They note that:

Support for same-sex marriage has been growing in the general population since at least the mid-1990s. That trend has been evident among blacks as well — but at a considerably slower pace. A poll conducted by Pew Research in April, just a few weeks before Mr. Obama’s announcement, found 39 percent of blacks supporting gay marriage and 49 percent opposing it. By contrast, a plurality of white Americans supported gay marriage in the Pew poll, as they have in most other recent surveys.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 59% of Blacks favor same-sex marriage.

538 also notes that:

There is reason to be cautious in interpreting these numbers. First, polling has tended to overestimate support for same-sex marriage ballot referendums by about seven percentage points. In addition, the sample sizes for demographic subgroups like African-Americans are small, producing large margins of error.

In the end, the thinking is more that Obama’s announcement made it easier for various Blacks to actually voice their support rather than actually changing people’s minds. A study conducted by Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison found that the race of the caller in polling actually effects support for same-sex marriage. Michelson stated that “So if it was an African-American calling an African-American, then they were much more likely to say they were a supporter of same-sex marriage. We don’t think people were changing their minds, but they felt more comfortable” expressing support for same-sex marriage.

J. Michael Bitzer also noted “I certainly want to see several more polls. But if these kinds of early signals are being sent, then we could see a significant transformation on same-sex marriage in the African-American community.”

Still, basically, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a lot of people leaving Obama over same-sex marriage.

William Marbury, plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison

The Federal Ethics Center, a private group, is requesting that Congress hold hearings concerning the actions of judges in the Federal 5^th Circuit. One of the judges demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder “confirm that the rule of Marbury v. Madison applies to the President.,” a really weird request since the 1803 case had one of the most convoluted decisions in Supreme Court history and appears to have nothing to do with anything the President has done. It involved a lame duck president and congress appointing 16 judges to newly created benches and the incoming Secretary of State, James Madison, refusing to deliver the commissions. A President telling the Supreme Court that one of their decisions sucks is not a violation of the separation of government branches.

Congress does not have jurisdiction over stupidity on the Federal bench. The Senate has jurisdiction over the confirmation of new judges to fill vacant seats, and President Obama simply stopped sending nominations to the Senate when all of his were filibustered into the trash can. There are around 80 current vacancies in the Federal Courts. The last time it was this bad was when Republican senators refused to confirm any of Bill Clinton’s appointees. It took Sen. Patrick Leahy over a year to clear the backlog when he became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When a Federal judge is behaving in an unprofessional manner or a Federal court is being mismanaged, members of the district’s bar associations – lawyers who work with that court – file complaints with the Judicial Review Board in Washington. And investigation team is sent in to analyze the court and the actions of the judge. They report to the person in charge of the Federal judiciary – the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Review Board can be a waste of time. They have been known to make arrangements to have other judges in a jurisdiction “ease the caseload” of erratic or unprofessional judges who are nearing retirement. It’s a way of containing the damage without destroying a good man’s record. They also have a bad habit of not doing adequate follow-ups after a review, especially if their review discovered problems in the management of a court. They walk away and let good people be hurt by vengeful managers who were embarrassed by the review.

Congress has only one real power when it comes to the Judicial Branch, and it’s the reason we should restore the Democrats to power in Congress. They can impeach a Supreme Court Justice. The power of impeachment does not cover the charge of being ethically impaired, but it does cover Justice Clarence Thomas’ disdain for the rules of financial disclosure and de facto bribery.

The cases that the Federal Ethics Center has alerted Congress to could also provide cause for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts if it is discovered that complaints of unprofessional behavior or evidence of impairment in a judge have been properly reported to the Federal Review Board and no action has taken place. But the FEC needs to follow routine procedures, and not try to give Congress a power it is denied in the Constitution.

This is not a good time for removing bad judges. Our Federal courts are dangerously understaffed. In order to comply with the Speedy Trial Law for criminal cases, civil cases are being back-burnered. We must retain all the judges we have, good or bad, because we cannot push justice any further into the future for those awaiting it. If the FEC truly wanted to help clear the benches of bad judges, they would be loudly and persistently petitioning the Senate Republicans to get off their obstructionist asses and fast-track nominations to the bench. They claim they are preventing the Federal Courts being overrun with vermin liberals, but what they are really doing is flexing their little filibuster muscles. If they can stop judicial nominees, as they did to Clinton, they can run on the message that the courts are malfunctioning under Obama.

The ironic thing is, Marbury v. Madison reaffirmed the separation of the three branches of government.

Related articles

• Marbury v. Madison Debate Sparked by Obama’s Supreme Court Health Law Remarks(blippitt.com)

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• Senator Leahy Threatens Justice Roberts In Advance of the Obamacare Decision(independentsentinel.com)

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• Shaw: Pushing and tugging on the Supreme Court (osvdailytake.com)
• Holder reaffirms Marbury (scotusblog.com)
• AG Eric Holder to 5th Circuit: We’re aware of Marbury v. Madison (legaltimes.typepad.com)

President Obama

Getting President Barack Obama to fight for LGBT rights has not always been easy, but he has done quite a lot for LGBT rights over the past four years. In the above campaign spot, Obama and supporter Jane Lynch outline what Obama has done in four years to secure more LGBT rights. Obama has done a lot for LGBT rights, and his decision to support same-sex marriage has only helped to secure some more moderate votes, but has not driven away any of the votes that would never have voted for him anyway.

From Creative Commons

I just found a fabulous website. It is run by a lady who only identifies herself as Middle Molly. She resides in Chicago, and she has posted less personal information about herself than I have, and I refuse to post a profile. Molly has the most concise, precise analysis about unemployment in America that I have ever seen. You can find her at mollysmiddleamerica.blogspot.com.

Quick summary, so visit Molly for the detailed analysis –

When Barack Obama took office, we had already lost 4,462,000 jobs, a million more than the Bush administration had admitted to.

In the next few months, we lost 4,317,000 additional jobs, all before a single Obama policy could take effect.

During the recession, we lost a total of 8,779,000 jobs.

We have gained 4,248,000 private sector jobs since February, 2010.

However, we have lost 503,000 public sector jobs – school teachers, road maintenance, police and fire fighters, library workers – almost all at the state and local level.

The net job gain for the Obama administration is 3,745,000.

We still need 5,034,000 jobs just to break even with what we have lost. That number does not take into consideration the new jobs needed for people who have graduated high school and college or immigrated to this country legally since 2006 when the recession began.

So, the question facing Americans is really very simple – do we want to return to the policies that cost us 8,779,000 jobs or continue with the guy who has helped to restore 3,745,000 of them?

Visit Molly monthly to track the jobs numbers and get that most elusive of things in this election year – real, honest, unbiased facts.

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• Quick! Guess How Many Jobs Were Created Per Month During The Bush Administration… (jhaines6.wordpress.com)

Yesterday, President Obama attended the graduation ceremony for the Joplin High School Class of 2012. Their school was leveled by the tornado. They lost friends, teachers, classmates and their school that day. But they persevered. They survived. They rebuilt their lives and are moving forward. The President was there to honor them and the spirit of the city.

Their principal, Dr. Kerry Sachetta, was on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show this afternoon telling her how honored the students were by the President’s presence. When people bother to listen to him, Barack Obama is a great speaker and can hit the right notes in a time of tragedy or triumph like few presidents before him.

His speech stayed away from politics, and spoke of the “power of community” and the community’s response to the tragedy without “greed and selfishness; ignorance and cruelty.” Not for Joplin the kind the of price gouging we have seen in the aftermath of hurricanes or the exclusion of certain people from assistance, no new zoning laws were passed to prevent the less acceptable from reclaiming their lives. All was good in Joplin last night.

President Obama told the class that what they have done in the past year is “…the same spirit we need right now to help rebuild America. And you, class of 2012, you’re going to help lead this effort. You’re the ones who will help build an economy where every child can count on a good education; you’re the ones who are going to make sure everyone who is willing to put in the effort can find a job that supports a family; you’re the ones who will make sure we’re a country that can control our own energy future and we lead the world in science and technology and innovation. No matter how tough times get, you’ll always be tougher. No matter what life throws at you, you will be ready. You will not be defined by the difficulties you face, but by how you respond – with grace, and strenght and a commitment to others.”

Related articles

• Obama Speaks At Joplin High School’s Graduation One Year After Devastating Tornado(huffingtonpost.com)

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• Joplin: Remember, Rejoice, Rebuild(whitehouse.gov)

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• Obama: “You Are From Joplin And You Are From America.”(duanegraham.wordpress.com)

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• Joplin remembers deadly tornado, one year later (wtvm.com)
• Joplin hospital honors 2011 tornado survivors (miamiherald.com)

Rep. Joe Walsh

Tyrant. . .the word that many Tea Party Republicans are looking for is Tyrant. Unfortunately, they seem to be missing the words Tyrant and Tyranny in their lexicon. Instead, they substitute the words socialism, communism and Naziism for those. During a town hall, Representative Joe Walsh was confronted by a woman who stated that she believes that Americans are losing their freedoms because of “elected officials who were falsifying their ideologies to get elected.”

She stated “It is sedition. I mean, they did it underground. If they are honest brokers and they believe in what they’re saying and where they want this country to go, like Obama, then you’re right. He should have said it before he was elected, and said ‘I’m a socialist, I believe in socialism, in communism, Nazism,’ whatever, and say ‘this is where I want to lead the country’ — not do it underhandedly.”

Actually, sedition is making statements that leads to insurrection or rebellion among the populous. In fact, the people who are acting in a seditious manner would be. . .well, the Tea Party and the Republicans. The word she is looking for is ‘treason’.

Walsh, of course, doesn’t bother with refuting her claim. After all, he is of the same seditious ilk as she is. He goes on to state “However you want to label or define it, don’t you think after three and a half years as a country now we have a really good idea where this president wants to go? There are people in this audience — it’s fine — who believe in this America we’re living under right now. That’s fine, that’s a legitimate viewpoint. I will fight to my last breath against it, but I wish politicians on the other side would be honest about how they feel.”

Apparently, both believe that freedom involves being allowed to die horribly in poverty while others are forced to make up the money it takes to care for you through higher prices at the hospital.

Freedom. . .it’s just another scam to get free funny hats to the Republicans, and only for the select few. Everyone else doesn’t get freedom, right?

The NAACP lissued a statement saying “The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the ‘political, education, social and economic equality’ of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment. “

The NAACP is one of the oldest Black Civil Rights Movements in America. The NAACP dates back to 1909, and is now 103 years old. Among the founders was W.E.B. Dubois, a Harvard scholar, as well as Ida B. Wells, Archibald Grimké, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William English Walling. One of its most famous members rose all the way to the United States Supreme Court. That would be Thurgood Marshal.

Among the ranks of the NAACP were many Whites, including Walter F. White, who worked with Marshal, and William Walling, one of the founders. Allies are always welcome while fighting for equality.

Today, the board of the NAACP announced its support for same-sex marriage rights. The decision comes in the wake of the endorsement of the same by President Barack Obama. It does put the NAACP at odds with more religious based Black Civil Rights groups, and with many Black pastors and churches; however, there are several Black religious leaders such as Reverend Joseph Lowery and Reverend Al Sharpton who have spoken out in support for same-sex marriage stating:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As leaders in today’s Civil Rights Movement, we stand behind the President Obama’s belief that same sex couples should be allowed to join in civil marriages. We also affirm that individuals may hold different views on this issue but still work together towards our common goals: fair housing and equitable education, affordable health care and eradicating poverty, all issues of deep and abiding concern for our communities.

President Obama stated his view that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. This is a view that we concur with, because as civil rights leaders we cannot fight to gain rights for some and not for all. At the same time, we acknowledge that the President stated his personal opinion, which everyone is entitled to – both those who agree with him, like us, and those who disagree. The President made clear that his support is for civil marriage for same-sex couples, and he is fully committed to protecting the ability of religious institutions to make their own decisions about their own sacraments.

There will be those who seek to use this issue to divide our community. As a people, we cannot afford such division. It is our hope that conversations on strengthening African American families continue in a civil and respectful way, on all sides, both with those who support the ability of same-sex couples to marry, and those who do not.

We are glad that President Obama has joined Dr. Joseph Lowery, Dr. Julian Bond and so many others in full embrace of equality for gay and lesbian individuals in our country. We also welcome the civil debate on this issue that will surely spring. And we encourage all individuals to keep all issues of import to our communities in mind in the days ahead, and we seek to secure equal justice, opportunity and dignity for all God’s children.

Some Republicans have hoped to use the President’s endorsement of same-sex marriage to undermine him in the Black Community, but that may not be as possible as they would hope.

NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous stated in a release on Saturday “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people. The well-funded right wing organizations who are attempting to split our communities are no friend to civil rights, and they will not succeed.”

The Washington Post notes that:

Surveys show blacks remain generally uncomfortable with same-sex marriage. A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll in November found that 58 percent of African Americans called same-sex marriage “unacceptable,” while 35 percent said it was “acceptable” in terms of their own values and morals.

More than half of all African Americans in a new Post-ABC News poll backed the president’s statement in support of marriage, suggesting there may be an opening to for Obama to help push support for gay rights among black Americans.

Pakman went on to explain:

Gordon also added that “when president obama endorsed homosexual marriage, he blamed jesus christ,” and made direct attacks against President Obama and against me, saying that the devil promotes homosexuality through straight people like David Pakman and President Obama. Another hugely dangerous comment he made is that straight marriages and society are hurt by gay marriages through the abuse of children which he claims is a constant in gay marriage/gay parenting (confusing to me as well).

From the sounds of it, not only is Klingenschmitt wrestling with his own demons, but that he sounds desperate to prove that he is right just so he can assuage his own problems.

Ricketts' proposal cover

Pardon me for rolling on the floor, but do you know who besides the President is considered a model of metrosexualism? Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock.

The Romney campaign is officially rejecting the offer of a series of character-assassination ads proposed by billionaire Joe Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs. Let’s get that part out of the way. This has nothing to do with Mitt Romney and everything to do with the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court.

The New York Times uncovered a proposal by Ricketts’ private little SuperPAC, “Ending Spending Action Fund,” to create a $10 million ad campaign, titled The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good. that would portray President Obama as a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” Now, let’s dissect that supposedly defamatory description.

A “metrosexual” is a well-groomed, well-dressed man who smells of Bulgari instead of sweat, has manicured fingernails and…well, in addition to the aforementioned Dwayne Johnson, who was dubbed a metrosexual a few years ago, what comes to mind is the description of Ranger in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. And though the President has embraced his black heritage, the fact is he’s bi-racial. News flash for the right wing, the President’s mother was white and he was raised mostly by his white grandparents.

As for comparing him to Abe Lincoln? That makes no sense. Our 16^th President is a national icon, a martyr to our nation’s unity, immortalized on the Mall, the Great Emancipator….oh, now I get it.

Rickett’s team wants to equate the President with everything a swamp-dwelling knuckle-dragger from East Armpit would supposedly hate – men who are educated and well-groomed, black men and the man who not only freed the slaves but defeated the Confederacy. The Tea Party wants to “take our country back” to the days before the Constitution, to the failed Articles of Confederation that the Southern states tried to restore in 1860, so, let’s equate the President with the man who prevented the proto-tea partiers from fulfilling their vision of a crippled pseudo-nation.

The Ricketts proposal also plans to stress President Obama’s connections to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., who delivered at least two inflammatory speeches in his Chicago church while the First Family were members. The President has written in his autobiography that Rev. Wright brought him to Christ and was a strong spiritual advisor for years. But, not a single accuser has been able to prove that the First Family were in the pews when Wright delivered those two speeches. The Rickett’s proposal calls Wright an espouser of “black liberation theology,” and says “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way.”

Excuse me, but what planet were these people living on four years ago? What rock have they been living under for the past four years? This is like all those right wingers who state that President Obama was not properly vetted four years ago. Really? I thought the only thing they didn’t dig up or elaborate about him was that famous Clinton question, “Boxers or briefs?” Maybe they did and I missed it.

We saw the right wing, and Sarah Palin in particular, pound away at two things about Barack Obama – his brief time working for a community organizing group between college and law school that allowed her to call him a “community organizer” and ignore his twelve years as a university lecturer; and his association with Bill Ayers, the never-convicted “domestic terrorist” who served on an education committee with Obama in Chicago and whose home was the place where Obama announced his first campaign for public office. Now, Ayers was involved in his “domestic terrorism” between 1969 and 1972. He has admitted to participating in several bombings, but when it became known that the Nixon administration had authorized an illegal anti-protest group called COINTEL, all pending federal charges against Ayers were dropped, though his wife turned herself in in 1980 and was fined $1,500 and served three years probation. While Ayers was active, Barack Obama was living in Indonesia with his mother and step-father. When the President knew Ayers, he was a respected university professor and advocate for education reform. But, Sarah Palin often referred to Ayers, who was 64 during the last election, as a domestic terrorist and bosom buddy of the President. But, admitting that the President’s association with Ayers stemmed from them both being members of the University of Chicago faculty would have meant admitting that Obama did something with his life besides being a community organizer.

That’s the way things have gone for the past four years or more. If anyone questionable was in the same stadium with the president twenty years ago, the right wing dug him or her up and used that person to smear the President.

There was an author named Saul Alinsky. Mr. Alinsky is the acknowledged father of grassroots organization and community outreach, and his books are pretty much required reading for anyone in those areas. Dick Armey handed out Alinsky’s books to the people who worked with him in the Tea Party Express. The right wing started out by re-defining Alinsky as a “socialist activist,” which was not true. Mr. Alinsky was completely apolitical and thought socialists were idiots, according to his son. Then, because President Obama had, either in college or working in community organization, read Alinsky’s books, they called the President a “student” of Alinsky, implying that he had sat at Alinsky’s feet in rapt attention. Not bloody hardly. Alinsky died when the President was 11.

What Rickett’s high-priced consulting firm has come up with, the methods they are recommending for discrediting him to America’s voters, are old news. We’ve heard all this nonsense before, over and over and over. Not a day has gone by since Barack Obama took the lead in the Democratic primaries four years ago that Fox News or right wing radio has not repeated some portion of this character assassination — he won because illegal immigrants voted for him, he was born in Kenya and the birth certificates and newspapers notices were an elaborate forgery, he subsidized ACORN’s voter fraud activities, he has stolen money from the taxpayer, he has ties to the New Black Panthers and shut down the federal investigation into their voter intimidation in Philadelphia, he hates America….on and on. There are those who believe this garbage and the rest of us rational human beings who know the facts and know how to use the search engines on our computers to obtain facts. Ten million dollars of smear isn’t going to change our minds about the veracity of these allegations. We know how far the right wing has stretched Six Degrees when it comes to the President and that they have not one honest fact with which to back up their assertion that he is a socialist who is destroying America.

Those who have not made up their minds in this election are those who want to hear the issues being discussed – taxation, the debt, the deficits, economic recovery, plans to “save” social security and medicare, education. They will not be persuaded by character attacks from either side. They don’t care if Mitt Romney’s grandfather had five wives and immigrated to Mexico to avoid anti-polygamy laws in the U. S. All they care about is how Romney would deal with the drug war in Mexico that threatens American citizens.

The proposal presented to Ricketts calls for television ads, full-page newspaper ads, aerial banners during the Democratic Convention, as well as the hiring of an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to offset charges of racism. Okay, attack the President for being too literate, well-groomed and educated, but hire his mirror image to attack him.

Ricketts should fire the firm that prepared this proposal. They wasted his money. Romney’s campaign people are right, there is nothing new here, and what is here would smear Romney worse than it would smear the President. The consultants couldn’t even sell this bullhockey to Glenn Beck. He’s said it all before and it didn’t cost him millions to have his researchers invent these disingenuous fabrications.

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But, the fact that the President voided those parts of the NDAA did not stop a group of journalists from bringing suit against the law. Lead plaintiffs Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges of the Nation Institute, Tangerine Bolen of RevolutionTruth, joined by Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, MIT professor and activist Noam Chomsky and WikiLeaks Birgitta Jonsdottir, argued to Federal Judge Katherine Forrest that the law infringes on freedom of the press, freedom of speech and due process.

The prime issue to Hedges and Bolen is the vague definition in the law of who could be indefinitely detained as “a person who was a part of or substatially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces.” Hedges and Bolen, along with a lot of American journalists, have had contact with terrorists as part of their work. Anyone who has ever worked in the Middle East or has investigated terror cells in any country might have come in contact with such persons. In another one of those “if we don’t defend it, it will go away” moments we have come to appreciate in the Holden Justice Department, the DoJ attorney defending the law refused to say that the government would never detain without charges or trial any member of the press. If the DoJ had argued that based on what Obama would do, there was no guarantee that the promise of journalistic immunity would be honored by a subsequent administration. Better to have the law stricken down by the court.

Judge Forrest, who was appointed in 2011 to the historic United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, one of the first courts established by our government, ruled that she found the language of the law “too vague.” She wrote, “At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [section] 1021. Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years. An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doind so. In the fact of what could be indeterminate military detention, due process requires more.”

Bolen, unfortunately, went overboard with her victory speech. She said “We dealt a pretty big blow to two branches of Congress and President Obama.” Like Jonsdottir, she works on WikiLeaks and the Bradley Manning case and has interviewed Iraqis and Afghans as part of her defense of WikiLeaks and Manning. With typical WikiLeaks lack of journalistic research, she did not understand that the President had already voided the provisions she was objecting to. Jonsdottir, however, is an Icelandic citizen and this ruling would not blanketly exempt her from arrest if she were engaged in activities involving terrorists. Paranoia must be contagious in WikiLeaks because Bolen was pretty sure that if she “became a thorn in the side of the U. S. Government in fighting for our rights…” she could be rounded up and detained.

Author/activist Naomi Wolf was even more over-the-top with her assessment of the hearing, saying that she found the judges questions to the federal lawyers and them not answering chilling, saying “To hear those words — it’s so true, it’s so obvious — it puts in glaring relief the hideousness, the unconstitutionality, the darkness of this legislative efffort and others like it. She [Judge Forrest] is so completely, obviously right. It’s nothing short of treason to have put forward legislation like this, let alone to have had most of the people who represent us and our president sign off on this clearly, obviously criminally unconstitutional — unconstitutional is inadequate. It’s anti-constitutional. It’s dictatorial. I’m so happy as a mother. It’s so profound. All of us were put in danger by this law.”

I really hope that Daniel Ellsberg at least is mature and rational enough to understand that the Obama administration handed this ruling to them. President Obama was opposed to this section of the law, but could not veto the law without cutting off paychecks for our troops and their families. By using a signing statement, he preserved the operational flow of the military and killed those provisions he objected to.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Reps. Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, and Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, have offered an amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act that would also void Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. According to Rep. Amash, their amendment would “..ensure that persons arrested on U. S. soil aren’t detained indefinitely without charge or trial.” Amash asked his colleagues in the House to pass the amendment because, “If our constituents haven’t sent a clear enough message, tonight’s ruling surely does. Congress must act now to guarantee the constitutional right to a charge and trial.”

Aw, shucks. Didn’t anyone explain to Amash that his own party loves this section and loves to ignore the signing statement because then they can accuse the President of trying to be a dictator who “wipes his ass” with the Constitution.

I will never claim that I am familiar with every law that our Congress has ever passed or every court ruling ever handed down, but I can’t recall off-hand any time a section of a law was killed three times just for good measure.

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• Journalists, Activists Challenge NDAA Law (commondreams.org)

Comedian Bill Maher

Newsweek has declared that Barack Obama is, somehow, the “First Gay President”. . .just like Bill Clinton was the “First Black President”. Personally, I think the whole idea of declaring who is the first of something when they aren’t really part of that minority is rather stupid. Last night, Bill Maher went on “Conan” where he shared some thoughts about the whole thing by first noting that the headline on Newsweek was an allusion to Toni Morrison’s remarks about Bill Clinton.

Maher stated:

She said [Clinton] was the first black president because she said so many things about him were similar to the black experience. Single mother, working class, grew up poor. Then she said ‘saxophone playing,’ as if all black people do that. McDonald’s eating… Okay, so Clinton was like black people for those reasons. What about Obama is gay? I don’t understand how this translates. What does he do that’s gay?

La Bandera de la Hispanidad, flag for Hispanic Americans, adopted at the 1933 Pan-American Conference

Originally published May 10, 2012

Americans love stereotypes. You know them from films – the Middle Easterner is a terrorist, the Hispanic is an illegal lay-about, the black is a gangbanger, Italians are Mafioso, Jews are money-grubbers. Movies are difficult enough to live with because they subtly color public opinion. When stereotypes are applied to ordinary citizens in the political arena, they lead to huge campaign mistakes.

Take President Obama’s statement yesterday that he personally supports gay marriage. The stereotype of Hispanics and the conventional wisdom it creates says that his support of gays will diminish his support among Hispanics because they are socially conservative and deeply Catholic.

Both the conventional wisdom and the stereotype are wrong. La Raza commissioned a poll on this subject and found that 54% of Hispanics support gay marriage and among those Hispanics who voted in the 2004 and 2008 elections, the number jumps to 65%. So much for stereotypes.

There are more important issues for Hispanics in this election, and more important issues for the campaigns to concentrate on.

Top of the list for Hispanics is not so much immigration reform as the way immigration and illegal immigration is being used to harass and harm the Hispanic population. While some are not happy with the deportation record of the Obama administration, they are more unhappy with “papers please” laws and inequalities in the law between states and industries. One of the nastier ways that the Bush administration punished New England’s moderate Republicans and the party defector, Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, was to exclude dairy farms from the guest worker programs, so small family dairy farms cannot legally hire foreigners to work the farms. Shrimp and chicken processors could bring in hundreds of Mexicans to work their lines, but dairy farmers couldn’t bring in a few Mexicans to muck the barns and milk the cows. Whereas states like Arizona want cops to stop every vehicle containing anyone who looks Hispanic, states with small dairy farms like Vermont tell their cops not to stop Hispanics.

Hispanics want a unity of laws and requirements across the country. They want recognition that some of them have been here for decades and have raised very American children who want to go to college and want to enlist in the military. The Dream Act is important to Hispanic voters.

Controlling the drug trade and the gangs is important in the Hispanic community, but the harassment of Hispanics has led to distrust of law enforcement that is seriously impacting efforts to control and contain unlawful activity. Like all immigrants to America for the past two centuries, Hispanics want equal opportunity for their children, but the culture of racial hatred that the right wing has fostered is making it harder for Hispanic children in school, no matter how many generations their families have been on this side of the Rio Grande. Many of those Hispanics who have deep roots in the United States want better opportunities for assimilation without loss of culture for more recent immigrants.

The issues are complex, but the bottom line is simple. There are 53 million legal Hispanic immigrants and native-born Hispanic-Americans. They want fair laws and equal opportunities. They don’t want their lives damaged by a political party that is buying bigots’ votes by limiting their rights and painting them as parasites on American culture. They are damned tired of a country that is overboard about Mexican food and has taken a small Mexican holiday and turned it into a second St. Patrick’s Day-style excuse for others to get drunk, while punishing the people for their heritage and color. They have been fighting for equality and respect ever since white Southerners decided they couldn’t live with Mexico’s anti-slavery laws and staged a revolution in Texas, and a rogue general invaded California without Congressional or Presidential approval. And the party that has passed the laws and built their base on hatred of Hispanics is the Republican Party. A simple statement from the President about his personal views on gay rights does not negate all the harm that the Republican Party has caused Hispanics, and no Hispanic or Latino politician who supports the party’s platform and actions is going to change the balance. There are two groups of Americans, groups whose roots stretch back before the arrival of the Europeans, who have yet to achieve equality and respect in the nation that was created on their land and by conquering their ancestors. Native Americans and Hispanics have seen their fights for equality pushed aside by the battles for African-American rights and even gay rights. Together they represent 17.5% of our population, 55 million human beings who deserve all the rights, privileges, responsibilities and respect demanded by all Americans.

One religio-social issue will not override the basic issue of human and civil rights.

Related articles

• Perceptions Override Reality With Hispanics(lezgetreal.com)

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• Barack Obama shift on gay marriage energizes young Hispanic immigration activists(miamiherald.typepad.com)

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• New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez on Romney: ‘Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign’(abcnews.go.com)

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Rush Limbaugh, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

FOX News’ Shepard Smith is the only one on FOX who seemed to actually have praise for Obama’s decision to vocally support same-sex marriage. Of course, that means that there are those who are going to attack him as soon as they can. . .like Rush Limbaugh.

Smith said of Obama’s announcement that the President was now on the “right side of the 21st Century.” He then asked Bret Baier if the GOP would still be campaigning against same-sex marriage all “while sitting very firmly, without much question, on the wrong side of history on it.”

So, of course, Rush Limbaugh had to say about the comments “Shep, where has the issue won? Where has the issue been victorious, Shep, outside your house? Where has the issue won an election? What state? Tell me where it’s happened.”

Baier’s remarks stating that same-sex marriage had always failed when it was put before a vote were played by Limbaugh who then stated “Exactly right. What do you want to look at, Shep? You want to look at the polls? Or do you want to look at the votes.” Even though Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, Limbaugh pressed, nothing has changed. “It’s still up to the hicks and the hay seeds in the state.”

Have you ever noticed that these guys like Limbaugh never seem to quite grasp that the bulk of those elections were held eight years ago. Additionally, they never quite get that whenever the rights of a minority are put to a popular vote, they are inevitably defeated. Had the First Amendment freedom of religion been put to a vote, the rights of Catholics and Jews would not have been allowed because both groups were hated. If the civil and political rights of Blacks had been put to a vote in the 1960′s, they would never have passed either. Had the right for women to vote been put to a popular vote, they would not have been allowed to vote.

Of course, given Limbaugh’s hatred of women, and nearly every other minority group, he undoubtably wishes that those votes had been taken.

Gavin Newsom, the Lt. Governor of California, spoke out today about President Obama’s decision to support same-sex marriage. On the Young Turks on Current TV he stated “The first sitting president in the history of this country that used those words, ‘I support same-sex marriage’ — a point of real courage. This is not a politician running for re-election for city council or mayor of a blue city or, for that matter, governor of a blue state. He’s running for re-election in a very close election where he’s got to pick up these swing states. It was a point of remarkable courage.” Obama’s reluctance to strongly endorse same-sex marriage follows growing dissent among Democrats, including vice president Joe Biden. Newsom says this statement restores strength to Obama’s campaign. “He’s become once again the president we elected.”

Additionally, we have this press release from the Rainbow Sash Movement:

The Rainbow Sash Movement a National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Roman Catholics responds to the public statement of Cardinal Dolan current president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, head of the New York Archdiocese and Rev. Bryant Wright, president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Both of these men claim to speak for Christians on Gay Marriage, expressing distress and sadness at President Obama’s newly announced support for gay marriage. On the contrary President Obama spoke of his personal religious belief in his understanding of the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. Given the current state of religious hypocrisy neither Dolan or Wright stand on solid ground.

The Rainbow Sash Movement commends President Obama on his integrity, and recognizing that it was time for Presidential leadership on Gay Marriage. Christianity like the Bible has no single group speaking for it, and any who claim to speak for either are not of God..

Joe Murray the Executive Director of the Rainbow Sash Movement said “We can no longer allow religious leaders to promote second class citizenship to any group of US Citizens based on their narrowly defined dogma which only promotes bigotry in the name of biblical fundamentalism as was done in North Carolina. Constitutional violence is just as wrong as any other form of mindless violence.

We are glad that we have a president who believes in the separation of Church and State.

God bless President Obama, you make us proud to be Americans once again.”

Originally posted 9 May 2012

Reince Priebus apparently doesn’t know what game he is playing. Maybe he thinks that he’s playing parcheesi or Snakes & Ladders instead of, well, politics. In fact, by complaining about President Barack Obama’s support for same-sex marriage as playing politics is, well, playing politics. Priebus, who is the head of the Republican National Committee, stated “While President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney have been clear. We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that.”

Of course, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, marriage should be between a man and a woman, the woman should not have the right to determine how many children she has, she should not have access to protections from domestic violence, and she should be inferior to her husband.

The details on rather damning even before we have to hear from Mitt Romney, who once supported LGBT rights emphatically. He stated even before Obama’s ABC interview:

“Well when these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name. My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights, and the like are appropriate but that the others are not. . .I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

President Obama

Reaction from the Gay-o-Sphere has been swift. Numerous organizations have already come out in praise and support of President Barack Obama for his decision to publically support same-sex marriage. He has stated that it is a personal decision, but it should be noted that his Administration has already been supporting same-sex marriage through attempts to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Equality New Mexico stated:

Just moments ago, President Obama became the first sitting US President to say he supports giving loving, committed same-sex couples the freedom to marry.

For the thousands of same-sex families that call New Mexico home, President Obama’s words provide genuine hope that our country will soon come to treat their relationships with the equal respect and recognition that comes through marriage.

This is a historic day. Thank you, Mr. President.

As always,

Nick

Nick Rimmer

Equality New Mexico

The Civil Rights Agenda out of Illinois stated:

The Civil Rights Agenda (TCRA), Illinois’ leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights advocacy organization, has learned that President Obama has stated that he now supports the right of same-gender couples to marry.

“I’m proud to be an Illinoisan today,” said Anthony Martinez, executive director of The Civil Rights Agenda. “The State that promoted Abraham Lincoln may now also claim the President who will work to end government sanctioned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. He understands that his legacy rests on the basic issues of civil rights. Like President Lincoln, President Obama knows this is what makes our country great.

“Today’s announcement by President Obama is not only historic, but is a major step forward for LGBT Americans who everyday live with the idea that we are supposed to be equal citizens and are supposed to have the same rights as everyone else, but that is not the case. We are second class citizens in the land of the free. Today, the President has taken a firm stand that all people should be equal. No matter who one loves, every citizen should be able to access the same rights and responsibilities of the civil institution of marriage.”

“This is an amazing moment,” said Rick Garcia, policy advisor for The Civil Rights Agenda. “The President was a supporter of our issues since I worked with him in the Illinois Senate. Frankly, President Obama has been on record supporting gay marriage, when he ran for Senate. This just shows us that politically, LGBT issues are not the wedge issue they once were. We are in a new era and we must continue to build the momentum towards full and equal rights for all LGBT Americans. Now we just have to make sure LGBT folks get out and vote in this upcoming election.”

And finally, GLAAD stated:

GLAAD, the nation’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) media advocacy and anti-defamation organization, today responded to President Barack Obama’s historic announcement in support of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples.

“The arc of history today bent a little closer to equality for every American,” said GLAAD President Herndon Graddick. “After hearing the stories of countless couples and families, President Obama has drawn the same conclusion shared across party lines and by a majority of Americans today: everyone deserves the opportunity to marry the person they love. As our nation draws closer to a more perfect union in which every person is created equal, we are left deeply encouraged by this truly watershed moment.”

In an interview with Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts today, President Obama stated:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

President Obama’s landmark announcement comes just days after Vice President Joe Biden told NBC’s Meet the Press that he was ‘absolutely comfortable’ with equal marriage protections for gay and lesbian couples, and just hours after voters in North Carolina approved a constitutional amendment known as Amendment One that will change the state’s constitution to recognize only married straight couples; bans civil unions; and eliminates health care, prescription drug coverage and other benefits for public employees and children receiving domestic partner benefits. In a written statement on Tuesday, the president said he was “disappointed” in the passage of the amendment.

A new Gallup poll released Tuesday finds that for the second time in the organization’s history, half of Americans support marriage equality.

Other recent polls that reflect growing support of marriage equality include:

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 59% of respondents oppose federal legislation that denies eligibility for federal benefits to gay and lesbian spouses.
A Public Religion Research Institute poll that found 51% support legal marriage for lesbian and gay couples.
An ABC News and Washington Post poll that found 51% of respondents said they thought marriage equality should be legal, a 17 percentage-point increase from the 2006 polling results.
A CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation poll that showed 51% of respondents were in favor of legal recognition for marriages for gay and lesbian couples.

Now we just have to get out there and make sure that Obama is reelected.

President Obama

President Barack Obama has voiced his dissatisfaction with the vote in North Carolina to ban any form of same-sex union. Obama’s NC campaign spokesman Cameron French stated that “The president has long opposed divisive and discriminatory efforts to deny rights and benefits to same-sex couples.”

He went on to say “He believes the North Carolina measure singles out and discriminates against committed gay and lesbian couples, which is why he did not support it. President Obama has long believed that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights and legal protections as straight couples and is disappointed in the passage of this amendment. On a federal level, he has ended the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act and extended key benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.”

While the voters of North Carolina voted 61 to 39 in favor of the amendment amid allegations of voting irregularities, this is not going to be seen as a full on set back for the LGBT rights movement, but rather as another attempt to bully other states into not holding votes on this issue moving forward.

Meanwhile, people are awaiting word from President Barack Obama himself about the issue of marriage equality. In fact, it is expected that Obama will now endorse same-sex marriage fully.

President Obama

Originally published May 8, 2012

Officially, President Obama’s views on same-sex marriage are still “evolving.” Nothing’s changed, there’s nothing to see here, move along people…..

I really don’t get the idea that statements of personal opinion by Vice-President Biden and Secretary of Education Duncan represent some kind of division in the administration. I don’t understand why commentators are going nuts over this and analyzing it to death.

There is a major difference between pandering to a fringe for votes and knowing how a single issue can be manipulated to drive voters to the polls. Anyone suggesting that President Obama is refusing to take a public stand on same-sex marriage to pander to Southern voters is wrong.

In 2000 and 2004, we saw the Republican Party use same-sex marriage to get people to the polls. They included same-sex marriage amendments on state ballots so that they could increase turnout among people who would vote against Democrats. In 2008, with the economy in freefall, they could not use a single religion-based issue to drive voter turnout. They have spent the past four years building up their smoke-and-mirror issues and throwing dirt at the President to see what will stick and what might get out the hate vote. He doesn’t need to hand them gay rights on top of all the rest of the stuff they have nurtured.

Listen to them, to conservatives and Republicans, and you hear allegations that he supports illegal immigration because illegals turned out in droves to vote for him; that he wants to turn the United States into a communist dictatorship; that he “wipes his ass with the Constitution”; that he supports killing babies; that he is anti-religion; that he has not done anything in four years; that he spends millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars on his lavish lifestyle; that he should be hung as a traitor; that he hates America; that he hates business; that he is bosom buddies with radicals he barely knows and sat at the feet of Saul Alinsky as a student, though Alinsky died when Obama was in short pants. They have dug up nonsense from thirty, forty years ago to smear anyone who gets within two-hundred yards of Obama and paint them as Maoists who control the President. You hear racism at every turn, with people calling the President of the United States of America a monkey, a gangbanger, a coon and describe our First Lady as resembling a “crack ho wiping cum from her lips.”

No candidate in his right mind is going to hand the opposition another way to get gullible people to the polls for a single, hate-driven issue. It’s bad enough a third of Republicans think he’s a Kenyan-born Muslim.

It does not matter what President Obama says in public about same-sex marriage or gay rights. He may, honestly, as a Christian, have reservations about same-sex marriage. What matters at this time are his actions. He signed the law ending DADT. He ended government defense of DOMA. He has made his position crystal clear….he opposes restriction of civil rights for any reason.

Isn’t that what really matters?

Related articles

• Obama’s shift on same-sex marriage puts focus on GOP centrists(boston.com)

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• Why Republicans should resist using the same-sex marriage issue against Obama.(althouse.blogspot.com)

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• Clay Aiken Tells Hate Group Leader Tony Perkins He’ll Be Ashamed of His Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• New Amendment on Same-Sex Marriage: Constitutional or Not? (parishgov.wordpress.com)

President Francois Hollande

Originally published May 7, 2012

Both French and Greek voters rejected the economic policies of conservatism over the weekend. The Serbs will probably do the same. The austerity program was spearheaded by Germany, which has a very unique economy and history and whose choices for dealing with deficits, debt and a global recession don’t work for everyone.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the first French incumbent President in over 30 years to not be re-elected. Françoise Hollande is the first Socialist elected to the job in 17 years. Let’s just repeat that one. France has not had an honest-to-goodness Socialist in the Presidency in 17 years. So much for the Republicans’ claim that all of France’s and Europe’s economic problems were caused by excessive socialism. Their economy tanked because everyone’s tanked when our financial sector tanked. It really is Bush’s fault, or least the fault of those who lobbied for and got a relaxation of regulations that allowed the financial sector to play silly bugger games with more money than actually exists in the world.

President Obama responded to the news of Hollande’s election with an immediate phone call to suggest a personal meeting before the G8 summit the end of the month. Like Obama himself, Hollande is starting his job with enormous economic problems in his country.

When Obama attended his first G-8, in a rare show of the new guy telling the old guys, and gal, what to do, Obama tried to convince the leaders of Europe that austerity was the wrong way to deal with a recession. They didn’t listen then, and have paid for it since.

Naturally, certain groups have decided to panic. The financial markets don’t want liberal politicians in office, so equity markets fell and the exchange rate for the euro fell, a whole $0.0036, from $1.30 to $1.2964.

Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, opined that the austerity strategy was dependent on the idea that drastically cutting government spending would somehow create “confidence” in consumers and businesses and the “confidence fairy” doesn’t exist. All the spending cuts did was cause more unemployment as government workers were laid off, cause a contraction of spending as salaries were cut, caused even more contraction of spending as pension payments and subsidies for the poor were cut. As Krugman wrote, “There seems to be little if any gain in return for the pain.”

And the pain has been extreme, with Greek workers having their minimum wage cut retroactively, so they went a month or more with no pay so they could “repay” their overpayment a year ago, and unemployment among young adults edging 50% in several countries.

Europe has had two years to do what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republican Party want to do to us. They have spectacularly failed to turn around their recessions, even pushing some countries into depressions and double-dip recessions. Trickle-down economics causes recessions. It doesn’t cure them. It never has. Herbert Hoover tried it, from the day the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929, to the day he turned over the Presidency to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 4, 1933. The world spiraled into a depression that was in part responsible for World War II.

The French didn’t wait until things had gotten so bad it would take ten years to recover. They have rejected the historically failed policy of trickle-down economics and government austerity in just two years. Of course, the Republicans will say that Europe is going to hell in a socialist rucksack. And to think they accuse liberals of favoring revisionist history.

Related articles

• Triangulating France(counterpunch.org)

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• Europe: austerity, safety nets, and spending(arunwithaview.wordpress.com)

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• Europe Finally Gets It: Austerity Isn’t the Answer(newser.com)

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• Meet France’s New First Lady (newser.com)

The reason why is very simple, of course. While Republicans may favor voting for Romney, they are not enthusiastic about it.

Gallup, though, writes:

It is unclear why Americans are more inclined to predict an Obama than a Romney victory when the two are essentially tied in Gallup’s latest election polling. It may be that Americans recognize the advantages Obama has as the incumbent and that historically, presidents seeking re-election usually win. For example, in March 2004, when President George W. Bush and John Kerry were about tied in voter preferences, more said Bush (52%) than Kerry (42%) would win. Or, Americans may expect in the months between now and the election that conditions in the U.S. will improve, which would make the incumbent’s re-election more certain.

…..

In three separate measurements in 2004, Americans thought Bush would be the winner in two and were split in their predictions in the other, conducted immediately after the Democratic convention. In the final prediction, from mid-October, 56% thought Bush would win and 36% thought Kerry would.
The accuracy of the 2000 election prediction is harder to evaluate, given that Al Gore won the popular vote and George W. Bush the electoral vote. In four out of five measurements that year, Americans thought Bush would win, though in the final measurement, taken in mid-September, Americans gave Gore the edge.
In an August 1996 poll, Americans overwhelmingly believed incumbent Bill Clinton (69%) would defeat Bob Dole (24%).

What does it all mean? Not a whole heck of a lot. Obama could still lose the election. There is a lot of campaigning between here and election day.

Mitt and Ann Romney

Sometimes the political calculus is not so much about what can gain you the most flat out, but rather, what you can gain and lose. Ask two different pundits about President Barack Obama’s support for same-sex marriage and you will get two different answers. What is amazing, though, is that they will both be mostly correct. By supporting same-sex marriage openly, Obama has managed to lose some voters while gaining others.

Political calculus is never really about the base gain, but rather the balancing act between the gain and the loss.

Bill White is a good example. The openly gay New Yorker has been a strong supporter for Mitt Romney, and even donated $2,500 to his campaign. However, after President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, White found himself in a position to make a choice, and he made it. The vehement opposition to same-sex marriage that came out of Mitt Romney’s mouth after Obama’s announcement was enough. White asked for his money back.

White stated in a letter to Romney’s campaign which was quoted in the Huffington Post “I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask you that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year. You have chosen to be on the wrong side of history and I do not support your run for president any longer.”

White is a registered Independent. He does not agree with President Obama on fiscal issues, but “I feel like [Romney has] declared war on my marriage. And I could just sit back and not say anything. Or I could do something about it. And I’ve chosen to do something about it.”

The Huffington Post notes that:

Obama’s campaign has sought to draw on that growing support by highlighting the “strong contrast” between the president and Romney. One day before Romney’s speech, the Obama team’s director of religious outreach, Rev. Derrick Harkins, said that Obama stands for “values like loving our neighbors, being our brother’s and sister’s keeper and dignity for all,” a reference to the president’s stance on same-sex marriage.

There is more to this than just that. Many businesses are opposed to banning same-sex marriage these days as they are finding it hard to hire workers who are not open minded. In North Carolina and Minnesota, businesses vehemently opposed bans on same-sex marriage.

Last night, Jon Stewart covered this insane attempt to try and make it look like Obama never thanked any of those who took out bin Laden, and try to give credit to George W. Bush because, you know, ten year old intelligence information just reeks of being useful. In fact, after about a week, any intel that they got off of those they captured was pretty much useless.

Obama Four Years From Now

Last night was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You can tell this because, well, there’s been a 70% drop in the news today given that most reporters and politicians are busy sleeping off their hangovers. While Obama was a cut up, he did make a somber note to begin with- it’s been a year since Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden.

Regarding his presumptive opponent, Mitt Romney, Obama stated “He and I actually have a lot in common. We both have degrees from Harvard. I have one. He has two. What a snob.” And about Hillary Clinton “Four years ago I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Four years later she won’t stop drunk-texting me from Cartagena.” And, finally, about the Secret Service “I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew.”

Still, that isn’t stopping Rove from claiming that “These projections will change as more polls are conducted in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the ‘toss-up’ and ‘lean’ states where Romney now has an advantage: just about all the ‘lean-Romney’ states are generally Republican-safe states, while all of the lean-Obama states will most likely move to the ‘toss-up’ or ‘lean-Romney’ column as the campaigns progress.”

Of course, Rove is talking about this (above) map which he created based off of a similar map from Real Clear Politics. Of course, Rove’s map is designed for spin. First of all, RCP’s map doesn’t include a lot of the same ‘lean-Obama’ or ‘lean-Romney’ states. Secondly, polling before about August is going to be rather difficult to pin down since no one really pays all that much attention to the election and a lot of people are already burned out on it.

Rove is desperate to try and spin the narrative so that Romney wins. This is not surprising given that Romney is being seen as a weak candidate even among Republicans. Right now, Obama stands at around 227 likely electoral votes. That means he needs less than fifty to win.

We shall see, but it seems like the Republicans are trying to bluff their way to victory today.

U. K. Prime Minister David Cameron

I wonder….if Mitt Romney were President, and he advised a group of other nations to follow his lead in economic policy, and they did the opposite and caused more economic problems for themselves and the world, would he say “I told you so.”? We don’t need to wonder about President Obama doing that. He’s far too gracious a person. But it is tempting…..

At his first summit with leaders of the European Union, President Obama strongly urged them to do the Keynesian thing and spend during a recession. They chose to slash budgets, contract social programs and basically do everything the opposite of Keynesian economics. Those leaders were singing the same off-key tune the Republicans are here – we must reduce our national debt no matter what happens. Republicans love to point at Greece and claim that “socialist policies” created Greece’s problems and “warn” us that unless America totally rejects anything remotely “socialist” we will end up like Greece. It’s pathetically simplistic, because Greece’s problems go far beyond their national debt and their social programs.

Europe’s leaders chose the trickle-down, Ryan-budget, slash-and-burn path, and every one of them has suffered. Duh! When you remove what little income that people have, whether it’s wages or welfare, it just makes sense that they will have not money to spend to stimulate economic growth. That’s what the austerity budgets did in Europe. The fact is that anything that happens in any of the countries that use the Euro impacts all of them.. The austerity budgets shrank the amount of money people had to spend. France and Italy have already acknowledged the fact that their GDPs are stagnant or shrinking, and they are swinging back to a more liberal economic policy, or rather, they are being forced back at the polls.

But, the United Kingdom isn’t part of the Eurozone. They still have an independent currency, and a national debt sitting at 400% of their GDP, four times the ratio of America’s debt, the third highest debt ratio in Europe, eight nations higher than Greece. Surprise – the Cameron government just announced that the worst has happened. The U.K. is in a double-dip recession.

Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament the bad news yesterday. He called the economic figures “…very, very disappointing. I don’t seek to excuse them. I don’t seek to try to explain them away. There is no complacency at all in this government in dealing with what is a very tough situation, which frankly has just got tougher.” Cameron said that the government would stick with what it has been doing (doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result?) in this “painstaking, difficult work” and do “everything we can” to reverse the situation.

Labour leader Edward Millibrand called the numbers “…catastrophic….This is a recession made by him and the chancellor in Downing Street. It is his catastrophic economic policy that has landed us back in recession…Arrogant, posh boys just don’t get it.” Love that line…can we use it in our campaign?

Big, important words…DOUBLE DIP RECESSION. That is what did not happen here. Our recovery might not be stunning anyone, but there is a recovery. Our GDP has risen 3%, enough that our deficit for the six months of the 2011-12 fiscal year is down $50 billion. The debt agreement called for a reduction for the whole year of $60 billion. We are way ahead of the curve. We may not be creating millions of jobs, but we are creating jobs. Those jobs may not be high wage with good benefits, but they are allowing people to keep above the water line.

The short version of Keynesian economics is this: in a recession, spend money; in good times, save money. That simple formula is the reason President Clinton was able to balance the Federal budget and end his administration with a budget surplus that he hoped would be applied to pay down the national debt. Remember the debt – that thing that the Republicans say is looming over our children’s grandchildren like a giant axe? If the Bush administration had not cut taxes, if they had imposed an income tax surcharge to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars as Johnson did with Vietnam, our national debt would be smaller today than when Bush took office. Because Bush screwed the budget, because the Republicans deregulated the financial services industry, we are in a position where we must increase the debt to get us out of debt.

Republicans want us to look to Greece to be scared enough to restore them to power. Instead, look to the rest of Europe – the double dip recession, the rejection of conservative politicians at the polls. They learned the hard way. We don’t need to. We just need to give President Obama the means to finish the job of restoring our future. We need to take back the House and get a 60+ majority in the Senate.

Arrogant, posh boys and girls just don’t get it.

Related articles

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• European Gut Instinct: Austerity Is Wrong Response (lezgetreal.com)
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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

Based on the questions asked by the members of the Supreme Court, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was positively orgasmic over the chances her beloved S.B. 1070 “papers please law” has to be upheld by the Court. News flash for Brewer – the questions are not really an indiction of how justices will vote, just how much they feel like making an attorney queasy.

The majority of the Supreme Court are five conservative men. They don’t like the Obama administration and certainly don’t like the two female liberals they have to share the bench with because of President Obama. But, their willingness to get difficult with the administration’s Solicitor General cannot be viewed as a window into how they will vote on a constitutional issue. They are also aware of how sullied their joint reputations are, and how close they are coming to ethics violations and disclosure frauds that could jeopardize their positions.

The questions that had Brewer so happy involved whether or not it is an infringement of Federal jurisdiction for the law to demand that law enforcement officers require proof of immigration status from anyone they stop for a traffic violation. They were not aimed at the parts of the law that go way into Federal jurisdiction.

The government’s case is that we cannot have fifty different immigration laws and standards. While the Feds have improved the ability of local law enforcement to cross-check immigration standards and outstanding warrants and deportation orders with other jurisdictions, the heart of the Feds’ argument is priorities. It is the Obama administration’s policy to first go after those illegal immigrants who commit crimes other than being here without papers, which is only a Federal misdemeanor. They want the drug dealers and rapists, gang members and robbers, killers and child abusers, not the guy suntanning his butt in the strawberry fields. SB 1070 and its cousins profile all Hispanics for harassment, causing the Hispanic communities to treat law enforcement as the enemy, and seriously threatens all of law enforcement’s efforts to win co-operation from those communities in apprehending, incarcerating and deporting real criminals. It is a question of whether or not a state should be able to upend the priorities.

One of the statements from the Justices that warmed the barnacled cockles of Brewer’s heart came from Chief Justice Roberts, who said, “It seems to me the federal government just doesn’t want to know who’s here illegally or not.” That was after telling Solicitor General Donald Verrilli that the Feds were under no obligation to deport illegals being held by local law enforcement after being discovered jaywalking or being profiled because there were too many of them in a car.

Seriously? Almost every state in the union is fighting to cut costs. Do we really need to be spending a whole bunch of money to jail for days or weeks some illegal immigrant who jaywalked just to have the ICE determine that he’s no real threat to America and let him go? That would be a one-way lead-in to Fox News’ newest hysteria over the U.S. being overrun by Mexican criminals.

This case, like all others, comes down to whether or not those five men are going to give greater weight to the letter of the Constitution and over two hundred years of precedents than to the desires of their political party for a new propaganda narrative. The Constitution is clear…immigration and naturalization are the sole jurisdiction of the Federal government.

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• Democrats Plan B For Anti-Immigration Laws(lezgetreal.com)

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President Obama

Don’t be surprised if President Barack Obama appears on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report sometime in the next few months. After all, it is that time of the year. . .it’s CAMPAIGN season!

Well, President Obama went on Jimmy Fallon’s show, and he had a bit of fun. Apparently, President Barack “Tuvok” Obama does like to cut loose occasionally. At least Obama is better than Mitt Romney who is being compared to a less interesting Data from Star Trek.

The USCCB is calling for protests beginning on 21 June and ending on 4 July. According to Catholic Advocate chairman Deal Hudson the protests, which have been dubbed “A Fortnight for Freedom” will be a game-changer in the presidential election, and are suppose to be an “unprecedented, aggressive attack” against the polices that the Church leaders feel are an assault on religious freedom.

Hudson may be correct, but not for the way that he thinks. Many Americans, including the majority of Catholics and Women, feel that these institutions should be covering contraception. In fact, if it is perceived that this is just an extension in the GOP/Catholic/Christian War on Women, it could benefit President Obama greatly.

Holocaust Memorial

Speaking at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum today, President Obama announced a new program to try to limit the use of technology to suppress information and communication by repressive regimes.

When the revolution began in Egypt, protesters used Facebook and Twitter to alert people to gatherings and co-ordinate rallies. The same media were used to set up protests in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya and Syria in February, 2011. The Syrian government, alerted to the plans to stage protests in Damascus, flooded the streets with security personnel and then boasted that the Syrian people had no interest in participating in the so-called Arab Spring. The protests broke out in Deraa instead.

President Obama has issued an executive order to establish a system of sanctions when a nation has been found to be using technology to repress its citizens. The administration is acknowledging the need to try to stay at least abreast of technology, since no one can stay ahead of it. The order targets companies and individuals who provide the means for governments to use technology against those who use it. It’s a tall order. In repressive regimes, even those we consider our allies, the governments control the Internet and cellphone networks. Direct satellite usage is the only way around governments like those. It is the way bin Laden avoided detection for so many years – he used satellite phones.

With our memorial to the greatest single act of genocide in modern history, the President addressed the problem of trying to prevent genocide and mass murder for suppression of dissent. He has ordered a National Intelligence Estimate – a co-ordinated report from all intelligence agencies – on the potential for use of mass murder in other countries and what their impact could be on American interests, which include national security and economic impacts. He is setting up a set of “challenge” grants to encourage tech companies to develop new technologies to alert citizens in these countries of impending attacks and has set up a panel to act as a central clearing house for intelligence, policy making and other issues relating to mass killings, such as humanitarian aid to refugees. The Atrocities Prevention Board was established in August and is headed by Samantha Power, who is the National Security Council’s senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights.

When the United Nations chose to become involved in Libya, the primary issue was the threat by the Qaddafi regime to “make the desert run red” and “kill every man, woman and child” in the rebel east. Our response to atrocities has been delayed in the past, in Bosnia and Rwanda for example, or non-existent, in countries that were our Cold War allies like Chile.

The President spoke about Syria during his address. There is speculation that the al-Assad regime may have used technology to target foreign journalists in Homs. When the Arab League monitors were there, a mortar shell fell among the journalists accompanying them. It was not part of a random shelling at the time. One French photojournalist was killed. Then, during the siege of Homs, a shell fell on the house where foreign journalists were gathered to report on the carnage, killing two reporters. The belief is that their technology allowed the regime to target them. The executive order states, “the same GPS, satellite communications, mobile phone and Internet technology employed by democracy activists across the Middle East and North Africa is being used against them by the regimes in Syria and Iran.”

The first sanctions being imposed are U. S. visa bans and financial restrictions on two Syrian “entities,” a Syrian individual and four Iranian “entities.” “Entities” can mean either government agencies or private companies.

The administration is hoping that technology companies, mindful of the possibility of sanctions, will be more responsible in who they sell their products to, but no one could be that naive. Companies are rarely known for their collective morality.

The Atrocities Prevention Board will be holding its first meeting next Monday, and will be reaching out to representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), university anti-genocide groups and others who are involved in the problem. Power, who is a published author on the subject of genocide, said, “This [board] doesn’t make atrocities go away, but it does give us a new set of tools and should prevent presidents from ever saying again that they didn’t have options to confront mass killings.” Unless future presidents shut down the board the way Bush 43 shut down the pursuit of Osama bin Laden before 9-11.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum is holding a series of events for Holocaust Remembrance. President Obama’s appearance is among their first events. During his speech, he spoke off-the-cuff about his visit to Buchenwald Prison Camp with Elie Weisel, who told the President that the Jewish people could have chosen to submit, to fade into the background, to retreat, but they chose to stand up for their rights, for the right of all humans to live in dignity. Obama also related his new focus on atrocities to the Holocaust, which progressed as far as it did because so many nations chose not to intervene on behalf of the Jews. Members of the Roosevelt administration have said that President Roosevelt knew he could not intervene in Europe on behalf of the Jews. It simply would not have had American support. He had to wait for Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against America before he could do anything.

President Obama acknowledged that the United States cannot physically intervene everywhere that atrocities are being conducted. There should never be another ten-year war with loss of American lives and great American debt based on allegations of atrocities committed by a foreign government. But there are things we as a nation should do, out of moral imperative and human compassion. Finding a way to do so without engaging militarily is what this executive order initiates.

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• Obama unveils Syria, Iran technology sanctions(hazimiai.wordpress.com)

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• Obama order targets technology used for human-rights abuses – The Hill’s DEFCON Hill(mbcalyn.com)

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• Obama Wants Sanctions On Those Using Technology In Human Rights Abuses(techcrunch.com)

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• US unveils Syria and Iran technology sanctions(mytechnologyworld9.blogspot.com)

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• Obama Clamps Down on Tech-Based Humans Rights Abuse By Foreign Nationals [Politics](gizmodo.com)

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• Obama targets technologies that abuse human rights (security.blogs.cnn.com)

Van Jones

In the spirit of fairness, it is necessary to call out Van Jones for his interview on AllHipHop.com which was excerpted on The Blaze. Jones was, for a whole six months, the White House’s Green Energy Czar, until the fact that he is an avowed communist became a problem for the Obama administration and Jones resigned. The right wing pointed to Jones and built the myth that President Obama is a Marxist-Maoist-communist-socialist-fascist (which of the five is not like the others?) Muslim Kenyan. On top of the revelations that the President’s former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave a couple of anti-white, anti-American rants from his pulpit, Jones was a blessing to the right wing. They could go so far beyond just putting the President down as a “community organizer,” ignoring his career as a university lecturer. Guilty by close association was so much better than guilty of having taken a class in college or studying the apolitical works of Saul Alinsky.

Now, on the heels of Ted Nugent’s National Rifle Association rant, Van Jones has handed the right wing more fodder for their anti-Obama propaganda. For those who have never heard of it, AllHipHop.com is a fourteen-year-old hip hop news website. It has five million visitors a month, making it the most popular hip hop site on the web. The Blaze is a conservative news and opinion website founded by Glenn Beck right after his Washington rally in August, 2010. So, what you have is a hip hop website getting 166,667 hits a day being quoted to Glenn Beck’s fanbase.

Ted Nugent, on the other hand, spoke live to 30,000 National Rifle Association members on the same day they gathered to hear speeches from major Republican leaders including their candidate for President. Jones ranted about jobs and Nugent called for chopping the heads off Democrats in November. Major case of false equivalency once again.

But, even liberals and progressives need to distance themselves from what Jones was saying. He is neither a liberal nor a progressive, but a full-blown communist in a world transitioning away from communism because it is a failed system.

Jones compared factory workers, fast food restaurants and retail stores with drug dealers and slave master. His comments bordered on racism and extreme class warfare. His point was that our factories create pollution and kill people. During the interview, Jones called for the end of all pollution-creating industries and restaurants that serve unhealthy foods. His message is being put out by the right wing as “proof” Obama is really anti-job and anti-labor, which is sort of funny given that the right wing is so determinedly anti-labor.

Jones is a fanatic, as deeply committed to cleaning up the planet as Ted Nugent is to owning guns and being able to shoot as many bears as he wants. He does not speak for the administration any more than Nugent speaks for Mitt Romney.

Neither of them should be taken for spokesmen for the candidates in this election, but the fuss The Blaze is making over Van Jones misses the point about Ted Nugent. Days before the 17^th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, before an audience of ardent gun owners, Nugent was talking violently about Supreme Court justices, the President, cabinet secretaries and members of Congress. Jones wasn’t talking about blowing up factories or shooting up a KFC.

The Republicans are very big on false equivalencies this year…Bill Maher’s very small cable audience is not Rush Limbaugh’s millions, Hillary Rosen is not part of the President’s election staff and Van Jones’ public endorsement of the Obama campaign was not sought out as Nugent’s endorsement of Romney was. The scales are not balancing here, no matter how balanced Fox News claims itself to be.

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• No Republican Should Welcome Ted Nugent’s Endorsement(lezgetreal.com)

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• Cagle Post ” Reaction to Nugent Showcases Manufactured Outrage On The Right(mbcalyn.com)

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Front: Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Bader Gingsburg. Rear: Justices Sotomayor, Breyer, Alito Kagan

Arizona v. United States, No. 11-182 (2012) is the official name of the case. The State of Arizona is suing to enforce Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which Governor Jan Brewer signed on April 23, 2010, making it an Arizona misdemeanor for an undocumented immigrant to be in Arizona without a green card, authorized state and local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration laws and created penalties for sheltering, hiring or transporting illegal immigrants. Specifically, the law required police to check immigration status of anyone being detained for a crime or just suspected of being an illegal, required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, bar illegals from seeking work in public places (as in sites on street corners where men or women stand around waiting for someone to offer them day labor), and allowed arrests without warrants on suspicion of any deportable crime.

The Obama administration cried foul. According to the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, “The Congress shall have Power…to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” The “immigration laws” passed by Congress in 1790, 1795, 1798 and 1870 all dealt with naturalization. The first law limiting immigration was passed in 1875. It and the laws of 1891, 1892, 1903, 1906, 1917 and 1918 all dealt with “undesirable” immigrants, specifically, Asians. The first real immigration law was passed in 1921, limiting immigrants from any country to 3% of the number of people from that country living in the United States in 1910. The next major immigration law was designed to keep out European Jews. There have been a total of 22 Federal laws passed dealing with immigration and naturalization.

To this day, being in the United States “illegally” is a misdemeanor.

The Feds object to Arizona SB1070 because it treads on Federal jurisdiction in a matter which effects all fifty states. The also do not want local law enforcement getting in the way of the Border Patrol and most of Arizona’s local law enforcement doesn’t want to. To them, the task of enforcing Federal law is an unnecessary burden on already overtaxed police departments and sheriff’s offices.

State Senator Russell Pearce, who was defeated in a recall election in November, pushed the law because his son was shot by an illegal immigrant years ago. Governor Brewer signed it because of “headless corpses” in the Arizona desert. They sold the idea to Arizona residents as a way to stop drug crime, not as a way to end illegal immigration. Since Arizona SB 1070 was passed, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah have passed similar laws. Portions of them will be effected by the ruling handed down by the Supreme Court in this case.

The states have claimed that these laws are necessary because the Obama administration isn’t doing its job protecting our border. They were all passed by Republican legislatures. No one ever made this much fuss over lack of border protection when a Republican was in the White House. The Obama administration’s record on border protection and arrest and deportation of illegals is impressive. A half-million potential crossers were stopped at the border, another half-million have been arrested and deported, and most importantly, the administration set up a network that can be accessed by any law enforcement agency in the country so that illegals who commit crimes do not simply cross state lines and get away. They have also greatly expanded the verification service for employers.

The issue that will be heard in oral arguments this week is jurisdiction. Who has jurisdiction over immigration – the individual states or the Federal government? The Constitution did not specifically address immigration because our founding fathers did not foresee a time when we would want to limit the number of immigrants coming to America. They also didn’t envision the United States including Hawaii and Alaska and having 311 million citizens.

The stupidest piece of propaganda to come out of the immigration battle says that Obama was elected with the illegal votes of illegal immigrants. To the right wing, that explains McCain losing by 9.5 million votes. There are 11.5 million illegals. The “illegal immigrant vote” is also the driver behind the new voter ID laws which are also making their way through the Federal court system. There’s only one thing wrong with their “logic” – if you take the vote statistics from the 2008 election, deduct a number from Obama’s votes equal to the number of illegals in the state, he would still have won. Obama would have lost 42 electoral votes, but the total would have been 323-215 instead of 365-173. Even if every one of the illegal immigrants in America right down to the smallest child had voted for Obama, they would not be the reason he won.

As in all Supreme Court cases, there will be oral arguments this week which will not be televised. There will be endless dissection of the arguments by commentators and analysts on the news programs and it will be weeks, if not months before we know the Court’s ruling.

This one should provide a better gauge of the Court than the Affordable Care Act ruling will. The conservative justices are supposed to be absolute sticklers for the Constitution, unlike those “activist” liberal justices. But the Constitution and the entire history of immigration legislation lays jurisdiction clearly in the Congress. If the Court should rule in favor of the State of Arizona, posterity will have its proof that this is one of the most biased Supreme Courts in our history.

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• Supreme Court to hear Arizona immigration case this week – MiamiHerald.com(miamiherald.com)

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• Arizona’s illegal immigrants adapt to life under a crackdown(staradvertiser.com)

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"Auto da Fe, what's an Auto da Fe?" "It's what you au'tntado but you do any way."

“Hey, you know, it was just, ya know, that Historical Context thingy we’ve all been hearing so much about.” That seems to be the response from the Diocese of Peoria over remarks made by Bishop Daniel Jenky regarding President Barack Obama. Supposedly, Jenky was making comments regarding historical context and religious liberty.

Jenky stated “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda – now seems intent on following a similar path.”

If we want to discuss historical context, let us talk about how the Roman Catholic Church systematically slaughtered Jews, Heretics, Pagans and Witches during the Inquisition, or how they put every man, woman and child to death in Jerusalem during the Crusades, or how they cut treaties with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco to protect their interests in this Fascist nations. How about the several invasions of Ireland and England to try and restore Catholicism to the throne or the religious wars that saw the slaughter of millions of people in Europe over the issue of whether or not someone followed the Pope.

Context can be a real kick in the nuts, huh, Bishop?

Diocese Chancellor Patricia Gibson stated that Jenky “offered historical context and comparisons as a means to prevent a repetition of historical attacks upon the Catholic Church and other religions. We have currently not reached the same level of persecution. But Bishop Jenky would say that history teaches us to be cautious. … (He) is concerned that our government is truly treading on one of our most dear freedoms, which is religious freedom.”

Persecution is not being required to meet women’s healthcare needs. Persecution is when the state starts rounding you up, putting you in concentration camps or just marching you out to a massive hole in the ground and filling you full of lead until you die from lead poisoning. Persecution is not being told to get use to same-sex marriage being legal. Persecution is being informed that your church is being closed down by order of the state and you being rounded up and taken away.

This isn’t about religious freedom. This is about religious domination. Jenky is terrified that his religious beliefs will be prevented from dominating others.

The Huffington Post reported that:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, meanwhile, filed a formal complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the diocese, suggesting Jenky may have crossed a line that put the church’s tax-exempt status in jeopardy.

The group noted that in addition to the comments about Hitler and Obama, Jenky went on to tell those gathered Sunday that, “This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries – only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down.”

“No rational person could believe the bishop was doing anything but saying vote against Obama,” said the group’s executive director, Barry Lynn.

Federal law prohibits churches and other tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing or opposing specific political candidates, but churches are allowed to engage in a wide range of political activities and the IRS rarely revokes a church’s tax-exempt status.

Of course, this isn’t stopping Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Illinois from saying that Obama’s “radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda” is violating the First Amendment and showing that OBama is “intent on following a similar path” as Hitler and Stalin. Jenky is upset that Obama has issued rules that would require Catholic institutions to provide birth control to women- something that the Roman Catholic Church, in their War on Women, would like to see not happen. In fact, the Catholic Church would like to abolish all contraception in the United States.

Jenky claimed that American Catholics are supposedly at “war” with Obama over these things saying “May God have mercy especially on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil.”

The Diocese of Peoria tried to clarify Jenky’s comments saying “Based upon the current government’s threatened infringement upon the Church’s religious exercise of its ministry, Bishop Jenky offered historical context and comparisons as a means to prevent a repetition of historical attacks upon the Catholic Church and other religions.”

The Catholic Church has shown not only a distrust of their own people, but a continued belief that they must force all non-Catholics to follow their religious beliefs because of their theocratic beliefs.

Rabbi Daniel Bogard of Peoria’s Anshai Emeth congregation stated that “casual use of the Holocaust and tragedy in general is really inappropriate. It’s demagoguery. These are very serious things. The Holocaust is not his to use.”

During the Holocaust, Jews were the largest population to be exterminated by Hitler with approximately 5,9 million Jews dying. Roughly 2.5 million Soviet POWs, 1.9 million Ethnic Poles, 1.5 million Romani, 225,000 disabled, 80,000 Freemasons, 22,500 Slovenes, 10,000 gays, and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed during the Holocaust. Hitler also rounded up communists, socialists, and trade labor unionists. Anyone he felt could threaten his power, he rounded up. In fact, it was not until well into World War II and several bishops began speaking out against Hitler that the Third Reich began to retaliate against Catholics. Initially, Catholic bishops supported the Hitler regime and Pope Pius even negotiated an accord with Hitler to protect Catholics and give Hitler legitimacy in the eyes of Catholics in Germany.

According to The Huffington Post:

The Anti-Defamation League, meanwhile, is demanding a policy from Jenky for remarks its regional director Lonnie Nasatir deemed not only “outrageous, offensive and completely over the top,” but also historically inaccurate, the Tribune reports.

And, no, Obama is not on the same path as Hitler or Stalin, and for Jenky to say so just shows how out of touch not only he, but the Catholic Church is on this issue. It is no longer surprising that the Church is losing power and membership these days.

Below is a statement from Freedom to Work’s founder and president Tico Almeida:

“Today’s congressional hearing featured three Republican-selected witnesses, including business representatives, and not a single one of them complained about the proposal to add LGBT Americans to the Labor Department’s rules that ensure taxpayer dollars are not squandered by discriminatory contractors who allow anti-gay hostile work environments. Not a single Republican member of Congress who attended the hearing complained either. That’s because our LGBT proposal is completely non-controversial and politically safe, as shown by HRC’s polling data that 73% of 2012 likely voters favor President Obama signing the executive order promoting workplace fairness and eliminating discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Moreover, America’s top contractors – companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon – adopted LGBT non-discrimination rules many years ago because they realize that ending harassment improves worker productivity and company profits.”

“Ever since I attended the White House meeting last Wednesday with Valerie Jarrett, White House spokesperson Jay Carney has been ducking questions from the press and making up lame excuses to justify the President’s delay in signing this executive order that Barack Obama promised four years ago he would sign if we helped elect him. I agree with the Center for American Progress and the Human Rights Campaign that President Obama should sign the LGBT order now. To quote the President’s own words, ‘We can’t wait.’”

This morning in Roll Call, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) commented on the White House meeting last week, during which White House staff gave indications of their unwillingness to sign an executive order “at this time.”

Polis told Roll Call, “Without a Congress that’s willing to pass [the Employment Non-Discrimination Act], I wish the president was a little more aggressive to pursue nondiscrimination.”

Two weeks ago, the Ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and Workforce, George Miller (D-CA), was among 72 members of Congress to write to President Obama urging him to sign the LGBT order. In addition, more than 110,000 Americans have signed Freedom to Work’s online petition to President Obama.

So, how can the government lose $50 billion a year without cutting the Pentagon budget? Well, how about cutting food stamps?

If the Republicans have their way in Congress, which they can, on September 1^st, the average family of four will lose 11% of their food stamp allotment, and the qualifications for receiving food stamps will be severely cut. Before a family could receive food stamps, they would have to be almost completely destitute.

Let’s say you are among the long-term unemployed. You have survived on a combination of unemployment benefits, which range between 30% and 60% of your former paychecks (the 60% is rare, 40% is average), and whatever you might have saved and food stamps. The savings enable you to keep up with the payments you agreed to, like your rent or mortgage and car payments, before you lost your job. Under the new rules, you would have to get rid of your savings before you could get food stamps. You will only be allowed to have less than $2,000 to qualify. So, there you are, your income has been cut in half or cut by two-thirds and you cannot have any money to fill in the blanks. You just lost 11% of your food stamp money to boot. The average food stamp benefit is $133 a month. The cuts would reduce that to $118.

The next Republican to talk about how the poverty rate in America has risen under President Obama deserves to be removed from office. Unemployment benefits and food stamps have kept many unemployed Americans from falling below the poverty level.

The Republicans love to say that President Obama is the “food stamp President” and they argue that they are just cutting back his “hammock to a safety net.” Gee, and they had nothing to do with deregulating the financial services industry so that it collapsed our economy and less to do with removing President Clinton’s barriers to companies taking jobs and money overseas. Oh, they also had nothing to do with two unfunded wars and an expansion of the defense budget. When George W. Bush became president, the Defense Department budget was $400 billion. Today it is $707.5 billion. That’s a 76.9% increase.

And food stamps? Well, in Bush’s last budget, the USDA requested $60 billion for nutrition progams, up 76% from his first budget request of $34 billion. This year, the USDA is spending $65 billion for the same programs. President Obama raised food stamps by a paltry 8%.

This will, obviously, not get past either the Democratic Senate or the President, and the Republicans will make a big campaign issue of President Obama spending American taxpayers hard earned money on lazy lay-abouts who will vote for the President just to save their entitlements. They will continue calling him the “food stamp President.” The only response is the facts: Bush raised the Pentagon budget and the food stamp budget by 76%. No Republican made an issue of deficits or the national debt until McCain was running in 2008, and then, suddenly, it was a national crisis that threatened our great-great-grandchildren and only the Republicans could save us from it.

They created this mess. They should be made to own it.

Related articles

• House panel to take up GOP food stamp cuts (upi.com)
• Why Isn’t Bush A “Food Stamp President”? (pinkbananaworld.com)
• USDA report concludes the obvious: Food stamps reduce impact of poverty (dailykos.com)
• Jesse Jackson: ‘It’s an Honor to Be a Food Stamp President’ (newsbusters.org)
• Liberals Offended by “Food Stamp President” Label, While Obama Gives Away More Food Stamp Grants (usamericanfreedom.com)
• Republicans to slash food stamps (politico.com)

Mitt and Ann Romney

There were a few images from the Clinton-Bush 1992 election that still stand out in memory. There was George H.W. not knowing what a grocery store scanner was. There was Bill knowing the price of a pound of hamburger and a gallon of milk. There was Barbara joking about her mother-in-law’s piano being washed out to sea during a nor’easter that damaged the family compound at Kennebunkport. There were dozens of California families weeping over their lost homes and possessions after raging brush fires. There was Bill talking about his mother, a working woman, her broken marriages, his father and stepfather. We didn’t have the terms 1% and 99% at that time, but the idea was there – Clinton was a 99%er who didn’t start making big money until after he left the Presidency and Bush was a 1% whose family had deep ties to the Saudi Royal Family and their oil.

Now, we do have those terms, and even though President Obama speaks of himself as a member of the 1% because of his income, it is understood that he was not always that way, that there was a working mother who left him to be raised by his grandparents, that she had two broken marriages, that she died too young partially because of the broken health insurance system in America, that he and his wife struggled with their student loan debt, that they know what the inside of a Target looks like and still shop there. He had a 99% life that became a 1% life through hard work and ambition. That’s the America dream, isn’t it? That’s what all of us hope for for ourselves and our children and grandchildren – a fair shot at the American dream.

And Mitt Romney? Well, that’s been a 1% life from the get-go. The Romneys haven’t really lived a 1% lifestyle all the time, not an ostentatious one at least. They had a strong streak of normalcy to them, a tendency to pile into a car for vacation instead of taking a jet, but it was never a matter of necessity, only of choice. And therein lies the difference. Mitt has chosen to stash his millions away in off-shore accounts. He has chosen to pursue the Presidency with the air of someone who believes he is just as entitled to it as he was to his trust fund. Mitt likes to talk about how he was successful, and isn’t that a good thing, but he had a massive jump start on that success, just the way the Bushes have.

The campaign to remove Barack Obama from the White House, in Mitt Romney’s hands, will come down to one issue – the economy. The Republicans still haven’t figured out why Bush 41 lost, so they can’t see how Romney will as well. For the past thirty-two years, since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, the American middle class has been paying dearly for the Republican “trickle-down, supply-side economics.” The middle class has shrunk, our incomes have shrunk, our poverty levels have increased. We have been riding a roller coaster of booms and busts, each bust deeper than the one before it.

And since 1980, women have favored Democratic candidates over Republicans in national elections. The 12% gap that favored Obama over McCain with women has grown to 18% favoring Obama over Romney. That’s a steep hill to climb and Romeny isn’t getting any help from his party on this one.

That “Ryan budget” that Romney likes so much? Well, it includes a return to block granting of Federal money for Federal programs. The last time we did that was under Reagan and the cost was day care. Because day care was not a mandated Federal program in the same way welfare and Medicaid was, it could be cut from the block grant money. That drove more women back onto welfare than any other factor in the Reagan years. For states, it was cheaper to keep a family on welfare than subsidize day care for four kids. The Republicans favor a return to the economic policies of Reagan and the Bushes, policies that sent millions of women into retail and hospitality jobs which paid at or just above minimum wage, were not full-time employment and had no health insurance. While the Republicans call Obama the “food stamp president” women know that it was the Bush administration that sent so many of us to Medicaid for health care for our children while we went without.

Republican strategists are saying that all Romney has to do is keeping talking about the economy and highlighting his wife to win over women voters. Fat chance. We’re not that stupid, guys. Look at the Forbes 400 list of billionaires. Not a lot of women on it, are there? Thirty-six to be exact, and only 9 of them are readily identifiable as not inheriting their money. Only 9% of America’s top 400 billionaires are women. Not exactly economic equality, is it? Those are the people Republican economic policies favor – the misnamed “job creators” who didn’t get where they are by creating decent paying jobs with good benefits. They got where they are by outsourcing our jobs, cutting domestic workforces to the bone and using every possible legal means to deny their employees health insurance.

In traditional macho-male societies, women fall into two categories – madonnas and whores. That has been the message this year from Republicans, from Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman who calls single motherhood “child abuse” to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” to all those men who claim that all women want is to kill their babies and have unlimited sex, so they need to cut off their drug dealers and defund Planned Parenthood. The wives of the Republican front runners aren’t helping that image. Karen Santorum is dedicated mother, but she’s also a nurse and a lawyer who has spent the past twenty years having babies and home schooling them. Ann Romney is a very nice lady who has never had to work and never had to put off paying one bill to pay another. They aren’t exactly connecting with working class American women. When Ann Romney talks about women’s issues, she says things like this: “Do you know what women care about? Women care about jobs. They’re angry and they’re furious about the entitlement debt that we’re leaving for our children.” Really? Sorry, Ann, but for too many of us, that “entitlement debt” – the part of the national debt that is caused by “entitlement” programs – that’s what’s feeding our kids and letting them go to the doctor, and supporting our elderly parents or disabled relatives so we don’t have to. How about the part of the debt caused by two unfunded wars that killed our husbands, fathers and sons, wives, mothers and daughters, or sent them home crippled and traumatized? How about the part caused by bailing out your husband’s fellow travelers, those Wall Street wizards who turned our mortgages into “financial instruments” and forced them into foreclosure? Frankly, my dear, most of us have not been indoctrinated by Fox News. We know better than to blame Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security for our national debt or our jobs crisis.

At this point, the only hope the Republican Party has of convincing women that they should vote Republican is not to tailor the message or send “Mrs. 1%” out on the campaign trail. The Party leadership needs to rein in the extremists, reverse the laws they have passed that hurt women, get misogynists like Grothman and Limbaugh to shut up, fund the largest provider of health care services for women in America and stop lying about it, admit that criminalizing abortions does not end abortions, get real and get honest about the false promise of trickle down economics, and put Fox News on notice that you will not support any more propaganda. In short, stop hurting us, insulting us and stop lying to us.

Yeah, and that will happen when the sun rises in the west.

Related articles

• Romney in fight to get female vote (timesleader.com)
• Challenges facing Romney in wooing female voters (newsday.com)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are joined by their daughters, Sasha and Malia, and Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, Monday, April 13, 2009, as they wave from the South Portico of the White House to guests attending the White House Easter Egg Roll. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Reading about the President’s remarks at the White House Easter Prayer Breakfast Wednesday morning, I suddenly realized why right wing fanatics think he’s not Christian. Barack Obama is more Christian than they are.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, 6:5-14, Christ told his followers, “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Verily, I say unto you, They have their reward. But, thou, when thou prayest, enter into they closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. After this manner, therefore pray ye: Our Father, who art in Heaven….” You probably know the rest, with or without the Protestant addendum.

President Obama does not make a show of his faith. The First Family decided that their presence at a Sunday service in a Washington church would be disruptive to the congregation, a very Christian decision, to put others before themselves. The President prays daily. He just does it quietly, in the privacy of the family quarters, not in front of an audience. He does exactly what Christ told us to do. With the exception of The Lord’s Prayer, there are no formal prayers in the Gospels, no ceremonies, no rituals, no titles of bishops or cardinals or even priests. Christianity, in its beginning, was a faith of the people. Over time, the Roman Church wiped out all branches that practiced a simple faith of the people. The Protestant Reformation was supposed to restore that pure church. Instead, it has given us megachurches and televangelists and predictions about the future that verge on soothsaying.

During his remarks, the President spoke simply of how he draws strength from his faith, and how the life of Christ helps him put our lives and times in perspective. He said, “It was only because Jesus conquered his own anguish, conquered his fear, that we are able to celebrate the resurrection. It helps us provide an eternal perspective for whatever temporal challenges we face. It puts in perspective our small problems. It gives us courage. It gives us hope.”

Hope is what Easter is all about, isn’t it? The hope of eternal life, the hope of redemption. It has always been about hope, when it was the pagan festival of spring and when it was the Jewish festival of Passover. They are all bound together in a simple set of rituals celebrating renewal and life, and they frequently overlap on our modern calendars.

Those who trade in hate and fear have spread the lie that the President is a Muslim, from some anonymous woman at a McCain rally who called him an “Arab” to Rev. Franklin Graham who still has not recanted his lie that Muslims become Muslims through their father’s sperm. President Obama is a Christian by choice. Exposed to every manner of religious thought in the world, he chose to be baptized as a Christian as a adult. Admitting that would diminish those who spread the lies. They didn’t make the same choice in the same way.

Related articles

• Christian Historian Defends Obama (lezgetreal.com)
• Franklin Graham: Well, Obama Says He’s a Christian (lezgetreal.com)
• Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House (whitehouse.gov)
• Easter/passover Ramblings (ourpoetrycorner.wordpress.com)
• One in a Garden: An Easter Reflection (pnissila.wordpress.com)

Murder is a rare occurrence in Vermont. There have been way too many murders of young children in the past few years, child abuse gone horribly wrong. There are too many cases of anger between those who know each other going too far. And there are increasingly too many cases of killings involving the drug trade. But, what happened here last week was unfathomable to Vermonters. A young, popular teacher, the mother of a toddler, was dragged from her vehicle, murdered and her body dumped miles away. Her son was found in her abandoned car. We all held our breaths. Maybe….but it was not to be. She had been murdered, senselessly, stupidly, with no comprehensible motive.

The front page of our local newspapers yesterday pretty much defined how we viewed Friday. At the top, above the fold as newspaper afficionados put it, was the story of the President’s visit. Below the fold, taking up just as much print space, was the funeral.

Melissa Jenkins’ funeral was the same day that President Obama spent four hours in Vermont, attending a rally, attending a high rollers fundraiser. He mentioned her at the start of his speech, mentioned that the dignitaries sitting near here would be going from Burlington to St. Johnsbury for her funeral, conveyed his and Michelle’s condolences to her son. As many people turned out to publicly mourn Melissa Jenkins as turned out to hear the President, or at least it seemed that way.

There is an old essay that sums up Vermonters. It was written in 1624 by John Donne and called Devotions. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of a continent; a part of the main….and therefore never send to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” President Obama noted this about Vermonters. We take deaths like Melissa’s personally, just the way we have taken Brooke Bennett’s death and every death in Iraq and Afghanistan personally. We may have never met the victims, but we feel the loss. We hang Fourth of July buntings with tears in our eyes the day after hearing of the death of one of “our” Guardsmen on the other side of the world. It is a phenomenon that turns us from a half-million residents of a small state into Vermonters. It’s part of what transpired last August and September with and after Tropical Storm Irene, the sense that we are not individuals, but part of a whole.

The President was here. He raised money for his campaign, about three-quarters of a million dollars. He gave a nice speech, but nothing really unexpected. All politics is local, and we will be more focused on the re-election campaigns of Senator Sanders and Representative Welch than on the Presidential race. We sort of know already who will win that. We had our moment in the Presidential sun in 2008, when our state was declared for Barack Obama and he was declared the President-elect in one breath, at 11:01 p.m. on election day. Never happened before and probably never happen again.

We thank him for finally remembering that we are here, even if it was for fund raising. We were kind of ticked off at him for going to New Jersey after Irene and not showing up here. Dubya never came here. We were the only state he didn’t visit. His only interest in Vermont was sending our National Guard to war over and over and over again. Michelle has been here a couple of times. Nice lady. We would appreciate it, however, if one of them realized that there is more to Vermont than Burlington. But, we would also like it if Rachel Ray, who grew up on our western border, realized there is more to Vermont than Woodstock and the interstate.

Well, that’s life in Vermont. Washington matters, but not nearly as much as our neighbors.

Related articles

• Obama to Vermont and Maine for fundraisers (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Obama to Vermont and Maine for fundraisers (whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com)
• President Obama Gave a Hell of a Speech in Vermont Today (slog.thestranger.com)
• Couple reportedly arrested in killing of Vermont teacher Melissa Jenkins – Fox News (foxnews.com)
• Arrests reported in Vermont in murder of St. Johnsbury Academy teacher Melissa Jenkins (boston.com)

Rep. Ron Paul

Ron Paul is out there to try and save the GOP from themselves. It is a crusade that the masses have not seen since the days of Don Quixote. Ron Paul’s attitude may be along the lines of saving the GOP from themselves, but his Ayn Rand based philosophy would be a disaster when it comes to the cultural structure of the nation.

Still, Paul stated on CBS’ Face the Nation that “The truth is, I’m trying to save the Republican Party from themselves because they want perpetual wars, they don’t care about presidents who assassinate American citizens, they don’t care about searching our houses without search warrants, and these are the kind of things people care about.”

Paul is refusing to backdown from his run for the Presidency saying that “The votes haven’t been counted … there’s no way I’m going to quit speaking out on this and there’s no way I’m going to give up on the effort to get the Republicans back to their roots.”

He is also critical of Obama’s handling of the Afghan War, apparently ignoring that Obama has already started the drawback. He stated that “It was a waste, there’s not gonna be a happy ending, and I think the Republicans have dug a hole for themselves because they’re trying to out-militarize the president, say ‘we should do more.’ Yet 75 percent of the American people say ‘we’ve had enough’.”

Paul finally stated that “The other Republican candidates offer nothing more than a continuation of a status quo or actually increasing the militarism we have around the worst so I think that’s a losing position.”

Via Huffington Post

President Barack Obama

One thing that President Obama proposed to help our economy was the JOBS bill, a method of easing the way new businesses could be started. It lifts Security and Exchange Commission restrictions on advertising for investors, allows the pooling of small investors to help entrepreneurs raise capital, allows companies to sell up to $50 million worth of shares before registering with the SEC and lifts the cap on shareholders from 500 to 1,000. What that translates into a way for an entrepreneur to put together a large group of middle class and upper middle class investors to start his or her business instead of needing a small number of very rich investors. It not only makes it easier to launch a business, but opens investing to a broader base of people. Critics say that the bill will allow companies to avoid disclosure of crucial financial information and government oversight, which could lead to fraud and investor abuse.

The Senate passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act last week, and on Tuesday, the House passed it by a 380 to 41 vote. It is almost precedent-setting. The Republican opposition actually passed a bill supported by the President, and the sky didn’t fall in.

Up next month is a bill that would create a 20% tax cut to growing companies. The Democratic Senate proposed it this week, it is in line with the President’s requests for tax cuts to truly small businesses and offers tax credits to companies hiring new workers or increasing the size of their payroll, like giving raises.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Republican Virginia

Of course, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia took the opportunity today for a victory lap. It helps that the President is overseas today. Cantor didn’t have to share the limelight on the bill. He said that the passage was “an increasingly rare legislative victory in Washington where both sides seized the opportunity to work together, improved the bill and passed it with strong bipartisan support.”

Facing a 9% to 11% approval rating for the past year, the Republicans in Congress may have finally figured out that if they don’t start addressing economic issues instead of obsessing over women’s vaginas and uteri, they may not have a chance to be obstructionist in President Obama’s second term, or even be supportive of a hoped-for President Romney.

Related articles

• Congress Approves Startup-Focused JOBS Act (mashable.com)
• Tale of two jobs bills: a parable of gridlock in Congress (csmonitor.com)
• Crowdfunding Bill Passes Senate! (isellerfinance.wordpress.com)
• Eric Cantor Can’t Explain Congress’ Lousy Poll Numbers (crooksandliars.com)
• Congress sends startup investment bill to Obama (sfgate.com)
• House Passes Bipartisan Bill (huffingtonpost.com)

Comedian Bill Maher

In defending Rush Limbaugh, conservatives keep pointing to comedian Bill Maher. Maher has said a lot of nasty things over the years. It’s what he’s famous for – being a foul-mouthed man with very strong opinions. But is he the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh? Not bloody hardly.

Maher has a show on the pay-cable channel HBO called Real Time with Bill Maher. He ended up on HBO because he was too politically incorrect for network and basic cable where he had shows before HBO. Real Time is an hour long and HBO runs a half-dozen repeats during a week. The show celebrated its ninth anniversary on February 21. In nine years and one month, there have been 242 episodes of Real Time. That’s an average of 27 episodes a year.

The Rush Limbaugh Show runs Monday through Friday for three hours each day on FM radio. I’ll be nice and assume he doesn’t broadcast on the ten national holidays. When he is on vacation or another honeymoon, he has a substitute host. The Rush Limbaugh Showwent national in August, 1988. He has broadcast approximately 5,900 times since then, at three hours each time.

That’s 17,700 hours of Rush Limbaugh compared to 243 hours of Bill Maher. Nice equivalent, isn’t it? It’s a 73:1 ratio.

Then, there’s the venue itself. The last time I asked, when managing a laundromat, pay cable cannot be piped into commercial spaces. You will not see an HBO movie in the laundromat any more than you will see a DVD. In order to see Bill Maher, one must first subscribe to HBO and then choose to watch the show, which is on late in the evening. Limbaugh is on FM radio, which is not restricted from commercial spaces. It is broadcast from noon to three. I have heard it in offices, both businesses and doctors’, in laundromats, in the waiting area of auto repair shops, in restaurants and even on a public bus. Rush Limbaugh is not restricted to the privacy of the listeners’ homes. His fans think nothing of imposing their choice of venom on innocent bystanders. Maher averages 300,000 viewers for the first run of his show. He may double that with the repeats. Limbaugh claims to have 15 million listeners daily, though that number is disputed because of the way radio ratings are done. That does not include the number of people who are stuck listening to him against their will. Another nice equivalent, a 25:1 ratio if we are very, very generous to Maher.

But, the right is having the vapors over Bill Maher. They keep quoting his shows to prove that the left is just as vile as Limbaugh. That may be true, but there is no way that Maher’s impact is equal to Limbaugh’s.

Ann Coulter (by Stephen Lovekin, Getty Images)

The ever caustic Ann Coulter has decided that because Bill Maher said some nasty things about Sarah Palin’s kids, conservatives should “go after” the Obama girls. She and Sean Hannity alleged that liberals have made fun of Palin’s Down’s Syndrome son and Rick Santorum’s sick daughter. The very worst you can accuse liberals of is being slow on the uptake for political correctness for Down’s Syndrome. People still use the words “retard” and “retarded” without thinking. But the references to Palin’s son and Santorum’s daughter have less to do with the children’s conditions than with what their parents did. Palin used to lug her son around like a sack of potatoes, with him always facing away from her. She passed him off to her youngest daughter constantly. She was never seen to actually interact with him, other than to show off his Halloween costume once. And knowing that he was going to be a Down’s Syndrome child, she decided to fly from Texas to Alaska when she went into labor with him, risking having him born in the plane without medical assistance. We criticized her parenting, not the child. The same for Rick and Karen Santorum. We questioned parents who brought a premature baby who was either dying or had just died home to “meet” his siblings and questioned why a man would put his family through a vigorous political campaign knowing that his daughter was already a year past her expected life span and could pass away any time. It is very hard to reconcile the whole “family values” thing in Republicans when these two candidates behave this way. That’s the part the right wing doesn’t get. If the Republicans didn’t claim to be the champions of families and traditional values, we wouldn’t be so derisive of them when they are exposed as sinners and bad parents.  It’s not that we have a double standard on morality, attacking Republican but not Democrats.  It’s that Democrats never claim to be channeling God or being more moral than the next person. 

When you are a voice for a party that claims a monopoly on morality and God, it is never a good idea to let your teenaged daughter attend a biker rally in a skin-tight t-shirt and painted-on jeans. 

So, Coulter and Hannity want open season on Malia and Sasha, and Bristol Palin has blogged that President Obama should call her and apologize for Bill Maher. She claims that since Obama called Sandra Fluke, he should call her. Otherwise, he is ignoring the insults Maher flung at the Palin girls because they are Republicans.

President Obama did address the attacks on Bristol, at the time they happened. He asked the press and the nation’s comedians to leave the children of the candidates out of the campaign. But, Bristol Palin was already a public figure. Her mother had dragged her into the public arena and she took root there. Sandra Fluke did not ask to be in the public arena other than as a witness in a Congressional hearing. She did give a handful of interviews when asked, but she didn’t sign a contract for Dancing With the Stars, didn’t get her face on the cover of People Magazine, didn’t get on two reality shows – her mother’s and her own.

Sean Hannity

I have a couple of questions for Coulter and Hannity. When will Coulter apologize for calling a group of 9-11 widows “money grubbing bitches” for opposing the invasion of Iraq? When will Hannity apologize for telling his television and radio audiences for three solid years that President Obama and Attorney General Holder stopped the investigation into voter intimidation by the Philadelphia New Black Panthers, charging that Obama and Holder supported the intimidation, when it was the Bush administration that decided that no intimidation had taken place? Those are words out of their own mouths, not the words of someone else. So, which Republican politician should apologize for them? While Coulter made her remarks at an event (I think it was a book signing), Hannity has been making it to a combined audience even larger than Limbaugh’s, and being believed by every one of them.

That is the real difference between Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh. Maher’s audience knows that he’s just bloviating. Limbaugh’s audience believes that he is telling them facts.

Related articles

• NYT Grants Bill Maher Space for ‘Stop Apologizing’ Plea; Paper Still Ignoring Maher’s Vile Insults of Sarah Palin (newsbusters.org)
• Letter: Limbaugh apologized; so should abominable Maher and ally Obama (tcpalm.com)
• Bristol Palin Slams President Obama Over Bill Maher’s Comments! (perezhilton.com)
• Bill Maher Defends Rush Limbaugh (thinkprogress.org)
• Romney’s Double Standard: Gives Limbaugh A Pass For Sexist Remarks, But ‘Outraged’ At Bill Maher (thinkprogress.org)
• Letter: Apology for Limbaugh? Will Democrats apologize for actions of Maher, Letterman? (tcpalm.com)
• Bill Maher: Stop Being So Offended, America (inquisitr.com)

President Obama

Sometimes in politics it is about the little things. President Barack Obama delivered remarks on energy policy at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland today. Of course, he shook hands after his speech, and in that, he shook the hand of Stefon, a 26-year-old student.

What was amazing, though, is that Stefon is deaf, and Obama replied to him in sign.

Jezebel quoted Stefon as saying:

Hello, I would love to share my experience; something that I will not forget for rest of my life. Today was a special day for me, and I was preparing for it. It was announced yesterday, March 14, for everyone to receive tickets to see none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama!

When I got ready to get up the morning at 7 am, I did not rush and took my time since the admission started at 8:30 am. I ate some breakfast and got onto the train to get to Prince George’s Community College. When I got there, there was such a long line and I got so worried that I wouldn’t get a good seat to be able to see my interpreter! How was it possible for me to understand what Obama had to say?!

I decided to let go of my nerves and went with the flow. I waited in line to go through security. Security was almost like security at the airport. It was the first time for me to experience that kind of security outside an airport. Of course, I have been to airports numerous times, but it was my first time to have that kind of experience on my college campus. I was not used to it. I saw the actual Secret Service, and you could feel how serious and strict they were, much different than dealing with county and even state police! You could tell they were not playing around.

When I got in, I took many videos. What amazed me is that it took two hours to make it just right before Obama started. I did not realize how great of seats there were for us deaf people. Right front of Obama. I sat in VIP with the Governor Martin O’Malley and many other important people. So, it started at about 11. Obama was right front of me. I was ready to jump up and walk toward him and shake his hand. Could you imagine how the Secret Service would’ve responded? When I watched Obama give his speech on the stage I thought to myself, “No way, Obama is not standing right in front of me! Wow!”

If you want to know more about what Obama’s speech was about, you can find out online. I was close enough to touch Martin O’Malley on his shoulder but I didn’t want to bother him. I regret I could have done better holding my camera while talking to Obama. The moment I will never forget was when he looked at me. He gave me a chance to talk to him. It was like he was waiting for me to say something. I took the moment and signed “I am proud of you,” and his response was “Thank u” in sign language back! Oh my gosh! I was like wow! He understood me after I said I was proud of him. It was so amazing…I was just speechless. Right after he thanked me, he smiled at another deaf lady who signed “I love you.” When I shook his hand it did not feel like he was superior to me. He was just a humble man. I am just impressed by him and know that he will have my vote and he will win second term without a doubt. Yeah, I feel safe to have him for another term.

Related articles

• In the face of so much hate this week, this definitely made me smile.(jovianzayne.com)

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• President Obama uses sign language during impromptu greeting with student – YAHOO! (news.yahoo.com)
• Deaf Student ‘Speechless’ After Obama Responds To Him In Sign Language (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Obama Uses Sign Language To Thank Deaf Supporter [Video] (inquisitr.com)

It is rather rare for Presidents to criticize their predecessors, but it does happen from time to time. Today, while in Largo, MD, Obama issued a criticism of one of his predecessors with some rather unflattering points of order.

Obama stated that “One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore. He’s looking backwards, he’s not looking forward. He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something. The point is there will always be cynics and naysayers.”

It should be noted that Hayes was a Republican. Hayes was also the last highly disputed President until George W. Bush. Hayes lost the popular vote against Samuel Tilden, but was awarded the Presidency when a Congressional Commission awarded him twenty electoral votes, putting Hayes in a one vote lead. His victory resulted in the Compromise of 1877.

Hayes, like many of his fellow Presidents at the time, oversaw the US’s entry into the Industrial revolution, but did little to encourage it as most Presidents then were more CEO types who did little or nothing to actually grow the nation. As a result, many inventions were ignored or forgotten, and the disparity in income and education was great.

Pretty much, in the five months since the repeal, not much has happened.

A Military Times Poll of 25 active duty service members who are LGB found that only one had come out from the closet after repeal, and the rest have either kept is private or their unit mates already knew about them.

However, the Military Times did find that the impact on heterosexual service members was fairly minimal. In 2011, they found that 59% of active-duty respondents said they did not believe3 that there would be an impact from repeal, and in 2012, they found that 69% had experienced absolutely no impact at all. In those units where someone had disclosed being LGB, 59% said there had been no impact or effect on them.

Only 2% of the respondents have left military housing since the repeal went through.

Of course Elaine Donnelly, the head of the anti-gay Center for Military Readiness, does not believe that nothing bad has happened, and said that it was too soon to know what the full impact of repeal would be. She stated “No one predicted anything would happen immediately, so that prediction is true. I’ve heard from military people who have no way of registering what they feel about this. They’re just quietly leaving, but they’re not leaving right away. No one predicted that they would.”

Of course, she is afraid now that Obama might try to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Donnelly might just want to get use to the fact that nothing bad is going to happen. Well, except that she is going to have to give up on being a hateful person.

Rush Limbaugh, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

Rush Limbaugh has never met a lie he didn’t like. So, it is not surprising that, in scoffing at his critics, he decides to lie. Currently, there are some 140 sponsors who have already dropped his show like a sack of flaming turds. Some are national and some are local, but what it is doing is cutting into his ability to actually have his show in the markets it is in. Several markets have pulled his show due to the cost.

Limbaugh decided to claim that his critics were ‘in shell shock’ over the fact that he had not disappeared yet. Never mind that most people admit that he is not going to go away any time soon, but we can all sit here and wonder why this man is so bitter. Perhaps it is because he never lived up to his family’s legacy.

Of course, the big lie was yet to come. Limbaugh claimed “Obama lost ground with women. I can’t begin to tell you the dismay and the shock and probably panic that exists in the White House and in the salons of the elites of the Democratic Party over this. They didn’t even consider this a possibility. This never entered their mind. This was going to be the end – not just of me, folks, the end of talk radio.”

Actually, Obama lost ground in the polls due not to the contraception debate, which has actually caused a lot of organization and support to shift to the Democrats, but because of rising gas prices. Women’s support for the Democrats has increased lately, but it is not surprising that Limbaugh would rather lie than actually tell the truth. Then again, if he had told the truth his head might melt. Limbaugh’s entire empire is based on lies, hate and anger.

Rep. Walter Jones, Republican North Carolina

Back in those idyllic early days of the Clinton administration, Georgia Representative Bob Barr set up an “Impeach Clinton” website, long before any of us had even heard of Monica Lewinsky. It’s a Republican thing. They are still trying to get payback for Nixon, and have no intention of giving up even though the Democrats have graciously decided not to arrest and try George W. Bush and half his administration for breaking laws, treaties and our economy.

Congressman Walter Jones, Republican (what else?) of North Carolina has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 107 to impeach President Barack Obama. The resolution states, “Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, section 4 of the Constitution, Where as the cornerstone of the Republican is honoring Congress’ exclusive power to declare war under Article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representative (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent……”

Okay, you get the idea. This idiot wants to impeach the President over the deployment of American aircraft over Libya, which was done in response to an Arab League request to the United Nations, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 and a hand-off of the operation to NATO 12 days after it started. It’s is a massive piece of bullshit.

Jones’ press release says that “This measure is necessary because President Obama has a history of overstepping his authority in this area of policy with his actions toward Libya. Mr. Jones has shown good foresight by taking an important step to avoid war in Syria or Iran, which this administration is considering. The only question is why such a step was not taken before now. The current President has a history of assassinating American citizens without due process, trampling on civil liberties, and engaging in pre-emptive and unauthorized wars. The time to initiate impeachment proceedings was long before the political environment of this election year.” That “assassinating American citizens” part refers to the killing of Al Quaida’s American born leader al-Alwaki a few months ago. In Jones’ mind, and the minds of many right wingers, it is perfectly all right to invade two countries and kill tens of thousands of civilians in pursuit of the war on terror, but not one America terrorist should be killed. It’s also all right with them to write a law authorizing holding Americans without charges if they are terror suspects, just don’t shoot them in the process of arresting them.

But, back to Libya…..according to the War Powers Act, the President does not need Congressional authorization to respond to treaty obligations by our allies. That means the U. N. and NATO or anyone else with whom we have a mutual defense treaty. Even in our Constitution, treaty obligations trump Congressional approval for defensive or other military actions undertaken by our treatied allies. Additionally, the physical involvement of our pilots in Libya was ended within the time frame set out by the War Powers Act, which is 60 days with a further 30 days for withdrawal of troops. We then conducted support and supply operations for the other NATO aircraft involved in the conflict. No Americans were intentionally on the ground, beyond an undisclosed number of CIA operatives who had been there already. The President is required to notify Congress within 48 hours that he has ordered the deployment, which is the part that has stuck in Republican caws since March 19, 2011, the day the United States, Britain and France started launching rockets into Libya to stop the advance of Qaddafi’s troops on Benghazi. President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Bill Gates assumed that since every news outlet in America was covering the Security Council vote on the no-fly zone the President didn’t have to go on his knees to John Boehner and tell him “we’re going to fly missions for the U.N. over Libya.”

Speaker Boehner had enough brains to withdraw his objections to the Libyan action last March. Anyone with a fifth-grade education can read the exemptions in the War Powers Resolution and understand that the President might have missed the 48-hour window, but otherwise the action was perfectly legal. It would appear that Rep. Jones either flunked fifth grade or is trying to play an anti-Obama angle for his re-election campaign. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and the never-ending Republican primary battle, is the only person still whining that Libya was un-Constitutional. It plays nicely into the right wing fairy tale that President Obama hates the Constitution and is the most Constitution-breaking President in history, a fairy tale lent gravitas by candidate Newt Gingrich who keeps insisting he is an historian instead of a fiction writer.

This resolution is not going to get anywhere. It is just another piece of election year diversion, something for Jones to take home to his constituents who might ask unpleasant questions about why Congress has done nothing about jobs for the past year. He’ll be able to tell them, “See, I tried to impeach the Muslim, Kenyan usurper of our White House, and tried to legislate women’s bodies even though I did sod all about the deficits, the budget and jobs!” Jones’ district includes the North Carolina Outer Banks, which saw so much devastation from Hurricane Irene last fall, and areas near Pamlico Sound. His father, Walter B. Jones, Sr., is the Democratic Congressman from the neighboring North Carolina 1^st District. Must make for interesting Thanksgivings.

This resolution is the kind of thing that really makes one wonder if these guardians of our liberties ever ruminate on why Congress has had a 10% approval rating for months…..

Related articles

• Panetta Testimony Prompts Resolution Threatening Impeachment (markamerica.com)
• Obama impeachment bill now in Congress (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Impeachable offense (fishygov.wordpress.com)
• Alex Jones Calls for Impeachment for Ceremonial Congress (disclose.tv)
• North Carolina Congressman Moves To Impeach Obama (alan.com)

Rush Limbaugh at 2009 CPAC when he bounced to the chanting

Joseph Kony is thought to be one of the worst war criminals alive in the world today. As the head of the Lord’s Resistence Army, the man has overseen the destruction of countless lives all in the supposed name of Jesus Christ. He has overseen the rape, mutilation and deaths of many people, and the conscription of children into his army. This is a man who stains blood on the legacy of the Carpenter from Nazareth.

Of course, there are those who see Christian and assume that he must not be bad. Kony was defended by, of all people, Rush Limbaugh back last year:

Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill.

So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it. Now, are we gonna help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians? Wouldn’t you say that we are? I mean the Coptic Christians are being wiped out, but it wasn’t just Obama that supported that. The conservative intelligentsia thought it was an outbreak of democracy. Now they’ve done a 180 on that, but they forgot that they supported it in the first place. Now they’re criticizing it.

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

That is, thankfully, not the view of Invisible Children, a charity which created the thirty minute movie embedded above. They want Kony to face trial in an international court for crimes against humanity, including using children as soldiers. Invisible Children has been under fire for a number of reasons, but the scale of the crimes that Kony has perpetrated are enormous no matter how much people want to claim that they have been exagerated.

Part of the criticism of the Kony 2012 movie stems from the fact that it is using social media and has gone viral. . .as of this point, it has been viewed over 40 million times.

Well, in the wake of the death of Andrew Breitbart, likely from a heart attack, there are Conservatives who are claiming that Obama had Breitbart killed. Supposedly this had something to do with the fact that Breitbart was working on a project that was purportedly going to ruin Obama. At CPAC, before he went on a screaming rant attacking the Occupy movement, Breitbart claimed to have films from Obama’s college years showing a gay lover, and detailing his cocaine habit.

There are quite a number of people who claim that Obama killed Breitbart, but the reality is that Breitbart’s deadh appears to be nothing more than natural causes. Of course, that will not stop those who still believe that Clinton killed Foster. One Mark Zagorski stated “Call for Congressional hearing and investigation WHO KILLED BREITBART. Obama is a hit man with an army or parasites!” Another, one Kathy Wren, wrote “Andrew Breitbart must have been getting too close to the truth about Barack Obama so he was offed! Typical Obama move!”

Ah yes, so far, the only opponent of President Obama’s who has been killed has been Osama bin Laden, but that does not seem to stop people like this from claiming that Obama has made a habit of killing his political rivals. This is, of course, why John Boehner and Eric Cantor are both dead now. After all, they cannot be allowed oppose President Obama’s agenda to turn this nation into something resembling a democracy.

Snarkiness aside, would these people please just give their hatred a rest. This is absurd.  As a note, a witness saw Breitbart collapse and called 911.

Speaking on Sirius XM radio, Parker was pleased that she had won reelection against five opponents, but also feels that she had to work harder than her opponents in order to win as she did. She stated “While it’s been a tough time to be an incumbent at any level of government, there’s definitely a hard-core group here that is just mortally offended that there is a lesbian mayor, and one of my opponents ran specifically because of that issue and raised it at every opportunity.”

She feels that she is held to a different standard because she is a lesbian:

“It’s been interesting to me. I recently joined 90 other mayors as part of the Freedom to Marry initiative. Local headlines–there was a backlash around that. And sometimes I sort of scratch my head. Okay, I’m an out lesbian. They know that. I’m in a long-term relationship. And yes, I want the ability to marry my spouse. And here I am, one of 90 mayors from around the country, and somehow it provoked this wave of hate mail. And the funny thing is that this initiative, it actually came from my mayoral colleagues in the big cities. This was Antonio Villaraigosa from Los Angeles. It was Mayor Bloomberg. It’s Mayor Menino in Boston. Nutter in Philadelphia. Emmanuel in Chicago.They had it worked out and then they invited me to join. This is not an initiative from the GLBT community. But because I’m a part of that, it’s like, somehow in people’s eyes down here, I’ve changed from my role as mayor of Houston into lesbian activist. Well, I’m the mayor of Houston first, but I’m still a lesbian. And I care.”

Taking something of a lighter tone, she noted that she got a call from President Obama when she was first elected, but this time, she got a call from Vice-President Biden. Of course, the fact that we are gearing up for the 2012 election may have had something to do with why she got Biden. She did say that “I guess when you’re running for re-election it’s no big deal. Vice President Biden called and I had a nice chat with him. First election, the president. Second election, the vice president.”

Still, the other possibility is that Obama didn’t want her to lecture him saying that he “needs to evolve a little bit faster and is not clearly where I think he ought to be.” She also threw her support behind the inclusion of marriage equality in the Democratic Platform saying “I think it should [include marriage equality], period, end of sentence. But it sort of goes to the conversation we just had about President Obama — he needs to evolve faster, he needs to know where his base is. But if he doesn’t get there, and if the party platform doesn’t get there, I’m a pragmatist and I look at the alternative. Let us not go to the Democratic convention and rip each other up as Democrats because we’re not getting to the right result fast enough. Let’s try to move people along as far as we can, and then join ranks. Please, Rick Santorum? Newt Gingrich? That’s truly scary. Mitt Romney — not a good choice.”

President Obama, by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons

President Barack Obama is on the campaign trail now, and today, he went out to Michigan to talk before the United Auto Workers to tout the auto-bailout, something that even Republicans are supporting, by and large. Obama took on Mitt Romney accusing him of trying to rewrite history and saying , “The other option we had was to do nothing, and allow these companies to fail. In fact, some politicians said we should. Some even said we should ‘let Detroit go bankrupt.”

He also said “I’ve got to admit, it’s been funny to watch some of these politicians completely rewrite history now that you’re back on your feet.”

And Obama said:

“These are the folks who said if we went forward with our plan to rescue Detroit, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Now they’re saying they were right all along. Or worse, they’re saying that the problem is that you, the workers, made out like bandits in all of this; that saving the American auto industry was just about paying back unions. Really? Even by the standards of this town, that’s a load of you-know-what. About 700,000 retirees saw a reduction in the health care benefits they had earned. Many of you saw hours reduced, or pay and wages scaled back. You gave up some of your rights as workers. Promises were made to you over the years that you gave up for the sake and survival of this industry, its workers, and their families. You want to talk about values? Hard work – that’s a value. Looking out for one another – that’s a value. The idea that we’re all in it together – that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper – that is a value.

But they’re still talking about you as if you’re some greedy special interest that needs to be beaten. Since when are hardworking men and women special interests? Since when is the idea that we look out for each other a bad thing? To borrow a line from our old friend Ted Kennedy: what is it about working men and women they find so offensive?”