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I'm frankly tired of this strawman argument. What once again sounds like common sense coming from talking points memos falls apart at the slightest realistic glimpse.

Here.

I'll summarize because you're probably not going to read it.

3 main points:

1. The vast majority of subprime loans were originated by institutions not subject to CRA oversight.

2. If you add up to the total value of all subprime loans, not just those in default, but all of them, the figure you get is about $1.5 trillion, an insignificant portion of the current crash's losses. Remember, that's all the loans, not the bad ones.

3. (this is the point that shatters your argument) The rate of loan default in CRA-generated mortgages is much lower than the national average.

Frankly, main street didn't have either the money or influence to pull off the activities you're trying to credit them with.

Rush Limbaugh does sound like a doofus when he tries to talk about science, but he is no racist.

Here are a few of Rush's "non-racist" comments that he's made. My favorite: "You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray (the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King). We miss you, James. Godspeed."

The man is an idiot blowhard. He has repeatedly shown that he is a ratings whore that will say anything to get people angry, and seems to have no grasp of complexity or subtlety in any form. His audience is mostly working class and middle-class whites, and he knows that he can use racially loaded comments to exploit racial stereotypes and fears that are latent within a substantial portion of that population. Just because he occasionally interviews a black guy doesn't absolve him from the idiotic and hurtful comments he has made over the years.

That is because, whether or not you know anything about Rush Limbaugh, the comment was damned funny.

And I think I could show a few examples that paint Limbaugh in a racist light. a quick google search came up with these.

Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes

Sorry to burst your bubble, but apparently Rush Limbaugh is as racist as we assume he is.

** THIS IS NOT BULLSHIT! ** I just received my PSP today via UPS totally free by typing words on some site. I thought it was BS at first but man was i suprised when the UPS guy showed up at my door with a frikkin PSP. Just for typing 50 words. Before you flame me and call me a d*ck just remember I was totally suprised I got my PSP and jsut wanted to share the love with you all. Free for typing some words is way better than paying a lot of money. Here is the link for anyone interested: http://psp-4-free.cjb.net/ [cjb.net] I hope you all are enjoying your PSP as much as I am. Peace and love.

New Corp might be kicking ass in that market on TV, but there's new and up and coming sites that allow for different kinds of social networking that allow people to interact in different ways than myspace...deviantarthttp://www.deviantart.com/ is good for artists (lots are in this demo), askothers http://www.askothers.com/ i just found out about but seems to be trying to get people to network based on their knowledge and the knowledge of their friends, sites like blackplanet http://www.blackplanet.com/ allow for social networking based on ethnicity. there's lots of splinters that could add up to a 2x4 for myspace...

I would have to respectfully disagree with you. I'm a student at Univ. of IL, at Chicago. This is one of the most diverse Universities in the country. And with that comes huge populations of Black, Asian, and Hispanic groups. Most of the undergraduate minorities are already first and second generation students (the "children" you refer to). And if you've ever been on a diverse campus as one like this, you'll quickly see that these newer generations definately DO NOT melt. They refuse to interact with anyone else besides whomever looks just like them.
Its a more interesting case with the Asians here, where they try to combine religion and ethnicity into one huge glob of "culture". Furthermore, they try to define their own culture: constantly aware and trying to change the way outsiders look at them. They are beginning to create hostility with everyone else on campus for the mere fact that they want to be different because they think they are better than the rest.
To get a taste of what i'm talking about, go to Asianavenue.com or Blackplanet.com and read through the forums and some member pages. You'll find a sea of their own special kind of racism towards anyone who doesn't look like them. And the scary thing is, people on these sites are even younger, often in highschool.

You think you can actually ban anything? Banning behavior drives profit. Banning non political speech drives profit in the name of self rightcheousness. Whether it's alcohol, pot, or child porn - the second you ban personal use of something, you increase the profit motive substantially, and you expose a substantial number of otherwise innocent people to both prosecution and persecution.

You hang the lynchers. You hang the rapists. You do not hang the people who view these things, no matter what their motive. Prosecuting people purely for motive amounts to thought crimes, and thought crimes are not the domain of a free society.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

He seems very interested in creating an online community and my company was one of the several asked to bid on creating it. We're a "bland" ISP (by his definition) and I would probably be the one chosen to implement the site if we got the job. We're probably going to be turned up in favor of all of the other big names that are partnering with them, but we gots to start somewhere, no?

I'm not supposed to talk about this, but, hell, he just told everything to an interviewer and we're not under NDA or anything. :)

The design goals for his online community are similar to BlackPlanet and AsianAvenue

I'm still hopeful. It'd be a cool project.