Umbrellagate is growing.

I am not sure if that picture with the four presidents and their human umbrella holders is a photoshop job or not. And, quite frankly, I don't care.

This "Umbrellagate" thing is getting out of hand. Wingnuts still can't get over the fact that president Obama asked a young white man Marine to hold an umbrella over his head.

"It is against the law and Marine protocol for crying out loud! This Negro done lost his mind!"

I know I know. The word uppity comes to mind.

"Of course, there's no rule against the president acting like a selfish asshole. That just comes naturally to Obama. We used to have dignity in our presidents, especially when George W. Bush was in office. This president is just an egotistical prick."
Some fringenuts are positive that what president Obama did was illegal and they are demanding answers.

Sadly, as is always the case with the black helicopter crowd, they are wrong.

"Yes, the Marines are often forced to get wet while standing outside the White House because they cannot hold an umbrella. Yes, the Marine Corps uniform regulations state a Marine cannot hold an umbrella. But Marine spokesman Capt. Eric Flanagan explained to the Washington Post that, according to Title 10 of the U.S. Code, Marines must "perform such other duties as the President may direct." So when the President asks you to hold an umbrella over his head, you hold an umbrella over his head." 

That's right; even when it's a black president.

"It didn't matter that there's a long history of Marines and Secret Service members holding umbrellas for the President, no matter which side of the aisle they represent. It also didn't matter that there are easily discoverable pictures of Sarah Palin having an umbrella held for her. They wanted to add more headaches to the President's very bad week. But, oh well. So much for Umbrellagate. It had a nice ring to it, too. "

More desperation from the right. Although I can't say that I blame them. Three "scandals" in one week and the man's approval rating didn't even take a hit.

Sorry guys, it would take his Oness having an affair with Kerry Washington to get most Americans to pay attention. That's just how we are built here in these divided states of America.

"A Confederacy of Dunces", and now comes umbrellagate.

It looks like the feeding frenzy around the faux scandal in Washington is causing journalists down there to turn on each other. I swear you just don't know who to trust anymore.

"One day after The White House released 100 pages of Benghazi emails, a report has surfaced alleging that Republicans released a set with altered text.

CBS News reported Thursday that leaked versions sent out by the GOP last Friday had visible differences than Wednesday's official batch. Two correspondences that were singled out in the report came from National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

The GOP version of Rhodes' comment, according to CBS News: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."
The White House email: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

The GOP version of Nuland's comment, according to CBS News: The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda."
The White House email: "The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings."

The news parallels a Tuesday CNN report which initially introduced the contradiction between what was revealed in a White House Benghazi email version, versus what was reported in media outlets. On Monday, Mother Jones noted that the Republicans' interim report included the correct version of the emails, signaling that more malice and less incompetence may have been at play with the alleged alterations."

Of course we now know that republican operatives fed folks like Jon Karl phony information and he ran with it. How is this for irony? ABC went looking for a scandal and found themselves trying to fend off one of their own.

Only in America.

"What did they know and when they did they know it? That question has been posed to the White House a lot this week — but it should also be put to ABC News, which has been caught reporting as fact emails about the Benghazi controversy that, it turns out, were doctored by Republican aides. There’s no indication that ABC and its reporter, Jonathan Karl, knew the emails were manipulated before reporting them, of course. But the network may run into trouble for overplaying its hand in claiming it had “obtained” emails that, we learn today from CBS News, were actually notes taken by GOP aides being briefed on the emails."

Don't worry Jonathan, there will be a job waiting for you over at FOX NEWS when this is all over. You seem like just their type.

Speaking of the FOX NEWS type, I see that Sarah Palin has denounced the N****r in the White House for daring to ask a Marine (and a white one to boot) to hold an umbrella for him while it rained on his press conference.

O, you are one uppity N****r. No wonder some of these folks hate you.

"The conservative Daily Caller wrote up the incident with the headline, “Obama breaches Marine umbrella protocol.”

“Mr. President, when it rains it pours, but most Americans hold their own umbrellas,” former Alaska governor Sarah Palin tweeted.

“These guys aren’t valets,” one conservative blogger wrote, though he also guessed that previous presidents had done the same thing “because the optics are sufficiently bad that Team O wouldn’t have tried it without precedent to cite in its defense.” Another wrote, “This is the nuclear version of bad optics.” The conservative Move America Forward PAC put out a fundraising e-mail on the subject:

Fundraising off Obama’s umbrella FTW. twitter.com/aseitzwald/sta…
— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 17, 2013 " [Source]

They are right about one thing, when certain people are looking, it is "bad optics."

This is what is known in certain quarters as pure "hateration". Consider the fact that Sarah Palin herself had someone holding an umbrella for her not too long ago.

Honestly, we knew that there was a serious short in her brain cells, but we didn't think that she had a short memory as well.

The Field comes clean: An open letter to my readers.

Dear Field Hands and friends of the Field Negro:

 

It is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.

 

I am forced to write it because it would appear that some of you have been right all along about his Oness and all the terrible things that he has done as our nation's 44^th president.

 

Unfortunately, I let the president's race and the historical significance of his presidency cloud my better judgment.

 

I found myself defending him over and over again against attacks that I thought were unfair and were only directed at him because of his race.

 

I failed to look at the cold hard facts regarding his presidency and the things that he has done so far throughout his tenure.

 

Yes, I know that the DOW, Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 keeps chugging along at a record pace, that unemployment has been on a steady decline, and that the budget deficit is shrinking much faster than we expected; that home prices are rising, and, that according to the Fed Chairman, the economy is looking up.

 

I know that he has overhauled the food safety system, expanded the children's health insurance program (CHIP), advanced women's rights in the work place, and ended don't ask don't tell in the military. And I know that he has increased funding for veterans, and reversed the torture policies of the previous president.    

 

I  know that he appointed two pro life women to the Supreme Court, signed into law a fair pay in the workplace bill for women, and that he passed the hate crimes bill and the fair sentencing act as well.

 

I am familiar with his  Obamacare (health care reform after five presidents failed), which, among other things, ended the practice of medical insurance companies denying medical claims for pre-existing medical conditions, and the fact that he signed an executive order which called for tougher emissions controls on automobiles.

 

Then there is that Osama Bin Laden fellow;  I think he killed him (not to mention many of his top lieutenants) , ended the war in Iraq as promised , and that he is withdrawing the troops in Afghanistan.

 

I also know that he bailed out and turned around the auto industry, and that he passed the stimulus plan when the country was on the brink of a total financial disaster. Oh, and he also recapitalized the banking system, kicked banks out of the federal student loan program,  and expanded Pell Grant spending.

 

But still,  I understand that in spite of these things, he pales in comparison (no pun intended) to the great presidents who came before him.

 

I should have recognized the obvious and not have been in the tank for this man.

 

 

I hope that you all will accept my sincerest apology.

 

Your humble servant,  the Field Negro.  

One of the real scandals in Washington.

Conservatives are about to find out that it's not only those poor Negroes in urban areas who depend on food stamps.

 

My experience has taught me that quite a few working head of households, college students, and hardworking families who are trying to make ends meet in America depend on food stamps as well.

 

Yes, there is fraud, but show me an area of society where there isn't fraud. I guarantee you that if we were to put a microscope to some of these politicians passing these draconian laws against  people they consider powerless we would find that their milk isn't exactly clean, either.

 

This is one of the real scandals in Washington that no one is talking about.

 

Speaking of politricksters in Washington, the clowns from both sides of the isle were in full finger- wagging mode today.

 

Good for Eric Holder for at least wagging back.

 

These hearings today involved the AP scandal, which, by the way, is the only one of these scandals that I consider serious--- or will even pay attention to.

 

This IRS "scandal" is a joke. Why? Because as I have been saying for the past few days, there is nothing to see here; been there done that.

This is selective outrage on the part of the clowns in Washington and the corporate media whores who have to drive their ratings.

 

No wonder O had to talk to the nation this evening to calm their fears. I just wonder where this outraged media was for all those years when Bush was in power and investigating churches, black organizations, and liberal groups. (Just ask Eric Dyson. Bush and his boys went after him five years in a row. FIVE!) I  know that I am starting to sound like a broken record, but I think I will keep playing this tune until you all at least catch the lyrics.

 

"We'd have every major liberal newspaper in America calling for investigation ending in impeachment. It'd be leading the evening news. We'd have have every group that had liberal or progressive tendencies demanding answers and marching on the White House. And leaders of Congress, Democrats in Congress, demanding to have answers. It'd be a nightmare at the Bush White House had this been done on our watch."

 

Mr. Rove, with all due respect, it was done on your "watch", and you seem to be sleeping pretty well these days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

The big overreach.

You [right]wingnuts might want to hold off on the impeachment party for the "Socialist" in the White House. I mean just when you think that you will finally get to see that Negro hold a press conference, put up a peace sign, and ride off into the sunset; it turns out that lady luck is smiling on him once again.

Anyway, it looks like the man in charge of allegedly targeting those Tea Party groups at the IRS was a W appointee. (Oh, and memo to Marco Rubio: there is no IRS Commissioner, that position has been vacant since November.)

"Oh Field, there you guys go blaming Bush for everything again"

Yes, and he makes it so easy for me.

But again, this all begs the question: Why is this even a scandal when W and his people were targeting the NAACP and other liberal groups with the heavy hand of the IRS when he was holding the hammer? The Tea Party apparently rejected an apology from the IRS; I would like to know why they (the IRS) even apologized to them in the first place. I certainly don't think the NAACP or Greenpeace got any when W was slapping his political enemies around.

Here is something you wingnuts and your friends might need to understand. If you are a political action group (such as the Tea Party)you cannot get 501(c)(4) tax-exemption status for your group. The IRS will target you if they believe that you are breaking these guidelines. These wingnuts crying a river over the government targeting should take a ticket and stand in line.

"Reuters has obtained part of a yet to be released report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) that confirms that the IRS was targeting groups on the left and right who focused their activities on advocating for expanding or limiting of the size of the government. The report also states that the screening process was not influenced by the Obama administration, and that none of the groups screened were denied tax exempt status.
Without the claims of a partisan witch hunt against conservative groups, this latest Republican fueled Obama scandal is set to lose all of its sizzle.
The real reason why Republicans are desperately trying to drum up a scandal here is because they don’t want the IRS forcing their dark money groups to pay taxes. The IRS is threatening their Citizens United fueled political slush fund, and Republicans want it to stop. Republicans are trying to bully the IRS into backing off.

It turns out that Obama isn’t Richard Nixon after all. He wasn’t using the IRS to attack his enemies. In their own bungling way, the IRS was trying to deal with the problems caused by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. First, Benghazi crashes and burns, and now the IRS scandal could be fading fast."

Oh yes, Benghazi, the places where almost half of you black helicopter tin foil clowns can't find on  a map. Well, as it turns out, those leaked e-mails were apparently edited to make the Socialist in Chief look bad.

"Turns out the press got played again by Republicans. Jake Tapper has the smoking gun of the original email from the Obama administration which differs significantly from the “leaked emails” ABC ran with.

In an exclusive for CNN, Tapper reveals that CNN has the original email sent by a top Obama aide, regarding the administration’s reaction to the Benghazi attacks. Tapper reported, “The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.” [Source]

I bet republicans all have very long arms.

Finally, on to a more serious subject: The urban terrorist terrorizing the hard working people of New Orleans.

19 people were shot at a Mother's Day parade, and the national press treated it as if it was just another one of those unruly young Negroes living out his gangsta fantasies here in America.

Two monsters cause death and mayhem at the Boston Marathon and they shut down a major American city and there is 24 hours cable news coverage about the incident. This was "terrorism", what happened in New Orleans was not.

Tell that to the poor people who live in that neighborhood or who went to that parade.

The FBI quickly issued a statement saying that this was not a terrorist act, and we could all just get on with our lives now. Nothing to see here America. Just Negroes in the hood being Negroes. You can all go back to pursuing happiness.  That is until the real terrorists strike again. (Shout out to Greg Fuller for this story.)

Melissa Harris Perry lives in that neighborhood, and along with the wonky Chris Hayes she tried to bring attention to the double standard when it comes to the mainstream media.

"You know, I thought that line, I want to ask you what you make of that line,” Hayes said. “This was street violence. I saw this on social media. Shooting in New Orleans. And then it was like, oh, oh, oh. That’s just, you know, gang-bangers in New Orleans, probably a black neighborhood, you know, that’s just life in the big city. Street violence isn’t terrorism, it’s not terrifying, it’s not terror that is being visited on people every day.” [Source]

Wrong Chris. "Street violence" is terror, and it's being visited on people every day. Maybe not the people in America that most Americans care about, but they are people, and they are Americans, and when they are terrorized it needs to be highlighted just like it is with the people of Boston.

Just a "flaw" in our history, Washington's real scandal, and hide your peacocks in Illinois.

It is always interesting to hear how some people in the majority population want to whitewash (pun intended) history when they talk about slavery.

 

Take for instance the conservative gentleman on Bill Maher's HBO program on Friday. He dismissed Joy Reid calling out the imperfections of the America Revolution because slavery was just "a flaw" in a grand experiment.

 

Now if you happen to be black or a descendant of one of these slaves, I dare say that you think that the atrocities committed against slaves was a bit more than just "a flaw". It was a crime against humanity, and it should never be forgotten, or white washed and minimized by 21^st Century talking heads and pseudo historians.

 

"Republicans love talking about slavery if they can somehow accuse President Obama of being worse than it, but when it comes to recognizing the historical significance of actual slavery… well, not so much. On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, a great example of this was on display when MSNBC contributor and Managing Editor for TheGrio.com Joy Reid mentioned slavery to refute the argument that the American Revolution was somehow exemplary, in comparison to the Arab Spring, and National Review writer Charles Cooke called the reference a “cheap shot,” opining that slavery was a “flaw” that rendered the Revolution “imperfect.”

 

Host Bill Maher was arguing that the Middle-Eastern dictatorships that have been overthrown during the Arab Spring are being replaced by Muslim theocracies, which, he argued, “are dictatorships themselves, aren’t they?”
Cooke responded that Americans “have a problem thinking about this” because “the revolution that happened here was great, and very rarely is that the case in the world.” 

Cooke responded that Americans “have a problem thinking about this” because “the revolution that happened here was great, and very rarely is that the case in the world.”

He explained, “You have this revolution in America in which the British fight the British, and then they codify classical liberal values in a constitution, and it’s great,” adding that in “normal” revolutions, “there’s bloodshed, and it’s horrible.”

Joy Reid countered that “The revolution in the U.S. was great, unless you were a slave, and there was a war in which 600,000 Americans had to die to make it better.”

“So, revolution isn’t always great,” Joy continued, “in the French Revolution, you had beheadings. Revolutions are messy, so if you want people to have democracy, it can be messy, right?”

“The slavery point, I think, is cheap,” Cooke responded.

“You mean the revolution in the United States that produced a government that included slaves, that included enslaved Africans, its a cheap shot, to include that in the narrative?” Reid asked. “Í mean, that is part of the narrative.”

“No,” Cooke replied, “the point is that of you’re looking for perfection in the 18th Century, you’re not going to find it. What the Americans did was a massive step forward, it wasn’t perfect, it was resolved in a civil war that was bloody and awful, but if we’re going to write off the greatest revolution, the greatest constitution in world history because it was imperfect and it was flawed.." [Source] 

Come on now Ms. Reid. That's only a part of the "narrative" if you happen to be one of those black racist troublemakers. Remember, as my twitter fam Jaru said, here in America "we never use historical facts in an argument".

Speaking of facts, that is something that is not too popular in Washington these days. But there are a lot of so called "scandals" swirling around that town. We all know about Benghazi, and the Tea Party IRS beef (I am still trying to figure out why the lamestream media didn't jump on the IRS when W and his crew were targeting the NAACP), but sadly,the biggest scandal of all in Washington has been ignored by the willfully blind and ignorant here in America.

"Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.

Don’t think it’s a scandal? It’s pretty basic: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.

The New York Times yesterday highlighted two of the more recent ways that Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy. It’s worth stepping back and realizing: what’s happening here is that Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters. 

That’s just two examples. There are numerous others; again, with virtually all nominees required to have 60 votes, one can accurately say that Republicans are filibustering every nomination. But perhaps the worst are the “nullification” filibusters, in which Republicans simply refuse to approve any nominee at all for some positions — the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because they don’t want those agencies to carry out their statutory obligations.

In doing so, Republicans are not breaking the rules of the Senate. They are, however, breaking the Senate itself, and harming the government." [Source]

Yes, but nobody cares about "harming the government" if the Socialist with the Kenyan father is in charge of it.

Finally, there are some truly sick people in the world. As a social Libertarian I strongly believe that folks should be able to do whatever they want to do in the privacy of their own homes. Especially if they are two consenting adults. But a bird????!!!!

I mean I agree that a peacock is a beautiful animal, but I am not looking at a peacock and thinking I want to get my freak on.

   

" A Roselle, Ill., man was charged with animal cruelty after police investigating another crime discovered that he had sexually abused his pet peacock.

 

David Beckmann, 64, was booked at DuPage County jail on Wednesday on separate charges of battery and attempted indecent solicitation of a child, the Daily Herald reported."

 

Lord have mercy! Not even our Peacocks are safe in society from these sickos. [Story]

 

 

 

  

 

The tax man cometh for the Tea Party, and Darrel's pants is on fire.

What's all the fuss about the IRS targeting the Tea Party? S**t happens with the IRS. Just ask Wesley, Lauren, and Redd. And I know that they allegedly broke the law and the Tea Party did not, but I didn't hear folks making a fuss when W's IRS targeted the NAACP back in 2004. Besides, anytime you can make Mark Levin miserable that's a good thing.

"The Internal Revenue Service is auditing the NAACP, scrutinizing the nation's oldest civil rights group after its chairman gave a stinging criticism of the Bush administration in a speech this summer.

Julian Bond's July 11 comments at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's convention in Philadelphia chastised President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the group.

Bush declined the group's invitation to speak, while Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry accepted.

In a letter dated Oct. 8, the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Division informed the NAACP's national office in Baltimore of the investigation.
The letter said the probe was limited to " ... whether or not your organization has intervened in a political campaign. ... "
Bond said yesterday that the audit was "an attempt to silence the NAACP" right before a tight presidential election.

"They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you," he said. "It's pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn't believe George Bush should be criticized, and it's obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too."
In a statement, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said the agency could not comment on activities involving specific tax-exempt organizations, but he rejected Bond's claims.

"Any suggestion that the IRS has tilted its audit activities for political purposes is repugnant and groundless," the statement said.

The IRS letter states that Bond's speech "condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq."
The letter goes on to note that the NAACP's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status prohibits "directly or indirectly participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office."
Tool of both parties

Bruce Payne, a lecturer in public policy at Duke University, said administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have used the IRS to harass political opponents." [Source]

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Finally, Darrel Issa has been implying that Hillary and the White House has been lying and covering up about the B word. But  guess what; we know that he is a liar.

"An exchange on Sunday morning’s Meet The Press illustrates how even the most subtle distinction can carry heavy political undertones. In discussing this week’s hearings on Benghazi, Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) asserted that Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who led the Accountability Review Board on Benghazi, “refused to come before our committee.”

Amb. Pickering jumped in to correct him, saying “That is not true,” and telling host David Gregory that “I said the day before the hearings, I was willing to appear, to come to the very hearings that he excluded me from.” [Source]

Nothing "subtle" about what Mr. Issa was doing; the man was lying plain and simple, and props to Ambassador Pickering for calling him on it.

Suffer the little children, and Jason calls it quits.

The NRA has lots of money. So when are they going to have gun safety classes for the American public? It seems that they spend a lot of money on lobbying politicians and not enough on protecting the children of their members.

This past Thursday there was yet another story of a child accidentally killing himself with a firearm.

"The past month or so has seen a seeming glut of shootings carried out by children and toddlers, and on Thursday, another tragedy was added to the trend. Two year-old Kinsler Allen Davis was just a few feet away from his father when the child found his father’s handgun, and fired it. The bullet struck Kinsler in the head, and he was pronounced dead a few hours later at a Dallas hospital. Aside from mentions on several of MSNBC’s primetime programs, the recent rash of child-involved shootings has gotten little attention from the national media, which has been concentrating on a tiny number of other stories.

Corsicana Police Chief Randy Bratton said the boy’s 35-year-old father called 911 just before 9 p.m. and told dispatchers his son shot himself at the family’s home on North 30th Street.

 

Kinsler Allen Davis was taken to Navarro Regional Hospital and then flown by helicopter to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, where doctors pronounced him dead just after 11 p.m. The boy was less than a month away from his third birthday.

 

A preliminary investigation shows the boy found the handgun inside a bedroom and fired it. The bullet hit him in the head, Chief Bratton said. The boy’s father was in a walk-in closet in the bedroom where the boy was, feet away from where the accident occured. Initially, the chief reported the father to be in another room but he later said that was incorrect.

 

Bratton said the initial investigation points to the incident being accidental. No one has been arrested. However, after the investigation is complete, Bratton said the case will be forwarded to the district attorney’s office to determine if any charges will be filed.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell have each devoted short segments to recent child-involved shootings, but so far, the rapidly-mounting reports of children tragically gaining access to firearms has escaped the notice of the national media. That’s a shame, because this story is one in which they could easily, painlessly fulfill their duty to serve the public and almost certainly save lives.

It’s true that there are political aspects to these stories, but kids getting their hands on guns is something we should all be able to agree shouldn’t happen.

We should, but those NRA folks are not like the rest of us.

Finally, I see that the Heritage Foundation let their racist in- residence go. Given what the GOP has been trying to do with Latino voters of late I guess this latest little racial dust up was unacceptable. Now they are acting like they had no idea that this guy had views like this. How could they not know them when the guy stated his views publicly back in 2008?

"Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position,” the Heritage Foundation said in a terse e-mail statement. “He’s no longer employed by Heritage.”The foundation declined to comment further, saying, “It is our longstanding policy not to discuss internal personnel matters.”

Let me translate that for you: Jason should have known better than to make or private views known to the public at large.

 "We believe that every person is created equal and that everyone should have equal opportunity to reach the ladder of success and climb as high as they can dream."

Yes, but some people are "more equal than others".

*Pic from Think Progress.

Foxnewsgate

Most people in America still think of a foreign sports car when they hear the word Benghazi.
 

The right wingnuts are hoping that all of this will change as more information emerges about what transpired before and after the attack on a US outpost consulate  in Libya.

Over at FOX NEWS if I had a dollar for every time one of their hosts said Benghazi I could buy the state of Texas and solve world hunger. But sadly for them it is just not sticking right now. And, you have to ask yourself,  if it does stick, who will it stick to and for how long?

I am going to take a guess and say that it will not stick to either Hillary or the beige dude currently occupying the White House.

Although you have to believe that the people around Hillary are sweating a little these days. 2016 is four years away and a lot can happen between now and the next presidential election.

The good news for them is that their enemies belong to the republican party, and those folks have a way of overplaying their hand. They always find a way to snap defeat from the jaws of victory.

  

But the FOX News barrage against all things O seems to be having an effect on the White House. Today they tried to calm the Benghazi waters by reassuring the American people that there is nothing to see and we should move along to more important issues.

Most of us normal people can put it in its proper context and see it for the political witch hunt that it is. But the White House should listen to people like David Horn who wrote the following:

"The latest revelations about the Benghazi talking points—as opposed to what actually happened at the US diplomatic facility at Benghazi, where four Americans died—do not back up Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's hyperbolic and absurd claim that the Benghazi controversy is Obama's Watergate. But neither are they nothing.

As ABC News reported on Friday morning, the most discussed talking points in US diplomatic history were revised multiple times before being passed to UN Ambassador Susan Rice prior to her appearances last September on Sunday talk shows. The revisions—which deleted several lines noting that the CIA months before the attack had produced intelligence reports on the threat of Al Qaeda-linked extremists in Benghazi—appear to have been driven by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, it should be noted, is a career Foggy Bottomer who has served Republican and Democratic administrations, not a political appointee. Her motive seems obvious: fend off a CIA CYA move that could make the State Department look lousy. (The other major deletion concerned three sentences about a possible link between the attack and Ansar al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group; last November, David Petraeus, the former CIA chief, testified that this information was removed from the talking points in order to avoid tipping off the group.)/

But here's the problem for the White House: It was part of the interagency process in which State sought to downplay information that might have raised questions about its preattack performance. That's a minor sin (of omission). Yet there's more: On November 28, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC's best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word 'consulate' to 'diplomatic facility because 'consulate' was inaccurate."
Assuming the talking points revisions released by ABC News are accurate—and the White House has not challenged them—Carney's statement was not correct. The State Department did far more than change one word, and it did so in a process involving White House aides. So, White House critics can argue, Carney put out bad information and did not acknowledge that State had massaged the talking points to protect itself from inconvenient questions.

This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi. My colleague Kevin Drum dismisses this recent Benghazi news ("on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5"). But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story. Despite Carney's statement, there was politically minded handling of the talking points. Yet in today's hyperpartisan environment, such a matter cannot be evaluated with a sense of proportion. Obama antagonists decry it as a deed most foul, and White House defenders denounce the the critics. The talking points dispute is not a scandal; it's a mess—a small mess—"

Yes, but even a "small mess" has to be cleaned up.

Obstruct at every turn and question their IQs.

I was reading an article over at my favorite website for politics today, and I saw where republicans, once again, blocked one of the president's nominations. This one was for the Secretary of Labor, and Tom Perez was their latest victim. This latest move by republicans in Washington represents what has been a consistent pattern by republicans since the Obama presidency: block and obstruct at every turn.

The article by Lauren Victoria Burke was interesting and insightful as it outlined not only this latest obstruction but many others which might have been over looked because of the mundane nature of these types of things.

As Burke writes:  "There are currently 82 vacancies for federal judges around the U.S.  By using the secret “hold,” Republican Senators don’t have to reveal they are blocking a nominee.

Some in the media, such as veteran journalists Ron Fournier to E.J. Dionne, have written that it’s President Obama that must adjust to Congress or in some way adjust his strategy. But clearly the strategy of obstruction President Obama has faced during the 112th and 113th Congresses is historic.

With compromise disappearing and Congress getting close to nothing done, members are leaving.  The Senate has had a 40% turnover in the last five years.  Many say the culture in the Senate driven by unwillingness to compromise with President Obama have led to the historic obstruction."

Go figure. But what is driving this new attitude towards the American President? Ideology? 

"Of course it's ideology, Field; the man is a Socialist. What else could it be?"

I will give you one guess.

On that note I will segue to another article I read over at Politic365,today.

This one shed some light on one of the darlings of the conservative movement.

"In a recently released video from an American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine asserts that Latinos, as well as Native Americans, and blacks have demonstrated that they are incapable of “assimilating” and adjusting their IQs to be on par with whites, Jews and Asians.


Here Richwine explains the differences between European and non-European immigrants. Specifically that non-European immigrants should be treated differently than European immigrants so that “we can get assimilation to work.”

In this video Richwine states that the U.S. should find smart, uneducated people from other countries and allow them to enter the country:

This week Richwine’s dissertation from Harvard University was revealed to contain a passage in which he questions whether Latinos’ IQs could ever be on par with whites:

“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Folks, in case you didn't know, the Heritage Foundation who this clown represents is leading the charge against immigration reform on behalf of conservatives here in America. This is where Jim DeMint took his wheelbarrow and unloaded the Brinks truck full of money that was offered to him.

"We believe that every person is created equal and that everyone should have equal opportunity to reach the ladder of success and climb as high as they can dream," Heritage said in a statement released by spokesman Mike Gonzalez.

Richwine was not at Heritage when he wrote the paper. In the acknowledgments section of his dissertation, he thanked the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank in Washington, "for its generous support, without which this dissertation could not have been completed."

No Jason, thank you! We always like when the true feelings of ignorant people are exposed, no matter how hard they try to hide their intentions behind the cover of fancy think tanks and political organizations. 

*Pic courtesy of Politic365

News day.

It's a busy news day here in America.

Let's start with the sink Hillary in 2016 hearings down in Washington. (Question for wingnuts: What if you try to create a scandal and no one cares but you? Honestly, you all have got to let this Benghazi thing go. If Americans didn't care about W and his merry band of neo cons lying about a war that cost thousands of Americans and Iraqis their lives, what makes you think that they are going to care about four Americans being killed in Libya?)

It's not looking good for the FOX NEWS crowd. I am quite sure that O isn't packing up to go back to Chicago just yet. The I word will just have to wait.

Out in Arizona Jodi Arias was found guilty. Sorry Jodi, America already let one guilty white girl go free; Nancy Grace and company were not going to let this one go.

Personally, unlike the cable news execs, I am glad that this circus is finally over.


Then there is the case in Cleveland. The more you read about it is the more sick it makes you.

The po po in Cleveland was playing more defense than the 1985 Bears at their news conference today.

One thing is certain, they did not give the people in that neighborhood where those girls were found the same attention they would have given the citizens of a more affluent neighborhood in Cleveland.

I believe that those people called the po po about that house, and I believe that the po po ignored those calls or downplayed them. I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

Finally, I have a question for my pro life friends who decry the "killing of babies" by American women by way of abortions: How does the following story out of India make you feel?

 

"300,000 day-old babies die each year in India: report                    

India accounts for 29 percent of all newborn deaths worldwide. The report added that more than 300,000 babies die within 24 hours of being born in India each year from infections and other preventable causes. More than 300,000 babies die within 24 hours of being born in India each year from infections and other preventable causes, a report said Tuesday, blaming a lack of political will and funding for the crisis."[Source]
 

This is what poverty does. And this is what poor people who do not have access to proper health care go through everyday all over the world.

 

Sorry to interrupt your gallop while you enjoy the view from your high horse.

 

You can go back to reading Psalm 137: 8-9 now.