Via The Huffington Post:

On Saturday Al Sharpton actually asked: “Are we dealing with someone who’s just racially insensitive or someone who’s cynical, who would use race to play and blacks as backboards to score a shot?”

Is the mainstream media trying to help Newt Gingrich win? Do they really think a fight on air between Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton would do anything but make Gingrich more powerful? Or are they that cynical that they want to drive ratings on the back of Gingrich’s surge?

But Gingrich can’t easily be tarred with the racist brush because he has a long history of supporting blacks as individuals against government largesse.

Here’s what he told ABC in 2008:

There are a lot of good cases to be made that the African- American community has been hurt more by the failures of government than any other community. Look at New Orleans, where the African- American community was devastated by the failure of the federal, state and local governments in Katrina.

Gingrich repeatedly supported outreach efforts toward blacks as Speaker of the House, especially J.C. Watts, who helped oust a younger John Boehner from a leadership position in the party. Gingrich even selected Watts to deliver the rebuttal to Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech in 1997. Watts is now returning the favor, having endorsed Newt Gingrich in his presidential bid. (more…)

The timing of this poll is quite suspect given the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, and Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s America-scolding. But who are the real discriminators here?

An Associated Press-Univision Poll found that 61% of people overall said Latinos faced significant discrimination, compared with 52% who said blacks did and 50% who said women.

If you get a chance, watch some Univision or Telemundo. See any dark-skinned Latinos on their shows who aren’t buffoons, bad guys or maids?

The AP-Univision Poll compiled the views of 901 Latinos, which were compared with the results of a separate AP-GfK survey of the general population.

Did the Associated Press and Univision ask who they thought was doing the discriminating? As someone who lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, I’d be willing to bet a significant amount of people would say that Latinos were doing as much discriminating as anyone else. (more…)

In a recent column I wrote for Irish Examiner USA, I mentioned an email I received that was politically correct but that I thought was very funny. I debated including it in the column but decided against it for the sake of my publisher.

Apparently we’re no longer allowed to laugh at anything remotely unflattering to ourselves or certain minorities, and that’s not only a shame, it’s downright dangerous.

Joan Rivers used to tell jokes about Italians; Don Rickles insulted everybody, and Jackie Mason still tells jokes about Jews. Now it seems as if some Hispanics are now being encouraged to be as testy over slights as are certain Muslims over perceived disses of the prophet Mohammed.

Here at Big Journalism, however, the mission should be to write about things too edgy for the MSM so here it is and if you’re black or Hispanic and get offended, you need to check your humor level. You may be a few quarts low. (more…)

Next we’ll hear that James O’Keefe attended a dinner party honoring Apartheid South Africa’s former president, P. W. Botha. If so, and the accusation verified, O’Keefe’s “insensitivity” to human (and civil) rights would barely register against that of Max Blumenthal’s boss at The Daily Beast, Tina Brown.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his suffering. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”  laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver, whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.  When during a 1959 press conference a Cuban black asked Guevara, “what his Revolution would do for blacks?” Che sneered: “we’ll do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!” (more…)