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Where to begin? I guess let's address them one at a time. The Federal Marriage Amendment didn't get out of the U.S. House of Representatives when the Republicans controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate majority in July 2006 and popular support was below 50%. Why would anyone expect a measure to divorce the estimated 100,000 same-sex married couple in the country to be more successful in 2013? It takes a vote of 2/3rds of BOTH Houses of the Legislature and then ratification of 3/4 of the states to be enacted. In 220 years the document has been Amended 27 times, and 10 of those happened within the first 5 years. A federal marriage amendment is not going to happen!
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Michael Fitzegerald becomes President Obama's 4th openly LGBT nominee to the federal judiciary |
This is excellent news, but it's probably going to take a billion dollars to re-elect the president if, as predicted, unemployment is well above 8.5% on election day 2012.Obama’s re-election campaign collected $47 million, while the president raised another $38 million for the DNC via a joint fundraising committee that allows donors to write a single check that is then divvied up between the two entitites.The haul far surpasses the goal [Campaign Manager] Messina set for the campaign’s national finance committee of collecting a combined $60 million between April 1 and June 30.[...]Obama’s total is more than the $35 million raised this past quarter by all the Republican presidential candidates combined (although Minnesota Rep.Michele Bachmann has not yet reported her fundraising). The GOP is lagging in fundraising, a problem made more acute by Obama’s success. By this point in 2007, 10 GOP presidential hopefuls had collectively raised more than $118 million. Obama had raised $58.9 million over two quarters.
I understand people being impatient about the economy, but considering voting for a Republican, who will only make things worse, not better, why?Let's start with the recovery act. In the 27 months since President Obama signed it into law, we've lost 1.3 million private sector jobs and 1.8 million overall.Those are terrible numbers, but in the 27 months before the stimulus, we were losing private sector jobs more than three times as quickly. During that stretch, we lost 4.5 million jobs in the private sector jobs and 4.1 million jobs overall. (The reason we lost more private sector jobs than jobs overall is that public sector hiring went up by nearly one-half million. Under Obama, we've lost a half-million government jobs, an ironic fact given the false Republican claim that government hiring has increased.)As you can see in the chart at the top of the post, as bad as the jobs picture was in 2009, it was even worse in 2008, and things have turned around in 2010 and 2011 with job growth stronger than it was in 2007. Moreover, we've now had sixteen straight months of private sector job gains.With unemployment still at 9.1%, economic growth is obviously still way below where anybody wants it to be, but to the extent the administration has fallen short, it's that they've soft-pedaled the need for more stimulus funds to accelerate the recovery beyond its current pace.And the fact remains that unlike Bush and the Republicans who wrecked the economy in the first place, Obama and the Democrats haven't made things worse. They've made things better.
"I believe homosexuality is a sin because I'm a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it's a sin," he said. "But I know that some people make that choice. That's their choice."
Cain was asked: "So you believe it's a choice?"
"I believe it is a choice," he responded.I wonder if Mr. Cain believes in the Golden Rule?
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| Newt Gingrich, with his 3rd wife (and former aide) Calllista |
Gingrich sought to lay blame for the recession, as well as the economic and social upheaval in Detroit, on Obama and his policies. “President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history,” Gingrich said. “I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.”Unfortunately for Newt it's not 1994 anymore, it's now 2011 so people like Salon's Joan Walsh and The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates have started to notice Newt's blatant appeals to racial prejudice:
But let me be clear: I might not have paid attention to Gingrich's "food stamp president" jibe had it not come along with a panorama of images designed to make clear Barack Obama is blackity black black. Praising right-wing Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Gingrich said he'll make the U.S. more like Texas, while Obama only "knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit." In the speech to Georgia Republicans where he tried out the "food stamp president" slur, Gingrich also told the bastion of the old Confederacy that 2012 would be the biggest election since 1860 -- you know, when Abraham Lincoln got elected and the South began to secede over slavery, commencing the Civil War. He also suggested the U.S. might need to bring back some kind of voting test, banned under the Voting Rights Act. Last year, of course, Gingrich denounced Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior," which made him "outside our comprehension" as Americans, spreading the lie that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from his absent African father, though he was raised by his white mother and grandparents. Oh, and he headed the drive to label Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor "racist" when she was nominated in 2009.
So let's review: Welfare slur? Check. Tie to a troubled, mainly black city? Check. Specious association with African anti-colonialism? Check. Dire reference to Lincoln and the start of the Civil War, while campaigning deep in the heart of Dixie? Check. Suggestion we need a voter test? Check. Oh, and for good measure, calling liberals concerned about racial injustice "racist"? Check. Awesome: They've hit pretty much every way the GOP has used to divide Americans by race in the last 200 years!
Great job, Newt. You've developed the perfect platform to run a spirited GOP campaign that attracts a cadre of aggrieved white people. You'll never be president of the United States, but you'll be the champion of the declining share of the country that still thrills to what we used to call dog-whistle politics: coded varieties of racism only understood by their intended audience.It will be interesting to see if other Republican candidates and politicians call Newt out for his racist remarks, or (more likely) they also use more subtly coded appeals to the predominantly pale populace's anxieties about racial progress. Interestingly, on This Week with Christiane Amanpour even George Will said that Newt "is not a serious candidate" for president.
Overall, Obama’s approval rating is up slightly from 53 percent in March and a 47 percent low point following last fall’s midterm congressional elections, in which Republicans won control of the House and gained seats in the Senate. It was 64 percent in May 2009, just months after he was sworn into office.
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In another finding, 53 percent in the latest poll say Obama deserves to be re-elected, while 43 percent say he should be fired, the first time in an AP-GfK poll that more people say he should get a second term than not.Good news!
Our nation’s permanent mission is to form a ‘more perfect union’ – deepening the meaning of freedom, broadening the reach of opportunity, strengthening the bonds of community. That mission has inspired and empowered us to extend rights to people previously denied them. Every time we have done that, it has strengthened our nation. Now we should do it again, in New York, with marriage equality. For more than a century, our Statue of Liberty has welcomed all kinds of people from all over the world yearning to be free. In the 21st century, I believe New York’s welcome must include marriage equality.The Big Dog had endorsed the concept of marriage equality publicly way back in 2009, some 13 years after he (in)famously signed the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law.
But Republican candidates, who have placed less emphasis on gay marriage in recent years, probably cannot expect their opposition to it to be a net electoral positive for them except in select circumstances. If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012.
Past trends, of course, are no guarantee of future ones, and it’s always possible that the momentum toward increasing support for gay marriage could flatten out or even reverse itself.
But this does put Republicans in a tricky position. Their traditional position on gay marriage is becoming less popular. But to the extent they disengage from the issue, they may lose even more ground. One way to read the trends of the past few years is that we have passed an inflection point wherein it is no longer politically advantageous for candidates to oppose same-sex marriage, which in turn softens opposition to it among the general public, creating a sort of feedback loop and accelerating the trend.It should be interesting to see how heterosexual supremacists who are opposed to marriage equality, especially Republican presidential contenders, deal with these poll results, especially since the first two primary states, New Hampshire and Iowa, both have legalized marriage equality.
Today, we are filing papers to launch our 2012 campaign.
We're doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you -- with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And that kind of campaign takes time to build.
So even though I'm focused on the job you elected me to do, and the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start today.
We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. It never does. But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we've made -- and make more -- we also need to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest.
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