Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

Ann, what's the point here? This is the original quote:

"And so I'm prepared if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps"

Gingrich is obviously making a racialized statement. The conversation may have been confused with the introduction of the organization he should have mentioned. But that is just a distraction. None of it takes away from the fact that he is saying that black people are satisfied with food stamps.

Best...

You do a great job in pointing out Gingrich's condescending and paternalistic attitude toward "the African-American community." And again JPT appears to share this attitude, as he did in describing how the Black vote is all about racial solidarity and fear of displeasing the Great Leaders Jackson and Sharpton.

People aren't stupid. They know when they're being spoken down to.

People tend to create false dichotomies in order to deny the existence of certain realities. This is particularly the case for persons of privilege who are able to deny the realities of others. This is generally how racism works. Those adversely affected by it point it out. And those not continue to mock others who do. "Your eyes are deceiving you. You heard it wrong." This is the psychological advantage of privilege, whether that privilege is race privilege, class privilege or another privilege of dominance or authority . As you say Gingrich displayed it in his speech when he condescends. And board members are displaying it here. "Racism? What racism? He just singled out a single ethnic group with a long history of being associated with welfare. That don't have nothing to do with no racism. And by the way, these are the words he really used. Don't pay attention to the fact that they are different from the words in the quote. He was talking about Obama's plan. He left the word 'plan' out because he wanted to make sure you were exercising your brain muscles." -- Lee Atwater died of a brain tumor from this type of mental gymnastics. There a lesson there. Yes, trust your instincts.

Best...

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

Gingrich's entire statement is: "Obama has been the greatest food stamp president in history, I want to be the greatest paycheck president in history."

He's always formulated it that way. Obama gives you food stamps, because he can't create jobs. If I'm elected, I will create jobs.

Instead, the left and the media twist it into: "he's insulting people on food stamps". Or, "he wants to get rid of food stamps". Neither of which is the case.

Repeat after me. Many people on food stamps have jobs. Many people on food stamps have jobs. Many people on food stamps have jobs.

As long as many jobs that need to be done (cleaning offices, mowing lawns, bussing plates at a restaurant, making Hamburgers at Burger King, cashiering at Target) pay poorly, many workers will need to use food stamps to supplement their earnings so they can put food on the table.

Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

Originally Posted by millennialX

I just want to say that for the first time in years, MOST of my Millennial and late Xer friends (from various backgrounds) are watching the State of the Union and leaving comments on Facebook. I have never seen so much civic energy. IMO, this is support of S & H theory.

I missed the speech, since I work on Tuesday nights. My husband forgot about it. My seventeen-year-old son watched the whole thing. Sometimes I think he's a closet news junkie.

The speech was exhausting. And I wanted to hit Biden over the head for all his nose picking, head scratching, looking at his crotch fidgetiness.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

The speech was exhausting. And I wanted to hit Biden over the head for all his nose picking, head scratching, looking at his crotch fidgetiness.

Cheers.

Why were you watching Biden? He was acting his part: wallpaper.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Why were you watching Biden? He was acting his part: wallpaper.

No, Boehner was wallpaper (until Obama said "the speaker" in which Boehner jumped three feet in the air). Biden was a second grader who missed his ritalin tablets.

I did not watch SOTU. Life is too short. But I did see this surprising comment this morning:

Pity the unemployed. Obama's State of the Union did not use the words "unemployed" or "jobless." Totally silent on extending unemployment insurance.

James50

Originally Posted by Uzi

Gingrich inauguration, 2013

Godwin's Law!

Originally Posted by radind

Good comment. I would like a drastic simplification of the US tax code so that all( at least most exemptions are deleted). Then be sure that all , including the wealthy and big corporations actually pay their taxes. If this were done, the rates would not need to be too high. Just stop the ones who escape taxes while the majority of workers continue to pay their taxes.

Loophole-free tax codes are like foolproof instructions. There will always be large numbers of people trying to punch holes in them. That's because the world's supply of lawyers and fools seems to outrace even inflation.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

As long as many jobs that need to be done (cleaning offices, mowing lawns, bussing plates at a restaurant, making Hamburgers at Burger King, cashiering at Target) pay poorly, many workers will need to use food stamps to supplement their earnings so they can put food on the table.

I know. Made that point several times:

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

To be fair, "food stamps" are not really intended to substitute for alternative sources of income. They are intended to subsidize employers not providing livable wages to their employees. This is why people not working are generally unable to qualify for them. A bit of propaganda in support…

Yet still...

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

People tend to create false dichotomies in order to deny the existence of certain realities.

So it's a good thing people can...

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

...trust [their] instincts.

Racism and ignorance go hand and hand.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Repeat after me. Many people on food stamps have jobs. Many people on food stamps have jobs. Many people on food stamps have jobs.

As long as many jobs that need to be done (cleaning offices, mowing lawns, bussing plates at a restaurant, making Hamburgers at Burger King, cashiering at Target) pay poorly, many workers will need to use food stamps to supplement their earnings so they can put food on the table.

In effect, welfare (whether Food Stamps, rent subsidies, or Medicaid) often ends up subsidizing giant corporations that terribly underpay their staff and customers of those businesses. Brilliant!

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

In effect, welfare (whether Food Stamps, rent subsidies, or Medicaid) often ends up subsidizing giant corporations that terribly underpay their staff and customers of those businesses. Brilliant!

It's not that much different than stimulus checks largely subsidizing Chinese manufacturing, really...

Careful Mr. President, you might lose your biggest donors. The pricking needle inches closer to the higher education bubble.

President Obama put higher education squarely in his rhetorical sights during the State of the Union address Tuesday night, calling for plans to reduce the interest rate on student loans, extend popular tax credits and shore up support for community colleges’ job training programs.

The president conveyed a brief but forceful message to the nation's colleges and universities: "You’re on notice."

“If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” Obama said, drawing immediate applause. “Higher education can’t be a luxury -- it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.” Although the speech did not offer any additional details about that warning, a document the White House published accompanying the speech said that the president would propose to "shift some federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value."

James50

http://robertreich.org/post/16409529548

Who is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?-

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner, is now the poster boy for what’s terribly wrong with our campaign-finance system. Adelson, you may recall, had, before the South Carolina Republican primary, donated $5 million to the pro-Gingrich Super Pac “Winning Our Future” – giving Newt a pile of money for negative advertising against Mitt Romney in South Carolina.

Adelson has done it again. He and his wife Marian have cut another $5 million check for Gingrich to go negative on Romney in Florida. The money won’t go as far as it did in South Carolina – TV ads cost a lot more in Florida – but it’s enough to give the Grinch a solid footing.

And, who knows? The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit.

Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Grinch presidency? I don’t. But if Newt becomes President of the United States, they’ll be singularly responsible. And we better find out, because Newt will owe them big time.

Forget the Lincoln Bedroom. The Adelsons and their kids will have the run of the White House, including the Oval Office. Hey, they’ll take over the Old Executive Building next door and turn it into a casino.

Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact – all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment
.

SOTU word cloud.

James50

Originally Posted by James50

Careful Mr. President, you might lose your biggest donors. The pricking needle inches closer to the higher education bubble.



James50

If Boomers have anything to hang their collective heads in shame, it would be this -

http://www.alternet.org/education/15...loan_industry/

Will the Young Rise Up and Fight Their Indentured Servitude to the Student Loan Industry?

January 24, 2012 | In October 2011, the White House announced, “Currently, more than 36 million Americans have federal student loan debt.” By the end of 2011, student loan debt had exceeded $1 trillion. Two-thirds of college seniors graduate with student loans, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. According to the Project on Student Loan Debt, they carried an average of $25,250 in debt in 2010, but many have far greater debt than that average. And nowadays, with high unemployment, even higher underemployment, the inability to pay bills, and accumulating interest and penalties, the lives of student loan debtors can quickly turn into financial nightmares.

Indentured Servitude? I’ll be paying for my student loans for the rest of my life....A large portion of my earnings goes to the Wall Street elites that have commoditized and securitized my loans....I knew at the time I signed the student loans (again and again) that I would be responsible...what I didn’t figure was the cost to my children —Jeff Vincent, AlterNet

How outlandish is it to say that the spirit of indentured servitude has been revived in the United States? What can young people and their parents do to prevent student loan debt servitude, and what can all of us do to help liberate student loan debtors who are currently doomed to decades of financial misery?

Colonial Indentured Servants and Modern Student Loan Debtors

In colonial America, historians estimate that between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Indentured servants in England were in servitude typically for one year, while indenture in America was typically four to seven years. Today in the United States, student debt is an even longer debt commitment than colonial indentured servitude. The standard Stafford federal loan is, for example, 15 years, and with waivers and refinancing, it is not uncommon for Americans to be paying off student loans well into middle age.

In “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeffrey Williams concludes, “College student loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.” Williams points out that college loan debt, like indentured servitude, “looms over the lives of those so contracted, binding individuals for a significant part of their future work lives.”

Similar to students signing their college loan papers, indentured servants also “freely chose” their servitude. In colonial times, while the elite saw indentured servitude as a freely chosen and fair economic deal, the servants themselves routinely saw it as an exploitative system of labor, a form of time-limited slavery. Like colonial indentured servants who “freely chose” to sign papers agreeing that they would pay off their debt directly in labor, modern student loan debtors “freely choose” to sign papers agreeing to pay off their debt. However, this is a choice that the financial elite do not have to make.

Like colonial indentured servitude, the student loan contract is virtually unbreakable. Student loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and unlike most other forms of debt, student loan debt is almost never forgiven even in personal bankruptcy.

Similar to some indentured servants, some student loan debtors—most famously, Michelle and Barack Obama—do go on to prosper. However, half of those who attend college don’t graduate, and many college graduates do not get high-paying jobs and struggle to make debt payments for much of their adult lives.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 20, 2010) reported, “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants....The growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all.”

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Originally Posted by Uzi

Gingrich inauguration, 2013

Godwin's Law!

So is that what happened? Explains a lot.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

No, Boehner was wallpaper (until Obama said "the speaker" in which Boehner jumped three feet in the air). Biden was a second grader who missed his ritalin tablets.

Boehner, very smug wall paper from the 70s.

Originally Posted by millennialX

I just want to say that for the first time in years, MOST of my Millennial and late Xer friends (from various backgrounds) are watching the State of the Union and leaving comments on Facebook. I have never seen so much civic energy. IMO, this is support of S & H theory.

Another Millie's thoughts post-SOTU:

http://www.newdeal20.org/2012/01/25/...mindset-70085/

Obama’s SOTU Captures the Millennial Mindset

.
..
Last night, listening to the State of the Union, I felt really proud of my president. I felt inspired. He spoke to me as a member of the Millennial generation.

There seems to be a lot of chatter in politics about how to help out my cohort — talk of how to save my generation from a dystopian future of mountains of federal debt, an oppressive federal health care system, and illegal immigrants stealing our jobs. Lord knows, if you’ve caught any of the recent political debates on TV or in Washington, you’ve heard it too. (See the phrase: “It’s for our children and grandchildren!”)

Last night, President Obama showed that he understood that this kind of rhetoric is not what my generation needs. Fairness is at the heart of the solution. Millennials know it, and the president gets it. He also understands that fairness is not merely a virtue to aspire to, but a core value that we can tangibly work on — and one that is at the center of what makes our country as strong and resilient as it is.

But the president was also right when he said that the defining issue of our time is how to keep the American dream alive. I know this to be true. Like the rest of my generation, I’ve watched friends and family struggle with what can feel at times like a Sisyphean challenge, but is, in fact, a challenge that can be met....

Catholic Leaders Call On Gingrich And Santorum To ‘Stop Perpetuating Ugly Racial Stereotypes’ About Poverty

Faith in Public Life reports that more than 40 Catholic leaders and theologians across the country are calling on two of their “fellow Catholics,” GOP contenders Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, to stop using divisive rhetoricabout race and poverty on the campaign trail.

Noting that Catholics consider racism an “intrinsic evil,” the open letter confronts the two candidates about their comments singling out minorities who receive welfare:

As Catholic leaders who recognize that the moral scandals of racism and poverty remain a blemish on the American soul, we challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. [...]

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...rty/?mobile=nc

and from one of Xenakis' femi-nazis (obviously)

http://www.newdeal20.org/2012/01/25/...-policy-70077/

Ellen Chesler, Senior Fellow, Roosevelt Institute:

“Since Obama’s speech was so overtly political and partisan, challenging Republicans on basic principles, I was actually surprised at first that it contained so few explicitly ‘gendered’ references. Candidate Obama, after all, can only win a second term handily if he woos back the independent women voters who favored him by such a wide margin in 2008, but then abandoned congressional Democrats in the midterms over their disenchantment with his handling of the economy.

Granted, the speech had a predictable shout-out to ‘equal pay’ and a coy but definitely pre-meditated reference to the owners of small businesses as ’shes,’ not ‘hes,’ which reminded us of my very favorite little-known employment statistic — that women-owned businesses employ more people in this country than all the Fortune 500 companies combined.

But by and large, Obama eschewed the potential divisiveness of identity politics in favor of a few overarching themes: I inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but we’ve created millions of new jobs since I’ve been here; after eight years of Republican rule, the gap between rich and poor has never been greater in this country, but I will end this extreme and unsustainable inequality; and I took on two wars, but today not a soldier remains in combat in Iraq, American troops are leaving Afghanistan, Bin Laden is dead, and his henchmen are in retreat.

And this may be the wiser strategy. The great majority of elections since 1984 have seen a sizable gender gap, with woman endorsing the government activism and commitment to fair play that Democrats represent. There have been only two exceptions: 2010, when the economy tanked, and 2002, when national security trumped all other issues after 9/11. Reminding those women that they and their families will be far better off and a whole lot safer under Democrats is really all candidate Obama needed to say about the State of the Union.”

Originally Posted by Deb C

Catholic Leaders Call On Gingrich And Santorum To ‘Stop Perpetuating Ugly Racial Stereotypes’ About Poverty

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...rty/?mobile=nc

Had completely forgotten about Santorum and hs "blah" comment...



Support from Catholic leaders is a pleasant surprise...

Best...

Originally Posted by summer in the fall

Had completely forgotten about Santorum and hs "blah" comment...



Support from Catholic leaders is a pleasant surprise...

Best...

Now this is the comment I remember hearing and talked about with some folks I know. Newt's remark was new to me.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Another Millie's thoughts post-SOTU:

http://www.newdeal20.org/2012/01/25/...mindset-70085/

That echos the comments I've heard and read.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

OK, I'll stop now too. I would like to hear more comments on the state of the union about which I'm still the only person to post.

What about my comments about his 30% tax proposal?

Originally Posted by millennialX

""Obama: Rebuild the American Dream"

There was a picture of a smiling Obama shaking hands with a smiling Boehner. Of course, the Speaker was standing above, with the President looking up below....

Anyway, I wonder if this is a positive sign for after we get passed this election.

Just my thoughts...

The only positive signs we can hope for, are signs that Boehner will not be speaker next year.