Allen West and Herman Cain are good examples of  members of the GOP who see and hear racist rhetoric against the POTUS, the poor and middle class working people.  Yet they side with those who would denigrate people of their own race, regardless of their station in life.

The President is a Harvard graduate who worked hard to get to where he is today, yet the main objective of the GOP is not just to make him a “one term president”, but to castrate him in the process and West and Cain are contributing with their “yes sir boss, we got him by the short hairs now, boss” attitude.

Metaphorically speaking, it sickens me to no end to see in this day and age, with the history Blacks have amassed, that there are still some “house negroes” that would do anything to please their master.

Think Progress

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) once again sparked controversy with a demagogic speech in Florida this past weekend where he demanded that liberals and President Obama “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Now, West is engaged in a rapid backpedal, appearing both on CNN and Fox this morning to insist that what he said is not actually what he said.

On CNN, West demanded that a skeptical host Soledad O’Brien view the entire speech an realize that “he was simply trying to draw attention to the decline of a country” at the hands of people who hold values that are “not in concert with our constitutional republic.” “And if you can’t understand that,” he added, “please come down to South Florida, you and I can read the Federalist Papers.” Later on Fox and Friends, West told host Steve Doocy, “I did not refer to any person leaving”:

WEST: The other thing is that I did not refer to any person leaving. If you go back and read the transcript of the message that I gave, it was about equality of achievement, it was about economic dependence, it was about enslaving the American entrepreneur’s will and spirit. That message needs to leave this country. And that was what I was referring to. And I think that anyone that sat back and looked at the entirety of that 12 minute, 45 second speech would understand that we’re talking about a contrast of visions of this country.

Watch both interviews:

Looking back at the transcript as requested, it’s pretty clear that West specifically named “President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee [Debbie Wasserman-Schultz]” to “take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States.”

Nonetheless, West has made a practice of lobbing incendiary rhetoric across the aisle and thenblaming the news media for the resulting backlash. Reacting to Fox pundit Bob Beckel’s demand that West apologize, a somewhat thin-skinned West shot back, “I think Bob Beckel owes me an apology for saying that he would not refer to me as a congressional representative nor as a lieutenant colonel, retired.”

Related articles

• Allen West Throws Down the Gauntlet (americanclarion.com)
• The Five’s Bob Beckel Refuses To Apologize To Rep. Allen West (mediaite.com)
• Allen West Denies He Said What He Said (alan.com)
• Allen West Retreats From Contentious Comment (huffingtonpost.com)
• Allen West Says to President Obama, ‘Get the Hell Out of the US,’ Then Denies He Said It (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Allen West To Liberals, President Obama: ‘Get The Hell Out Of The United States Of America’ (thinkprogress.org)

Mitt Romney and his Super Pac buddies are literally trying to BUY this election.  No wonder the POTUS had to amass one billion dollars to fight those who would throw “democracy” out with the bath water!

Politicus USA

What an unimaginable election season. With the birth of massive super PACS now flooding states, thanks to the conservative Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, it is hard to predict anything at all. We are in uncharted territory that is for sure.

The flood of money going into the states, the ads and mailings going to voters homes is definitely impacting elections. The reason why Mitt Romney won in Florida isn’t about substance, positions, messaging or anything like that. It is all about the money. The Wall Street Journal is tracking the Super PACs and not surprisingly, Romney’s Restoring Our Future Super PAC spent millions, including a $5,00,000 dollar media buy on January 24th to attack Gingrich. A grand total of well over $10 million in just attack ads against Newt by Romney’s Super PAC was spent in Florida alone.

Newt on the other hand only spent $358,000 attacking Romney in Florida according to the WSJ Super PAC project. All total, with the exception of New Hampshire, Romney has been relentless in his attacks on Newt. Florida though was a make or break moment for Mitt, I believe.

Romney’s Super PAC has spent $16,328,326 dollars just on Newt throughout the primaries thus far, with the majority of that sum being spent in Florida, again over $10,000,000 just in Florida. Newt, has literally only spent $3,529,190 in attack ads against Mitt Romney.

In South Carolina, Newt was a lot more aggressive. Newt’s Super PAC spent well over $3 million attacking Romney while Romney spent about the same attacking Newt. This was a level playing field and Newt was ultimately the clear winner.

My conclusion is money buys elections. If Newt can keep up with Romney’s fundraising, Newt will be the nominee. Romney is buying the primary, not winning it as we can see by the massive amount of money he had to spend in order to beat Newt in Florida.

Related articles

• Mitt Romney Knows No Shame – With Attack Ad On Newt Gingrich (crooksandliars.com)
• Mitt Romney spending five times as much as Newt Gingrich in Florida (dailykos.com)
• Romney and the Florida Primary: Live Blogging Arrogance and Hubris (skydancingblog.com)
• Republican primary ad spending shifts from campaigns to Super PACs (dailykos.com)
• Will the meaner Mitt win? (politico.com)
• Money Changes Everything (thedailybeast.com)

The Huffington Post

Tennessee Senator Stacey Campfield’s proposed “Don’t Say Gay” law continues to divide residents — but one local restaurateur made her views on the legislation resoundingly clear this weekend.

As Metropulse   and Towleroad  are reporting, Martha Boggs, the owner of Knoxville’s The Bistro at the Bijou, asked Campfield to leave after he tried to dine at her establishment.

Following the incident, Boggs posted a status on her restaurant’s Facebook page  which read, “I hope that Stacy (sic) Campfield now knows what it feels like to be unfairly discriminated against.”

Metropulse reports that Boggs later clarified her actions in an interview. “I didn’t want his hate in my restaurant,” she said. “I told him he wasn’t welcome here. … I feel like he’s gone from being stupid to being dangerous, and I wanted to stand up to him.” Boggs is also due to appear on HuffPost Gay Voices Editor-at-Large Michelangelo Signorile’s radio program on SiriusXM OutQ  today to talk about the experience.

Many have been quick to applaud Boggs’ actions on Facebook. “You didn’t unfairly discriminate against Stacey Campfield,” one user praised. “You have the right to refuse service to anyone, especially a poorly educated bigot.”

Still, another user added, “Denying service to a man because you don’t agree with his opinions is no different than denying service to a man because you don’t like his skin color.”

Boggs’ actions come on the heels of an interview Campfield gave last week to Signorile, in which the senator made controversial statements on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the media’s supposed “glorification” of homosexuals.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community — it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall,” he said in the interview. “My understanding is that it is virtually — not completely, but virtually — impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex…very rarely [transmitted].”

You can listen to that interview here. 

Related articles

• TN bistro refuses service to anti-gay Republican: ‘He’s gone from being stupid to being dangerous’ (dangerousminds.net)
• Homophobic Lawmaker Booted From Tennessee Bistro (lezgetreal.com)
• Ovation: Knoxville’s Bistro At The Bijou Stands Up To Representative Stacey Campbell. (diatribesandovations.com)
• Stacey Campfield outrage fueling online posts, petitions (knoxnews.com)
• TN Senator Stacey Campfield Reportedly Thrown Out of Restaurant Over His Anti-Gay Remarks: VIDEO (towleroad.com)

Jan Brewer is nothing like her honorable and well-liked colleague from Arizona, Gabby Giffords.   Brewer is crass, seemingly out of sorts quite a bit and she lies at the drop of a hat/

Mario Piperni

So you take a year to write a book on your heroic life and few people are interested in reading it. It’s at 343,222 on the Amazon ranking and sinking fast. What to do?

Easy. Take a page out of Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewer’s playbook and start a confrontation with the President of the United States the next time he comes by for a visit. Make sure photographers get a good pic of you wagging your finger at the President in a manner which suggests he’s getting a well deserved scolding. And should the President not take the bait and instead remains cool and calm, follow Jan’s lead: spin the hell out of the story and tell the world how tense and awful it all was.

If you do all that, here’s what can happen to that book of yours.

…the governor has used her version of the encounter to get plenty of air time, seeing an increase in sales of her book which she has called a “truth telling” tome. Amazon ranked “Scorpions for Breakfast” at No. 7 on its best sellers list on Friday. The day of the event, the book had been at No. 343,222.

It’s that easy.  So go out there and put together that book you’ve always dreamed of writing. Worry little about the writing style and even less about making it truthful. It matters not. Brewer has been going around saying that her dad died fighting Nazis in WWII even though he died from lung cancer in California in 1955. So don’t get caught up in thinking your book has to be factual. It doesn’t. All that counts is that the book makes youlook good and everyone else comes off as a putz.

Once the book is published, practice your ‘ooh, the big black man is scaring me’ look in the mirror. Do all that and you’re ready to invite Barack Obama for Sunday brunch and watch your book sales soar.

Related articles

• Why Can’t Barack Obama and Jan Brewer Just Get Along? [Jan Brewer] (gawker.com)
• Obama and Jan Brewer Have Words on Airport Tarmac; Update: Brewer Book Sales Skyrocket (michellemalkin.com)
• 2nd Mayor Says Obama ‘Wasn’t Tense At All’ During Brewer Encounter (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Ed Schultz Panel Groups Jan Brewer, Allen West And RNC Chair To Chide ‘Divisive’ Rhetoric (mediaite.com)
• Shame on You Governor Jan Brewer (professionalscoundrel.com)

From the subtle to the sickening, this Republican primary season has seen a normalizing of racist and racially-coded language. It was not so long ago that the chairman of the Republican National Committee apologized for his party’s history of “trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” and told the NAACP, “I am here today as the Republican Chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Such leadership cannot be found now.

Newt Gingrich may be the new master of race politics with his efforts to label Barack Obama the “food-stamp president” and his generous offer to lecture African-Americans at the NAACP on why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps. We know that Mr. Gingrich’s claims of being a “historian” for Freddie and Fannie are a strain, but would it be that hard for him to check the history of NAACP’s leadership on developing and demanding groundbreaking job creation policies? (Or to note that more food stamp recipients are white than any other race or ethnicity?) But why would a historian let facts get in the way of historical racial prejudice?

ThinkProgress’ Jeff Spross has compiled a recent history of the GOP’s dehumanizing and divisive language that threatens to plague the primary process for weeks to come. Watch it:

Related articles

• Welfare issue makes political comeback (goerie.com)
• Gingrich Defends Food Stamps vs. Paychecks Charge (abcnews.go.com)
• Welfare issue makes political comeback; so do mistruths (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Gingrich On Defense After NAACP, Food Stamp Remarks (alan.com)
• It’s a Mystery Why Republicans Have Trouble Attracting Black Votes (outsidethebeltway.com)
• You: Gingrich wants to urge black people at NAACP convention to demand paychecks, not food stamps (washingtonpost.com)

I specifically watched to see political commentator and host Martin Bashir who’s afternoon show on MSNBC is my number one DVR priority for that time slot.  However, Mr. Bashir hardly got a word in because of the two aforementioned extremely talkative wing-nuts.

However, Bill Maher did indeed score big on his question and then analysis on Saul Alinsky, the guy Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, and Fox News always compare the President to on their programs…

Mediaite

One of Newt Gingrich‘s most bizarre lines of attack against liberals and President Obama is that they’re basically working from the playbook of Saul Alinsky. This has been a rally cry of his for months now. Most of us who aren’t that aware of early 20th century political activists have no idea who the hell Saul Alinsky is, but luckily, Bill Maher  gave everyone a primer on who this insidious man is on his show tonight. And what he discovered is that it’s not just Newt Gingrich, but also Glenn Beck, who has turned Alinsky into the latest liberal boogeyman.

Maher joked that for Alinsky to garner the ire of Newt, he must be a divorce lawyer or something.  And he admitted that even as a member of the evil liberal media,  he had no idea who the actual fuck this person is. But after a quick Wikpedia search, Maher realized that Alinsky is best known for being a civil rights advocate in the 1950s.  Like the president, Alinsky was a community organizer, but the chances of them ever swapping notes are pretty slim, mostly because Alinsky died during Obama’s preteen years.

But the Alinsky line of attack was not the main target of Maher’s new rule, but rather the Republican attempts to paint Obama as someone he is clearly not. Maher went down the list of attacks (including a small dig at Dana Rohrabacher‘s comments from earlier in the show).

“This is how politics has changed. You used to run against an actual president. But now you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate.”

Maher argued that as partisan and occasionally hyperbolic as George W. Bush‘s critics were, at least they were attacking the actual person. But for Gingrich to actually accuse Obama of being “anti-work,” Maher suspected Republicans were operating on “a paranoid feeling about what he might do.”

Watch the video below, courtesy of HBO:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/bill-maher-wants-to-know-who-the-fk-is-saul-alinsky/

Related articles

• Bill Maher: ‘Who the Fuck is Saul Alinsky?’ and Who is This ‘Barack X’ Republicans Are Running Against? (bradblog.com)
• Saul Alinsky: A True American Exceptionalist (mykeystrokes.com)
• Who is Saul Alinsky? (newsy.com)
• Who is Saul Alinsky, and why is Newt Gingrich so obsessed with him? – Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com)
• Will the Real Saul Alinsky Please Stand Up? (caelumetterra.wordpress.com)
• ‘Real Time’ Panel Goes Nuts Trying To Convince Bill Maher Obama Is Anti-Military (mediaite.com)
• The Republicans, Not The Democrats Are Following Europe (eoghann.com)
• Martin Bashir Exposes The Great Republican Hoax (crooksandliars.com)

As usual Mario Piperni sees things more clearly and logically than the Republicans he draws in his illustrations.   He writes about their weird and sometimes crazy antics and depicts it perfectly with his drawings.

There’s no secret that I am a die-hard Piperni fan.  Here’s yet another example…

Mario Piperni

From the compassionate conservative wing of the Republican party, Rep. Larry Pittman of North Carolina  speaks out .

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

How long before execution by guillotine for liberals and atheists is proposed by Republicans?

The surprise or concern is not that wingnut politicians say stuff like this. Republicans have been running on CRAZY for a while now. No, the real worry should be that enough Americans voted for this guy to get him elected.

Related articles

• North Carolina GOP Lawmaker Calls For Bringing Back Public Hangings, Starting With Abortion Providers | ThinkProgress (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• North Carolina GOP Lawmaker Calls For Bringing Back Public Hangings, Starting With Abortion Providers (thinkprogress.org)
• North Carolina Politician Calls For Public Hanging Of Abortion Providers (thefrisky.com)
• Public Hangings: Bring Em On (alan.com)
• Justice And A Call For Public Hangings (skydancingblog.com)
• This week in the War on Women: Public hangings, rape is a gift from God, and cream of fetus soup (dailykos.com)

The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the statements — nay — the very existence of Barack Obama.  Urban Dictionary…

Think Progress

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus compared President Obama to  Francesco Schettino, the Italian cruise ship captain who took off in a lifeboat after his ship ran aground at Isola del Giglio, Tuscany and is suspected of multiple counts of manslaughter.

“In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history,” Priebus said in response to a question about the brutal GOP primary, “and we are going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama who is abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.”

At least 17 people died in the cruise ship disaster.

Watch it:

Related articles

• Jake Tapper Calls Out RNC Chairman For Comparing Obama To Italian Ship Captain (mediaite.com)
• RNC Chairman: Obama Is ‘Abandoning The Ship’ Like Italian Cruise Ship Captain (mediaite.com)
• RNC Chair Criticizes Obama (myfoxphoenix.com)
• RNC Chair Reince Preibus Says President Obama Is Our Own Captain Schettino (crooksandliars.com)
• Priebus: Obama’s our Capt. Schettino (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• RNC Chair compares Obama to Capt. Schettino (cbsnews.com)
• Obama likened to disgraced ship captain (smh.com.au)

However, throwing around the word “impeachment” is mere hyperbole since they would need a majority in the Senate to succeed and although it may be by the narrowest of margins, the GOP do not have that majority and won’t have it in the near future.

Think Progress

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has long held a tight grip on the marionette strings of the GOP. Wielding undue influence as the head of the Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist ensures that Republican lawmakers sign his anti-tax pledge and threatens them with electoral defeat  should they even think of deviating from it. Norquist has marked a successful few years, killing the deficit super committee agreement,batting down  a tax increase on millionaires, and, of course, ensuring the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Pleased with his headway, Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer: “impeach” Obama .

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Norquist certainly revels in his power , but suggesting Republicans impeach the president over tax cuts is wildly outlandish. According to the constitution , the president, vice president, or public officials can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Preserving a tax cut that gives more to the top 1 percent than the average income of the 99 percent hardly qualifies. But if Norquist’s only goal is to “crush the other team ,” it seems he’ll stop at nothing to do so.

Related articles

• Who’s Afraid of Grover Norquist? (skydancingblog.com)
• Late Night FDL: Crime and Punishment, by Grover Norquist (firedoglake.com)
• Norquist: Impeach Obama over taxes? (hotair.com)
• The Impeachment Crisis Of 2015? (outsidethebeltway.com)
• How Out There Is Grover Norquist? (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• The culture of hyperbole (atlmalcontent.wordpress.com)
• Norquist Threatens Impeachment If Obama Does Not Extend Bush Tax Cuts (crooksandliars.com)