The Delusion of Allen West

For those of you who haven't been paying attention over the last couple of days, Allen West is back in

the news again, and I am thoroughly convinced that this is the way Allen West likes it.

The Congressman from Florida's 22^nd District stated late last week that President Barack Obama “does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning, and having the title of an American...he would rather you be his slave.”

After being called to the carpet by some in the political media, West didn't offer a mea culpa as much as he did a “yeah...and what!” by basically saying that the President's policies, including the recently upheld Affordable Care Act, have created a state that is completely government depended.

"Since June of 2009 or so, we have seen 2.4 million private-sector jobs created, but we’ve had 3.1 million people going on Social Security disability and, as we said just this past month, the 85,000 went on Social Security disability as opposed to 80,000 jobs created." He added, "So once again we are creating the sense of economic dependence which, to me, is a form of modern, 21st-century slavery."

There are a lot of things that need to be debunked in West's diatribe of bullshit, starting with the fact that many of those 3.1 million people eligible for disability may in fact be disabled and can't work, also while he mentions the fact that 2.4 million private-sector jobs have been created, he neglects to tell people that his party has been on a mission to stop the creation of public-sector jobs that would go a long way in terms of bailing out cities, states, and ultimately the nation.

This also brings to the forefront Republican hypocrisy which is running rampant these days. Anytime a progressive makes mention of slavery, the civil rights movement, or anything else that has to do with this country's shameful history on race they are usually nailed with the predictable and unoriginal tag of “race-baiter”. (If Dr. King were alive today he would be number one on the list.) Chris Rock, who is a comedian by the way, tweets a hilarious and fact based joke and the right has a collective meltdown, West goes on Mike Huckabee's Fox News show, unleashes this garbage and he is heldup as the party's next great star.

I try not to pay attention to West and his evil twin Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, who apparently takes pleasure in bashing war heroes even though he himself has never served while at the same time declining to pay his child support. In a lot of ways these guys are the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity of The United States House of Representatives, proxies who are willing to do and say anything to a base that doesn't understand that the medicare they so desperately love comes from the government they so desperately despise.

There is a huge difference between the two sets though, while Limbaugh and Hannity can influence millions of sheep with their radio and television projects, what they can't do is get actual legislation passed. Twenty years ago clowns like West and Walsh would not have even been granted keys to the party's front door, now they sit at the dining room table with their feet propped up.

West has espoused his distrust of muslims. He cited the threat of "radical Islamic terrorists" as his motivation for voting to extend provisions of the Patriot Act however he voted against another extension in May 2011. He once sent a scathing email to his state colleague Florida Congressswoman and head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz that should have had even the most partisan Republican repudiating it for it's sexist tone. There is also the by now famous quip about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party being communists.

West isn't a politician as much as he is a carnival barker, a guy who desperately wants the spotlight, but not for any of his legislation work. If voters in his district don't send a message and vote him out in November, the next two years will be a collection of Chris Christie type You Tube videos that make him look like the toughest guy on the block.

If only there were Republicans who were willing to return to their roots, and reign in the buffoons.

Libor Scandal Is A Huge Deal

It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you are talking about the corporate greed that exists within the world's banking system however, then you just ask has anything changed at all?

The latest black eye for the banks is the London Interbank Offered Rate scandal, or in short Libor, and it makes America's subprime mortgage scandals of four years ago look like a routine candy swipe by a twelve year old at the local convienent store.

The situation is basically this, as early as 2008 there were signals that banks were underreporting borrowing costs to the Libor, which is the average interest rate estimated by leading banks in London that they would be charged if borrowing from other banks. This easily created the impression that banks were borrowing money from other banks more cheaply than they should have, It also made the system and particular banks look healthier than what they really were.

To put it in plain english, imagine going to Vegas, placing a huge bet on a heavyweight championship fight, and then finding out years later the guy you bet on had two broken hands at the time.

For those people out there who still feel the sting of the global economic recession, the thing that makes this so mind numbingly frustrating is not only does this scandal involve the same cast of characters like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, but once again very little is being done about it.

Barclays, the European banking giant where this all started basically shoved their CEO Robert E. Diamond Jr. and COO Jerry del Missier onto the sword. The two men resigned on Tuesday after basically offering up a “well everybody is doing it” and “we didn't know it was going on” defense.

Barclays will also be forced to pony up $450 million after being fined by the United States Justice Department for manipulating the system, but that is a drop in the bucket for a bank that makes billions.Diamond and del Missier may be out of a job, but they more than likely will not be spending time in jail and the hefty severance checks that they received in the past will be more than enough to dry their tears.

The fact is until England, the United States and any country in the free world decides to step up and punish these thieves for stealing, the merry-go-round will continue. Last month in the United States JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon testified twice in front of congress after his bank lost anywhere from two to nine billion dollars on controversial trades, and outside of a few Democrats who actually take their jobs seriously like Massachusettes Congressman Barney Frank, politicians of both parties treated him like a rock star.

The likelihood that Dimon has placed money into the coffers of 85% of the folks in the capital might be a safe bet, and of course Republicans in D.C are not hypocrites because they see nothing wrong with the way banks operate.

At the risk of infuriating my fellow progressives I am a huge fan of this President and his Administration. I am also a fan of the Attorney General Eric Holder, whose name and entire career has been dragged through the mud GOP scumbags like Darrell Issa.

The President and the AG have dropped the ball on this particular issue however. When Barack Obama was sworn in back in 2009, one of the first things he should have done was called a press conference to televise the arrests of everyone responsible for the worst economic crisis since the great depression.

As we know now, Wall Street was going to turn it's back on the President anyway because of his embrace of regulation policies, particularly Dodd-Frank. An all out assault on the real takers would have earned Obama a huge chunk of progressive support that he is missing while at the same time scared straight the entire business community.

Diamond, the now disgraced former CEO of Barclays is scheduled to testify in front of the British Parliament next week and try to explain what went wrong. I wonder if our worst and clueless like South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint has been in contact with British conservatives. Someone needs to show them how to kiss up to the crooks.

Roberts Will Be The Roberts Of Old

As we sit here in the middle of 4^th of July week, You would think that this would be a good time for Republican anger towards Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to dissapate. No more charges from Rush Limbaugh saying Roberts is now owned by The New York Times, The Washington Post and all of the other so-called leftwing media outlets, No more rants from Michael Savage saying Roberts must have somehow allowed the supposed medication he takes affect his judgement on siding with the more liberal judges on the court to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Conservatives should not take it personal that the Chief Justice did not do them this one solid, because something tells me that ol' Johnny will be returning to the fold very soon.With the court looking at cases in the fall term that deal with Affirmative Action, Voting Rights, and The Defense of Marriage Act, Roberts has more than enough of an opportunity to make up for the ACA debacle.

If I've never mentioned it before in one of my posts, one of if not my all time favorite movie is Martin Scorsese's “Goodfellas”. There is a scene where Henry, played by Ray Liotta is released from prison and has no money to start his life over. He goes to his former boss Paulie, played by Paul Sorvino and asks for help. Paulie gives Henry this very sad and dissapointed look, hands him $3200 and then tells him, “Now I have to turn my back on you”

For all intents and purposes the Democrats are Henry, and Paulie is masterfully being played by Roberts. The Chief is on one hand willing to live with the GOP scorn for doing what the law said he should have done, while at the same time knowing that Dems should never ask him for anything ever again, because he did what the law said he should have done.

In a lot of ways Roberts can be seen as the Mitt Romney of Supreme Court Judges. In the mid-80s while working in private law Roberts was once an adovocate for Gay Rights. He prepared arguments for the Supreme Court case Romer vs. Evans, which was a landmark case in the Gay Rights Movement.

Also during this time Roberts was an advocate for the homeless.

If the John Roberts of 1986 were serving on the Court now we would certainly have a better nation. We would see a repudiation of DOMA even if it was just by a 5-4 vote. That John Roberts can't show up though, if he did George W. Bush himself would fly into D.C just to drag him away from the bench by his collar.

Let alone, the increasingly negative vibes he is now getting from his colleagues on the court who come from the right side of the aisle. If you believe the reports that have come out this week which I do, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy the supposed swing vote on the Court who begged and pleaded with Roberts not to go the other way and uphold the law.

The other thing about that is there are never any leaks coming from the Supreme Court. This Decision was made months ago and we never heard anything about it, yet as soon as it was made public we hear all about the anger and disenchantment coming from the Republican judges. I'm not saying that any justices on the court or any of their clerks are leaking this stuff to newspaper reporters, but I would be suspicious of the one black guy on the court whose wife, it just so happens, made it her life's mission to get the ACA overturned.

Unfortunately the world will turn right-side up once again. The GOP may never get over their anger and resentment for Roberts and his ACA decision, but it will be us on the left who will be feeling the pain of future decisions that will go the wrong way. If any of you out there had already inducted the Chief Justice into the progressive Hall of Fame, now would be a great time to take down that plaque.

Second Chance For The President

As I sit here a couple of days removed from the Supreme Court's historic ruling which

upheld President Obama's baby, The Affordable Healthcare Act I've yet to come off cloud

nine. This is by no means a full throated endorsement of the law, which has many holes in it.

The biggest flaw with the ACA is private insurance companies profiting from the medical misfortune of so many, but as filmmaker and liberal champion Michael Moore said this week, while seeing

this as a start towards what we all want which is a “Medicare For All” plan, Liberals should also embrace this for what it is, which is a victory.

“This was a major defeat for the right-wing, We get so few of these we should enjoy them when we get

them” said Moore. I personally have allowed myself another day to revel in the misery and bitterness of Republicans across the country, after that it will be time for me, liberals everywhere and more importantly the White House to become even more embolden and take this victory right into November.

As Progressives we don't know what to do when we have the wind in our sails. A lot of us were still on such a euphoric high from 2008 that we didn't see the GOP and more importantly The Tea Party plotting. By not showing up in 2010 we allowed Nancy Pelosi, the person who next to the President is most responsible for the ACA going into law lose her speakership to some orange guy who isn't worried about governing as much as he is worried about his second in command and the tea party activists who make him toe the line.

A lot of us were on a high two months ago when we thought there was a legitimate chance that union busting Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker would be thrown out of the mansion thanks to a recall that was put in place by the people of the state. The bubble was burst so fast on election night, that for a split second it made me question whether or not getting invested in politics was even worth it.

That was just a split second though, and the ACA decision is an overwhelming yes to that question. In terms of where we go now Libs have to continue to put pressure on elected officials Democrats and Republicans alike. If you like the ACA but live in a state where you have a Governor is promising not to implement it into law, let them know about it.

Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Rick Scott, and Nikki Haley, these people should not be allowed to get away with not following a law that has been ruled constitutional by a Chief Justice who was a George W. Bush appointee. All of this big talk reminds me of a few years ago when these same GOP Governors were in front of every camera claiming they would not touch The President's stimulus money. Now Governors like Scott of Florida and John Kasich of Ohio have that same stimulus money to thank for their thriving economies which are better than the overall national averages.

More so than anything the President himself has a second chance to make a first impression. For all of the polls that the GOP likes to tout saying people don't like this law, a healthy percentage of that comes from people who don't think it goes far enough in providing everyone with healthcare.

President Obama, doing what he does best out on the stump has the ability to say this law is a great thing for the American people. It's not just that kids can stay on their parents insurance until they are 26, It's not just that companies can no longer be able to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, The law will also reduce the deficit by $210 billion over the next ten years and $1 trillion over the ten years after that.

The law will create 4 million jobs of the next decade, by reducing the costs of healthcare and making it cheaper for companies to hire. Between 250,000 and 400, 000 jobs a year will be created and spread across all sectors from manufacturing to services.

The White House passed the ACA in 2010, put it out there and then walked away from it, giving every right-wing billionaire the opportunity to make lie-driven political ads trashing it without any resistance. The Supreme Court gave the President his Etch-A-Sketch moment (with all apologies to Eric Fehrnstrom).

With this second chance The President's populist message is more effective now than it ever was,

The ability to make this argument from an economic standpoint, as well as a health standpoint is something that Mitt Romney can't deal with, especially being that the law was his idea.

Good luck making an effective argument against your signature governing achievement Mitt.

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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.

I want to hear from you e-mail me at ebrew79@hotmail.com.or follow me on twitter @ebrew79