FBI Reports Upsurge In Hate Crimes

It makes sense. We live in a society ruled by a hateful President. Bush has used his bully pulpit to bully people, rather than using his power to bring Americans to together:

Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by almost 8 percent, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.

Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of prejudice against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability.

That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

[...]"It's unfortunate that the numbers went up by almost 8 percent, but the truth is the FBI Hate Crimes statistics severely undercounts the number of hate crimes that we have in the United States every year," she told CBS News.

That's because only 12,600 of the nation's more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies - roughly three-quarters - participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006.

Consequently, the FBI figures did not contain highly publicized incidents in late 2006 at Jena, a small town in Louisiana, which involved hanging nooses reminiscent of those used in the lynching of black people in an earlier time and beatings of white students by black youngsters in retaliation, because neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish (the county where the town is) were among the agencies reporting.

Racial hatred comes from ignorance. And there is no politician more ignorant than George Dubya:

Will someone please explain to the president how annoyingly irrelevant he's become? He still has the power to lead us into poorly executed military operations: Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on (perhaps even Iran). He may still wield a mean veto pen. But the time has long passed since he should be allowed to lead a U.S. delegation on an important scientific mission.

Unfortunately, W will be heading the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on climate change in Bali next month.

This is a man so far afield of mainstream thinking on matters of science that his eyes twinkle as he clings with pride to outdated, primitive notions. As recently as last year, he argued publicly that climate change was not a product of man-made carbon emissions.

[...]How many more international scientific panels on climate change can Bush ignore? Let me count the ways, er, the reports. The weekend's report was the fourth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a worldwide collection of scientists of such stature that it recently shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.