Happy Thursday, Everyone! Are y’all in the MOOD?
-
-
Black Girls Rock!
Flickr Photos
-
Potus Takes Oath of Office
Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China
My Brothers Keeper
-
-
-
-
-
AFRO PUFFS
Most Adorable Shoe Stealer
Six Little Babies
Fatherhood
-
-
Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
-
3Chics Action Alert
Lets Make It Happen
3 Chics Trio
-
REALITY Blog Award
Recent Comments
Top Posts
Guard The Change
Vote 4 Democrats
-
-
-
Go to the polls
President Barack Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama
Obama Love
Your Vote Matters
President Obama & Bo
The Obama Family
-
-
-
-
Presidential hug
-
Pingback: Afternoon Open Thread - Jack & Jill Politics
Obama Sends Iran’s Ayatollah Warning
http://url2it.com/lfsk
Who’ll blink first? The New York Times reports that using secret communications, the Obama administration has directly warned Iran’s Supreme Leader that blocking the Strait of Hormuz is a “red line”—and the United States will take action. Iran has threatened to block the strait between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, which transfers a fifth of the world’s oil everyday. Closing the strait would be “economic suicide” for the nation. The message to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggests that the U.S. would consider using minesweepers, warships, or even airstrikes on Iran to free up the strait. The news comes as Iran has said it wants open to “serious talks” with world leaders about its highly secretive nuclear program.
President Obama don’t play! Ask Osama Bin Laden?
Jacqueline:
Mitt speaking out of both sides of his mouth. 1) Capitalism is great but sometimes people lose jobs 2) I’m a great job creator.
Hey guys, check this out. Go, Texans! Whoo Hoo!
BWA HA HA HA Good grief; you’re going SOUTH alright, Huntsman.
MITT ROMNEY FOR BARACK OBAMA!
OH OH!
White House ‘plugs’ Cantor website
White House officials are shamelessly pushing GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s website today, and it’s not because they want to help him get more page views.
Prominently displayed under “FLOOR UPDATES” on the site are the words, “The House is not in session” — a pronouncement that would seem to undercut Republican assertions that Congress actually is in session, and therefore President Obama’s recess appointments last week were illegal.
White House social media guru Jesse Lee Tweeted a picture of Cantor’s site earlier today with the hash tag #recessfloorupdates. Press secretary Jay Carney — responding to a question about the legal basis for the recess appointment of Richard Cordray — also urged reporters to visit Cantor’s web site.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/wh-plugs-cantor-web-site-110647.html
So the GOP kiddies were at recess, likely jumping ropes or palying jacks! LOL
Take that, bee.itches!!!!!!!!!
What’s Not to Love About Tim Tebow? Start With His Anti-Abortion Ad
by Jamilah King
Thursday, January 12 2012, 9:00 AM EST
Denver Broncos second year quarterback Tim Tebow may not actually be Jesus, but he is capable of performing miracles. That’s according to the logic of one of the most captivating NFL story lines this season. And it was reinforced last Sunday, when Tebow led his underdog Denver Broncos to a surprise overtime victory against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Wildcard playoff game. The game turned out to be CBS’s most highly rated NFL Wildcard game in 25 years.
But the fervor surrounding Tebow has little to do with his actual playing ability. He’s an evangelical Christian who proudly and publicly backs conservative causes. That, of course, is not an anomaly in professional sports, nor should it be all that controversial. Yet it’s a prominent part of the narrative being written about Tebow as sports’ supposedly most endangered species: the underrated “good guy.” Or, through another lens: the white, God-fearing athlete who believes in so-called “traditional” family values.
Through that latter lens, Tebow’s narrative represents an enduring double standard in sports, one in which athletes are free to endorse conservative causes, while others are hounded as bad apples for progressive political stances, particularly those involving race. “Tim Tebow is just a window into how certain politics are not only respected, but they’re valued,” says David Leonard, a professor at Washington State University.
There’s no denying that Tim Tebow is a world class athlete. Before entering the NFL, he won a Heisman trophy and two national championships at the University of Florida on his way to becoming arguably the most celebrated player ever to take a college football field.
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/whats_not_to_love_about_tim_tebow_start_with_his_anti-abortion_endorsements.html
Republicans Argue That Corporations Should Be Allowed To Sponsor Candidates
The popularity of NASCAR has exposed most Americans to photographs of drivers in silly jumpsuits festooned with myriad patches of their sponsors’ logos. The drivers’ uniforms rival their race cars for corporate advertisements and in combination, the drivers and their machines are eerily similar to a clown and his little pretend car people attending a circus recognize. If Republicans have their way, it will not be long before candidates appear in debates and on the campaign trail wearing jumpsuits with their corporate sponsors’ logos, and unlike NASCAR drivers and their cars, the GOP clowns will not engender derisive laughter, but fear and desperation as America’s elections, democracy, and government are sold to the highest spending corporation. Willard Romney and the Supreme Court claim corporations are people, but if the RNC prevails, corporations will have more influence on elections than millions of people.
The Citizens United decision the conservative Supreme Court handed down gives corporations the right of free speech to spend unlimited funds to run political ads or use other media modalities to influence elections in their favor. Corporations are still forbidden from contributing directly to a candidate or a committee (such as the Republican National Committee {RNC}), and it is the last line of defense to prevent corporate ownership of a candidate. In a brief filed on Monday in the 4TH Circuit, the RNC argued it is unconstitutional to deny direct corporate sponsorship of a candidate or committee because they claim the ban applies “across the board to all corporations,” regardless of size.
The RNC argues that most corporations are not giant entities that seek to influence elections and that most corporations are little more than mom and pop operations typical of small shops in any American neighborhood. However, the brief points out that the prohibition on corporate giants such as Halliburton unfairly targets little family shops and therefore is unconstitutional. If the court agrees with the RNC’s argument, there will be no distinction between Uncle Paul and Aunt Irene’s craft store and Koch Industries or General Electric. The Republicans are not challenging the prohibition on direct corporate financing for family-owned markets, but for giant corporations with unlimited amounts of cash
http://www.politicususa.com/en/rnc-corporate-candidates
BorowitzReport: Sign of Romney’s growing confidence: At rally today he throws $10,000 at crowd and shouts, “Make it rain, bitchaz!”
BWA HA HA HA HAHA Borowitz is HILARIOUS.
First Lady Michelle Obama receives rave reviews as she enters Twittersphere – NY Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lady-michelle-obama-receives-rave-reviews-enters-twittersphere-article-1.1005136
LOL Michelle Obama is ALL.THAT.
Melissa Harris-Perry:
Here’s link to a section from the “Michelle” chapter. http://yalepress.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/harris-perry_michelle_excerpt.pdf
Mark Knoller:
Pres. Obama today formally notified Congress that the Debt Limit needs to be raised again.
Jerry Lewis Retiring: GOP Congressman From California Stepping Down After Term
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/jerry-lewis-retiring-california-congressman_n_1202344.html
WASHINGTON — Rep. Jerry Lewis of California became the latest Republican to announce his retirement from Congress after new boundaries drawn through redistricting promised to make the road to re-election more difficult.
Lewis, 77, is the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He made his mark in Congress by steering hundreds of millions of federal dollars over the years to a congressional district that includes portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
The Justice Department investigated whether Lewis improperly steered federal projects to clients of friends and a former colleague, but it closed its investigation in 2010 without taking any further action. Lewis had hoped the DOJ’s decision would help him retain the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee when Republicans retained control of the House, but he lost that bid last year.
The Bitter Politics Of Envy”
That’s how Romney frames debates about inequality in America:
Dan Amira expects this message to flop:
This is not a gaffe, really, just a particularly stark reflection of Romney’s true beliefs as he’s repeatedly expressed them. Still, it’s a ballsy way to handle issues of income–power inequality, particularly when he’s already being portrayed as an unfeeling, opulently wealthy corporate monster by Democrats and Republicans alike. And Romney might soon find that the 77 percent of Americans (including 80 percent of independents) who believe there is “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations” and the 61 percent (including 61 percent of independents) who say that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” don’t find his ideology very relatable.
Ryan Avent likewise questions the wisdom of Romney’s argument:
[I]t seems strange to me to refuse to acknowledge that what has happened [with inequality] has happened, and stranger still to lack any sensitivity to this divergence in outcomes. After all, it is those who have benefited most from recent labour-market developments that have the most to lose from a breakdown in the system. One would think that if a return to Clinton-era top tax rates was what it took to purchase the quiescence of the 99%, that it just might be worth it to avoid any broader populist movement. That doesn’t seem to be how the 1%’s political leadership views the issue, however.
A reader watched the above segment:
I honestly could not believe what I was hearing. In no way did Romney attempt to find some middle ground and admit that perhaps, just perhaps, there was some truth in the claims that the income distribution in this country is unfair. And then he doubled down, seeming to say that public discussion on the matter was not OK, that it was something to be discussed only in private. This man is completely tone deaf to the needs and opinions of most informed Americans. I don’t blame the majority of the Republican Party seeking a different candidate; they are sharp enough to know this guy is not a winner
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/
Why am I the designated loser?
by Kay
I was talking to a local Democrat the night before last about Obama’s chances. He’s the former county chair, now retired. He said he was done with politics when he retired, said he was going to spend time with his grandchildren and follow Notre Dame football and to hell with all of us, but he didn’t mean it, because he still calls me all the time. He’s (generally) a pessimist, a dour person, although I recently borrowed his car and the one and only CD he had in there was called something like “Silly Songs for the Very Young”. Now I imagine him cruising west on I-80 towards Indiana, huge sedan full of his tiny grandkids, singing merrily along. I don’t “know” anyone, really.
Anyway, he worries about things I forget to worry about, and he’s fretting about the health care lawsuit. He told me it’s “bad for Obama”. I thought about that, and I’m not sure that’s right. I think the health care lawsuit carries risk for both sides.
Why is it assumed that 5 judges repealing the Affordable Care Act is good for conservatives, politically? The polling isn’t at all conclusive, despite what we’ve been told. This isn’t a slam-dunk. Republicans support repeal, and Democrats oppose repeal.
Conservative lawyers and donors are asking the Supreme Court to throw out the whole law, which is of course consistent with their long-held principle of judicial restraint. But, conservative lawyers and donors (and federal judges) have health insurance, and if they win this ideological battle they’ve draped in legal garb, 2.5 million young people who are now covered under the Act will get very, very nervous.
And, conservative lawyers and donors aren’t just suing on Obamacare. They’re gunning for Medicaid, which of course has huge implications for those people who are dependent on Medicaid. Conservatives mischaracterize Medicaid. Medicaid is a program for old people, children, and disabled people. And, you wouldn’t know it to listen to the pundits chatter, but Medicaid is actually very popular with Real Americans.
It’s a program for poor people without insurance, yes, but many more people fall into that category than you might realize. There are, first, the working-age Americans, along with their children, for whom Medicaid provides basic health insurance. And then, there the elderly and the disabled, for whom Medicaid provides supplemental coverage (to pay for the deductibles in Medicare, for example) or long-term care insurance (most famously, to pay for nursing homes). In many cases, these are people who were not poor until they needed long-term care, spent down their savings, and eventually became eligible for Medicaid once they ran out of money.
While 5 judges overturning Obamacare and chipping away at the legal foundation for Medicaid may be popular with the conservative base and complicate Obama’s campaign message and chance at re-election, I think it’s safe to say that 5 judges throwing 2.5 million young Americans off health insurance, knocking the pins out from under Medicaid, and destroying President Obama’s signature domestic achievement will also complicate Mitt Romney’s campaign message.
Conservatives have nothing to offer on access to health care for the uninsured. They’ve spent the last thirty years avoiding the subject altogether, hoping the uninsured would go away and quit bothering them. Mitt Romney is going to run around celebrating the fact that 2.5 million Americans just lost their health insurance, by judicial fiat? Mitt Romney is going to be cheering as all the states that are putting Obamacare into practice are ordered to STOP? Romney’s going to come out and crow that we’re now back to the status quo on health care? It’s morning in America! The Supreme Court got rid of any chance you had to get covered under Medicaid or purchase affordable health insurance, and, oh, by the way, I plan to end Medicare too? Is that Mitt Romney’s winning message?
There’s going to be political repercussions on both sides no matter what the outcome of the court case, and I don’t know that conservatives benefit, automatically and inevitably. They certainly didn’t benefit from the S-CHIP battle. They were left defending denying health care to children. They lost.
On the flip side, if the law is upheld, what is going to be the reaction of the perennially angry and vindictive Tea Party faithful? First they were told a House majority would overturn the law, and then they were told that 5 judges would overturn the law. The House majority didn’t repeal the law, because one chamber can’t repeal a law in America, despite what they were told. What if the 5 conservative judges let them down too?
Seems to me there’s political risk on all sides. Seems to me conservatives might want to have waited and repealed the law the old-fashioned way, by winning elections.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
Posted at 11:30 AM ET, 01/12/2012
Mitt Romney’s extreme defense of capitalism
By Greg Sargent
If there’s one thing the presidential race has made clear, it’s this: There’s broad bipartisan agreement that certain practices of capitalism are not above reproach. It’s not only legitimate, but desirable, to raise questions about whether certain types of profiteering, such as that practiced by Bain, are immoral, destructive and fair game for condemnation.
The big story that pulls the events of the last few weeks all together is that Mitt Romney, the likely GOP nominee for president, is to the right of this consensus.
Romney openly equates any criticism of his Bain conduct as putting “free enterprise on trial,” suggests his brand of capitalism is synonymous with the foundations of American life and greatness, and refuses to say whether any concerns about inequality and excessive Wall Street influence are rooted in anything but “envy.”
We now have yet another leading Republican figure taking issue with Romney on this. Here’s Sarah Palin, on Fox News last night, flatly saying that Republicans are raising legitimate questions about Romney’s Bain tenure, and that they are not attacking “free market capitalism” at all:
So let’s tally this up so far. There’s Palin. There’s Bill Kristol, who has said that “the unqualified defense of the virtues of Bain Capital “silly,” scoffing at the idea that “any behavior by a private firm” is a “assault on capitalism.” Newt Gingrich has repeatedly drawn a distinction between Romney’s Bain’s conduct and free enterprise writ large, saying Bain’s practices “undermine capitalism.” Rick Perry has slammed enterprises like Bain as “vultures” that eat the “carcass” of victims.
Frank Luntz has counseled Republicans not to defend “capitalism,” and to stick to “economic freedom.” Writers at National Review like Michael Walsh have been sharply dismissive of Romney’s efforts to sell his Bain conduct as “job creation.” The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis recently argued: “the fact that Bain’s business practices were both legal and productive doesn’t mean they weren’t distasteful and politically toxic.”
It’s possible, of course, that some critics are motivated by a desire to destroy Romney and don’t really see anything wrong with Bain-style excessive capitalism. But that reinforces the point. Their belief that such an argument could carry weight among GOP primary voters again underscores that there’s bipartisan agreement that certain practices of capitalism do constitute a destructive force, are not above reproach, and are not synonymous with free enterprise or with the American way. As John Harwood notes today, shifts in the political landscape have made even blue collar Republicans receptive to criticism of capitalism’s excesses.
Oh, sure, Romney has tried to muddy his image as a complete free marketeer, throwing a few bones to working class GOPers with tough talk about “crony capitalism” and cracking down on China. But the bottom line is that at a time of rising public anxiety about inequality and undue Wall Street influence, the GOP is on the verge of nominating someone who is to the extreme right of even some leading Republicans on the morality and practicality of unfettered profit-driven free market excess. That’s the big story here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romneys-extreme-defense-of-capitalism/2012/01/12/gIQAFZTbtP_blog.html
January 12, 2012 1:20 PM
Why we can’t have nice things
By Steve Benen
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) appeared on MSNBC this morning, and spoke briefly about his perspective on the nature of compromise.
“[S]aying to compromise now, and I use this analogy a lot, is just like a coach telling his team to go out and work with the other guys and cooperate with them. The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constituency is based on dependency on government and those who want more from government.”
As a matter of policy, we know DeMint isn’t telling the truth. Democrats in the Obama era, much like Democrats in the Clinton era, have cut quite a bit of spending. And as part of the “grand bargain” offer and the so-called super-committee process, Dems were prepared to cut even more, in exchange for some concessions from Republicans. GOP leaders refused.
But it’s that first part of the response that stood out. As Kate Conway put it, “Perhaps governing is all a game to DeMint, but his analogy should worry the real people who have elected him to represent their interests. Viewing his job as inherently combative in nature means rejecting one of its primary objectives — keeping the federal government up and running.”
That’s not an exaggeration. The American system of government, especially at the federal level, was developed after a series of compromises, and relies on additional compromises to complete even the most basic tasks. At a basic, structural level, the story of “how a bill becomes a law” is a story about … you guessed it … compromise.
Take the existing landscape, for example. First, House Republicans have to compromise among themselves, and maybe consider dealing with House Democrats. From there, the House and Senate have to compromise. In time, Congress and the White House have to compromise.
We don’t have a parliamentary system; we have separate branches with a variety of choke points. Compromise is built into the cake.
Except as DeMint helps remind us this morning, congressional Republicans no longer see it that way. Every conflict is a zero-sum game in which elected officials from the other party aren’t just rivals, but practically enemies. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) made the case against compromise last week, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t even want to say “compromise” out loud a year ago, adding, “I reject the word.”
Of course, if Democrats approached every policy dispute with the identical attitudes, our system of government would shut down.
DeMint wasn’t asked this today, but I’d be curious how he envisions Congress making any laws at all. If compromise isn’t an option, could Washington only function when one party has the White House, the House majority, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/why_we_cant_have_nice_things034720.php
January 12, 2012 2:15 PM
Answering the Public Editor’s question
By Steve Benen
Arthur Brisbane, Public Editor of the New York Times, has a piece today asking, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” The piece is generating some spirited discussion, so I thought I’d weigh in with my own answer to the question.
As Brisbane sees it, the underlying issue is whether journalists — more specifically, beat reporters —- should “challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”
[O]n the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less: “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”
This comes up quite often, in large part because major media outlets have been embraced “forced neutrality” — it’s a newspaper reporter’s job to tell the public what both sides are saying. If you want to know which side has the facts on their side, go somewhere else. (The Washington Post’s Paul Kane is one of the more enthusiastic advocates of this style of journalism.)
The subject is admittedly well-traveled ground, but so long as Brisbane is sparking some discussion, the larger question is pretty straightforward: what is the purpose of a newspaper article? If it’s to serve as a conduit, passing along talking points from political figures to voters, then the status quo is working beautifully. “Mitt Romney today said two plus two equals five; Democrats and mathematicians disagree.”
If an article is supposed to provide news consumers with the something more meaningful — offering context, scrutiny, and analysis that helps make sense of the arguments, giving the public a sense, not only of what the arguments are, but whether they’re accurate — then media professionals, including beat reporters and their editors, have a broader responsibility to help the public separate fact from fiction.
And more often than not, they don’t even try.
This generally draws howls from the right, in part because Republicans seem to lie more frequently and shamelessly, and in part because reality has a well-known liberal bias. Indeed, the constant, baseless accusations about “the liberal media” helped create the forced-neutrality dynamic in the first place.
But the result is a media that fails the public. By publishing falsehoods without scrutiny, for fear of being accused of “bias,” the media is effectively leaving news consumers with the impression that lies and the truth deserve equal footing, which is ultimately untenable. Indeed, as Jamison Foser explained very well this morning, he-said/she-said journalism makes matters worse through neglect.
When reporters omit reality from their stories in order to avoid being seen as “involved” or “taking sides,” they are taking sides. And they are taking the wrong side. When you treat two statements — one true and one false — as equally valid and equally likely to be true, you are conferring an undeserved benefit on the false statement.
To a certain extent, Brisbane poisons the well a little with the headline, suggesting that critics want the NYT to serve the role of a “vigilante” — a word with a clearly negative connotation. But vigilantism isn’t at the heart of the debate; accuracy is. If there’s an objective truth, and media professionals know when policymakers are trying to mislead the public, why in the world would journalists deliberately pass along claims they know to be false?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/answering_the_public_editors_q034721.php
I don’t tweet, but for those of you that do, could you tweet Roland Martin and give him this link to Steve Benen. It’s a chart of the massive increase in the use of the filibuster by the GOP. He had that GOP clown on his show, and let him utter the LIE that the GOP really hadn’t been using the filibuster all that much.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/unprecedented_obstruction_and033982.php
Done!
LOL Thanks, SG2; you’re our TWITTA QUEEN! Go get’em!
I finally found his Twitter handle. I don’t know if he opened the link but I sent it.
Sinead O’Connor Attempts Suicide
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/sinead-oconnor-pleads-for-psychiatric-help-on-twitter–suicide-attempt_n_1201626.html#comments
michelleobama to attend BET Honors 2012 http://obamafoodorama.blogspot.com/2012/01/michelle-obama-to-attend-bet-honors.html
Microsoft’s “Avoid Ghetto” App: Racism Built into Technology
By Jessie
Microsoft has developed and filed a patent for a new “Avoid Ghetto” GPS app. The app connects to your smartphone (or dashboard GPS) and let’s you know when you’re getting close to a neighborhood with high rates of (street) crime.
A story about this dreadful new technology appeared in this piece by Ross Kenneth Urken, who talked to a CUNY colleague of mine, Sarah E. Chinn, author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism. Chinn observes:
“It’s pretty appalling. Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods. I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.”
Of course, Sarah’s absolutely right about this. (Strangely, The Root mentions her book, uses the same quote, but totally mangles attribution.)
Here’s the way this app is supposed to work, according to the white-fearful-of-crime-imagination (again from Urken):
On the other hand, consider how this app could potentially help wayward drivers in some cities. In Detroit, for example, the city has a central downtown from General Motors headquarters up Woodward Avenue to Ford Field and Comerica Park where comparatively little crime happens. But just a few blocks outside that area, and a driver can find himself amidst streets of abandoned buildings and street-gang territory
http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2012/01/12/avoid-ghetto-app-racism-technology/
Lord Have Mercy! When will it stop?!
YT can run, but there’s NOWHERER to HIDE.
C-SPAN Getting Hammered With Prank Calls About Mitt Romney’s Penis http://www.mediaite.com/tv/c-span-mitt-romney-peni/
Video
MJ from Obamacrats.
“Why are White folks always scared of everyone? Surely, it’s the rest of the world that should be scared of White folks? Let’s put things into perspective of why white folks are scared of Black folks:Black folks invaded the White continent and enslaved, tortured, murdered, raped, sold millions of White folks? NOPEBlack folks segregated and lynched White folks? NOPEBlack folks mentally tormented White folks with racism daily for hundreds of years denying them education, jobs, dignity? NOPEBlack folks colonized White folks’ countries stealing their natural resources, treasures, raping their women and men? NOPEBlack folks regularly lie on White folks claiming they’re apes, sub human, ugly, fat? NOPEBlack folks on TV and Radio disrespecting White folks daily and still to date mentally torturing them with racism or carrying racist signs against White folks? NOPESo, what exactly do white folks have to be scared of Black folks for and why should Black folks have to be anything but themselves just to alleviate the fears of ignorant white folks. If anyone should be afraid, it should be Black folks of White people.Nearly 200 million Black Africans died at the hands of Whites during slavery. NEVER FORGET!!!
SOME, not all whites are SCARED of black folks’ retribution. Which is another useless fear. We just want a level playing field, and be left the fuck alone to live and enjoy our lives and famiilies.
*****Tears*****
I feel you, SG2. This is DEEPLY personal for us. We’ve experienced this racism on the regular, some subtle and blatant even today. It must be called out for what is is, EACH and EVERYTIME.
Racist will be confronted and challenged to OWN THEIR SHIT!
ALL OF THIS
zizi2:
Check out Obama recess appointments DOJ decision on Docstoc – http://docstoc.com/docs/110799477
These 2 shuckin and buckin negroes on my TV. STFU and go away!
LOL Wuh? What are they up to now?
Two shuckin and buckin coons still bashing. See, he’s so concerned about poor folks while giving Wells Fargo a wink wink.
These 2 still want in on the Obama for cash BASH. THAT.IS.ALL.
@michelleobama: Hi, everyone, and thanks for the warm welcome. Look forward to staying in touch with you here. -mo
A Stopped Clock is Right…
by BooMan
Thu Jan 12th, 2012 at 09:15:50 AM EST
I wonder if Justice Samuel Alito will whisper that this isn’t true, as he famously did when the president said much the same thing during his 2010 State of the Union address:
Sen. John McCain says the Supreme Court ruling that led to formation of super PACs was “one of the worst decisions I have ever seen.”
McCain, whose name has been synonymous with the push for campaign finance reform, also says, quoting, “I predict to you that there will be huge scandals associated with this huge flood of money.”
McCain was referring to Citizens United, the court’s 2010 ruling against limits on spending by independent organizations. The justices based their decision on freedom of speech principles.
In a very real way, we’re not witnessing the people decide who will run against Obama in the fall. We’re witnessing a contest between Jon Huntsman’s father, gambling magnate (and close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu) Sheldon Adelson, a bunch of Texas oil men and religious hucksters, and the shadowy Wall Street forces behind Romney. Each of these people or groups have their own horse in the race, and they can pummel us with five, ten, or twenty-five million dollars of negative advertising per state to make sure retail politics and community organizing mean little to nothing.
Even before the Citizens United ruling, this country was ruled by oligarchs. But we had a fighting chance to overrule their preferences, and we often succeeded. That’s no longer true. Until we can get a Supreme Court that will overrule themselves on Citizens, our democracy will be a bad joke that only breeds cynicism, apathy, and violence.
Will John McCain help us get that Court?
Of course not.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/1/12/91550/4299
Memo to John McCain:
Picking Sarah Palin as your Vice Presidential candidate was teh WORSE DECISION you ever inflicted on America!
2012 A Republican RERUN
[wpvideo DKei97Ar]
LOL the pic heads on sticks Maddow used are hilarious. SSDD. Same Shit, Different Day..
Justice Department releases legal justification for Obama’s recent recess appointments
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71376.html
“We conclude that while Congress can prevent the president from making any recess appointments by remaining continuously in session and available to receive and act on nominations, it cannot do so by conducting pro forma sessions during a recess,” the head of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Virginia A. Seitz, wrote in a 23-page opinion.
BAM!
LOL
January 12, 2012 10:45 AM
Defining a rival early
By Steve Benen
Some of Mitt Romney’s Republican rivals, most notably Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, have invested quite a bit of energy lately in going after the former governor’s private-sector background. Very quickly, the political world started catching up to what lefty blogs have been arguing for months: Bain Capital is a potent, potential campaign-changing issue.
And as Romney takes his lumps, what does the Obama political team think? Jackie Calmes reports today on how delighted Chicago is at the recent developments.
For months David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior strategist, has argued with evident anticipation that Mitt Romney offers a glass jaw when he boasts that his business record sets him apart as a presidential candidate. Now Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals have beaten the Obama team to the punch, and Democrats could hardly be more pleased.
“It’s a total win-win,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who works with a group supporting Mr. Obama. “Either Romney will be the nominee or one of those other, even more unelectable candidates will be.” […]
Democratic operatives say Republicans’ words are certain to be heard again in advertisements this fall if, as many expect, Mr. Romney is the nominee.
“We’ll be able to show what his rivals said about him and what workers have said about him,” said Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee. “The fact that his own Republican rivals — from a party that talks about itself as being for the free market — are offended about his practices in the private sector makes our case a lot easier.”
There is a chance, of course, that as a matter of campaign strategy, this is all happening too early for Democrats’ liking. For one thing, the issue may seem “stale” by the time fall comes around, months after it was a major topic of discussion. For another, as the race for the Republican nomination winds down, there may be a sense that Romney has been inoculated — the questions about his ruthless greed and mass layoffs would enter the “asked and answered” category.
Those concerns are legitimate, but there’s ample evidence Dems are willing to risk it. An Obama campaign strategist told Benjy Sarlin, “I would have preferred to wait, yes, to keep the bottle of whup-ass fresher. At the same time — and this is important to note — having the Republicans eat their own actually makes the Bain story more potent than we ever could because it instantly validates it as a line of attack and falls on independent ears as a matter of legitimate debate, not as a partisan line of attack.”
That’s persuasive to me. It’s one thing for Democrats to have concerns about Romney mass layoffs; it’s another to have those concerns be bipartisan.
I’d just add that there’s another value in getting these attacks out early: they define a candidate in ways that prove hard to shake. With Republicans’ help, Romney will spend 2012 as the guy with a “controversial” business background — the one who got rich laying off American workers and crushing companies and communities for a quick buck, vulture-style.
It takes away what’s supposed to be Romney’s big strength, and it does so before he’s even introduced to much of the country.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/defining_a_rival_early034711.php
Why won’t Romney release his tax returns?
By Editorial Board,
As Mitt Romney edges closer to the Republican presidential nomination, the imperative grows for the former Massachusetts governor to release his income tax returns and disclose the identities of the fundraising bundlers who have brought in millions for his campaign. Mr. Romney’s determined lack of transparency on these two fronts — the candidate and his campaign have said he has no plans to release either — represents a striking and disturbing departure from the past practice of presidential candidates of both parties.
Asking candidates to make their tax returns public is undoubtedly an invasion of privacy. But it is one that comes with the territory of a presidential campaign. Such disclosure is not required by law but, as with the voluntary release of tax filings by the president and vice president, it has become routine, if at times grudging and belated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-wont-romney-show-his-money-trail/2012/01/11/gIQAcSZ5qP_story.html?hpid=z2
Kantor: I could have been clearer
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/kantor-i-could-have-been-more-precise-110529.html#.Tw8MPTNDbD8.twitter
Michelle Obama was raring to help her husband promote his signature health care plan during the summer of 2009. But, according to the latest book about the first couple, “the West Wing never really took the first lady up on her offer.”
“She did a few events, but they were small and drew little coverage,” New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor wrote in “The Obamas.” And because the president’s aides worried that her popularity could be threatened if she got more deeply involved, “Her support for the initiative became a mostly private matter, the subject of long conversations between the Obamas.”
But a review of news clippings during the period covered by that chapter in the book — May through August 2009 — found that Michelle Obama was very public about her support and received extensive coverage. The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and ABC News, among others, reported on her efforts. Kantor’s own newspaper declared in July 2009 that she had become “one of the Obama administration’s most visible surrogates on health care.”
Kantor says that she stands by her core assertions but believes her language could have been clearer.
Nah bish, you LIED on our First Lady! You didn’t consider the pushback on your lie. Let me give you a tip….Don’t fuck with Michelle Obama.
Kantor’s getting an AZZ WHIPPIN’; and she deserves it. Don’t PHUCK with our FLOTUS! We will slap a bitch.
Is 3 Chics gonna have to choke a bitch?
New Hampshire Officials Call For O’Keefe’s Assistants To Be ‘Arrested And Prosecuted’
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/01/12/403155/new-hampshire-officials-arrest-o-keefe/
After James O’Keefe’s latest video, released yesterday, featured individuals committing voter fraud during Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, two prominent Granite State officials are calling for their arrest and prosecution. Ted Gatsas, the Republican Mayor of Manchester, told the New Hampshire Union Leader, “They should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Similarly, Nashua City Clerk Paul Bergeron told ThinkProgress by phone that what these individuals did “is a crime, regardless of what the intent might be. What they did was wrong.” Bergeron said he hopes the case gets prosecuted because it “appears to be a violation of the state’s wiretapping code for one thing, which is a Class B felony in New Hampshire, in addition to a possible violation election fraud.”
Note to the ugly weasel, James O’Keefe:
If you dig one ditch, you better dig two- because the other ditch just may be for you!
A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses
January 12th, 2012
The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country’s reputation.
http://confrontaal.org/wordpress/
Five U.S. Senators Are Perfect Koch Servants, Americans For Prosperity Reports
By Brad Johnson on Jan 11, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Five senators and 39 representatives received a perfect 100 percent score from the Koch brothers’ Astroturf group Americans For Prosperity for the first half of the 112th Congress. AFP judged Congress on their votes to protect the Koch brothers’ right-wing petrochemical empire on such issues as the repeal of President Obama’s new health care law, preempting EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget to end Medicare, ending ethanol subsidies, several Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval to overturn new regulations and the fiscal year 2012 appropriations bills.
The Koch Five are Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Ron Johnson (R-WI), who have received a combined $187,400 in campaign contributions from the Koch empire:
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/01/11/402770/five-us-senators-are-perfect-koch-servants-americans-for-prosperity-reports/
Why FLOTUS Michelle Obama Scares “white folks”
Posted on January 11, 2012 by Jueseppi B.
First a little Michelle Obama history….
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian (née Shields), a secretary at Spiegel’s catalog store. Her mother was a full-time homemaker until Michelle entered high school. The Robinson and Shields families can trace their roots to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South. Specifically, her roots can be traced to the Gullah people from South Carolina’s Lowcountry region. Her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an American slave in the state of South Carolina, where some of her paternal family still reside. Her maternal great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, also a slave, became pregnant by a white man. His name and the nature of their union have been lost. She gave birth to Michelle’s biracial maternal great-great grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields. Jealous much yet “white folks”?
Michelle grew up in a two-story house on Euclid Street in Chicago’s South Shore community area. Her parents rented a small apartment on the house’s second floor from her great-aunt, who lived downstairs. She was raised in what she describes as a “conventional” home, with “the mother at home, the father works, you have dinner around the table”. The family entertained together by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading. They attended services at nearby South Shore Methodist Church. The Robinsons used to vacation in a rustic cabin in White Cloud, Michigan. She and her brother, Craig (who is 21 months older), skipped the second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). No dummy is MY First Lady, yes I know, an educated Black woman frightens you “white folks”.
She attended Whitney Young High School, Chicago’s first magnet high school, where she was a classmate of Jesse Jackson‘s daughter Santita. The round trip commute from the Robinsons’ South Side home to the Near West Side, where the school was located, took three hours. She was on the honor roll for four years, took advanced placement classes, a member of the National Honor Society and served as student council treasurer. Obama graduated in 1981 as the salutatorian of her class.
Michelle was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University; he graduated in 1983. At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational. As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” ”I remember being shocked,” she says, “by college students who drove BMWs. I didn’t even know parents who drove BMWs.” While at Princeton, she got involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group that supported minority students, running their day care center which also included after school tutoring. Robinson majored in sociology and minored in African American studies and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985. She earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988. At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases. She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush. In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended
So….lets recap shall we? Born in a big city to a two parent family. Grew up as an inner city youth, attending inner city schools. Went on to a stellar college career, met and married the most powerful man in the United States, also known as the Leader Of The Free World. And she scares the shit out of small minded, racist “white folks”. Why? First Lady Of The United States Michelle LaVaughn Obama is a strong Black woman, which upsets “white folks” more than a strong Black man. Why? Because a strong Black Woman has carried the Black American family in her shoulders since the times of slavery. Black Women know how to do shit. That scares racist “white folks”.
First Lady Of The United States Michelle LaVaughn Obama is intelligent, savvy, smart, gorgeous, intense in her beliefs, classy, graceful, diligent, a loving mother, a loyal wife, a role model for young ladies of all races, all over the planet, And THAT scares the racist “white folks
http://theobamacrat.com/2012/01/11/why-flotus-michelle-obama-scares-white-folks/
LOL This is a dup post, but it can’t be posted enough. Juseppi is the BOMBDIGGETY! Loved that a man took the time to write so eloquently about our FLOTUS. Big up to him.
Juseppi rocks!
Obama Campaign Raises $68 Million For Re-Election, The Democratic Party http://huff.to/znYOX8
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama raked in more than $68 million combined for his re-election campaign and the Democratic Party during the final three months of 2011, gearing up for a formidable challenge against his Republican opponent later this year.
The large fundraising quarter helped Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee surpass $220 million in 2011, bankrolling the president’s re-election campaign as Republicans settle on a nominee. Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney raised $56 million for the primary through Dec. 31, his campaign announced Wednesday, far outpacing his GOP opponents.
Why FLOTUS Michelle Obama Scares “white folks”
http://theobamacrat.com/2012/01/11/why-flotus-michelle-obama-scares-white-folks/
excerpt~
So….lets recap shall we? Born in a big city to a two parent family. Grew up as an inner city youth, attending inner city schools. Went on to a stellar college career, met and married the most powerful man in the United States, also known as the Leader Of The Free World. And she scares the shit out of small minded, racist “white folks”. Why? First Lady Of The United States Michelle LaVaughn Obama is a strong Black woman, which upsets “white folks” more than a strong Black man. Why? Because a strong Black Woman has carried the Black American family in her shoulders since the times of slavery. Black Women know how to do shit. That scares racist “white folks”.
Good stuff, 3 Chics! Check it out!
Jussepi broke it down like a FRACTION! BRILLIANTLY
this is what they’re afraid of:
Foreclosures fall to lowest level since 2007
http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/12/real_estate/foreclosures/index.htm
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Foreclosure filings and repossessions fell to their lowest level since 2007 last year.
Total filings, including default notices and bank repossessions were down 33% for the year to 2.7 million, according to RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed properties.
One in every 69 homes had at least one foreclosure filing during the year, while 804,000 homes were repossessed. That’s a significant improvement from the peaks reached in 2010 — when 1.05 million homes were repossessed — and the lowest levels seen since 2007.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012 | 4:55 PM
Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle & Common to Perform at BET Honors
By Derrick Bryson Taylor
Though Mariah Carey, Dr. Maya Angelou, Stevie Wonder, Spike Lee and Beverly Kearney are set to be honored at the 2012 BET Honors — its the night’s performers who’ll be singing their praises.
First Lady Michelle Obama will be at the awards.
http://www.essence.com/2012/01/04/aretha-franklin-patti-labelle-and-common-to-perform-at-bet-honors/
Posted at 07:00 AM ET, 01/11/2012
“The Great Nurse-In” to take place at the National Mall this summer
By Janice D’Arcy
Want to make a very public statement about public breast-feeding? Than mark a date on the calendar for this summer on the National Mall.
A D.C. mother of two is organizing what she hopes will rival some of the largest gatherings on the Mall and send a strong message about the need for all of us to embrace the natural and healthy act of nursing.
The event, with a working title that is subject to change (explained below), is scheduled for Aug. 4, 2012, smack in the middle of ” World Breastfeeding Week.“
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/the-great-nurse-in-to-take-place-at-the-national-mall-this-summer/2012/01/05/gIQA4bLLfP_blog.html?hpid=z11
The Hill:
Michelle Obama gets her own Twitter account http://bit.ly/z28uy8
Yay!
BAM!!!!! It’s on and POPPIN now! I just might join twittter just for this purpose.
The Washington Post:
Just hours after her Twitter debut, @MichelleObama has more than 60,000 followers: http://wapo.st/yTxcUO
She;ll have millions before month’s end.
skepticalbrotha:
Mrs. Obama just added about 8,000 twitter followers in twenty minutes. Wow. #MrsObama #FLOTUS
LOL Michelle LaVaugh Robinson OBAMA is the “CLOSER”
@michelleobama passes the 100,000 follower mark!!
Gov. Walker Accused Of Over 1,000 Violations Of Campaign Finance Law, Could Face $557,500 Fine
By Scott Keyes on Jan 11, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) may have violated his state’s campaign finance law over 1,000 times in the 2010 gubernatorial campaign by failing to properly report contributions, according to a new report.
Wisconsin law requires gubernatorial campaigns to disclose information about contributors who give more than $100. Again and again, Walker appears to have skirted that requirement.
One Wisconsin Now examined the Walker for Governor’s finance records and found 1,115 instances where the campaign received contributions of more than $100 but did not properly disclose who gave the money. In total, “Walker has improperly reported well over $500,000 in contributions from inside and outside of Wisconsin,” said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. According to the group, which has filed a complaint with the state Government Accountability Board, Walker’s violations could result in a fine of $557,500:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/11/402299/scott-walker-campaign-finance-violation/
12, 2012 5:58 AM
U.S. Marines to probe alleged urination video
The U.S. Marine Corps has vowed a full investigation into video posted online which purportedly shows Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin says if it turns out to be authentic, those involved could face court martial proceedings for violating U.S. military rules which specifically forbid “photographing or filming… human casualties” – regardless of whether the Americans were actually urinating.
Martin says the U.S. military has told CBS News the Marines seen in the video are no longer in Afghanistan, raising a question about how old the clip may be.
Regardless, the Pentagon is extremely worried about what reaction might be. The hope, Martin tells “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Charlie Rose, is that the Taliban’s own unpopularity in Afghanistan will lead many in the country to see the video as an insult to the radical Islamic group, rather than to Afghan culture or Islam.
Click the player above to see Martin’s full report.
“While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps,” said the statement issued by the Marines. “This matter will be fully investigated.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57357618/u.s-marines-to-probe-alleged-urination-video/?tag=nl.e875
Consumer Protection Agency Gets Started on Shadow Lenders. Step One: Mortgage Originators
The biggest reason the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needed a director – that was being blocked by Senate Republicans as a way to weaken consumer protection – was that without a director, it could not start to regulate non-bank actors in our financial sector. But the President decided that Americans can no longer wait for the whim of the minority, and appointed Richard Cordray through the use of his Constitutional recess appointment powers as the Director.
With a director now in place, America’s first ever agency to solely have as its purpose the protection of consumers sprung into action. Their first non-bank target: the mortgage industry. Today, they released an examination procedure to subject non-bank entities associated with a mortgage process – brokers, non-bank lenders (ahem Countrywide before being bought by BofA ahem) and servicers – to the same level of scrutiny the agency has already been providing for bank lenders, ending the area of the mortgage market where the sun don’t shine.
Until now, a significant part of the mortgage market — which includes independent lenders, brokers, servicers, and others unaffiliated with banks and depository institutions — has not been subject to federal supervision. This “nonbank” mortgage sector included many of the largest subprime lenders during the housing bubble. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act significantly reformed the gaps in federal supervision of the mortgage market by providing the CFPB with authority to supervise a range of mortgage participants.
These product-specific procedures are an extension of the CFPB’s general Supervisory and Examination Manual. The Mortgage Origination Examination Procedures outline the CFPB’s supervisory approach to ensure mortgage originators — lenders and brokers — comply with federal consumer financial laws.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2012/01/consumer-protection-agency-gets-started.html
When Mitt Romney Came To Town — Full, complete version
Thanks; just posted a seperate thread for this. It’s KILLA!
January 12, 2012 9:15 AM
It’s like deja vu all over again
By Steve Benen
Dave Weigel made a very clever observation yesterday, noting the striking similarities between the 2008 and 2012 races for the Republican nomination.
I’m thinking of a Republican primary. It starts with a candidate (John McCain/Mitt Romney) who ran once before, came in second place, and won over the party’s elite class without winning over its base. Other candidates, understandably unwilling to accept this, line up: An under-funded social conservative (Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum), an elder statesman who’s walked to the altar three times (Rudy Giuliani/Newt Gingrich), a libertarian who wants to bring back the gold standard (Ron Paul/Ron Paul).
The conservative base is displeased. In the year before the primary, it pines for a perfect candidate. At the end of summer, on (September 5/August 13), it gets him: (Fred Thompson/Rick Perry). The dream candidate immediately rises to the top of national polls, but collapses after lazy, distaff debate performances. When the primaries arrive, he’s in single digits and reduced to attacking the front-runners.
The under-funded social conservative generates all kinds of buzz with a strong showing in Iowa, fizzles in New Hampshire, and then quietly starts to go away. The establishment guy, despite being hated by the party base, regroups after Iowa, wins big in New Hampshire, and starts his march in earnest towards the nomination. The savior candidate becomes a punch line, Ron Paul gets ignored, the thrice-married statesman, despite enjoying temporary frontrunner status a month before the voting begean, drifts into irrelevance.
Sound familiar?
Rachel Maddow had a terrific segment on this last night, including an interview with Weigel, adding the related question: if this Republican fight is practically identical to the last Republican fight, and the party establishment overrode the base the same way in both instances, did the rise of the so-called Tea Party “movement” have any meaningful impact at all?
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I’d just add one other question: how did this work out for the Republican Party the last time the stuck to this script?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/its_like_deja_vu_all_over_agai034708.php
Maddow did a good presentation on this last night. Just changing the faces & places, SSDD- SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT DAY.
Political AnimalBlog
January 12, 2012 8:55 AM
The new Gilded Age gets noticed
By Steve Benen
We’re apparently not supposed to talk about this outside of “quiet rooms,” but more and more Americans are taking note of the tensions between the haves and the have nots.
About two-thirds of the public now believes there are strong conflicts between the rich and poor in America, making class a likelier source of tension than traditional flash points of race or nationality, a study from the Pew Research Center found.
The nonprofit think tank in Washington released a study Wednesday that reported a growing number of Americans say there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor — a number that has risen by 9 percent since July 2009.
“It is kind of amazing,” said Richard Morin, a senior editor at Pew who authored the study. “This is people not only sensing conflict, but people sensing an intensity of these conflicts — that’s what makes it striking and politically important.”
The beliefs are widespread — a majority of Americans in every income group and all political parties agree that there are growing conflicts between the wealthy and everyone else.
Republicans reviewing these numbers may pause to consider the data in the context of the 2012 presidential race. Exactly how wise is it to nominate a callous multi-millionaire who was born into a wealthy family, only to get much richer by laying off thousands of American workers?
The question is whether the times match the candidate.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/the_new_gilded_age_gets_notice034707.php
Romney’s Killer Instinct: How Mitt’s Winning and Why Obama Should Take Note
Mitt Romney has been running his presidential campaign based on a primal instinct: kill or be killed. And so after Rick Santorum fought Romney to a virtual tie in Iowa and arrived in New Hampshire trailed by media hordes, Romney’s Boston headquarters decided it was time to take the former Pennsylvania Senator down.
Boston trotted out Senator John McCain, New Hampshire’s favorite anti-pork crusader, who proceeded to slice Santorum sideways for years of earmark spending in Washington. “Senator Santorum and I have a strong disagreement… [in] that he believes that earmark and pork barrel projects were good for America,” said McCain, who added, for good measure, that pork is a “gateway drug to corruption.” (VIDEO: Mark Halperin Interviews Mitt Romney)
All successful campaigns have three simple goals: To win, you must project the image you want to define you; deflect efforts by your rivals to define you on their terms; and define your rivals on your terms. And this time around, Mitt Romney has been far better at defining himself and his opponents than anyone else in the race. Romney stopped pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Rather than play down his Mormon faith, he has discussed his long-standing church membership and his leadership role as a local bishop. Rather than skirt his gilded tenure as a venture capitalist at Bain, he has embraced it, defending the free market system with relish. And he kept things simple, traveling around the early states in a bus which read: “Conservative, businessman, leader.”
But behind the scenes and at high-profile moments he also has systematically targeted anyone who posed a threat to his status as GOP front runner. When Rick Perry vaulted to the top of the polls in September, Romney’s team seized on the Texas governor’s support for in-state college tuition rates for some illegal immigrants and his advocacy of radical changes in Social Security, putting his rival in a right-left vice. Backed by an armada of surrogates, spinners and web videos, Romney dismantled Perry in the debates, repeatedly questioning his stances on those two issues. Perry was rattled; the more he tried to explain, the worse he looked. In short order, the Perry threat was neutralized. (MORE: As Romney Claims New Hampshire, the GOP Comes to Grips with His Inevitability)
Newt Gingrich’s balloon proved even easier to puncture. The Romney campaign knew it was dealing with a man with a tendency to combust in the face of even the mildest criticism. From its armory of ammunition Boston chose Gingrich’s $1.6 million in consulting work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac because it made the former Speaker look greedy, hypocritical and disingenuous. Gingrich never escaped the cycle of debate questions, news stories and negative ads that Romney’s assassins helped to generate.
Much of the credit for Romney’s kill rate goes to Matt Rhoades, 36, one of his generation’s top opposition research maestros. Rhoades, who worked for Bush 43′s re-election campaign and Romney’s 2008 presidential run before becoming campaign manager this time around, excels at finding a rival’s Achilles Heel and making sure everyone in America hears about it. And he doesn’t spook easily: While some Romney staffers fretted as other candidates surged in the polls, Rhoades “did not even arch an eyebrow,” says colleague Kevin Madden, another veteran of Romney’s ’08 effort. “He calmly waits for the right moment. When that moment comes? Boom.” (MORE: Romney Rises: Five More Signs of the Mittening)
All of this suggests that if Romney wins the nomination, he may prove a more formidable fall opponent than some of Barack Obama’s advisers currently believe. Rhoades’ team has spent the better part of a year gathering material to use against the President once the primaries are over. Among the most promising: putting a human face on the nation’s grim economic statistics. Obama’s lieutenants, no slouches themselves at dragon slaying, plan to showcase the names and stories of workers who lost jobs at the hands of Romney’s companies.
http://news.yahoo.com/romneys-killer-instinct-mitts-winning-why-obama-note-102500383.html
GOP Muffs Up Hispanic Outreach Effort Pretty Much Immediately
When it comes to Hispanic outreach, Republicans on Wednesday took two tiny steps forward and one giant step back. The RNC announced they were ramping up their outreach efforts to Hispanic voters and Mitt Romney released an advertisement in Florida in Spanish. But it’s hard to see either of those overshadowing Romney’s embrace of the architect of notorious Arizona and Alabama anti-immigration laws.
Wednesday morning, the Romney campaign announced the endorsement of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. “I’m so proud to earn Kris’s support,” Romney said in the press release. “Kris has been a true leader on securing our borders and stopping the flow of illegal immigration into this country,” which Romney said he was “very pleased to get.”
But that’s not entirely what Kobach is known for. Rather than secure the border, Kobach is the architect of a different approach. As is evident in the Arizona and Alabama laws he helped design, the goal is to drive Hispanics, and particularly immigrants, out of the country. As Kobach put it, according to The Daily Beast, “People often see federal immigration policy as a dichotomy between amnesty and deportation. But the most rational approach is a third one: you ratchet up the enforcement so that people make their own decisions to start following the law.” Or, as the legislation itself says, “attrition through enforcement.” The Alabama law — portions of which have been blocked in court for now — has been blamed for prompting children to drop out of schools and devastating industries that depended on Hispanic labor. He is involved in legislation and lawsuits across the country, including suing states for granting in-state tuition to undocumented students, and is planning anti-immigration effort in Kansas this year.
Kobach, with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, approaches the immigration question from a legal perspective and puts on a measured air, but his rhetoric is extreme. Kobach currently serves as counsel to the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), recently listed as a nativist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“It’s unbelievable,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of the liberal immigration reform advocacy group America’s Voice, speaking about Romney’s embrace of Kobach. Sharry points to Kobach’s own words, quoted in Romney’s press release:
We need a president who will finally put a stop to a problem that has plagued our country for a generation: millions of illegal aliens coming into the country and taking jobs from United States citizens and legal aliens…Illegal immigration is a nightmare… Mitt Romney is the candidate who will finally secure the borders and put a stop to the magnets, like in-state tuition, that encourage illegal aliens to remain in our country unlawfully.The terms ‘plague’ and ‘nightmare,’ says Sharry, are the language of the far right. That’s not going to go over well with Hispanic voters where Romney’s approval is currently in the low 20s.
“There’s an old saying Spanish, ‘tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are,’” says Sharry. “Is he as well known as Joe Arpaio? No, but is his work well known? You bet.” Latinos perceive these laws as an “existential threat.”
But Republicans, including Romney, argue they can win over Latino voters with their economic message. On a press call Wednesday, RNC chair Reince Priebus announced Republicans were expanding their outreach efforts to Latino voters with social media outreach and on-the-ground organizing around an economic message. They’ve hired a new Director of Hispanic Outreach.
When Sharry heard this he laughed. “They should save their money. They should close up shop and they should look for a new job.” Certainly, the state of the economy is hurting President Obama, as is his failure to implement immigration reform and the high number of deportations his administration has overseen. The economic message could work for Republicans says Sharry, except Romney’s “position on immigration disqualifies him.”
The Democratic National Committee sees the Kobach endorsement as a major mistake. “On the issue of immigration, he’d be the most extreme presidential candidate of our time,” said DNC spokesman Ricardo Ramirez. ”It’s no wonder he fumbled his recent Hispanic outreach by flaunting an endorsement from the architect of the Alabama and Arizona anti-immigrant state laws, just days after he pledged to veto the DREAM Act and accused DREAM Act students of looking for a handout.”
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/republicans-hispanic-outreach-efforts-ignore-elephant-in-the-room.php
Eric Holder’s Wife Tells Her Story in PBS’ ‘Slavery by Another Name’
Imagine this…
You do some research into your family tree and discover that your uncle, who was born nearly 30 years after slavery, was one of thousands of black men pulled back into a forced labor system in which they were arrested – largely on trumped up charges – and compelled to work without pay as prisoners.
Imagine that this “convict leasing” system saw the groups of prisoners sold to private parties – like plantation owners or corporations – and that it was not only tolerated by both the North and South, but largely ignored by the U.S. Justice Department.
Now, imagine that nearly a century after your uncle served 366 days in this penal labor system, you find yourself married to the head of the U.S. Justice Department, who, ironically, just so happens to be the first African American in the position.
Dr. Sharon Malone, wife of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, tells the heartbreaking story of her uncle Henry in the upcoming 90-minute PBS documentary “Slavery by Another Name.” The film is based on the eye-opening book by Douglas A. Blackmon, which exposes a part of American history that most folks either had no clue existed, or didn’t know existed to the extent that it did.
“I want people to understand that this is not something that’s divorced and separate, and this doesn’t have anything to do with them,” Dr. Malone told EURweb exclusively at the Television Critics Association press tour last week. “If you were a black person who grew up in the South, some way or the other – whether or not you were directly involved in the system as my uncle was – you knew somebody who was, or your daily lives were circumscribed by those circumstances.”
http://www.eurweb.com/2012/01/eric-holders-wife-tells-her-story-in-pbs-slavery-by-another-name/
About the pardons by Governor Foghorn Leghorn:
read on another blog someone speculating that he threw the ‘ controversial’ pardons in there to obscure that he had pardoned a rich socialite, who, while driving drunk, killed two doctors who had just finished their residency.
Mississippi judge bars release of inmates pardoned by Barbour
A Mississippi judge barred the state on Wednesday from releasing any prisoners recently pardoned by former Governor Haley Barbour, a conservative Republican who outraged some by granting clemency to more than 200 convicts during his final days in office.
The judge blocked the release of 21 inmates who were still serving their sentences when the pardons were announced and who remained incarcerated, the injunction said. It also ordered five others who already had been released to appear at a hearing later in January.
Barbour’s office said that 90 percent of those who received clemency were no longer in prison when the pardons were granted
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/12/us-pardons-mississippi-judge-idUSTRE80B05020120112
Glitch puts some Wisconsin voters in Africa
Clerks scrambling to get voters in right districts before primary
Clerks in the state are scrambling to assign voters to the right districts after last summer’s redrawing of legislative maps, with changes to the process putting voters in incorrect locations across town or even across the Atlantic Ocean.
The problems could add to the confusion for voters who may already be affected by the redistricting law approved by legislators last summer. Primaries for spring races are being held on Feb. 21, leaving little time to sort out the problems.
The errors affect thousands of voters around the state and stem from different sources, including inaccuracies in U.S. Census Bureau data and problems with a new way of assigning voters to districts in a state database.
“We’re not only changing and moving districts, we’re changing the system beneath it,” said Julie Glancey, the Sheboygan County clerk. “We had many, many voters who showed up (on the computer map) on the coast of Africa and we had to drag them back to the state of Wisconsin and put them where they belonged.”
State elections officials said they were trying to help clerks resolve the problems.
They hope to fix the issues by the Feb. 21 election, but if they don’t, some voters could wind up at the wrong polling place – or find that they don’t appear on the polling list at their correct polling place. In that case, they would have to work with election officials to fix the situation.
“Our job is to help clerks assign voters to proper districts based on the law. The legislation provides some challenges. We are working with the municipal clerks to assign voters to their proper districts,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the state Government Accountability Board, which administers elections.
Magney provided only limited information on the problems, saying that he was unable to say more until Thursday because it could affect ongoing lawsuits over the redistricting maps.
But a Nov. 18 memo from the accountability board to clerks said that some stemmed from Census Bureau geographic data, which is accurate to about 50 meters. That’s a big enough error margin that a house could potentially be placed in the wrong district, according to the memo.
State and local governments must draw new maps every decade for the districts of local officials, state legislators and members of Congress to account for shifts in population recorded by the U.S. census.
Different approach
In past decades, lawmakers waited for local officials to draw their lines and then built legislative maps along those ward lines. But this time, Republicans who control the Legislature drew the state maps first, using U.S. census blocks.
Republicans who control the Legislature acted quickly on the maps at a time when they faced recall elections that could have cost them the Senate majority. Democrats made gains in those elections, but Republicans held onto the majority with a one-vote margin.There was no immediate agreement among clerks and state officials on whether that decision to start with census blocks was adding to the problems.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) said he believed some of the problems could have been detected earlier if the Republicans had taken the usual approach.
“It doesn’t surprise me that we would have these kinds of difficulties given the haste with which they rammed this through,” Barca said. “It’s so unfortunate. It could have been avoided.”
Andrew Welhouse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), disagreed. He said most of the problems stemmed from the accountability board’s decision to change how voters are handled in the state’s database.
“That’s got nothing to do with the redistricting decisions that we made ,” Welhouse said.
Sheboygan County’s Glancey also said she didn’t believe that the problems for her office would have been resolved by using local ward lines to draw the legislative maps.
That’s because those problems stem from changes to the way voters are now being entered into the state system for registering them.
Going forward, voters are being entered into different districts by the physical location of their address in computerized maps. Previously, they were entered into different districts in the state voter database according to where their address fell in certain address ranges.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/clerks-scrambling-to-get-voters-in-right-districts-3v3ov36-137102098.html
Warren Buffett: I’ll Pay Up If Republicans Do The Same
David Taintor- January 11, 2012, 5:45 PM
It has been a few months since billionaire Warren Buffett called on President Obama to “stop coddling the super-rich” and raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
His “Buffett Rule” sparked some backlash, especially from Republicans, who suggested that Buffett should cut the U.S. government a check if he’s so eager to pay his fair share of the nation’s debts. Well, Buffett tells TIME magazine that he’s willing to do just that. He’s willing to match one-for-one any donation by a Republican member of Congress — except for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, he gets three for one.
“We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren’t as well adapted to the market system, and to capitalism, but are nevertheless just as good citizens, and are doing things that are of use in society,” Buffett told TIME’s Rana Foroohar.
Buffett’s bold suggestion led to some bizarre backlash last fall. After President Obama embraced the “Buffett Rule,” as it became known, some conservatives demanded he release his tax returns if his views on taxes were to serve as the basis for the administration’s policy. But Buffett had already done that.
In the TIME interview — which is available online Thursday and on newsstands Friday — Buffett also took a swipe at Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. He called Gingrich’s criticism of Occupy Wall Street protesters unfair and questioned Mitt Romney’s business tactics at Bain Capital.
“I don’t like what private equity firms do in terms of taking out every dime they can and leveraging [companies] up so that they really aren’t equipped, in some ways, for the future
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/warren-buffett-ill-pay-up-if-republicans-do-the-same.php
Jealousy Made a Monster Out of Me
by mistermix
James Fallows highlights this clip of Matt Lauer committing some journalism on the most glass-jawed hothouse flower in the race, Mitt Romney. Romney says that “envy” at the success of others (the top 1% are the “most successful”) is driving the discussion about wealth disparities, not considerations of fairness. When Lauer gently but firmly presses him, Mitt allows that it might be OK to talk about fairness in “quiet rooms”, but it isn’t appropriate to do so in a Presidential campaign.
Stupid remarks like this are similar to plane crashes and train wrecks: they have more than one cause. Part of the cause is Romney’s wooden touch and rich-kid sensibilities, which make him say really offensive and stupid things. But what really drives the train off the tracks is his need to put any discussion of his personal wealth out-of-bounds. In particular, he has to work the refs hard enough to have them look the other way on his unprecedented decision to avoid releasing his income tax returns. A smart politician would release them now and work through the pain well before election day. Mitt is a shit politician, so he’s going to let the pressure build from the usual suspects, and from some less likely sources such as even the conservative Washington Post editorial page, who hit him hard on that topic yesterday.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/01/12/jealousy-made-a-monster-out-of-me/
Good Morning, Everyone at 3CHICS!!
Good Morning, rikyrah & Everyone! :-)
Mornin; SG2. Loving this morning’s greeting graphics! :-)
Morning Chics! :)