The most racist areas in the United States

There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.
North Korea.

And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.

The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.  READ MORE

Hate Map (from splc) interactive map, click on a state to see what hate groups are there.

Extremist Files

 

Anti-gay "pastor" charged with stealing $150K...blames gays. No, really.

This would make a good headline for The Onion.  Sadly, it's not satire at all.

Harris Himes, who calls himself "pastor" of the Big Sky Christian Center in Montana (the address of which is Himes's post office box), got himself in a bit of hot water recently.  He and another "pastor," James "Jeb" Bryant, apparently swindled an investor out of $150,000 by claiming to own a business called Duratherm Building Systems and promising good returns.  From the Missoulian:

The charges included theft, fraud, conspiracy to commit both, failure to register a security and failure to register as a salesman of same.

According to court records, Himes and Bryant claimed to own a business, Duratherm Building Systems, and promised at least one investor a large return on his $150,000. But the investor claimed to have never received any returns or confirmation of sale, nor could he get his money back.
READ MORE

Americans Love Class War!

A poll shows majorities of swing voters, Democrats and even Romney supporters don't admire the rich.

June 5, 2012

Americans still hate the rich, according to yet another poll. And not just godless secular liberals! Pew’s major Trends in American Values poll shows class resentments bridging the partisan divide: “Majorities in all educational and income groups agree that ‘today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.’ In the current survey, 76% of the public agrees with this statement, about the same as the 74% that agreed in 1987.”

Even the moderate pundit crowd’s beloved independents agree: Our ruling classes are worthless parasites. A mere 22 percent of “swing voters” “admire the rich.” (How many Romney supporters “admire the rich,” you ask? Thirty-eight percent. No one likes rich people.)

As Elspeth Reeve puts it, succinctly and correctly, “swing voters are not libertarians.” They’re also not “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” like the vast majority of our well-off media elites tend to consider themselves.  READ MORE

Where Oh Where Is All This Bigotry Coming From?

FROM THE: Happy Valley News Hour BLOG

Posted on September 25, 2011 by kamper

Booergate continues! Following up on my post from yesterday,I checked in with Althouse earlier today and, sure enough, she had revisited the controversyof Who Booed the Gay Soldier at the Republican Debate: of Who Booed the Gay Soldier at the Republican Debate:

I have listened to the video several times, and I stand by my perception that only one person audibly yells “boo.” I hear a loud “boo,” then a difficult to decipher noise — which could be an ugh response to the booer — and then a little more of a boo, which sounds like the original guy.

She links to Jim Geraghtyat the National Review, who quotes a woman who witnessed booergate first hand:

I was at the debate, in the audience on the right hand side about halfway back (here’s my tweet of the video screen that was right in front of us). The person who booed was just a few rows in front of us.

Hmmm. Right hand side. About halfway back. Booer was just in front of her. Maybe if we employed some sort of advanced parametric analysis of the audio track we could pinpoint the booer’s exact location and thereby . . . hold on, wait one minute.

WHAT THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT?
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The Republican Party Needs to Get a Grip

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the presidential campaign trail, 09/18/11. (photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)

By Ana Marie Cox, Guardian UK

25 September 11
Never mind the candidates, can you believe what GOP debate audiences are telling us? The Republican party needs to get a grip: cheering executions and booing a gay soldier in prime time are not good for the brand.

robably the best thing that can be said about the audiences for the GOP presidential debates is that they are not representative of either the Republican party or the country as a whole. For one thing, debate audiences have an active interest in politics, a passion the overwhelming majority of Americans lack. But that indifference towards the political process also translates into an amiable ambivalence regarding the government's role in our lives: "live and let live" could be our national motto, right behind "super size me", in terms of how often we apply any piece of wisdom to our daily lives.

By contrast - and it is a stark one - Republican debate audiences have thus far shown themselves to be in favor of both government cruelty and personal vengeance.
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Conservatives Say It Out Loud: They Hate Democracy

Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future: "The roots of today's toxic conservative movement lie in Ayn Rand's teaching that wealthy 'producers' - now called 'job creators' - should be left alone by the government, namely the rest of us. The rest of us are 'freeloaders,' 'moochers,' 'leeches' and 'parasites' who feed off these producers and who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions to collect taxes from them or regulate them or interfere in most other ways. The Randians hate democracy, and say so, declaring that 'collectivism' sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes."

(See Concern Over Republican Embrace Of The Ayn Rand Poison.)

For decades these selfish, childish, "you can't make me" beliefs stayed largely below the radar, because conservatives understood that voicing them in public risked alienating ... well, anyone with any sense at all. But for various reasons sense has departed the country and conservatives are finally saying it out loud, for everyone to hear: they hate democracy. They want to limit the country's decision-making and the rewards of our society and economy to those they feel "deserve" to be on top, namely the "producers" and "job-creators." Read the Article