Wiki: Brenda L. Lawrence (born October 18, 1954, Detroit, Michigan) is the current mayor of Southfield, Michigan and was the Democratic nominee for Michigan lieutenant governor in 2010.
Lawrence grew up in Detroit’s northeast side and was raised by her grandparents; her mother died when she was three years old.[1] She graduated from Detroit’s Pershing High School, and earned her bachelor’s degree in public administration from Central Michigan University.
In the early 1990s, as an active member of the Parent Teacher’s Association at her children’s school, she sought and earned a seat on the Southfield Public Schools Board of Education, serving as president, vice president, and secretary.
Southfield politics
In 1997, she was elected to serve on Southfield’s City Council and in 1999 she was elected council president.
In 2001, she defeated longtime Southfield Mayor Donald Fracassi becoming the city’s first African-American and first female mayor. She was re-elected in 2005 without opposition. As mayor, she was invited by the U.S. House Oversight Committee in 2008 to represent United States mayors in testimony about the mortgage crisis and its effect on American communities.[2] She returned to Washington later that year to lobby Congress for a bridge loan for the American auto industry.[3]
Lawrence was a Michigan delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As a superdelegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, she endorsed U.S. SenatorBarack Obama for president in June 2008.[4]
She successfully sought a third term as mayor in 2009 defeating former Councilwoman Sylvia Jordan with nearly 80 percent of the vote.[5]
Mayor Lawrence is the first African-American and woman to serve as the Mayor of Southfield (elected in 2001).
Mayor Lawrence was appointed to serve as a member on the U.S. Conference of Mayor’s Advisory Board.
Mayor Lawrence is actively working with State Senator Gilda Jacobs, State Representative Vincent Gregory, and City Council to pass legislation to provide tax relief for Southfield residents.
http://twitter.com/NoShock/status/269978519004663808/photo/1
if anyone’s interested, The Bodyguard is on TVOne right now.
Just getting in from a wonderful day at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “Contact” with Jodie Foster on REELZ. Love that movie.
http://youtu.be/ufJ1leBqLVo
Loves it! We are the UNITED STATES BITCHES!!!
The McCain Backpedal on Benghazi Begins
By: Sarah JonesNovember 17th, 2012
Asked about Senator Reid’s brutal letter to him in which Reid denied McCain’s calls to head a special committee to investigate Benghazi, McCain said at a press conference at the Halifax International Security Forum, “I’m concerned about four Americans who died. Their families need to know the circumstances, why it happened, how it happened, and where responsibility lies. That’s all. That’s all that we’re seeking. We’re not seeing a confrontation with anyone. We’re not trying to quote ‘take on anyone.’”
McCain claims that he knew better than the entire intelligence community (also known in Republican circles as “the administration” now) and thus he is not taking back his criticism of Susan Rice. The Senator said, “No, because I knew it was a terrorist attack from the beginning. People don’t go to spontaneous demonstrations with mortars and RPGs.”
To date, no one has asked McCain how he can “know” with such certainty what happened in Benghazi when he was not there, and when he clearly did not read the intelligence reports sent to him that Rice based her comments on, or attend the briefing in which he could have more fully informed himself.
In McCain world, it was simple; he knew because there were mortars and RPGs there. And yet, it was not so simple. Shocking, I know. There were actually two attacks, and the intelligence community seems to think at this point that they may have been two separate attacks – perhaps one spontaneous and one planned or some combo thereof. Furthermore, Petraeus suggested that Rice’s talking points were the unclassified version of what happened, something McCain should have grasped for obvious reasons since he claims to be an expert at national security. Perhaps he expected us to send a cable to the suspects on day one.
But never mind McCain’s big talk on RPGs (you have to feel for the guy, clinging to his days as The Military Guy), what is really important here is that he now says he is not seeking a confrontation with anyone.
From lies and calling for a Watergate-esque investigation to “We’re not trying to quote ‘take on anyone,’” McCain is backpedaling. Not so fast, Senator.
http://www.politicususa.com/mccain-backpedal-begins.html
It was Romney Vulture Capitalist Style Management that Killed Hostess, Not Unions
By: RmuseNovember 17th, 2012
A scapegoat is a person or group made to bear the blame for another’s actions, and usually they are easy targets to assign blame for something they had nothing to do with. Republicans have attempted to blame union labor for much of the nation’s economic woes in recent years and, yesterday, the Hostess Brands took a page right out of Republicans’ playbook and blamed a union strike as the reason they were shutting their doors and liquidating their assets costing 18,500 employees their jobs. However, much of the responsibility for Hostess shutting down lies with the company’s management and the private equity firm behind them, and yet union workers are the ones bearing the blame and subsequently will suffer the consequences of the shutdown.
Hostess Brands’ demise is a recurring story that should be well-known after Americans learned the predatory private equity tactics of Bain Capital during Willard Romney’s failed run for the White House. In fact, union president Richard Trumka pointed out that Wall Street investors that own Hostess were disinterested in the company’s success and cited similarities to the situation of Bain Capital and KB Toys in 2000. As a reminder, Bain Capital’s scheme was leveraging companies with crushing debt, cutting workers’ wages and benefits, and when the company can no longer repay their loans they go into bankruptcy, often more than once. Hostess is in bankruptcy for the second time since 2009 and a major factor in their inability to succeed is that over the past eight years, they were owned by Wall Street investors that were restructuring experts, managers from other non-baking food companies, and now a liquidation specialist. There was no plan for Hostess to succeed and it appears that was the objective all along.
Hostess’s failure was compounded by having six CEO’s in 8 years who had no experience in the bread or cake baking industry, and despite their financial woes, the company’s CEO got a 300% salary increase from $750,000 to $2,250,000, and other top executives received raises worth hundreds-of-thousands of dollars; all while the company was struggling. Instead of acknowledging the lack of competent leadership and exorbitant executive salaries as contributing to the company’s decision to close its doors, CEO Gregory Rayburn issued a statement saying, “We deeply regret the necessity of today’s decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike.” However, Rayburn and Hostess management claimed the strike would be responsible for closing plants even before there was a strike, and they had made plans to close plants whether or not workers accepted the Draconian wage and benefit cuts the company offered, or if they went on strike.
Hostess workers previously made numerous concessions to keep the company afloat, but they were not enough for the company’s management so they stopped making contractually-obligated contributions to employee’s pensions to save money. The employees stayed on the job until management offered a new contract cutting wages and benefits an extra 27 – 32 percent that prompted employees to strike and thus become scapegoats for Hostess’s demise. What Hostess failed to tell the public is that plans were in the works to close plants months before offering to slash workers’ wages. According to the company’s 1113 bankruptcy court filing earlier this year, they planned to close at least nine bakeries as part of its reorganization plan in addition to the three bakeries that were to be closed as a result of the company’s planned sale of its Merita division. In a November article, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said, “I was told months ago they were planning on closing the site in St. Louis, and there was no indication at that time it had anything to do with the strike the workers were waging.”
The ideal of blaming unions for Hostess’s bankruptcy and subsequent shutdown is one that transcends corporations and is being used by Republicans in states and at the federal level to garner public support for eliminating unions. Hostess Wall Street investors were not interested in the company’s success or they would have appointed competent managers and a CEO with experience in the baking industry as well as reining in salaries the way they cut worker wages. Using Romney’s tactics of loading up the company with debt it could not possible repay is a proven death-knell for any business, and as usual the losers in the Hostess affair are 18,500 workers who lost not only their pensions, but their jobs. It is the private equity blueprint for enriching a few at the expense of shareholders, lenders, creditors and especially workers.
http://www.politicususa.com/romney-vulture-capitalist-style-management-killed-hostess-unions.html
How Obamacare Will Allow Women To Be Less Dependent On Their Spouses’ Health Coverage
By Tara Culp-Ressler on Nov 15, 2012 at 12:37 pm
President Obama’s landmark health care reform includes multiple provisions with significant positive implications for women, including putting an end to discriminatory gender-based insurance costs and ensuring affordable access to contraceptive services and maternity care. But Obamacare could also have another unexpected effect on women’s lives: helping ensure they don’t have to rely on a spouse for their health coverage, or worry about losing that coverage after a change in their marital status.
According to a new study from the University of Michigan, about 115,000 American women lose their private insurance coverage following a divorce each year, and 65,000 of those women remain uninsured because they don’t have any way to access health care without a spouse. Women are much more likely than men to be covered as a dependent — nearly a quarter of women under 65 years old were dependents last year, versus just 14 percent of men in the same age group — because they continue to be less likely to be insured through their jobs, partly because they tend to be in fields that don’t offer comprehensive benefits. Men are still more likely to have jobs that offer better insurance packages, and the Michigan study suggests that’s one reason why women often choose to access health insurance through their husbands’ plans.
Once those women get divorced, however, they lose the ability to access coverage as a dependent, and they often can’t afford the high costs of private insurance on their own. And rather than just a temporary gap in coverage immediately following a divorce, researchers observed that the rates of insurance coverage for divorced women remained depressed for more than two years after their splits occurred. “Insurance loss may compound the economic losses women experience after divorce and contribute to as well as compound previously documented health declines following divorce,” researchers warned.
This study builds on previous research that has already drawn a link between marital status and uninsurance rates. Unmarried women are estimated to be between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to be uninsured than the women who have a legal spouse — and even when unmarried women are insured, they are more likely to rely on public insurance programs like Medicaid. In fact, women make up 68 percent of the recipients in the Medicaid program.
But thanks to Obamacare, women may not have to keep relying on insurance plans that are only available through their husbands — something that will help women who choose to remain unmarried, women who seek a divorce, and LGBT women who live in states where they cannot legally marry. By requiring that all employers provide their workers with insurance, preventing insurance providers from charging women more than men for the same medical care, and expanding the eligibility levels for the Medicaid program, the health reform law actually represents a step toward ensuring that women’s ability to have insurance isn’t impacted by women’s ability to get married.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/11/15/1196801/obamacare-women-divorce/
http://twitter.com/GrumpyDem/status/269867150355861504/photo/1
November 16, 2012
Obama’s supremacy at risk
From Mitch McConnell, the NY Times expects “four more years of sputtering rage.” Or at least two more years, since the minority leader–with the effective power of a majority leader under the Senate’s insane rules–is, in 2014, seeking six more years of sniveling subversion. This means re-cementing his cred with Kentucky’s tea party fanatics of orthodox madness.
Over at the nation’s less exclusive asylum, the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker John Boehner is dangling from a spidery thread which itself dangles just above a mutinous mob of strife-loving morons. Poor Mr. Boehner has been reduced to such mammoth vacuities as reaffirming the House’s commitment to repealing ObamaCare, just after affirming that it’s the law of the land.
Meanwhile, back at the Times, Paul Krugman is ratcheting up the rhetoric:
The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction….
This should be a red line in any budget negotiations, and we can only hope that Mr. Obama doesn’t betray his supporters by crossing it.
Betray–Krugman’s strong and, I’m sure, long-pondered word. Yet it faithfully foreshadows the inescapable reality of Obama’s political position, which at the moment is both immensely powerful and awfully precarious. He holds all the fiscal cards in the form of a cliff, but any substantive concessions on entitlement reform would likely dispirit and destabilize the vast electoral coalition he just pieced together for potential reuse in 2014–a coalition that extends far, far beyond the always-disappointed progressive community.
And with whom is President Obama required to negotiate? See first two paragraphs.
I do not envy the man.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/11/obamas-supremacy-at-risk.html
November 17, 2012
Milbank’s contract hit
It looks as though either the Clinton or Kerry camp got to Milbank. What a partisan-fed hit job on Susan Rice.
“[S]he appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department”? Yeah? And? Everybody, at some point, once told the overbearing Holbrooke to go fuck himself. So what?
Rice also had the temerity, Milbank reminds us, to defect from Clinton to Obama in ’08. Shocking. And to question Clinton’s insane support of the Iraq war. Atrocious. And to call John McCain “reckless.” Ghastly. And to openly scrutinize the G.W. Bush/Europe-aligned policy on Iran’s weapons program. Oh dear the smelling salts, please.
Maybe Rice isn’t Obama’s top choice for State. Maybe Rice shouldn’t be Obama’s top choice for State. Maybe the manufactured Benghazi controversy has done its work and poisoned her nomination beyond cure. I don’t know. What I do know is that Susan Rice’s career should not be judged by some vulgar, schoolyard defamation campaign led by a Beltway Walter Winchell.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/11/milbanks-contract-hit.html
Essay: How the Republican Party alienated the once reliable Muslim voting bloc
By Rany Jazayerli,
Nov 16, 2012 05:58 PM EST
The Washington Post Published: November 16
Rany Jazayerli is a dermatologist in private practice in St. Charles, Ill. He is also the co-founder ofBaseball Prospectus and an accomplished sportswriter who currently writes at Grantland as well as his personal blog Rany on the Royals.
Almost before I knew that I was an American, and almost before I knew that I was a Muslim, I knew that I was a Republican. I knew this because my father told me so. My father finished his cardiology fellowship just weeks after I was born, and moved the family from Michigan, where we had relatives and a large Muslim community, to Wichita, Kan
Kansas, then as now, was a Republican state, and those political sensibilities suited my dad just fine. These were the 1970s, when the income tax rate on the highest earners was 70 percent, a rate that people of all political persuasions would agree today can only be described as confiscatory. My dad had just left behind Syria, where the government had literally confiscated his family’s wealth, and he would be damned if he was going to let the American government take more than two-thirds of his marginal income.
So a political party whose platform rested on tax cuts and placed small business owners on a pedestal – well, they didn’t have to ask my father twice. The early years in Wichita were the Jimmy Carter years, and while my parents admired Carter and what he accomplished with the Camp David accords – bringing the first measure of peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict — they were swept up by the Reagan Revolution.
“Government is not a solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
My parents had settled in America to get away from an authoritarian regime in their homeland, and here came a man running for president on the platform that the best way to govern was to leave the public alone. All my parents wanted was to be left alone, to work and raise their children and own a house with a finished basement and a white picket fence. My dad, who had just obtained his American citizenship in 1978, became a reliable supporter of the Republican Party, both with his ballot and occasionally with his checkbook. He wasn’t alone. Most immigrant Muslims to America – once they obtained their citizenship – joined the Reagan Revolution
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/essay-how-the-republican-party-alienated-the-once-reliable-muslim-voting-bloc/2012/11/15/23e2af70-2da5-11e2-9ac2-1c61452669c3_story.html
November 17, 2012
Jen Rubin’s last stand
One would think that Jennifer Rubin would be exhausted after her shrill, months-long, Romney-pumping, Maxwell Smart-like campaign against America’s Satan, Barack Obama; so exhausted, she might even give her paranoid hysteria a rest. At least a brief one. But no, not the Washington Post’s Jen Rubin. Indeed, she’s foaming and frothing more than ever.
Her latest screed trumpets the Benghazi Affair as “a full-blown scandal.” Rubin cites a “blockbuster” Washington Guardian story which, she explains, “indicates that the president certainly knew that Benghazi wasn’t a rogue movie review gone bad.” She quotes from the story:
Most of the details affirming al-Qaida links were edited or excluded from the unclassified talking points used by Rice in appearances on news programs the weekend after the attack, officials confirmed Friday. Multiple agencies were involved in excising information, doing so because it revealed sources and methods, dealt with classified intercepts or involved information that was not yet fully confirmed, the officials said.
Rubin then writes–and this is mindblowing–“How could the president and his senior staff then have allowed (or rather, sent) Rice to go out to tell an entirely different tale to the American people on Sept. 16 on five TV shows?”
Yet she had already answered that in the very quote she led with: Multiple agencies were involved in excising information, doing so because it revealed sources and methods, dealt with classified intercepts or involved information that was not yet fully confirmed.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/11/jen-rubins-last-stand.html
http://youtu.be/REn1BnJE3do
Michael Tomasky: The Nonexistent Case Against Susan Rice Crumbles
Peter King admitted on CNN that David Petraeus, in his Hill briefing, the one John McCain couldn’t be bothered to attend because he was holding a press conference denouncing the administration for withholding information, gave Susan Rice the green light to say what she said on those TV appearances on that fateful day.
…. the agency approved Rice’s talking points. So she wasn’t lying or spinning. So says Peter King, no ideological or partisan doormat on these matters, I think you would agree.
…. Rice maybe should or should not be secretary of state, but she sure shouldn’t be disqualified on the basis of these flimsy and silly allegations, and King’s admission helps clear her plate.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/16/the-nonexistent-case-against-susan-rice-crumbles.html
Predicting the House
by BooMan
Sat Nov 17th, 2012 at 11:03:33 AM EST
Midterm elections are different from presidential elections because turnout is much lower. I’d argue that midterm elections can be further distinguished depending on whether they occur during a president’s second year in office or his sixth. Since World War Two ended, we have had four midterm elections in the sixth year of a presidency and two additional midterm elections that almost fit that model. In 1958, Eisenhower’s sixth year in office, the Republicans lost 48 seats in the House. In 1986, Reagan’s sixth year in office, the Republicans lost five seats in Congress. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s sixth year in office, the Democrats gained five seats in the House. In 2006, Bush’s sixth year in office, the Republicans lost 30 seats in the House. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the Republicans lost 48 seats. In 1966, which would have been JFK’s sixth year in office, the Democrats lost 48 seats.
This is a small data set, but the trend is pretty clear. The president’s party doesn’t do well in the sixth year of his presidency. In the post war era, the only time the president’s party gained seats in the sixth year was in 1998, and that was pretty clearly a backlash against the impeachment proceedings again President Clinton. Yet, if you look at all these examples, they all have unique circumstances that explain the results. In 1958, the booming economy we associate with that decade came to an abrupt halt and went into recession. In 1966, there was a backlash against the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, and there was growing consternation about the war in Vietnam. In 1974, people were furious about President Ford’s pardon of Nixon. In 1986, there was the Iran-Contra scandal. In 2006, there was exhaustion with the war in Iraq.
I think it is a mistake to think that we can use these past sixth-year midterm elections to make confident predictions about what will happen in 2014. If the president is staggering through some massive scandal, his party will probably do badly unless (as in 1998) the public perceives the Republicans to be overreacting.
The truth is, no post-war president has had a good second term. The least bad second term was Eisenhower’s. He had a bad economy and got caught lying about the Gary Powers U-2 incident, but that scandal occurred after the midterms. I think we have to go back to FDR’s second term to find an example that is likely to fit Obama’s second term. But even that example won’t be helpful in predicting the congressional elections of 2014. In 1938, the Democrats lost 72 seats and still didn’t lose their majority. The last time a president went into their sixth-year midterms with a split Congress was in 1986. Reagan’s party lost control of the Senate.
I think the best guide for predicting the 2014 elections is to look at each individual seat and its likelihood of changing hands. From that standpoint, the House looks very stable. There is almost no chance of a wave election where 48 seats change hands. There are many more seats that the Democrats won narrowly than that the Republicans won narrowly, making it a little more likely for the Republicans to make significant gains. The Democrats will need to pick up 17 seats to regain control of the House. That doesn’t sound all that daunting, but it looks nearly impossible when you begin to look at the individual races.
We need to figure out a way to beat expectations or the House is going to be in Republican hands for the remainder of the decade.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/11/17/11333/469
So, Little Luke, show me the Democratic lawmaker – not the President – who raised 85 million for the party.
oh, you can’t find them?
then sit down and S-T-F-U with your ageist dribble against Nancy Smash.
………………………………..
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/11/14/the-millions-of-reasons-nancy-pelosi-decided-to-stay/
The millions of reasons Nancy Pelosi decided to stay
… [T]he lawmaker Republicans love to hate isn’t going anywhere. She means to be at the table when three others, all men — McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — knock out a debt deal with the president. “For some people in the public,” she said, “the thought of four men at the table was not an appealing sight.” With entitlements presumably on that same table, she wants to be there to watch over them. Having pushed through the Affordable Care Act, she wants to be on the job when it’s finally implemented. When Obama lately began speaking again about climate change — one of her signature issues — that, too, was an inducement. And looking out for women, she made clear, is very much the point of her decision to stick around…
As long as you’re still wearing out the kids on your staff, though, as I saw Pelosi do during a few days on the campaign trail with her this summer, you are just not ready to go yet. She did 450 fundraisers this year, raising $85 million for her party this cycle, and reveling in the process. Though Democrats did not come close to netting the 25 seats they needed to take back control of the House, I always thought she’d stay on doing what she loves — and what, at this point, no one can do better.
One sign of how far women in politics have come is that more are now doing what men have always done, aging on the public stage. Pelosi often makes light of her age: “Nobody’s older than I am,” she says unselfconsciously. Her 83-year-old colleague Louise Slaughter, a microbiologist who motors around the Capitol now on a senior scooter, is part of the House Democratic leadership team, too, and the ranking member on the Rules Committee.
Then there’s Pelosi’s 79-year-old neighbor in San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and just coasted to reelection, becoming the oldest woman ever elected to a new term in the Senate, historian Don Ritchie told me. Feinstein didn’t run away from her years, either, but on the contrary, ran on her decades of experience. Especially in vast California, she said this summer, “You have to build a base over time.” And then, if you’re lucky, you get to stick around and put it to use
Oops! BWA HA HA HA
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18 TALK SHOWS- SAMEOLD RETREADS.
I’ll be having Sunday brunch with my HUBBY!
Meet the Press: Lindsey Graham, Dianne Feinstein, Mike Rogers, David Cote, Raul Labrador, Tom Friedman, John Podesta, Mike Murphy, Andrea Mitchell
Face the Nation: John McCain, Dick Durbin, Olympia Snowe, David Ignatius, Thomas Ricks, Margaret Brennan, Bob Orr, Maya MacGuineas, Mark Zandi
This Week: Nancy Pelosi, Carl Levin, Peter King, Xavier Becerra, Newt Gingrich, George Will, Donna Brazile, Jonathan Karl
Fox News Sunday: Saxby Chambliss, Joe Lieberman, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Bill Kristol, Bob Woodward, Kimberley Strassel, Charles Lane
http://thepage.time.com/
Friday, Nov 16, 2012 10:00 AM CST
Dear Mr. President: Please admit it — you’re a Jedi
Can you share the Force with the rest of us now? We’re ready to get to work
By Tobias Barrington Wolff
Mr. President:
With your last-ever campaign behind you, and faced with the task of rallying an American community that has nearly had the unity beaten out of it by a politics that has often forgotten its purpose, I believe that now is the time for you to reveal your truth. For it can be a healing truth, and we are ready to hear it.
It is time to admit that you are a Jedi.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/16/dear_mr_president_please_admit_it_youre_a_jedi/
YANGON, MYANMAR – NOVEMBER 17: A Burmese worker fixes a welcome sign as the city gets ready for the first visit by a serving US President, on November 17, 2012 in Yangon, Myanmar. Obama is making a four-day tour of Southeast Asia that will also include visits to Thailand and Cambodia.
US President Barack Obama departs the White House for a trip to South East Asia on November 17, 2012 in Washington, DC. Obama is the first serving US President to visit Myanmar as he makes a four-day tour of Southeast Asia that will also include visits to Thailand and Cambodia.
(November 16, 2012 – Source: Pool/Getty Images North America
Obama to make history visiting Burma http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-to-praise-burmas-progress-during-historic-visit/2012/11/16/9fff99f2-2f93-11e2-9f50-0308e1e75445_story.html …
President Barack Obama walks to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, November 17, 2012. Obama is traveling to Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia. REUTERS/Jason Reed
SWAGGA!
Myanmar Welcomes Obama With Graffiti
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/obamas-myanmar-visit-graf_n_2150067.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
YANGON, Myanmar — When Arker Kyaw heard President Barack Obama was coming to Myanmar, he gathered 15 cans of spray paint and headed for a blank brick wall under cover of darkness. Kyaw, whose passion is graffiti, labored from 3 a.m. until the sun came up. Passing taxi drivers and the occasional pedestrian gave him signs of encouragement as Obama’s grinning, uplifted face took shape against a background of the American and Myanmar flags.
“I wanted to welcome him,” said Kyaw, a 19-year-old with a sweep of styled hair and a penchant for skinny jeans.
The next day, someone – a rival graffiti artist, suspects Kyaw – scribbled over his handiwork with a can of black spray paint.
Before dawn Saturday, as he watched for cops between tea breaks, he painted another wall with an image of Obama scrawled with the words “hello again.” He sees it as a shout out from the youth of Myanmar, and hopes Obama will glimpse it during his six-hour visit to the country, the first by a U.S. president.
POTUS has departed for Asia. May God watch over him day and night and protect him with all his might!
Clean Sweep for Democrats
The Economist: “The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote for divided government. It’s a clean sweep.”
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/11/16/clean_sweep_for_democrats.html
Camille posted this at POU about Ebony Magazine having Tavis and Corny in the magazine criticizing the President:
Camille 5 comments collapsed Collapse Expand
You are a much better and more patient human being than I’ll ever be GN.
Ebony magazine can’t hide it’s painful mediocrity behind this useless and now throroughly debunked and certainly exposed as completely bogus and worthless this shallow manipulation and public stabs in the back with proclamations of “balance” in “reporting”.
They know exactly what they are doing by throwing shade on behalf of the now marginalized but formerly self-important, self-absorbed, green-eyed, self-appointed “black leaders” and “black high society” who always called the shots, led the way in their minds, constantly leveraged their perceived roles and earned the exclusive perks from white America and its top politicians in return for endorsing and supposedly rallying the black vote behind their guy, who are now seething and heart-heavy as they slip into complete irrelevance in the age of Barack and Michelle Obama.
They never saw this 21st century man and wife coming and they’ve done everything to stop them.
The people Ebony magazine are shilling on behalf of have tried everything to take down the Obamas—
They have tried to maliciously malign, besmirch, attack, question, slander, cast aspersions on – in public and private – this great man and his amazing wife who just happen to be the first black President and First Lady of the United States.
No, Ebony magazine isn’t looking to do “balance” all of a sudden— they wouldn’t know what that was if it hit them in the face seeing as they never did “balance” in their many years of existence.
That was never the point for Ebony as a magazine. That is not what it was set up to do. It always highlighted, uplifted, supported and proudly celebrated the best and brightest of black America, not to tear down, but to inspire, give credit and celebrate especially where other traditional, mainstream media refused to.
Suddenly that’s all changed now, and only because the Obamas represent to the purveyors of Ebony magazine, its benefactors and the folks that make up the Ebony magazine inner circle alike, the very same threat they pose to the Donald Trumps, Michael Bloomberg’s, Bob Woodards, Bill O’Reilly’s, Rush Limbaugh’s on the other side of the ODS color divide.
How ironic that once upon a time, it would have been Ebony magazine front and center fighting for the Obamas against the massive envy, petty jealousies and mainstream attempts to deny them their rightful place in history.
And how ironic that when Ebony magazine finally goes out of business for failing to do what it once did so well— highlight the positive and uplifting stories about black America instead of trying to cater to a very narrow and fleeting audience with a negative agenda that at once depresses and diminishes for the sole purpose of destroying the first black President—
When Ebony finally dies that death, watch for them to blame it all on Barack Obama.
One of the most telling stories from this time will be how much of formerly “important” black America, misbehaved and self-destructed from envy and the fear of irrelevance at the rise of a young, brilliant, intrinsically decent, great black man and his equally formidable black wife.
Spot on! Haven’t bought a Ebony mag since forever. And even when they feature PBO & FLOTUS; I scope it out before I buy it.
Photos: New Democratic Members of the House http://dccc.org/blog/entry/new_democratic_members_of_the_house/ …
Make it stop!
Allen West Granted Recount After Bitter Loss
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/allen-west-recount-early-votes_n_2148757.html#comments
Allen West’s political career was granted a temporary reprieve on Friday, after the St. Lucie County Canvassing Board ordered a recount of early ballots in his race against Democrat Patrick Murphy for Florida’s 18th Congressional District, NBC Miami reports.
West (R- Fla), a controversial freshman congressman elected in the 2010 Republican landslide, appeared to have lost his contest against Murphy by 0.7 percentage points after all ballots were initially counted last week. The margin of victory was too large to trigger a recount, and the state of Florida certified the race’s results on November 10. West, however, refused to concede, claiming “discrepancies” in early voting results.
Larry O went all in on what many of us have been talking about with regards to the Generals….it’s not the cheating….it’s the JUDGEMENT.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755883/ns/msnbc-the_last_word/#49861959
Good Morning Everyone at 3CHICS!!
Good morning! Happy Saturday!
Good Morning, Ladies & Everyone! :-)