I think she was talking about the 1860s. Har har.

Hmmm... I bet a woman of her age and region has a pretty interesting civil rights history herself.

Whoa, never mind. She was born in... The Bronx !(?).

Forty years from now they'll be bragging they passed universal health coverage.

If we are doing history...

Then Kristof's op-ed today (The Wrong Side of History) is must read:

Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country.”

John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”

In hindsight, it seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Social Security passed, and the republic survived.

Foxx needs to be reminded that southern conservatives were Democrats because the Republicans are "The Party of Lincoln".

Saw her talking last night as she was imagining Jesse Helms "looking down on us from Heaven." and wishing he was here to join them fighting the gov't takeover of healthcare.

Clearly, she doesn't know up from down or heaven from hell.

Damn, I hate deliberate stupidity. But if the electorate is hell bent on electing this garbage...

Seems to me there are more than a few states out there who just might elect a brilliant (but nefarious) progressive independent who campaigns on God, guns, free beer, and loose women. Then delivers on true HCR, strident wall street oversight, an effective climate bill (,loose women) and then retires.

My worst fear is stealth Rethugs implementing the exact same strategy to promote the Xtian Taliban agenda. Fortunately, they haven't yet figured out how to keep the stupid out of their verbal diarrhea.

When civil rights legislation was being pushed by LBJ and others, racism wasn't a GOP issue, it was a conservative issue. The GOP and Dems both had a broad spread if ideologies from deeply conservative to liberal, Rockefeller and Javits being prime examples of the long extinct liberal Repug. Enter the 'Southern Strategy' and for the last generation the GOP has openly appealed to white nativists and racists, peeling off conservative Dems. The reason the GOP is so wildly racist now is that there is only one stripe of repug, and that's the conservative stripe, liberals long since banished and moderates now endangered.

One can point to a number of GOP legislators who supported civil rights, but they were liberal/moderate and their kind is gone for good. We can also point to Dems who were violently opposed to civil rights legislation, but they quickly became the 'Dixiecrats'.

I ask this question timidly as an ignorant New Yorker:

We hear a lot about the Dixiecrats of this era, but little of the Southern Republicans. They were a minority party, but presumably they existed. In the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, where did Southern Republicans stand on Civil Rights? Did they stand alongside Northern Republicans on this issue? Or did they stand with the Southern Democrats?

virginia foxx is vile and deceitful, not ignorant at all.

perhaps only progressive crackers can understand the irony of a good ol' sam ervin bringing down the founder of the repugnant southern strategy, after lbj gave up the south to the repugnants for a generation with his civil rights bill.

the migration of cracker racists from the cracker southern Dims to the Repugnant party was springboarded by the economics of the "new south." the growth of upper-middle class, country club -- white only, boy --crackers fit right in with the rest of the Repugnant crowd.

virginia foxx knows that most folks are unfortunately about as dumb as dana perino and sarah palin when it comes to real american history...

If modern Republicans want to take credit for advancing the cause of civil rights, I'd think the obvious retort would be "What the Hell happened to you since then?"

What part of "We create our own reality" do you not understand?

In the late 70s and before, elections in Georgia were decided at the primary level. Two or three Democrats would battle it out and the primary election winner would invariably win the general election in November. Most interested people would vote in the primary but just skip the general election unless it was a presidential year. There was just no point. Maybe Bob Barr or Newt Gingrich was the first Republican I ever heard of winning an election. But I'm sure that there were others.

I've never voted for a Republican, but a few of the Democrats I'd voted for switched parties on me. Zell Miller comes to mind.

zz @ 3:12 - interesting query. Don't have an answer but I found this while looking.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Conservatives-2511/2009/8/1964-civil-rights-act.htm

It's a breakdown of '64 civil rights vote by house/senate, north/south, Dem/GOP

As a republican from the economic top and as a republican who is willing to be honest, I again say:

Our base, the low information voter, believes every lie that we tell them. That right now is about 25% of the voting public.

Another 35-40% of the voters are so confused by our lies that they are convinced that all politicians are always lying. With them, that confusion keeps them in play for votes for republicans.

Yes, we lie...
Yes, we know that we lie...
Yes, there are no penalties from our corporately owned media for lying...
Yes, our base believes our lies...
Yes, our lies work...
Yes, we will continue to lie!

"Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle," said Fox. "They love to engage in revisionist history."

As suggested above, she must mean the 1860s, when Repubs passed Reconstruction and then southern Dems passed Jim Crow laws. As someone else notes, this demonstrates that it is conservatives who opposed civil rights, and that those on or near the left in both parties had to fight tooth and nail to get these things passed. Now we just have two parties with an increasing difference between them.

Sounds like she's mixing the 1860s up with the 1960s. I knew these guys were old school, but jeez.

Somehow I don't think this is going to get black people to vote Republican. Better call Michael Steele.

Southern Republican conservatives opposed the Civil Rights movement, e.g., Barry Goldwater.

John Tower was the ONLY Southern Republican in the Senate at the time, he voted no on both bills.

The Senate Republicans overall voted 27-6for the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, Edwin L. Mechem of New Mexico, Milward L. Simpson of Wyoming, and Norris H. Cotton of New Hampshire all joined Tower in voting no.

There were 10 Republicans in the House from the old Confederate states -- and they ALL voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

The modern Republican Party brags that it is descended from Barry Goldwater through Ronald Reagan, and it energetically expels as RINOs the heirs of Everett Dirksen and Jacob Javits.

Virginia Foxx is wrong.

Of all the GOP policies that I hate, the one I hate the most is their opne support for the willful denial of objective reality. Call me old-fashioned, but I have a deep, abiding commitment to, you know, facts, and it really pisses me off the way they just don't care about them.

This gal is what I call a true conservative; a lying sack of horse excrement.

To lie is one thing, but to have an entire party spew lies is getting downright depressing.

It's as if history doesn't matter anymore.

It's as if truth doesn't matter anymore.

Look no further than the rise of Sarah!

Since when did we start believing that lying is a virtue?

Rep. Foxx is a danger to our way of life! She should be put on the no fly list and the national list of most wanted persons for bearing false witness to our nataion's history and our nation's present and trying to get us to accept her unAmerican future! -Kevo

The only question is what Foxx could possibly have been thinking when she said this. She has every reason to know it's false. She was a conscious adult living in North Carolina when it all happened. They were far & away the most emotionally charged events in the area's recent history, & not easily forgotten by anyone w/ a functioning memory.

I don't think she has a brain disorder, & I suspect she isn't coinsciously lying. It seems more likely she's just so deeply into bullshit & wishful thinking that she can't be trusted to remember anything clearly.

This should be enough to disqualify her from public office.

The list of bat shit crazy Republicans -- let's call them The Bachman Cohort; we could spin a Ludlum thriller out of it -- just keeps getting longer. Can't they be declared non compos and institutionalized? Or is the House their retirement/convalescent/asylum home?

Since when did we start believing that lying is a virtue?

Saint Ronnie Rayguns blessed the Nixonian rhetoric -- aka "lying every time his mouth moved" --along with blessing greed and blaming the poor for all the social ills of the country.

Oh, and for good measure, he basically ended all the social programs for the mentally ill, and created a whole nation-of-homeless here in the "land of the free, home of the etcetera...

get dana perino or sarah palin to tell you all about it...

North Carolina Congresswoman Viginia Foxx stood directly behind Michelle Bachmann, smiling and grinning for the cameras, during Bachmann's orchestrated anti-healthcare reform "press conference" on the Capitol steps last week. Foxx is a former teacher (!) who fought against the hate crimes bill, claiming that Matthew Shepherd was murdered in WY because he was a petty thief, not because he was gay. Foxx claims that the Republican heathcare plan (?) is pro-life, and she has repeatedly promoted the "death panels" lie. How would you have liked to be a student in her English class? Scary, mean old broad!

In the fifties there were no Republican representatives or senators from the Deep South. The Republican Party was so marginalized in the Deep South that it tended to attract only a small number of misfits and eccentrics (and a few transplanted northerners).

When Thurmond and Helms and all the other Dixiecrats became Republicans they were uniformly adamant that they had not left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left them. In other words they still supported Jim Crow, the Democratic party had supported (or at least tolerated) Jim Crow in the past but was now opposing it, while the Republicans had opposed Jim Crow in the past but had shifted their stance to firmly embrace it going forward.

Who you callin' "we" Kemosabe?

Not all the Republicans of today would have been Republicans during the Civil Rights era. They would have been yellow dog Democrats who were Democrats because Lincoln was Republican.