Yes, billmon posted a diary on Daily Kos yesterday focusing on the greatest hits of that wonderful Alabama U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions.
Why the focus? Well, his bigoted ways speaks for itself. And let us not forget that he is going to replace the New Democratic Senator Arlen Specter as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee choice. This very committee that confirms President Obama's supreme court justice. (the emphasis in bold is mine)
Republicans are set to name conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as their point man on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, signaling that they won't shy away from a protracted fight despite risks of being cast as obstructionist.
Sessions' ascension as the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee comes more than 20 years after the panel rejected him for his own federal judgeship during the Reagan administration over concerns that he was hostile toward civil rights and was racially insensitive.
Yes, racially insensitive. He is just that and let's look at his greatest hits.Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy.
OK. Let the ball roll...Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers."
Ummmmm. OK, it is heating up.....Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause c?l?bre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.
Wow, cherry picking at its finest......Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.
Lastly, not a racist.Folks, he is a racist and one that was voted by Alabama and now will challenge the nominee that Obama picks for the supreme court. Let's be blunt, folks don't go around stating things like this unless they BELIEVE IT and Sessions does, he is the worst of what this country is all about and does not represent what this country is moving forward to.
Sessions is the poster boy for Republican politics in the south and unfortunately for the Republican Party is the image that many view right now. The bigoted, racist part of the Republican Party. Is this party all of this? No, of course not, but it is the likes of Sessions and their mouthpiece of Limbaugh that has painted that party's image.
Sessions is an abomination, period.
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