Though the Time Warner decision had reportedly been threatened due to Current’s low ratings, there’s no denying that at least some segment of the U.S. viewing public has long harbored antipathy toward Al Jazeera. An editorial published today by Fox News runs through the talking points about the network it calls “anti-American terror mouthpiece Al Jazeera.” Among them: “Al Jazeera, known as the network of the Arab Street, is also known for taking anti-American, anti-Israel and pro-terror positions.”

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That is a possibility which angers some, frightens others and disgusts a few more, saying as much or more about the sorry state of movie audiences today and the still-closed world of big-time filmmaking than any tart provocation Tarantino has managed to splash on the screen.

The reason we’re having this conversation — again — is thanks to the latest addictive confection of revenge film, spaghetti Western, Blaxploitation movie and anti-slavery fantasy Q.T. dropped on us all to close out 2012: "Django Unchained."

Beyond the fact that it is gleefully bloody, luxuriating in crimson-splattered shootouts at a time when America is deeply conflicted over how much it loves this stuff, "Django Unchained" uncorks the perfect revenge fantasy for black people descended from slaves and living in a still-white-dominated society.

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Brownstein is identifying a fault line, not creating it, let alone endorsing it. He raises points that are well worth discussing. But I wince at such a catchy depiction of polarization – even though Brownstein is right about the way particularly wealthy white seniors have gobbled up resources for themselves while denying them to others.

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For instance, I just Googled “black on black crime,” and the very first link that came up  was to a blog post by an African-American writer, discussing the relative lack of attention the writer claimed the African-American community pays to crimes committed by black people against other black people.

This is an example of how, in America, a white person who commits a crime is merely a criminal, while a black person who commits a crime is a black criminal.  In other words, being black in America tends to make one a member of what sociologists call a “marked category.”

The easiest way to explain what that means is to contrast it with its opposite: If I ask you to picture a police officer, what does this person look like?  I’m pretty confident that, whatever other characteristics the person may have, he is a man – just as if I ask you to picture a kindergarten teacher, you almost certainly will conjure up an image of a woman. We don’t usually notice the gender of male police officers because we expect police officers to be men: In this context, maleness is an unmarked category.

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On Wednesday, students discovered a handwritten sign on a bathroom stall door in the school's Powell Library that read, "Asian Women are White-Boy Worshipping Sluts." It was the second such incident in as many days. On Tuesday, a sign saying "asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores" was tacked to a Vietnamese Student Union sign on the campus's Kerckhoff Hall.

It's not the first time UCLA has battled racism, either. Last year, shortly after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, then-student Alexandra Wallace gained YouTube infamy after posting a three-minute diatribe about the "hordes" of Asians in the school library, "going through their whole families just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing," adding, "I'll be typing away furiously, blah blah blah, and then all of the sudden, when I'm about to, like, reach an epiphany, over here from somewhere, 'OHH Ching chong ling long ting tong? OHH.'" (Wallace left the school soon after the clip went viral, saying she'd received death threats.) And last winter, a nearby apartment complex that houses students was defaced with graffiti against "you rude ignorant spic cunts" and "dirty Meximelt bitches."

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It was a calm, respectful conversation, until Davis volunteered that Romney lost because of Obama's voter turnout operation – specifically, his ability to turnout "underclass minorities" and "particularly those who orient toward the city" who were "pulled out of the apartments." Since we had been talking about the GOP's problems with women and people of color, I respectfully offered Davis some "free advice" – that it might be time to retire the term "underclass." It got worse.

Davis mumbled about the term not being "politically correct," and when I referenced Stevens's slur against people who make less than $50,000 a year, many of whom are actually middle class, Davis jumped in: "That's not where the voter turnout came, if you know your voter stats, it was really people who were making even less than that, pulled out of the apartments…groups that traditionally haven't voted." (Yes, I caught the condescending "if you know your voter stats.")

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Voters had passed the ban on affirmative action in 2006 by a statewide referendum, and last year a three-judge panel on the court struck it down. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who is defending the ban, had asked for an en banc hearing before the full 6th Circuit, which ruled last week.

From CNN, Judge R. Guy Cole wrote the decision to overturn the ban:

"'A black student seeking the adoption of a constitutionally permissible race-conscious admissions policy ... could do only one thing to effect change: She could attempt to amend the Michigan Constitution -- a lengthy, expensive and arduous process -- to repeal the consequences' of the ban, Cole wrote.

On the other hand, a student could do several other things to persuade a college to alter its admissions policy to favor applicants' alumni connections, including lobbying the admissions committee or petitioning the university's leaders, Cole wrote.

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Perlstein explains the context:

The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.

James Carter IV, who also unearthed Romney's 47 percent video, dug up the full interview with Atwater. You can listen to all 42 minutes at the Nation.

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A new study in the Journal of Public Administration Research looks at possible factors contributing to why some city police departments are particularly stringent on enforcing immigration law. "Many assume that in places where the political climate runs against unauthorized immigrants — and where longer-standing community members perceive the 'threat' of encroachment by new arrivals — there is automatically a backlash, manifest through law enforcement crackdowns. But research suggests these dynamics are often complex," noted the report from Arizona State University and John Jay College-CUNY.

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The headline is "Barack Obama and the Triumph of Identity Politics." "Identity politics" is a conservative term for "attracting the votes of women and minorities." (Mitt Romney's explicit plan to turn out as many white people as possible is usually not considered "identity politics" for reasons you can probably figure out on your own.)

First, we establish that Obama has no mandate:

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But a little over a year ago, the New York Times zeroed in on the Obama campaign's looming 2012 challenge. He was way behind in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa that had carried him to victory in 2008. So the Obama team, the Times reported, was busy "charting an alternative course to re-election should he be unable to win Ohio and other industrial states traditionally essential to Democratic presidential victories."

The trouble in the Rust Belt states, the Times and other outlets reported, was that "his support among blue-collar white voters far [was] weaker than among white-collar independents." Trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa, the Obama campaign was focusing on states like "Virginia, Colorado and Nevada, maybe even Arizona, places where the new Obama coalition of minorities and college-educated whites would carry the president to victory."

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But a video resurfacing today could make race an issue in the last two days of the campaign. The video shows Allen, then a member of the Virginia General Assembly, defending a song with racially insensitive lyrics. The song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” became the state’s official song during the Jim Crow era. In the 1990s, there were several attempts to retire the song or change its lyrics.

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I have to say: Harris’ thinking seems not much better than John Sununu suggesting Colin Powell endorsed Obama because they're both black; it’s a strange notion that political support should demand so little. And it's a problematic argument, that the decisions of black intellectuals and voters about whom we support and how, are always grounded in race. This implies that we consider race before we consider anything else. This implies that we think with the color of our skin and the cultures from which we rise and above all else, so desperate must we be for scraps from the political table.

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It's certainly true that bigotry is not automatically synonymous with criticism of the Obama record. For instance, many liberals (including me) who question the substantive gap between candidate Obama's policy promises and his policy record are not doing so out of any racial animus; they are doing so out of a sense of democratic citizenship. Similarly, many honest conservatives who oppose the Obama administration's civil liberties atrocities and Drug War are doing so on principle rather than because of prejudice.

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The negative chatter kicked up last week when the blogger, Michelle Joni, attended a fried chicken festival and blogged that it was “obviously an occasion to wear the fro.”

“You are a walking cliché,” reads one of the comments on her site. “A white person that believes Black culture, heritage, and natural BEING is something to poke fun at, to have fun with, to experiment with, and to belittle. Because that is exactly what you’re doing, whether you mean to or not.

Here’s another: “From one white girl to another – please just stop. You are hurting people. You are wearing their identity and culture as a costume that you can put on and take off.”

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Now, thanks to his comments yesterday, he has surpassed even Bush, becoming not just an image of White Privilege, but an example of how that privilege quietly operates in too much of America.

In a post-debate interview with a North Carolina radio station, Tagg was asked about his visceral reaction to President Obama, and he said his first thought was that he wanted to "jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the stage and take a swing at him." He then laughed and added, "But you know you can't do that because, well, first because there's a lot of Secret Service between you and him."

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As Colorlines noted, "The class-action lawsuit, submitted in a federal court a stones throw from the New York Stock Exchange, alleges that Morgan Stanley [via now-bankrupt financial agent, New Century Mortgage Company] intentionally steered blacks in the Detroit metropolitan region into subprime loans. Blacks who were credit-worthy and qualified for traditional mortgages were caught up in Morgan Stanley’s biased dragnet."

Of the 9 million foreclosures since 2007, four out of 10 have been against people of color. Both Bank of America and Wells Fargo have settled discrimination lawsuits over steering black and Latino borrowers into subprime loans. "Race was laced throughout Wall Street’s activities," Colorlines' Imara Jones commented.

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