This week is the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Justice and Jobs. Let’s look back at some of the heroes of the March.
Today’s Hero is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I believe most of us know Dr. King’s biography.
Here is a snippet of Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which was one of the most important documents of the Civil Rights Movement. They hated Dr. King because he was brilliant and knew how to use language to:
1. Tell the truth about America
2. Explain the plight of the Negro in America
3. Expose the brutal fraud that America’s platitudes were towards the Negro
And he did it in the King’s English, which pissed them off to no end.
LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL
April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.
…………………….
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.
Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants — for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken .in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor. will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
Sarah Palin Took a 75% Pay Cut To Get Her Job Back at Fox News
By: Jason Easley
My how the mighty have fallen. It turns out that Sarah Palin had to give up a whole lot of money to get her job back at Fox News. The Wasilla Washout had to surrender about $750,000/year.
Back in January, Palin turned down a new contract from Fox News because the money wasn’t good enough. Howard Kurtz reported then that,”The new contract offered by Fox, say people familiar with the situation, would have provided only a fraction of the million-dollar-a-year salary. It was then, they say, that Palin turned it down and both sides agreed to call it quits. A friendly announcement was planned for Friday, but a source close to Palin leaked the news in the afternoon to Real Clear Politics, saying the former Alaska governor “decided not to renew the arrangement” and ‘remains focused on broadening her message of common-sense conservatism.’”
It was widely reported that Sarah Palin took a pay cut to come back to Fox News. What wasn’t known was how large of a cut she took. Now we know, and boy did Roger Ailes sock it to Palin.
In a report on TV Guide’s list of the highest paid people on television, TVNewser revealed how big of pay cut Palin had to take in order to get her Fox News gig back, “Other notable names: Megyn Kelly’s new deal is estimated to be worth $6 million a year, twice what Hoda Kotb draws, and more than three times as much as ABC’s Josh Elliott. Ann Curry is still one of the highest-paid reporters at NBC, drawing $5 million a year, while Sarah Palin’s new FNC contract is believed to be in the $250,000 range.”
Sarah Palin came groveling back to Fox News, because she realized that without Fox she was nothing. While she was on her own, Palin had vanished into the oblivion of her Facebook page. Even more important than the lack of media attention that she no longer received, her PAC slush fund that she has used to maintain her lifestyle dried up. Fox News is the hub of conservative fundraising, and Sarah Palin needed to get the cash flowing back into her PAC, so she needed Fox News a whole lot more than Fox needed her.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/08/23/sarah-palin-75-pay-cut-job-fox-news.html
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/371101524891426816/photo/1
https://twitter.com/DaRiverZkind/status/371085886798041088/photo/1
In the above video Michelle Alexander discusses mass incarceration holding back Martin Luther King’s Dream.
I am posting a link to a 9 minute PBS video published today.
Here are some quotes from this video:
REV. VINCENT HARDING (Iliff School of Theology): “King himself continued to move. He didn’t get down from podium in 1963 and then say, “Well, we’ve made the speech, we’ve made the march, thank you very much, we’ll see you in 50 years.” The question for us now, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, is what is the work that has to be done that hasn’t been done?”
LAWTON: “Harding and other civil rights leaders say the Trayvon Martin case, and the intense reactions to it, show some of the work that still needs to be done. Racial tensions flared after neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Martin last year in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, outside Orlando. Martin was unarmed and wearing a hoodie. There were more protests after Zimmerman was acquitted of murder charges in July. Yet, while the case exposed ongoing racial divides, in some areas, it has also generated opportunities for new conversations about race.That’s the situation in Sanford, where the tragedy took place. In the wake of the shooting, some local pastors, black and white, began meeting together to discuss the crisis. They formed a new group called Sanford Pastors Connecting, which promised to promote racial reconciliation. ”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/08/23/august-23-2013-march-on-washington-50th-anniversary/19795/
LAWTON: “The pastors began talking openly with each other about their backgrounds, their resentments and their fears.”
KRALL: “Very hard conversations to have. You know, in the past I think there wasn’t enough grace for one another. Someone would express their issue or problem and the other side would go, “Oh, there you go again,” and people would take their ball and bat and go home. What was different about this, and it goes back to that spiritual environment that changed here, is when people were sharing very difficult things about hurt, people stayed in the room.”
GAY: “And as you get them into the same room, people hear the hearts of others and as they hear their heart, then we’re able to then talk about those things, then we’re able to discuss those things, and we really see, as I said, it opens the door for healing to take place.”
I just finished watching Al Sharpton’s 2 hour special on the March on Washington. It was fabulous with great interviews and clips from the 1963 March on Washington.
I especially enjoyed his interview with Edith Lee-Payne whose picture that day holding the march pennant has become an iconic picture:
http://cdn3.standard.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/max_800/2012/02/24/story-26-black-history-121489.jpg
Al Sharpton closed his program with some great words….I was unable to transcribe them but they went something like this:
I also was glad to see a very short clip of Fred Shuttlesworth speaking, addressing the audience at the March. I consider him one of the most important leaders of the civil rights movement.
Most of what I know about Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth I gleaned by reading his biography, “A Fire You Can’t Put Out” and John Lewis’ book “Walking With the Wind”…..both fabulous books.
Now I hope sometime to find a video from the March on Washington with his full speech. Here is what is said in the biography about his unplanned speech:
One Easy Thing All White People Could Do That Would Make The World A Better Place.
http://www.upworthy.com/one-easy-thing-all-white-people-could-do-that-would-make-the-world-a-better-place-5 …
Thanks for posting this, SG2!
Yes, there is much we with our white privilege can do to make this a better world.
I wish we had a “like” button for comments.
Bev Smith poses “A Challenge to African American Women”
Posted by Olivia Lammel on Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 1:02 PM
http://www.pghcitypaper.com/Blogh/archives/2013/08/23/bev-smith-poses-a-challenge-to-african-american-women
Tickets to the full conference cost $335 per person. The daily rate is $130 per day and single events start at $15. Scholarships for low-income women are available. For more information, visit bevsmithconference.org.
Georgia school hero, Antoinette Tuff, invited to White House, reunites with 911 dispatcher
http://bit.ly/1d9uclh
CPS removes Olympic hero’s name from school
Former Jesse Owens Elementary now officially Gompers South
August 22, 2013|
By Naomi Nix, Chicago Tribune reporter
The first day of classes in Chicago is just days away, but the three daughters of Jesse Owens, the African-American hero of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, are not giving up their fight to keep their father’s name on a Far South Side school.
Jesse Owens Community Academy in the West Pullman neighborhood was one of 49 elementary schools the Chicago school board voted in the spring to close, with students moving to Samuel Gompers Fine Arts Option School.
But the district is keeping the Owens building open, under the Gompers name, for students in kindergarten through the third grade. Students in the fourth through eighth grades will be taught in the existing Gompers Elementary farther north.
Jesse Owens’ name has been removed from the building, and a marquee near the building reads Gompers South. Owens’ daughters, who all live in Chicago, have been loudly protesting the district’s move since the preliminary list of school closings came out last spring.
“It is just beyond me as to why they would do something like that,” said Owens’ youngest daughter, Marlene Rankin. “It is disrespectful.”
Jesse Owens spent much of his adult life in Chicago. His name is one of several with a strong local connection on schools that were closed, among the others being retailer Nathan Goldblatt and physicist Enrico Fermi.
Owens’ daughters testified against shutting down the school during hearings last spring. They said they didn’t know students would still be using the old Owens building until about two weeks ago.
Last week, Rankin and her two sisters sent a letter asking that the former Jesse Owens school get its old name back to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, CPS Board President David Vitale and two South Side aldermen, Anthony Beale, 9th, and Leslie Hariston, 5th.
In the letter to Vitale, they note that Sept. 12 marks the 100th anniversary of their father’s birth. “We can’t think of a better gift to Chicago and its schoolchildren than that of restoring the Jesse Owens name to this CPS school,” the letter concludes.
Others have expressed support.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-08-22/news/ct-met-jesse-owens-school-20130822_1_cps-school-chicago-school-board-school-closings
FLOTUSnews @FLOTUSnews
Michelle Obama to appear on Univision’s “Sábado Gigante” tomorrow http://flotusnews.com/michelle-obamas-gigante-saturday/ …
11:03 AM – 23 Aug 2013
Kobach, Bennett team up for voting-rights lawsuit
By Steve Benen
Fri Aug 23, 2013 2:00 PM EDT
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) is known for his far-right antics targeting immigrants. Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R) is perhaps best known for flirting with the “birther” conspiracy theory and publicly questioning whether President Obama would be on the state ballot in 2012.
Put them together and what do you get? One misguided voting-rights lawsuit.
All of this goes back to a recent Supreme Court ruling, in which the seven-member majority said states can’t simply add conditions to the federal voter-registration forms. Federal law doesn’t require Americans who hope to register to prove they’re citizens, so Arizona erred in making that a condition as part of a Republican anti-immigrant push.
Originally, Kobach envisioned a parallel voter-registration system in which folks would register twice — once with federal forms, allowing them to vote in federal elections, and then again with state forms, which would require proof of citizenship, and which would allow voters to participate in all other elections.
That, not surprisingly, was deemed utterly ridiculous, so now Kobach and Bennett have a new idea. They’re filing suit to require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to change federal voter-registration forms for Kansas and Arizona so they reflect far-right wishes on proof of citizenship.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20155034-kobach-bennett-team-up-for-voting-rights-lawsuit?lite
Neville Brothers – Sister Rosa
This story speaks for itself
ANd if you told this stupid mofo that this was Obamacare, I’d bet he’d turn it down.
SEE, I told you…I have no pity for stupid mofos willing to cling to Whiteness like this.
…………..
Obamacare’s unwitting fans
By Steve Benen
Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:44 AM EDT.
This anecdote, reported by Jason Cherkis after attending an event in Louisville, speaks to a fascinating larger phenomenon.
Yep, that guy in Kentucky has been told so many times to hate Obamacare that he genuinely believes it’s awful. But in Kentucky, a red state with a Democratic governor, implementation of the Affordable Care Act is continuing apace with the creation of “Kynect” — the state’s new health care marketplace. Indeed, as Cherkis explained, “The state had spent millions establishing the exchange, staffing up outreach, and conducting market research that included holding a dozen focus groups in Louisville, Paducah and London.”
And as the anecdote helps demonstrate, it’s having some success. People don’t necessarily realize that new benefits available in Kentucky have anything to do with the federal law they’ve been conditioned to reject. It’s why they’re impressed when they hear the pitch from policy experts like Reina Diaz-Dempsey — the benefits sound like a pretty good deal for folks.
If they think those benefits “beat Obamacare,” so be it.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20153578-obamacares-unwitting-fans?lite
Some of these DEVILS will go to their graves as the ignorant, hateful, bigots they behave like.
You know, the hell of it is that this never even occurred to me. That people would think they were signing up for state provided insurance that was not related to Obamacare. Ignorance is so unpredictable anymore. If these people weren’t such a$$hole haters, you would almost feel sorry for them.
Dr. Martin Luther King: Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena.
Dr. Martin Luther King:Let us march on the ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our Nation tremble away in silence.
Dr. Martin Luther King: Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so their children may eat.
Dr. Martin Luther King: We will be the participants in a great building process that will make America a new nation.
The Sisters of Civil Rights Get Their Due
By Elizabeth Dias @elizabethjdias
Aug. 23, 20130
Many have never heard the names of all the Civil Rights Movement’s heroes. History remembers the “Big Six”—Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. But behind the scenes is an extensive list of names that often gets overlooked: women.
That’s why the Black Women’s Roundtable, an initiative of The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, led a conference on Thursday to honor the women of the 1963 March on Washington. “We know our brothers did great work 50 years ago,” Melanie Campbell, NCBCP president and conference convener, told some three hundred women gathered at the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency. “But we know, in Melanie’s opinion, our sisters did even greater work.”
Panelists from a range of women’s organizations shared stories of the African-American women behind many of the movement’s most pivotal moments. Martin Luther King, Jr. and fellow civil rights leader Andrew Young, for example, only met because their wives, Coretta Scott and Jean Childs, knew one another, and that connection eventually inspired their Birmingham Campaign. “Women were the backbone of the civil rights movement during a time when that was more the acceptable role,” says Ingrid Saunders Jones, chair of the National Council of Negro Women and former senior vice president at Coca-Cola Company. “When women convene powerful things happen.”
The most famous unsung heroine, most panelists agreed, was Dorothy Irene Height. President Obama called her “the godmother of the civil rights movement” and gave her a place of honor on the platform at his first inauguration. Height fought the “slave markets” of black women in New York City who worked as day laborers for 15 cents an hour. She was the president of Delta Sigma Theta, an international sorority of black women, and brought hundreds of Deltas to the March on Washington. Thelma Daley, a Delta who came to the March and who now chairs the Women in the NAACP, told the women at the conference that she and her fellow Deltas marched under the impression they would get to hear Height speak. “We didn’t know the dynamics then, we didn’t know the inner workings,” Daley remembered. “She was too much of a diplomat to tell the group ahead of time [that only men would speak]…but we looked at her stature on the stage, with great dignity, with great power.”
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/23/the-sisters-of-civil-rights-get-their-due/#ixzz2coHuEA4G
Beautiful job you’ve done with this series, Rikyrah! You’ve rocked it all week long.
Let the countdown begin…
August 22, 2013 3:53 PM
All Killings Are Tragedies, But Some Become Travesties
By Ed Kilgore
If you pay any attention to conservative news/views sites, you have probably heard a lot over the last couple of days about Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player who was shot to death in Oklahoma in what was apparently a random act of violence. Two African-American teenagers have been charged with first-degree murder; a third, who drove the getaway car, is being charged with lesser offenses.
To hear a lot of conservative gabbers (including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and every other right-wing blogger), this case is George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin without the alleged self-defense motive, but it’s not being discussed by the president or deplored by liberals because it’s a black-on-white crime, which PC rule out noticing.
Salon’s Alex Seitz-Walk makes short work of this idiotic analogy, which, unlike the original Martin case, really does involve the political exploitation of a tragedy and a heinous crime:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_08/all_killings_are_tragedies_som046541.php
‘It only gets worse’
By Steve Benen
Fri Aug 23, 2013 9:40 AM EDT.
One month ago today, we learned that the House Republican Conference had given its members “exceptionally detailed” guides on how best to survive the August recess. The “planning kit” told GOP lawmakers to, among other things, push the IRS “scandal” in the media, despite the fact that there is no IRS “scandal.”
And the party is following the plan closely.
Yesterday, for example, the National Republican Congressional Committee launched this attack ad targeting Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.), claiming that when he voted against the latest Obamacare-repeal bill, he voted to “keep the scandal-ridden IRS in charge” of the Affordable Care Act.
Yes, in case you were wondering, the National Republican Congressional Committee really does believe voters are fools. And yes, House Republican leaders really did hold their 40th vote on repealing the federal health care law precisely so the party could create attack ads like this one.
As a substantive matter, the message is demonstrably ridiculous and was debunked months ago. As Jonathan Cohn explained in May, “The IRS scandal has nothing to do with Obamacare but that’s not stopping laughable attempts to link them.”
Brian Beutler even highlighted the irony: Republican health care measures rely on the IRS every bit as much as the Affordable Care Act does.
But the larger takeaway is that the IRS story is dead and buried, but Republicans need to pretend otherwise.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20153050-it-only-gets-worse?lite
The Morning Plum: John Boehner searches for a way out
By Greg Sargent, Published: August 23 at 9:01 am
John Boehner to conservatives: Guys, c’mon, check it out, we’ve already won! Can’t we just declare victory and throw a party?
With pressure mounting for a defund-Obamacare stand, John Boehner held a conference call with Republicans late yesterday in which he provided the clearest glimpse yet of how he’ll try to get out of this mess. He said the plan is to pass a Continuing Resolution this fall funding the government temporarily at current sequester levels — effectively acknowledging the threat of a shutdown is off the table.
Conservatives are greeting this as full scale surrender, which is why Boehner sought to package the extension — at sequester rates — as already representing a victory for austerity. As Lori Montgomery relates, GOP aides say they may use the debt limit for a stand against Obamacare later, but even that’s not clear, with one claiming: “This is all in the discussion phase right now.” The key nugget:
This is exactly what GOP-aligned commentators who recognize that a shutdown is nuts have urged: declare the sequester cuts as a victory — which in some ways they are — and don’t ruin things with insane Obamacare brinksmanship. But conservatives won’t accept this, because the sequester has been their only real victory in the epic struggle over the size and scope of government that has defined the Obama era, which won’t be settled until Obamacare lies in smoking ruins.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/08/23/the-morning-plum-john-boehner-searches-for-a-way-out/
Cato’s Fundamentally Flawed Analysis
August 22, 2013 at 3:34 pm
The Cato Institute released a report this week that argues that people on “welfare” are better off than low-income working families. In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth, as we explain in our recent commentary.
Cato’s analysis makes two fundamental errors:
◾It substantially overstates the help that poor jobless families receive. Cato assumes that when a parent is out of work, the family can readily access cash welfare benefits, housing assistance, nutrition assistance through SNAP (formerly food stamps) and WIC (for pregnant and new mothers, infants and young children), and Medicaid. But, very few families get that much help. Just one-third of families that are eligible for cash assistance in the state they live in actually receive it. Among those who do get help from TANF, Cato’s own figures show that just 15 percent also receive housing assistance.
◾It substantially understates the help that low-income working families get. Cato ignores the fact that low-income working families are eligible for, and receive, assistance through programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, and WIC. These are important supports that help working families make ends meet. For example, 86 percent of children who get health insurance through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are in working families. And, more than half of able-bodied adults in households with children receiving SNAP work while receiving assistance. When families leave welfare for work, the other forms of assistance they receive — such as SNAP and housing assistance — continue and only begin to fall if the family’s earnings exceed the amount it received from cash welfare benefits.
Moreover, due to changes to the safety net over the last few decades, these programs now do much more to promote work and support low-income working families. They help keep millions of working parents and their children out of poverty. To be sure, many working families still struggle to make ends meet, particularly if they face high child care costs, but Cato offers no policy proposals to improve these families’ financial security.
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/catos-fundamentally-flawed-analysis/
August 22, 2013, 11:26 am 109 Comments
Karl Rove Shouldn’t Pretend He Understands Health Policy
by Paul Krugman
Austin Frakt Austin Powers Aaron Carroll points me to Karl Rove claiming that Republicans do too have health care ideas. Not surprisingly, what Rove actually does is demonstrate his party’s intellectual bankruptcy.
It’s always helpful here to keep your eye on the problem of Americans with preexisting conditions. That’s the best starting point for understanding why Obamacare has to look the way it does; it’s also often the best way to see what’s wrong with alleged Republican solutions.
So, ask the following question: how is it that many Americans with preexisting conditions have health insurance now? The immediate answer is, they get it from their employers. But why do employers do that? Well, employment-based health insurance is tax-advantaged: it’s a benefit employers can provide that isn’t counted as taxable income, which makes it better, in some cases, than offering higher wages instead.
But for company health plans to receive this tax-advantaged status, they have to obey ERISA rules, which essentially require that the same benefits be made available to all full-time employees — no discrimination based on health history, and you can’t provide benefits only to your highest-paid workers. So employer-based insurance is, when you come down to it, a lot like Obamacare, with enforced non-discrimination and a fair bit of subsidization of less-well-paid workers.
Now comes Rove, and his big idea is to make the tax break on health coverage available to everyone, not just beneficiaries of employer plans. Great! Now employers can say “Here, we’ll eliminate your coverage, but we’ll pay you more, and you can use the money to buy tax-deductible insurance on your own!” Except that employees with preexisting conditions won’t find insurers willing to offer them affordable coverage — oh, and lower-paid workers won’t be able to afford coverage even if they’re healthy.
So Rove’s “solution” would actually have a devastating effect on millions of Americans who currently have decent coverage.
It goes on from there — the interstate competition zombie shambles on — but you get the point. Rove has nothing but the usual catchphrases, and obviously hasn’t thought for a moment about the actual issues.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/karl-rove-shouldnt-pretend-he-understands-health-policy/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=0
Karl Rove Is Half-Right About Republicans and Health Care
BY JONATHAN COHN
Karl Rove is feeling a little defensive today. President Obama recently suggested that Republicans have no serious ideas for health care reform. Writers like Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman (and, yes, me) have written similar things many times. Rove thinks that’s nonsense. “Republicans,” he writes today in the Wall Street Journal, “have plenty of sensible ideas to make health coverage more accessible and more affordable.”
Actually Rove is at least half-right. Republicans do have plenty of ideas. But they are not the kind of ideas that would come anywhere close to achieving universal coverage, at least in the way most people understand it. At best, Republican proposals would make insurance a bit cheaper, mostly for people who are healthy and need coverage the least. At worst, these ideas would make coverage less accessible for people with pre-existing conditions—and leave more of the insured exposed to crippling medical bills.
The reforms that Rove describes in his op-ed fall into two categories, more or less. One category consists of reforms that most experts would support and, in many cases, are already part of Obamacare. An example of this would be efforts to curb defensive medicine. Even most liberals would admit that the existing malpractice system encourages physicians to provide tests or procedures that might not be necessary—and that these extra services make health care more expensive at the margins. Obamacare attempts to address this problem, by funding pilot programs in alternative ways of settling malpractice claims. These ideas include creating no-fault systems that would compensate all victims of medical errors, creating special health courts to hear cases before they go to lay juries, as well as the “sorry works” scheme (in which providers admit mistakes upfront and negotiate settlements) that the University of Michigan Medical System developed.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114425/karl-rove-gop-health-care-agenda-its-there-really
National Politics|By Amy Walter, August 21, 2013
There’ll Be A Democratic Primary. With Or Without Hillary
When people find out what I do for a living, the first question they inevitably ask is “Is Hillary running?” When I answer that I think she will, the follow up is almost always: “Will anyone run against her?” My answer is, of course. Why wouldn’t they?
My view is not necessarily conventional wisdom in DC. Talk among the chattering class here is that she’ll have a glide path to the nomination. It’s hers for the taking. She’ll have the money. She’ll have the political infrastructure. And, more important, she will have gobs of goodwill among a Democratic base eager to put the first woman in the White House.
All true. But, it was also true in 2008. More important, being a frontrunner – especially this far out from 2016 – is a very dangerous and precarious spot to be. Long before the first bumper stickers are printed or the first volunteers start their door-knocking, Hillary Clinton has already been dragged into a veritable A-B-C of controversies: Anthony Weiner, Benghazi, and the Clinton Foundation. News organizations have already designated “Hillary” beats for enterprising reporters to rack up scoops (and dig for scandal) for the next three years. GOP organizations from the RNC to the opposition research group American Rising have already been filling my inbox with negative and/or unflattering stories about the former Secretary of State.
This scrutiny was going to come no matter what – but it’s just coming a lot earlier than expected. A stagnant second term for Obama plus Capitol Hill gridlock equals a bored and restless press corps. And everyone knows a bored press is a dangerous press. Moreover, these aggressive political reporters are under more pressure than ever to serve new and juicy political morsels to their anxious editors every day. Plus, as my friends at NBC’s First Read have pointed out, Hillary herself is just as responsible for the frenzied coverage. Her speech to the American Bar Association criticizing changes to the Voting Rights Act was an overtly political move. And, there will be more speeches like this in the near future.
This isn’t to suggest that Hillary Clinton is going to be intimidated out of the race. However, it should serve as a reminder to any and all potential Democratic White House wannabes that there’s no telling what will happen to a frontrunner over the course of three long years.
This is why there is no real downside for Vice President Joe Biden or Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to run in 2016, regardless of whether or not Hillary Clinton is in the race.
http://cookpolitical.com/story/6115
GOP ‘getting perilously close’ to impeachment madness
By Steve Benen
Fri Aug 23, 2013 8:00 AM EDT.
When fringe figures like Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.) talk about impeaching President Obama without cause, it’s a mild curiosity. When U.S. senators push the same idea, it’s more alarming.
Coburn apparently has given this a fair amount of thought, telling constituents, “What you have to do is you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president, and that’s called impeachment. That’s not something you take lightly, and you have to use a historical precedent of what that means.” He added that he believes “there’s some intended violation of the law in this administration.”
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And what, pray tell, has the president done that Coburn perceives as possible “high crimes”? In keeping with the recent trend, the Oklahoma Republican never got around to explaining what the grounds for impeachment would be. Coburn mentioned that he’d heard a rumor about the Department of Homeland Security choosing to “ignore” background checks for immigrants, but he did not elaborate.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20152064-gop-getting-perilously-close-to-impeachment-madness?lite
Key House Republican asks Holder to back off in Texas
By Steve Benen
Fri Aug 23, 2013 8:44 AM EDT.
As we discussed yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder is challenging new voting restrictions imposed by Texas Republicans, hoping to use the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act to protect Texans’ access to the ballot box. GOP officials, not surprisingly, weren’t pleased with the move, but there was one reaction in particular that I found interesting.
It’s worth noting for context that Sensenbrenner may be a conservative Republican, but he’s also earned a reputation as a long-time supporter of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, among GOP lawmakers, it’s probably fair to say the Wisconsin Republican is the VRA’s most reliable ally. When Sensenbrenner says he’s working on a legislative fix in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, I’m inclined to believe him.
That said, for Holder to back off now would be crazy.
Look, I don’t blame Sensenbrenner for this, but literally every indication suggests congressional Republicans intend to block efforts to pass a new-and-improved Voting Rights Act. The Attorney General has a simple calculation to make: protect Americans against discriminatory voter-suppression tactics or wait for the House GOP to work in a bipartisan fashion on voting rights.
Can anyone seriously blame Holder for preferring the former to the latter? It seems far more realistic for the A.G. turn Sensenbrenner’s request around and say, “When Congress passes the Voting Rights Act, I’ll stop filing these lawsuits, not the other way around.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20152483-key-house-republican-asks-holder-to-back-off-in-texas?lite
Scott Walker’s Sand Grab: Wisconsin Wants a Piece of the Fracking Boom, No Matter Who Gets Hurt
BY MOLLY REDDEN
On the night that he was elected governor of Wisconsin in 2010, a beaming Scott Walker told the hundreds of supporters sandwiched into Waukesha’s little Country Springs Hotel ballroom that his state was “open for business.” It was shorthand for his promise to slash taxes and lay waste to state regulations, all to create a quarter of a million new jobs by the end of his fourth year in office. But halfway through Walker’s term, Wisconsin had added only a quarter of the promised jobs, it ranked 44th in private-sector job creation, and private-sector wages were falling at twice the average rate nationally. A non-partisan audit of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., a job-creation agency Walker started, found it repeatedly broke state laws in its first year. Still, among the detritus of the Republican governor’s job creation efforts, one sector of Wisconsin’s economy has been roaring: the sand-mining industry.
The hydraulic fracturing boom that has transformed the plains of North Dakota into an industrial mecca observable from space is fueled by tiny grains of silica sand from southwestern Wisconsin’s hillsides. In fracking, “frac sand” is used to prop open fissures in the earth, creating an escape route for natural gas. A single well can require 2,000 tons of sand over its lifetime. As fracking sites have proliferated across the nation, silica sand mines and processing facilities have too, with Wisconsin far and away the leading provider of frac sand. Just five years ago, there were fewer than 10 sites in the state; today, the state has greenlit a little more than 100, most of which are operational. Rich Budinger, the president of the Wisconsin Industrial Sand Association, estimates that the industry has brought 2,000 jobs to the state so far.
Republicans, who control the state Senate and House, want the boom to be even bigger. Their 2013 budget set aside $6.4 billion for freight rail and roadway improvements, which Walker said would allow companies to export frac sand in even greater quantities. At an event in Sparta, a small city in west-central Wisconsin, he said that improving rail transport makes the shipping of frac sand “a lot more environmentally sound … because you can connect it right there and not put as much burden on county and town roads and things of that nature.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114320/frac-sand-mining-wisconsin-rides-fracking-boom
Rick Perry’s Dilemma and The Real Reason Why Republicans Want to Defund Obamacare
Thursday, August 22, 2013 | Posted by Spandan C at 2:16 PM
Irony, thy name is Republican. The President of the Sovereign Republic of Texas, I mean Texas governor Rick Perry – who has beat his chest and stomped his feet against Obamacare to no end – is now putting his tail between his legs and his hat in hand begging the Obama administration for $100 million of that Obamcare pie – to improve and expand Medicaid services for the elderly and the disabled in the state. As Politico reported yesterday,
So, Rick Perry doesn’t want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, but he wants $100 million of it anyway to improve Medicaid services in a different way.
This is the danger the Republican party has created in describing Affordable Care Act in its entirety as the devil’s spawn. They have succeeded somewhat, preventing the overall idea from becoming popular (although that is about to change in 2014), but by the same token they have convinced their own idiot base that touching Obamacare in any form at all is anathema for their party. Their leaders are not allowed to accept 100% federal funding for Medicaid expansion (hence Jan Brewer is now persona non grata), to form marketplaces (exchanges) – handing it over to the federal government instead, or even to seek any funding under any program that is touched by Obamacare.
………………..
Rick Perry’s struggle with this issue highlights the broader Republican dilemma with Obamacare and the reason some are desperate to defund it at the eleventh hour: the Republicans in positions of power know that the Affordable Care Act will work. They know that when it comes into full effect next year, it will show the differences in uncompensated medical costs for hospitals in states that accept the Medicaid expansion vs. the ones that refuse it. They know that people will be galvanized over this issue, and this time, they will be aided by the hospital industry that does not want to have to provide uncompensated care. They know that their ideological interests (the Tea Party) will be aligned against their financial interests (the health care industry).
They know that if they continue to wholesale reject health reform while it begins to work – and work better in states that fully accept and implement it – on a large scale, they will be scorned by people who are being denied benefits they could otherwise get, forced to fund uncompensated care from state coffers, and be abandoned by their financial benefactors in the health care industry who are looking for a piece of the pie of Obamacare’s funding. If they drop their opposition, they will be seen as weak, unprincipled and compromised by their own base. Either way, it would threaten their ability to stay in power.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2013/08/rick-perrys-dilemma-and-real-reason-why.html
Syria and Snowden’s Shared Protectorate: A Question of Conscience
Thursday, August 22, 2013 | Posted by Spandan C at 5:41 PM
What’s the “civil libertarian” response when one of the movement’s contemporary ‘heroes’ evades the reach of American law shares his protectorate with governments that use chemical weapons on their own people? Evidently, silence. With the Syrian government blocking UN investigators from finding the truth about their apparent chemical weapon use with assistance from Russia, the deafening silence from the self-appointed defenders of civil liberties like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras should tell you all you need to know about their real intentions and priorities.
Why the silence? I suppose you don’t want to start something up with the power that is now protecting the holder of the classified information that you hope will catapult you to fame and fortune. After all, you wouldn’t want to force Russia to decide between protecting Edward Snowden and protecting the Syrian regime, would you?
And where is the great hero Edward Snowden in all of this? Is the courageous defender of liberties too much of a coward to speak out against his and Syria’s common protectorate? Just what form of civil libertarian conscience allows one to stay silent in the face of mass murder protected by the government of the country they take refuge in just so that they don’t have to face a legal trial at home? Under what definition of civil liberty does avoidance of a criminal trial under full and complete due process of law outweigh wholesale slaughter of thousands by their government?
For all the moral force claimed by the Greenwald and Snowden Left, where is the call for them to stand up and denounce Russia’s open backing of Syria? For that matter, where is the call for Ed Snowden to leave Russia’s protection in protest?
You won’t see any of it – not from Greenwald and not from Snowden. You won’t see any of it because if they truly cared about civil liberties and government tyranny, Snowden would be on a plane out of Russia tonight, even if that means he has to stand trial here at home. If they cared even the slightest bit about civil liberties and state sponsored tyranny, Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian page would be lighting up in condemnation against Russia.
Yet, none of that. Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden don’t want their hero status to be damaged by such pesky things as mass chemical attacks against middle easterners. No, they’re too important for that.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2013/08/syria-and-snowdens-shared-protectorate.html
Where is the white liberal outrage on stop-and-frisk?
Opinion
by James Braxton Peterson | August 21, 2013 at 5:05 PM
Growing up as a teenager in Newark, N.J., the summers were often correlated with the dread of enhanced police presence in the city brought on by the infiltration of New Jersey State Troopers.
This practice of state police support in Newark continues to this day. Much like the entire nation, the citizens of Newark accept the appearance of enhanced security without much discussion about privacy and/or civil liberties especially significant given the state’s long history of racial profiling and the plethora of police stops casually justified as “driving while black.”
What we refer to now as “stop and frisk” has been tactical practice for urban police departments for nearly all of my life. That it has been formalized and institutionalized in the 21st century only serves to strengthen law enforcement’s reliance on it and faulty justifications for it.
Maybe if you’ve never been profiled; if you’ve never been stopped for no apparent reason, questioned about your destination, tousled and frisked, searched and put up against a wall or a car; maybe if you’re not painfully aware of how many of these kinds of encounters (between police and innocent citizens) have ended in the deaths of too many innocent victims to tally here; maybe if you have no connection to the utter humiliation of being publicly detained by police for no reason, then it might be difficult to comprehend the underpinnings of privilege in the recent discourses on the NSA, Manning, Snowden, and the unchecked access to our digital lives.
The left’s outrage directed at the Obama administration in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified information has been palpable and well documented in both print and television media
………….
Yet how can we have a discussion about civil liberties and security, privacy and safety without connecting it to the physical surveillance to which black and brown Americans have been historically subject? In short, why aren’t the champions of Snowden, Manning, and others saying anything at all about stop-and-frisk and Stand Your Ground laws/policies. They have been and remain silent on the historical and perpetual encroachment upon the civil liberties – the freedom to walk the streets without being detained or shot – of black and brown citizens of the United States.
http://thegrio.com/2013/08/21/where-is-the-white-liberal-outrage-on-stop-and-frisk/
Reminder:
Rev. Al’s POLITICSNATION will be 2 hours tonight for the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary on the March on Washington.
I want to watch that!
I wonder if it will be possible to watch it live on internet.
BET To Air 50th Anniversary March Coverage Live
Aug 22, 2013
By Tonya Pendleton, BlackAmericaWeb.com
To celebrate and commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, BET will cover the events live from the anniversary March on the Washington Mall on Saturday to the “Let Freedom Ring” event on the actual anniversary date of the March next Wednesday, August 28th.
“50 – The March and the Movement” airs live on BET on Saturday, August 24 at 11 a.m. and covers the history of the March with some of its organizers and participants.
It’s very exciting,” Debra Lee, CEO of BET Networks told The Tom Joyner Morning Show. “BET will be there covering it live. 50 years is an amazing milestone and with all we have going on in our community – the George Zimmerman verdict, gun violence, all the issues that we still have to resolve it’s a great time for us to march.”
BET.com users will have the chance to ask questions from a distinguished panel of guest including Eleanor Holmes Norton, who attended the 1963 March as a volunteer, Representative John Lewis, who is the last of the March’s 10 speakers who is still alive, Bernice King and Andrew Young. A Twitter hashtag #MarchDC50 has already been established.
http://blackamericaweb.com/158817/bet-to-air-50th-anniversary-march-coverage-live/
Obama on CNN: Congress Has Two Jobs, But Too ‘Worried About’ ‘Rush Limbaugh’ to Do Them
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday, President Barack Obama said that the upcoming fight over the continuation of a resolution which will fund the government does not have to be a fight at all. He said that enough Republicans in Congress agree that seeking to defund the Affordable Care Act is a bad idea, but they are afraid of angering their base or of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
“Congress doesn’t have a whole lot of core responsibilities,” Obama said. “One core responsibility is passing a budget, which they have not done yet. The other core responsibility that they’ve got is to pay the bills that they’ve already accrued.”
VIDEO
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/obama-on-cnn-congress-has-two-jobs-but-too-worried-about-rush-limbaugh-to-do-them/
Suggestions for Videos
Rachel Maddow was in Elizabeth City, NC last night and did her entire show pretty much on the GOP Voter Suppression down there and why Elizabeth City is Ground Zero for the GOP Voter Suppression Efforts:
This video shows how the local Election Board closed the polling place on the college campus, made a precinct of 9000 people, and moved all of them to a facility with 35 parking spots. Maddow showed the dangerous road that the students would have to walk to in order to vote.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52824304#52824304
This one is a background piece of how North Carolina’s voter participation has changed.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52823877#52823877
The background of the student case at the center of the GOP Voter Suppression.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52823882#52823882
Explaining why the college town has been targeted.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52823962#52823962
How the DOJ is on the Voter Suppression…….and an interview with Congressman Butterfield, who used to be on the NC Supreme Court.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52824015#52824015
Thankfully, I was able to sit through the entire show last night without her mentioning Manning. I’ll check with sG2 on these clips.
Good Morning!
Oh, the possibilities that come with the dawn of each new day….”when morning gilds the skies” !
I want to act and bring about positive change!
from Mama Cass’s song “There’s a New World Coming”
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Good Morning, Rikyrah & Everyone @ 3 CHICS! :-))))
Good morning, rikyrah!
You have topped off your great week of articles with this outstanding one on Martin Luther King, and you have selected wonderful videos of his speeches!
Thank you so much!
Good Morning, Ametia and Everybody!
I am especially glad that you posted MLK’s sermon entitled “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool”.
excerpt from this sermon:
As I read MLK’s words: “It occurred to him that he had only one alternative, and that was to build some new and bigger barns so he could store all of his crops.”
Is that not like the Koch brothers? the NRA? the gun manufacturers? as they use Alec and various lobbying efforts for the real purpose of increasing and “storing” their wealth?
Instead of using their wealth (like Bill Gates) to help the world, to help their fellow man to alleviate suffering, poverty, injustice……these people and organizations use their wealth to attempt to accumulate more wealth.
Is that not like the wealth of position? such positions as those held by influential members of congress? of members of state legislators? of retired Presidents? of influential media outlets? of influential news commentators?
Have these people allowed themselves to be “bought” by lobbies? bought by owners of news stations? Have not a majority of these people sold out their morals, their souls, their humanity…..simply for the purpose of accumulating wealth?
Jesus, I am sure, would call these people “fools”…..just like the rich man in the parable.
And, how about us whites who refuse to recognize the benefits and advantages of being white in a society that caters regularly to whites? a white power structure that neglects the needs of its minorities? a white power system that allows injustice, that allows (and promotes) inequality, profiling and stereotyping of its Black citizens?
Yes, anyone who lives life and practices immorality as this parable’s man did IS indeed a fool!
Simon and Garfunkel’s parable song speaks to this issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc5JLrpXpkE