Just in case you thought racism was over

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CBS has decided to shut down comments on all Obama stories on its website. Not because they hate Obama, but because of the amount of racist comments that get posted on those stories:
Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to "the volume and the persistence" of the objectionable comments.
(Emphasis added). Here's what Crooks and Liars has to say:
This might explain why Obama requested Secret Service protection this early in the campaign. Sadly, this is what you get when racists and bigots are given credibility and unlimited airtime on a national platform who are joined by racist politicians backed by a well funded political party.
Old-fashioned racism seems to be alive and well, and I think the nod-and-wink treatment it gets from mainstream Republicans has a lot to do with this. Here's Orcinus on the subject:
This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner ... well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

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