From the Belly of the Beast: first Alberto Gonzales hired for a one-year, $100,000 gig at Texas Tech. Now a county judge has decided that a racist poster in the County Court House, implying that all Obama supporters are criminals, is a way to "spark discussion."
Amanda Terkel at Think Progress is all over this:
Judge Tom Head is under fire for an offensive poster he put up on a public bulletin board in the Lubbock, TX county courthouse. The poster shows nine arrest photos of people wearing Obama t-shirts, accompanied by the text:
Did you ever see anyone arrested wearing a Bush T-shirt, or for you older folks, an Eisenhower?, Gerald Ford?, Ronald Reagan?, even Nixon?, or any political t-shirt? There MUST be a message here, but I can’t quite grasp it, or maybe I’m afraid to.
The poster is culled from a mug-shots database, specifically selecting a subset of nine suspects who were photographed wearing Obama T-shirts. Some asshole going by "tom2" posted it, and the Judge decided it would "spark conversation" if he printed the poster and hung it on a public bulletin board in the Court House.
Now, first a clarification: "Judge" Heard is actually an administrator; this is an elected position, and he does not sit on any bench. To its credit, the local paper did cover the story, and the county commissioners yanked everything off the said bulletin board (it wasn't the only offensive anti-Obama thing hanging there).
But the Judge does not bloody get it:
He saw nothing wrong with the poster and had not heard from anyone in the community who did, he said. The reaction surprised him, he said.
"It seemed like a good thing to put on the board to try and get people talking to one another," Head said. "I don't consider it racist. I still don't."
The commissioners, it's clear from the paper's coverage, would like the whole thing to blow away, and I can't blame them: Head is a jackass and an administrator, who may in 2008 have taken cash in return for political favors, and he's a general embarrassment to us here. The Commissioners also recognize that Judge Head needs some re-education.
But, I don't think it should be allowed to blow over: I'd like to see Head called on the carpet nationally for this.
Action items:
- You can comment directly onnline in response to the article at http://www.lubbockonline.com/...
- You can comment to (and congratulate!) the reporters on the story here:
elliott.blackburn@lubbockonline.com l 806-766-8722
marlena.hartz@lubbockonline.com l 806-766-8753
- You can comment directly to the paper's "Letters to the Editor" here:
http://www.lubbockonline.com/...
- Contact Commissioner Bill McCay and thank him for his removal of the offending material. McCay is a conscientious administrator and understands that this is a terrible misrepresentation of what most people think.
- Finally, if you've got a lot of free time on your hands :-), you could cull through stories about right-wing/fundamentalist/birther/deather/terrorist types and list their right-wing affiliations for the Lubbock paper (contact info above).
Suggestion: in all of the above fora, emphasize that "Lubbock is better than this" and "does not deserve to be represented by such backward behavior in the national press." The commissioners, City Council, and Mayor's office are incredibly sensitive to the perception of Lubbock as a redneck backwater, and so a recognition that this kind of conduct is not an accurate reflection of how most Texans think is the best tack.
Thanks, friends. Down here, we need all the help we can get.