White Boy Nichols Denies Racial Profiling

Update: Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling ... , Amnesty International. Wisconsin's protection from racial profiling: None. Not yet.

Mike Nichols has made it clear: There is no racial profiling in Wisconsin and certainly not in Milwaukee suburbs.

Collecting data that might support or disconfirm this conclusion is a waste of time.

Nichols is shocked, shocked by Pedro Colón's (D-Milwaukee) "startling accusations" that dark-haired, dark-skinned people are pulled over while driving with dark hair and dark skin.

You might think Colón and Rep. Tamara Grigsby's (D-Milwaukee) (pictured above) defense of a new requirement approved by the Joint Finance Committee mandating police tracking of the race of the people they pull over is a no-brainer.

But not to Nichols who can't be troubled with innocent people being persecuted. [See Bill Christofferson's Should we admire prosecutor who sees crime where there is none in which Nichols defends the prosecution of the innocent Georgia Thompson. See also The proven-innocent Georgia Thompson and Biskupic tried to 'squeeze' Georgia Thompson for additional background on the prosecution.]

Writes Nichols at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):

I think this is going to be interesting because it sounds like Pedro Colón doesn’t just have one name [of a minority being pulled over], he has lots of them. After all, he says, 'all the guys' complain. Everyone knows what’s going on. That’s 'just the way it is.'

In reality land every dark-skinned, dark-haired person who I know takes it as a fact of life that police pull you over if you're dark-skinned and dark-haired in a white community. It's a humiliating and abusive experience that's painful to talk about.

How far removed from reality is Nichols that he doesn't know this? That he smirks and repeatedly ridicules the notion in his column?

But a rigerours empirical investigation is called for, i.e. collecting data. As Nichols demonstrates many lily-white Republicans are clueless that racial profiling actually occurs.

Nichols demands names and data. But data is exactly what Colón and Grigsby are mandating. So what is Nichols' objection with collecting data?

Noting the race of the person next to the sex on a statewide basis is not a hardship for anyone who cares about defeating racism.

You just have to wonder how someone like Nichols can be so isolated to what is common knowledge in minority cultures and progressives fighting racism. Is this guy really that dumb?

Spice Boys: Right on Schedule

As I predicted last week, Spivak and Bice continue their quest to dirty up the campaign of Bryan Kennedy. This morning, they break--well, no, I did that--pimp the news that Bryan pays his babysitter.

Perhaps I should let Bryan respond himself; he wrote to Journal Sentinel columnist Mike Nichols yesterday after Nichols repeated the Spice Boys' earlier smear attempts regarding the stipend Bryan's been paying himself, and Nichols put it on the web for us:

As I see it, our representative democracy has 3 options:

1. Middle-class people don't run. We continue with the same oligarchy that we have traditionally had because middle class people don't have family fortunes to fund unpaid leaves of absence to campaign full-time. (We can see what government of, by and for the rich has given us).

2. I continue to work at my state teaching post and state taxpayers support my family and me while I run for office. After all, that is what Jim Sensenbrenner has done. With the exception of his first campaign when his mother supported him from his vast family fortune while he campaigned full-time, every subsequent election has seen Jim Sensenbrenner draw a state or federal paycheck while he campaigns full-time.

3. I draw a salary that is less than my university salary (basically enough to make the mortgage, car pymt, student loan pymt, utilities and essentials) from money that has been donated by people who want to see me win.

It seems to me that no middle-class voices in politics does not serve us well as a people. Given the choice between being supported by state tax dollars or from voluntary contributions, most taxpayers would choose the campaign salary.

Respectfully,

Bryan Kennedy