You know, I think the conventional wisdom is right in this instance: Mitt Romney is the most electable candidate for the Republicans this year. But what that really means is this: out of their current cadre of nutjobs, he will lose to President Obama the least badly. How can I be so sure of that, given the political media's dire predictions of a president in peril come November? How can I be so certain, with "Left" outlets whining constantly that Obama isn't farting enough rainbows for the base?

Because I live in the real world. And in the real world, there are stories that go beyond the political dogfights of the day. In the real world, there is every reason to be optimistic about four more years for President Obama. Don't confuse the optimism with complacency - winning in November is going to take all we can give, but give it we must, and we will - which is in and of itself one of the main reasons for my optimism. But let me lay out the reasons why I'm not worried about Mitt Romney.

Today, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is proposing a bill that would institute the Buffett Rule - the extraordinarily simple concept that millionaires, specifically those with more than $1 million a year in income, should pay at least the same tax rate as the middle class (at least a flat 30%) - into the federal tax code. The top 400 tax filers in this country, each making at least $110 million in a year - the uber rich of the uber rich - paid an average federal tax rate of 18% in 2008. A third of these taxpayers paid less than 15% (Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney is included in this select group of tax dodgers) and fully 85% paid less than 30%. The effective tax rate on a middle class business owner earning $70,000 a year? 28%.

So why this disparity? As we have discussed on TPV before, the closer you get to the higher end of the income brackets, the less of one's income tends to come from work, and more of it tends to come from investment, known as "capital gains." Our tax code has a terrible discrepancy that treats income made from work differently from money made from wealth, and it gives preferential treatment to the latter. Here's a graphic representation of what that looks like (the orange line is the effective tax rate of the richest 400 people in America):

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

President Obama in the State of the Union laid out a tax proposal that will pretty much do the following:

1. ensure those making over $1 million pay a minimum effective rate of at least 30%
2. eliminating tax subsidies for housing, health care, retirement, and child care for those making over $1 million
3. ensure that taxes won't go up on those with incomes under $250,000
4. extending the payroll tax cut
5. eliminate tax incentives to those who ship jobs offshore by ensuring that all American companies pay a minimum tax on their overseas profits
6. eliminate the tax deduction companies receive for the cost of shutting down factories and moving production overseas
7. create a new tax credit to cover moving expenses for companies that close production overseas and bring jobs back to the United States
8. lower tax rates for companies that manufacture and create jobs in the United States

Now, if you ask me, all these proposals are common sense tax policies that should have broad support by the American people. However, when you have millionaires in Congress representing the PEOPLE and coddle with those top 1%, President Obama's tax proposal in our Congress seems like a dead on arrival proposal that would not have any chance of passing especially in the Republican majority House. Even in a Democratic controlled Senate, I have no doubt that the Republican will have enough votes to block the tax proposal. Beside, it is not only in the best interest of the Republican to kill this proposal, it is in the best interest of many multimillionaire Democratic lawmakers in Congress.

You have to ask yourselves why would a person in a position of power who pretty much gets their millions by doing favors in passing laws that makes it possible to enrich themselves be willing to have more taken from them in taxes? The thing is this people are not scrapping to survive. They are filthy rich and honestly don't give a damn about their constituents.

So I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks. That's because I have been on vacation to India, visiting my family for the first time in 10 years. It's been a wonderful time - I hope to give you all some updates soon. I will be arriving back into the US tomorrow.

A word as to why I haven't said anything ahead of time about this short "hiatus": I didn't want possible trolls to take advantage of an announced absence - simple as that.

It's good to be home (soon).

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

In this article, I compiled a number of key benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or ObamaCare which included many benefits that are currently in effect and helping many Americans today. What I did not included was things that will be in effect in 2012 and beyond. While I am working to compile the benefits that will take effect in the future, there is one element (the Individual Mandate which will take effect in 2014) that I feel has gotten a bad rap as it has been used to undermine ACA and scare many Americans because it requires penalty if a qualified individual does not buy insurance in the exchange.

I will explain what the Individual Mandate is, its benefits to controlling the cost of health care and its central principle, how the individual mandate works, the penalties for being without health insurance, the process to determine who would qualify for Medicaid or Government Subsidies and what it means if the individual mandate is repealed by the Supreme Courts but the rest of the Affordable Care Act survives.

The classic response we hear from Obama-haters after he gives any speech is, "Yeah, he gives a great speech but..." And, surely, last night was a great speech. It was more than a great speech, it was an inspirational speech. Never before has a national politician spoken so openly and plainly about the unfairness in our economic system. This speech went beyond populism; it asked us to engage our brains and look at things from a common sense standpoint.

Which, of course, why Obama-haters (a) didn't hear the same speech as the rest of us and (b) didn't understand the concepts President Obama was talking about.

In order for a concept to become firmly lodged in the national dialog, it needs to be repeated over and over again. The discussion about fairness in our economic system began in earnest with the Occupy movement. You couldn't listen to the State of the Union address last night without hearing resounding echoes of the Occupy message: that the system is rigged for the super-wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes. For that, we owe them a big debt of gratitude.



Now President Obama has taken up the charge and is repeating this message at every opportunity. In interviews. On the campaign trail. And last night during his State of the Union address.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

I must say -- I am so proud to listen to the vision President Obama has for my country as he laid it all out in detail during the State of the Union address last night. I will also add that I expected no less as usual from President Obama.

The President came out highlighting his populist message that we must all work together to achieve great things and build this country in its time of trial and tribulations. If there was one paragraph that sums the gist of the President's message while covering many new ideas, it would be this:

I'm reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other's backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we're joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Video of the speech from last night and read the full transcript of President Obama's 2012 State of the Union Address.

Suzzane Mettler's book The Submerged State is a attempt to explain how anti-health care demonstrators could yell "Get government hands of my medicare" and other equally delusional slogans. Here's an amazing graph from Mettler (via Ezra Klein) listing a number of Federal programs and the percentage of people polled who received aid from those programs yet told the poll taker that they had not received any government aid.

Like the right wing TV actor who told Glenn Beck that he had been so poor that he'd been on welfare and food stamps and he didn't get any government help, many Americans receive government social benefits yet don't or won't understand that they are from the government. Mettler points out that the largest social benefits, like the Mortgage Interest Deduction, student loans, and medicare are delivered in ways that make it easy to think of them as private. Many of her students were under the impression that their student loans were private loans - because of the way the funding is delivered. The obscure way these benefit programs works often hides the fact that they are grossly unfair - for example the mortgage deduction gives the biggest subsidy to wealthy people and student loans, until the Obama reform, were a direct subsidy of banks.

The NYTimes has a not miss article about why Apple does not make things in the USA anymore.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

 and this passage that is obviously something way beyond economists like Dean Baker.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

In the economic models used by conventional economists, left and right, there is no measurable difference between a factory making electronic devices and an office building managing corporate HR paperwork as long as gross accounting measures are the same. But in the real-world, there is a huge difference not only between the economic effects of the two businesses but in the economic position of the workers and the surrounding economy. It's the difference between making and managing. Which is why Robert Reich, Dean Baker and other "left economists" are so confused and so unable to offer illuminating critiques or useful proposals. Keynesian stimulus is not going to bring those Apple jobs back or fix the erosion of the middle class that is tied to the erosion of the manufacturing base.  The failure of "the left" to understand that the rise of the Romney/Koch economy of corporate looting and crony capitalism is not the result of some bad corporate executives and lack of sufficient regulation, but is generated by deeper forces is part of the reason that "the left" has become a barrier to progress.

 Dean Baker is widely seen as "to the left" of Barack Obama and Obama's famously (among some people) evil "neoliberal" economic team. But Baker, like Robert Reich and to some extent Paul Krugman, are deeply committed to a orthodox economics ideology that is essentially conservative. Here's Baker:

[The Wall Street Journal] has an article the point of which is to warn readers that engineering is increasingly being outsourced to Asia. This may be bad news to people who hope to work in engineering, but for the rest of us, it means cheaper products, just as buying clothes and shoes manufactured abroad meant cheaper products.

 So, here we are in 2012, and the "left/liberal" economists are still pushing the theory of the service economy.  Andy Groves, one of the founders of Intel, pointed out   the social costs

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?

So we live in an era where a billionaire industrialist understands the crushing effect of deindustrialization on the social structure, yet our "left/liberal" intellectuals tell us to stop worrying and apply for a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. To me, this is an indication of a more general collapse of the "left" and its isolation both from the last thirty years of economic research and from real-life. Baker and similar are deeply critical of the Obama administration, but their critique is not illuminating nor does it produce progress because the "left" is operating on an intellectual framework that is not capable of addressing the important issues of the day.

1) The First Obama/Biden 2012 TV Ad - Brilliant

2) Is 15% taxation for a multimillionaire enough?

Romney in hot seat paying only 15% while his father George paid 37% in Taxes when he run for President in the 60s. Oops, I guess someone is using tax heaven investment to game the system. Go figure!

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

I have been reading a lot about Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota's phony love affair with Ron Paul. I must admit it is fascinating how the minds of these self proclaimed liberal wanna be caricatures take the bandwidth of the online community. Like them annoying little hairy things that gets in-between your teeth when you eat a mango, their phony liberal libertarian hyperbole have gotten in-between my teeth so here is how I floss out the many dishonesty and hyperbolic rhetoric I keep hearing God knows for how long.

Glenn Greenwald or David Sirota by any stretch of imagination are not people I follow because they are just not Liberals. I always find them a controversial read in blogs I frequent and often I find their ideology intellectually dishonest. Their aim: By any means necessary to paint President Obama in a negative light! Why? Because the choices made by the President is never radical enough to satisfy their ego and considering their consistent hyperbole attacks it seems as if their ego has been infected by a racists ideology like these people. In fact researching Glenn Greewald's writing at salon, his attacks on the President sure makes one to conclude that the venom he foams out of his mouth is not objective but personal and filled with hatred that he is welling to over look everything this President has done to get even for being called a Libertarian and racist. Well, as they say, you reap what you sow and everything Greenwald has been getting from the liberal circle is indeed deserving while he as usual religiously dismiss them with his idiotic non-stop rantings. The over the top rhetoric he spews to tarnish President Obama exaggerating the truth beyond recognition while you won't see him write remotely anything that is critical of the GOP says volume and you only have to scan through his recent articles to realize that.

Can you see this woman in the photo to the left? If you answered "no" you may be a member of the false-left. There was exactly one member of Congress with the courage to vote against the war in Afghanistan and it was not Ron Paul. Here's how Congresswoman Lee explained her vote against the authorization of military force (AUMF).

It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events -- anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.[SFGATE]

This stand earned Congresswoman Lee a wave of attacks and death threats against herself and her family - she had to get police protection against the jingoists. Read her explanation of her vote not to rush to give nearly-unlimited power to George W. Bush. It looks pretty damn smart right now. At the same time, the famous Ron Paul not only voted for the AUMF but also wanted to give President Bush authority to charter Blackwater mercenaries as unregulated world wide assassination teams. That would have been, no doubt, a treat for all concerned.

 Although Congresswoman Lee was a strong supporter of President Obama's election, she has not moderated her criticism of the wars since he took office far from it - she has continued to call for rapid withdrawal, to propose legislation forcing the US out of Afghanistan, to propose significant cuts in the DOD budget, to urge greater US humanitarian aid as a replacement for military efforts, and even opposed the Obama administrations intervention in Libya. Congresswoman Lee has been chair of the Black Congressional Caucus and co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus - she's high profile and an eloquent, powerful speaker. Barbara Lee is the critic from the left that so many in the false left claim to be. So of course, our self-appointed guardians of left-orthodoxy and principle have completely ignored her.  Instead they keep whining that Racist Kook Ron Paul is being attacked for standing up for principle.

You wouldn't know it to listen to the freakouts from the extreme Right wing who think the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform law is the second coming of Joseph Stalin (or Hitler, or Mao, they can't keep their "isms" straight) or the fanatic whiners on the Left who think it was a big giveaway and surrender to the big banks, but Wall Street reform is working. I wrote this week about the consumer protection agency's steps to regulate non-bank and shadow-bank actors in the mortgage market. And now, thanks to the sunlight and 'say on pay' provisions on banker executive pay in Dodd Frank, Wall Street pay is heading to the chopping block as institutional shareholders demand accountability because of poor performance.

You see, banks have had kind of a bad year compared to the general market this year. And so...

While still lofty compared to the rest of the US, pay for some Wall Street workers will be the lowest in years, at a time when critics have been lashing out at what they deem excessive finance-industry compensation.

At Goldman Sachs, many of the roughly 400 partners can expect to see their 2011 pay cut at least in half from 2010, according to people familiar with the situation. Pay for some employees in the New York company's fixed-income trading business will shrink by 60%, with some workers getting no bonus, these people said.

Morgan Stanley is expected to shrink bonuses for some investment bankers and traders by 30% to 40% from 2010, said people familiar with the matter.

Attention to all self-proclaimed liberals and progressives.
I would like to properly introduce you to a man about whom you’ve heard much — especially from his enemies and those who prefer a continuation of the status quo — but at whom you might wish to take a second look, and whom you might consider supporting for president.
Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an immediate end to our current and ongoing wars abroad.
Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an end to predator drone attacks by the United States military, which kill innocent civilians and foment growing hatred of America. He believes that the so-called “war on terror” as we’ve engaged it has undermined American freedoms at home and contributed to greater tensions and anti-American sentiment abroad.
[..]Clearly, with such a progressive vision, no one of the left would want to pass up the opportunity to support a candidate such as this for president! Surely it would be a vast improvement over Barack Obama, that Wall Street- friendly, imperialistic, war-monger, who promised to close Guantanamo but didn’t, among other unforgivable crimes.
So by all means, let’s get behind someone who will close down the national security state, stand up for civil liberties, and stop handing out money to bankers.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the left, I give you your perfect candidate for 2012:
David Duke.
Oh I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about someone else?   Tim Wise - read it.

But if you really want a flavor of the sheer dumb that is the heart of "progressive" - see this discussion. 

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the stereotyping of black women by the media and how much double standard there is in the treatment of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. The standards are still different today when it comes down to treating a black woman in America even if she is the First Lady, Michelle Obama, compared to how the last 43 White First Ladies have been treated. I don't intend to link to the blog I wrote about this because I don't believe in promoting a business driven website (hence: the Orange Site) that is a sanctuary for some Ron Paul types of libertarians while fronting as a progressive site.

Nonetheless, since Michelle became the First Lady, she has been a victim of many stereotypes in this so called post racial society some claim we live in mainly because she is a beautiful intelligent woman with power and popularity, and the main stream media and some racist personalities just don't want to acknowledge that strong black women can be role models in our society.

The biggest reason the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needed a director - that was being blocked by Senate Republicans as a way to weaken consumer protection - was that without a director, it could not start to regulate non-bank actors in our financial sector. But the President decided that Americans can no longer wait for the whim of the minority, and appointed Richard Cordray through the use of his Constitutional recess appointment powers as the Director.

With a director now in place, America's first ever agency to solely have as its purpose the protection of consumers sprung into action. Their first non-bank target: the mortgage industry. Today, they released an examination procedure to subject non-bank entities associated with a mortgage process - brokers, non-bank lenders (ahem Countrywide before being bought by BofA ahem) and servicers - to the same level of scrutiny the agency has already been providing for bank lenders, ending the area of the mortgage market where the sun don't shine.

Until now, a significant part of the mortgage market — which includes independent lenders, brokers, servicers, and others unaffiliated with banks and depository institutions — has not been subject to federal supervision. This “nonbank” mortgage sector included many of the largest subprime lenders during the housing bubble. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act significantly reformed the gaps in federal supervision of the mortgage market by providing the CFPB with authority to supervise a range of mortgage participants.

These product-specific procedures are an extension of the CFPB’s general Supervisory and Examination Manual. The Mortgage Origination Examination Procedures outline the CFPB’s supervisory approach to ensure mortgage originators — lenders and brokers — comply with federal consumer financial laws.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog:

Note: It pains me to see that there are many folks who are not well informed about the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). Below the fold, I have compiled a well researched comprehensive list of the ObamaCare achievements. I am giving permission to anyone interested to use/re-post the information within this essay to your audience as you see it fit.

=============================================================

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) into law on March 23, 2010. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about repealing ObamaCare. In fact, House Republicans passed unanimously voted in favor of repealing ObamaCare by a 245-189 vote with three Democrats [Rep. Dan Boren (OK), Rep. Mike McIntyre (N.C.), and Rep. Mike Ross (Ark.)] joining in with the Republican majority.

Sometime ignorance is bliss when what you don't know is just more comfortable than seeking the truth. So, here is why it is important that we speak about what ObamaCare has done to date and if you believe a right wing polling entity like Rasmussen Reports, why we must change the hearts and minds of the 54% of likely U.S. Voters who still seem to favor repealling one of the most comprehensive Health Care Reform Bill.

The only way to remedy misinformation and ignorance is by sharing sourced and factual information about what ObamaCare has achieved for Americans. Below is a summation of the benefits and what ObamaCare has contributed in helping Americans since the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) passed into law.

Glenn Greenwald's  and Matt Stoller's embrace of Ron Paul can't be separated from their multi-year campaign against Barack Obama. Here's Stoller in 2008 fabricating a position for then candidate Obama and wagging his finger (by citing Krugman!):

Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable. [..] It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so.  Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power [OpenLeft January 2008]

 Of course that was all made up, but now Stoller is perfectly happy to tell us:

But then, when considering questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public scrutiny.

If anyone is a "saavy politician using a civil rights backlash", it's Ron Paul - who revived his political career and raised money telling his numbskull newsletter subscribers that "fleetfooted" black "thugs" were going to steal their meth labs or something.  The only consistency between the two paragraphs from Stoller  is  that Obama is the bad guy. Similarly for Greenwald, who excoriates Obama for having the US military kill armed enemies of the United States but finds nothing to say about Paul's proposal that the US charter mercenary bounty hunters to assassinate anyone the President names as an enemy. Consider Stoller's argument in 2007 when he claimed that Obama was going to lose the primaries.

The Republicans hate Mitt Romney. Yet, unless something catastrophic happens, he is going to be their nominee for president. And when he is their nominee, there are few things likely to dog him more than his passionate plea a little over three years ago to let Detroit go bankrupt. President Obama's administration has seen stunning turnarounds in this economy: an economy that was hemorrhaging 600,000 jobs a month (and a recession caused by George Bush and the Republicans that lost 8 million jobs total) has now created nearly 2 million jobs in the past year, and 212,000 private sector jobs in the last month alone. But nothing tells the real story of the economic turnaround under President Obama better than that of the American auto industry.

Let's start with Romney's big prediction. After all, he's running on his business acumen. Let's see how strong it is.

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Well, guess what? The auto industry got that rescue, and then some. And not only are we not saying "goodbye" to the American automotive industry, the US auto-maker GM is once again on track to become the world's largest auto-maker in sales numbers, and other US auto-makers also compete globally with increasing success.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

Mitt Romney's Estimated net worth is between $190 million to $250 million according to reports based on his filing with Federal Election Commission and most of it comes from Bain Capital, a venture capital firm he co-founded.

According to wiki, "Bain Capital is a Boston-based alternative asset management and financial services company that specializes in private equity (PE), venture capital, credit and public market investments." Josh Kosman described Bain Capital LLC in his 2010 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses". In fact, there is a whole host of things that a lot of people don't know about Private equity firms and especially what Mitt Romney had done to get filthy rich.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

If anyone tells you that Democrats have enthusiasm gap, tell them to stop hanging with Glenn Greenwald and Joan Walsh.

The President was at Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on January 4, 2012, with his recess appointee Richard Cordray (R) who is now the head of the new consumer financial protection watchdog. Watching the speech President Obama gave and seeing some of the pictures from the public domain, I must say Shaker Heights, Ohio, Was Fired Up and Ready To Go!

Enjoy the pics...

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

This week has been an action packed and interesting week in politics especially on how President Obama has been schooling the Rethugs, so without further due let's recap here what the POTUS has been doing...

1. The Republicans will probably call it entitlement but I call it restoring the hopes of many.

Unemployed? Well, President Obama's Federal Housing Finance Agency has issued a one year mortgage forbearance directive that you may Qualify for if your mortgage is Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae backed mortgage. That is granting a much need break to many homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage.

Can I hear Thank you President Obama?

According to the Chicago Tribune:

The change, with takes effect Feb. 1, means loan servicers can offer six months of forbearance to jobless borrowers without Freddie's approval and another six months with approval. Currently, servicers can grant up to three months of no mortgage payments without prior agency approval, or six months of reduced payments with approval .

Fannie Mae is expected next week to announce guidelines that will align with the new ones at Freddie Mac.

I bet Republican would scream foul calling the move another coded whatever.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

To some, anything President Barack Obama is set out to do is bad for America. Newt Gingrich thinks PBO's economic policies are a failure despite the latest jobs numbers reported by US Department of Labor which noted that 200,000 nonfarm payroll jobs was added in December 2011. Of course this brings the unemployment rate to 8.5%, lowest level in nearly three years, from 8.6% at the end of November 2011.

An employment of 8.5% is the lowest since President Obama took office in January of 2008 but Newt Gingrich and his ilks dread as usual any positive accomplishments of the President's economical policy by making statements like:

"The Obama experiment has failed, and it is time to look to proven solutions that have successfully empowered job-creators in the past."

It sounds like he wants 8 years of another Bushist administration in the White House. May be someone should remind him and those teabagging Republicans the truth about that proven solution (War and Tax Cuts for the rich) that accounts for over half of public debt.

The Republican party is blowing the dog whistle of racism and calls for white superiority again except this time it is as loud as an air raid siren. Over this past week we have had two major Republican figures reach for the white race card. I'm really in a blah mood over it and as a member of the NAACP I think I want to yell something else at Newt Gingrich. Playing on racial hatred is nothing new for the Republican Party. It has been part of their electoral strategy from the days of Nixon and the early 70’s. The Republicans adopted racial polarization as an electoral strategy.

NOTE: I had taken a well needed break from blogging for about three months and have been spending a lot of quality time with my family. Being away has given me a little appreciation for my role as a husband and Dad. I must say I am returning to the grind full force. I have also created my own blog (ThisIsOurTime Blog) to continue to reach to as many voters as possible to shape a winning message. I will continue to cross-post here at thepeoplesview as frequently as I can. Happy New Year to all! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

Many lives have been shattered, homes lost, businesses closed and unemployment is still dragging many down mainly because of years of Imperialistic-like Presidencies and political leadership that ignored the contribution of many hard working Americans while catering to the top 1% who are living larger than life itself and in a different universe. The American dream is indeed in the decline for the 99ers and that is many of us. The challenges we are facing and will be facing in the coming years are going to be difficult and serious as we seek CHANGE that has brought the worse out of the Republicans party.

However, if the November 2011 elections around the country is any indication, the American people have just started to show that they have just about had it and are fight for a better American not just to survive in a world that has become controlled by the top 1%. Today, we have a movement and we must continue to build on it. The effort to strip or silence the voices of employees in Ohio was defeated last November. The people of Maine have said enough of Republicans obstruction of citizen's rights and have restored the same-day registration to vote law at polling places. Mississippi killed a measure that would have outlawed a woman's right to abortions and many forms of contraception. Voters in Arizona ousting State Senator Russell Pearce, the architect of SB 1070, the state’s controversial anti-immigration law. Organized labor and progressive groups in Wisconsin put a stand against incumbents law makers and recalled 2 out of the 6 State Senators and today the effort to recall Wisconsin's Governor Walker is in full force. These are not isolated incidences. Many Americans are marching and voicing their dissatisfaction as today's politicians are throwing the American People under the bus and continue to cater to the wealthy.

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

The Year of the Vote

by Nancy A. Heitzeg

"In 1965, when President Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act into law, he proclaimed that, 'the right to vote is the basic right, without which all others are meaningless.'

Today, as Attorney General, I have the privilege – and the solemn duty – of enforcing this law, and the other civil rights reforms that President Johnson championed. This work is among the Justice Department’s most important priorities. And our efforts honor the generations of Americans who have taken extraordinary risks, and willingly confronted hatred, bias, and ignorance – as well as billy clubs and fire hoses, bullets and bombs – to ensure that their children, and all American citizens, would have the chance to participate in the work of their government. The right to vote is not only the cornerstone of our system of government – it is the lifeblood of our democracy. And no force has proved more powerful – or more integral to the success of the great American experiment – than efforts to expand the franchise.

Despite this history, and despite our nation’s long tradition of extending voting rights – to non-property owners and women, to people of color and Native Americans, and to younger Americans – today, a growing number of our fellow citizens are worried about the same disparities, divisions, and problems that – nearly five decades ago – LBJ devoted his Presidency to addressing. In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from many Americans, who – often for the first time in their lives – now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble, and essential, ideals."

~ Attorney General Eric Holder Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum, 12/13/2011

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald published a weird defense of his shameless promotion of Ron Paul, while strenuously contending that despite Ron Paul's core as a white southern racist, Greenwald only supports his foreign policy/civil libertarian agenda. When told to find another spokesperson for those views given Paul's baggage, Greenwald easily puts the burden of finding such a spokesperson on his critics.

The article from Greenwald has an easy corollary and translation: Yes, yes I know the Klan is horrible. But they are making an important point! So stop telling me I shouldn't popularize the Klan!

Is it fair to compare Paul with the KKK? You tell me: Paul is an avowed opponent of the Civil Rights Act, which he believes "destroyed privacy" (ah yes, Glenn Greenwald's big privacy concern and his support of Paul on that finally opens its door), published these things in his own newsletter:

Some samples: A December 1989 newsletter quoted by James Kirchick in the New Republic predicted "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.' "

Another letter said "I think we can assume that 95 percent of the black men in that city [Washington] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

An August 1992 edition of the Ron Paul Report labeled former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D) of Texas "the archetypal half-educated victimologist," according to the Houston Chronicle.

Conflicted by AmaSepiaChan age 12 This morning I woke up to an article on NEWSONE asking this very interesting and provocative question for their headline: Are Republican Front Runners Racist?... NEWSONE has decided to make a point of tracking their racist spews throughout election. Wow! They just went right at it head on:

The top GOP candidates who emerged from yesterday’s Iowa Caucus have a few things in common: They’re all white. They’re all men. And they’ve all been accused of racism. Some of these claims proved baseless, but others — we think — are legitimate...

After that opening shot they went through the lineup one by one and made clear why the title was necessary. A quote attributed to Romney was dissected and found to be untrue but the others were right on target. We heard the comments with our own ears you know: Santorum's “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Ron Paul"s Newsletters and his "hate Whitey day". Gingrich's Obama is the "Food Stamp President".

Remember the brouhaha from the chronic whiners when Keith Olbermann was given the boot from MSNBC? And remember his bragging about his gig at Current TV, for which Al Gore is apparently paying him $10 million a year?

Well, that lasted all of six months. To be fair, actually it's still lasting. But there might just be something brewing. Since no one watches Current, it went unnoticed that the station's highly paid "chief news officer" did not anchor the coverage for the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday night. Well, it went almost unnoticed.

Olbermann, the host of Current's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" and listed on the masthead as the network's chief news officer, was supposed to be on air Tuesday night, assuring a concerned Twitter follower earlier in the day that he was "headed into the office now in fact."

But a few hours later, Olbermann announced he would not, in fact, be on the air.

"So as not to mislead," Olbermann wrote on Twitter, "I am informed Countdown will not be on tonight. I must defer on all questions to [Current CEO] @JoelHyatt @AlGore and @Current."

When President Obama nominated Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - the first ever federal agency dedicated solely to protecting consumers - the Republicans in the Senate loudly declared their intention to block any nominee. Not because said nominee was unqualified, but because they wanted to use the block as leverage to weaken or eliminate the powers of the agency to protect consumers.

But you see, Congress likes to take vacations. Really long ones. Their "Christmas break" lasts till January 17 (for the Senate, till January 23). And during those vacations, the President is empowered by the Constitution to make recess appointments. But wait, wait. They are, after all, Republican members of the Senate. They are nothing if not the finest wrench throwers money can buy. So that the Senators can have their cake and eat it too, I mean so that they can have their vacation and block the president's nominations too, they set up "pro-forma" sessions to try to "technically" keep the Senate in session so that the wrench throwing continues during their lofty vacations.

In a rare act of bipartisanship, both the House and Senate recently passed H.R. 2845, the "Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011.

According to the White House, "this bill doubles the maximum civil penalties for violations of Federal pipeline safety laws, authorizes the Transportation Department to issue various regulations related to leak prevention and detection' and reauthorizes various programs of the Department's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration." Yesterday, President Obama signed H.R. 2845 into law.

When we say at DOT that safety is our number one priority, we are not kidding around. And today, as part of that important goal, President Obama signed into law the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act.

Last April, following several fatal pipeline accidents, we called upon U.S. pipeline owners and operators to conduct a comprehensive review of their oil and gas pipelines to identify areas of high risk and accelerate critical repair and replacement work. We also convened a Pipeline Safety Forum with state officials, industry leaders, and other stakeholders to discuss steps for improving the safety and efficiency of America's pipeline infrastructure.

Admittedly, I am a little late to this. I hadn't had a chance to notice this as over the new year, I had paid less attention to politics. Then, I see this by adept2u about Glenn Greenwald's sick, perverted, nasty attack on Angry Black Lady and the supporters of the President that we would support "any evil" should it be committed by President Obama:"assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape."

Greenwald has made a habit of throwing stones while he sits in a glass house. Glenn Greenwald is terrified that someone will point out his love for Ron Paul and link it to Ron Paul's racist past and present. Greenwald certainly has no proof that the President's supporters would support rape, if committed by the President, nor does he have evidence that the President would commit such a heinous crime. But we have proof that Greenwald's political love Ron Paul is a racist, and that Greenwald has no trouble loving on this racist. I will return to the issue of race here momentarily.

But first, it is important to clarify some things. This originates from a Twitter conversation about the National Defense Authorization Act, which the president signed along with a signing statement, as is pointed out on Eclectablog, reiterates the point that the NDAA neither expands nor contracts executive power on detention of American citizens on the suspicion of terrorism.

Here's Robert Scheer:

It should not be difficult for those same editorial writers [at the New York Times] to treat Ron Paul as a profound and principled contributor to a much-needed national debate on the limits of federal power instead of attempting to marginalize his views beyond recognition.

 Dear Bob, you and all the other "progressives" who want to treat the Dixiecrat sleazeball politics of Ron Paul as "profound" are exactly why I don't call myself a progressive anymore. I have no patience for your racist drivel, your ignorance of history, your smug-self-regard and condescending lectures. Take your limousine liberalism for a long drive off a short pier. This is where Ron Paul's anti-federalism comes from - and if you are too stupid, too immersed in your privileged position, too ignorant to understand that, why don't you go join the Republicans?


That The Nation is debating Ron Paul is an indication of how much the election of a black man as US President has unhinged a number of white guys who think of themselves as deserving a place in the elite - whether they call themselves "leftists" or "rightists".

On New Years Eve 2011 I witnessed tectonic shift in the blogosphere and twitterverse. The “Enthusiasm Gap” evaporated. It was as if we were all waiting for it to actually be 2012 to allow ourselves to become enthusiastic about re-electing the President. And wow, are people enthusiastic. It’s like a bright light turned on in a dark room. Everyone is awake now and definitely ready to go. So I thought I’d share some tips and tools for surviving the ten month and six day road ahead.

Breathe

Breathless reporters reporting breathlessly. We’ve all seen it; reporters and pundits reporting on events like they’re covering the end of the world. The operative word is breathless. When we don’t breathe, we don’t think, we don’t reason, we don’t listen. We’re agitated and out of control and do not make good decisions or evaluate what we hear, read and see correctly. The media wants us in this state of mind so we don’t tune away. We’re waiting to catch our breath and see if the world really does end.

The first and most important tool in our toolkit is breathing. I suggest taking it a step beyond the simple reflexive action to actively take time to ‘exercise’ breathing. Take a walk and focus on the act of breathing. Practice yoga or T’ai Chi or meditation—anything that alters the breathing habits used during the day for at least 20 minutes. Even stopping what we do and inhaling deeply using the diaphragm a few times a day will help. I do yoga for 20 minutes 6 days a week and I believe it is the main reason why I am able to get through reading about politics without overreacting to every little thing that’s out there. Actively controlling breathing helps us relax and stay calm. Staying calm makes all of us better advocates for the President. Pay attention to how calm he is about everything. Calm works. Breathing produces calm.

Do you think I’m being hyperbolic? Did you read that headline and think; No surely he has at least a modicum of respect for supporters of the President. No he doesn’t and he is completely illustrative of this new lean forward pro left.

I’ve explained in a previous post why I haven’t been blogging as much as I once did. I’ve fallen in love with the Twitter for the time being. It is there that Glenn Greenwald showed his entire ass and by extension has damned anyone who supports him to support this point of view.

I heard a few of the old timers complain about the chirpstory the last time I did one, so I’m going to let Zerlina Maxwell of the MSNBC property The Grio tell the story above the fold, you can read Glenn Greenwald’s disgusting spoor in the form of the chirp story below.

Zerlina Maxwell's must read take down of Glenn Greenwald

In a particularly heated exchange on Twitter Saturday night, a blogger named "DrDawg" tweeted about Gandy: "Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you'd say we weren't seeing what we were seeing." In response, Greenwald chimed in, "No - she'd say it was justified [and] noble - that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape."

 When twitter exploded in attacks on Greenwald for making a "rape joke," instead of apologizing for the comment, Greenwald doubled down, tweeting that the reference to rape was not a metaphor and in fact Obama supporters would defend the president in the face of "ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape violent crime like rape."

SNIP

Meanwhile, an irony of the infusion of rape into a debate in which it doesn't belong, is that theNDAA that Greenwald finds so offensive, also includes a provision which finally addresses the serious problem of rape, abuse and sexual harassment in the military.

Before this version of the NDAA, servicewomen who are raped were not allowed to transfer to another base or had a very difficult time doing so. Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), who along with Democratic Rep. Niki Tsongas fought to get these provisions into the bill has said that, "in civilian life, you have complete control of your movements, and if you're in an unsafe situation, you can remove yourself. In military life, the victim needs permission to take even basic self-preservation actions." 

Don’t believe me or Madame Maxwell join me over the fold and believe your lying eyes.