s it 2012? Yes, it is, but in Sanford, Florida (near Orlando), the clock winds back to the days of Deep South Justice. Unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was hunted down and gunned down for the heinous crime of “carrying Skittles while black.”

As we learned back in 2008, the race-baiting fringe was so overwhelmed by the possibility of having a black man as President that they became completely unglued, showing up at McCain/Palin rallies to hang their bigoted @sshattery out for the whole world to see, gleefully shaking monkey dolls with “Obama” on them, burning crosses and the like. And of course the GOP did nothing to condemn it — and even whipped up the racial/Muslim/terrorist angle.

The federal judge in Montana who forwarded a racist email about the President must resign according to the national progressive group Common Cause. But the judge has an excuse: nobody was actually supposed to see the email except for the recipients.

I’m continuing a Minnesota-focused discussion of political bigotry in action, as practiced by ALEC’s Mary Kiffmeyer, her fellow Republicans and her conservative allies at Minnesota Majority, who put up a racist/steretype image to scare voters about supposed voter fraud and to support voter IDs.

I saw an interesting story the other day that starts off thus…

Racism in the GOP? Nah… just class from the state of Fred Phelps and the personal email of Rep. Mike O’Neal, via Pat Cunningham of the Rockford Register Star.

I wrote previously about Ron Paul’s newsletters, and I still think there’s reason to condemn not only the writings but the worldview they espouse, one which Paul embraces even as he disavows some of the finer points of the newsletters. But I think there’s more to say about this incident and what it means about American politics.

I think it’s fair to say that Ron Paul doesn’t like to take questions about the newsletters that bore his name in the 1990s. He walked out of an interview with Gloria Borger when she peppered him with questions about it.

Kevin William Harpham of Colville, WA, confessed to leaving an explosive device near the intended route of a Martin Luther King Day Unity March in Spokane. Stored in a backpack, it was packed with fishing weights coated with rat poison. Now he faces 32 years in prison.

At Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church in Pike County, Kentucky, an inter-racial couple, Stella Harville, who is white and who was baptized there and a member of the church as a child, brought her fiancé, Ticha Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, to sing at a service. Then they were banned.