and talking heads over at Fox. Schultz asked Bell what her reaction was to the treatment of her husband and if she was angry about all of it.

BELL: I am angry and I'm sad. I'm sad that they could be so dishonest and it's just really part of that radical right wing and the right wing media's patterns of distortion and misinformation. But you know, I'm smiling because I want to lift up the memory of Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell left a great legacy, ot just to me and our family, but my husband was... if he were here today, he would be standing up for Sandra Fluke. You know Gloria Steinem once named him an honorary woman, because he was a feminist before feminism was cool and that's the Derrick Bell that I know; a man of courage, of conviction and he was always standing up for justice. It didn't matter who it was, he accepted people as they were.

Bell expressed her concern over the “drumbeat” of negativity coming from Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and their ilk and asked when the Republicans were going to speak out about what they were doing. In response to the attempt to paint her husband as a radical and someone who didn't love America, Bell continued:

BELL: My husband was a war veteran and he was a patriot and what he tried to do was make this country stand up to the ideals that he believed in. He believed it with his whole heart. Derrick thought the ideal, fair play, social justice, equality, opportunity, those are things that should be shared. Everybody should get a shot at the American dream. That's what Derrick Bell was about.

I await Janet Bell being attacked on Fox in 10... 9.... 8....

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Melissa Harris-Perry deconstructed quite nicely just what is behind the recent attacks by the right instigated by the Breitbart lackeys over President Obama hugging the late Prof. Derrick Bell. Sadly, it's the 1940's all over again, indeed, because that is where it looks like they're trying to take us back to.

If what's left of Breitbart's site and Hannity and the rest of them want to try to convince anyone besides the racists in the Republican base that were already running around with pictures of the president as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose that this is proof that he's somehow a "radical", they're going to have to do better than this. It's nice to see someone like Perry taking the time to explain some of the man's actual history and what he stood for to try to counter the hyperbolic attacks on him coming from the right.

Rough transcript to follow from this Saturday's show on MSNBC:

HARRIS-PERRY: This week, a manufactured controversy erupted around an extraordinary legal scholar, who used self-sacrifice as an agenda change of his own. This week, this twenty two year old video surfaced of then student Barack Obama at a protest rally, introducing Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell. Now Prof. Bell spent his career questioning and critiquing the institutional racism that infects America's legal structures.

This week, conservative media outlets offered up the video as proof by association that President Obama is adhering to a radical, anti-American agenda. Derrick Bell died in October of last year, so he's not here to correct the lies circulating about him. Thankfully, he left behind a rich legacy of legal activism and scholarship that speaks for itself.

Continue reading »

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Sean Hannity decided he wasn't done embarrassing himself after his ridiculous pimping of the latest Breitbart fake scandal from his previous show this Thursday evening and who better to bring in and talk about how President Obama supposedly was not "properly vetted" by the media before being elected president, than the un-vetted half-term quitter from Wasilla, Sarah Palin.

I would not recommend playing a drinking game with the word "radical" for this segment of Hannity's interview with Palin, because if you're doing a shot every time it comes out of one of their mouths, you might have to call an ambulance for blood alcohol poisoning by the time it's over.

The racist blow horns were on full alert with this bit of mind-blowingly stupid hackery from Palin about our first black president when Hannity asked her what she thinks if heaven forbid their worst nightmare comes true and he's reelected:

PALIN: Well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are all on the road that we are on and it's based on what went into his thinking, being surrounded by radicals. He is bringing us back Sean to days that... you can harken back to days before the Civil War, when unfortunately too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal. And it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth here in America... yes, we are equal and we all have equal opportunities, not based on the color of your skin.

You have equal opportunities to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities, god given opportunities to develop resources and work extremely hard and as I say, to succeed.

Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that that gravity, that mistake, took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.

Why are we allowing our country to move backwards instead of moving forward with that understanding that as our charters of liberty spell out for us, we are all created equally.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The amount of sheer projection here is just astounding, but that's just how they roll. Whatever our worst traits are, we're going to hurl them right back at the other side and hope the low information voters who watch this tripe are too stupid to know the difference.

And surprise, surprise, the video Hannity and Breitbart's site are pushing, which he mentioned again here of the lecture by Harvard professor Charles Ogletree is doctored. Who would have guessed?

h/t Media Matters

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Jon Stewart took a shot at Sean Hannity after his ridiculous hackery the previous night promoting the latest debacle to come out of the Breitbart lackeys, trying to paint President Obama as a "radical." Stewart opened the show promising to show viewers a tape which would reveal the "real" Sean Hannity that he didn't want you to see.

He followed with making a mockery of the latest non-scandal which Hannity is making a fool out of himself pushing with the "newly"... or not so new it turns out "secret" tapes of President Obama that Karoli already wrote about here.

Gotta' love the Clockwork Orange screen shot with what's required to force anyone to actually have to watch Hannity's show followed by Stewart calling out Hannity for hanging around with "an admitted perjurer" (Oliver North), "a convicted Watergate murderer (G. Gordon Liddy), or "a man who stomped another man to death in Cleveland" (Don King), or "whatever this is." Cut to Ted Nugent which C&L covered here -- Ted Nugent curses out Hillary, Obama, Feinstein and issues threats with Machine Guns.

Stewart wrapped things up saying if Hannity really wanted to go after President Obama for his "radical" associations or for "damaging Obama footage" he might consider his hiring of Larry Summers to fix the financial crisis he helped cause, his claim that he'll close Gitmo, or maybe he should look into that foreign Portuguese Water Dog they've got living in the White House. That last one would not be all that much more ridiculous than Hannity's latest attack sadly.