Mia Love’s Nothing Speech

The Republicans are extending a lot of effort to place their newest buckdancers front and center. The problem is, Mia Love – Like Scott of South Carolina isn’t buying the Lawn Jockey routine.

The usual suspects are trying to spin Mia’s speech last night into some sort of home run successful come out at the Debutante Ball –  As if Snookie suddenly changed into Selma Hayek…

The problem is..Mrs Love didn’t bite on being the Party’s newest Tom in residence by doing the Herman Cain.

In that – Mia should get a little respect here, for not wallowing in the filth.

Taken for it’s content – Mia’s speech was nothing more than neutral pablum – I mean everybody loves Mom and Apple Pie. The attack on President Obama (for a change) wasn’t out-of-bounds – or an appeal to the dog-whistle racism of her party.

Let me tell you about the America I know. My parents immigrated to the U.S. with ten dollars in their pocket, believing that the America they had heard about really did exist. When times got tough they didn’t look to Washington, they looked within.

So the America I came to know was centered in personal responsibility and filled with the American dream.

The America I know is grounded in the determination found in patriots and pioneers, in small business owners with big ideas, in the farmers who work in the beauty of our landscape, in our heroic military and Olympians.

Mia Love to John Boener – Motown makes you move too?

It’s in every child who looks at the seemingly impossible and says, “I can do that.” That is the America I know!

President Obama’s version of America is a divided one — pitting us against each other based on our income level, gender, and social status. His policies have failed! We are not better off than we were 4 years ago, and no rhetoric, bumper sticker, or campaign ad can change that.

Mr. President I am here to tell you we are not buying what you are selling in 2012.

The American Dream is our story. It is a story of human struggle, standing up and striving for more. It’s been told for over 200 years with small steps and giant leaps; from a woman on a bus to a man with a dream; and the bravery of the greatest generation, to the entrepreneurs of today.

This is our story. This is the America we know because we built it.

With Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan we can restore the America we know and love. The world will know it, our children will tell it and our grandchildren will possess it for years to come!

No Mia – You didn’t build anything. It was already built by the sweat and blood of a lot of other Americans…

Before you got here from Haiti.

Perhaps that is why you got that sequence of events wrong starting with that “Woman on a bus..”

 

Alan West Buckdances …Again

Alan West is a traitor and disgrace to the US Army. They essentially threw his ass out for his criminal behavior.

So wrapping himself in the flag and uniform is like Benedict Arnold wearing the uniform of the Continental Army.

This Lawn Jockey is a real piece of work.

 

President Obama – Fighting Words!

“I think it’s fair to say that I have gone out of my way in every instance — sometimes at my own political peril and to the frustration of Democrats — to work with Republicans to find common ground to move this country forward. Each time, what we’ve seen in games-playing, a preference to try to score political points rather than actually get something done.” – President Obama

Tavis Smiley and Sheila Jackson Lee on Obama’s CBC Speech

No surprise here with Tavis having heartburn with the speech President Obama made before the Congressional Black Caucus. What is interesting is Sheila Jackson Lee’s response…

With 40 members in the House – seems to me the CBC could be quite effective at taking out some of the trash, in terms of tying the Tea Party Rethugs in knots. Why won’t they do that?

An Angry Black Man as President

Giant Negro Alert! An Angry Black Man – an image President Obama has tried desperately to escape by “Milquetoasting” himself into near electoral and Presidential oblivion…

Has finally peeked through.

John McWhorter made his chops by criticizing the black community and black students as anti-education. He was instantly lauded as a darling of the right, quoted in virtually every right-wing publication in the country. Probably one of the most “literate” writers in America, his writing can vary from the sublime to the utterly literally obtuse. McWhorter isn’t exactly a card carrying member of the Project 21 Lawn Jockey Squad – he’s a guy akin to Juan Williams who is, somewhere in what was, before our politics became so polarized – that middle to moderate. Which means to this Blogger – sometimes he’ll piss you off, and sometimes he’ll say something that you feel is dead right. It’s what our political spectrum used to be about before Karl Rove.

The great lie in this country is that “politics has become polarized” as both sides have moved to the extremes. It is a lie because the Left really hasn’t gone anywhere. The right in this country has made a leap out into the world of the tin foil hats – which just makes traditional left positions seem further away. What can you say of a group which has so polarized itself that any Republican wandering from the orthodoxy is labelled as a RINO and targeted for electoral elimination by his own party – and even staunch Republicans like Lamar Alexander are willing to leave their Senate Leadership positions because of the polarization his party forces upon him?

The Tea Party in this country is a rabid dog. Proof of that? Here and here and here. The only solution to dealing with a proverbial “rabid dog”…

Is the proverbial “2 x 4 between the eyes”. To paraphrase a quote by Ben Franklin – “No amount of reason can get a person out a position reason didn’t get them in in the first place.”

One of those times McWhorter gets it right.

It’s Time We Had an Angry Black President

The president has been talking some new talk. He should keep it up, and even step it up.

Obama rode in on his vaunted oratorical abilities, but the kind of ability we fell in love with him for is no longer of any use. The calls for unity, the echoes of Martin Luther King Jr., the rising above it all — it was great then, and maybe there will be a time for more of it in some years. But only after some new things have happened. And if they’re going to, Obama needs to retool his oratorical chops for a new style. I highly suspect that he’s up to it.

The present-day Republican establishment, with its know-nothing ideology and blithe absence of concern for most American human beings, has become tragically similar to the famously inert, heartless Senate of the Gilded Age, which for decades killed almost all progressive legislation even when it had been carefully hammered out in the House. The problem continued into the 1960s, before which the Senate was run by old-style Southern Democrat committee chairmen who for generations resisted, among other things, serious race-based legislation.

The president had no way of knowing that he would be up against as hollow-hearted and anti-intellectual a contingent as the Tea Partiers. But as of the debt-ceiling negotiations, it has become clear to all of us — Obama included — that we’re not going to be rising above much of anything anytime soon.

It’s time for the president to fight fire with fire, and he can accomplish much of it with a new way of talking. Obama needs to take a cue from the way even top-level politicians communicate in Parliament debates in the United Kingdom: a feisty, often almost heckling style of debate and address in which words and phraseology are wielded as weapons.

We saw hints in his jobs speech two weeks ago that the president is finally understanding this. “I know that some of you have sworn oaths to never raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live,” he addressed to a particular stripe of Republican, with a quiet smirk.

Good line. Many of them must have felt a touch silly having that fact pinned overtly upon them. Many people going along to get along would be shocked to have someone follow them all day for a week with a mirror so that they could watch themselves acting as they do.

Students working in a classroom with a large mirror on the wall have been shown to perform better. This kind of rhetoric can help change people, change minds and thus foster change.

Mr. President, along these lines, please start calling some names. This week’s callout to Speaker of the House John Boehner was a good start, when you proclaimed about his intransigence: “That’s not smart. It’s not right.” The Republicans have had no compunction about lobbing dirt at you; at this point you must do some of the same to avoid seeming — and thus, in many ways, being — weak.. (Catch the rest over at The Root)

Pass This Bill. NOW!

Great speech as usual last night by the President. Once again he is trying to thread a path though a minefield by appeasing Republicans, and trying to shame them into doing something positive for the country.

He still doesn’t “Get It”.

Insofar as creating jobs, the payroll tax reduction is a joke. The Bush tax giveaways got us into this mess in the first place.

You raise taxes, including on the wealthy. You raise taxes on companies offshoring. And you eliminate loopholes which allow corporations and over half the American public to avoid paying any tax – especially any loophole that allows corporations not to invest in American job growth. That is the prescription Reagan followed to get the country back on its feet.

We are a tech and services economy. While the country’s infrastructure is crumbling and needs a serious repair -more construction jobs don’t either build or help the economy. What I had hoped for as a bold vision like Kennedy’s “put a man on the moon” which would drive tech and scientific development for the next 30 years and put our economic core back to work.

 

 

SOTU…And the Wingdizzie

Good speech tonight by President Obama. Good response also by the Republican side.

Then the was the clown show, by Michelle Bachman which CNN carried.

The key earth shaker in the speech was Obama’s plan to restructure the Federal Government. This was an interesting move, and basically a statement that Obama would (finally) begin utilizing the apparatus of the Federal Government to accomplish his goals. It also means the bloated infrastructure developed under the Bush Administration is going to get torn down – moving us back to a Clinton style small lean federal  government.

He said the corruption is a target – I think that is a serious warning to the miscreants, in Congress, in politics, in Wall Street, and in the Banks.

Would have liked to see him take on the gun lobby.

But overall – President Obama moved the dime in his direction.

The Picture Which Says It All…

Gabrielle Giffords’ Husband Walks Up and Hugs President Obama After His Memorial Speech Last Night.

Did anyone else notice that besides Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, there were no prominent Republicans at the event last night? I expected Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Kennedy because of ties to the region, and felt that made an important point that the Court stands with Americans for justice and the rule of law.

I don’t know if they were dis-invited, felt uncomfortable, or what – but I expected the Speaker of the House, John Boehner to be there as the head of Congress.

That would have been an even stronger message to the haters. I think an opportunity was missed on someone’s part to show some solidarity.

To anyone still believing President Obama is a Muslim…Your belief isn’t based in any reality – it’s based on your bigotry. You ARE the problem.

President Obama Speaks at Reception for HBCUs

President Obama speaking at a reception today at White House for HBCUs. Notice he made a strong point about getting those graduation rates up, which have been abysmal at a number of the schools.

President Obama at Reception for Historically B…, posted with vodpod

A Caribou Barbie Roast in Alaska

Folks in Alaska are getting increasingly disenchanted with the wayward wingdizzie – the Sno’ Ho’. The President of the AFL-CIO in Alaska is giving a speech today which includes the following:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is expected to blast Sarah Palin in a speech set to be delivered Thursday in Anchorage, Alaska.

What is this crazy magnet that’s pulling people to the right? I mean, look at your former governor….

Who is she, anyway?

Sarah Palin?

She used to have a job, your governor…. You knew her…. Or thought you did…. I know I thought I did. She seemed like a decent person, an outdoorswoman. Her husband’s a steelworker. She seemed to take some OK stands for working families.

And then things got weird. After she tied herself to John McCain and they lost, she blew off Alaska. I guess she figured she’d trade up…shoot for a national stage. Alaska was too far from the FOX TV spotlight.

I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.

I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn’t have to be accountable… so she wouldn’t have a record that could be scrutinized…

Instead, she’s hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his “death panels….” Talking about “the real America.” Talking about building schools in “our neighboring country of Afghanistan.” Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.

President Obama’s Surprise Speech to Netroots Nation

I think he is beginning (finally) to make his case …

Democrat Senate Candidate SC Alvin Greene Makes His First Speech

Obviously unpolished and nervous, Alvin Greene makes his first public speech hosted by his hometown NAACP.

“South Carolina and America cannot afford six more years of my opponent,” Greene said of DeMint. “We cannot let my opponent keep this country hostage.”

Alvin Greene’s First Official Speech, posted with vodpod

The Sno’ Ho’ Dissed By College Kids

Picked up on a live Mike were the comments by Cal State students after suffering through a Sno’ Ho’ babble…”Now we know what is the dumbest of the dumb”!

PALIN CONTROVERSY! – CSU Students Call Palin “D…, posted with vodpod

Congressman John Lewis Speech At Kent State

Congressman John Lewis is the senior statesman in the House of Representatives (as well as Majority Whip). Here he gives a bit of the history he lived in a speech at Kent State University on the anniversary of the Kent State Shootings. Well worth a listen to understand John Lewis…

more about “Congressman John Lewis Speaks of the …“, posted with vodpod

Governor Paterson, The “Hammer” Part Deux – State of the State

NY Governor David Paterson outlines his plan for economic recovery in New York -