black…MYstory

Oh, I guess those on the right have found religion on “fiscal responsibility” and are now taking their anger to the streets.

Yesterday, I watched (and shook my head) as I see swarms of disaffected (mostly conservative) folks fill downtown Cincinnati to protest the stimulus.

Dubbing themselves the “Cincinnati Tea Party”, the “movement” is calling on the U.S. government to stop bailing out banks and corporations.

Question: Where have you been?

When George Bush was in office, spending money like a drunken sailor, where where you?  When he doubled our foreign debt and borrowed to finance unnecessary war (causing us to double our national debt, as well), where was your concern for fiscal responsibility.  You were making noise but, at the time, it was cheerleading because your guy was in charge and you shouted down anyone who questioned the wisdom of borrowing money we didn’t have to fund a war that we didn’t need to fight.

Furthermore, you complained when people talked of regulation, saying that the “free market” should rule the day, not realizing that, when you take out the rules, it stops being a free market and becomes a free-for-all, where anything goes.

So, you fed this beast, helped it grow and now, when it comes back to bite you in the a$$, you want someone else to put it down for you?

There’s a old saying, “pay me now or pay me later”.  Well, it’s now “later” and the price is going to be high as a mutha.

Popularity: 58% [?]

On Real Time last night, Bill Maher handily shoots down the Republican assertions that there is no role for government in the lives of Americans.

Video below:

Popularity: 63% [?]

Wow, the brother has had the job for a month and there is already a call from a high-ranking Republican official that Michael Steele step down as chair of the Republican National Committee.

Granted, it’s been a rough month for Steele.  I don’t think his “hip hop makeover” strategy for the Republican party has been well-received by the establishment of the party.  To be fair, I clowned it too but, for different reasons, I suspect.

And, we saw how he got punked after crticizing Rush Limbaugh and felt compelled, for some reason, to apologize for not worshipping at the altar of Rush.

However, like I said, it’s only been a month, people.  Can the man get some time to find his footing?

Apparently not.

The Hill is reporting that North Carolina’s Republican national committeewoman, Dr. Ada Fisher, has sent out an email to fellow RNC members claiming that he is “eroding confidence”  in the GOP and asks that his transistion team encourage him to step down.  Fisher goes on to say:

“I don’t want to hear anymore [sic] language trying to be cool about the bling in the stimulus package or appealing to D.L. Hughley and blacks in a way that isn’t going to win us any votes and makes us frankly appear to many blacks as quite foolish.”

Even worse, the email includes Michael Steele’s personal email address.  I presume that this would allow those that co-sign to email him to directly to express their dissatisfaction.

The Republicans continue to eat their own.  I’ll guess I grab my bucket of popcorn and continue to watch this horror movie play out.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Rush Limbaugh is the GOP’s version of Suge Knight (before he started getting knocked out).  Most Republican politicians or leaders are scared to death to say anything negative about him.  Those that do soon regret it because he quickly ends up taking their manhood from them.

It’s kind of like the saying I used to hear from older cats talking tough, “if you even dream about kickin’ my a$$, you’d better wake up and apologize.”

Well, the latest GOP leader to be turned out and put on the stroll is Michael Steele.  Steele had the audacity to believe that being elected the chair of the Republican National Committee put him in a position where he could actually say that Rush Limbaugh does not speak for the Republican Party and that he (Michael Steel) is actually the party’s head.

Well, that was Saturday.

By Monday, he was kissing the ring, handing over his manhood, putting on the high heels and hitting the “track”.

Yes, Michael Steele joined the growing list of GOP leaders who have to bow down to their real leader, Rush Limbaugh.

Of course, he’s getting clowned for it.

I share with you two videos.  One is from the show, The Young Turks. This show leans more to the liberal side.  So, of course he’s clowned there, right?  However, the second is more telling.  It’s from Morning Joe, an MSNBC show that leans more to the right side of the political aisle.  This morning, they clowned Steele mercilessly.

Videos below:

Popularity: 32% [?]

Has Michael Steele bumped his head?  In a strategic move (insert sarcasm here) that is sure to elicit many an eye-roll from Black and Latino voters, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee is planning a “hip hop makeover” for the GOP.

This is part of the party’s effort to get young Blacks and Latinos to join the Republican ranks.  Steele says “There was underlying concerns we had become too regionalized and the party needed to reach beyond our comfort zones…We need messengers to really capture that region - young, Hispanic, black, a cross section … We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings.”

However, the problem, Chairman Steele, is not how the message is conveyed.  The problem is the message itself.  For too long, the Republican party, in playing to its base, has been too willing to throw black people, en masse, under the bus.  Whether they were accusing us of being  just welfare cases or assuming that any position of  importance we received was at the expense of a more qualifed white person, the GOP has played on racism for political gain. Chairman Steele, people are not that blind and their memories are not that short — your party has issues.

Having the right beat can get your song on the charts but, I doubt that a hot beat is going to be enough to salvage the party’s reputation with people of color.  Michael Steele, you have your work cut out for you.  If this is your best idea, I say go back to the lab and don’t come out until you get a better one or, since you’re so into hip hop, here’s a few bars from Eminem when he battled in 8 Mile:

Matter fact, dog, here’s a pencil /
Go home, write some s**t, make it suspenseful, /
And don’t come back until something don’t hits you/
f**k it! You can take the mike home with you!/

Popularity: 13% [?]

David Frum, a former speechwriter for the Bush White House and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is not one of my favorite people to hear speak but, I have to give credit where credit is due.  Frum is taking his party to task for not coming up with serious alternatives for the economy at a time when they are needed.

For example, one thing the Republicans have been railing about is that there is money in the package for wetlands restoration.  The Republicans turned this into an allegation that $30 million was going to be used to study the marsh mouse and, in typical fashion, began their  so-called indignation agains wasteful spending.  However, Frum rightly takes them to task for focusing on this item vs. focusing on the issues with the broader economy:

The problem with the story is not that it was false. The problem with the story is that it was stupid.

The US economy has plunged into severe recession (94% of Americans describe economic conditions as “bad,” according to the Feb 2-4 CBS poll, and 51% say conditions are getting even worse).

President Obama and the Democrats have responded by steering the US radically to the left. Since World War II, the federal government has most years spent less than one dollar in five of national income. Once the stimulus gets underway, the federal government will spend more than one dollar in four. The cost of everything the Democrats want to do comes closer to one dollar in three.

We’re facing more regulation of everything from high finance to the ordinary workplace. The Democrats are expanding Medicaid to crowd out private insurance. The federal government wants a huge new role in redirecting private investment in transportation and energy in the name of “green jobs.”

And facing all this – we’re talking about mice?

Could we possibly act more inadequate to the challenge? More futile? More brain dead?

He further chastises them for going back into the old tax cut bag when offering “solutions”:

We in fact have a constructive solution to offer, one that would deliver more jobs faster: the payroll tax holiday, an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist. But that’s not the solution being offered by Republicans in Congress. They are offering a clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions, including capital gains tax cuts. Capital gains! Who has any capital gains to be taxed in the first place?

I think Frum is reading the writing on the wall.  Politically, America is not where it was four-plus years ago.  Middle America is very concerned, and rightly so, with food, clothing and shelter.  People are concerned with whether or not they are going to be able to stay in their homes or if the company at which they work is going to fold.  In the face of these very serious challenges, the last thing they care about is theatrics and political gamesmanship.

Republican congresspeople continue to push themselves into irrelevance.  I just hope they don’t try to take the rest of us down with them.

Popularity: 9% [?]

This is one of those moments where you just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of lemonade to watch two fools duke it out.

In this case, this comes in the form of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and conservative talk radio host Mark Levin.

Obviously, the $700 billion bailout plan has been a hot topic but, you wouldn’t think anything would be enough to make conservatives abandon the talking points.

Well, I was wrong.

Here are the clips from the beef between right-wing radio hosts.

First up, Bill O’Reilly.  He rants about right-wing hosts for nearly the first minute-and-a-half of this clip.

Next up, Mark Levin responds to the diss with a track of his own.

My verdict — both are correct in calling each other idiots.

Popularity: 18% [?]

In what was supposed to be a 9/11 tribute video show at the Republican National Convention and aired on the networks carrying it, instead of remembering the fallen, the Republicans instead played on fears and attempted to use the imagery of that day to score cheap political points.  Sadly, they find nothing sacred.

The video is below along with Keith Olbermann’s response to his audience for his network having aired this video.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I guess Georgia Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland must have caught a plantantation flashback.  In a interverview yesterday, he was comparing vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to Michelle Obama (oddly enough, I didn’t realize Michelle Obama was running for vice president but, I digress) and offered the following:

“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”

He was then asked to clarify that he said “uppity” and he stated:

“Uppity, yeah.”

Uppity is a word that has often been used to disparage black people who some white folks believed were too proud of themselves or, more often, were perceived to be not acting in “their place” on the racial hierarchy.  In other  words, an “uppity negro” was one who had the audacity to believe that he/she was equal to a white person.

So, to hear someone, particularly a Southern politician who would be well aware of the implications of such a word, using it to describe two black people, leads me to believe that he was using it in the racially-tinged way that it has come to signify.

So, Rep. Westmoreland, from this uppity negro, I present to you the “Middle Finger” award.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Roland Martin sat in for an interview with Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks this week at the Republican National Convention.  In this interview, he hits on everything from the glaring double-standard from the right in regards to the pregnancy of their vice-presidential candidate’s teenage daughter to why the Republicans can’t garner more of the black vote.

Popularity: 9% [?]