GOP Takes Big Hit On ObamaCare

With the ruling by The Supreme Court that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, The Presidency

of Barack Obama avoided the type of iceberg that The Titanic was unable to. The President was looking at the prospect of having the most significant piece of legislation passed during his first term done away with because of the hatred that tea party yahoos and powerdrunk GOP Congressman have for him.

A constitutional lawyer not realizing that a bill he basically authored was not constitutional would have been one of Mitt Romney's main talking points all the way until the November election. Also given the fact that ever legal pundit in the country had the bill on death row after the oral arguments in March, things didn't look good for the President. Then all of sudden to the rescue of the healthcare bill comes.....John Roberts?

Look I am in no way going to crown Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as a new champion of left-wing causes, hell I still don't forgive him for allowing Citizens United to become law, but there is no way around it, Roberts, knowing that he would face a mountain of criticism from GOP nutjobs led by scumbags like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge did his job and he did it impartially.

The question now is what does The Obama Administration and elected Democrats do? Do they walk away from the Affordable Care Act like they did when they passed the bill back in 2010 or do they spend the time needed to explain to The American People why this law is a good thing.

Young people under the age of 26 are allowed to stay on their Parent's insurance, adults and children will not be discriminated against for having pre-existing conditions, and the biggest one which is one that the White House should buy billboards all across the country for, you will not go to jail, you will not have a lein taken out on your property and you will not have money deducted from your paycheck if you don't buy health insurance.

Also they can ask Mitt Romney and his right-wing cronies that if these things are so horrible what is their plan for a broken healthcare system? We are talking about a group of individuals who have been saying since they came into power that they would “Repeal and Replace” Obamacare, now since the Court's announcement they've dropped the replace portion of that phrase and are just talking about repeal.

For Romney himself there really is no good answer, he is the mastermind of Obamacare and the Obama Administration, when constructing the law, bought in the same advisers who consulted Romney when he put the plan in place in Massachusettes. Romney is the deadbeat dad who is now ashamed of his child and what he or she has become. The last thing the 2012 version of would do is praise the President over healthcare, The 2004 version would give him a high five. What Romney fails to realize or refuses to admit is that his pledge to repeal the ACA on the first day of his Presidency runs the gambit of being laughable to flat out delusional. There is that whole 60 vote thing in the Senate that he would need but would never in a million years get.

As the Obama Presidency was avoiding that aforementioned iceberg, the court was right behind it swerving at just the right time, with Justice Roberts doing the steering. Never has the court been seen as being more polarizing, the latest example being Justice Alito's ridiculous dissenting opinion to the court's decision on the Arizona “papers please” law earlier this week. With this decision Roberts at least for know, avoids charges of the court being made up of right-wing majority activists who are brought with dirty money from GOP sugar daddies like the Koch Brothers.

At the end of the day I am and will always be a proponent of a single payer healthcare system, it cuts out most of the red tape and does not enrich blood sucking insurance companies who capitialize on the tragedies of everyday Americans, this bill right now in this day and time however is a good start and the possibility of really good provisions being added to it just as provisions were added to the original Civil Rights Act is enough for me to feel good about what the President and Congressional Democrats have done.

Hopefully the days of every American not having health insurance will soon be a thing of the past.

By the way I hope this puts to bed this notion that Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote on the Court, voting for Citizens United and against ACA disqualifies him from having that title.

Democrats Have to Serve Two Masters

As the 2012 Presidential Campaign drags on into the dog days of Summer, I am starting to get the

feeling that I've heard a lot of the rhetoric before. From Republican Nominee Mitt Romney,

as one television pundit put it, It's “Blah, blah, blah The President has failed to lead”, all the while still refusing to put forth any grand ideas that will move the nation forward with him in The Oval Office. As for President Obama, while still pressing for Congress to pass his Jobs Bill that has been sitting on their table since last September, he and his charges have gone back into attack mode on Governor Romney and his time spent at Bain Capital.

In my best Sister Sledge voice, “Just let me state for the record”. I have no problem with the Obama camp going after Romney over Bain. As a Progressive I happen to think capitalism is the inherent link to the financial meltdowns that we have seen over the last decade and a half. Enron, Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers all stem from the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” culture. The other reason why I don't have a problem with it is Romney can't have it both ways. You can't say my time in the private sector qualifies me to be President, and then complain about people pointing out that less than stellar private sector record.

The one problem that exist in this post Citizens United world however, is that Democrats have to serve two masters. Dems have to be the populist party, the party that truly cares about the middle class and the working poor,a cause I think most elected Democrats truly believe in, but they also know that they can't piss off Wall Street. Campaign cash is more important now than it has ever been in politics anddon small donors and Hollywood Celebrities can only take you so far. That's why the Bain argument is tricky.

Wall Street was good to Bill Clinton, and why not. In 1992 Clinton ran on the promise of a short-term stimulus package that would kickstart the sagging economy, but once elected and in the presence of then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan he abandoned this theory for one called “the financial markets strategy” which called for raising taxes but also cutting spending in order to placate the markets. The markets did well, but the overall effect has helped lead to the rise in CEO pay and the stagnation of workers wages, also Democrats wound up losing their majority in The House in 1994 thanks in part to strategy.

That's why it was no surprise when the initial Bain attacks were unleashed by Team Obama, Clinton did his best Republican surrogate impression, Clinton bent over backwards to defend Bain and Romney because he sees very little about big business that we as Americans should be concerned about, he also knows that in order to get funding for the various pet projects that he is running in his post Presidency he needs Wall Street to open the checkbooks.

Also take the curious case of Corey Booker. Booker up until a couple of months ago was about as good an Obama aid as you could find, that was until Bain and then Booker did Clinton doing Romney. Booker is the Mayor of one of if not the toughest city in the country, Newark, New Jersey. It's next to impossible for Booker to get money from his State Legislature to keep his city afloat, so he basically has to make trips across the state line with bowl in hand to ask the big boys in Manhattan for donations.

On one hand it is tough for me to be critical of Clinton or Booker, they didn't set up this system, but they should get blame for embracing it rather than doing more to try and change it. We all know which way the other side is going.

Republicans love Citizens United and corporate money, they pay lip service to the middle class and the working poor by offering them a bogus trickle down theory that any objective person knows has not worked for the last 35 years. Yet the GOP doesn't have the same dilema facing the Dems, as long as they can keep getting Wall Street's cash they may be able to stay in power in Congress, particularly with gerrymandered districts and defeat the President by outspending him 10 to 1.

Here's to hoping real campaign finance reform and a Constitutional Amendment to repeal Citizens United is right around the corner, God knows the republic needs it.

Demographics Are Killing Republicans

Like most political junkies around the country I watched the President of The United States Barack Obama and the man who wants to take his job Republican nominee and Former Massachusettes Governor Mitt Romney deliver speeches to The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) this past week. Both Candidates clearly realize what an important voting block the Hispanic community is.

The appearance was more important for Governor Romney because polling suggest that he trails the President by huge numbers when it comes to the Latino vote. Romney is clearly paying the price for the position that he took in the GOP Primaries where he wasn't just to the right of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich on immigration he was to the right of Lou Dobbs.

Being African-American and watching Romney struggle to make his case with Latinos, I wondered about how equally difficult it would be for Romney or any other GOP nominee to make the same case to the Black Community.

Before 1968 black votes were pretty much split evenly among the two political parties, black people liked The New Deal policies put forth by FDR and The Dems, but hated the fact that scumbags like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd hid out within the party given their ties to the support of segregation

and The Ku Klux Klan respectively. 1968 however should be thought of in the same manner of 1865, the year slavery was officially ended, as a watershed year for race relations and politics in the U.S.

1968 was the year that Republican Presidential nominee Richard Nixon emplored “The Southern Strategy”. Nixon basically said to disaffected White Southerners, who voted Democrat all their life, but were upset about the recent passages of The Civil Rights Act and The Voting Rights Act ensuring equal treatment under the law for people of color, to vote for him because he would be the guy who would champion their causes.

Over 40 years later The GOP finds themselves as the party of rich middle-aged white guys in a time where it doesn't pay to be. This puts Governor Romney in the akward position of having to speak to NALEO and the NAACP, which he will do next month, knowing that he will garner little support. Latinos are further disenchanted with the Goveronor's refusal to say whether or not he, if elected would reverse the President's executive order that would not deport the children of undocumented individuals who happen to be in the country. As far as the black vote is concerned, if Romney gets more than five percent he and his supporters should pop champaign like they are the Miami Heat.

Romney isn't the first Republican to carry this weight, GOP God Ronald Reagan, whose name brings tears to the eyes of any card carrying conservative, got 14% of the black vote in his 1980 Presidential Campaign. On the surface that is a terrible number, but considering the challenge Reagan faced particularly with disparaging comments about welfare queens and his less than friendly approach towards the black community during his time as California Governor it was not a bad feat. 1980 however was a time when Reagan could overcome his problem with minorities by relying on his support from not just wealthy white married couples, but also white working class men.With America's ever changing demographics Romney doesn't have that luxury.

The Reagan election in '80 was also a peak in black support for the Republican Party in Presidential Elections also. George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole never got close to Bill Clinton in terms of the black vote in 1992 and 1996 respectively, and despite lukewarm feelings for both Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004 the best that George W. Bush could muster in terms of black support was the 9% he got against Kerry in his re-election campaign.

At the risk of speaking in generalizations, the thing that the GOP doesn't get is that black people for the most part are not going to vote against their economic interests. When the African-American community looks at the amount of public-sector jobs that have been shedded in the last five years they know exactly where to point their finger. The fact that people of color, black people in particular made up a huge portion of those employees and the fact that Paul Ryan's budget plan, which conservatives love almost as much as they claim to love the Constitution, is reason enough to be skeptical of the GOP's economic plans. The first order of business for President Romney should he occupy the Oval Office is to institute The Ryan Budget which in effect calls for the disappearance of more public sector jobs, which in turn would contribute to a black unemployment rate that now stands at 13.6%

If Republicans can overcome that by proposing policies that don't just focus on free market, government is the boogeyman solutions, the last mountain still may be unscaleable, the mountain is named Barack and Michelle Obama. It cannot be underscored how huge the first family is in Black America, they are rock stars. The Obama's will forever be looked upon like Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King, people who made history when it seemed almost impossible. No matter who the Democrats nominate in 2016 Clinton, Biden, Cuomo when that individual picks up the phone and asks the Obama's to come and stump for them the black vote will be pretty much guaranteed.

Not only do Mitt Romney and Republicans have 2016 to worry about when it comes to minority voters overwhemingly going left, the prospect of this turning into a 30 year reality should be a very sobering wake up call for The Grand Old Party.

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Fast And Furious Is A Smoke Screen

In a nation where the unemployment rate is 8.2 %, where 23 million people are now out of work,

and long term economic growth is a serious concern, A Congressional Panel on Wednesday recommended that the House of Representatives cite Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt over issues dealing with the now defunct “Fast and Furious”Program.

Fast and Furious was a program started under the George W. Bush Administration where ATF agents allowed guns to be “walked” across the border into Mexico so they could be tracked to higher profile criminals including those in Mexican Drug cartels. The unfortunate death of U.S Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry by a gun that may or may not have been involved in Fast and Furious has lead to an arduous and painstaking congressional investigation.

To be clear, the death of Agent Terry is a tragedy, and the Fast and Furious program should be investigated, in fact how such a dangerous and reckless program was put in place at all is beyond me, that being said it did began under President Bush and was abruptly stopped by Attorney General Holder after he was made aware that it was going on. California Congressman Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee's chairman has not subpoened anyone from the Bush White House however, including Michael Mukasey, the Attorney General at the time Fast and Furious was enacted.

Issa who has never met a camera or a microphone he doesn't like was given the ability to waste tax payer money with the investigation by the GOP takeover of the House in 2010. He also has been spurred on by right-wing apologist like Sean Hannity to Ann Coulter to pursue this matter with extreme vigor and put Holder in his place, Issa has called Holder every name possible with the exception of “uppity and “boy”

The entire Dog and Pony show is about one thing and one thing only, the desire of a GOP controlled House and the Republican Party in particular to embarrass the Barack Obama White House. Eric Holder has been a right-wing target since day one, If it wasn't for Fast and Furious the right would be

saying Holder has overstepped his bounds regarding Florida Governor Rick Scott's voter purge in Florida, apparently the GOP is fine with Scott turning himself into a modern day “Bull” Connor by suppressing the votes of Blacks, Latinos, and the elderly. There are also cases like the Department of Justice's refusal to defend The Defense of Marriage Act and their challenging of the State of Arizona's crackdown on undocumented workers

What the right won't admit to you is that they have got the wrong black man in the hot seat, Republicans want Barack Obama gone from the White House so bad they can't see straight, and by the President invoking executive privilege over documents that would not help congress get to the bottom of the situation (and also keeps him from breaking the law by releasing them) more fuel has been thrown onto the fire. Charges of White House cover-up and Obama's Watergate are now being thrown around conservative stomping grounds.

The Administration's refusal to back down is encouraging though, The President didn't have to step in, and given the fact that this is the first time he has used an executive privilege in his first 3 ½ years in office, all signs point to him not wanting to. By taking this step Obama is clearly saying he is behind Holder and thinks this is a witch hunt of the highest order. There has never been an Attorney General who has been held in contempt of congress in the history of the nation, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez should have been cited on numerous occasions for lying about everything under the sun.

This unfortunately is what we will see from now until Barack Obama is no longer President, whether that is in November or 2016 John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and every other prominent Republican in D.C will be on the lookout for everything from government overreach to whether or not Obama washed his hands after a trip to the restroom. The GOP has never taken partisianship to this extreme and the Fox News spin machine will continue to beat the drum.

I want to know what you think, please e-mail me a ebrew79@live.com ebrew79@live.com or follow me on twitter!

Stop and Frisk More Trouble Than It's Worth

Last Sunday people from both sexes, all races, all religious denominations and sexual orientations marched through the streets of New York City to protest the strict Stop

and Frisk laws used by The City's Police Department. The march which begin at 110^th Street passed by Gracie Mansion, home of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg before ending at 78^th Street.

If you aren't familiar “Stop and Frisk” is the policy where police officers in the city are given license

to stop people who they deem suspicious. Who would have ever imagined that of the 685,000 people

stopped last year as a result of the policy 87% would be Black and Latino. As calculated as the march strolling thru the Mayor's neighborhood was it was also extremely fitting.

Under Mayor Bloomberg Stop and Frisks in New York have skyrocketed 603% since 2002 when the city was ran by then mayor Rudy Giuliani. When you are to the right of Rudy in Gotham on the issue of police misconduct it's not a good place to be as far as the Black and Brown communities are concerned, Giuliani wasn't the second coming of Eugene “Bull”Connor, but he might as well had spit on the graves of Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo, two black men who were killed by NYPD under his stewardship.

One of the interesting developments in the increase of Stop and Frisks is that fewer than 10% of those being stopped have been arrested, while the percentage of crime in the city has not gone down because of it. These numbers and asinine comments by the mayor himself only lead to more hostility between the community and its cops. Bloomberg was quoted as saying Sunday that “Innocent people who are being stopped can't be disrespected, that is not acceptable”, then as to appease people of color by quoting a man who he still clearly thinks was the first Black President Bill Clinton he said “The practice should be mended not ended”.

There are so many things that are wrong with the Mayor's outlook on this entire situation, for one the fact that the numbers are so skewed towards black and brown people tells me that Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly don't think that white people commit crimes. Even in more priviledged parts of the city where the diversity of the residents is almost non-existent people of color make up a higher percentage of those who are stopped, which is basically a situation where the officer is saying “what the hell are you doing in this neighborhood”.

Secondly, some of these stops have led to the arrests of teenagers and young people who have had small amounts of marijuana in their possession. We can debate the pros and cons of marijuana, but no seventeen year old kid should placed in the criminal justice system, tagged as a felon, and be put at risk of ever getting into college or getting an apartment, which is what this does. White kids who are not stopped nearly as much as kids of color are basically given a license to experiment with weed without being subjected to the same possibilities.

What this policy does more than anything though is just heighten the tensions between these two communities and the police department that is suppose to protect them. Bloomberg knows very well the history of New York, not only the murders of Dorismond and Diallo, but the murders of Sean Bell and Ramarley Graham. Graham was an 18 year old black kid who was shot and killed by an NYPD officer in his Grandmother's bathroom earlier this year. While apparently being tone def on these individual situations, The Mayor seems intent on pushing a policy that continues to exacerbate negative feelings that Black and Brown people have about “The Men in Blue”.

The Father's Day March on Sunday was great because it was an example of the community using it's voice to shed light on injustice, I get the feeling however that real change won't come until there is a new occupant in the aforementioned Gracie Mansion. Let's just hope Mikey B. doesn't use anymore of his vast personal fortune to buy himself another term.

I want to know what you think e-mail me at ebrew79@live.com for the latest columns and updates, also follow me on twitter @ebrew79

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Obamacare Decision Is Important For A Lot of Reasons

As we sit here in the middle of June we are nearing a Supreme Court decision on The

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now for those of you who are not familiar with

the names of Constitutional Laws, it is primarily known nationwide as “Obamacare”. The Court

will be weighing whether to uphold the law which was signed by President Obama in March of

2010, overturn the law altogether, or throw out the key provision within the law, The Individual

Mandate, which calls on everyone to purchase private health insurance.

As both political parties setup their respective talking points in anticipation of the verdict, and the

court prepares for the attacks from diehard lefties and righties, The importance of the decision will

be felt not only in the upcoming Presidential Election, but with individual citizens in this country going

forward.

From a personal perspective The ACA is kinda of like eating White Castle burgers when you have this

huge craving for steak. Any Progressive worth his salt wants and desires a single-payer health care system, but those liberals who think the striking down of this law will pave the way for single-payer are not realistic, not with this Republican House and if the dreaded happens not this future Republican President.

GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been vocal about the fact that he as The Commander and Chief would repeal the ACA if the SCOTUS doesn't overturn it. Romney repealing the law is like a parent disowning one of his children because it was Romney, who as Governor of Massachusettes implemented his own healthcare law with an individual mandate, basically providing the President with a blueprint..

If President Romney follows through on his promise he says he will replace the ACA with a plan that basically does not guarantee mandates. The Obama Administration in it's brief to the SCOTUS about the Constitutionality of the ACA said that without mandates “premiums would increase significantly and the availability of insurance would decline”. In short the working poor, and the middle class who didn't have health insurance prior to 2010 will return to a world where it would be increasingly difficult to acquire some under Mittens.

The fact that we find ourselves in a position where a Supreme Court that is becoming more partisan by the day (see Citizens United) is now going to decide the fate of the ACA has to be laid at the feet of the Obama Administration. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of Tea Party activists out there who would have called Barack Obama a Kenyan, socialist, Marxists, even if he had done away with every government job and called British Prime Minister David Cameron for austerity tips, but the messaging or lack thereof by the Administration until fairly recently has been weak at best, and they wasted the opportunity to win over true middle of the road moderates.

How many people out there who have no political agenda whatsoever and are only interested in getting themselves and their family quality healthcare know that the ACA will provide financial assistance to people who have to buy insurance on their own, expands Medicaid, and eliminates copays for some preventitive services. Sure anyone can get lost in the weeds when it comes to this stuff, but if your not out there selling the way the President and his staff should have been and the fact that you put in place measures that won't allow a lot of these things to kick in until 2014, of course every right-wing think tank on the planet is going come up flat out lies and negative connonatations such as the name “Obamacare” itself.

As I say all of this I realize that it may all be a moot point. The Supreme Court could go two of three ways, strike down the law and force the President to start over (without single-payer), or throw out the individual mandate, which in a sense guts the law anyway. Given Justice Samuel Alito's response to the President's feelings on the Citizens United decision rendered by the court I'm not expecting this group to do the right thing.

Obama Takes Lead on Immigration

Obama Takes Lead on Immigration.  This June 15^th was shaping up to be another ho-hum day in the political sphere, with talks of grand

speeches, jaw dropping gaffes, and a lack fresh new ideas from either Presidential Candidate. That was until about 10:15 a.m eastern time when President Obama announced that his Administration will halt the process of deporting young illegal immigrants from the U.S..

Even the right-wing hacks over at Fox News cannot underestimate how much of a gamechanger this is

for this November's election, and how much of a shot in the arm this is for a President who may have been struggling with one of if not the biggest and most influential voting block in the country.

The disenchantment with the President from the Latino Community has been well documented, There has still been no comprehensive immigration reform that the President promised throughout his campaign in 2008, not to mention the fact that 400,000 illegal immigrants have been deportated by The Obama Administration. Friday is a reversal of that somewhat, and even though it is not the pathway to citizenship that the Latino Community wants, hopefully it will be a conversation starter for Congress and persuade them to pass The Dream Act that has been sitting on their desk for almost two years.

To go along with the political implications of this decision it places Republican Presidential Nominee, Mitt Romney and The Republican Party in general in a perilous position. Romney in order to secure his party's nomination placed himself as far to the right as he could on the issue of immigration during the primary season. Romney expressed his want to veto The Dream Act, and touted the virtues of Self-Deportation. Last September Romney was quoted as saying “I would be civil and resolute in terms of securing our borders even if that means constructing a high tech fence and investing in adequate man power and resources”.

Unless Romney thinks the electorate is really stupid, doesn't have the luxury of the internet, or suffer from memory loss, they are not going to forget those things. Even the possibility of Florida Senator Marco Rubio as a Vice Presidential running mate may not have the positive effect that he would've hoped for. Rubio referred to the President's announcement as a “short-term answer”, but the question is if Rubio were as popular on the hill as Republicans would like you to believe he would have enough pull to get his bosses, John Boehner and Eric Cantor to pass the aformentioned “Dream Act” which is similar to what Rubio has proposed in the past, and what the President has proposed today!

The Jeb Bushes and the Haley Barbours of the GOP understand the changing demographics of the country, and why the rest of the party needs to join them in their way of thinking. “We need to secure the borders for a lot of reasons, and we need to realize we are not going to deport 12 million people and we don't need to” said Barbour who spoke on Friday morning during a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. If only the elected officials inside the party like Romney, Boehner and Cantor were listening to those outside of the party the GOP would be viewed more favorably by so many, instead by taking these harsh stances they may be giving away the White House by alienating the groups that exist outside of the good ol' boy network that has propped them up for so many years.

I would like to hear from you. email me at ebrew79@live.ebrew79@live.com or follow me on twitter @ebrew79