Salvatore Ballarino, Staten Island Education Appointee's Email Disparaging President Obama, John McCain, Ignites Firestorm

Well, another racist email about President Barack Obama has surfaced. Boy am I getting sick of hearing about this stuff. Salvatore Ballarino, the Staten Island borough president's appointee to Community Education Council, sent the email, which was crudely presented as a mock debate between President Obama and Sen. John McCain. The email was sent to dozens of recipients, including other members of the public schools' parent advisory board, is stirring outrage among African American leaders, who anonymously received a copy of the offensive email and plan to take action.

The mock photo strip, sent Jan. 4 by Ballarino features cartoon-like speech balloons drawn out of McCain's mouth referencing lynching African Americans and equating African American babies with excrement.

The widely forwarded email also questions black fathers' ability to support their families and states Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are always smiling, because they did not know they were black. After each "punch line" the cartoon-like strip shows a photo of Obama's face, positioned in such a way to make him look stunned and dumbstruck.

Dozens of African American parents, school children and educators are expected to attend the meeting of the Community Education Council tonight at Petrides Educational Complex, Sunnyside, to question how somebody charged with representing all Staten Islanders could find the material funny, and then have the bad judgment to forward the email around.

"If they're upset about something it's their own inner workings -- it's what they want to make out of it," said Ballarino, when reached yesterday at home. "It was a political cartoon; that's how I treated it. What was funny about it was the look on Obama's face, like he didn't even know what he was talking about. Source: Staten Island Advance

Ballarino does not believe he did anything wrong or inappropriate. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions. For me, enough is just enough.