Song of the South

Don't listen to what other say about you - just by your actions show your true self.

Southern Republicans - especially South Carolina Rethuglicans - are nothing but racist, sexist, homophobic, redneck, uneducated reactionaries. Right?

Sure, this is old news - but I wanted to go there anyway.

Voters in South Carolina nominated a black Republican lawmaker for an open congressional seat Tuesday, rejecting a legendary political name and adding diversity to the national party.

State Rep. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond, an attorney who is son of the one-time segregationist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. Scott, who won the runoff with 69 percent of the vote, is now poised to become the nation's first black GOP congressman since 2003.

Scott, 44, owns an insurance business and became the first black Republican in the South Carolina Legislature in more than a century when elected two years ago. Before that, he served 13 years on Charleston County Council and was elected chairman four times.

He's now the favorite in the coastal 1st District, which has elected a Republican congressman for three decades.

... and to make it even better ...

Indian Americans are making waves in politics. Nikki Haley won a runoff election yesterday as the South Carolina Republican governor nominee with 65% of the vote. She is favored to take the Governor seat in November. If Nikki Haley wins, she would be South Carolina’s first woman governor and the first Indian-American woman in the country to win such a post. She’ll join Bobby Jindal of Louisiana as the second Indian-American governor in the US. Her backers include the “tea party” movement and Sarah Palin. Let’s see what happens in November.

... and to go with our RC Cola, Slim Jim, and Moonpie of a glorious feast ... we have a little banana cream pudd'n to go with it.

Read Dylan Matthew's jewel over at Ezra Klein's place - it points out something that hit me like a bolt the after living in the Northeast a few years ... and one of the reasons I will never go back.

It starts with a question.

What states experience the highest racial achievement gap and how is has that changed over the course of history?

... and turns your biases on their heads.

On math, for example, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Illinois and Connecticut immediately follow, topping southern states where legally enforced school segregation was a more recent phenomenon. Among southern states, the deep South, where one might expect to see the largest gaps, does not stand out, with Alabama and Mississippi doing roughly as well as the Carolinas or Tennessee. Hawaii and West Virginia report the smallest gaps in both surveys. Both have notably small black populations, which provide less opportunity for de facto school segregation.

Perfect? No, but we've come a long way. If the South's critics would take some time to get out of their glass houses in NYC and LA they would know it. Spend a week in Charleston and Savannah or let me take you through the central spine of FL some day. The sharp among you would have also noticed that both of these Southerners are Gen X.

So - ya'll hater-Yankees and race-hustling poverty pimps; kiss my grits.