1 For whiteys who over the years have seen bigotry paraded and celebrated through the black community and meekly assented to being denounced as racist by, um, proud and vitriolic racists like Farrakan, Jackson, Sharpton and Wright for the temerity of being born white this had better be a wake-up call for it is the last one you shall receive that doesn't have a boot behind it.

2 This has been happing for years. Children are indoctrined into pro liberal agenda in schools. I'm a young guy I remember being taught about global warming in elementry school. We got to evolution in Middle School and in High school they poured on so much white guilt I almost drowned. They make Abe Lincoln God. They treat the "white men" as savages compared to the calm peaceful indians that we massacred. Every student reads at least one book about the holocaust every year like it happened here in America and not across the Atlantic.We celebrated black and latino history month even though the school was 97% white. Every book in the library talks about some negro who lived in the pre-civil rights era south, and all the hardships they faced. We had various clubs but two clubs sounded liberal think-tanks. Amnesty International which supported giving all illegal immigrants amnesty. The other group was the gay-straight alliance. I think you already know that this group supported everything that wasn't straight.

3 Illinois Nazis? I hate Illinois Nazis.

4 ACORN is there to insure he doesn't have to contest this one either...

5 I'm from the Detroit area and have been subjected to racism for years. It's ugly, it's pevasive, and it's all around. Blacks are the worst racists in the country, and have been for such a long time that, in the north, when they snap their fingers, they expect all the whiteys in the area to be "in the air" before asking "How high?" There's only a few of us that have the guts to tell them to "f*** off". Try to buy a "Dixie Tag" for your car anywhere in the north. Intimidation and terror are attempted by blacks often in the north for their advantage. Race card playing is common and actually pretty mild. That sure doesn't play here in the south.

6 It dosen't make a difference if he was "Joe the Plumber", "Joe the Baker" or "Joe the candlestick maker." the premise of his question was spot on. What BO and company want is to live off the backs of others. Now SCOTUS just help the left win Ohio!

7 I couldn't agree more with Megapotamus - this is a wake up call we'd better heed and realize that our safety is in numbers. Also, let's stop prefacing everything with "...I don't want to sound rascist, but..." It plays right into their hands and instantly loses the argument.

8 Let's not paint this as white-vs-black racism: Farrakhan, Sharpton and company also hate Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Jews...basically anyone who isn't black. It isn't called afro-fascism for nothing.

9 My RPG-playing, science-fiction-watching teenaged son makes a good point: it isn't racism, it's colorism. We're all part of the same human race.

10 False accusations of racism have been used effectively to protect any number of scumbags: Kwame Kirkpatrick, OJ, Alcee Hastings, Marion Berry, and now Obama.

Time for it to end.

11 As much as I agree that it was completely wrong for those kids to do that, it's because they indoctrinate their kids into politics that this happens. I wouldn't put a political shirt on my child, until they express interest in politics of their own accord. I usually criticize those who send their kids to school with an Obama shirt or button (to myself or my wife, not overtly), so I'd be a hypocrite to send my kid with a McCain/Palin shirt. Lets do our best to let our kids just be kids, even if they won't.

12 Obama's supporters and the media (but I repeat myself), in their zeal to smear Joe Wurzelbacher, have no idea of the damage they are doing to Obama's campaign. I'd be surprised if the Obama campaign's own internal polling hasn't alerted them to how the attack on Joe offends Americans. Most Americans, I'd say, not just aspiring entrepreneurs like Joe, because while not all of us share the dream of owning our own business, all of us treasure the right to ask a politician whatever we damn well please without recrimination. I expect the Obama campaign, at least officially, to start walking back from attacking Joe though right now it hasn't happened. It depends if Axelrod & company want to win this election or stick to the Alinsky playbook.

Even though the outrage on the right over the treatment of Joe was something I sensed immediately, I had no idea of how deeply the attack on Joe affected people until I found myself doing something I purposely avoid: messing with somebody's job over something political. I've been online since before the web and one of the fundamental early rules of netiquette was that however the debate raged and flamed, messing with someone's job for something said online was out of the pale. It's the kind of intimidation that is symptomatic of the left and I don't like to do it myself. Also, back when I had a day job at DuPont paint lab, I was once leaving for lunch and someone from one of our customers was getting out of her minivan and I noticed her anti animal experiment PETA bumper sticker. I suppose it was a mistake asking her if she'd let one of her kids die rather than use a drug developed with animal experiments because when I got back from lunch I got called on the carpet, finding out that she tried to get me fired. So I have a personal distaste for messing with someone's job over political matters.

That's probably one reason why Joe resonates so well with me and maybe it's ironically why I broke one of my own rules. I was at a bank cashing a customer's check. I'm a voluble kind of guy and this particular bank specializes in servicing small businesses. I mentioned to my teller something about Joe the Plumber and how dangerous he is to the Obama campaign. That even many Obama supporters aren't comfortable with the idea of going after someone just because they asked a politician a question who gave a self-damaging answer. I then said that in any case, we'll have a new president next January and that their won't be troops in the streets keeping order, referring to our centuries old behavior of peaceful transitions of power. The bank wasn't busy, so the other teller, a black woman, who wasn't immediately attending to a customer, sort of challenged what I said about troops in the street, using the affect that only disgruntled black women can, a different ethnic style, perhaps, than the way my Jewish mother and her peers express their own disgruntlement, but there was an expression of disgruntlement, nonetheless. So I told her that the only people threatening riots are Obama supporters. At that point, she tried to cut me off and said she didn't want to talk about it. By then my ire was raised so I told her that she was the one who intruded and now that someone said something about Obama, the Messiah, she didn't want to hear it. My own teller was looking like she'd rather be someplace else and quickly handed me my cash with the smallest number of bills possible and I started to leave.

As I walked toward the door, I noticed that one of the managers was at his desk as I passed and that's when the rage took over me. I poked my hood in his door, said that I never like to mess with someone's job. Well, actually I said that I never like to fuck with someone's job but that now I'm fucking with someone's job and that the teller was rude to me over something political. I told him that if they were going to fuck with Joe the Plumber, screw it, I'll fuck with their jobs too, and stormed out with his mouth wide open.

Screw it. Sign me up with the guy who said he's going to use the left's own tactics during the next 4 years if Obama wins. The left cannot suppress it's own authoritarianism, so screw 'em.

Obama is a smart man and was right when he just said that the Dems can blow this race and shouldn't be overconfident. I think he's right. The Democratic base sees the video of McCain with that not very bright lady awkwardly calling Obama an Arab and they come away thinking what racists and bigots Republicans are. I think most Americans saw McCain's basic decency in how quickly he snatched the microphone away and said, no ma'am and defended Obama. I know that when McCain isn't always going for the jugular upsets the right wing, but I think McCain's strategy about setting clear lines and rebuking his supporters for excess zeal resonates with most Americans. I think the fact that McCain is riding with Joe the Plumber works well that strategy because in addition to keeping Joe's beautiful summation of Obama's tax plan and Obama's clumsy self-revealing response before the public, the treatment of Joe by the left and the media along with Obama's complicity (he and Biden have taken their shots at Joe) is a mirror image of McCain's decent campaigning behavior.

Obama's remark about sharing the wealth was clumsy and revealing, a self wound, but not fatal if handled properly. Obama may find that his attack dogs are gnawing on his own ankles.

13 When I was about ten years old, I realized that the purpose of "public" schooling was not to educate children, but to domesticate them.
Nothing has happened in the intervening forty-four years to change my mind.

14 When will someone stop those horrible 12 year olds in Florida? They're stealing our election and tied to Illinois Nazis.