Democrat lawmaker attacks police officer

If so, so sad, too bad . . . but don't expect any tears from me. In this thread, i've seen no evidence that anyone has called you racist. Given your track record for over-the-top, hysterical whining about how you are treated by those with whom you disagree, you've become the little boy who cried wolf. If you were called a racist, no one else would likely believe you if you said so.

Anyway, I think the issue will soon die out if no charges are filed. I hope so, I think it's been blown out of proportion.

This response by Tico gives me the opportunity to ask: do US (federal and state) lawmakers have immunity?

If they commit a person crime or intentional tort (battery), they are liable for their actions.

No, you're wrong.

MM is attempting to "play the race card" (conservative political rectitude code term, there) in reverse. He claims he was called a racist in this thread. He offes no proof to that effect, however.

So now the people of Georgia that are her constituents are crackers??

And you call me a racist!!!

As an insult, "cracker" was and is used most frequently in the South, especially in Georgia and Florida. One of the traditional nicknames for Georgia is "The Cracker State".

It is invoked typically against poor, white Americans without formal education and of rural backgrounds. However, today the term is sometimes used as a racial epithet against white people throughout the U.S., regardless of socio-economic status, ethnicity or geographic origins.

Usage of the term "cracker" generally differs from "hick" and "hillbilly" because crackers reject or resist assimilation into the dominant culture, while hicks and hillbillies theoretically are isolated from the dominant culture. In this way, the cracker is similar to the redneck.

In recent years (as of 2006), the term has gained some currency as a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, the term "cracker" is now used informally by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations.

However, the term "white cracker" is usually not used self-referentially and remains an offensive ethnic slur. Depending on context, this slur can have the same negative and demeaning stance to whites as the word Nigger does to blacks.
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Etymology

There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker."

The term cracker was in use during Elizabethan times to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Gaelic craic 1 meaning "entertaining conversation" (One may be said to "'crack' a joke"), a term still in use in Ireland. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this . . . that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"

By the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode."

There are also similarities to the Irish Gaelic word carraig, and the Scottish Gaelic word creag for "rock", which are both pronounced with a hard /k/ at the end. For example, the anglicization of this Irish term for "rock" is "carrick."

A folk etymology claims the term cracker originated from piney-woods Georgia and Florida pastoral yeomen's use of whips to drive cattle. The word then came to be associated with the cattlemen of Georgia and Florida.

Other less likely theories include references to cracking a whip over oxen when driving cotton to market, the 18th century practice of cracking corn to make liquor, or to poor whites having had to crack their grain because they couldn't afford to take it to the local mill to have it ground. There may also be another possible origin - the first residents of Georgia were British convicts. In this setting the word takes on an illegal or criminal context. The term was used by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers).

A popular and apocryphal suggestion is that "cracker" derives from the white overseers who cracked the whip onto black slaves for the purpose of control and intimidation. However, this has no basis in fact.
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Examples of usage

When used in pop culture, the term "white cracker" or "cracker" is sometimes intended to be humorous, though the distinction is not always clear.

An example is found in the popular American satirical cartoon television series South Park. One episode features the character "Chef" (who is black) planning to get married. The white children from the grade school where he works as a cook are at his home, waiting to see him to warn him off the marriage. While they wait on the sofa, Chef's elderly black father, as he is telling them a long-winded story about the Loch Ness Monster, refers to them as "little crackers" - something that Chef affectionately addresses the show's main young characters as in the show's first episode. Chef also refers to many people in South Park as "crackers" in several other episodes.

The Florida Cracker Trail is a route posted across southern Florida by the Florida Department of Transportation.

The rustic lives of crackers were the topic of the novels of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Crackin' Good Snacks (a division of Winn Dixie, a Southern grocery chain) has sold crackers similar to Ritz crackers under the name "Georgia Crackers". They sometimes came in a red tin with a picture of "The Crescent", an antebellum plantation house in Valdosta, Georgia.

Before the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, the Atlanta minor league baseball team was known as the "Atlanta Crackers." The team existed under this name from 1901 until 1965. They were members of the Southern Association from their inception until 1961, and members of the International League from 1961 until they were moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1965. Ironically, an Atlanta team in Negro League Baseball was known as the "Atlanta Black Crackers."

Curtis Mayfield uses the word "crackers" twice in his cautionary anti-racist anthem "If There's A Hell Below (We're All Going To Go)" - once in the opening spoken introduction ("Niggers, whiteys, jews, crackers/If there's a hell below...") and once in the first verse ("Blacks and the crackers, police and their backers.")

In the John Boorman film Deliverance, Lewis, played by Burt Reynolds, derisively refers to the rural people they encounter as being "crackers," implying that they were slow-witted hillbillies who lived in a world much different from that of him and his friends from a southern city. (However, a northerner would be just as likely to call Lewis/Reynolds a cracker.)

In the 1984 movie "Tank" starring James Garner, the white, southern sheriff was derisively referred to as a "cracker" multiple times.

In the film O Brother Where Art Thou?, the upper class white character "Pappy" O'Daniel, candidate for the Governor of Mississippi and host of the radio show "Flour Hour", meets a lower class and uneducated white character as he arrives at the radio station for his program. Pappy is told that he can make $10 for singing into a can inside, whereupon he snaps, "I'm not here to make a record, you dumb cracker."

Musician Matthew Shafer uses the stage name Uncle Kracker (the second word being an obvious, and clearly intentional, misspelling of "cracker"). Stand-up comedian Chris Rock frequently uses this term in his performances.
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Politics

On August 20, 2000, Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge reported that Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager, called George W. Bush a "white cracker" while talking to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

In recent years, members of the American Left from the West Coast and New England have taken to calling Christian Conservatives as "Crackers" presumably as a sort of insult.

A political machine that dominated city politics in Augusta, Georgia for most of the first half of the 20th century was known as "The Cracker Party."

If she does not have the brains to wear her ID and can not understand instructions by a police officer, maybe she should resign her position in Congress and take up a job at Burger King./

Capitol Police Chief Denies Racism Charge[/i][/u]
Apr 05 8:48 AM US/Eastern

By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON


U. S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said Wednesday that Rep. Cynthia McKinney turned an officer's failure to recognize her into a criminal matter when she failed to stop at his request, and then struck him.

"He reached out and grabbed her and she turned around and hit him," Gainer said on CNN. "Even the high and the haughty should be able to stop and say, 'I'm a congressman' and then everybody moves on."

For her part, McKinney wasn't backing down from the argument. She charged anew that racism is behind what she said is a pattern of difficulty in clearing Hill security checkpoints.

Gainer said that racism, however, was not a factor.

"I've seen our officers stop white members and black members, Latinos, male and females," he told CNN. "It's not an issue about what your race or gender is. It's an issue about making sure people who come into our building are recognized if they're not going through the magnetometer, and this officer at that moment didn't recognize her."

"It would have been real easy, as most members of Congress do, to say here's who I am or do you know who I am?" Gainer added.

Police also have said that McKinney was failing to wear a pin that lawmakers are asked to display when entering Capitol facilities.

But she said Wednesday: "Face recognition is the issue .... The pin doesn't have my name on it and it doesn't have my picture on it, and so security should not be based on a pin ... People are focused on my hairdo."

The Georgia Democrat, appearing on CBS's "The Early Show" Wednesday, recently dropped her trademark cornrows in favor of a curly brown afro.

"Something that perhaps the average American just doesn't understand is that there is a heightened sense of a lack of appropriateness being there for members who are elected who happen to be of color," McKinney said, "and until this issue is addressed by the American public in a very substantive way, it won't be the last time."

Last Wednesday's incident in a House office building has caused a commotion on Capitol Hill, where security in the era of terrorist threat is tighter than ever and where authorities had to order an evacuation just Monday because of a power outage.

McKinney has garnered little support among fellow Democrats in her feud with the Capitol police. No one in her party chose to join her at a news conference last Friday to discuss the situation, and the event was canceled.

As a federal prosecutor considers whether to press assault or other charges against her, Republicans presented a resolution commending Capitol police for professionalism toward members of Congress and visitors _ even though they "endure physical and verbal assaults in some extreme cases."

"I don't think it's fair to attack the Capitol Police and I think it's time that we show our support for them," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R- N.C., a sponsor of the measure. Ignoring a police officer's order to stop, or hitting one, "is never OK," McHenry said.

Some GOP members have said the McKinney incident serves to underscore Democratic insensitivity to security concerns.

Setanta wrote:

No, you're wrong.

MM is attempting to "play the race card" (conservative political rectitude code term, there) in reverse. He claims he was called a racist in this thread. He offes no proof to that effect, however.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/31/mckinney.police/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, faces possible criminal charges for a Wednesday altercation with a Capitol Police officer, one of her lawyers said Friday that the real issues were "sex, race and Ms. McKinney's progressiveness."

In a news conference featuring actor Danny Glover and singer Harry Belafonte, McKinney said she would be exonerated and that "this whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female, black congresswoman."[/u]


Bullshit! Stop attacking the messenger. This politician should be ashamed of herself for not taking responsibility for her actions. If she does not have the brains to wear her ID and can not understand instructions by a police officer, maybe she should resign her position in Congress and take up a job at Burger King./

People who live in Georgia and North Florida ar often called crackers.

Besides, calling white people crackers isn't racism, it is merely a descriptive, somewhat pejorative word to describe a certain type of person;

Besides, calling BLACK people n*****s isn't racism, it is merely a descriptive, somewhat pejorative word to describe a certain type of person;

Big Bird, don't hold back, tell us what you really think of her.

Rep. McKinney herself established and demonstrated amply the attributes of which she is possessed.