Showing posts with label Blacks4Barack.net. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blacks4Barack.net. Show all posts

Friday, March 23, 2012

WATCH:
President's Powerful Comments
on Trayvon
Martin case:


" IF I HAD A SON,
HE'D LOOK LIKE TRAYVON "

WATCH:









WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the first time since the controversy erupted on the national scene, President Barack Obama weighed in on the killing of Trayvon Martin, calling it a tragedy, urging cooperation among law enforcement and declaring that "some soul searching" was needed throughout the country.

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," Obama said, underscoring how the issue affected him on a personal, and not just a political or legal, level. "I think [Trayvon's parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened."

The statement by Obama came after he introduced Dartmouth President Jim Kim to be the next head of the World Bank during an appearance in the Rose Garden. He took only one question before heading back into the West Wing -- signaling that both he and his press handlers were feeling pressure, coming from black activists and others, to make a public comment on the Martin case.

Obama was careful not to get too far ahead of events. He said he was wary of "impairing" an ongoing legal process but praised the fact that federal, state and local law enforcement are now working together on Martin's death.

"Obviously, this is a tragedy," he said. "I can only imagine what these parents are going through, and when I think about this, 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 everybody aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together -- federal, state and local -- to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened."

He went on.

"I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen," said Obama. "And that means we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident."

The latter point may, in the end, be the most politically consequential. George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin in late February, has avoided arrest by evoking the Stand Your Ground law in Florida, which allows individuals broad latitude to claim self defense in wielding a firearm. Florida is one of 21 states with such laws, which have since come under intense scrutiny even by previous supports. Prior to that law being passed in Florida there were 13 "justified" killings in the state each year. Since then, there have been 36.

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Thursday, March 22, 2012


Time for Republican voters to
WAKE UP !

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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

GOP Unveils Plan to Cut Medicare,

Medicaid, Food Stamps and More !


WASHINGTON -- Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled his latest plan to slash spending Tuesday, returning to his controversial proposal to cut Medicare in part by privatizing the system that provides health care to the elderly.

His budget plan -- which Congress will not enact, but which offers an election-year blueprint for the GOP to tout as evidence of fiscal responsibility -- would set just two income tax rates of 10 percent and 25 percent and a corporate rate of 25 percent, while eliminating many deductions and loopholes. Ryan promised the tax reforms would be "revenue neutral."

But the flash point is likely to be the Wisconsin lawmaker's proposal to begin offering retirees the option of switching to a privatized Medicare system in which beneficiaries receive "premium support" from the government permitting them to buy insurance on the open market. Democrats hammered that proposal last year as ending Medicare as we know it. Ryan cast it as saving the program and controlling costs through competition.

"We propose to save and strengthen Medicare by taking the power away from bureaucrats," said Ryan as he rolled out his proposal Tuesday on Capitol Hill. "We believe competition and choice should be the way forward."

Ryan's budget would cut Medicare by $205 billion compared to President Barack Obama's budget, according to the documents he handed out.

Democrats pounced.

"A Republican budget to end Medicare is a Republican budget to end Medicare, no matter what you call it," said Eddie Vale, a spokesman with the Democrat-aligned Protect Your Care. "Paul Ryan can claim a tweak here or a tweak there from his last budget that ended Medicare. He can try to latch onto a new co-sponsor. But no window dressing can change the fact that, at its heart, his budget is a plan to end Medicare by ending the way the program has worked successfully for decades and throwing seniors out onto the mercy of the private insurance companies."

Also likely to generate opposition are plans to to dramatically cut other safety net programs, including food stamps and Medicaid, both of which would be converted to block grant programs that would be run at the discretion of individual states. Medicaid would lose $770 billion compared to Obama's budget, according to Ryan's documents. (read rest of article)

The GOP MUST Be Stopped...

GET FIRED UP !!!

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Happy 48th Birthday to Our Wonderful

1st Lady Michelle Obama !



You Make Us So Proud !


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Thursday, January 12, 2012

What Has The President

Done for 'Progressives' ?




Watch: Find out in just 2 minutes


Watch:


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Watch:
1st Lady Dispels

'Angry Black Woman' Stereotype




(CBS News) Michelle Obama said depictions of friction in a new book, "The Obamas," between her and former top aides to her husband, President Obama, aren't true.

In a wide-ranging interview with "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King, the first lady also said that some have tried to portray her as an "angry black woman" since Mr. Obama first announced he was seeking the presidency.

More from the interview: Michelle Obama on how she's changed

" ... I guess it's more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here and a strong woman and-- you know? But that's been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced, that I'm some angry black woman."

"The Obamas," written by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, reports that there was tension with former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and with former presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

But Mrs. Obama told King that simply wasn't so.

Watch:


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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

No Longer a Party of Lincoln:


The Racial Politics of the New GOP

By John Nichols



The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and the political home through much of its history for committed foes of segregation and discrimination, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of Southern strategies and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the "coded" language of complaints about "forced busing," legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and "entitlements."
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum told a crowd of supporters: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."


Around the same time, Texas Congressman Ron Paul was scrambling to explain away old newsletters that went out under his name with sections suggesting that "95 percent of the black males in that city (Washington) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal" and describing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as "Hate Whitey Day." Order was restored in riot-torn Los Angeles, the newsletters suggested, only when welfare checks arrived.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who spent the fall talking about eliminating child-labor laws so that school janitors could be replaced with poor kids, and who regularly refers to Barack Obama as "best food stamp president in American history," arrived in the first-primary state of New Hampshire and announced: "I'm prepared if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

All these remarks and revelations drew consternation. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leaders rebuked Gingrich and Santorum, with NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous saying of Gingrich: "It is a shame that the former speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country. The majority of people using food stamps are not African-American, and most people using food stamps have a job."

Instead of objecting to the excesses of the other contenders, the "adult" in the race, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, picked up on the themes developed by Santorum and Gingrich to gripe about "the ever-expanding payments of an entitlement society" as "a fundamental corruption of the American spirit."
Romney is arguably the most disappointing of the current candidates, as he surely knows better.

His father, George Romney, was one of the Republican Party's most ardent advocates of civil rights, anti-poverty programs and investment in urban renewal during the 1960s. As the newly elected governor of Michigan, George Romney marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, George Romney argued, at considerably political cost to himself, on behalf of a Republican Party that would welcome newly enfranchised African-American voters and reject the coded language of Southern strategists and repurposed segregationists. In 1964, as one of the nation's most prominent Republican elected officials, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy. He complained that Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was gearing his campaign toward disaffected Democrats in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi, had broken faith with party members who valued "basic American and Republican principles."

While some Republicans responded to the outbreak of rioting in American cities by blaming Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty initiatives, Geoffrey Kabaservice recounts in his brilliant new analysis of the decay of the Republican Party, "Rule and Ruin" (Oxford, 2012), how George Romney argued that government was not doing enough. Instead of squandering federal funds on the Vietnam War, he argued, the United States must change its budget priorities and focus on the "human, social and economic problems of own people."
George Romney's was an honorable Republicanism, and that Republicanism remained alive long after the elder Romney left the political hustings. In the 1980s, when some Republicans openly opposed the creation of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, they were called on the carpet by U.S. Sen. Charles Mathias, R-Md., who had in the early 1960s taken the lead (with then-Congressman John Lindsay and a handful of others) in forcing reluctant Democrats in the U.S. House to consider civil-rights and voting-rights legislation. Mathias was horrified that any Republican would consider squandering what he correctly considered to be one of its finest legacies. In the late 1980s and 1990s, former Congressman Jack Kemp, a New York Republican who served as a Cabinet secretary and the party's 1996 vice presidential nominee, repeatedly raised alarms when Republicans engaged in stereotyping of African-Americans and other minority communities. And for a time in the 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed as if a young Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and then a few years later as one of the nation's most liberal Republican governors, was aligning with Kemp and revitalizing the best traditions of his father's Republican Party.

But no more.
Unlike his father, Mitt Romney refuses to call out, let alone break with, the reactionaries who mouth slightly updated variations on the 1960s language of the "white backlash" against civil rights, social programs and the war on poverty. Indeed, with his crude complaints about the United States as an "entitlement nation," he embraces the rough outlines of their arguments.
Even worse, in many senses, is Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who has tried without much success to position himself as a moderate runner in the GOP race.

Huntsman had a perfect opening to distinguish himself in the days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, when so many of his fellow contenders were objecting to "making black peoples' lives better" and dismissing the first African-American commander in chief as the "best food stamp president in American history." He could have been the leader that Mitt Romney was not. But Huntsman lacked the courage to do the right thing. Or, perhaps, and this is even more unsettling, Huntsman simply concluded that an appeal to "basic American and Republican principles" would not be recognized by what remains of a once Grand Old Party.
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com.


Thursday, January 5, 2012

WATCH:

President Flexes Muscle;

Bypasses Congress


President Barack Obama waves with Richard Cordray (R) after announcing that he has appointed Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during a trip to Cleveland, Ohio January 4, 2012. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law to police the market for consumer products such as credit cards and mortgages.—-REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque


WATCH: President Announces Cordray to head CFPB (Cleveland)









ANOTHER Great Job Mr. President !


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