Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson; June 7, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career.[1] Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of the instruments on his recordings.[1] In addition, Prince has been a “talent promoter” for the careers of Sheila E., Carmen Electra, The Time and Vanity 6,[1] and his songs have been recorded by these artists and others (including Chaka Khan, The Bangles, Sinéad O’Connor, and even Kim Basinger). He also has several hundred unreleased songs in his “vault”.[2]
National Review Fires John Derbyshire, Writer Who Penned Racist Screed. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/07/national-review-fires-john-derbyshire_n_1410273.html
NAACP calls emergency meeting in wake of north Tulsa shooting spree
http://www.krmg.com/news/news/local/naacp-calls-emergency-meeting-wake-north-tulsa-sho/nMLg5/
TULSA — Several members of the Tulsa chapter of the NAACP gathered at a north Tulsa church Friday evening for an emergency meeting to discuss what police have characterized as a possible “shooting spree” that targeted five people early Friday morning.
As news spread that the police are looking for a white man in connection with the shootings of five black people, people began saying they believe the shootings were racially motivated.
KRMG spoke with Tulsa City Councilor Jack Henderson as the meeting continued in the 2200 block of N. Peoria Avenue.
When asked if people in the community felt that the shooter or shooters were deliberately targeting black people, he replied “yes, absolutely.”
He told KRMG the “word on the street is that this person would drive up to people walking, ask for directions, and when they would turn away, walk away, begin firing. That’s truly a concern, and anybody would be (ill) at ease if you knew this was going on.”
He added that “I’ve talked to the Mayor, and the Mayor assures me that the city is on top of this. The police chief, I’ve talked to him, they have a lot of people that are on this case, they’ll be working around the clock.”
Henderson said he urges anyone with information to come forward, and in the meantime he wants people to be careful. Also, he definitely wants to avoid any sort of vigilantism.
“Don’t go out late at night walking by yourself, until these people are apprehended. We need to be careful, and we don’t want anybody to go out and do any vigilante-type stuff either. Let the police do their jobs.”
Obama campaign pushes Romney on Wisconsin overturn of equal-pay law
By Justin Sink – 04/06/12 02:37 PM ET
After a week in which Democrats and the Obama campaign have argued that Republicans are waging a “war on women” in an effort to solidify their base of female voters in the coming election, the president’s campaign team is seizing Friday on news that controversial Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly overturned his state’s equal-pay law.
Obama’s campaign team said Friday that Walker’s move was evidence Republicans are willing to “undermine not only women’s health care, but also their economic security,” and demanded that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney comment on Walker’s move.
“Mitt Romney has repeatedly dismissed the effect of Republican efforts to rollback access to contraception and other health care services on the women’s vote, saying that he would appeal to women by talking about their economic concerns. If this is the case does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?” said Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith in a statement.
Smith noted that Romney “repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker’s leadership, calling him a ‘hero’ and ‘a man of courage’ ” while campaigning in Wisconsin. Walker faces a recall election this summer after his move to prohibit public-sector employees from forming unions drew ire from many in the state.
While Democrats are encouraged about the headway that they’ve made with female voters —Obama leads Romney with women by 18 percent in swing states, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll released this week — they believe that opening up their case beyond the sole issue of contraception is crucial to make the topic a sticking point in the campaign.
On Thursday, the DNC seized on a caterpillar analogy Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made when defending Republicans and trying to make the point that the GOP was not waging a “war on women.” Later in the day, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president believed women should be admitted to Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters golf tournament is under way. Democrats likely wanted to see if one of the president’s political opponents would oppose opening up the club to female membership.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/220367-obama-campaign-pushes-romney-on-wisconsin-overturn-of-equal-pay-law
How to make the gender gap worse
Did Scott Walker just give Obama an opening to drive an even bigger wedge between women and the GOP?
There’s been much discussion this week of the gender gap in the presidential race, which has exploded since Republicans decided in February to pick a fight with President Obama over contraception.
A survey of voters in 12 swing states released at the start of the week showed Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney among women surging to 18 points, compared to just 1 with men. Among independent women in those states, Obama is now ahead by 14 points – a complete turnaround from late last year, when he trailed Romney by 5 with the same group. The sizable overall leads that Obama now enjoys are largely the result of this movement of women.
But as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein showed, the shift is coming from a very specific subset of the female population: college-educated white women. As Brownstein explained,
They are consistently the portion of the white electorate that shows the most receptivity to activist government and also tend toward the most liberal positions on social issues, from abortion to gay rights to the availability of contraception.
In other words, the contraception debate (and, probably, the national controversy over Virginia’s mandatory ultrasound law) is probably at the heart of Romney’s – and the GOP’s – gender problem. The hopeful spin from Republicans is that it will go away once Romney is clear of the GOP primaries and the national conversation is again focused on the economy. It may turn out that there’s something to this.
But it’s also possible the gender gap could get worse for the GOP. For that to happen, the party would have to do something to turn off blue-collar, non-college-educated white women – “waitress moms,” as Brownstein refers to them. Right now, these women seem largely unmoved by the contraception debate, and by Democratic efforts to paint the GOP as culturally extreme. But what if there were an issue that ties gender and the economic interests of waitress moms together?
Greg Sargent flagged an interesting possibility today involving Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who just scrapped the state’s equal pay law. As Sargent notes, Walker is now a nationally significant figure, thanks to the efforts to recall him. He’s also a celebrated figure on the right, which is why Romney hailed him as “hero” last week.
This could put Romney in an uncomfortable spot. Sargent got Obama’s campaign to lash out at the repeal and to call on Romney to take a stand; if the issue is forced, Romney will have to choose between spitting in the face of a conservative icon and causing himself immense intraparty grief, or giving Obama an opening with waitress moms.
Notably, the last Democratic president to win reelection did so on the strength of a gender gap comparable to the one measured in the new swing state poll. In the 1996 election, Clinton managed to extend his appeal to blue-collar women with a stream of relatively noncontroversial initiatives – school uniforms, the V-chip, an end to “drive-through” child deliveries – that showed waitress moms that he was mindful of their concerns.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/how_to_make_the_gender_gap_worse/
The facts vs. Mitt Romney
By Dana Milbank, Published: April 6
Mitt Romney is developing a Mirlande Wilson problem.
Wilson, for those not acquainted with the name, is the Maryland woman who claimed to have a winning lottery ticket worth $218 million. She had agreed to buy lottery tickets with money pooled from her co-workers at McDonald’s, but then she claimed that the winning ticket was one she bought separately. As the New York Daily News has documented, she has since claimed she’s not sure she won, she hasn’t checked the ticket, the ticket is at her home, the ticket is hidden at McDonald’s, the ticket is secreted away somewhere else, and now she can’t find it.
On Wednesday, she called a news conference, only for her lawyer to tell reporters to “go home.”
This was developing, by chance, on the same day I watched Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, give a speech in Washington. Like Wilson and her golden ticket, Romney was having some trouble getting out the facts.
“Good morning,” he began, though it was already afternoon. The accuracy of his statements went downhill from there.
He blamed President Obama for the “weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression.”
He said he would save “about $100 billion a year” eliminating Obamacare.
He accused the president of “taking a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it.” And he claimed Obama had created an “unaccountable panel, with the power to prevent Medicare from providing certain treatments.”
Incorrect, wrong, false and fictitious. And that was just a sample from one Romney speech on one day.
Fortunately, fact-checkers in the press, such as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact, have been diligently pointing out Romney’s whoppers. Unfortunately, this has had little, if any, effect on his prodigious output.
That candidates don’t tell the truth is hardly news. Voters already know there are lies, damn lies, and politics. And certainly, Romney has abundant company in his mendacity. Just this week, Obama dared the Supreme Court to overturn his health-care reforms, saying it “would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” In fact, the law passed by the barest of margins — and, as a former constitutional law instructor such as Obama surely knows, the Supreme Court routinely strikes down laws passed by Congress.
But the fact that the fibs are routine doesn’t make them less insidious. Public support for the war in Iraq was no doubt aided by the perception among a majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks — a frequent insinuation of the Bush administration.
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PolitiFact has awarded Romney its “Pants on Fire” or “False” ratings for 32 claims. Among them are these: that Obama “didn’t even mention the deficit or debt” in his State of the Union address, that “our Navy is smaller than it’s been since 1917,” that Obama “never worked in the private sector,” that Obama “gave” the automakers “to the UAW,” and that “we’re only inches away from no longer being a free economy.”
Wednesday’s speech alone had more than a dozen distortions, including allegations that: Obama “has failed to even pass a budget” (Congress passes budget resolutions, which the president doesn’t sign); Obama created a panel empowered to deny treatments under Medicare (the board can only make recommendations, and only if Congress fails to find Medicare cuts), Obama “has added regulations at a staggering rate” (the Business Roundtable just said it “lauded” the administration’s attempt at regulatory reform).
No fewer than three Romney claims in that one speech merited PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” rating: that Obama led “a government takeover of health care,” has been “apologizing for America abroad” and is ending “Medicare as we know it.” Romney’s assertions that Obama “is the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare” and that eliminating Obamacare saves “about $100 billion” were rated false.
That Romney resorts to such gratuitous falsehoods discredits his leadership more than his opponent’s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-facts-vs-mitt-romney/2012/04/06/gIQAITqjzS_story.html?hpid=z2
Good Morning, Everyone :)