Happy Sunday, Everyone!
-
-
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
-
great comment at POU about POTUS and the WHCD:
JojoRaze
PBO straight up shanked the media and his enemies! He uses these things to just ether folk and that joke about using him as their test run to reach out to POC was deep on so many levels.
The Repubs think they can go around PBO and try and reach out to POC, but POC are like ‘Nawl, if you can’t respect him, why should I listen to anything you have to say?’ PBO was like you ain’t getting no where with anybody non-white until you respect me cuz until then, as Celie said, ‘Everything you do is gonna crumble.’ I will never forget the election post-mortems on TPM where they posted e-mails from black people and Asain-Americans how the otherization and blatant disrespect of the president by the Repubs was a turn-off because it looked like racism and prejudice we experience in our everyday lives. The Asian-American writer was like ‘PBO is everything we tell our kids to be: Go to school, study, work hard, get a good professional job, carry yourself well. And to see white folks dog him out and stop him from fixing messes, for no good reason, is not cool.’ Until the Repubs acknowledge PBO’s Americanness and humanity, they will get nowhere with POC. I LITERALLY judge people on whether or not they like PBO. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, I don’t agree with SSM, but if you hate him or his family on a Glenn,Beck/Alex Jones level that racial and envious of him even being president-you and I can’t be friends or acquaintances. Imagine how that affects folks’ voting habits.
Reblogged this on okieprogressive.
In a first, black voter turnout rate passes whites
By HOPE YEN
— Apr. 28 8:50 AM EDT
America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.
Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.
Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November’s exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.
The analysis also used population projections to estimate the shares of eligible voters by race group through 2030. The numbers are supplemented with material from the Pew Research Center and George Mason University associate professor Michael McDonald, a leader in the field of voter turnout who separately reviewed aggregate turnout levels across states, as well as AP interviews with the Census Bureau and other experts. The bureau is scheduled to release data on voter turnout in May.
Overall, the findings represent a tipping point for blacks, who for much of America’s history were disenfranchised and then effectively barred from voting until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
But the numbers also offer a cautionary note to both Democrats and Republicans after Obama won in November with a historically low percentage of white supporters. While Latinos are now the biggest driver of U.S. population growth, they still trail whites and blacks in turnout and electoral share, because many of the Hispanics in the country are children or noncitizens.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/first-black-voter-turnout-rate-passes-whites
AND THAT’S WHY THEY’RE MAD! Too bad, soooo SAD. And they’re still trying to SUPPRESS our VOTES.
—————–FLATLINES—————
hilarious
Those two had so much fun last night. I loved the line wihere PBO mentioned Kamala Harris. Perfect set up and the AG Holder punchline, just floored Michelle. You could tell, she didn’t see that one coming.
Republicans Have Created a World Where Going to Work Can Get You Killed
Conservatives spend inordinate amounts of time trying to neuter the government from its role as a regulatory body with the power to rein in corporate depravity. For them, unfettered capitalism is a religion, because the “invisible hand” of the market place is supposed to somehow overcome the malevolent tendencies of the profit-motive and churn out a healthy society. The rash of employee deaths on the job across a number of industries has received inadequate responses from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for several decades now as conservatives have undermined them. There is one additional guarantee for employers across the country; no matter how egregious their worker safety violations become, they know they will never have to face real criminal consequences.
Outside the Corn Belt, few people realize that corn bins are actually quite dangerous. In 2010, 26 people died by becoming entrapped in corn. They effectively drowned in it as it takes on the qualities of quicksand. There are worker precautions that can limit the risk of this type of accident occurring. However, many businesses have factored in the cost of doing business without safety precautions, and they have decided to risk the lives of their employees. They know that the consequences for allowing one of their workers to die are minimal. Since 1984, fines for grain entrapment deaths have fallen by almost 60%. In fact, according to Jim Morris, a report by the Center for Public Integrity and National Public Radio found, “analysis of OSHA data shows that 179 people died in grain entrapments at commercial facilities — bins, rail cars, etc. — from 1984 through 2012. The fines initially proposed in these cases totaled $9.2 million but were cut to $3.8 million, a reduction of 59 percent.” Penalties like jail time are incredibly limited.
OHSA isn’t doing any better at protecting the oil & gas workforce, steel mill workers, trench diggers, or as we all keenly aware following the West, Texas explosion, chemical plant workers. During a 4-month period in 2010, 58 workers were killed in the oil and gas industry, and one union health and safety inspector notes, “They are basically self-regulated.” It isn’t surprising, because the penalties that OSHA is allowed to assess are among the lowest of any regulatory agency. By law, they haven’t been able to increase penalties with inflation since 1990. They are not even allowed to force an employer to fix a safety hazard after they issue a citation, often settling for a “pledge” from the company to behave. For example, a worker death at Crucible Steel Industries came after OHSA had cited the company for 70 safety violations and issued it $250,000 in fines. These figures stand out, because “serious” violations defined by OSHA as “most likely result in death or serious physical harm” carry a maximum penalty of $7,000 and “willful” violations receive a maximum fine of $36,720.
http://www.politicususa.com/republicans-created-world-work-killed.html
Fox News Preys on Poor Kids and Demands They Be Forced To Work For Their Food
By: Rmuse
Apr. 27th, 2013
War is a systematic and prolonged conflict carried out by one group against another and is characterized by extreme violence, social disruption, and economic destruction between political communities; therefore, it can be defined as political violence. Republicans love war, and it is irrelevant to them who faces social and economic destruction even if it is the citizens of their own country. Over the past two years Republicans have, with their evangelical cohort, publicly waged a sustained war against women and the gay community, but their bigger war is against the poor who are easier to decimate because they are unseen and have little resources to defend themselves; especially children. Whether it is because children are defenseless, or because Republicans enjoy using them as proxies for their parents economic status, America’s poor youth cannot escape the onslaught from the GOP. This past week, Republicans in West Virginia and Fox News opened a new front in the war on America’s poor children that reveals no-one is safe from the GOP unless they are rich.
The news that West Virginia Republican Ray Canterbury, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, supports forcing poor children into labor to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches puts a new meaning on the phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” While Democrats and Republicans were debating Senate Bill 663, the Feed to Achieve Act, a bill to make breakfast and lunch available for free to poverty-level students from kindergarten through high school seniors, Canterbury proposed forcing children to mop floors, mow lawns, and do other janitorial tasks because according to him, “providing students with free lunches would destroy their work ethic and show them there’s an easy way” to live off the hard work of other Americans. Canterbury is not unique in perpetuating the notion that people forced into poverty by Republican policies that have kept unemployment high are lazy and stealing from the wealthy, and instead of working to help parents find living wage jobs, it is better to denigrate their children by forcing them to work or go hungry.
Republicans labor under the fallacy that Americans living in poverty are doing so out of choice, and to teach them to take responsibility for their economic plight and become “real hardworking Americans,” it is best to withhold the basic necessities of life. The idea that children living in homes of the working-poor and unemployed will achieve greater success if they learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps by making basic nutrition dependent on forced labor ignores that these are children and they go to school for an education, not a job. Besides using food as an incentive to learn a strong work ethic, forcing kids to perform maintenance work for food also puts social pressure in the form of degrading them in front of their wealthier peers, as well as sending a message to school maintenance workers that 2nd grade students can do their jobs and that they are over-compensated for their work that is only worth a child’s free breakfast and lunch, and only during school hours.
Last month in Tennessee, Republicans proposed a 30% percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (food stamps) to families whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school. It is another form of war against the poor and like Republicans in Congress and state legislatures across America, their goal is punishing poverty-level Americans instead of creating living wage jobs necessary to lift them out of poverty so they would not require assistance whether it is free school lunches, food stamps, or basic healthcare. If Americans have learned nothing else from Republicans for the past four years, they cannot ignore the simple fact that the GOP is on a crusade to inflict the maximum amount of harm on the least fortunate Americans by choice in their war on the poor, and the recent congressional action to eliminate flight delays is a perfect example.
The Republican sequester was meant to cut spending across all demographics to reduce the deficit, but within a week of flight controller furloughs that created a “hardship” for those fortunate enough to afford air travel, Republicans quickly passed legislation to eliminate the “hardship” of waiting an hour for their flights. The sequester’s damage to the poor however, cannot be abridged because they have been the primary targets of Republicans’ Draconian spending cuts for over two years and counting; especially children, and in West Virginia, if children do not work, they will not eat.
http://www.politicususa.com/fox-news-preys-poor-kids-demands-forced-work-food.html
Muslim congressman slams GOP’s call for religious profiling after Boston.
http://thkpr.gs/ZPOpE7
During an appearance on Meet The Press Sunday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) repeated his call for profiling Muslims in the name of public safety, stating that although most Muslims are “outstanding people,” the threat of terrorism still stems from “the Muslim community.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman, quickly shot down that line of thinking, arguing that blanket profiling doesn’t serve the needs of law enforcement and actually undermines effective investigations by unnecessarily straining public resources.
Ellison detailed the shortcomings of King’s approach, stressing that individual behavior and actionable evidence should form the basis of terrorism investigations. He also compared King’s strategy to the similarly misguided policies that the American government adopted towards Japanese Americans during World War II.
Republicans, Need a Minority To Love? Try President Obama
By: Black Liberal Boomer
Apr. 28th, 2013
If President Obama is unsure what to do with himself once he leaves office, he can always do standup. The man is just funny.
But of all the lines he delivered at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (and he made sure to get his licks in with a razor), the hands-down keeper was when he suggested that if the Republicans were really sincere about their new outreach efforts to attract more minorities, perhaps they might want to do a “test run” by reaching out to the President of the United States.
Video of Obama on the GOP’s minority outreach:
…………………….
“Hello…?”
Usually it’s not a good idea to break down the anatomy of a joke, but in this instance I think it’s warranted. And when you break it down it’s really pretty simple; this joke was funny because it was so blatantly true and in-your-face. It was one of those things that had to even force the Republicans in the room to ask themselves, “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?”
There’s an answer to that question, and it’s why Obama was the one telling the jokes tonight, and not a Republican.
http://www.politicususa.com/repubs-minority-love-potus.html
Good Morning, Everyone
Good morning, everyone!