ridin' the storm out
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Newsroom: Teaparty is America's Taliban
SPAM
"Amaze your android with our ihub AP
No thanks... How do i not get continual spam by ihub??
How do i get that annoying ad for android ap to stop appearing?... I x it out but it always comes back... Pretty rude
you might be the biggest idiot on ihub
all you can do is hurl juvenile personal attacks instead of staying on topic... because to stay on topic proves what an idiot you are
and the topic was you posted you were gung ho for a 10% flat tax
and when i asked you how that would work in the real world you panicked like a retarded child
you said if someone makes $230 per week or $250,000 per week they should pay the same 10% rate
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75167877
so you think a person making $230 per week should pay the same percentage as someone making $12 million per year? that's what you call "fair"??
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=75167877
yep...i do. if you choose to make $230 a week or choose to make $250,000 a week then what is fair is fair- nligntn the monumental idiot
according to unlightn someone who makes $12Million per yr should pay the same rate as someone who makes minimum wage.... minimum wage is currently not even enough to pay taxes
Rmoney/Ryan should hire u as their spokesman... but i think you're too retarded, even for them
the big money is still on vacation in the Hamptons... things will probably heat up in September
Too Many Questions. Answers Due Soon.
http://www.streetsmartpost.com/2012/08/21/too-many-questions-answers-due-soon/
Tuesday, August 21, 9:25 a.m.
The dog days of August are drawing to a close. European leaders are beginning to return from vacations. Important meetings are scheduled for early September. Rumors are rampant. Opinions are wide-ranging. News is sparse and contradictory.
It’s been reported that the ECB is finalizing a bazooka attack on the eurozone debt crisis that will include placing a cap on the bond yields of troubled members. The report was immediately denied by Germany’s Finance Minister. But the Spanish bond market seems to believe the report, with the yield on Spain’s bonds dropping significantly.
In Asia, continuing indications that China’s economy, the 2nd largest in the world, is coming in for a hard landing has its stock market hitting repeated new long-term lows. Hopes have been high that its government can and will still come to its rescue in time. Analysts are convinced it will. But China’s central bank is providing no hints of action.
In the U.S., the market is still hopeful the Fed will provide another round of stimulus even though there are encouraging signs that the economy is beginning to recover again on its own.
Answers from all directions should be coming soon.
German, French and Greek leaders are meeting this week on Greek’s crisis. Rumors are that some euro-zone leaders would be just as happy if Greece were to exit the eurozone. Others claim such an event would be a disaster.
The ECB’s next policy meeting takes place on September 6.
In the U.S., the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium takes place August 30 through September 1. Fed Chairman Bernanke speaks on Friday August 31, and it’s widely expected he will provide guidance on whether some form of QE3 will be forthcoming.
With news so sparse in August, the market has been unusually non-volatile and trading on very low volume, conditions that are usually followed by periods of large moves.
Opinions vary on which direction that move will take, but some of the uncertainties should have answers before the month ends.
thanks,
I responded PM as to not cause a ruckus, :^)
poor baby... you are just like Rmoney... afraid to discuss it in public... you want to keep it hidden... LMAO! talk about a coward... and you are the one who banned me you coward
there is nothing else to discuss... your pathetic posts speak for themselves... you want to raise taxes on the poor and give massive tax breaks to billionaires
were you lying then or lying now???
how pathetic... you blame someone else for your stupid posts and lies
now run along and watch out for those chemtrails that Obama is spraying on you... evidently it has rotted your brain
okay, run from your lie mr phony
were you lying then or lying now
you are lying again
you said if someone makes $230 per week or $250,000 per week they should pay the same 10% rate
hey Mitt, were you lying then or lying now???
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75167877
so you think a person making $230 per week should pay the same percentage as someone making $12 million per year? that's what you call "fair"??
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=75167877
yep...i do. if you choose to make $230 a week or choose to make $250,000 a week then what is fair is fair- nligntn the liar
according to unlightn someone who makes $12Million per yr should pay the same rate as someone who makes minimum wage.... minimum wage is currently not even enough to pay taxes
Rmoney/Ryan should hire u as their spokesman... but you might be too radical for them
you are the one who said you supported a 10% flat tax which is more radical than the GOP
were you lying then or are you lying now?
maybe it's those chemtrails that Obama is spraying on you have rotted your brain
you are a phony piece of shit, and dumb as dirt... end of story
what a phony douche you are... your 10% flat tax garbage is even more fanatical than the GOP... were you lying then or are you lying now?... congratulations, you make Ryan/Rmoney look like liberals
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=75178553
once again... none of your gibberish and rants will change the fact that a 10% federal income flat tax is libertarian garbage that favors the top percentage of wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor... taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society... move to Somalia if you hate a progressive tax system that taxes rich folks more than the less fortunate... i'll stick with the economic and moral philosophy of Warren Buffet... you can have Ron Paul and Herman Cain and Romney the phony phucker and Paul Ryan the immoral douchebag and the rest of the right wing ghouls
Louisiana Thinks Funding School Run By ‘Apostle And Prophet’ Is Somehow Constitutional
http://wonkette.com/481709/louisiana-thinks-funding-school-run-by-apostle-and-prophet-is-somehow-constitutional#more-481709
Louisiana’s exciting experiment in public-school vouchers is steaming forward, providing parents and children with educational excellence and traditional values, hooray! But that’s not all! It’s also an excellent lesson in how the free market can improve education, by taking taxpayer funds from the wasteful public schools and handing it to efficient private schools run by religious loons, just the way Real America wants. Among the 119 voucher schools approved so far is New Orleans’ Light City Christian Academy, founded and run by Apostle Leonard Lucas.
The state’s voucher program will be sending this gentleman, who “walks in the fullness of his calling and wears the mantle of an Apostle and Prophet,” some $364,000 to educate 80 students. You know it’s a good school because it has an educational philosophy and everything!
The Academy is a close-knit school embracing a community concept wherein the “whold” child is attended to spiritually, morally and intellectually.
Parents of whold children should find this an exciting opportunity! Strangely enough, some people are skeptical about Light City Christian Academy’s claims to educational excellence. This may be because they Hate Jesus. On the other hand, it could also have something to do with these bloggers’ observations that Apostle Lucas operates some two dozen nonprofit organizations, several of which seem to be … well, maybe just a little scammy, what with the Louisiana Secretary of State listing them as “Not in Good Standing.”
Or maybe it’s just math: Light City Christian Academy claims “a 90% success rate of our graduates continuing higher studies in Universities across the state,” but with total K-12 enrollments from 2008 to today ranging between only 35 and 53 students a year, this may not be an overwhelming record of achievement:
What does this actually mean? 90% of its dozen or so graduates have taken at least one college course in Louisiana?
The good news for Apostle Lucas is that, going forward, his school simply needs to achieve “at least a state-issued grade of D-minus” to continue to accept school vouchers. That kind of competition should make the godless government schools improve their performance!
After Delaying Release Of Voucher Documents, Louisiana To Send Taxpayer Funds To ‘Prophet’
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/louisiana_school_vouchers_prophet.php
Casey Michel August 23, 2012, 9:04 AM 7548
Louisiana Superintendent John White, the public face of the state’s massive and much-maligned school voucher system, has been hammered both locally and nationally for his announced slate of school standards. Editorials, educators, and legislators have criticized the program, and the latest news — St. John the Baptist parish (the equivalent of a county) announced on Tuesday it could lose up to $2 million due to the program — only serves to emphasize the controversy.
In an attempt to assuage criticism, White said his department would finally release documents detailing the vetting process that the 119 voucher schools — 99 percent of which are religious — endured prior to their approval. He won’t, however, release the documents until September — one month after many of the students have begun studying at their new schools.
Claiming “a deliberative process privilege,” White’s department was able to delay the release. Department of Education officials claimed that the documents in question — namely, those that displayed the measures taken to judge which schools would receive the 5,600 approved voucher students — were not matters of public record.
The Associated Press filed an initial request for the documents nearly ten weeks ago, but DOE spokesperson Barry Landry informed reporters that the documents would be withheld because the department carried a concern in “providing outdated information that may cause confusion to parents who are trying to make decisions around their participation in the program.”
James Gill, columnist with New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, noted that he believes the approved schools likely received little to no vetting whatsoever. “Evidently the Louisiana education department hasn’t heard that ‘Don’t confuse them with the facts’ is supposed to be a joke,” wrote Gill. http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/08/odds_are_no_process_existed_fo.html
Gill also noted that another DOE spokesperson, who had cited a desire to avoid “ridicule or criticism” as the impetus for withholding the documents, was effectively rebutted by White’s willingness to open the documents in September.
Indeed, criticism of the voucher system — which the Louisiana Supreme Court failed to block last Thursday — seems likely to increase once the documents are released. After initial tales of schools teaching antediluvian creationism and methods for preparing for the Rapture — including at least one school that discriminates based on religion and sexual orientation — it was reported that the Light City Christian Academy, located in New Orleans, had been approved for 80 students this fall, raking approximately $364,000 in state funds.
The school is not the only Christian institution that will be receiving state monies, but it is, thus far, the only one helmed by a man who says he “wears the mantle of an Apostle and Prophet.” Apostle Leonard Lucas, a one-term state representative, has been the subject of recent profilings for his charitable ventures, many of which are listed as “Not in Good Standing” by the Louisiana Secretary of State.
Should Light City meet the minimum voucher standards over the first year — that is, if they receive at least a state-issued grade of D-minus — they are eligible for an additional 83 students, which, if granted, would jump the K-12 school’s size approximately 400 percent from its 2011-12 total.
White has hinted that he may begin tightening standards going forward, especially in regards to schools approved in the future. However, there’s no indication that there will be any further action taken in stemming the flow of public funds to any of the current schools — meaning that Apostle Lucas’s academy is set to see a six-figure sum from Louisiana taxpayers in turn for offering the self-proclaimed prophet’s “vision” to the students.
After Delaying Release Of Voucher Documents, Louisiana To Send Taxpayer Funds To ‘Prophet’
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/louisiana_school_vouchers_prophet.php
Casey Michel August 23, 2012, 9:04 AM 7548
Louisiana Superintendent John White, the public face of the state’s massive and much-maligned school voucher system, has been hammered both locally and nationally for his announced slate of school standards. Editorials, educators, and legislators have criticized the program, and the latest news — St. John the Baptist parish (the equivalent of a county) announced on Tuesday it could lose up to $2 million due to the program — only serves to emphasize the controversy.
In an attempt to assuage criticism, White said his department would finally release documents detailing the vetting process that the 119 voucher schools — 99 percent of which are religious — endured prior to their approval. He won’t, however, release the documents until September — one month after many of the students have begun studying at their new schools.
Claiming “a deliberative process privilege,” White’s department was able to delay the release. Department of Education officials claimed that the documents in question — namely, those that displayed the measures taken to judge which schools would receive the 5,600 approved voucher students — were not matters of public record.
The Associated Press filed an initial request for the documents nearly ten weeks ago, but DOE spokesperson Barry Landry informed reporters that the documents would be withheld because the department carried a concern in “providing outdated information that may cause confusion to parents who are trying to make decisions around their participation in the program.”
James Gill, columnist with New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, noted that he believes the approved schools likely received little to no vetting whatsoever. “Evidently the Louisiana education department hasn’t heard that ‘Don’t confuse them with the facts’ is supposed to be a joke,” wrote Gill. http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/08/odds_are_no_process_existed_fo.html
Gill also noted that another DOE spokesperson, who had cited a desire to avoid “ridicule or criticism” as the impetus for withholding the documents, was effectively rebutted by White’s willingness to open the documents in September.
Indeed, criticism of the voucher system — which the Louisiana Supreme Court failed to block last Thursday — seems likely to increase once the documents are released. After initial tales of schools teaching antediluvian creationism and methods for preparing for the Rapture — including at least one school that discriminates based on religion and sexual orientation — it was reported that the Light City Christian Academy, located in New Orleans, had been approved for 80 students this fall, raking approximately $364,000 in state funds.
The school is not the only Christian institution that will be receiving state monies, but it is, thus far, the only one helmed by a man who says he “wears the mantle of an Apostle and Prophet.” Apostle Leonard Lucas, a one-term state representative, has been the subject of recent profilings for his charitable ventures, many of which are listed as “Not in Good Standing” by the Louisiana Secretary of State.
Should Light City meet the minimum voucher standards over the first year — that is, if they receive at least a state-issued grade of D-minus — they are eligible for an additional 83 students, which, if granted, would jump the K-12 school’s size approximately 400 percent from its 2011-12 total.
White has hinted that he may begin tightening standards going forward, especially in regards to schools approved in the future. However, there’s no indication that there will be any further action taken in stemming the flow of public funds to any of the current schools — meaning that Apostle Lucas’s academy is set to see a six-figure sum from Louisiana taxpayers in turn for offering the self-proclaimed prophet’s “vision” to the students.
Louisiana Thinks Funding School Run By ‘Apostle And Prophet’ Is Somehow Constitutional
http://wonkette.com/481709/louisiana-thinks-funding-school-run-by-apostle-and-prophet-is-somehow-constitutional#more-481709
Louisiana’s exciting experiment in public-school vouchers is steaming forward, providing parents and children with educational excellence and traditional values, hooray! But that’s not all! It’s also an excellent lesson in how the free market can improve education, by taking taxpayer funds from the wasteful public schools and handing it to efficient private schools run by religious loons, just the way Real America wants. Among the 119 voucher schools approved so far is New Orleans’ Light City Christian Academy, founded and run by Apostle Leonard Lucas.
The state’s voucher program will be sending this gentleman, who “walks in the fullness of his calling and wears the mantle of an Apostle and Prophet,” some $364,000 to educate 80 students. You know it’s a good school because it has an educational philosophy and everything!
The Academy is a close-knit school embracing a community concept wherein the “whold” child is attended to spiritually, morally and intellectually.
Parents of whold children should find this an exciting opportunity! Strangely enough, some people are skeptical about Light City Christian Academy’s claims to educational excellence. This may be because they Hate Jesus. On the other hand, it could also have something to do with these bloggers’ observations that Apostle Lucas operates some two dozen nonprofit organizations, several of which seem to be … well, maybe just a little scammy, what with the Louisiana Secretary of State listing them as “Not in Good Standing.”
Or maybe it’s just math: Light City Christian Academy claims “a 90% success rate of our graduates continuing higher studies in Universities across the state,” but with total K-12 enrollments from 2008 to today ranging between only 35 and 53 students a year, this may not be an overwhelming record of achievement:
What does this actually mean? 90% of its dozen or so graduates have taken at least one college course in Louisiana?
The good news for Apostle Lucas is that, going forward, his school simply needs to achieve “at least a state-issued grade of D-minus” to continue to accept school vouchers. That kind of competition should make the godless government schools improve their performance!
SHOCKING: Bobby Jindal’s Vouchers Will Provide Over $700,000 Per Year To School Led by “Prophet, Apostle.”
http://cenlamar.com/2012/08/07/shocking-bobby-jindals-vouchers-will-provide-over-600000-per-year-to-school-led-by-prophet-apostle/
Meet Leonard Lucas, a former, one-term Louisiana State Representative and erstwhile candidate for New Orleans City Council. When Mr. Lucas sent out a press advisory announcing his candidacy for City Council, here’s how The Times-Picayune reported the news:
Lucas, the founding pastor of Light City Church and a one-term state representative, sent out a statement riddled with grammatical errors saying he will formally announce his candidacy today at 1 p.m. at the shuttered Schwegmann’s Shopping Center on Bullard Road.
And when Leonard Lucas isn’t butchering the English language, he’s busy trying to convince people that he’s an “apostle” and a “prophet.“
Mr. Lucas is also the proud owner and registered agent of at least three dozen different companies, the overwhelming majority of which are non-profits (or, to borrow a term from my friend Dambala, “con-profits”) listed as “Not in Good Standing” by the Louisiana Secretary of State.
.....
Governor Jindal and Superintendent White have, effectively, provided Light City Christian with the taxpayer funding necessary to nearly triple its enrollment, and that’s just in Year One. If all goes according to plan, Light City Christian Academy will expand its enrollment much more dramatically, from only fifty-three students to well over 200, an expansion that will be paid for and brought to you, almost entirely, by taxpayer funding.
Let’s also put this into context: Fifty-three students in grades K-12 means an average of four students per grade, which should raise questions about the legitimacy and veracity of Light City Christian Academy’s claim of a “90% success rate of graduates continuing higher studies in Universities across the state.” What does this actually mean? 90% of its dozen or so graduates have taken at least one college course in Louisiana?
I don’t know Mr. Lucas personally, but I know this: He is not an Apostle. He is not a Prophet. And he does not deserve or merit taxpayer dollars. If anything, he deserves a thorough audit.
But in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, with the full support of Superintendent John White, Apostle/Prophet Lucas is the future of education.
Lord help us.
here's some music to read by
Bless The Rains (remix)
http://soundcloud.com/late-nite-tuff-guy/bless-the-rains-lntg-epic
Fear of a Black President
As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?single_page=true
The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.
Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities—the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat—were photographed wearing hoodies. When Representative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.
VIDEO: Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with Atlantic magazine editor Scott Stossel about the anger behind this article.
The reaction to the tragedy was, at first, trans-partisan. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigation—and in fact it was the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, who appointed the special prosecutor who ultimately charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. As civil-rights activists descended on Florida, National Review, a magazine that once opposed integration, ran a column proclaiming “Al Sharpton Is Right.” The belief that a young man should be able to go to the store for Skittles and an iced tea and not be killed by a neighborhood-watch patroller seemed uncontroversial.
By the time reporters began asking the White House for comment, the president likely had already given the matter considerable thought. Obama is not simply America’s first black president—he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obama’s two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. And yet, when Trayvon Martin died, talk Obama did:
When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together—federal, state, and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened …
But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.
The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled. Rush Limbaugh denounced Obama’s claim of empathy. The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, broadcast all of Martin’s tweets, the most loutish of which revealed him to have committed the unpardonable sin of speaking like a 17-year-old boy. A white-supremacist site called Stormfront produced a photo of Martin with pants sagging, flipping the bird. Business Insider posted the photograph and took it down without apology when it was revealed to be a fake.
Newt Gingrich pounced on Obama’s comments: “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be okay because it wouldn’t look like him?” Reverting to form, National Review decided the real problem was that we were interested in the deaths of black youths only when nonblacks pulled the trigger. John Derbyshire, writing for Taki’s Magazine, an iconoclastic libertarian publication, composed a racist advice column for his children inspired by the Martin affair. (Among Derbyshire’s tips: never help black people in any kind of distress; avoid large gatherings of black people; cultivate black friends to shield yourself from charges of racism.)
The notion that Zimmerman might be the real victim began seeping out into the country, aided by PR efforts by his family and legal team, as well as by various acts of stupidity—Spike Lee tweeting Zimmerman’s address (an act made all the more repugnant by the fact that he had the wrong Zimmerman), NBC misleadingly editing a tape of Zimmerman’s phone conversation with a police dispatcher to make Zimmerman seem to be racially profiling Martin. In April, when Zimmerman set up a Web site to collect donations for his defense, he raised more than $200,000 in two weeks, before his lawyer asked that he close the site and launched a new, independently managed legal-defense fund. Although the trial date has yet to be set, as of July the fund was still raking in up to $1,000 in donations daily.
But it would be wrong to attribute the burgeoning support for Zimmerman to the blunders of Spike Lee or an NBC producer. Before President Obama spoke, the death of Trayvon Martin was generally regarded as a national tragedy. After Obama spoke, Martin became material for an Internet vendor flogging paper gun-range targets that mimicked his hoodie and his bag of Skittles. (The vendor sold out within a week.) Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team.
The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.
No amount of rhetorical moderation could change this. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to “every parent in America.” His insistence that “everybody [pull] together” was irrelevant. It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable—“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”—would not mollify his opposition. It is, after all, one thing to hear “I am Trayvon Martin” from the usual placard-waving rabble-rousers. Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another.
By virtue of his background—the son of a black man and a white woman, someone who grew up in multiethnic communities around the world—Obama has enjoyed a distinctive vantage point on race relations in America. Beyond that, he has displayed enviable dexterity at navigating between black and white America, and at finding a language that speaks to a critical mass in both communities. He emerged into national view at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, with a speech heralding a nation uncolored by old prejudices and shameful history. There was no talk of the effects of racism. Instead Obama stressed the power of parenting, and condemned those who would say that a black child carrying a book was “acting white.” He cast himself as the child of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and asserted, “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” When, as a senator, he was asked if the response to Hurricane Katrina evidenced racism, Obama responded by calling the “ineptitude” of the response “color-blind.”
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama’s insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina’s effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy—white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes.
Obama’s first term has coincided with a strategy of massive resistance on the part of his Republican opposition in the House, and a record number of filibuster threats in the Senate. It would be nice if this were merely a reaction to Obama’s politics or his policies—if this resistance truly were, as it is generally described, merely one more sign of our growing “polarization” as a nation. But the greatest abiding challenge to Obama’s national political standing has always rested on the existential fact that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. As a candidate, Barack Obama understood this.
“The thing is, a black man can’t be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that’s still out there,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. “However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president.”
Belcher’s formulation grants the power of anti-black racism, and proposes to defeat it by not acknowledging it. His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.
Before Barack Obama, the “black president” lived in the African American imagination as a kind of cosmic joke, a phantom of all that could never be. White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett’s boyish gaze. Dr. King turned the other cheek, and they blew it off. White folks shot Lincoln over “nigger equality,” ran Ida Wells out of Memphis, beat Freedom Riders over bus seats, slaughtered Medgar in his driveway like a dog. The comedian Dave Chappelle joked that the first black president would need a “Vice President Santiago”—because the only thing that would ensure his life in the White House was a Hispanic president-in-waiting. A black president signing a bill into law might as well sign his own death certificate.
The moment Obama spoke, the Trayvon case passed out of its mourning phase and into something dark and familiar—racialized political fodder.
And even if white folks could moderate their own penchant for violence, we could not moderate our own. A long-suffering life on the wrong side of the color line had denuded black people of the delicacy necessary to lead the free world. In a skit on his 1977 TV comedy show, Richard Pryor, as a black president, conceded that he was “courting an awful lot of white women” and held a press conference that erupted into a riot after a reporter requested that the president’s momma clean his house. More recently, the comedian Cedric the Entertainer joked that a black president would never have made it through Monicagate without turning a press conference into a battle royal. When Chappelle tried to imagine how a black George W. Bush would have justified the war against Saddam Hussein, his character (“Black Bush”) simply yelled, “The nigger tried to kill my father!”
Thus, in hard jest, the paradoxes and problems of a theoretical black presidency were given voice. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America’s democratic double-talk, that was too ghetto and raw for the refinement of the Oval Office. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that “they” would never accept us. And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5-foot point guards might invoke the dunk—as evidence of some great cosmic injustice, weighty in its import, out of reach.
And yet Spud Webb lives.
When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.
The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting “of chocolate.” The line sounds ripped from Essence magazine. That’s the point.
These cultural cues became important during Obama’s presidential run and beyond. Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation—crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photographed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair. There is often something mawkish about this signaling—like a Virginia politico thickening his southern accent when talking to certain audiences. If you’ve often been the butt of political signaling (Sister Souljah, Willie Horton), and rarely the recipient, these displays of cultural affinity are powerful. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful. Whole sections of America that we had assumed to be negrophobic turned out in support of him in 2008. Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.
It is often said that Obama’s presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama’s election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves—an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.
What black people are experiencing right now is a kind of privilege previously withheld—seeing our most sacred cultural practices and tropes validated in the world’s highest office. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon. The expansion of this cultural power beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous advance for black America. Conversely, for those who’ve long treasured white exclusivity, the existence of a President Barack Obama is discombobulating, even terrifying. For as surely as the iconic picture of the young black boy reaching out to touch the president’s curly hair sends one message to black America, it sends another to those who have enjoyed the power of whiteness.
In America, the Irights to own property, to serve on a jury, to vote, to hold public office, to rise to the presidency have historically been seen as belonging only to those people who showed particular integrity. Citizenship was a social contract in which persons of moral standing were transformed into stakeholders who swore to defend the state against threats external and internal. Until a century and a half ago, slave rebellion ranked high in the fevered American imagination of threats necessitating such an internal defense.
In the early years of our republic, when democracy was still an unproven experiment, the Founders were not even clear that all white people should be entrusted with this fragile venture, much less the bestial African. Thus Congress, in 1790, declared the following:
All free white persons who have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to all the rights of citizenship.
In such ways was the tie between citizenship and whiteness in America made plain from the very beginning. By the 19th century, there was, as Matthew Jacobson, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, has put it, “an unquestioned acceptance of whiteness as a prerequisite for naturalized citizenship.” Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that “this government was made on the white basis” and that the Framers had made “no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay, or an other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men.”
After the Civil War, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor as president and a unionist, scoffed at awarding the Negro the franchise:
The peculiar qualities which should characterize any people who are fit to decide upon the management of public affairs for a great state have seldom been combined. It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.
The notion of blacks as particularly unfit for political equality persisted well into the 20th century. As the nation began considering integrating its military, a young West Virginian wrote to a senator in 1944:
I am a typical American, a southerner, and 27 years of age … I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, BUT I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throw back to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
The writer—who never joined the military, but did join the Ku Klux Klan—was Robert Byrd, who died in 2010 as the longest-serving U.S. senator in history. Byrd’s rejection of political equality was echoed in 1957 by William F. Buckley Jr., who addressed the moral disgrace of segregation by endorsing disenfranchisement strictly based on skin color:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
Buckley, the founder of National Review, went on to assert, “The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.”
The myth of “twice as good” that makes Obama possible also SMOTHERs him. It holds that blacks feel no anger toward their tormentors.
The idea that blacks should hold no place of consequence in the American political future has affected every sector of American society, transforming whiteness itself into a monopoly on American possibilities. White people like Byrd and Buckley were raised in a time when, by law, they were assured of never having to compete with black people for the best of anything. Blacks used inferior public pools and inferior washrooms, attended inferior schools. The nicest restaurants turned them away. In large swaths of the country, blacks paid taxes but could neither attend the best universities nor exercise the right to vote. The best jobs, the richest neighborhoods, were giant set-asides for whites—universal affirmative action, with no pretense of restitution.
Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: these bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness. What Byrd saw in an integrated military was the crumbling of the ideal of whiteness, and thus the crumbling of an entire society built around it. Whatever the saintly nonviolent rhetoric used to herald it, racial integration was a brutal assault on whiteness. The American presidency, an unbroken streak of nonblack men, was, until 2008, the greatest symbol of that old order.
Watching Obama rack up victories in states like Virginia, New Mexico, Ohio, and North Carolina on Election Night in 2008, anyone could easily conclude that racism, as a national force, had been defeated. The thought should not be easily dismissed: Obama’s victory demonstrates the incredible distance this country has traveled. (Indeed, William F. Buckley Jr. later revised his early positions on race; Robert Byrd spent decades in Congress atoning for his.) That a country that once took whiteness as the foundation of citizenship would elect a black president is a victory. But to view this victory as racism’s defeat is to forget the precise terms on which it was secured, and to ignore the quaking ground beneath Obama’s feet.
During the 2008 primary, The New Yorker’s George Packer journeyed to Kentucky and was shocked by the brazen declarations of white identity. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race,” one voter told Packer. “That’s my opinion.” That voter was hardly alone. In 2010, Michael Tesler, a political scientist at Brown University, and David Sears, a professor of psychology and political science at UCLA, were able to assess the impact of race in the 2008 primary by comparing data from two 2008 campaign and election studies with previous surveys of racial resentment and voter choice. As they wrote in Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America:
No other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans. The impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions … was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes on Jesse Jackson’s more racially charged campaign for the nomination in 1988.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard, is studying how racial animus may have cost Obama votes in 2008. First, Stephens-Davidowitz ranked areas of the country according to how often people there typed racist search terms into Google. (The areas with the highest rates of racially charged search terms were West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, and southern Mississippi.) Then he compared Obama’s voting results in those areas with John Kerry’s four years earlier. So, for instance, in 2004 Kerry received 50 percent of the vote in the media markets of both Denver and Wheeling (which straddles the Ohio–West Virginia border). Based on the Democratic groundswell in 2008, Obama should have received about 57 percent of the popular vote in both regions. But that’s not what happened. In the Denver area, which had one of the nation’s lowest rates of racially charged Google searching, Obama received the predicted 57 percent. But in Wheeling, which had a high rate of racially charged Google searching, Obama’s share of the popular vote was only 48 percent. Of course, Obama also picked up some votes because he is black. But, aggregating his findings nationally, Stephens-Davidowitz has concluded that Obama lost between 3 and 5 percentage points of the popular vote to racism.
After Obama won, the longed-for post-racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified. At rallies for the nascent Tea Party, people held signs saying things like Obama Plans White Slavery. Steve King, an Iowa congressman and Tea Party favorite, complained that Obama “favors the black person.” In 2009, Rush Limbaugh, bard of white decline, called Obama’s presidency a time when “the white kids now get beat up, with the black kids cheering ‘Yeah, right on, right on, right on.’ And of course everybody says the white kid deserved it—he was born a racist, he’s white.” On Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had exposed himself as a guy “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture … This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Beck later said he was wrong to call Obama a racist. That same week he also called the president’s health-care plan “reparations.”
One possible retort to this pattern of racial paranoia is to cite the Clinton years, when an ideological fever drove the right wing to derangement, inspiring militia movements and accusations that the president had conspired to murder his own lawyer, Vince Foster. The upshot, by this logic, is that Obama is experiencing run-of-the-mill political opposition in which race is but a minor factor among much larger ones, such as party affiliation. But the argument assumes that party affiliation itself is unconnected to race. It pretends that only Toni Morrison took note of Clinton’s particular appeal to black voters. It forgets that Clinton felt compelled to attack Sister Souljah. It forgets that whatever ignoble labels the right wing pinned on Clinton’s health-care plan, “reparations” did not rank among them.
Michael Tesler, following up on his research with David Sears on the role of race in the 2008 campaign, recently published a study assessing the impact of race on opposition to and support for health-care reform. The findings are bracing. Obama’s election effectively racialized white Americans’ views, even of health-care policy. As Tesler writes in a paper published in July in The American Journal of Political Science, “Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinton’s 1993 health care initiative.”
While Beck and Limbaugh have chosen direct racial assault, others choose simply to deny that a black president actually exists. One in four Americans (and more than half of all Republicans) believe Obama was not born in this country, and thus is an illegitimate president. More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced “birther bills” demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship as a condition for putting him on the 2012 ballot. Eighteen percent of Republicans believe Obama to be a Muslim. The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.
White resentment has not cooled as the Obama presidency has proceeded. Indeed, the GOP presidential-primary race featured candidates asserting that the black family was better off under slavery (Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum); claiming that Obama, as a black man, should oppose abortion (Santorum again); or denouncing Obama as a “food-stamp president” (Newt Gingrich).
The resentment is not confined to Republicans. Earlier this year, West Virginia gave 41 percent of the popular vote during the Democratic primary to Keith Judd, a white incarcerated felon (Judd actually defeated Obama in 10 counties). Joe Manchin, one of West Virginia’s senators, and Earl Ray Tomblin, its governor, are declining to attend this year’s Democratic convention, and will not commit to voting for Obama.
It is often claimed that Obama’s unpopularity in coal-dependent West Virginia stems from his environmental policies. But recall that no state ranked higher on Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s racism scale than West Virginia. Moreover, Obama was unpopular in West Virginia before he became president: even at the tail end of the Democratic primaries in 2008, Hillary Clinton walloped Obama by 41 points. A fifth of West Virginia Democrats openly professed that race played a role in their vote.
What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism—rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama’s presidency, a stranger to American politics might conclude that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly. Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies race and politics, examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. Obama’s racial strategy has been, if anything, the opposite of radical: he declines to use his bully pulpit to address racism, using it instead to engage in the time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.
His approach is not new. It is the approach of Booker T. Washington, who, amid a sea of white terrorists during the era of Jim Crow, endorsed segregation and proclaimed the South to be a land of black opportunity. It is the approach of L. Douglas Wilder, who, in 1986, not long before he became Virginia’s first black governor, kept his distance from Jesse Jackson and told an NAACP audience: “Yes, dear Brutus, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves … Some blacks don’t particularly care for me to say these things, to speak to values … Somebody’s got to. We’ve been too excusing.” It was even, at times, the approach of Jesse Jackson himself, who railed against “the rising use of drugs, and babies making babies, and violence … cutting away our opportunity.”
The strategy can work. Booker T.’s Tuskegee University still stands. Wilder became the first black governor in America since Reconstruction. Jackson’s campaign moved the Democratic nominating process toward proportional allocation of delegates, a shift that Obama exploited in the 2008 Democratic primaries by staying competitive enough in big states to rack up delegates even where he was losing, and rolling up huge vote margins (and delegate-count victories) in smaller ones.
And yet what are we to make of an integration premised, first, on the entire black community’s emulating the Huxtables? An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality—it’s a double standard. That double standard haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.
Another political tradition in black America, running counter to the one publicly embraced by Obama and Booker T. Washington, casts its skepticism not simply upon black culture but upon the entire American project. This tradition stretches back to Frederick Douglass, who, in 1852, said of his native country, “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.” It extends through Martin Delany, through Booker T.’s nemesis W. E. B. Du Bois, and through Malcolm X. It includes Martin Luther King Jr., who at the height of the Vietnam War called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And it includes Obama’s former pastor, he of the famous “God Damn America” sermon, Jeremiah Wright.
The Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, in his 2011 book, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, examines this tradition by looking at his own father and Reverend Wright in the context of black America’s sense of patriotism. Like Wright, the elder Kennedy was a veteran of the U.S. military, a man seared and radicalized by American racism, forever remade as a vociferous critic of his native country: in virtually any American conflict, Kennedy’s father rooted for the foreign country.
The deep skepticism about the American project that Kennedy’s father and Reverend Wright evince is an old tradition in black America. Before Frederick Douglass worked, during the Civil War, for the preservation of the Union, he called for his country’s destruction. “I have no love for America,” he declaimed in a lecture to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847. “I have no patriotism … I desire to see [the government] overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.”
Kennedy notes that Douglass’s denunciations were the words of a man who not only had endured slavery but was living in a country where whites often selected the Fourth of July as a special day to prosecute a campaign of racial terror:
On July 4, 1805, whites in Philadelphia drove blacks out of the square facing Independence Hall. For years thereafter, blacks attended Fourth of July festivities in that city at their peril. On July 4, 1834, a white mob in New York City burned down the Broadway Tabernacle because of the antislavery and antiracist views of the church’s leaders. Firefighters in sympathy with the arsonists refused to douse the conflagration. On July 4, 1835, a white mob in Canaan, New Hampshire, destroyed a school open to blacks that was run by an abolitionist. The antebellum years were liberally dotted with such episodes.
Jeremiah Wright was born into an America of segregation—overt in the South and covert in the North, but wounding wherever. He joined the Marines, vowing service to his country, at a time when he wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in some states. He built his ministry in a community reeling from decades of job and housing discrimination, and heaving under the weight of drugs, gun violence, and broken families. Wright’s world is emblematic of the African Americans he ministered to, people reared on the anti-black-citizenship tradition—poll taxes, states pushing stringent voter-ID laws—of Stephen Douglas and Andrew Johnson and William F. Buckley Jr. The message is “You are not American.” The countermessage—God damn America—is an old one, and is surprising only to people unfamiliar with the politics of black life in this country. Unfortunately, that is an apt description of large swaths of America.
Whatever the context for Wright’s speech, the surfacing of his remarks in 2008 was utterly inconvenient not just for the Obama campaign but for much of black America. One truism holds that black people are always anxious to talk about race, eager to lecture white people at every juncture about how wrong they are and about the price they must pay for past and ongoing sins. But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old Baby Boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing. There was a broad sense that integration had failed us, and a growing disenchantment with our appointed spokespeople. Obama’s primary triumphs in predominantly white states gave rise to rumors of a new peace, one many blacks were anxious to achieve.
And even those black Americans who embrace the tradition of God Damn America do so not with glee but with deep pain and anguish. Both Kennedy’s father and Wright were military men. My own father went to Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne, but came back quoting Malcolm X. The poet Lucille Clifton once put it succinctly:
They act like they don’t love their country
No
what it is
is they found out
their country don’t love them.
In 2008, as Obama’s election became imaginable, it seemed possible that our country had indeed, at long last, come to love us. We did not need our Jeremiah Wrights, our Jesse Jacksons, our products of the polarized ’60s getting in the way. Indeed, after distancing himself from Wright, Obama lost almost no black support.
Obama offered black America a convenient narrative that could be meshed with the larger American story. It was a narrative premised on Crispus Attucks, not the black slaves who escaped plantations and fought for the British; on the 54th Massachusetts, not Nat Turner; on stoic and saintly Rosa Parks, not young and pregnant Claudette Colvin; on a Christlike Martin Luther King Jr., not an avenging Malcolm X. Jeremiah Wright’s presence threatened to rupture that comfortable narrative by symbolizing that which makes integration impossible—black rage.
From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.
Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said in his “More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.
Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of inconsistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?
What we are witnessing is not some new racism—it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that rendered the best pickings the province of unblackness.
The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on everything. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.
But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.
But in the age of the Obama presidency, expressing that kind of patriotism is presumably best done quietly, politely, and with great deference.
This spring I flew down to Albany, Georgia, and spent the day with Shirley Sherrod, a longtime civil-rights activist who embodies exactly the kind of patriotism that Obama esteems. Albany is in Dougherty County, where the poverty rate hangs around 30 percent—double that of the rest of the state. On the drive in from the airport, the selection of vendors—payday loans, title loans, and car dealers promising no credit check—evidenced the statistic.
When I met Sherrod at her office, she was working to get a birthday card out to Roger Spooner, whose farm she’d once fought to save. In July 2010, the conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart posted video clips on his Web site of a speech Sherrod had delivered to the NAACP the previous March. The video was edited so that Sherrod, then an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, appeared to be bragging about discriminating against a white farmer and thus enacting a fantasy of racial revenge. The point was to tie Obama to the kind of black rage his fevered enemies often impute to him. Fearing exactly that, Sherrod’s supervisors at the USDA called her in the middle of a long drive and had her submit her resignation via BlackBerry, telling her, “You’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
Glenn Beck did eventually do a segment on Sherrod—one in which he attacked the administration for forcing her out. As it turned out, the full context showed that Sherrod was actually documenting her own turn away from racial anger. The farmer who was the subject of the story came forward, along with his wife, and explained that Sherrod had worked tirelessly to help the family. The farmer was Roger Spooner.
Sherrod’s career as an activist, first in civil rights and then later in the world of small farmers like Roger Spooner, was not chosen so much as thrust upon her. Her cousin had been lynched in 1943. Her father was shot and killed by a white relative in a dispute over some cows. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury in her native Baker County did not indict the suspect. Sherrod became an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, registering voters near her hometown. Her husband, Charles Sherrod, was instrumental in leading the Albany Movement, which attracted Martin Luther King Jr. to town. But when Stokely Carmichael rose to lead SNCC and took it in a black-nationalist direction, the Sherrods, committed to nonviolence and integration, faced a weighty choice. Carmichael himself had been committed to nonviolence, until the killings and beatings he encountered as a civil-rights activist took their toll. Sherrod, with a past haunted by racist violence, would have seemed ripe for recruitment to the nationalist line. But she, along with her husband, declined, leaving SNCC in order to continue in the tradition of King and nonviolence.
Her achievements from then on are significant. She helped pioneer the farm-collective movement in America, and co-founded New Communities—a sprawling 6,000-acre collective that did everything from growing crops to canning sugar cane and sorghum. New Communities folded in 1985, largely because Ronald Reagan’s USDA refused to sign off on a loan, even as it was signing off on money for smaller-scale white farmers. Sherrod went on to work with Farm Aid. She befriended Willie Nelson, held a fellowship with the Kellogg Foundation, and was shortlisted for a job in President Clinton’s Agriculture Department. Still, she remained relatively unknown except to students of the civil-rights movement and activists who promoted the rights of small farmers. And unknown she would have remained, had she not been very publicly forced out of her position by the administration of the country’s first black president.
Through most of her career as an agriculture activist, Sherrod had found the USDA to be a barrier to the success of black farmers. What hurt black farms the most were the discriminatory practices of local officials in granting loans. Sherrod spent years protesting these practices. But then, after the election of Barack Obama, she was hired by the USDA, where she would be supervising the very people she’d once fought. Now she would have a chance to ensure fair and nondiscriminatory lending practices. Her appointment represented the kind of unnoticed but significant changes Obama’s election brought.
But then the administration, intimidated by a resurgent right wing specializing in whipping up racial resentment, compelled Sherrod to resign on the basis of the misleading clips. When the full tape emerged, the administration was left looking ridiculous.
And cowardly. An e-mail chain later surfaced in which the White House congratulated Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s staff for getting ahead of the news cycle. None of them had yet seen the full tape. That the Obama administration would fold so easily gives some sense of how frightened it was of a protracted fight with any kind of racial subtext, particularly one that had a subtext of black rage. Its enemies understood this, and when no black rage could be found, they concocted some. And the administration, in a panic, knuckled under.
Violence at the hands of whites robbed Shirley Sherrod of a cousin and a father. White rage outlined the substantive rules of her life: Don’t quarrel with white people. Don’t look them in the eye. Avoid Route 91 after dark. White racism destroyed New Communities, a fact validated by the nearly $13 million the organization received in the class-action suit it joined alleging racial discrimination by the local USDA officials granting loan applications. (Which means that her being forced out by Vilsack was the second time the USDA had wronged her directly.) And yet through it all, Sherrod has hewed to the rule of “twice as good.” She has preached nonviolence and integration. The very video that led to her dismissal was of a speech aimed at black people, warning them against the dangers of succumbing to rage.
Acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. The community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality and seethes.
Driving down a sparse country road, Sherrod and I pulled over to a grassy footpath and stepped out at the spot where her father had been shot and killed in 1965. We then drove a few miles into Newton, and stopped at a large brick building that used to be the courthouse where Sherrod had tried to register to vote a few months after her father’s death but had been violently turned back by the sheriff; where a year later Sherrod’s mother pursued a civil case against her husband’s killer. (She lost.) For this, Sherrod’s mother enjoyed routine visits from white terrorists, which abated only after she, pregnant with her dead husband’s son, appeared in the doorway with a gun and began calling out names of men in the mob.
When we got back into the car, I asked Sherrod why she hadn’t given in to rage against her father’s killers and sided with Stokely Carmichael. “It was simple for me,” she said. “I really wanted to work. I wanted to win.”
I asked Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.”
In 2009, Sergeant James Crowley arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent professor of African American studies at Harvard, at his front door in Cambridge, for, essentially, sassing him. When President Obama publicly asserted the stupidity of Crowley’s action, he was so besieged that the controversy threatened to derail what he hoped would be his signature achievement—health-care reform. Obama, an African American male who had risen through the ranks of the American elite, was no doubt sensitive to untoward treatment at the hands of the police. But his expounding upon it so provoked right-wing rage that he was forced away from doing the kind of truth-telling he’d once lauded. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Obama said at the time, “but nobody’s been paying much attention to health care.”
Shirley Sherrod has worked all her life to make a world where the rise of a black president born of a biracial marriage is both conceivable and legal. She has endured the killing of relatives, the ruination of enterprises, and the defaming of her reputation. Crowley, for his actions, was feted in the halls of American power, honored by being invited to a “beer summit” with the man he had arrested and the leader of the free world. Shirley Sherrod, unjustly fired and defamed, was treated to a brief phone call from a man whose career, in some profound way, she had made possible. Sherrod herself is not immune to this point. She talked to me about crying with her husband while watching Obama’s Election Night speech. In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”
In 2000, an undercover police officer followed a young man named Prince Jones from suburban Maryland through Washington, D.C., into Northern Virginia and shot him dead, near the home of his girlfriend and 11-month-old daughter. Jones was a student at Howard University. His mother was a radiologist. He was also my friend. The officer tracking Prince thought he was on the trail of a drug dealer. But the dealer he was after was short and wore dreadlocks—Prince was tall and wore his hair cropped close. The officer was black. He wore dreadlocks and a T-shirt, in an attempt to look like a drug dealer. The ruse likely worked. He claimed that after Prince got out of his car and confronted him, he drew his gun and said “Police”; Prince returned to his car and repeatedly rammed the officer’s unmarked car with his own vehicle. The story sounded wildly at odds with the young man I knew. But even if it was accurate, I could easily see myself frightened by a strange car following me for miles, and then reacting wildly when a man in civilian clothes pulled out a gun and claimed to be a cop. (The officer never showed a badge.)
No criminal charges were ever brought against Carlton Jones, the officer who killed my friend and rendered a little girl fatherless. It was as if society barely blinked. A few months later, I moved to New York. When 9/11 happened, I wanted nothing to do with any kind of patriotism, with the broad national ceremony of mourning. I had no sympathy for the firefighters, and something bordering on hatred for the police officers who had died. I lived in a country where my friend—twice as good—could be shot down mere footsteps from his family by agents of the state. God damn America, indeed.
I grew. I became a New Yorker. I came to understand the limits of anger. Watching Barack Obama crisscross the country to roaring white crowds, and then get elected president, I became convinced that the country really had changed—that time and events had altered the nation, and that progress had come in places I’d never imagined it could. When Osama bin Laden was killed, I cheered like everyone else. God damn al-Qaeda.
When trans-partisan mourning erupted around Trayvon Martin, it reinforced my conviction that the world had changed since the death of Prince Jones. Like Prince, Trayvon was suspected of being a criminal chiefly because of the color of his skin. Like Prince’s, Trayvon’s killer claimed self-defense. Again, with little effort, I could see myself in the shoes of the dead man. But this time, society’s response seemed so very different, so much more heartening.
Then the first black president spoke, and the Internet bloomed. Young people began “Trayvoning”—mocking the death of a black boy by photographing themselves in hoodies, with Skittles and iced tea, in a death pose.
In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.
And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama’s historic victory—a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem. Who would truly deny the possibility of a black presidency in all its power and symbolism? Who would rob that little black boy of the right to feel himself affirmed by touching the kinky black hair of his president?
I think back to the first time I wrote Shirley Sherrod, requesting an interview. Here was a black woman with every reason in the world to bear considerable animosity toward Barack Obama. But she agreed to meet me only with great trepidation. She said she didn’t “want to do anything to hurt” the president.
Romney And Ryan: Lying Champs Team Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/truth-and-lies-about-medicare.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Truth and Lies About Medicare
Republican attacks on President Obama’s plans for Medicare are growing more heated and inaccurate by the day. Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan made statements last week implying that the Affordable Care Act would eviscerate Medicare when in fact the law should shore up the program’s finances.
Both men have also twisted themselves into knots to distance themselves from previous positions, so that voters can no longer believe anything they say. Last week, both insisted that they would save Medicare by pumping a huge amount of money into the program, a bizarre turnaround for supposed fiscal conservatives out to rein in federal spending.
The likelihood that they would stand by that irresponsible pledge after the election is close to zero. And the likelihood that they would be better able than Democrats to preserve Medicare for the future (through a risky voucher system that may not work well for many beneficiaries) is not much better.
THE ALLEGED “RAID ON MEDICARE” A Republican attack ad says that the reform law has “cut” $716 billion from Medicare, with the money used to expand coverage to low-
income people who are currently uninsured. “So now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you,” the ad warns.
What the Republicans fail to say is that the budget resolutions crafted by Paul Ryan and approved by the Republican-controlled House retained virtually the same cut in Medicare.
In reality, the $716 billion is not a “cut” in benefits but rather the savings in costs that the Congressional Budget Office projects over the next decade from wholly reasonable provisions in the reform law.
One big chunk of money will be saved by reducing unjustifiably high subsidies to private Medicare Advantage plans that enroll many beneficiaries at a higher average cost than traditional Medicare. Another will come from reducing the annual increases in federal reimbursements to health care providers — like hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies — to force the notoriously inefficient system to find ways to improve productivity.
And a further chunk will come from fees or taxes imposed on drug makers, device makers and insurers — fees that they can surely afford since expanded coverage for the uninsured will increase their markets and their revenues.
NO HARM TO SENIORS The Republicans imply that the $716 billion in cuts will harm older Americans, but almost none of the savings come from reducing the benefits available for people already on Medicare. But if Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan were able to repeal the reform law, as they have pledged to do, that would drive up costs for many seniors — namely those with high prescription drug costs, who are already receiving subsidies under the reform law, and those who are receiving preventive services, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, with no cost sharing.
Mr. Romney argued on Friday that the $716 billion in cuts will harm beneficiaries because those who get discounts or extra benefits in the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans will lose them and because reduced payments to hospitals and other providers could cause some providers to stop accepting Medicare patients.
If he thinks that will be a major problem, Mr. Romney should leave the reform law in place: it has many provisions designed to make the delivery of health care more efficient and cheaper, so that hospitals and others will be better able to survive on smaller payments.
NO BANKRUPTCY LOOMING The Republicans also argue that the reform law will weaken Medicare and that by preventing the cuts and ultimately turning to vouchers they will enhance the program’s solvency. But Medicare is not in danger of going “bankrupt”; the issue is whether the trust fund that pays hospital bills will run out of money in 2024, as now projected, and require the program to live on the annual payroll tax revenues it receives.
The Affordable Care Act helped push back the insolvency date by eight years, so repealing the act would actually bring the trust fund closer to insolvency, perhaps in 2016.
DEFICIT REDUCTION Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan said last week that they would restore the entire $716 billion in cuts by repealing the law. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that repealing the law would raise the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.
The Republicans gave no clue about how they would pay for restoring the Medicare cuts without increasing the deficit. It is hard to believe that, if faced with the necessity of fashioning a realistic budget, keeping Medicare spending high would be a top priority with a Romney-Ryan administration that also wants to spend very large sums on the military and on tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
Regardless of who wins the election, Medicare spending has to be reined in lest it squeeze out other priorities, like education. It is utterly irresponsible for the Republicans to promise not to trim Medicare spending in their desperate bid for votes.
THE DANGER IN MEDICARE VOUCHERS The reform law would help working-age people on modest incomes buy private policies with government subsidies on new insurance exchanges, starting in 2014. Federal oversight will ensure a reasonably comprehensive benefit package, and competition among the insurers could help keep costs down.
But it is one thing to provide these “premium support” subsidies for uninsured people who cannot get affordable coverage in the costly, dysfunctional markets that serve individuals and their families. It is quite another thing to use a similar strategy for older Americans who have generous coverage through Medicare and who might well end up worse off if their vouchers failed to keep pace with the cost of decent coverage.
Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan would allow beneficiaries to use vouchers to buy a version of traditional Medicare instead of a private plan, but it seems likely that the Medicare plan would attract the sickest patients, driving up Medicare premiums so that they would be unaffordable for many who wanted traditional coverage. Before disrupting the current Medicare program, it would be wise to see how well premium support worked in the new exchanges.
THE CHOICE This will be an election about big problems, and it will provide a clear choice between contrasting approaches to solve them. In the Medicare arena, the choice is between a Democratic approach that wants to retain Medicare as a guaranteed set of benefits with the government paying its share of the costs even if costs rise, and a Republican approach that wants to limit the government’s spending to a defined level, relying on untested market forces to drive down insurance costs.
The reform law is starting pilot programs to test ways to reduce Medicare costs without cutting benefits. Many health care experts have identified additional ways to shave hundreds of billions of dollars from projected spending over the next decade without harming beneficiaries.
It is much less likely that the Republicans, who have long wanted to privatize Medicare, can achieve these goals.
Ohio suspends election board members who pushed for extra voting hours | The Raw Story »
On her show Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow talked with two Democratic election board members in Ohio who were suspended after they pushed to get extra voting hours on the weekends. Dennis Lieberman and Tom Ritchie faced an administrative hearing Monday for refusing to comply with an order from Secretary of State Jon Husted. They told Maddow that having voting hours on the weekends was crucial in their county, noting approximately one-third of those who voted early in the last election voted on a weekend.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/21/ohio-suspends-election-board-members-who-pushed-for-extra-voting-hours/
i think it's more social influences than being born that way
most of us are born a blank slate i believe... sure, some people are born with certain biases i guess, but peer pressure and the cult mentality has much more to do with it imo
i have one sibling, a brother, who is the total opposite of myself... he is a born-again bible thumper and actually a glenn beck fan, omg... when he comes to visit he can't even stand to go to a restaurant that has a bar in it, such a prude, how boring... we are total opposite, and the only way to explain it is the crowd he hangs with
my relatives from tennessee are all pretty much bible thumping racists... i went to a family reunion a few years back and i told my mother i wouldn't be coming back for another family reunion outing... too many 'nigger' and 'towel head' jokes... fuck those imbeciles... now i don't include my mom with her redneck relatives, i go to visit her but not those assholes... i hardly ever get involved in politics in real life because it's pointless,, i guess that's why i prefer to do it online where it doesn't matter if i piss people off, lol
yes, pretty much every ihub political board and even ones that claim politics is not allowed is ruled by the right wing circle jerk crowd who do nothing but spew lies and delete posts when you expose their lies... right wing ghouls, fascists, and various morons... these people are so idiotic they are still searching for Obama's "real" birth certificate and apparently they are so dumb they will vote against their own best interests and the interests of their children because they are basically cult members
no thanks
i actually give that a good possibility
how else to explain how time and space can have a beginning and an end point
there cannot be a beginning or end point to time and space
it must be circular, instead of a straight line
Matt Taibbi:
“Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent… that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.”
Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class
Matt Taibbi - April 7, 11:52 AM ET
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/tax-cuts-for-the-rich-on-the-backs-of-the-middle-class-or-paul-ryan-has-balls-20110407#ixzz23GwWerNh
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.
Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.
The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.
The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.
This is a political game that gets played out in the media over and over again, and everyone in Washington knows how it works. Which is why it’s nauseating (but not surprising) to see so many commentators falling over themselves with praise for Ryan’s “bold” budget proposal, which is supposedly a ballsy piece of politics because it proposes backdoor cuts in Medicare and Medicaid by redounding their appropriations to the states and to block grants. Ryan is being praised for thusly taking on seniors, a traditionally untouchable political demographic . Here is how old friend David Brooks, taking a break from his authorship of breathless master-race treatises, put it in a recent column called “Moment of Truth”:
Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes…
Brooks sums up the Ryan proposals this way:
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract. The initial coverage will talk about Ryan’s top number — the cuts of more than $4 trillion over the next decade. But the important thing is the way Ryan would reform programs…
Brooks then goes on to slobber over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).
What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.
Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits.
We are in the middle of a major national disagreement over budget priorities, and that debate is going to turn into a full-scale cultural shooting war once the 2012 presidential election season comes around. It is obvious that we have a debt problem in this country and that something needs to be done about it. But a huge part of the blame for the confusion and the national angst over our budget issues has to be laid at the feet of media assholes like Brooks, who continually misrepresent what is actually happening with national spending.
The last ten years or so have seen the government send massive amounts of money to people in the top tax brackets, mainly through two methods: huge tax cuts, and financial bailouts. The government has spent trillions of our national treasure bailing out Wall Street, which has resulted directly in enormous, record profit numbers – nearly $100 billion in the last three years (and that doesn’t even count the tens of billions more in inflated compensation and bonuses that came more or less directly from government aid). Add to that the $700 billion or so the Obama tax cuts added to the national debt over the next two years, and we’re looking at a trillion dollars of lost revenue in just a few years.
You push a policy like that in the middle of a shaky economy, of course we’re going to have debt problems. But the issue is being presented as if the debt comes entirely from growth in entitlement spending. It’s bad enough that middle-class taxpayers have been forced in the last few years to subsidize the vacations and beach houses of the idiots who caused the financial crisis, and it’s doubly insulting that they’re now being blamed for the budget mess.
But the icing on the cake comes when a guy like David Brooks – like me a coddled, overcompensated media yuppie whose idea of sacrifice is raking one’s own leaves – comes out and calls Paul Ryan courageous for having the guts to ask seniors to cut back on their health care in order to pay for our tax breaks.
The absurd thing is that Ryan’s act isn’t even politically courageous. It’s canny calculation, but courage it is not. It would be courageous if Ryan were, say, the president of the United States, and leaning on that budget with his full might. But Ryan is proposing a budget he knows would have no chance of passing in the Senate. He is simply playing out a part, a non-candidate for the presidency pushing a rhetorical flank for an out-of-power party leading into a presidential campaign year. If the budget is a hit with the public, the 2012 Republican candidate can run on it. If it isn’t, the Republican candidate can triangulate Ryan’s ass back into the obscurity from whence it came, and be done with him.
No matter what, Ryan’s gambit, ultimately, is all about trying to get middle-class voters to swallow paying for tax cuts for rich people. It takes chutzpah to try such a thing, but having a lot of balls is not the same as having courage.
yes, the tax code is a joke, and it gets more complicated every year
definitively favors those that can hire armies of tax attorneys
dunno why GE wasn't in the article,, i'm sure the list is endless
yes, libertarian, that's what i figured
so you are warning me that the media is a mind control machine but you are getting your opinions from CNBC... the shills for Wall St
LMAO!!... gotcha
26 firms paid CEOs more than they paid in U.S. taxes, study says
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ceo-pay-taxes-20120816,0,7442298.story
The study, by the Institute for Policy Studies, said the companies, including AT&T Inc., Boeing Co. and Citigroup Inc., paid their CEOs an average of $20.4 million last year while paying little or no federal taxes on ample profits, according to regulatory filings.
On average, the 26 companies generated net income of more than $1 billion in the U.S., the study said.
The study blasted tax rules allowing unlimited deductions for CEO "performance-based" pay, such as stock options. It said the five biggest performance payers among the 26 companies took $232 million of these deductions last year.
Among the CEOs it criticized was James McNerney Jr. of Boeing. It said he got $18.4 million in pay last year while his company received a tax refund of $605 million.
The study also laid into Citigroup for paying CEO Vikram Pandit $14.9 million while the bank received $144 million in net tax benefits.
Eighteen of the 26 companies received cash back or credits to apply against taxes in the future, according to the report.
The study, a 45-page criticism of the corporate tax code, said deductions and credits are allowing companies to lavish big pay packages on executives so they can cut their tax bills while Washington gets less money in a time of trillion-dollar-plus deficits.
To calculate tax, the study used the companies' own math based on accounting rules. Regulators require companies to estimate their tax bill and disclose it in public documents for investors.
The tax filings the companies make to the government, typically in September, are private and can differ from the estimate.
Another problem is that the study doesn't count taxes the company plans to pay but has deferred to future years. The authors argue that deferred taxes can be put off indefinitely.
Charles Bickers, a Boeing spokesman, said that the company's federal tax bill, including deferred tax, was $1.3 billion last year, not a net credit, as the think tank's study found.
Boeing did lower its tax, in part by using a popular tax credit encouraging companies to spend more on research and development. Bickers said that helped the company hire 11,000 people in the U.S. last year.
"Boeing supports a simpler, more competitive tax code. At the same time, we have put the R&D tax credit to exactly the use it was designed — creating U.S. jobs in a high-value, advanced technology industry," he said in a statement.
The study said AT&T used accelerated depreciation to save $5.2 billion on its 2011 taxes while paying CEO Randall Stephenson $18.7 million last year.
Sarah Lubman, an AT&T spokeswoman, said the deductions encouraged the company to make $20 billion in investments last year. She also said that the deductions won't be available to take in future years, which should increase taxes.
A Citigroup spokeswoman noted that the company lost money in 2008 and 2009 and used the losses to offset taxes on profits this year.
26 firms paid CEOs more than they paid in U.S. taxes, study says
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ceo-pay-taxes-20120816,0,7442298.story
The study, by the Institute for Policy Studies, said the companies, including AT&T Inc., Boeing Co. and Citigroup Inc., paid their CEOs an average of $20.4 million last year while paying little or no federal taxes on ample profits, according to regulatory filings.
On average, the 26 companies generated net income of more than $1 billion in the U.S., the study said.
The study blasted tax rules allowing unlimited deductions for CEO "performance-based" pay, such as stock options. It said the five biggest performance payers among the 26 companies took $232 million of these deductions last year.
Among the CEOs it criticized was James McNerney Jr. of Boeing. It said he got $18.4 million in pay last year while his company received a tax refund of $605 million.
The study also laid into Citigroup for paying CEO Vikram Pandit $14.9 million while the bank received $144 million in net tax benefits.
Eighteen of the 26 companies received cash back or credits to apply against taxes in the future, according to the report.
The study, a 45-page criticism of the corporate tax code, said deductions and credits are allowing companies to lavish big pay packages on executives so they can cut their tax bills while Washington gets less money in a time of trillion-dollar-plus deficits.
To calculate tax, the study used the companies' own math based on accounting rules. Regulators require companies to estimate their tax bill and disclose it in public documents for investors.
The tax filings the companies make to the government, typically in September, are private and can differ from the estimate.
Another problem is that the study doesn't count taxes the company plans to pay but has deferred to future years. The authors argue that deferred taxes can be put off indefinitely.
Charles Bickers, a Boeing spokesman, said that the company's federal tax bill, including deferred tax, was $1.3 billion last year, not a net credit, as the think tank's study found.
Boeing did lower its tax, in part by using a popular tax credit encouraging companies to spend more on research and development. Bickers said that helped the company hire 11,000 people in the U.S. last year.
"Boeing supports a simpler, more competitive tax code. At the same time, we have put the R&D tax credit to exactly the use it was designed — creating U.S. jobs in a high-value, advanced technology industry," he said in a statement.
The study said AT&T used accelerated depreciation to save $5.2 billion on its 2011 taxes while paying CEO Randall Stephenson $18.7 million last year.
Sarah Lubman, an AT&T spokeswoman, said the deductions encouraged the company to make $20 billion in investments last year. She also said that the deductions won't be available to take in future years, which should increase taxes.
A Citigroup spokeswoman noted that the company lost money in 2008 and 2009 and used the losses to offset taxes on profits this year.
nope they are not the same
not even close
and i have posted that Carlin piece probably before you ever posted on ihub
i guess you really didn't listen to the Carlin piece, or you would know there is a huge difference
you must be a disgruntled Ron pauler
oh no!!... did you hear Obama also likes spicy mustard???
what an outrage!!!