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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.
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https://twitter.com/vineyardgazette/status/499371700069621760/photo/1
Love this pic
https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/499371886112161792/photo/1
https://twitter.com/estella_one/status/498899643221438464/photo/1
Atlanta’s Housing Recovery Is a Tale of Two Cities
Atlanta home prices are up 14 percent over the last year. But minority suburbs remain underwater.
By Stephanie Stamm
August 12, 2014 In the affluent suburb of Dunwoody, Ga., northeast of downtown Atlanta, the housing market is recovering. Only 12.3 percent of homes in Dunwoody’s 30338 ZIP code are valued lower than the outstanding mortgage balance. Home prices are rising. Just a short drive south is Riverdale, a lower-income community where 80 percent of the residents are African-American. A whopping 76 percent of homes in Riverdale’s 30296 ZIP code are underwater.
Since bottoming out in early 2012, Atlanta’s recovery has roughly tracked that of the nation as a whole. Atlanta’s home prices are up 14 percent over the past year, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Indices. (Case-Shiller’s 20-city index is up 11 percent.) But behind that topline figure are Atlanta area communities such as Dunwoody, which has largely recovered from the housing crisis, and Riverdale, which is still struggling, with no end in sight.
Why are so many of the most underwater ZIP codes in the Atlanta area? To answer that question, researchers Taz George and Bing Bai of the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center analyzed Home Mortgage Disclosure Act statistics. They found that from 2001 to ’05, Atlanta saw a 51 percent increase in new borrowers, compared with 38 percent nationwide. Then from 2005 to ’12, Atlanta saw a 73 percent drop in new-purchase mortgages, while the U.S. saw a 62 percent decline.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-economy/big-questions/atlanta-s-housing-recovery-is-a-tale-of-two-cities-20140812
https://twitter.com/nationaljournal/status/499354921494675456/photo/1
I hate texting. Pick up the damn phone and talk to me.
UGH.
I hate texting too.
Ametia text, amirite?
ME 3 I want to hear the VOICE. It takes less time to put in numbers than punching letters.
I will never get why my kids likes texting. Ugh!
Lauren Bacall has passed away :(
Reports: Legendary actress Lauren Bacall has died at 89
Cindy Clark, USA TODAY
Legendary film star Lauren Bacall has died, reports Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. She was 89. Both outlets are reporting she died of a suspected stroke Tuesday morning at her New York home.
Known for her husky voice and sizzling looks, Bacall started out as a model and then broke out as a leading lady opposite Humphrey Bogart in her first film, 1944’s To Have and To Have Not. The two had a whirlwind romance and wed the following year, but it wasn’t without scandal. When they met, she was 19 and he was 44 — and an unhappily married man.
The couple went on to star together in more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). They had a son and daughter together and remained married until Bogart’s death from throat cancer in 1957.
Bacall’s other notable films include 1950’s Young Man With a Horn and 1953’s How To Marry A Millionaire, in which she starred alongside Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe.
She also experienced success on stage, starring on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie (1959) and Cactus Flower (1965), and won Tony Awards for her performances in Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981).
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/08/12/reports-legendary-actress-lauren-bacall-has-died-at-89/13974973/
You know how to whistle don’t you..
Just put your lips together and blow…
KeyLargo, one of my fav Becall movies.
I hope y’all are enjoying my boyfriend’s music today? He makes me feel some kinda way. ;)
I see Hillary Clinton is as TONE DEAFT as ever. GO AWAY, WOMAN, JUST.GO.AWAY.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), trails Democratic challenger state Rep. Paul Davis by 10 percentage points, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.
The poll, released Tuesday, found Davis, the state House minority leader, leading Brownback 51 percent to 41 percent. Another 3 percent said they preferred another candidate and 5 percent said they were undecided. The poll, by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen, is the latest in a series of signs showing Brownback in serious trouble in his re-election campaign.
Brownback’s little-known primary challenger, Jennifer Winn, did surprisingly well in the primary against the governor, despite her long odds.
Before this Rasmussen poll, the TPM Polltracker average gave Davis a 6 point lead over Brownback.
The poll was conducted among 750 likely voters between August 6 and August 7. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/rasmussen-poll-paul-davis-leads-sam-brownback?utm_content=buffer2ec71&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
What if the 2014 election isn’t really about Obama?
By Aaron Blake August 12 at 6:30 AM
Another new poll shows President Obama’s approval rating dropping, with just 40 percent of registered voters viewing his tenure in a positive light. The poll also shows the GOP asserting what would be quite a favorable lead in a generic 2014 matchup, 43 percent to 38 percent.
But at least on its surface, the McClatchy/Marist College poll suggests the 2014 election isn’t really about Obama. In fact, most registered voters — and the vast majority of swing voters — say he’s not even a factor for them.
The poll shows just 29 percent of Americans say Obama is a major factor in their vote, with another 17 percent saying he’s a minor factor. A majority, meanwhile, says Obama has no effect whatsoever on whom they vote for (52 percent).
In addition, most of those who say the election for them is about Obama are already partisans — 48 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans. Among independents, just 37 percent cite Obama as either a major (22 percent) or a minor factor (15 percent) factor in their vote. Six in 10 say he doesn’t matter one lick.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/08/12/what-if-the-2014-election-isnt-really-about-obama/
Re-elected in 2012 by an overwhelming majority. The Obama coalition is not STUPID.
Koch-linked group cancels Michigan ads
By ALEXANDER BURNS | 8/12/14 10:00 AM EDT
A powerfully funded group backed by the conservative Koch brothers has canceled over a million dollars’ worth of Michigan ads for the month of August, according to sources tracking the 2014 air war.
Freedom Partners, which had booked about $1.1 million in Michigan airtime, abruptly canceled the ads this week.
The state is home to a contested, open-seat Senate race between Republican Terri Lynn Land, Michigan’s former secretary of state, and Democratic Rep. Gary Peters. Koch-supported groups, led by the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, have advertised heavily there this year.
…………….
But the withdrawal — at least for now — of the Koch group is striking in a state that Republicans have long yearned to capture, and where Democrats have explicitly made the Kochs’ involvement an issue in the Senate race.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/koch-brothers-cancel-michigan-ads-109941.html#ixzz3ACmcF1Kl
August 12, 2014 1:04 PM
The Medicaid Expansion Promise
By Ed Kilgore
At WaPo’s Wonkblog today, Jason Millman cites a prominent study to knock down one of the first and most abiding Republican arguments in states that have rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion: the generous federal match rate reflects a promise liberals do not intend to keep. There’s certainly no historic support for that assertion:
[B]ased on the 49-year history of the Medicaid program, that claim doesn’t hold up, according to Urban Institute researchers in a finding that hasn’t received as much attention….
Urban researchers found that of the 100-plus cuts the federal government has actually made to the Medicaid program since 1980, lawmakers just once reduced the federal share of Medicaid financing — and that was in 1981. Other federal cuts have been to services, payments to providers, or in program eligibility.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_08/the_medicaid_expansion_promise051625.php
August 10, 2014
The New Racism This is how the civil rights movement ends
By Jason Zengerle @zengerle
Long before he became the most powerful man in the Alabama Senate, before he controlled billions of dollars in state money and had lobbyists, governors, and future presidents seeking his favor, Hank Sanders used newspapers and magazines as bathroom tissue. His mother would collect periodicals from the wealthy white family whose house she cleaned and bring them back for Sanders and his brothers and sisters. There were 13 children, all told, and they lived with their parents in a three-room shack that their father had built out of one-by-eight boards among the tall pines and chinaberry trees in Blacksher, a speck of a town 50 miles north of Mobile.
This was Alabama in the 1950s, when Jim Crow reigned and a governor’s race was determined by which candidate managed to secure the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Life in Baldwin County, where Blacksher was located, may have been marginally less horrid for its black residents than in other parts of the state: The county’s last lynching had occurred in 1919 and some of the white men who perpetrated it had even gone to prison. But there were certain realities by which Sanders, as a black child, knew he must abide. He knew not to spend any of the money he earned picking cotton on the six-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola at the drugstore; those were only for white customers, and a black person who tried to buy one risked more than just being refused service. He also knew not to look in the direction of a white woman. The one time he did, the woman’s male companion threatened to whip him, and probably would have had Sanders’s mother, a strong-willed woman named Ola Mae, not intervened. For Sanders, the fact that there was no electricity or running water in his house—to say nothing of toilet paper—was far less distressing than the constant threat of danger.
In 1954, when Sanders was twelve, he momentarily ignored the intended purpose of a magazine his mother had brought home and instead read an article about Thurgood Marshall’s work on Brown v. Board of Education. The case had no bearing on Sanders’s everyday life. Baldwin County’s schools were segregated and would remain defiantly so for more than a decade after his education in them. But Marshall’s legal heroics wormed their way into the back of Sanders’s mind, and when his seventh-grade teacher asked her students what they wanted to be when they grew up, Sanders surprised himself by saying, “A lawyer.” His classmates—whose professional aspirations tended toward farming or turpentine work—burst out laughing. Sanders began to cry; the other kids laughed even harder, which prompted even more tears. When the episode was finally over, Sanders resolved that he would become a lawyer (still not entirely sure what one was) just to prove his classmates wrong.
Sanders went from being an eager student—the kind who devoured, cover-to-cover, the two encyclopedias that comprised his school’s entire library—to a determined one. By graduation, he had high marks, but not enough money to go to college. He spent the next three years working in a sawmill and then as a janitor and an elevator operator, squirreling away as much as he could. When he finally enrolled at Talladega College, a historically black school in central Alabama, it was 1963, and he threw himself into the civil rights movement. He joined the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to the Voting Rights Act, and he did the dangerous work of registering black people to vote in Lowndes County, a part of Alabama so plagued by racial violence it was known as “Bloody Lowndes.”
……………………………………….
Sanders told me the story of his remarkable rise to power earlier this year, but his tone was more wistful than triumphant. For so long, his life had been an uplifting tale of slow but seemingly inexorable progress—not just for himself, but for African Americans throughout the South. In recent years, however, the trajectory of Sanders’s story has been abruptly—and just as inexorably—reversed. In 2010, Republicans took over the Alabama Senate and Sanders lost his chairmanship; in the four years since, he’s watched as the new GOP majority has systematically dismantled much of his life’s work.
Now 71, with a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache and glasses that are forever sliding down his nose, Sanders struggled to articulate the magnitude of this development in personal terms, except to say that it had been “the most devastating and adverse of my time in the Senate.” But he wasn’t hesitant to describe the political ramifications. Sitting in his current office—a cramped space with missing ceiling tiles far from the Senate floor—he waved his arm and gestured at the statehouse halls. “The Republicans have demonstrated that we can be down here,” he said, “and that we can be powerless.” Sanders and other black Alabamans can now buy a Coke whenever they want or look at anyone without fear of being set upon. But in other, less obvious ways, black people in Alabama and across the South are as politically vulnerable as they’ve been since the emergence of the civil rights movement. “It’s a total disempowering of African Americans,” Sanders said. “We are going back to the past very fast.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119019/civil-rights-movement-going-reverse-alabama
If his work in Alabama Senate has been dismantled now…..how many more in other states have seen their lifelong work dismantled.
And, it was disturbing to see John Lewis’s sacrifice to gain voting rights dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2013 as the court dismantled and gutted Sec. 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
(I have my copy of the article, which I plan to read today, right here next to my computer.)
Also, from the article on page 18 of the magazine:
In February 2013, Quinton Ross was appointed to the conference committee handling an education-reform bill. An African American senator from Montgomery and a former high school principal, Ross was one of the Democrats’ leading voices on education and had spent much of his time since the 2010 elections battling GOP attempts to cut spending on public schools. On the last day of the month, an unseasonably warm one for February, the committee met in a packed, sweltering hearing room on the seventh floor of the statehouse.
Ross and the other Democrat on the committee, an African American state representative named Laura Hall, got there about 15 minutes before their four Republican colleagues. When the Republicans arrived, a clerk handed out copies of the eight-page school flexibility bill, which was designed to give schools more freedom from various state regulations. Then, in the space of minutes, the committee’s Republican chairman gaveled the meeting to order, called a recess, and exited the hearing room along with his GOP colleagues. The two Democrats were left alone at the front of the room, Ross recalls, “just looking at each other like, ‘What happened?’”
For more than an hour, Ross and Hall waited for the Republicans to return. When they finally did, a clerk handed out copies of a new bill. It had a different name, the Alabama Accountability Act, and in the time the Republicans were gone, the legislation had grown to 27 pages and included a host of additional provisions—most controversially, one that allowed tuition tax credits for Alabama children to attend private schools. Ross and Hall tried to read through the document and voice their objections, but only a few minutes after they received it, the committee chairman called for a vote. The bill passed the committee four to two on a party-line vote and was immediately sent to the Senate and House for final passage.
Ross stormed to the Senate floor and confronted Marsh at the microphone. “You went behind closed doors!” he shouted. “You are a hypocrite, Mr. Pro Tem!” Other Democrats screamed their objections, too, but the Republican lieutenant governor, Kay Ivey, who presides over the Senate, ruled them out of order. The bill passed 22 to eleven, diverting some $40 million in government funds from Alabama’s public schools to private ones.
Thank you for posting this outstanding video, Ametia.
May those who claim to be kind and loving prove it by supporting the precious lives and, at the very least, showing tolerance of LGBT community.
We can afford to allow ourselves to be divided by hatred. The LGBT community should stand up for their rights and alongside other groups who have been discriminated against.
FROM TOWN:
August 11, 2014 11:25 AM
Two, Three, Many Straw Polls?
By Ed Kilgore
Sticking with the emerging GOP circus in Iowa for a minute, the FAMiLY Leadership Summit in Ames was a reminder that according to precedent we’d normally be anticipating the First Big Scored Event in the presidential cycle a year from now in that same city: the Iowa Republican Straw Poll.
As you may recall, a strong second-place finish in the 2007 Straw Poll make Mike Huckabee rather than Sam Brownback the Christian Right candidate in that cycle (leading to an eventual Caucus victory that royally screwed up Mitt Romney’s campaign). And in 2011, Michele Bachmann became an unlikely (and short-lived) front-runner after edging Ron Paul in Ames, while one-time Smart Money contender Tim Pawlenty was knocked right out of the race.
The inherent craziness of the event (participants are typically bused to Ames and fed box lunches by campaigns; big money is spent on securing by auction the most favorable tent locations near the arena), and the sometimes capricious results, have led to a lot of talk about killing or replacing it. One of the biggest critics has been Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, whose allies recently succeeded in retaking control of the state party apparatus from Paulites (naturally among the biggest defenders of an event determined by the ability to dominate a relatively small room via sheer mobilization of zealots). Branstad’s talked about replacing the Straw Poll with a series of regional events, maintaining the basic concept of shaking down presidential candidates by making them pour resources into a state party fundraising initiative. But it’s not a done deal yet, per this report from National Journal’s Emily Schultheis:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_08/two_three_many_straw_polls051599.php
I posted this yesterday, but ICYMI…this bears sharing again.
I had no idea this was happening.
Prison Reform MY BLACK ASS!!!
……………….
Sentencing, by the Numbers
By SONJA B. STARR
AUG. 10, 2014
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — IN a recent letter to the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the growing trend of evidence-based sentencing, in which courts use data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Mr. Holder is swimming against a powerful current. At least 20 states have implemented this practice, including some that require risk scores to be considered in every sentencing decision. Many more are considering it, as is Congress, in pending sentencing-reform bills.
Risk-assessment advocates say it’s a no-brainer: Who could oppose “smarter” sentencing? But Mr. Holder is right to pick this fight. As currently used, the practice is deeply unfair, and almost certainly unconstitutional. It contravenes the principle that punishment should depend on what a defendant did, not on who he is or how much money he has.
The basic problem is that the risk scores are not based on the defendant’s crime. They are primarily or wholly based on prior characteristics: criminal history (a legitimate criterion), but also factors unrelated to conduct. Specifics vary across states, but common factors include unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.
……………………………………………….
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/opinion/sentencing-by-the-numbers.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
This is some real RACIST BULLSHIT right here. So what I’m gathering from this article is that prisoners are sentenced according to risk data, and not by any actual CRIMES they’ve committed.
THAT’S the actual CRIME here. Our justice system is RIGGED & RACIST.
Cavuto Fails to Bait NFL Star into Badmouthing Michelle Obama on Fox
by Matt Wilstein | 5:53 pm, August 11th,
Fox News’ Neil Cavuto welcomed Seattle Seahawks quarterback and 2014 Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson on his show Monday to discuss his new campaign with the United Way to get kids in eat healthy food and exercise. But if Cavuto thought he could get Wilson to say anything bad about First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to do the same, he was quickly corrected.
After Wilson made his pitch, Cavuto asked him what “we are we doing wrong as a nation” when it comes to getting kids to eat healthier. “Michelle Obama is trying. Many argue that she’s getting to be too much of a food police mommy,” the host said. “Be that as it may, whatever she’s doing isn’t working. And I’m wondering what you are doing that is working. What’s the difference?”
“Well, the first lady, I have so much respect for her. I was able to meet her and the president, obviously, you know when we went to the Super Bowl, we won the Super Bowl and got to go to the White House,” Wilson said, smiling. “You know, I think at the end of the day, you know the kids, it’s tough to eat healthy. You know, I remember when I was a little kid I was always struggling, trying to eat healthy.”
Nice try, Neil. A for effort.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cavuto-fails-to-bait-nfl-star-into-badmouthing-michelle-obama-on-fox/
BREAKING: Judge Allows America’s Worst Voter Suppression Law To Take Effect For 2014 Election
by Ian Millhiser
Posted on August 8, 2014 at 7:10 pm
Almost a year ago today, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a comprehensive voter suppression bill incorporating numerous different tactics used to restrict voting in other states. Among other things, the law imposed a strict voter ID requirement, a common provision used to reduce turnout among minority, low-income and student voters. It cut a full week of early voting. And it will prohibit certain kinds of voter registration drives.
On Friday, Judge Thomas D. Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, held that this law could go into effect — at least for the 2014 elections. The plaintiffs in this case, which included the United States, various civil rights organizations and the League of Women Voters, had asked Schroeder for a “preliminary injunction,” a temporary order suspending various parts of the voter suppression law until his court holds a full trial in 2015. In Friday’s order, Schroeder denied this request.
Much of Schroeder’s order is defensible. As Schroeder notes early in his opinion, the fact that North Carolina’s law is bad policy does not necessarily make it illegal or unconstitutional. And some of the arguments raised against the North Carolina law are legitimately quite weak. Judge Schroeder is rather charitable, for example, when he describes a claim that a provision eliminating same-day voter registration violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s requirement that citizens over the age of 18 be allowed to vote as a “novel claim.”
Similarly, the impact of Schroeder’s decision to allow the law to go into effect is mitigated by the fact that the law’s voter ID provision does not itself take effect until 2016. The law calls for a “soft rollout,” where, in the upcoming election, voters will be “notified that photo identification will be needed to vote beginning in 2016″ and required to sign an acknowledgement that this requirement is coming if they indicate that they do not have ID. Given the fact that the voter ID requirement will not actually prevent anyone from voting until 2016, however, Schroeder’s conclusion that it will not irreparably harm the plaintiffs during the 2014 election is a fair conclusion.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/08/3469490/breaking-judge-allows-americas-worst-voter-suppression-law-to-take-effect-for-2014-election/
Are we left to prayer or what??
What will our country be like after the 2014 elections?
Everyone needs to prepare and get into high gear and VOTE!
http://youtu.be/_NqEKvk9F4I
Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams (1951-2014) contributed a wake-up call to NASA’s 1988 STS-26 “return to flight” mission after the loss of space shuttle Challenger. “G-o-o-d morning, Discovery!”
http://youtu.be/HzY7fEijiuA
https://twitter.com/TheAcademy/status/498996314395246593/photo/1
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Good Morning rikyrah, SG2 and Everyone!
Good morning, everyone!
I couldn’t go this week without playing Michael Rose… with his sexy self. ;)
Good Morning, Everyone@ I see you Young Lady ::-))))))
My boyfriend! ;)