Judge Tom Dick Head
A county judge in Lubbock, Texas, is facing questions about his impartiality after he posted a flyer on his courthouse wall showing arrest photos of nine individuals wearing Obama T-shirts.
A note underneath the poster read: "Just think about this for a second: Did you ever see anyone arrested wearing a Bush T-shirt, or for you older folks, an Eisenhower?, Gerald Ford?, Ronald Reagan?"
Of the nine persons depicted in the photos, seven appear African-American and one appears Latina.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported on the controversy Friday, noting that county officials had the poster removed after it drew a large amount of attention. The paper said that the arrest photos poster was not the only offending document:
[County Commissioner Bill] McCay removed a series of printouts that began with a short narration of a person contemplating waking up, putting on an Obama T-shirt and then abusing drugs, robbing a store and hitting his wife.
Other posters critical of the Obama administration, including a political cartoon of the president playing Pied Piper to national media outlets and a fictional discussion of former Republican presidents calling Obama 'no Abraham Lincoln' hung nearby.
In an interview with the paper published Saturday, the jurist at the center of the controversy, County Judge Tom Head, defended his actions, saying "he saw nothing wrong with the poster and had not heard from anyone in the community who did," the paper reported.
"It seemed like a good thing to put on the board to try and get people talking to one another," Head told the Avalanche-Journal. "I don't consider it racist. I still don't."
Commissioner McCay told NBC affiliate KCBD, "Some of the items on the board could be controversial. This is not the place for that kind of material. This is the court house for civil and criminal justice and politics should be kept outside the courthouse and so that's why I removed it."
On Wednesday the Avalanche-Journal published a scathing criticism of Judge Head on its editorial page.
"It's one thing to keep political material and satire in your home computer for use in personal e-mails, but it's another issue for an elected official to post cartoons, photos and text on a bulletin board outside his office in a public building," the paper stated. "People entering the Lubbock County Courthouse should assume business will be handled in a fair manner, regardless of someone's skin color."
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/08/texas- ... ort-obama/
