Where The Hell Were These Blackademics Before 2008?

Barack Obama in 1992 as director of Project Vote; which achieved its goal of registering 150,000 African American voters

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Don

Where the hell were these blackademics before 2008?

They damn sure didn’t help the black farmers get their money, they damn sure didn’t get black people health insurance, and they damn sure didn’t help our black gay brothers and sisters from getting kicked out of the military.

So where the hell were they?

I’ll tell you where they were, they were at each other’s schools sitting on some fucking panel theorizing about how to end racism or make it better for African Americans.

But do you know where President Obama was?

He was out in the streets registering people to vote, he was condemning an unjust war before it became fashionable to do so.

We got pictures of Barack Obama fresh out of college walking in poor black neighborhoods registering people to vote.

We got pictures of a young Barack Obama helping black folk.

We got pictures of a young Barack Obama sitting in a village in Kenya breaking bread with his grandmother.

And these same motherfuckers want to question his blackness

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Barack Obama in Chicago, 1995, photo by Marc PoKempner

Illinois State Senator Barack Obama at a community meeting in his district with his state representative (second from right) House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie

Barack Obama in his first year at Harvard Law School after working at Developing Communities Project as a community organizer from 1985 – 1988 where he set up a tenants rights organization, job training program, and college preparatory program. He enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988 so as to better help his community

This photo released by Obama for America shows Barack Obama teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. After Harvard Law School, Obama returned to Chicago, joined a small civil rights firm, ran a voter registration drive, and lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School

Barack Obama with his grandmother Sarah Hussein Obama in her home in the village of Nyagoma-Kogelo, western Kenya, 1987

Barack Obama at an antiwar rally in Chicago in September 2002

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IRONY: @MichaelEDyson speaking on the importance of "being present" in #Ferguson from MIAMI (& everywhere else BUT Ferguson). #nerdland

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  (@Only4RM) August 23, 2014

@Only4RM I. Am. Not. The. President. Get it?

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Michael Eric Dyson (@MichaelEDyson) August 23, 2014

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And POTUS. Is. Not. Your. Preacher. Or. Activist. Get THAT? As Chief Executive, he engaged THE EXEC BRANCH on all cylinders! @MichaelEDyson

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  (@Only4RM) August 23, 2014

@Only4RM He. Went. To. Sandy. Hook. And. Hurricane. Sandy. Stop. Making. Excuses. For. The. President. Not. To. Show. Up. For. Ferguson!

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Michael Eric Dyson (@MichaelEDyson) August 23, 2014

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Was. There. A. Pending. Federal. Investigation. Against. The. Storm. Or. The Dead. Mass. Killer.??? Facts & nuance, Prof. @MichaelEDyson.

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  (@Only4RM) August 23, 2014

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@SmartyPants

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After his graduation from Harvard Law School, working on a voter registration drive in Chicago

President Obama Is Doing His Job

 President Barack Obama signing an executive memorandum for the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative

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Jonathan Capehart: The Unrealistic Expectations Of Obama In Ferguson Shooting

The president of the United States has awesome powers and responsibilities. But being a superhero is not one of them. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to those demanding that President Obama do all sorts of questionable things in response to the tumult over the police killing of Michael Brown. They want Obama to act out in some visceral way. They want more emotion from him on the horrible actions in and images coming out of Ferguson, Missouri. They just want him to do something. All the while completely ignoring what he’s actually doing, what he actually can do and what he is actually capable of doing. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, “[W]e need presidential leadership. He needs to step up to the plate and be responsible.” White House officials tell me that personnel from the Department of Justice’s community relations service arrived in Ferguson on Aug. 10, the day after Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown.

Some won’t be satisfied until Obama bursts into East Room clad in Kente cloth brandishing a definable “black agenda” wapo.st/1pIlxL6

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Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) August 23, 2014

The level of attention has only ratcheted up from there. DOJ is conducting its own parallel federal investigation. FBI agents swarmed Ferguson over the weekend. A third autopsy of Brown’s body conducted by the federal government was done yesterday. Because of the ongoing investigation the last thing anyone should want is for the president to be rhetorically reckless in talking about the police killing of Michael Brown. deep in his second term, we know the president is no fan of the theater of politics, especially needless theatrics that might make people feel good in the short-term, but do nothing to advance a greater cause or achieve a worthwhile mission in the long run. Obama cares. Deeply. But if you’re expecting him to do seemingly heroic and showy things that make you feel good but do nothing to actually fix big, systemic problems in the long-term you will never be satisfied. All the energy being used to harangue the president should be directed at officials in Ferguson and St. Louis County who have refused to release key documents in the case.

More here

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President Barack Obama speaks about his budget during the State of the Union Address

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Exhibit A

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NYT: Obama Cares. Look At The Numbers.

A true measure of a president’s priorities lies hidden in plain sight in his budget proposals. Under that standard, Mr. Obama has been more committed to communities like Ferguson than any Democratic president in the past half century. Mr. Obama earmarked 17 percent of his budget for these needs, versus Mr. Clinton’s 12 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 8 percent. These presidents all faced economic challenges, although of different degrees and strength. Each was committed to the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged. But Mr. Obama made good on that commitment far more concretely. No president gets all he requests, but the outcomes speak well for Mr. Obama, too. Christopher Wimer of Columbia University found, for example, that tax and transfer policies lowered the poverty rate by only 1 percentage point in 1967, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, but by almost 13 points in 2012.

Did Mr. Obama plan to spend more simply because he had more mouths to feed? No. Even after accounting for the higher numbers of poor people caught in the Great Recession, Mr. Obama’s record outshines his predecessors’. His proposed first-term spending per poor individual was $13,731 to Mr. Clinton’s $8,310 and Mr. Carter’s $4,431, in 2014 dollars. Mr. Obama even exceeds Mr. Johnson, whose budget priorities amounted only to $111 per poor person. (Because Mr. Johnson was the first postwar president to tackle poverty issues with so many new programs, it is not surprising that his proposed funding levels were low at the start.) The same pattern shows up in spending per poor family. Mr. Obama allocated $67,132, Mr. Clinton $39,820, Mr. Carter $20,790, and Mr. Johnson $546, again using 2014 dollars.

More here

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err, any ad that quotes him is a lie, okay?

Thank you M 😉

‘litmus test’

‘obama’s cautious approach is perfectly sensible’

UK Independent: …Think what would have happened if Washington had taken the lead in declaring a no-fly-zone over Libya without UN agreement or Arab backing. The people now criticising President Obama for dilatoriness would be accusing him of being another Bush. And if he’d refused to have anything to do with the no-fly-zone, commentators in Europe and the Middle East would be saying that it was because, at the end of the day, America doesn’t want democracy in the Arab world, that it prefers the rulers of Bahrain and Yemen to suppress revolt than bow before it….

…Obama’s cautious approach is perfectly sensible. Libya is not America’s dogfight. Thanks in large part to Lockerbie, Washington has never favoured Gaddafi. It is, in US eyes, and rightly, a European problem. It was France and Britain – Sarkozy and Blair – who spent their time sucking up so obscenely to the Libyan dictator, just as Silvio Berlusconi embraced him in a Faustian pact to stop illegal migration from Africa. Washington under President George W Bush certainly welcomed Gaddafi’s dramatic (and largely meaningless) gesture of giving up nuclear ambitions – but they didn’t sell their souls to him in the way we (the British), and the French, did.

Nor can Washington be blamed for being forced into military command of the first phase of the Libyan operation by the simple fact that it is only the US that has the hardware and control systems to do it. French objections to this becoming a Nato exercise are just so much hot air. They can’t do it, nor can the British in alliance with them.

Obama is also right to spell out, as he did this week, a clear separation between the objectives of the UN resolution, which is to protect Libyan civilians, and the objectives of American policy, which is to see the back of the Colonel.

…Once Gaddafi had turned the military tide and was openly threatening, by word as well as deed, to wreak his wrath on the rebels in Benghazi, the world couldn’t stand by and watch a massacre. Memories of Srebrenica and Rwanda are too raw for western politicians to allow it to happen again….

Full article here

‘not the fake scandals i expected’

Paul Krugman: OK, Republicans have surprised me, at least so far. Based on the experience of the Clinton years — not to mention all that stuff about how the Obama administration is the “most corrupt in modern times” — I expected a proliferation of fake scandals over mowing the White House lawn, or Sharia law presidential hit squads led by the reanimated corpse of Vince Foster, or something. Maybe that’s still in the pipeline.

But what we have so far are complaints that the president plays too much golf and is too into basketball.

If that’s the best they can come up with …

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So true! Seriously, if this is all the GOP have …. they’re in very deep poo poo.

‘the psychic satisfaction of obama-bashing’

Robert Shrum: There is something at the heart of progressive politics that yearns to turn on its own. So it’s open season on Barack Obama.

It’s right to expect the assault from the right; the patently obvious plan there is to oppose, obstruct, deadlock, and depress the economy.

Now, from the other side of the spectrum, progressives and the Democratic chattering class are increasingly and, at times, even bitterly critical. Obama doesn’t fight enough, communicate enough, change enough. Even his great achievements are tainted….

…The next two years will be decisive, not just for the election, but also for a generation and more. The stakes are too high for liberals to indulge the psychic satisfaction of Obama-bashing.

But the cudgels are in full swing. Paul Krugman, the canary in the coalmine of the liberal commentariat, has just assailed “progressives who had their hearts set on Obama”: They “were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion.”

Disgruntled with Obama from the start, Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics, but not politics; he has never explained what the president could have done, other than stamping his foot, to secure a trillion or more in stimulus followed by a second one.

….The prospect of realignment should still beckon Democrats. They should pursue it; they can and should prod Obama; but in a tough and testing time, they also have to offer him a measure of trust. The alternative is a lost chance to bend history and probably a long exile in a cul-de-sac of liberal righteousness without results.

… He and they have their share of mistakes, missed opportunities, and miscommunications. That could be said of every great president. So it’s time for progressives and Democrats to concentrate their convictions and come to this understanding: Barack Obama’s all we’ve got—and he’s already gotten more done than any president on our side in half a century.

Full article here

‘blow-torched by the left’

Washington Post (Jonathan Capehart): As someone who frequently catches more hell from liberal Democrats than from conservative Republicans, I am completely sympathetic to President Obama’s exasperation at the “sanctimonious”  folks in his party who cling to “unrealistic” “purist position[s].” He was at his best yesterday when he pushed back against the cranky critics in his own party.

You know that saying that we’re harshest towards the ones we love most? Well, for the last two years, Obama has been blow-torched by the left as the expectations of hope and change smacked up against the reality of governing. I completely understand the frustration and anger. But there are some on the left who view compromise as total abandonment.

The president barely got to day 100 in his administration before his commitment to gay rights was called into serious question. During the health-care reform debate, the left was none too pleased because Obama junked the public option when he determined that the overall effort would fail if he insisted on pushing it. And now the revolt  over the Bush tax cut compromise….

….this is the first time that I can recall that Obama has given to the left as good as he’s gotten from the left on national television. And I loved every minute of it.

sanity restored

Thanks Bill 😉