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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Politicans / Black Jimmy Carter

Black Jimmy Carter

Just a Reminder

by John Cole|  March 17, 20183:55 pm| 75 Comments

This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Dolt 45

I’m so old I remember when the right wing collectively lost their shit when President BLACKITY BLACK BLACK BLACK politely noted that perhaps a cop shouldn’t have been an asshole to a black man on his front porch. The world stopped, we had to have a beer summit, and wingnuts and their cohorts in the media and PBA’s across the nation screamed that the Kenyan usurper hated law enforcement and this was proof.

Trump just fired a lifelong law enforcement officer to fuck him out of his pension, and wingnuts are cheering. Funny that, hunh?

Also, last check- has anyone not received their calendar before I give away the remaining few to anyone who will take them?

Just a ReminderPost + Comments (75)

Stupid People on the Internet

by John Cole|  August 29, 201711:28 pm| 85 Comments

This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter

Sigh.

Barack Obama wasn't president during Katrina which means Michelle Obama wasn't First Lady then.
Also, that's a pic of Condoleezza Rice. https://t.co/VdDDY6W4dI

— Laurie Crosswell ? (@lauriecrosswell) August 30, 2017

But now that you bring it up, what was Obama doing during Katrina?

What was Obama doing during Katrina? He was actually at the Astrodome helping out and wasn't even goddamn president yet. pic.twitter.com/UFZoGfgxuo

— Talia (@2020fight) August 30, 2017

Oh. He actually went to Houston to visit with displaced Katrina victims, too.

Having the best President of my lifetime (and I am including anyone who comes after him) followed by the worst is just awful.

Stupid People on the InternetPost + Comments (85)

Bams Weighs In

by John Cole|  June 9, 20161:56 pm| 299 Comments

This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Election 2016

President Obama is off the sidelines and has released an endorsement of Hillary:

The general election is on. Time to pummel Trump and take back our statehouses, courthouses, and the House and Senate.

I can not wait for Obama to start beating Trump around the head and neck. It’s going to be fucking beautimous.

Bams Weighs InPost + Comments (299)

Relief, of Sorts, For the Middle Class

by John Cole|  May 18, 201612:26 pm| 113 Comments

This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

In reality, it’s just enforcing a bit of fairness:

The Department of Labor on Wednesday will finalize a rule extending overtime protections to 4.2 million more Americans currently not eligible under federal law, boosting wages by $12 billion over the next 10 years, the White House said Tuesday evening.

The updated rule, which takes effect Dec. 1 and doubles the salary threshold below which workers automatically qualify for time-and-a-half wages to $47,476 from $23,660 a year, or from $455 to $913 a week. Hourly workers are generally guaranteed overtime pay regardless of what they make.

“We’re strengthening our overtime pay rules to make sure millions of Americans’ hard work is rewarded,” President Obama said in a statement. “If you work more than 40 hours a week, you should get paid for it or get extra time off to spend with your family and loved ones.”

One of those Americans, Obama said, is Elizabeth Paredes, a single mom from Tucson, Arizona, who works as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop. “Elizabeth sometimes worked as many as 70 hours a week,without a dime of overtime pay,” Obama said. “So Elizabeth wrote to me to say how hard it is to build a bright future for her son. And she’s not alone.”

$12 billion over ten years is real money, and could be a game changer for a lot of people.

Relief, of Sorts, For the Middle ClassPost + Comments (113)

Letter to the Bernieland Fail

by John Cole|  May 7, 20167:26 pm| 247 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Black Jimmy Carter, Election 2016

Obama gave a magnificent speech to the graduating class at Howard today, and I have embedded it so you can watch it. It’s everything I love about Obama- it’s smart, it’s witty, it’s hopeful, it’s realistic, it’s based in historical reality, it’s optimistic, and it’s a challenge to the audience to do better while convincing them that they can. Watching it made my heart ache, because even though he is just a man and he has obviously done some things that I really disagree with, I just love him and wish he would be our President forever.

It’s why even on the issues I strongly disagree with him, I don’t lose my shit, because maybe he has a bigger picture view of things that I do, and he has earned my trust. Plus, for a politician, he’s just so goddamned cool. It’s like a mad scientist said let’s take FDR and Lincoln, add in some Jay-Z and Idris Elba, a little MLK and and Ali and Poitier, and see what happens- Presto- Obama!

At any rate, enough of the gushing. The best part of this speech today is how it does all the things that should be done at a commencement speech, but also sends a clear message to the youth about the current political realities taking place within the Democratic party. To wit:

And finally, change requires more than just speaking out — it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois’s first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement. I didn’t say to them, oh, you guys are so racist, you need to do something. I understood, as many of you do, that the overwhelming majority of police officers are good, and honest, and courageous, and fair, and love the communities they serve.

And we knew there were some bad apples, and that even the good cops with the best of intentions — including, by the way, African American police officers — might have unconscious biases, as we all do. So we engaged and we listened, and we kept working until we built consensus. And because we took the time to listen, we crafted legislation that was good for the police — because it improved the trust and cooperation of the community — and it was good for the communities, who were less likely to be treated unfairly. And I can say this unequivocally: Without at least the acceptance of the police organizations in Illinois, I could never have gotten those bills passed. Very simple. They would have blocked them.

The point is, you need allies in a democracy. That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow. But history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse. That’s not just true in this country. It’s not a black or white thing. Go to any country where the give and take of democracy has been repealed by one-party rule, and I will show you a country that does not work.

And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.

We remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory, the power of his letter from a Birmingham jail, the marches he led. But he also sat down with President Johnson in the Oval Office to try and get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act passed. And those two seminal bills were not perfect — just like the Emancipation Proclamation was a war document as much as it was some clarion call for freedom. Those mileposts of our progress were not perfect. They did not make up for centuries of slavery or Jim Crow or eliminate racism or provide for 40 acres and a mule. But they made things better. And you know what, I will take better every time. I always tell my staff — better is good, because you consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.

***

So that’s my advice. That’s how you change things. Change isn’t something that happens every four years or eight years; change is not placing your faith in any particular politician and then just putting your feet up and saying, okay, go. Change is the effort of committed citizens who hitch their wagons to something bigger than themselves and fight for it every single day.

That’s what Thurgood Marshall understood — a man who once walked this year, graduated from Howard Law; went home to Baltimore, started his own law practice. He and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, rolled up their sleeves and they set out to overturn segregation. They worked through the NAACP. Filed dozens of lawsuits, fought dozens of cases. And after nearly 20 years of effort — 20 years — Thurgood Marshall ultimately succeeded in bringing his righteous cause before the Supreme Court, and securing the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that separate could never be equal. (Applause.) Twenty years.

Marshall, Houston — they knew it would not be easy. They knew it would not be quick. They knew all sorts of obstacles would stand in their way. They knew that even if they won, that would just be the beginning of a longer march to equality. But they had discipline. They had persistence. They had faith — and a sense of humor. And they made life better for all Americans.

That’s as clear a message as Obama can give to Democrats without endorsing one candidate or the other, and it is a clear message to the Bernie or Bust folks who subscribe to the asinine notion that sitting out the election if Sanders does not win (he can’t win the nomination- why is that not clear? Oh, yeah. Because we’re too busy harassing math teachers for being swarthy than we are listening to them) will somehow help. There’s something to this Dylan Matthews piece.

God damnit. Just repeal the 22 amendment already. At least we will still have Obama campaigning for Hills this year and hammering Trump. We still got that.

Letter to the Bernieland FailPost + Comments (247)

No One Could Have Predicted, Garland Edition

by John Cole|  May 4, 201610:58 am| 145 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Best President Ever, Black Jimmy Carter

garland

Barack Obama, Jedi Knight.

barack-obama-jedi

No One Could Have Predicted, Garland EditionPost + Comments (145)

Long (Hate) Read: “The Selling of Obama”

by Anne Laurie|  May 1, 20165:38 pm| 181 Comments

This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Our Failed Media Experiment, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

Let's call the president that has a sense of humor beyond calling people idiot nicknames "Spock-like" one more time. pic.twitter.com/JCbHMc6K2n

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) May 1, 2016

This showed up online well in advance of last night’s WHCD, as part of Politico‘s “Media Issue,” as a story about how the President failed to uphold the Media Village Idiots’ prescriptions:

President Barack Obama insists he does not obsess about “the narrative,” the everyday media play-by-play of political Washington. He urges his team to tune out “the noise,” “the echo chamber,” the Beltway obsession with who’s up and who’s down. But in the fall of 2014, he got sick of the narrative of gloom hovering over his White House. Unemployment was dropping and troops were coming home, yet only one in four Americans thought the nation was on the right track—and Democrats worried about the midterm elections were sprinting away from him. He wanted to break through the noise… [I]in a speech at Northwestern University, he tried to reshape his narrative. If the presidential bully pulpit couldn’t drown out the echo chamber, he figured nothing could.

The facts were that America had put more people back to work than the rest of the world’s advanced economies combined. High school graduation rates were at an all-time high, while oil imports, the deficit, and the uninsured rate had plunged. The professor-turned-president was even more insistent than usual that he was merely relying on “logic and reason and facts and data,” challenging his critics to do the same. “Those are the facts. It’s not conjecture. It’s not opinion. It’s not partisan rhetoric. I laid out facts.”

The Northwestern speech did reshape the narrative, but not in the way Obama intended. The only line that made news came near the end of his 54-minute address, an observation that while he wouldn’t be on the ballot in the fall midterms, “these policies are on the ballot—every single one of them.” When Obama boarded Air Force One after his speech, his speechwriter, Cody Keenan, told him the Internet had already flagged that line as an idiotic political gaffe… Obama’s words couldn’t change the narrative of his unpopularity; they just gave Republicans a new opening to exploit it. They quickly became a staple of campaign ads and stump speeches tying Democrats ball-and-chain to their leader. “Republicans couldn’t have written a better script,” declared The Fix, the Washington Post’s column for political junkies. Even Axelrod called it “a mistake” on Meet the Press. The substance of the speech was ignored, and Keenan still blames himself for letting one off-message phrase eclipse a story of revival, a prelude to the second Republican midterm landslide of the Obama era. “I’m still pissed off about that,” Keenan told me. “Everything he said was true and important, and that one line got turned against him.”

Obama was hailed as a new Great Communicator during his yes-we-can 2008 campaign, but he’s often had a real failure to communicate in office. The narrative began spinning out of his control in the turbulent opening days of his presidency, and he’s never totally recaptured it. His tenure has often felt like an endless series of media frenzies over messaging snafus—from the fizzled “Recovery Summer” to “you didn’t build that” to the Benghazi furor, which is mostly a furor about talking points…

show full post on front page

Like him or not, Obama has had a hugely consequential presidency, transforming America’s approach to foreign and domestic affairs, enacting almost all of his original Change We Can Believe In policy agenda. And credit him or not, America’s trajectory has improved on his watch. Along with the trends he cited at Northwestern, the housing market, gas prices, combat deaths, and other vital statistics have moved in the right direction. So why does only a quarter of the public still think the country is on the right track? Why haven’t his reforms of health care, education, energy and Wall Street been more popular? In short, why hasn’t America gotten his message?…

The president’s Spock-like, no-drama persona has also complicated his efforts to connect with the public at times when terrorists were beheading innocents and pathogens were on the loose, especially in the new on-demand environment of rapid response and viral content. Obama sees himself as playing a longer game, rising above the tyranny of the news cycle, valuing the verdict of history over the hot take. But the Washington narrative unspools in real time, and to quote one of his favorite TV shows, The Wire, the game is the game…

One day early in his race for the White House, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, threw a newspaper on the desk of his traveling press secretary, Dan Pfeiffer. It was the inaugural issue of The Politico, a startup dedicated to as-it-breaks, wall-to-wall coverage of politics for an insider audience.

“This,” Plouffe said, “is going to be a problem.”

Along with “cable,” Obama’s dismissive shorthand for TV’s blab-a-thon of talking heads, Politico—the “The” soon disappeared—became Obama’s snide term of art for political coverage that prioritized optics over substance, short-term gamesmanship over long-term consequences, speed over thought. Eventually, his beef became less about Politico than his view that its established competitors seemed to be adopting its up-to-the-second style. He still thinks of most political journalism as superficial theater criticism, although his aides say that partly reflects his contempt for the political theater it chronicles, and they notice he still reads quite a lot of it…

There are a lot more words, which will no doubt be parsed exhaustively once the Villagers recover from #NerdProm. But once you get beyond the self-congratulation, it all breaks down to the same old problem: President Obama is a (very large) cat president in a small-dog media environment. As far as they’re concerned, his language is strange to them, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the value of their friendship overtures, his self-containment is off-putting. It’s like he’s some kind of alien! — very threatening, and yet too well-armed to be bluffed into running away. All they can do is bark & yap in chorus; fortuitously, that’s a major component of their core skill set, as the thought leaders would say.

Long (Hate) Read: “The Selling of Obama”Post + Comments (181)

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