The Texas answer to Michele Bachmann

[yendi]

"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Wow. There's stupid and racist. And then there's epically stupid and racist. Betty Brown would be the latter.

Not surprisingly, she's well-liked by the Eagle Forum, and boasts that she "supports religious freedom" and "put the Bible back into the classroom" in the same breath.

The fact that idiots like this can get elected are the reason we have a Constitution.

Comments

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

I have no adequate response for that.

DUDE.

[mfree.livejournal.com]

...provided we still have a constitution by the time we need to use it to stop them.

Did you hear the one about the FBI carting off an entire colo center because of what "could" be on one or two servers in Texas? Not those servers, not that rack, but dozens of full racks of other company's IT infrastructure, cord-pulled and gone, likely forever. 4'th amendment much?

[audacian.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness the comments, why do I always go read the comments?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

omg this is like textbook for "racist concern troll".

[jerel.livejournal.com]

You know, I remember reading (a long time ago) that one of the English kings basically told the Irish to drop the Gaelic names and start using colors, occupations, etc. So you have a lot of Coopers, Bakers, Weavers, Whites, and...hey, Browns! who are descended from families with such lovely ETHNIC names as Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Ó Súilleabháin, and Coisdealbhaigh. Try saying those three times fast. :)

(For those of you who are baffled, you can pronounce them "O'Flaherty, O'Sullivan, and Costello," and you'd be close enough. The last one is kind of tough.)

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

How the fuck would we have to learn Chinese to be able to deal with a transliterated name?

I'm sorry Betty Brown is unable to deal with the idea of phonemes that sound different than what she's used to. What a twit.

[shellefly.livejournal.com]

Reading the comment thread to that article is frightening. Apparently liberal Americans and Americans who have foreign-sounding names (foreign to some, anyway) are anti-American.

I didn't realize before that I hated myself. :)

[litch.livejournal.com]

The parts about this story I would like to call people's attention to:

She honestly does not understand why everyone is so upset and thinks it's all whipped hysteria just to make republicans look racist when she is just trying to help.

She is a moderate as far as republicans in the texas legislature goes.

Terrell sucks.

[smurasaki.livejournal.com]

WTF? O_o

Speaking as someone who's worked as an election judge - poll workers are not morons. We don't need a racist politician telling people to change their names to Smith and Jones so we can find them in the poll book. Hell, it's actually harder to find people with common names because there are so bloody many of them. "Which Jane Smith are you?"

Just in case the racist cake needed some icing.

[eustaciavye.livejournal.com]

Seriously. And how are names like Chen, Phan and Ko harder to pronounce than "limbaugh" :D

[sarabellum.livejournal.com]

I think there are too many people named Brown in the U.S. Betty needs to change her name to make it easier for Americans to deal with.

[filbypott.livejournal.com]

Like how in the 1800s we forced immigrants to change their name from O'Donahue to Donaldson or Bratislaus to, oh I dunno, Brown? That's not nativist or robbing people of their heritage at all.