tagged w/ Shirley Sherrod
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Andrew Breitbart
1969 - 2012
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Mr. Andrew Breibart is gone but he won’t be forgotten. He
will be long remembered for his bigotry and lies; and for
his hatred towards those he deemed unfit.
I feel sorrow for his mother’s loss but also I feel anger at
how she apparently raised him. If I had
a son who displayed such disrespect for others by using
character assassination as a weapon to obliterate people
like Shirley Sherrod, and organizations’ like ACORN, while
feeling a sense of victory, upon their ruin, I would feel
DEEP SHAME.
In essence, people like Sherrod and the hard workers at
ACORN were only the tip of the iceberg of the nasty deeds
perpetrated by Breitbart upon his fellow human beings.
His legacy will exhibit a long list of vile attempts to
annihilate reputations of those who did not happen to fit
into his cold-hearted dogmatism.
I know there are some that shared his warped sense of
‘who is’ and ‘who is not’ valuable in our society and they
will miss him,
but I am not one of them.
Right now the Internet is ablaze with his death.
The right-wing is calling him an angel and a warrior and is
strongly criticizing the left for acting gleeful over his death
but I just came across something that Breitbart had written
after the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy:
{{After Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts died in
2009, Breitbart tweeted, "Rest in Chappaquiddick" and
called him "a special pile of human excrement."
When critics questioned his tone, he tweeted they "missed
my best ones!"}}
Now that's nasty but it also is typical Breitbart.
thinkingblue
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Some thoughts from David Frum at the Daily Beast. “Breitbart reinvented the culture war and made it more about personalities than issues. Along the way, he got some stories right (Anthony Weiner) and some wrong (Shirley Sherrod), but he didn't care either way. Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise."
All of which leads Frum to conclude that Breitbart's legacy is a "poisonous" one. He achieved success through a "giddy disdain for truth and fairness" and his politics were "inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas." He was a public figure and should be judged by his public actions, even if "the obituary cannot be pleasant reading."
...
And this from: http://blog.bleacherreport.com/Andrew Breitbart
1969 - 2012
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Mr. Andrew Breibart is gone but he won’t be... more
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'It’s not bad enough that right-wing media have attempted to portray the Occupy Movement as dirty hippies, lazy freeloaders, ignorant dupes, leftist traitors, godless heathens, diabolical Marxists, violent revolutionaries, and White House plants, Breitbart is adding Al-Qaeda terrorists to this list. If it wasn’t so dangerously provocative it would be moderately humorous. But Breitbart’s accusations are irresponsible and his activities may be illegal."
http://veracitystew.com/2011/10/18/breitbarts-slimy-efforts-to-discredit-occupy-wall-street/'It’s not bad enough that right-wing media have attempted to portray the... more
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"It's so hot that Dick Cheney waterboarded himself." Stand-up comedian Chris Martin get topical and tropical August 3, 2010 at the Charlottesville Comedy Roundtable's open mic at the 12th Street Taphouse in Charlottesville, VA.
http://www.chrismartincomedy.com"It's so hot that Dick Cheney waterboarded himself." Stand-up comedian... more
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WASHINGTON – A former Agriculture Department employee who was shown in an edited video making what appeared to be racist remarks has sued the conservative blogger who posted the video that led to her dismissal.
Shirley Sherrod said Monday that she is "still reeling" from being ousted in a racial firestorm last July. USDA officials asked Sherrod to resign after blogger Andrew Breitbart posted an edited video of comments she had made in a speech earlier in the year.
The clip showed Sherrod, who is black, telling a local NAACP group that she was initially reluctant to help a white farmer save his farm more than two decades ago, long before she worked for USDA. Missing from the clip was the rest of the speech, which was meant as a lesson in racial healing. Sherrod told the crowd she eventually realized her mistake and helped the farmer save his farm.
She later received numerous apologies from the administration, including from President Barack Obama, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked her to return. She declined the offer, but she said at the time she might do some contract work with the department.
Sherrod's lawyer released a statement Monday saying she was suing Breitbart in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for "defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress." The statement said Breitbart's video "went viral on the Internet, igniting a national media firestorm, costing Mrs. Sherrod her federal position" while damaging her reputation.
"This lawsuit is not about politics or race," Mrs. Sherrod said in the statement released by her lawyer. "It is not about right versus left, the NAACP or the tea party. It is about how quickly, in today's Internet media environment, a person's good name can become 'collateral damage' in an overheated political debate. I strongly believe in a free press and a full discussion of public issues, but not in deliberate distortions of the truth."
Breitbart has said he released the video to illustrate racism within the NAACP, which earlier had accused the tea party of having racist elements. A statement on Breitbart's website, BigGovernment.com, said he was sued but did not mention Sherrod by name. The statement said he is "confident of being fully vindicated."
"Mr. Breitbart categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech," the statement said.
The lawsuit names Breitbart and his employee Larry O'Connor, who the lawsuit claims posted the video. The suit also names a "John Doe" defendant described as "an individual whose identity has been concealed by the other defendants and who, according to defendant Breitbart, was involved in the deceptive editing of the video clip and encouraged its publication with the intent to defame Mrs. Sherrod."
Breitbart's original posting showed clips of a March 2010 speech to an NAACP group in which Sherrod talked about her reluctance to help the white farmer who came to her more than two decades ago when she worked at a farm aid nonprofit group.
She said the man was acting "superior" to her and she debated whether to help him.
"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land," Sherrod said in the speech. "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do."
Breitbart said at the time that the video showed the NAACP condoning racist comments from a government official.
What was cut from the video was that Sherrod was telling a story of racial reconciliation and explaining to the audience how she eventually became friends with the farmer and helped him save his land from foreclosure. His situation, she said, "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have."
"We have to overcome the divisions that we have," she said.
In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Sherrod declined to talk about the lawsuit but said she is still looking for work. She said she had spoken with Vilsack in recent months but had not been offered any contract work from USDA.
"I'm not employed and no one's offered me a job anywhere, so I don't know where to look at this point," she said. "I'm just trying to survive."
Vilsack declined to discuss the lawsuit Monday during an unrelated briefing on the federal budget. But he said he hopes to work with Sherrod on a USDA effort to help disadvantaged rural residents apply for government loans.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110214/ap_on_re_us/us_usda_racism_resignationWASHINGTON – A former Agriculture Department employee who was shown in an edited... more
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Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video |
Former USDA official targets conservative blogger with aggressive lawsuit.Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video |
Former USDA official... more
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In this shocking, unedited video, Andrew Breitbart proudly announces to an audience that he was on crack cocaine during the birth of his children, is in rehab, has sexual problems, is a narcissist and in the end confesses, "I'm kind of a fraud."
Should he be forced to resign?In this shocking, unedited video, Andrew Breitbart proudly announces to an audience... more
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CNN talking heads Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discuss internet journalism and the Sherrod case. “Imagine what would have happened,” says Roberts, “if we hadn’t taken a look at what happened to Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said.”
Too bad this self-righteous attitude was nowhere to be found when it was discovered that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. It was obvious well before Bush and the neocons invaded Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear and biological weapons. Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. It did not buy yellow cake in Niger.
In 1995 Gen. Hussein Kamel told U.N. inspectors and the CIA that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles (weapons, incidentally, sold to Hussein by the U.S. and European countries). Even one of then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s analysts, Greg Thielmann, said key evidence cited by the administration was misrepresented to the public.
Everyone knew Saddam did not have WMDs and that includes the corporate media. Tony Blair said Iraq did not have WMDs. Majority Whip at the time, Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, who was on the Senate intelligence committee, knew Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, who was a member of the National Security Council, said he saw absolutely nothing he would have characterized as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. He also said the neocons planned to invade Iraq well before the attack of September 11, 2001.
In 2008, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan published a memoir. In his book McClellan said that the Iraq invasion and occupation was sold to the American people with a “political propaganda campaign” led by Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”CNN talking heads Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discuss internet journalism and the... more
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President Obama said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack erred in pushing out Shirley Sherrod over allegations of racism that later proved unsubstantiated, but the real culprit, he told ABC News, was the media.
"He jumped the gun," Obama said of Vilsack, "partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles."
Obama's charge was broadcast by ABC News Thursday night, excerpted from a longer interview scheduled to run Friday on "Good Morning America."
"I've told my team and I told my agencies that we have to make sure that we're focusing on doing the right thing instead of what looks to be politically necessary at that very moment. We have to take our time and, and think these issues through," Obama said.
"If there's a lesson to be drawn from this episode," the President continued, it's to avoid "jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other."
For her part, Sherrod blamed the White House for overreacting to criticism, whether that criticism is honest or not. "This administration is definitely too sensitive to what the right is saying," she told CBS News Thursday morning. "I definitely think the right has actually edited speeches that have been made to try and get their point over, when they know it's a lie."President Obama said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack erred in pushing out Shirley... more
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WHACKO-TV continues its series I’M SOOOO CONFUSED with a guest rapper “Mr. Natural” who does free association between the latest news and his confusion to understand it. He talks about the Russian spies, Lindsay Lohan and Shirley Sherrod.WHACKO-TV continues its series I’M SOOOO CONFUSED with a guest rapper “Mr.... more
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP was founded in 1909 by 53 white "Liberals" in response to lynchings and a so-called "race riot" in 1908 in Springfield Illinois. All the presidents of the NAACP from 1910 to 1966 were white men. This fact and a reputation for being in favor of integration with the status quo caused some friction between its most famous black member, W. E. B. DUBOIS, who was the editor of the NAACP's publication, "The Crisis," and the most nationalistic and economically independent minded black leader of the era, namely MARCUS GARVEY. Garvey is reported to have visited the NAACP's offices of "The Crisis" to invite Dubois to a meeting and found it staffed entirely by whites. Dubois brushed off the invitation and it appears the relationship, between Debois and Garvey, continued to deteriorate from there. All of this background to establish that the NAACP often called the nation's oldest and most prestigious civil rights organization still has credibility and relevancy problems.
Although the NAACP helped end lynching and fought segregation and discrimination, some people are questioning its relevancy on its 100th anniversary. Its current president, BEN JEALOUS, ignited a conservative backlash by calling on the Tea Party leadership to repudiate the racist elements among their ranks. Although he actually missed the mark, since this so-called movement doesn't just contain racist isolated "bad apples" but, it's ideological genesis and inspiration is... in my opinion, formed of a hate-filled and racist backlash to the Obama presidency. Enter ANDREW BREITBART, characterized in the media as a conservative "blogger." But in reality, Breitbart is a right wing professional "operative" whose job is to carry out media "hits " against all enemies -foreign and domestic." Unfortunately, his victim this time was a completely innocent sacrifice, in the person of SHIRLEY SHERROD, the head of the Georgia USDA. Mrs. Sherrod was the victim of a hatchet job that included broadcasting clips from a speech she gave at a NAACP meeting; where she recounted her experience, with a white farmer in danger of losing his farm. The irony, which she pointed out, was that hundreds of black farmers who had lost their farms, as a result of discrimination by this same agency. Mrs. Sherrod told how she realized that all poor people, both black and white, were being taken advantage of, by the "powers that be." She actually was successful in saving the white family's property; but, that's not the story Fox News told.
Before anyone reviewed the tape, in order to ascertain the truth, Mrs.Sherrod had been fired by the Dept. of Agriculture, vilified by BEN JEALOUS and many media outlets. But, as in devine intervention, SHIRLEY SHERROD was quickly vindicated and offered an apology from the Sec. of Agriculture and offered her job back. BEN JEALOUS also backtracked and offered his "mea culpa's." This is the whole point, before Jealous revived the tape the NAACP tape he started tap dancing to the Fox News beat. So frightened was he, of the charge of racism from the GLEN BECK's and BILL O'RIELLY's he threw the sister "under the bus" After 100 years of "tap dancing" to white liberal tunes... is the NAACP now "buck dancing" to the beat of the conservative drum? A. YUSUF RAMADAN
A.Yusuf Ramadan //// Resident Imam Masjid Nurriddin /// Ed. Dir./Clara Muhammad School-Queens NY /// Host of A New Day For Al-Islam In America Radio Show /// WPAT 930 AM Dial or WPAT930am.com /// Saturday Mornings - 5am-6am (Eastern) /// 4am-5am (Central), /// 2am-3am (West Coast) ///The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP was founded in... more
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In fact Juliet Huddy is trying to cover the holes in the Fox News reporting. We ask Juliet Huddy and Doocy of ‘Fox &Friends’ to apologize for their false claims and wrong accusations on Sherrod.In fact Juliet Huddy is trying to cover the holes in the Fox News reporting. We ask... more
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The Obama Administration did just what it promised, and what we voted for; It passed major health care reform that provides insurance to those who had none, prevents insurance companies from dropping people when they become sick or reach a predetermined limit, extends coverage for children and protects those with pre-existing conditions. Yet all last summer the buzz was over 'death panels' and 'government takeover,' both of which were proven to be lies. (Politifact even called the so-called 'death panels' the lie of the year.)
Just this past week, President Obama signed the biggest financial reform since the New Deal into law in an effort to prevent the kind of economic meltdown we saw at the end on the Bush Administration. But because the conservative Fox News passionately reported a very misleading story on Shirley Sherrod, the week was spent talking about her and not financial reform. Bill O'Reilly later apologized to Sherrod as his reporting specifically, and Fox's in general grossly misrepresented the facts. Unfortunately the damage had been done. Sherrod lost her job and financial reform got buried on the third page.
Fox has proven you don't need to be accurate to get ratings. Conservative politicians have demonstrated you don't need to be accurate to have an impact. Thanks to the Supreme Courts ruling last year that gives corporations the ability to poor unlimited amounts of money into campaigns and political advertisements, it appears you will need to be rich to have a voice. (But you won't need to be accurate to have one.) Despite what they would have you believe, conservatives have mastered the media. Unfortunately for America, they haven't mastered being accurate.The Obama Administration did just what it promised, and what we voted for; It passed... more
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The decision to fire Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod -- an action that has now been rescinded -- is clearly part of a larger debate about discrimination and race in the public sphere. It's also evidence that hopes Barack Obama would lead the country into a "post-racial" future have thus far gone unrealized.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128672288The decision to fire Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod -- an action that... more
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Former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that she would consider legal action against the conservative blogger who posted the video that led to her ouster.
Speaking on CBS' Early Show, Sherrod said that while she hasn't actively talked about suing Andrew Breitbart, she "would definitely consider it."
Sherrod said that Breitbart's intentions were obvious - but misguided.
"As much as he's saying it was about the NAACP, he had to know that it was about me," Sherrod said. "He was willing to destroy me to get to what he thought -- to try to destroy the NAACP."
"He had to know what he was doing," she added. "I'm certain he didn't think the other side of the story would come out, but he knew he was misrepresenting the facts."
Sherrod also said that Breitbart had not apologized to her.
"I don't think I would ever receive an apology," she said.Former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that she would... more
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Olbermann: The witch-hunt vs. Sherrod, and those who made it possible
Did the right wing media manipulate the USDA scandal?Olbermann: The witch-hunt vs. Sherrod, and those who made it possible
Did the... more
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This is a good start: At the press briefing just now, Robert Gibbs apeared to extend a heartfelt apology to Shirley Sherrod on behalf of the Obama administration, and promised a look at what went wrong.
Interestingly, though, he sidestepped a question about whether fear of the conservative media drove the decision to fire Sherrod before the facts were all in.
Here's what Gibbs said, referring to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack:
The secretary is trying to reach her. I hope the secretary reaches her soon, and they have an opportunity to talk. The Secretary will apologize for the actions that have taken place over the past 24 to 36 hours. And on behalf of the administration, I offer our apologies.
Gibbs also seemed to promise some kind of reckoning as to how the White House botched this mess, though he stopped short of promising anything official:
I think everybody has to go back and look at what has happened over the past 24 to 36 hours, and ask ourselves how we got into this. How did we not ask the right questions? How did you all not ask the right questions? How did other people not ask the right questions?
When asked directly by a reporter whether the administration had "overreacted" because the White House is "afraid" of the conservative media, Gibbs brushed off the question.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/07/white_house_apologizes_to_shir.htmlThis is a good start: At the press briefing just now, Robert Gibbs apeared to extend a... more
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The woman ousted from the Agriculture Department over racially tinged remarks that sparked a firestorm in the media said she was uncertain if she would return to her job if invited back.
On Monday, Shirley Sherrod resigned from a senior position with the USDA in Georgia after edited video clips surfaced appearing to show her admitting to racial bias toward a white farmer.
However, when the full video of her speech at an NAACP event was made public, the civil rights group retracted a previous statement condemning her for acting in a racist manner, and said she had been treated unfairly. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack then said in the early hours of Wednesday that he would reconsider the USDA's decision to ask for her resignation.
"I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner," Vilsack said.
But Sherrod, who said on Tuesday that she was pressured to resign, said on NBC's TODAY show that she might not want her job back.
"I am just not sure how I would be treated there," she said, adding that she couldn't get coworkers to listen to her side of the story about a speech she made in March, edited clips of which were recently shown on a conservative website.
Sherrod said her comments were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation. They were not racist, she said, and were taken out of context.
"That's not my message. That's not me," she said on TODAY. "If you look at my life's work, you would know that that's not me."
NAACP was 'snookered'
On Tuesday, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said that the group was "snookered" into believing that Sherrod expressed racist sentiments at a local NAACP meeting in Georgia earlier this year. After initially supporting her ouster, Jealous changed his mind and said she should keep her job.
The Obama administration's move to reconsider her employment was a reversal on the position just hours earlier, when a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Barack Obama had been briefed on Sherrod's resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department's handling of it.
However, the white farming family that was the subject of the story came to Sherrod's defense and said she should stay in her job.
"We probably wouldn't have (our farm) today if it hadn't been for her leading us in the right direction," said Eloise Spooner, 82, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner of Iron City, Ga. "I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you."
She told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she considered Sherrod a "friend for life," saying that "the federal official worked tirelessly to help" them hold onto their farm as they faced bankruptcy in 1986.
"Her husband told her, 'You're spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,'" Spooner told the Journal-Constitution. "She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out."
As people came to her defense and Sherrod reached out to media to plead her case, the administration faced criticism that officials, nervous about racial perceptions, had overreacted to her comments and made her a political sacrifice amid dueling allegations of racism between the NAACP and the "Tea Party" movement.
In the clip posted on BigGovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. It was 1986, and she worked for a nonprofit rural farm aid group. She said the farmer came in acting "superior" to her and she debated how much help to give him.
"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land," Sherrod said.
Initially, she said, "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do" and only gave him enough help to keep his case progressing. But eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have."
The full video of Sherrod's speech showed that while she took some shots at conservatives and spoke of continued racial inequities, she focused on encouraging blacks, particularly the younger generation, to do more to help themselves.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38321920/ns/us_news-life?Gt1=43001The woman ousted from the Agriculture Department over racially tinged remarks that... more
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(CBS/AP) Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he will reconsider the department's decision to oust a black employee over racially tinged remarks after learning more about what she said.
Vilsack issued a short statement early Wednesday morning after Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday was the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia, said she was pressured to resign because of her comments that she didn't give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago.
Sherrod said her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism, and they were taken out of context by bloggers who posted only part of her speech.
The NAACP--which initially condemned her remarks, said Tuesday it was "snookered" by the initial reports based on the blog, reports CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford. The NAACP said the speech was "deliberately edited to create a false impression of racial bias."
Vilsack's statement came after the NAACP posted the full video of Sherrod's comments Tuesday night.(CBS/AP) Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he will reconsider the... more
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Breitbart hits NAACP with promised video of racism
HotAir.Com
July 19, 2010
by Ed Morrissey
The NAACP is about to learn one of the most basic of all lessons in life — those who live in glass houses should avoid provoking a stone-throwing war. After the civil-rights organization threatened to issue a condemnation of Tea Party activism by equating it with racism (a position from which they ultimately retreated), Andrew Breitbart announced that he would publish at least one video of the NAACP itself cheering racism. Breitbart delivers on that promise today at Big Government, showing USDA official Shirley Sherrod explain to an appreciative NAACP audience in July 2009 how she deliberately withheld information from a white farmer in Georgia trying to save his land and his business:
Click to watch....USDA’s Shirley Sherrod VIDEO: ...http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/usdas-shirley-sherrod-video-breitbart-exposes-real-racists-the-naacp/Breitbart hits NAACP with promised video of racism
HotAir.Com
July 19, 2010
by Ed... more
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