Racism On Your Dime

(UPDATE: Now on Daily Kos, and on the rec list no less. Not bad for my first time posting anything there in three months)

(UPDATE 2: Aaaand now on the front page of Daily Kos. This story went viral REALLY fast)

The queen of West Tennessee, Newscoma, received a disgusting and racist email with a "keepsake photo" of all the Presidents, with a picture of a "spook" where President Obama's picture should be. I'm not putting it up here, you'll have to go to her blog to see it.

This was up a few hours ago, but we now know that the picture was sent by Sherri Goforth, a staffer for Republican Senator Diane Black of Gallatin. The email was originally sent around to a group of fellow Republican staffers, but got forwarded to Newscoma apparently by someone disgusted with the whole thing. When contacted for comment by Christian Grantham of Nashville Is Talking/WKRN, all Ms. Goforth could do was apologize for "sending it from the wrong email address" rather than sending out a racist email. Not sorry for what she did, sorry that she got caught.

Now I'm sure the Republicans are immediately gearing up to say, "Oh come on you ultra-PC libs, it's a JOKE, lighten up!" Well for one thing, this follows a classic pattern of racist "jokes" for Tennessee Republicans. Second, why are they making these "jokes" on my taxpayer dime? Aren't we paying them to work for the state of Tennessee rather than to circulate "jokes" at work?

And of course, this all goes back to how politicians in this state have not caught up to new media. If you pull this, you will get caught, no matter what email you sent it from. And now it's going up on every blog in the whole state.