Kucinich is coming to my little Hawaiian village this week to boost Danny Akaka's campaign for the D senate nomination. You remember Akaka -- the guy who wanted to create a "nation within a nation" in Hawaii? Akaka is running against his fellow dem (and my current congressman) Ed Case in next month's primary election.
Case is far to the left of Lieberman, but he does not support an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq so Akaka's people, and the Hawaiian dem party as a whole, are calling him a "Bush croney".
The primarys here are closed. I'll pick up a democratic ballot at the polling place just so I can have the satisfaction of voting against Akaka. Change is good!

Having met and talked with Keith, I'm curious, based on what exactly do you make your outrageous claim that he's a racist? Oh, I know, you've been drinking the Kool-Aid from MN Democrats Exposed, which bases such a claim on his participation in the Nation of Islam, and nothing else. I got to talk with Keith about Israel, about Jews, watched hin interrogated by a woman who identified herself as Jewish. His comments as I recall were of a committment to Israel which was unflinching, his only disagreement with the woman was that he felt violence was not a real solution, not long-term, and not in Israel's best interests. I suppose in your eyes not supporting violent conflict makes him a racist, but it also makes 99% of the world one too, and it makes you a nutjob.

Compare that to comments yesterday from Republican George Allen (Sen-VA) who called someone video-taping his speech to a his pro-republican, sympathetic audience "Makaka" and a "Makaka", and saying "Wel.c.ome to America", making both the assumption that he was foriegn and seemingly either Muslim or Latino(?). Allen of course had no idea of his ethnicity, nationality or religion, other than an assumption based on his skin color, which was brown, Ellison seems like Mr. Tollerance. I wonder what he meant by "Makaka", is it something like calling him Mohammed combined with the Spanish word for "poop?" The world can only guess what this racist actually meant.

Sure is a BIG tent the Republicans live in.

Compared to that, Ellison's brief participation the Nation of Islam when he was 20, seems rather mild, and hardly something to be called a racist for except by right-wing nutballs. Considering it was the same at which George Bush was a committed alchoholic, womanizer, and drunk-driver, it sure seems like you have one standard for people named George who are white, and another for guys named Keith who aren't. Other than throwing the race card around irresponsibly, who is it exactly that should be examining their bias?

I don't actually expect you're a racist, but that kind of yellow-journalism comes from the gutter, it's disgusting, and you ought to know better.

Ted, it's not so much Keith's one time dalliance with a racist organization that condems him. It's his enthusiatic support and defense of every indefensible criminal scumbag this city has ever produced, from the murderers of an off duty Minneapolis cop quietly eating pizza in a south Minneapolis pizza joint to a terrorist cookbook publisher who aided and abetted the murderers of an innocent black woman just trying to deposit her paycheck in a bank.
Yeah, Keith's a prince among men. You can have him under your big tent.

Kermit

Damn you for encapulating the very essence of what I was going to say

Damn your eyes!

Ditto Kermit. You beat me to the draw.

Ellison never met a cop killing scumbag that he didn't love at first sight!

So what makes him a racist is that he is merely someone you don't like based on a bogus pile of crap complaint like he loves cop killers?

That gets nicely compared with a Senator who assumed, simply because of the color of someone's skin, that he was foriegn, and named "Makaka". Who's the racist?