Jack & Jill Politics

No pills and certainly no Waka, but there will be plenty of liquid intoxicants when Jack and Jill Politics hosts an inaugural #tweetup Sunday, January 20, 2013 in Washington, DC! Can’t be there? Follow hashtag #jjpolitics to follow the action online. Headed to the District? RSVP NOW! We’ll be meeting in the bar at Social Reform, doing our absolute best not to bother anyone.

Good Morning.

As you spend this weekend with family and friends, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

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Obama portrait: Picture of a young man in Chicago

By Lynn Sweet on January 15, 2013 4:46 PM|

By Miriam Di Nunzio

The Chicago Public Library today unveiled artist Steve Musgrave’s new portrait of President Obama to celebrate the upcoming inauguration. The event took place at the West Pullman Branch on West 119th Street.

According to a statement, the portrait reflects Obama’s efforts as a community organizer in the South Side Chicago neighborhood prior to seeking public office.

In addition to the likeness of Obama, who is depicted holding a copy of his memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” the portrait features images of people who have influenced the president’s life including his First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia, his mother and grandmother, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Harold Washington, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, among others.

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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Recently a lot of attention has been paid to school bullying which is a good thing. Still most of the coverage on bullying is in suburban communities after a suicide or incident of violence happens. Bullying affects urban communities as well. The way the media covers it violence in suburban communities is cause by bullying while violence in urban neighborhoods in inbred.

As both a teacher and a student, I have seen the way bullying affects students, damaging self esteems, drawing students into gangs and turning the bullied into the bullies. Bullying is further accelerated when issues of race, class, religion and sex come into the picture.

After Jigy Jada, a young female emcee wrote a song “Stop Bullying,” the song was turned into a 30-minute short film by famed cinematographer, Gerald Barclay, “The Bully.” The song and documentary show how the cycle of bullying, bigotry and violence hurt and separate people.

The movie screened earlier this month on January 10th at the The Anthology Film Archives in New York to an audience full of college professors and students, film makers, city council and nonprofit organization reps. With a young Muslim girl as a protagonist and a neo-nazi young man as the bully, the film touches at the prejudice and discrimination which often drives bullying. The film will premiere at the Pan African Film Festival next month in Los Angeles. For more information, go to www.TheStopBullyingProject.com or email thebullyfilm2012@gmail.com

“Our attitude is if you take something out of the Earth, you have a responsibility to give a little bit back to the Earth. So these are the right steps to take for our environment. But they’re also the right steps to take for our country” ~ President Barack Obama

Since taking office, President Obama has taken steps towards improving the quality of the air that we breathe. For instance, under his administration he’s worked towards cleaner air by passing national limits on mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants. The Mercury and Air Toxic Standards will save over 17,000 lives each year. And even with that significant accomplishment, President Obama still has much to do towards ensuring our air is safe to breathe.

Towards the end of last year, the American Lung Association released their Healthy Air Agenda. This report called upon Obama to continue his fight. Janice Nolen, Assistant Vice President of National Policy, and one the authors of the the report states:

“Still, too many people suffer and die early because the air is not clean enough. The Obama Administration must continue to defend the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s ability to implement the law.”

The Healthy Air Agenda recommends critical next steps that Obama needs to take to continue to improve the air that we breathe. These next steps are broken into 4 key areas:

• Clean-up Emissions – This suggest steps towards cleaning up air pollution from power plants, cleaning air pollution that blows across state lines, and cleaning up air pollution from vehicles.
• Strengthen the Law – The Healthy Air Agenda encourages the administration to strengthen the soot standards to “levels that law requires which will help prevent thousands of premature deaths in the United States each year.”
• Improve Healthy Air Infrastructure – With funding and budgets being cut all over the place, the Healthy Air Agenda urges Obama to continue to fund work that state and local level air pollution agencies are doing to clean our air and protect the health of our communities.
• Protect the Clean Air Act - The Clean Air Act undergoes constant attacks from members of Congress. They want rollbacks the laws and to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency.  The Healthy Air Agenda urges Obama to protect the Clean Air Act, and to strengthen enforcement programs that hold polluters accountable.

Yes, President Obama….you still have a lot of work to do. As long as there are legislators and businesses out there that are fighting for the right to pollute our air, then you have to keep fighting too.

But President Obama is not the only one that has work to do. So do we! Here are steps you can do to ensure our kids have quality air to breathe:

• Clean up Emissions -  Hey, you can commute, drive less…and you can make sure your own cars pass your local emissions standards.
• Strengthen the Law – Find out what you can do personally to support clean air initiatives. Become an example for your children so they will be grow up to be good environmental stewards. Check out the MCAF field team efforts.
• Improve Healthy Air Infrastructure – At your home, use less energy in order to reduce your dependency on polluting power plants. Identify areas where you can use more energy-efficient products around your house.
• Protect the Clean Air Act - Use your voice to tell your local officials, Congress, and the President that they need to implement plans to protect the air that we breathe and continue to fight climate change.

What are your next steps towards healthy air?

TELL THE PRESIDENT TO GIVE US A PLAN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

How precious is this?

HERE’S THE INAUGURAL SCHEDULE:

TGIF and Good Morning.

As you go through your day, don’t forget JJP.

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And always, have a peaceful day.

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Ed Schultz continues his campaign of knowledge about the GOP attacks on the USPS.

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Outgoing Labor Secretary Solis.

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Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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No, Mr. Wayne LaPierre. No. It appears that certain basic concepts have to be explained to you as we would to a six-year-old child (armed with an AK-47 and a Glock), so let us make this as easy to understand as we possibly can. And by ‘we’ I mean those of ‘us’ who still reside in the realm commonly referred to as sanity.

No, we do not regard President Barack Obama’s children as better than anyone else’s as your recent ad implies, and we seriously doubt he feels that way either. When President Obama said that he would like to rid the streets of assault weapons and other weapons with high capacity magazines, and when he says that he thinks it might be a good idea to tighten up background checks so that certifiably crazy folk can’t just stroll into a Walmart and purchase enough guns and ammo to single-handedly trigger Armageddon, we’re quite certain these aren’t the ravings of an elitist snob who only cares about protecting his own kids with the Secret Service. The same Secret Service, by the way, who have been charged with protecting the families of every single president going back, damn, I don’t even know. But I think we can safely say that the children of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan weren’t just out there roaming the malls free and easy with no one paying attention.

No, the purpose of these more stringent proposed regulations is to prevent more children from being blown away by senseless violence. And while we may agree that it is not guns that kill people but people who kill people, I think it’s safe to say that people with guns have killed a whole lot more people than people without guns. And just as it doesn’t make sense to toss gasoline onto a forest fire and call yourself a firefighter, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to propose adding even more folks with guns to the homicidal violence equation (armed guards in schools, armed teachers, and so forth) in the belief that this will somehow bring peace. It will, however, provide more jobs in the gun manufacturing business and related industries, so kudos for that sir!

But, now, back to that ad. See, the reason why this isn’t helping your public relations campaign is because the majority of Americans are getting kind of tired of seeing one story after another where innocent folks are getting slaughtered, only to hear you and your team coming back to defend the weapons used in the slaughter as essential for everyone’s survival. Because survival and slaughter are two words that cannot comfortably co-exist right? Because…

Hell. My bad. I forgot who I was talking to. Just kiss your rifle goodnight and get some sleep, l’il buddy.

This is being cross-posted in Black Liberal Boomer.

Today is the 49th Birthday for our First Lady- Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama.

Thank you, Mrs. Obama, for your service to our country. I couldn’t be more proud to have you as our First Lady if I tried.

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Good Morning.

As you make it through the day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

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From The Maddow Blog:

RNC backs radical electoral-vote schemes
By Steve Benen
Tue Jan 15, 2013 12:55 PM EST.

The Republican National Committee is restricted by a 30-year consent decree from targeting racial and ethnic minorities in its efforts to end fraudulent voting. Calling the anti-intimidation decree “antiquated,” RNC lawyers asked the Supreme Court to lift the order, but yesterday, the justices turned down the appeal without comment.

The RNC, however, is not without other offensive ideas

National Committee believes Wisconsin and other battleground states should change the way they allocate their Electoral College votes, but he said he is not inserting himself into how states decide to proceed.

“It’s not my decision that can come from the RNC, that’s for sure,” said Reince Priebus, the RNC’s chairman.

Gov. Scott Walker recently said he was intrigued by the notion of Wisconsin divvying up its electoral votes by congressional district, but that he had not made up his mind on whether to back the idea.

We’ve discussed this before, but for those just joining us, Republicans in a variety of states — including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio — have raised the prospect of changing the way their states’ electoral votes are allocated in presidential elections. Instead of winner-take-all contests in which the candidate who wins the most votes in the state then wins that state’s electoral haul, some in the GOP want district-by-district races.

That way, in a state like Wisconsin, President Obama can beat Mitt Romney by over 200,000 popular votes, but when it came time for the electoral college, Obama and Romney would split Wisconsin’s electoral votes, five to five. Expand this to the national level and Obama would have finished 2012 with 5 million more popular votes than Romney, but Obama still would have lost the election thanks to gerrymandered districts.

——————————————————————————–

As Rachel explained on the show last month, Republicans “are talking about crossing a Rubicon that has never been crossed before.” GOP officials, with the national party’s blessing, are looking for ways to rig presidential elections in Republicans’ favor, and have settled on this scheme as a possible solution to the problem of American voters preferring Democratic candidates.

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Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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From The People’s View:

Twilight of the Liberal Elite: Smearing Jack Lew and Barack Obama for Deregulation that Began with Jimmy Carter

Monday, January 14, 2013 |
Posted by Deaniac83 at 2:19 PM

For every so-called progressive out there running around with their hair on fire about the president’s nomination of Jack Lew to succeed Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury, I want you to carefully watch this interview Martin Bashir did with Jon Alter and Jared Bernstein about the nomination:

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The rap from the Right on Jack Lew is twofold – that he runs circles around Republicans during negotiations, and that he is too kind to poor people to be able to close the budget deficit effectively. The rub from the Left, lead by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Scheer is that he is a child of Wall Street and an advocate of deregulation, and since Obama is appointing him, he’s supposedly slipped into the dark side for deregulation as well. All of this, regardless of the fact that Lew, like his predecessor Geithner is a career public servant, and has never had anything to do with deregulation. He did serve as a chief operating officer – an operational management position, not an investment decision making vehicle. Blaming him for Citigroup’s follies during the financial meltdown is like blaming FAA officials for the catastrophic intelligence failure on 9/11.

The truth about Jack Lew is simple: he is a career, consummate budget professional who scares the pants off of Republicans because he’s a tough negotiator and an unapologetic liberal. That’s right, a liberal. Robert Scheer is so blinded by his hatred for Bob Rubin that he forgets Jack Lew is the product of liberal lions like Paul Welstone and Tim O’Neill.

A staunch liberal, he started his political career canvassing for anti-war hero Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (he was 12); his adviser at Carleton College was Paul Wellstone, later an iconic liberal senator; and one of his first jobs in Washington was working for Democratic lion and former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.
Subsequently, of course, Lew held the distinction of being the only head of the Office of Management and budget under whom the federal budget ran a surplus since Eisenhower.

But I can understand the liberal elite’s problem with Jack Lew. You see, I don’t think it has much to do with policy. I think it has much more to do with him embarrassing them. When every liberal elite political rookie – including Paul Krugman – in the country was howling about the president’s “weak” negotiating performance during the 2011 debt limit deal, it turns out that the president and his team completely floored John Boehner, without Boehner even realizing it. A key member of that team that did it to them? Jack Lew. Not to mention how that deal shaped the complete Republican surrender in the recent fiscal cliff deal. If I didn’t know that the howling Left is incapable of feeling embarrassed, I would contend they are opposing Jack Lew because of that embarrassment.

Good Morning.

As you make it through Hump Day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

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The President met with Afghan President Karzai and reiterated that we are outta there.

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The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and MSNBC’s Alex Wagner talk about Colin Powell’s recent comments about the Republican Party’s “dark vein of intolerance.”

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Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, said Saturday, that the Trillion Dollar Coin, or the Magic Coin, aka the Big Trill, was officially dead like disco. Done. Fineto. Caput. Over and out. For a lot of Dems, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Some Senate Dems, almost the entire progressive media, this comes as troubling news. To me, it is a celebration and vindication of what I have been saying all along. The GOP wants to crash the Debt Ceiling of the United States. They want to default on bills we can clearly, obviously, easily, play? Then do it. I dare you. I double dare you. I triple dog dare you. Do it.

The consequences for the nation if we default are real, they are calamitous, and they will be almost instantaneous. The stock market, embodied by the DOW will crash. That’s for starters. That’s the good news. Our credit rating will drop from AAA to AA. The result of which will be massive increases in the cost of borrowing, and a massive reassessment of current debt. Meaning that as our rate goes up, what we currently owe for the loans on the books already will also go up. Say good bye to 16 Trillion in debt. That number will skyrocket.

The US, which is currently the Reserve Currency of the world, will be reassessed, and that reassessment could decenter the world markets away from the US as the dominant force. It isn’t like the Russians, through BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) haven’t already discussed trying to crash our economy. Putin, famously, discussed with China that very thing Pre-Obama. Sec. Paulson wrote in his book On the Brink, about the financial collapse that Russia attempted to get China to join them in massive selling of Fannie and Freddy in 2008. According to Bloomberg, the Russian’s had 65.5 Billion invested in GSE, Government Sponsored Enterprise, specifically Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, and they dumped all of it in 2008 between August and the end of the year. If China had done likewise, how complicated would our financial picture have been?

The GOP’s death wish, embodied in their fiscal recklessness, has created this moment in time when the full faith and credit of the Nation, of The United States of America, is called into question. This is part of a slow public suicide of the Grand Old Party. They are shrinking demographically, stagnant in terms of ideas and ideology, confused and discombobulated in terms of political effectiveness, and now they are completely utterly mad.

Another consequence of the debt crisis will be a global depression. Our markets are interconnected. Europe is just starting to sputter back to life. This madness could kill that spark hurtling them from recession to depression. President Obama and the congressional Dems have, through smart fiscal policy, sacrifice, and brilliance, brought our nation back from the abyss. And in so doing they have saved the economy of the world. The GOP, rather than being a partner in this almost resurrection, has been an active blocker. They aren’t just standing there while we do all the work; they are doing the utmost to sabotage, to undermine, to retard, and to destroy the economic viability of the nation.

Yes, I said destroy. The GOP, in the throes of Obama Mania, a sickness that is a conflation of race hatred, school yard bullying, inferiority complexes, and simple stupidity, has decided that since they aren’t in charge nothing should get done. They have decided that if they can’t force America to its very knees and beyond, that America should die a slow tortuous death of a thousand cuts. Hence their refusal to vote for Stimulus, to extend Payroll tax cuts, to tax the wealthy or regulate banks and a hundred other things that are necessary for the health and welfare of our nation.

This isn’t an ideological disagreement. This is sabotage. This is (along with calls to secede which are all linked in my mind) sedition. This is the opposite of economic patriotism, a phrase I heard for the first time during the campaign. Do you know what the opposite of economic patriotism is, economic treason. And that is how we, as a community, as a nation, must speak of this continued destructive economic farce.

The GOP is committing economic treason. That is what attempting to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States of America is, treason. Do you know what happened the last time the United States was in an economic depression? WWII. Do you know how many people died during WWII? 63 million. We’re not playing around with the debt ceiling. Crashing our economy, crashing the economy of the world, which is based in no small part on the belief that our debt is as good as cash since we have NEVER defaulted on it, been close to defaulting on it, or been in any kind of serious way in jeopardy of defaulting on it… until now, is a monumental decision. The GOP seems too small to make a decision with global repercussions. There ideology, their belief system seems too fringe to destroy the entire world. But elections, as always, have consequences.

It isn’t enough that they undermined the recovery for two years, or that they have actively worked against the interest of the nation. Now they want to crash it all. In my heart of hearts I have wait for this moment — this denouement for two years. The President, understanding that this conflict with the GOP has become a cold civil war, long before anyone else did, has created a final test for the will of the GOP. They are incapable of avoiding it, incapable of reacting rationally and reasonably, and because of that, I believe, they will crash the debt ceiling.

The President, in refusing the 14th amendment and the use of the coin, is expertly applying leverage to the GOP. They are being forced to act. It is simple. Either act for the good of the nation or against it. They are being forced to make a declaration, once and for all, for America or against America. Either the GOP will raise the debt limit and once so doing, stop this foolishness, acknowledge the President’s superior leverage and begin to govern the nation, or they won’t. The later outcome being more likely in my opinion. If it is the later then they have to deal with the consequences of their failure to act, their sabotage and treason. They have to own it. Forever. And that is the end of the GOP folks. Their party will accelerate their own demise. They will cease to exist. Each day, as the consequence of their action multiples and grows, the GOP will lose credibility. All the purple states, all the blue states, and the functional red states, will be outraged. Everything from legislatures to Gov. races, will change. The GOP brand will be as toxic to most Americans as it is currently to me. This little escapade will be the end of them. Utterly.

As we move closer to this arbitrary and idiotic deadline created by the GOP as a means of extorting the President the pressure to act will be enormous. It is exponential in nature. The GOP will be asked more and more by the press what they want to do and they will either further entrench their loosing position or cave. If they cave they will do so because they will recognize the politics of the country and they will be easier to work with going forward. Either way the President is not in a position to force their choice. This is a classic, “do what you feel,” moment. If the GOP wants to grow up and come back to the adult table they can. Just raise the debt limit for the next two years. If the GOP wants to remain in the midst of this silly destructive treasonous traitorous tantrum, so be it. We’ll see you the day after the debt collapse when the DOW is down a thousand points and people are wondering happened to their 401ks, their portfolios and their jobs.

Peace,

J.

Follow me on Twitter @JCWPolitics

Gun Appreciation Day founder, Larry Ward is so deeply convinced gun ownership is a civil rights issue, that he furthermore believes the very openly non-violent Martin Luther King Jr. would support his work to create Gun appreciation day. In a blatant reminder of how little white Americans are actually required to know about American history and by extension slavery, Ward went on to say had the slaves had guns slavery would have never happened. (No mention of those pesky slave revolts.)