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The Flyers are scrubbing connections with famed singer Kate Smith as the team investigates racist lyrics in several of her songs. That includes covering a bronze statue of Smith that stands outside Xfinity Live! and removing her iconic recording of “God Bless America” from their playlist. “We have recently become aware that several songs performed by Kate Smith contain offensive lyrics that do not reflect our values as an organization,” the Flyers said in a statement. "As we continue to look into this serious matter, we are removing Kate Smith’s recording of 'God Bless America’ from our library and covering...

The Yankees have taken a stand against racism for their seventh-inning stretch. For 18 years, Yankee Stadium regularly used Kate Smith’s 1939 recording of “God Bless America” in the middle of the seventh inning. But they ditched it altogether this season, replacing Smith’s rendition with different versions of the song. Why? As the Daily News learned, the Yankee were made aware of Smith’s history of potential racism.

As singers, Kate Smith and Paul Robeson have something in common. They each recorded the song, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” At NJ.com, Paul Mulshine accurately describes the song as “written from a standpoint of sympathy for Southern blacks,” which helps explains why Robeson, a black communist, sang the song as well. To read the lyrics is to understand how perverse is an out-of-nowhere attack on the beloved Ms. Smith. “Someone had to fight the Devil/ Shout about Gabriel’s Horn/ Someone had to stoke the train/ That would bring God’s children to green pastures/ That’s why darkies were born.” Substitute...

Kate Smith, famous for “God Bless America,” has become the latest American to be jammed down the memory hole. The singer, who died in 1986 at age 79, sang the semi-national anthem, most famously at baseball games, especially Yankee Stadium, which began regularly playing the recording during the seventh-inning stretch after 9/11. It invariably elicited tears and a sense of unified purpose. But upon learning that Ms. Smith sang a song called “Pickaninny Heaven” and “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” in the early 1930s, the Yankees announced an end to the tradition, as did the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, which...

We’ve clearly got it good as a nation. Economic growth is robust. Joblessness has never been lower. The stock market is roaring. We live in relative peace. There’s very little to complain about these days. Which is why we had to travel back to the 1930s to find a problem. Apparently, it’s Kate Smith. I moved to Philadelphia nearly a decade ago and attended my first Flyers game shortly after. The sold-out crowd was fired up. It was a great atmosphere. Then, the pre-game festivities began. The overhead scoreboard, center-ice played a grainy video of what appeared to me to...

The Southern Poverty Law Center – the “vicious left-wing attack dog” used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify “hate groups” – is unraveling. A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims – with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism,” the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization’s legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday. Cohen had been with the organization 33 years and was one of its most prominent figures. At 5:03 p.m. Friday, Cohen...

Good Morning. The developments regarding Robert Mueller's investigation will be noted later in this Newsdump summary. But first, the shakeup at a group hostile to supporters of President Trump and a broad range of conservative, religious and libertarian people and organizations continued Friday. The President of the Montgomery, Alabama based Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen, announced in an email that he's leaving taking responsibility for unspecified "problems"...... The French government's crackdown policies in force this Saturday for Week 19 of the Yellow Vests protests.... British Prime Minister Theresa May releasing a letter to MP's Friday evening specifying her plans...

The head of the Southern Poverty Law Center on Friday announced that he is stepping down, the latest high-profile departure from the watchdog organization best known for its work monitoring extremist groups. Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen sent an email to staff saying that he would be stepping down from his leadership role at the organization. The organization last week fired founder and prominent civil rights attorney Morris Dees for unspecified reasons. “Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them,” Cohen wrote. […] Last year, it agreed to pay a...

When he decided in 2016 to create a club for his supporters, Gavin McInnes says he had in mind something fun — like the “Loyal Order of Water Buffalo” lodge to which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble belonged in the old cartoon series. A humorist-turned-political commentator whose YouTube channel has nearly 270,000 subscribers, McInnes certainly didn’t intend the Proud Boys to be a “hate group,” but that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them, and a federal lawsuit McInnes filed this week accuses the Alabama-based SPLC of “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, defamation, and false light invasion of...

The Southern Poverty Law Center said Thursday that it had fired its co-founder and chief trial lawyer, Morris Dees, after nearly a half-century, during which he helped build the organization into a fearsome powerhouse that focused on hate crimes and with an endowment that approached half a billion dollars. The group’s president, Richard Cohen, did not give a specific reason for the dismissal of Mr. Dees, 82, on Wednesday. But Mr. Cohen said in a statement that as a civil-rights group, the S.P.L.C. was “committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and...

In the 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove,” the part of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, described in Wikipedia as a “paranoid ultra-nationalist,” was played by Sterling Hayden. If the movie was made today, the role would go to Michael T. Flynn — on the face of it as much a paranoid ultra-nationalist as the fictitious Ripper. Flynn, though, is no fictional creation. He’s Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser. Flynn, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired lieutenant general, is already known for his bizarre tweets, not to mention his bizarre management style. (He was ousted...

Donald Trump is a one-man basket of deplorables. He is a braggart and a liar. He is a bully and a demagogue. He is an ignoramus and a deadbeat, a chiseler and either a sincere racist or an insincere one, and his love for himself is matched only by my loathing of him. He is about to be president of the United States. A constitutional coup may be in the offing. Since winning the election, Trump has not moderated his behavior. He still behaves like a brat — his childish tweet zinging Arnold Schwarzenegger for failing to get Trumpian ratings...

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is no conservative, and certainly no fan of Donald Trump. The headline of a column he wrote during the campaign, after all, was “Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth.” Which makes his column of today, “Thanks to no-drama Obama, American leadership is gone,” which absolutely rips the bark off Barack Obama, all the more remarkable. Observing that Obama “has been all too happy to preside over the loss of American influence,” he describes the current president as having “waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough...

MONTGOMERY,Ala.-The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission has filed ethics charges against Chief Justice Roy Moore over his effort to keep gays and lesbians from marrying in the state. In April, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed complaints accusing Moore of violating judicial ethics when he told Alabama probate judges to refuse issuing same-sex marriage licenses despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal across the country. "Moore has disgraced his office far too long," SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement released Friday night. "He's such a religious zealot, such an egomanaiac, that he thinks he doesn't have...

A key player behind what has been described as an orchestrated attack on conservative justices on the Alabama Supreme Court is now, himself, on the defense after being named in an Alabama Bar Association complaint for allegedly making “unethical statements” about his targets. The complaint, of which WND obtained a copy this week, names Southern Poverty Law Center chief Richard Cohen The complaint filed by lawyers Trent Garmon and Holly Garmon was submitted to the Alabama State Bar Disciplinary Commission and alleges Cohen repeatedly has violated Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 8.2, which states, “A lawyer shall not make a...

Columnists are starting to blame voters for the rise of Donald Trump, and say their collective decision to make him the presumptive Republican nominee is a terrible mistake. Liberal columnist Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post on Monday that the election has filled him with a sense of "fear of my fellow Americans." "I don't mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest," he wrote. "I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way… I always knew who Trump was. It's the American people who have come as...

<p>A mong some people, the new parlor game is choosing who would make the worse President: Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. This is not a lady-or-the-tiger dilemma, but a tiger-or-tiger one. The choice is between a fiercely friendless reactionary and a bombastic, thoroughly dishonest egomaniac. You pick.</p>

<p>Sometimes I think that Rush Limbaugh is the dumbest man in America. This happens whenever I take him at face value and forget that he is basically an entertainer with contempt for his audience.</p> <p>He will tell them anything. Last week, as if to validate my opinion of him, he went after Michelle Obama for playing the “race card” at the dedication of a museum in New York City. He described her as angry and complaining. The word he should have used was “right.”</p>

<p>In the category of “no good deed goes unpunished,” we now have the speech of FBI Director James Comey at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He said some remarkable things. The first is that he requires all his agents and analysts to visit the museum so that they can acquaint themselves with evil. The second is that he personally is so “haunted” by the Holocaust that “it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith.”</p>

The White House has finally divulged the names of American Muslim leaders who met with President Obama this week, including Imam Mohamed Magid, who has advised the administration on formulating responses to incidents that Islamists consider offensive. After stonewalling journalists for two days about the names of the participants at the meeting Wednesday, the White House quietly attached the list of attendees to the end of its daily press briefing transcript Thursday evening. The guest list identified Imam Magid as a representative of the Adams Center, a large mosque in Sterling, Virginia. He has also served as president of the...