Highway Ramblings Brought To You By The Tea Party

I spent last week in a seminar to learn the ins and outs for an online database application for a client that I’m working with.  The seminar was held in a little town about an hour’s train ride outside of New York City and very close to Connecticut.  The misses and I drove the one thousand miles one way trip with our five year old son and made the trip a working vacation.  She had never been to the east coast and I hadn’t spent much time their either so we were going to take full advantage of this opportunity.

The seminar was very successful.  I learned a considerable appreciation for the online application I went to study and got more than a few ideals about future database application development.  The misses and son spent their time exploring the area, chasing chipmunks, and studying a few artificial waterfalls at the resort we were staying.  We all enjoyed ourselves and considered the trip a very successful one.

Saturday morning we started on the long drive home.  While traveling through Pennsylvania along interstate 78 heading west, we saw a political billboard along the side of the highway that briefly summed up the record of President Obama as making the American people less free, endorsing bigger government, and responsible for fifteen percent “real” unemployment.  The misses and I had to laugh at the sign and wondered what could anybody point to that would support the contention that Mr. Obama made the American people less free now than they were three years ago.  We wondered what would has Mr. Obama done that has made the American government bigger than it was three years ago.  We found the contention that Mr. Obama was responsible for the current unemployment rate dubious considering the fact that when Mr. Obama took over the reins of the country the American people were in the middle of an economic freefall resulting from the policies enacted from the previous administration.  Blaming Mr. Obama for the unemployment rate would be akin to blaming firemen for the fire that burned the building down.

The sign went on to say that it was paid for by the local tea party.  I just knew I had my inspiration for my next article.  But by the time we read the sign we were passed it, traveling home at the illegal rate of eighty five miles per hour in a sixty five zone.  I would’ve liked to have taken a picture of the sign.  But it would have been miles before we would come to our next exit.  With so many miles of travel ahead of us, turning around was not even close to being an option.  I would look on the internet to find an image of the sign.  Unfortunately, I never did find an image of it.

As we traveled down the highway the misses and I thought about what the country would be like if the tea party ran things.  The tea party, with its single minded focus on cutting taxes and keeping government from being able to do much of anything to help support the development of our national infrastructure.  The misses actually summed it up very well.  If the nation followed a tea party mindset, chances are we wouldn’t have our interstate system that enabled us to travel so quickly and easily.  The government would have never made the investment into the nation’s interstate highway system that so many people take for granted.  We would still be stuck on a network of local roads with varying standards of design and maintenance.

One thing that made our travel so easy and painless was the navigation application that came with our android phone.  We entered our destination into the phone and the global positioning system that the government developed guided us directly to where we wanted to go without a single wrong turn, just as long as you paid attention to the instructions the device was giving.  And when you did happen to make a wrong turn, the device quickly calculated a new route to put you on track.

The billboard was gone.  But I was going to use the internet to see if I could find a copy of the sign left by somebody else.  Regardless, I would use the internet to let other people know how I felt about the sign and about the tea party.  The same people who talk about getting government out of their lives would be using the same internet made possible by the government to tell people that the government needs to be made smaller and ineffective, so that the developments that would take us further into the future would be made totally unlikely to ever see the light of day.  The tea party would prefer to dismantle our educational system that would make all the thinkers, scientists, dreamers, and the rest of us that make it possible for us to make the progress to keep us forever moving forward.

The sign reminded us that we need to keep working and making sure that government, the collective of people who come together to assure that the welfare of the nation is protected and developed to its fullest potential possible, is protected from people who don’t have the vision to see the benefits of investing into the future as a nation.  Without the government the seminar that I attended would not have been possible.  The highway system, the internet, the global positioning system, and many other things wouldn’t be possible if our government didn’t do its part to make progress possible.  No corporation could ever do what our government has done.

To add just one more caveat to the mix, it was a federal government that made it possible for a couple of black people to pack their son into a car and travel across the country with some semblance of security that they would arrive safely to participate in the development of database applications as entrepreneurs for a fledgling software company.  While the system is far from fair, without the federal government the second class status of black people would be even worse than it is now.  It’s the government that initiated the social economic change that is helping to dismantle the bigotry that would have black people exist at white people’s property.  The way a lot of people in the tea party operate, their against that kind of progress as well.

It Takes A Community To Raise A President

Anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis should know I can be pretty critical of President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama has been very careful to keep the black community at arm’s length so as not to give his political opponents any reason to bring race into the picture. Mr. Obama will deny that his race is a factor for any of the criticism and outright hatred that many of his constituents have for him. It’s understandable. In politics, it would be easy to say that a black man that embraces black people will be anti white.

When asked for his opinion on the Trayvon Martin case, Mr. Obama said that if he had a son he’d look like the slain teenager. Some conservatives were quick to use that comment as evidence that Mr. Obama doesn’t care for white teenagers. The same thing happened when Mr. Obama tried to put accusations of racism against white people aside when he addressed his relationship with his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In his speech, he talked about the racism he witnessed from his grandmother who he described as a typical white person. Many of his critics were quick to say that Mr. Obama threw his grandmother under his bus. This man can’t say anything about race without somebody calling him racist.

In order to give Mr. Obama some slack from the race factor, many people in the black community were willing to give Mr. Obama a pass from addressing the needs of the black community. Most black people were confident that Mr. Obama would do what’s best for the black community without being asked for assurances or for an understanding what his plan would be. He was a shoe in to win the black vote after all. Wasn’t he one of us? Didn’t he have black skin? So did Clarence Thomas and you see where that got us.

Nevertheless, the black community voted for Mr. Obama in droves and we kept our questions and concerns to ourselves. But that only helped to lead Mr. Obama astray. Instead of keeping his focus on our communities, his attention was elsewhere as he did his best to keep the assurances he gave to others around the nation and throughout the world. Mr. Obama bent over backwards to try and win favor from his conservative opponents. When the conservatives were making their pact to deny Mr. Obama anything that could be construed as a success, Mr. Obama was trying his best to gain the favor of conservative constituents by compromising time and time again with people who refused to compromise.

But by letting Mr. Obama off the hook and free to pursue the favor of conservatives who demanded concession after concession before saying no to everything, we left Mr. Obama to wander away from his political base in a fruitless appeal for bipartisanship with people who would rather drive the country to ruin in order to make Mr. Obama look like a failure than agree with him on anything that would improve the national welfare.

Mr. Obama seems to have awakened from his delusion that conservative politicians can be reasoned with. He now recognizes the fact that his political future and the future of the country depends on him taking a harder line on the people trying their best to sabotage his leadership. Mr. Obama now understands that it is naïve to think that he can negotiate with people who want him to fail at any and all cost.

Just like Mr. Obama has awakened from his slumber, the black community needs to awake from its slumber as well. If people had made sure that Mr. Obama focused his attention on the things that were important to the black community like jobs and the protection of educational opportunities and unemployment benefits while the country works through its malaise. It’s unfortunate that healthcare reform was done without a single payer option. But now that conservatives have challenged the reform in its current iteration, if it gets rejected maybe Mr. Obama would push for it on a second round. All of those things would help people in the black community as well as people who need help throughout the country.

If the black community wants to help Mr. Obama have a successful presidency, the black community needs to be willing to criticize Mr. Obama when he goes off course from his base. Staying mum as he goes down what we feel is the wrong path isn’t helping. The people who may care most about him having a successful shouldn’t be afraid to speak up and give him some feedback on what we see going down in the political arena. If we showed something that resembled a political backbone, maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to turn a back on his base to win the political favor of others.

Criticizing Mr. Obama when he fails to protect our interest is not necessarily an automatic condemnation. It ranks right up there when a parent criticizes a child or a supervisor criticizes an employee. Feedback should be welcomed in a relationship that remains respectful for everyone concerned. When Mr. Obama fails to represent us, when he fails to respect us along with the rest of his constituencies and we fail to bring that fact to his attention, we have no one but ourselves to blame for his lack of concern for us.

Mr. Obama is up for reelection and the black community, along with the Hispanic community, along with the female community, along with the Jewish community, along with the gay and lesbian community, along with the white community, along with the business community, and every other community, has interests that should be voiced and protected.

Questions Of Leadership

President Barack Obama is under attack for politicizing the assassination of Osama bin Laden.  Before Mr. Obama ever set foot in the White House as our commander in chief, people were trying to paint him as too weak to keep the country safe.  Mitt Romney has often criticized the President for having an ineffective foreign policy, claiming that the President travels around the world to foreign countries apologizing on behalf of the United States and appeasing terrorist, the very people who are moving heaven and hell to hurt us.

To counter the claim that his foreign policy is worthless, Mr. Obama has used the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks on September 11th that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and heavily damaged the Pentagon, to remind people that it was his leadership that led to the United States’ greatest foreign policy triumph.  And now, the opponents say that Mr. Obama is not playing fair and is trying to take credit for something that Mr. Romney claims even somebody as politically feeble as Jimmy Carter would have done.

First, everything the President does revolve around politics.  If the President gets a dog it becomes a political issue.  If the President takes his wife to a play in New York’s Times Square it becomes a political issue.  If the President finds himself ahead of schedule and takes time to get a haircut his opponents are ready to pounce.  And if he as so much grabs a burger, people will point to his potentially poor dietary choice as an example of how the people shouldn’t trust him to make the hard choices to keep us safe.  Everything the President does can and will be used against him in a court of public opinion.

If people stand ready to use everything he does against him, it is only fair that he can use everything he does to support his brand.  It’s why the guy who wears the title of President when the Berlin Wall comes down takes credit for the fall of the wall.  It’s why the commander in chief will allow somebody to put up a “mission accomplish” banner on the front windshield of an aircraft carrier to proclaim premature success for his rash decision to go to war.  If the President doesn’t toot his own horn once in a while, who will?

When he campaigned for the White House then Senator Obama made it clear that he would make the elimination of Osama a top priority if he was elected.  Mr. Bush admitted that he didn’t care to look for the puppet master behind the greatest terrorist attack against the United States.  Mr. Obama said he would finish the job left by his predecessor.  At the same time, Mr. Romney said he wouldn’t waste America’s resources in a hunt for a single man and didn’t think it should be a priority.  Mr. Obama won the election and kept his word, albeit very quietly.  He rarely made a public statement filled with bravado about how tough he would be on America’s enemies.

America didn’t just happen on bin Laden.  It took an intelligence network and the cooperation of many people around the world, American personnel and people from many other countries, to find him.  That’s evidence of a foreign policy.  In order to effectively run and maintain that network there had to be resources in place to sustain that network, resources that other people would not commit because they didn’t think his capture was important.

Finding the terrorist was just one of the first steps.  Next, a plan had to be concocted to deal with him.  More resources were expended to train the people who were going to go in and get him.  Navy Seal Team Six needed to have every advantage to assure their success.  Intelligence had to be gathered to uncover every bit of information related to the compound where Osama was staying.  That information was used to recreate a simulation compound so that the team could rehearse their infiltration procedure.  Intelligence continued to be gathered in order to determine the best time to spring the assault.  And all of that had to happen with the approval and under the direction of the President.  It didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Now, Jimmy Carter made a similar call as President when Iranian students took over the American embassy in Iran and took sixty six Americans hostage back in 1979.  When diplomacy failed to win the release of the hostages, Mr. Carter gave the military his blessing to attempt a rescue.  In April of 1980 Operation Eagle Claw failed miserably with the death of eight American servicemen and one Iranian civilian when a United States helicopter crashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane.

Mr. Carter made the call to go into hostile territory on a daring mission and it failed.  He paid a considerable political price for that decision.  The idea that Mr. Carter deserves scorn for the failure of the people he led in a crisis situation is a part of politics.  If he had succeeded, things would have been much different.  He knew what the risk were and pulled that trigger regardless.  It was a tough decision that was met with tough luck.  But that’s politics when you’re the President.

Mr. Carter’s failure only put more pressure on Mr. Obama when he was faced with a similar decision.  Failure would be a serious albatross that would impact the political future for not just Mr. Obama but the entire Democratic Party.  People already assume that conservatives are better at keeping America safe and that liberals are incompetent when it comes to commanding our military.  If Mr. Obama’s decisions proved disastrous, it would have only cemented that political perception and opponents would have taken advantage of it.  Many of his advisers suggested that he not give the go ahead.  Mr. Obama had to weigh the odds.  In the end, he pulled the trigger and the mission was accomplished, finally.

Republican pundits are now saying that the assassination of bin Laden was such a unifying accomplishment for the nation that it should be off limits.  A year ago, even the Republicans who would rather stand up during a presidential address and yell that the President was a liar had to give Mr. Obama his props for a job well done.  It was a remarkable feat of leadership.  But now it’s nothing special, anybody would have done it, anybody but President Bush that is.

Conservative political pundit Ed Gillespie went on the Sunday morning political talk shows and said that Mr. Obama was trying to use the accomplishment of the death of bin Laden as a wedge issue against the conservatives and that was indicative of him trying to divide the country.  The death of bin Laden was a unifying event and now that he wants to use it as a proof of his leadership was now dividing us.  So the assumption is that anything that the President points to as proof of how he brought a politically divided country together with his leadership is politically divisive.  There’s just bizarre logic that only makes sense on opposite day.

Another pundit said that as a leader, Mr. Obama shouldn’t be trying to take credit for the successes of the people he leads.  The only thing a good leader should be taking is the responsibility for failure.  That’s why so many people who lead corporations get paid tens of millions of dollars in an annual compensation package.  They never take credit for leading a company to financial success.  They only take credit for leading a company to financial ruin.  It’s just more nonsense to hold Mr. Obama to a different standard.

The assassination of bin Laden was an achievement that every American can enjoy.  The fact that it was Mr. Obama that led the country to that accomplishment as he said he would do was something that he can take great pride in.  The people who feel that this now gives Mr. Obama unfair proof of his ability to lead and defend himself against their accusations that he’s incompetent is just the way things fall in politics.

Good job Mr. Obama!  If your opponents want to criticize you as being a poor leader when it comes to foreign policy, that’s going to be pretty hard to do with Osama’s demise under your belt.  But that won’t mean they won’t try.  Don’t let your opponents define the limits of what is and what’s not admissible as a political issue.  Don’t let them take this one away from you.

Gary Stein Got What He Wanted

Staff Sergeant Gary Stein will get an other than honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits for violating the policies of the United States Marine Corp. Mr. Stein is being discharged for his high profile and public criticism of his boss, President Barack Obama, on Facebook. Mr. Stein used his Facebook page to express his contempt for his commander in chief with statements like “screw Obama” and openly admitting that he would refuse an order from the President and images that went so far as to compare Mr. Obama to a jackass. He later amended his statement to say that he wouldn’t follow an unlawful order of the President. But his contempt was still very much evident.

The Marines Corp say that Mr. Stein was repeatedly warned about his posts. While troops are encouraged to carry out their obligations of citizenship and are allowed to express their personal opinion on political issues and candidates and issues, they cannot take part in any political activities as official representatives of the military. Mr. Stein included a disclaimer on his posts that said that what people read was his personal opinion and not the opinion of the Marine Corp. So in all fairness he was doing nothing more than exercising his constitutionally protected freedom of speech. So Mr. Stein was able to avoid a court martial. But unfortunately for him, while freedom of speech meant that he wouldn’t have to face time in jail, it doesn’t mean immunity from any reprisals for expressing his rage of his employer.

After serving the Marine Corp for more than nine years, Mr. Stein will get an other than honorable discharge and lose most of the benefits that come with military service. Mr. Stein said he loved being a Marine and enjoyed his career as a military meteorologist. He just didn’t love it enough to keep his opinion in check and express his displeasure with Mr. Obama in a more respectful manner. He claims that all he was doing was expressing his freedom of speech. But he forgot that the military also has its own right to express its freedom of speech.

What better way for the military to let the world know that it doesn’t care for rather over the top dissention of the commander in chief than to fire people who engage in such activity? And it’s not like Mr. Stein was just yanked out of his uniform the first time somebody caught wind of his expression. He was warned and he was warned repeatedly. He made the choice to continue down a path that would pretty much guarantee a confrontation.

Mr. Stein named his Facebook page, Armed Forces Tea Party. While it’s not clear if he was an official member of the tea party, he appears to have made a connection nevertheless. He probably felt that his affiliation with an organization so vociferous in its opposition to Mr. Obama would give him ample protection to make the suggestion that Mr. Obama was a jackass. The only problem was that most of the people in the tea party who carried signs saying that Mr. Obama was a lying African and should go back to Kenya didn’t work for Mr. Obama. Mr. Stein did. He knew that he was treading in thin ice and yet he continued to press forward. It was inevitable that the amount of force he was using to push the issue would eventually meet sufficient opposing force that would make him regret his actions.

I have never served in the Marine Corp so I cannot speak from experience or with inside knowledge, but I do believe that it’s a given that the chain of command is highly valued and protected by every branch of the military. People who serve and openly challenge their superiors do so at their own peril. It doesn’t matter if an individual’s actions were unintentional or purposeful the military has an obligation to keep discipline and order. Allowing a subordinate to undermine respect for their superiors cannot be good for the smooth operation of organizations charged with the protection of our national security. Any challenge to discipline and order should be met with enough corrective action to discourage similar behavior in the future.

Mr. Stein believes he is being made an example to others. I couldn’t agree more. Other people in military service should think twice before they openly criticize any of their superiors with contempt and loathing, let alone the President. Besides it’s only fair. Mr. Stein made Mr. Obama an example of his disrespect. It wasn’t like Mr. Obama had a history of making unlawful or unreasonable orders to the military. What prompted him to suddenly voice his need to hold Mr. Obama to a standard that he didn’t hold for Mr. Obama’s predecessor President George Bush Jr.?

All things considered it looks like Mr. Stein brought his premature discharge on himself. Now he wants to cry foul and talk about regretting his choices. Maybe he’s learned from his ordeal. Too bad the price of learning was so high. He should look at the bright side now. Once his termination is complete, he will be free to exercise his freedom of speech without the fear of losing his job that he already lost. Isn’t that what he wanted, at least more than he wanted his career.

Obama Attacks The Supreme Court

When former Illinois Senator Barack Obama made his pitch to become the next President of the United States, he was dogged rabid style with criticism over the way he responds to controversy.  Mr. Obama had to respond to accusations that he would be willing to tolerate racism against white people after video clips of his former pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright became public.  Mr. Obama tried to stiff arm his long time spiritual mentor, but that wasn’t good enough.  He had to address the issue head on.  The result was Mr. Obama’s speech titled “A More Perfect Union” where he denounced his pastor, but made the mistake of describing his white grandmother as the typical white person who held deep suspicions of black people, yet embraced him as her own.  People accused Mr. Obama of throwing his grandmother under the bus.

In July of 2009, Mr. Obama’s friend Henry Louis “Skip” Gates was arrested for being angry about someone calling the police on him.  Mr. Gates had just returned from a long trip overseas and his front door refused to budge even after the door was unlocked.  A passerby saw a black man looking suspicious and called police.  The police showed up to make sure everything was on the up and up.  Mr. Gates probably wasn’t in the best of mood.  The result was a confrontation between the angry black man in his own home and the police and the police took Mr. Gates to jail for being disorderly.  Mr. Obama wanted to defend his friend and said that the police behaved stupidly.  The backlash was quick and fierce.  The President apologized and extended an invitation for both Mr. Gates and the arresting officer to share a beer with him at the White House.

If nothing else those experiences have taught Mr. Obama that he has to be even most careful and think twice before expressing his own opinion regarding an issue that is bound to be controversial.  Indeed, if Mr. Obama expresses his opinion over the most mundane issue, his political opponents will stop at nothing to paint him as an out of control liberal doing his best to undermine the constitution.

Earlier this year Mr. Obama called Sandra Fluke to offer his support after she suffered more than two days of vicious attacks by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh because Ms. Fluke had the audacity to testify before the Congress and express her opinion of the healthcare mandate that insurers must offer contraceptive coverage to women.  Mr. Obama’s opponents accused him of trying to manipulate the controversy for political advantage in the middle of a presidential election year.

When the news of the travesty regarding the murder of Trayvon Martin went national, Mr. Obama was asked his opinion and the President made the mistake of expressing his sympathy to Trayvon’s family.  Mr. Obama said that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon.  Frankly I was surprised that Mr. Obama would identify with Trayvon so personally.  Mr. Obama rarely expresses his connection to the black community so publicly.  I would have expected a generic statement about how we have to be patient while somebody goes to the wheel store to buy a new wheel of justice, mount that wheel to the legal system and wait for it to do something radical like turn.  But the President’s statement gave just a hint that Mr. Obama recognizes the racial problem we have in this country.

Mr. Obama’s political opponents took the President’s statement about Trayvon as an attempt to introduce race into a situation that already had race written all over it.  The statement was interpreted to mean that Mr. Obama doesn’t care when white teenagers are murdered the way Trayvon was.  It should be noted that the political opponents who are trying hard to defend Trayvon’s murder actually admitted a possibility that Trayvon was indeed murdered.  Goes to show how confusing partisanship can be when opponents are only focusing on being Mr. Obama’s opposition.

Now Mr. Obama’s statement on the Supreme Court and the future of the healthcare law is getting the take it totally out of context treatment.  When asked his opinion of the high court, Mr. Obama said that he was confident that the unelected nine justices would not overturn the law that was appropriately passed by the Congress.  Now Mr. Obama is being accused of attacking the Supreme Court and making a threat against them.  Conservative presidential contenders accuse Mr. Obama of being a bully.  It’s now being billed as POTUS versus SCOTUS and the justices are now in their chambers cowering in fear for their very lives. People are gathering in the streets to defend the highest court in the land from the anticipated onslaught that is bound to come because we all know Mr. Obama has a history of attacking anybody and everybody at the drop of a hat.

The President has been accused of being a proponent of food stamps for black people.  He has had his faith questioned at every turn from people suggesting that he is a Muslim or an atheist even when he’s accused of being a Christian in Rev. Wright’s church.  His birth certificate is routinely rejected by people who refuse to accept him as an American citizen.  People in the United States Congress are so bold that they yell the President’s a liar while he gives his State of the Union address.  His wife is routinely criticized for trying to help people live healthier lives by eating right and exercising.  He is called arrogant, ignorant, stupid, incompetent, and every other negative adjective that comes to mind.  People say that the President should go back Kenya even though his home is Hawaii.  He is accused of not loving America.  He wants to see America fail.  His opponents hope he fails in his bid to make the country better.  Marines under his command have the audacity to put a derogatory image of their commander on a Facebook page with a comment that they would not follow his orders.  United States regional Judges currently sitting on the bench distribute tasteless jokes about the President’s mother having sex with animals.  The President has to deal with boney fingers from Governors thrust in his face.

But now he’s on an attack against no less an entity than the Supreme Court.  If Mr. Obama saying that he has confidence that the Supreme Court will let the healthcare law stand is a veiled attack then Mr. Obama is pretty lame when it comes to starting something with somebody.  And what would one say about all the shit’s that been said about him?  Are any of those statements or the many others that weren’t mentioned an attack on our President?

Please Do Not Hold For A Call From The President

On February 29, 2012, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh initiated a series of degrading, insulting, and scandalous remarks about Georgetown University Law Center student Sandra Fluke.  Based on Ms. Fluke’s statements in her speech to House Democrats in support of mandated contraceptives for women, Mr. Limbaugh came to the conclusion that Ms. Fluke was a slut.  In a fantastic leap of logic, Mr. Limbaugh concluded that the fact that Ms. Fluke wanted insurers to provide no cost contraceptive coverage meant that Ms. Fluke wanted to be paid to have sexual intercourse and that made her prostitute.

For three days Mr. Limbaugh used his globally syndicated radio show to make his vicious verbal attack against Ms. Fluke.  On the third day, in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Ms. Fluke announced that she had received a call from President Barack Obama just before she appeared on the program.  Ms. Fluke said that Mr. Obama gave her words of encouragement and support and thanked her for exercising her freedom of speech about the concerns of American women.  Ms. Fluke was understandably touched.  She admitted that what was really personal for her was that Mr. Obama told her to tell her parents that they should be proud.  It meant a lot to Ms. Fluke because Mr. Limbaugh had used his show to pose the question whether or not her family would be proud of her.  During a trying time she appreciated the gesture so very much.

The White House said that Mr. Obama made the call because he wanted to offer his support and express his disappointment to Ms. Fluke that she had become the subject of such an inappropriate personal attack.  The President thanked her for speaking out on public policy as a private citizen.  When White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked what Mr. Obama thought about Limbaugh’s comments, Mr. Carney said that the President found it reprehensible that those kinds of personal and crude attacks.

On February 26, 2012, three days before the thirty year old Ms. Fluke verbally assaulted by Mr. Limbaugh, a seventeen year old Trayvon Martin was confronted by twenty eight year old George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.  The confrontation turned deadly and Trayvon was killed when Mr. Zimmerman pulled out his nine millimeter Kel-Tec pistol.  According to reports, Trayvon Martin was murdered by a single bullet wound to his chest.  Despite a series of 911 calls made by people in the vicinity of the killing where Trayvon could be heard in the background pleading for help before being shot, and Mr. Zimmerman’s own emergency operator call where he says that Trayvon was trying to run away from Mr. Zimmerman, despite the fact that Mr. Zimmerman admits that he was chasing the young black teenager and initiating a confrontation, Mr. Zimmerman claims he was being attacked and fatally shot Trayvon in self defense.

The police took Mr. Zimmerman for his word claiming there was no evidence to contradict his story.  The only other eyewitness to the sequence of events had died.  Mr. Zimmerman went free as Trayvon Martin’s body went to the city morgue and sat for three days before the police gave his parents the horrible news of what happened to their son.  To this day, there has been no indication of any call from President Barack Obama to the parents of Trayvon Martin to convey his disappointment about a fatal attack on a young black teenager and the cover up by the Sanford, Florida police to hide at best their ineptitude, at worse their blatant racial bias that prevented a thorough investigation of a possible crime of murder.  Chances are pretty high that Mr. Obama will never make that call.

President Obama rarely injects himself into matters of race that pertain to black people.  The majority of times Mr. Obama would probably do so would be to defend his self from accusations and insinuations that he is racist against white people, like all the times it was suggested that he went to Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ to hear anti white propaganda even though many of the people who fervently pushed that suggestion are the same ones who would accuse him of being a Muslim.  The only other time Mr. Obama spoke of matters of race was when he used his Father’s Day address at the Apostolic Church of God in 2008 to berate black fathers for their lack of responsibility to support their family.  Otherwise, Mr. Obama appears to be under the assumption that issues of race just aren’t all that big a deal here in America.

It is well understood that if black people would just do the right thing and keep their nose clean they too can achieve the American dream.  If Mr. Obama had made that call to Trayvon’s parents, he’d probably chastise them for their inability to keep their son under control.  Just like black men with children have a reputation for being irresponsible, young black men have an even greater reputation for irresponsibility and criminal behavior.  Everybody knows that if there is an altercation between a black male and just about anybody else that the black man is guilty until proven innocent well beyond the most unreasonable doubt.  That rule holds even when the black male is a teenager with nothing more deadly than a bag of candy in his hand.

In fairness to Mr. Obama, the altercation between Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke had political implications that could be used to help Mr. Obama in his bid to win reelection.  For many people, the President looks good when he offers his support to a white woman being defamed by a conservative windbag.  He’ll score some political points.  There are no points to be gained from the President injecting his self into the senseless murder of a black teenager gunned down by an armed self proclaimed neighborhood watchman for walking home late at night and the resulting cover up from the botched police investigation.

Mr. Obama knows that it is rare for the murder of an innocent black teenager to garner national attention.  On a national level there are many other cases that match the senselessness of Trayvon’s murder.  Trayvon’s murder is far from being a rare event.  Black men are constantly being confronted at the drop of a hat but then will be accused of being the aggressor when they wind up injured or dead.  It’s why people like the ones who serve at the Sanford, Florida police department don’t bother to lift a finger to do a thorough investigation when a black man is murdered.

If Mr. Obama says anything he will be lambasted by his opponents.  But then again, he gets lambasted by his opponents no matter what he does.  Mr. Obama was thoroughly criticized when he called Sandra Fluke.  He was willing to take that battle on in order to ingratiate himself to the women of America as the one most likely to support and protect women’s rights.

You would think the black Mr. Obama could relate to a black teenager minding his own business and only trying to get home when he was accused of being threatening.  Not too long ago Arizona Governor Jan Brewer made headlines when she stood on the tarmac under Air Force One and pointed her bony finger at the President not too long after he descended from the plane.  Later, when she was asked what circumstances led to such a blatant disrespect of the President, Ms. Brewer said that she had felt threatened.  Lucky thing for Mr. Obama Ms. Brewer wasn’t the Governor of Florida.  Just imagine what could have happened.

But there is nothing for Mr. Obama to gain as a supporter of black people.  Mr. Obama already has the majority of black people in his favor.  From a political perspective there is nothing to gain from him reaching out to the parents of a murdered black teenager.  In fact, he’d probably open himself up to a can of political whoop-ass that would cost him far more than he would gain.  It’s just the way our national collective responds to issues of race when it involves black people.

Protecting Government From Government

A lot of people either have first hand experience with financial institutions that run roughshod over consumers or knows somebody who has suffered the experience.  Banks are developing a reputation for fees on top of fees for the privilege to dole our money back to us.  The economic crisis has become synonymous with home mortgage lenders cutting corners and not following procedures to immorally, and often illegally, kick people out of their homes.  Payday lenders and automobile title lenders that have become so pervasive within the black community charge exorbitant rates and charges that will turn the promise of a short term loan into an overwhelming long term deal with financial parasites.  And these days more than ever consumers need protection from these institutions that are using the state of our economic troubles against us for profit.

To help correct this condition, the Congress of the United States founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a result of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which President Barack Obama signed into law on July 21, 2010.  But since then, conservative politicians have relentlessly blocked any attempt to get this government agency up to operating speed.  Republicans refused to accept the fact that the existence of this agency was permitted by law.  To circumvent its function, they refused to approve Mr. Obama’s nominee to run the agency.  Mr. Obama’s initial choice to run the agency was bankruptcy law expert Elizabeth Warren, who championed the concept of the agency, could not win the support of the Republicans who, although they are the minority in the Senate, had enough seats to block her appointment.  The same was true for the alternate in waiting, Mr. Richard Cordray, who has been waiting for confirmation since July 17, 2011.

That changed yesterday.  Yesterday, for all intensive purposes, the unstoppable force managed to bypass the unmovable object.  Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Cordray to the position that has been waiting to be filled for nearly a year and a half while the Senate was out for the holiday season.  The day after conservatives were in the news for the caucus selection of Mitt Romney with Rick Santorum placing a close second, Mr. Obama steals a bit of their thunder to announce Mr. Cordray’s recess appointment.  It looks like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will soon be up to full speed, finally!

But the Republicans are crying foul and are promising a legal challenge.  It is the contention of the conservatives that the Senate was not in recess having had a session on Tuesday.  Although no business was conducted, the fact that at least one Senator was there to say that the Senate was open for business meant that there was no recess of the Senate and the President was obligated to wait at least three days before he could use his recess appointment option.  The White House counters that Tuesday’s session was not in fact a meeting of the Senate and that in practical terms the Senate is indeed in recess.  However, the Republicans are salivating at the thought of a legal challenge to keep the agency as ineffective as possible.

And so, this is the latest event to show how conservatives want to protect people, and by people I mean the big corporations with deep pockets to influence politics that so many conservatives think are people.  It’s painfully apparent that conservatives could not care any less if flesh and blood people have some kind of protection from corporations.  Conservative politicians actually claim to believe that the current design of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau might be too powerful and might be too unfair to corporations who would be too helpless against the onslaught of overwhelming regulations.  So their solution is to not do anything and let the status quo of corporate institutions raping consumers continue.  It is another example of how Republicans are using all of their resources to keep people at the mercy of institutions whose only interest is the pursuit of profit at any and all cost.  People should have the freedom to become victims of the powerful.

Conservatives are crying foul and are accusing Mr. Obama of circumventing the will of the people.  And by people it is assumed that they mean the corporations.  Because it seems that the majority of people recognize the fact that the public needs some kind of protection from financial institutions that would use their resources to keep anything even remotely resembling some kind of protection for consumers off the books.  An agency designed to protect flesh and blood people is too much like socialism and that’s not good for anyone.

It has been theorized that the best way to challenge the recess appointment of Mr. Cordray would be for some third party corporation to challenge the appointment and have the agency’s legal status called into question.  Conservatives are giving their blessing to such a move.  And when such a move takes place, it should be proof positive that corporations have all the resources they need to challenge the government as needed.  The idea that government has to protect corporations from people just doesn’t fly.  If fact, if any one needs protection, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau might need some protection from conservatives.  After all, governments are people.

Cain’s Train Wreck

Texas Governor Rick Perry has got to be the worst candidate for the presidency that ever achieved frontrunner status in America’s history.  Watching clips of this man’s debate performances were a combination of excruciatingly painful and side splitting comedy.  The man has about as much intellectual curiosity as a stale fig newton.  Paper bag sales should be off the charts down in Texas where the people actually voted this man into their highest office five times straight.  Cowboy boots and a John Wayne vernacular can’t save this wayward tumbleweed.  If people in Texas had any sense of humility they would hide their faces out of embarrassment.  Mr. Perry should take his six shooter and hunt down all those people that encouraged him to run for President.

But not far behind had to be Herman Cain.  I saw his interviews and I asked myself, “What the hell do people see in this man?”  He was hypocritical and all over the map on many issues.  He said he doesn’t think abortion should be legal but in the next sentence would say that it should be a choice.  He said that there is no racism against minorities but cries racism because people want to know about his past.  He said that people should blame themselves if they are not successful but then blames everybody else when his bid to become President began to unravel.  He promised that he would be the champion of the institution of marriage, but then is besieged by a series of women who claim to have had a tryst with the former head of the National Restaurant Association.

While just about every politician has to deal with skeletons and explain their past, Mr. Cain simply said that everybody was lying on him and he was under an attack by the liberals who didn’t want to see a conservative black man become our next President.  It’s funny, during those debates he shared the stage with a number of conservatives who didn’t want to see a conservative black man succeed the black man that was already calling the White House home.

Like a lot of conservatives running for office, Mr. Cain appeared to revel in his ignorance.  He claimed he didn’t care to know foreign leaders in faraway lands.  He didn’t even care to know the name of countries on the other side of the globe, invoking gibberish as a reference to a third world country that isn’t really important enough for him to know as President.  He told us that in his presidency he will have people for that.  It was his contention that the people weren’t electing him to read, they were electing him to lead.  In Mr. Cain’s mind, it doesn’t make much sense to ask a leader to be knowledgeable and read about what happening in the world.

And if all of that isn’t enough to cause intense scratching of one’s head as one wondered what is so attractive about this conservative candidate, he declares that he’s the billionaire Koch brothers other brother from a different mother.  Obviously it was a lame attempt to endear his self to wealthy men who use their largess to influence political races across the country.  Mr. Cain might as well have grabbed a harmonica and tap dance a jig with a cheesing smile on his face like some black wannabe in an old Shirley Temple film.

The United States is experiencing precarious times.  We are experiencing difficult times like just about the rest of the world.  We don’t need leadership from people who refuse to read first hand what’s happening in the world and prefers to be ignorant.  We don’t need world leadership from a man who refuses to learn the names of the other countries in the world.  If I were to guess I would say that our leaders would be the type of people who were constantly learning and staying on top of issues and not having people on staff who will take care of that for him or her.

We need real leadership from people with real ideas and with real experiences with real ethics and morals and with a well understood sense of self and with a full understanding of the responsibilities that come with the job.  The White House isn’t a place for somebody who talks about all the things twirling around in their head when asked a simple question about the country’s policies regarding a political hotspot in the Middle East.  These days more than any other we need smart people at the country’s helm who have a clear understanding of domestic policy as well as foreign policy.

We don’t need people who can come up with catchy slogans and we don’t need people who wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.  We don’t need common folk with obviously little interest in the bigger picture.  The world is far more sophisticated than many of us will ever know.  We don’t need your average Tom, Dick, or Harry employing their simple, scratch the surface understandings to things that require a lot of thinking.  Today, the country and the world is a lot more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

So when a person who wants to be President is at a loss when asked a relatively simple political question, how do you think he or she will respond when they find themselves in the hot seat and the world is looking for leadership?  That would be a train wreck just waiting to happen.  I for one am glad that Mr. Cain got his wreck over with.  Now if we can get some of the other candidates derailed, not just for the presidency but throughout our entire political system.

Potshots At Poitier

People in Idaho can be seriously crazy. I should know after spending an adventurous year there living in the ninety five percent white environment with a less than a one percent black population. Feeling emboldened by the comfort of having so many of their obviously melatonin deficient brothers and sisters around to back them up a lot of white people in Idaho feel like they can wear their racism on their sleeve and go out of their way to make a seriously under represented minority feel out of place, unwanted, unwelcomed, and unfortunately, sometimes living in fear. Some people in Idaho will go out of their way to give a black person a hard time.

But even with my personal firsthand experience, I have to admit to some surprise to see somebody from Idaho travel twenty five hundred miles to do a drive by shooting against the absolute last black man on the planet to be fucked with living in the absolute last house on the planet that anybody should be pointing anything other than a finger at, let alone a loaded weapon. Twenty one year old Oscar Ortega-Hernandez is believed to have done just that. Late last Friday, eight gunfire shots were reported in the vicinity of the White House. On Tuesday, investigators from the FBI discovered bullet holes in the White House’s façade. I can only imagine the chain of events after that. Mr. FBI got on his two way radio to initiate their defense of the White House plan codenamed “Potshots At Poitier”.

Although I have never been there and probably will never go there without an invitation, I’m sure the White House is a virtual fortress with armored walls and bulletproof windows and its own garrison of defenders who have been itching for some kind of action for years. With the proper code words were given people were quick to action. It probably took all of two seconds for some HAL-9000 supercomputer somewhere to review every person and vehicle that may have wandered into the vicinity of the White House for the past week to determine who they were after. Medical records were tapped to identify the shooter, and it took another six seconds to task the President’s personal satellite to hone in on traces of the shooter’s DNA. After that, it was only a matter of time before police, FBI, CIA, the national guard, the coast guard, the boy scouts, the girl scouts and everybody else had the shooter in custody. Once PETA found out that Beau the dog could have been the target they were on that bandwagon as well.

Anyone who would spit in the direction of the White House is probably looking for trouble. Mr. Ortega-Hernandez took eight shots. Eight shots at anybody is enough reason for authorities to do an investigation. Eight shots at the White House is an attempt at suicide. Even by Idaho standards this is seriously crazy behavior. People locked away in Guantanamo Bay will say “damn” and scratch their head at this man’s audacity. And those same prisoners will thank their lucky stars and whatever gods they may believe in that they won’t get the same punishment that’s about to fall on Mr. Idaho. Mr. Ortega-Hernandez is facing charges of attempting to assassinate the President of the United States. His life is forever screwed.

In the quick investigation work that has happened since this incident, people who knew Mr. Ortega-Hernandez said that he had become agitated against the federal government in recent years. One person who knew him said that he actually admitted that he wanted to hurt Mr. Obama personally. Imagine that, a white man in Idaho wanting to hurt a black man. When investigators inspected his car that he quickly abandoned right after the shooting, they found a Romanian Cugir SA semi-automatic assault riffle with a large scope and three loaded magazines. I don’t know exactly what particular model it was but if it looks anything like the model pictured it sounds like Oscar had planned on doing some really serious damage.

Even people in Idaho have to scratch their head on this one. Although there aren’t very many black people in Idaho, surely Mr. Ortega-Hernandez could have found a much more convenient target for his angst a lot closer to home. And the way some courts operate the penalty for being found guilty of harming or attempting to harm black people is relatively tame. We’ve heard of boot camp guards killing unarmed teenagers too tired to run on camera getting off. We’ve seen a police officer kill an unarmed, handcuffed black man lying on the ground by shooting him in the back get only two years.

But Mr. Ortega-Hernandez wanted to do something big, and he’s about to pay big too. More than likely he’ll have the rest of his life to reflect on the bigness of what he tried to do. He won’t have anything else to do with all of his new found free time.

No Difference Between Barack Obama And Herman Cain

Lord knows I have encountered more than my fair share of black people who go out of their way to incur the favor of white people.  One of the easiest ways for a black person to win white people’s favor is to ridicule, to unfairly criticize, and/or to blatantly display contempt for black people.  It seems like this blog attracts these people like moths to a flame.  And some of the comments made by these people will make Herman Cain’s claim that black people are brainwashed look like a compliment.  These people support racial disparity like a house nigger supports enslaved black people working in cotton fields as white people’s property.  This supporter of all things racist would be on master’s porch telling other black people that if they don’t like their conditions they should blame themselves.

Usually these black people are ultra conservatives with no sense of black community.  If these people are old enough, they are usually the ones who will claim that they couldn’t participate in the civil rights movement for equality because they had to go to work or because they were in school or because they had a family to raise or because they had plans for a future, as if all the black people and others who did participate only did so because they had nothing else to do at the time.  And after that the struggle was somewhat successful, these black people, who were so anxious to tolerate the status quo when black people were deemed second class citizens by institutionalized nation wide racial discrimination, are ready to say enough is enough and the black community needs to just tolerate any lingering racial discrimination because we’ve already impacted white people’s world too much already.

These are the type of black people who will be more than happy to use any form of affirmative action to get where they are.  But as soon as they’ve arrived, they’ll want to stand on the pinnacle of their success and use their influence to dismantle the very programs that were key to their achievement.  These people will claim that it’s only reverse racial discrimination to say or do anything to correct the disparity caused by the original racial discrimination that directly led to the black community’s current inability to sustain itself.  Those programs are too successful at correcting a wrong so in essence they are invalidated with a bastardized version of the argument that two wrongs don’t make a right.  Correcting the racial disparity caused by racism is racist.

While these black people are usually conservative, black people who are the models of liberal thinking will employ these very same tactics to get where they need or want to be as well.  President Barack Obama is quick to stiff arm black people and the black community.  Mr. Obama has a history of telling black people to pull themselves up by their own bootstrap while ignoring the poverty rates and the unemployment rates that impact the black community harder, stronger, and longer than just about any other racial community.  On more than one occasion Mr. Obama has said that he’s not trying to be the President of black America.  He will say that by law he can’t do anything that favors one community over another, but lately he doesn’t seem to have a problem using his bully pulpit to influence the creation of laws that will help alleviate the unemployment rates of America’s veterans of the war on terror.  The argument is nothing more than a smoke screen to justify his unwillingness to do for the black community.  Essentially, Mr. Obama has told the black community that if black people aren’t happy with their lot in life, they should blame themselves.

Granted Mr. Obama is much more subtle in his criticism of the black community.  People will hear his criticism and think he’s only being tough or is trying to get black people to become more responsible, as if black people are somehow more irresponsible than other communities.  But the truth is that Mr. Obama’s rhetoric with respect to the black community is just as cold and as indifferent as Mr. Cain’s rhetoric as he tries to grab attention on the conservative political stage.  If Mr. Cain made the comment that black men need to stop being fools and show some responsibility and start acting like responsible fathers, it is a fair bet that people would see the put-down plainly as the nose on their face.  But Mr. Obama made a similar statement to a roaring applause.

When it comes to the black community, all Herman Cain has done is taken Mr. Obama’s political operating procedure, spiced it up a bit, and regurgitated it.  When it comes to their perception of what ails the black community, there’s not much difference between the two.  They both want to appeal to the larger, racially generic community and will use the black community as a stepping stone to get there.  However, there is one significant difference between the two.  Mr. Cain knows that he won’t get but a fraction of black voters to support him.  Mr. Obama said that he expects black people to get in line behind him because he’s got more work to do.  If these two were our only choices it would look like a classic example of being between a rock and a hard place.