by Jeremy Leaming
As is being widely noted by media, right-wing pundits, or blowhards, such as Fox News’ Sean Hannity, are feverishly working to create uproar over President Obama’s association with the late Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell.
TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly reports on Hannity’s airing of a video edited by associates of the late Andrew Breitbart that shows a young Barack Obama, then a Harvard law student, hugging Bell at an event calling for the law school to hire more African American women for its tenured faculty. “This was supposedly secret video that the late Andrew Breitbart had promised from Obama’s college days, showing … Obama supporting Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell’s campaign for more diversity at the institution,’ Reilly writes.
The video, as TPM and Media Matters’ Simon Maloy note, has been aired and written about before. But, Breitbart’s team 
hasn’t given up on trying to sully Bell’s legacy.
As Maloy writes, Breitbart, who died last week, has painted Bell as “a dangerous radical who, in the act of pressing his body to the young Obama’s, imparted to him all the insane radicalism that now animates the moderate liberal currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
The late professor, however, was no radical. Remember, this charge is coming from the late Breitbart, who Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone points out, should be celebrated largely for his shamelessness.
Obama, and many others for that matter, should be proud of Bell (pictured) and his work.
As noted by Inimai Chettiar, a civil rights attorney, for ACSblog, Bell “was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many.” She continued, “He was the first black law professor at Harvard Law School, yet in 1990 he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school hired a black woman for its tenured faculty.”
Maher Arar is 
David Cole said, "This statute is so sweeping that it treats human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threatens them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes. In our view, the First Amendment does not permit the government to make advocating human rights or other lawful, peaceable activity a crime simply because it is done for the benefit of, or in conjunction with, a group the Secretary of State has blacklisted."