If you support Rush Limbaugh, you're a racist. No doubts, no excuses.

This appeared on Rush Limbaugh's blog this week...


...after the following quote from his radio show.

This guy is an utter wrecking ball all by himself on the world stage to the point now of getting embarrassing. This presidency of Obama's, it doesn't take much to irritate the left. Try this: "Barack Obama's presidency is graffiti on the walls of American history." That's what his administration is. No more than graffiti on the walls of American history. We have a juvenile delinquent for a president who has ruined so much public and private property, not even his gang is making much of an effort here to protect him. It's an utter disaster.

If you support this horrible racist windbag, you're a racist yourself. No two ways about it. This isn't a policy discussion, this is race-baiting.

via Andrew Sullivan

Sept. job numbers: more private sector jobs in 2010 than in 8 years of Bush/Cheney

Cesca

The September jobs report was just released and demonstrates that America is on a far slower path to recovery than anyone originally predicted. Despite this, the shedding of government jobs cloaks a glimmer of hope: more private sector jobs have been created this year than during the entire Bush administration. Read that again: 2010 has had more private job creation than during the entire 8 year tenure of George W. Bush.

This is the 9th straight month of private sector job growth in the midst of a devastating recession that has put a serious strain mostly on the poor and middle class. There has been a total of 863,000 private sector jobs created in 2010, exceeding the total created under the Bush/Cheney regime.

In no way am I saying that these numbers are great. What I am trying to figure out is why Americans, who say they're going to vote GOP because of jobs, don't understand that this preisdent IS creating jobs? Why don't they understand that Obama has cut the deficit by over $100 million in 2010, in the middle of a recession?

Obama has created more jobs in 2010 than Bush did in EIGHT YEARS. He has cut the deficit more in one year than the last Republican administration ever did. That has to count for something. But it doesn't seem to, and here are three thoughts as to why:

1) Americans don't seem to understand that before you can heal a wound, you have to stop the bleeding. The stimulus and other actions that Obama has taken have stopped the bleeding. That is, and always was, goal number one.

Our "instant culture" of I-want-it-now doesn't give us the patience to see this through. We're tryintg to work our way out of the worst economic situation in 80 years, one that took 10 years to create, and we expected it done in 12 months.

We're unrealistic.

2) The GOP noise machine drowns out the facts.

3) Issue number 3 is that the Democratic party sucks at getting the message out. From our media wing to our leadership, there's no "there" there. The GOP has John Boehner, Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor. The Democrats have Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Reid and Pelosi are incredibly gifted legislators - especially Pelosi - but they can't communicate with middle America.

Add to that a huge right-wing media machine that's unable to be embarrassed and willing to engage in massive intellectual fraud and hypocrisy on a giant scale and it's not hard to understand how they're selling a message of fear and hate to a scared populace.

We're a nation with a raging case of Teh Stupidz.

Bravo Mr. President. Obama reaches out to bullied gay teens: it gets better

Things like this remind me why I love this man and why I'm still inspired by him.

Remember why we came out in '08, and ask yourself if you'll really be better off with a GOP majority

We need to take a serious look back at the absolute disaster that was the Bush Administration and the mess that it created - a mess that we're still trying to deal with today.

This leads to a question for the progressives like Jane Hamsher and FireDogLake that spent the summer leading a charge against the president because he didn't go far enough... do you really think that rallying the troops against Obama has had a positive effect? Do you think that the causes that you care about are going to benefit from the GOP surge? Do you really think, now that the Bushies are on their way back in to power, that Obama is "just like Bush"? Do you think that you'll make gains under a GOP Congress?

To the middle... watch and remember. And think.

Midterm report card contradictions... GOP gets lowest grades

We're told that Obama is politically dead, but he polls better than either party in Congress, especially Republicans. How does this reconcile with the dire predictions for election day in three weeks? There are only two real explanations. One is that the pundits are listening to a vocal minority of loudmouths and over-extrapolating. The other is that Americans are schizophrenic.

Either is possible.

Also look at the variation in grades between generic members of Congress (about 1.75) and the respondent's own Congressperson (2.22). It seems to say that we hate pork and spending, unless it gets brought back to my district.

There are also some interesting stats on who likes Obama and who doesn't and it suggests that targeted turnout will be critical in 2012 (duh, I know...).

Graph via Cesca

Fox News racebaiting: "POTUS loves gangsta rap"

In Obama's interview in the new Rolling Stone, he gets asked about what's on his iPod.

My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There's still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards.

A lot of classical music. I'm not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.

Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president's personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.

Here's how Fox presented it:


Really? Can this be seen as anything other than racebaiting? This is clearly throwing red meat to the racist elements of the Republican party. Fox should be ashamed. How can someone who cites Maria Callas, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan be a gangsta thug? But that's exactly what Fox has implied.

They're disgusting.

Fineman on Obama's Could-Have-Been-Worse Presidency

Howard Fineman

If (the Democrats) avoid a blowout it will in part be because voters see the Obama that is, not the fiction they worshiped or dreaded. He is the plodding “national incident commander” for our beleaguered era, and his accomplishments—to the extent he has them—so far are mostly about how our predicament would have been worse had it not been for his bailing of water. It’s a hard message to sell in the midst of 9.5 percent unemployment, when dollar discount stores are all the rage, and the gap between the rich and everyone else in the country is as wide as it has been since the Progressive Era.

...(H)e is what he is. To get a real fix on our 44th president and what he has done—or not done—it’s best to leave behind the grandiose language and grand expectations. He is a singular, history-making character, yet he is best defined by what he is not. He is neither the we-are-the-change savior his acolytes saw early on, nor is he the radical his foes see now. Obama is labeled a socialist by the hungriest recipients of government welfare in the history of commerce—Wall Street banks—but he is nothing more nor less than a legalistic believer in the regulatory state.

...Oddly, his foes think he is viciously effective; it’s only his friends who think he is ineffectual.

In fact, he’s neither. Halfway into his second year, we can see that he is just a smart but cautious guy who succeeds by dogged effort and not by eloquence (he really isn’t very eloquent) or by grand gesture. Critics on the left and right—from Paul Krugman to Sarah Palin—can say what they want, but the truth is that Obama and his team did help avoid, or forestall, a global economic collapse, in part because his demeanor was cool and his ability to grasp the details (and desire to do so) was evident well before he was even elected.

...The president doesn’t have the rhetorical chops to tout such items with Clintonian, kitchen-table vividness (you can just imagine Big Dog with all this material to work with). But that doesn’t mean the incremental achievements aren’t real.

Obama was elected as a sensation, but he is isn’t governing as one. He is putting points on the board, sometimes with little notice and comparatively less fuss than either was anticipated or was the case in the past: a pay-equity law for women; two quite liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court (without a filibuster in a filibuster-mad Senate); a renewal of Mideast peace talks. Road and bridge projects, however delayed, are now underway—bright spots in the much-derided Stim.

...I can say this about the president. It could have been worse. And if we aren’t careful, it probably will be.

Obama's moral cowardice

Jacob Weisberg/Newsweek

Obama has had numerous chances to assert leadership on values questions this summer: Arizona’s crude anti-immigrant law, the battle over Prop 8 and gay marriage, and the backlash against what Fox News persists in calling the “Ground Zero mosque.” These battles raise fundamental questions of national identity, liberty, and individual rights. When Lindsey Graham argues for rewriting the Constitution to eliminate the birthright-citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, or Newt Gingrich proposes a Saudi standard for the free exercise of religion, they’re taking positions at odds with America’s basic ideals. But Obama’s instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil-rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage.
...

the current politics don’t favor the liberal position. But read the rug: “The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us”—Theodore Roosevelt. Obama has let pass moment after moment—such as the recent Republican suggestion to revise the section of the Constitution that guarantees due process—in which he could have reframed an issue in terms of inclusiveness and justice.

Few would argue that defending liberal principle serves Obama’s short-term interests. Americans oppose the mosque 61 percent to 26 percent, according to one recent poll, and support the Arizona law by an even wider margin. But even if some people don’t like Islam, or illegal immigrants, or gay weddings, they may respond to admonitions that our society is built around freedom of conscience and equal treatment under law. If he applied his oratorical gifts to these principles, Obama could remind a grumbling nation what it liked about him in the first place.

Sadly true. This doesn't mean "give up on this President", however. It means that we need to stand and show the moral courage that we want him to exhibit. It's my belief that he's fallen short in these areas because we've fallen short in these areas. Liberals and progressives worked so hard to elect Obama, and since that point we've largely expected him to govern - in the face of outright distortions, blatant lies, and the worst examples of the politics of hate - by himself while we bicker over how much progress is enough to get us to go back to work for him.

Ultimately, Obama needs to find his moral compass. And so do we.

Newsweek calls out right-wing for wanting to have it both ways

Jonathan Alter

The blame for this extends from Fox News and the Republican leadership, to the peculiar psychology of resentment in public opinion, to the ham-handed political response of the Obama White House. Whatever the cause, if smash-mouth tactics are validated by huge GOP gains in the midterm elections, then Big Lie politics may be with us for good.

In some ways, it has always been with us, going back to the 18th-century calumny of James Callender against John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, the Rev. Jerry Falwell sponsored a film that falsely accused President Clinton of ordering murders and dealing drugs. What's changed about politics as a contact sport is the reach of the lies. With the exception of Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic "radio priest" of the 1930s, reactionaries haven't generally had big audiences. But now the cranks who once could do little more than write ranting letters to the editor on the red ribbons of their typewriters (loaded with exclamation points and in all caps, of course) can spread their venom virally, with the help of right-wing billionaires underwriting their organizations. And while the cable network they watch, Fox News, might not actively promote the idea that the president is a foreign-born Muslim, it does little to knock it down. Fox often covers Obama's place of birth and religion more as matters of opinion than of fact.

I'm sure the right-wing shitstorm will start early tomorrow morning. And really, who cares? This is the Age of the Politics of the Big Lie. Denying it what they do.

Jon Stewart To Media: 'Nothing Obama Does Will Ever Make You F**king Happy'

Employment down, corporate profits up; more GOP memes fall apart

Ezra Klein

Employment? Down 5.9% since late-2007. Corporate profits? Up 5.7% since late-2007 -- and driven by Wall Street.

The GOP likes to claim that the private sector is the only thing that can save the economy. While I don't disagree that a strong private sector is vital, if the theory were true, we'd be in better shape right now. the private sector has been growing for 6 straight quarters now.

Speaking of exploding memes, let's debunk the "Obama is against corporate America" myth. Look at the rise in corporate profits since the first quarter of 2009. That doesn't look like the gateway to a socialist worker's paradise.

Earthquakes.... blame Obama

Jon Stewart takes on Obama's BP Speech, our obsessive demand for oil

Obama hammers teabaggers on oil spill

Almost 2 months in, Obama is strating to talk tough about the oil spill. His points below are correct and allude to what's been said for months - the right-wing doesn't care about issues, they care about dinging Obama. He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Politico

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”
The president also implied that anti-big government types such as Tea Party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

Washington Post

"Even though I'm president of the United States, my power is not limitless," he told Grand Isle, La., locals in the video, released Friday. "So I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put honest, hard-working smart people in place ... to implement this thing."

Obama: GOP Drove The Country Into A Ditch. 'Now They Want The Keys Back'

Dems in Disarray! Obama's numbers plunge upward

Obama Job Approval: Approve 52%(+1) / Disapp 41%(-1)

Highest in 10 weeks. These poll numbers are his Katrina. Why can't he close the deal?

"Obama's Market"

via Cesca

We later learned that it was an electronic trading glitch and not Greece or wherever.

But okay -- let's take Limbaugh at his word and call this "Obama's Market" so when it continues to climb, we know who to credit and we know who coined the phrase. Remember "The Obama Bear Market" a year ago? Hannity and others dropped that one rather quickly.

Dems in Disarray!

Nation in Crisis!

President Failing!

PANIC!

MSNBC

BREAKING NEWS: Consumer Confidence Index rises in April to highest level since September 2008

USA Today

Sales of new homes surged 27% last month, bouncing off the previous month's record low and blowing past expectations as better weather and government incentives boosted sales.

MSNBC

In a sign of its confidence in the economic recovery, Ford said it's boosting North American production in the second quarter to 625,000 vehicles, a 9 percent increase over first-quarter levels.

The GOP Myth of Obama's Falling Poll Numbers

via Eric Boehlert

The Gallup Daily Polling debunks the myth of Obama's falling poll numbers.

At the end of last August, in the middle of the Town Hall Tea Party hysteria, the President's numbers stood at 51/42.

Today?

51/42.

This is after he supposedly rammed health care down America's throat, turned us into a socialized country, squandered America's respect by bowing (several times), gave away our nuclear capability and made us less safe, and coddled the Underwear Bomber by Mirandizing him, increased taxes by passing a tax decrease, and tried to take away our guns (??). And that's just off the top of my head.

After all that, he's still in the same place.

The media want to play the "both sides do it" meme. If the Republicans are lying - making up stories out of thin air or whole cloth - then Democrats must be doing it too. The evidence isn't showing that, but the media is in such full-on CYA mode that they feel the need to create balance where none exists, or a counter-narrative where no valid one is available.

They've done it for the last decade - from Valerie Plame to WMD to death panels. Now they're doing it with a false narrative of falling electoral confidence.

As the almost always disagreeable Mark Halperin points out:

It is too early to assess the ultimate measure of victory: whether the President's actions have been prudent and beneficial, domestically and internationally. But by Election Day 2010, Obama will have soundly achieved many of his chief campaign promises while running a highly competent, scandal-free government. Not bad for a guy whose opponents (in both parties) for the White House suggested that he was too green in national life to know how to do the job — and whose presidency began in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis that demanded urgent attention and commanded much of his focus.

Cesca

The Republican Party doesn't get that President Obama, while being iconic, is also supremely qualified to be president -- perhaps not in terms of having a lengthy political resume, but chiefly in terms of having the temperament, education and intelligence for the job to a degree rarely seen in the presidency.

The GOP runs on race because it apparently works

Not all of the anti-Obama sentiment is race-based. Just most of it.

Look at the Tea party complaints and the lack of truth behind them and then ask yourself, 'if this is a red herring, what's the real reason for the opposition?':
1) Taxes
TRUTH) Obama lowered them for 95% of working families

2) Health care
TRUTH) You can debate a states rights version of government power here (though the right has not), but the truth is that it's ridiculous for most tea partiers to oppose health care because, even by the worst objective numbers, we pay 1% more to cover 34 million more people (via Ezra) and reduce overall health care costs. Many of the beneficiaries of this coverage are tea partiers. Tea partiers who also, by the way, accept government run Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

TRUTH) It's NOT a government takeover. This is being done through private companies and if anyone thinks they're in danger, look at their stock prices post HCR

3) Subverting the Constitution
TRUTH) Where specifically? As the interviews with the Tax Day protesters showed, many cannot articulate their positions beyond "socialism". When questioned about what, exactly, this President is doing to endanger this country, they cannot answer.

Where were the protests when Bush launched an illegal war, based on lies and without a formal declaration of war? Where were the tea partiers when Bush gutted Due Process and the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus? Where were the demonstrations when Bush rolled back posse comitatus, allowing the Federal government to use the military in the streets of America to act as law enforcement?

Where were they then?

Given the lack of answers to these questions, the Tea Partiers inability to articulate their reasons for opposition and their failure to act when their rights were really being taken away, we have to conclude that their are other reasons for their opposition to Obama.

Look at this graph from the Washington Post via The Electoral Map. Look at where McCain's support came from.


In every state that was a part of the Confederacy, McCain won a greater share of white votes than he did nationally.

Given conservatives general dissatisfaction with McCain as a candidate I'd suggest that this is at least partially a referendum on Obama. As a black man.

Michael Steele, the chair of the RNC, acknowledged last week that the Southern Strategy is real. The Southern Strategy, cooked up by Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan, was designed to appeal to southern whites by practicing racially-divisive politics in the post-Civil Rights era to build a reliable Southern bloc for the the Republicans. The GOP has denied this for years. Until Steele:

The Plum Line

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

There's nothing illegal about admitting you're voting on race. True, I believe that it makes you an anachronism, but it's not illegal. But it is completely dishonest, intellectually and otherwise, to try to hide your true opposition behind charged code words. Obama is not a socialist. He's not a Muslim. He is black.

Just admit it.